by Josh Woods
She walked closer toward Valentine.
Valentine was telling her to stay away from him, but she shushed him, and he went quiet. She was scanning all around for it, whatever it was.
There was something ahead. She saw the presence of it now. It was not like the men around her, no body heat, no fear. She saw that it was crouched, somewhere, completely hidden from sight. “It’s still in here,” she said. “I see that it’s in here.”
Jan said, “What is it?”
She still didn’t know. It wasn’t breathing, but it was waiting. It thought that it was hidden from them. It was waiting for its prey.
“I don’t see anything,” Jan said, catching up with her. “We have the place lit up, DiFranco, and I don’t see it.”
She edged closer, and then, up the wall, toward the ceiling, she knew it. She shot. She pumped, and then it lunged down, flying between her and Jan, and she shot again, and he shot at it too, and it hit the floor.
It shuddered face down and hacked up clots of blood, and then it moved no more.
Everyone else was yelling.
Jan’s voice was still half a scream too when he said, “How did you know it was in there?”
She didn’t know what he meant specifically—maybe the thing had been hiding in a hole in the wall, or in the top of a huge clock. But that didn’t matter, because she needed to know what the creature was. She said, “Is it dead?”
“I guess,” Jan said.
Tango was still screaming and cussing.
Valentine was too, screaming for them to keep shooting it, that the thing had been eating his leg for fun and asking whether it was having fun now.
She knelt by it and ran her hands over its body. It was slick, and she could feel that it was albino. Its skin wrinkled loosely in deep folds like a hairless cat. It was thin-limbed, as long as a man, and already cold. It stunk like rot.
She rolled it over to face them and felt the sharp length of its velvet ears, the frozen snarl of the muzzle, the savage teeth.
“What is it?” Jan said. “A felinthrope?”
She felt the puncture wound in its brow, through its brain, that had dried a while ago. The hole was the width of her stiletto. She moved her hand out of the way and looked deep into the wound, and she saw it for certain. She saw her own hand having already killed this beast once, in the arena, back when it was covered in hair and had hot blood in its veins. And now she knew why it had been holding Valentine, digging into his flesh to get him screaming for others to come. That kind of trap was typical of the old pedigree of vampires, the kind that would rise when slain as werewolves. She said, “It’s one of our Medievals.”
“It tracked us up here,” Jan said. “Didn’t it?”
“I think so,” she said. She stood to get ready, because she knew what that meant. “There will be others.”
“Bull shit,” Valentine said. “Vampires are all solitary now. Can’t stand the smell of each other.”
“It tracked you?” Tango said. “From outside the Black Palace?”
“No,” Jan said. “We killed it as a werewolf down in a lower level. I think two more, right, DiFranco?”
“I think three,” she said.
Tango said, “Jesus. How long have you guys been in here?”
“All night,” she said. “Jan, reload your exotics. Then help me with mine.”
“Bull shit,” Valentine said. “Tango, get over here and help me up.”
Tango asked, “Do you want me to help him up, DiFranco?”
“I’m the goddamned commissioner here,” Valentine yelled. “Don’t talk to her. She’s one of them.”
She scanned the area to try to sense any of the other vampires that she knew would be coming. She said, “You’ll want to keep your voice down, Valentine. They’re coming to finish the job on you.”
“Don’t you dare help him,” Jan said to Tango. “We’re leaving him here.”
But she said, “If he can shoot at vampires, we’re going to need him.”
“He’s a bad guy, DiFranco,” Jan said. “We can’t trust him.”
“I’m the bad guy?” Valentine said. “Listen, you little freak show. You and her are the monsters here in case you haven’t noticed.”
“We can sort that out if we all live through the next ten minutes,” she said. “Right now we need to hurry back to the rest of the gear and hunker down back-to-back. They’ll be coming at us from any angle any minute, and they’ll be fast, and they won’t care which of us are the bad guys.”
Tango said, “They told me vampires ain’t never left a team intact, but we just made it through that one right? So we all got a chance, right?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“If we stick together,” Jan said reluctantly. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
She said, “Valentine? Are you with us?”
“Yeah, okay,” he said.
“Then help him up, Tango.”
Tango lifted Valentine and helped him walk like a crutch.
She and Jan covered close by. They moved cautiously out into the gallery together. She told them all to keep watching the walls and ceilings too, and that the things were as fast as death. Presumably the one she had killed had gotten the drop on Valentine, disarmed him, and tortured him as bait with little trouble. And if it had known that she had been able to see its hiding up there, she would have been dead too. So two or three more of them would be very bad news.
As they moved across the gallery, stepping over crackling glass, Jan said that it looked clear, that he still didn’t see anything.
But she saw the air of whispering nearby. She focused. It was Valentine’s voice in Tango’s ear. He was up to something. And then their footfalls hurried.
And Jan yelled, “Hey, get back here!” He took off running after them.
She didn’t follow them. The guys had lowered their guard and turned their backs to the gallery. But she was focusing and now sensed it. Something that crouched and waited had seen its opportunity. It rushed toward them. She turned and shot, and she pumped the shotgun, and shot again.
It pounced her to the ground. She was under it, and she pushed away at it with her shotgun, which was in its biting mouth, its teeth screeching against the metal, pulling curls of thin ribbons from the surface in high pitches. The vampire kept pushing its face at her guts, trying mindlessly to chew through her, not being able to get through the shotgun yet but pinning her to the ground all the same. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t press it off of her. She tried pumping to load another round, but it would do no good. As the creature thrashed, it cut the flesh of her legs. It pushed her back as it drove forward, trying to get to her internal organs. They both slid along the floor, grinding along the shards of glass. Even if she could sweep it to the side, it would come right back without the gun in its mouth. She kept trying to breathe but could only exhale. All the noises tunneled around her. Time sounded like slow sparks. The pain began to fade. The end was drawing down over her.
But she would not be lulled into death like this, pinned into the ground. She would not die until she decided her time was fulfilled. Before this night was over, she would stand on tall stones in the wind with her arms spread across opened doors and the bright ending of the sun.
She held the shotgun in place with one hand and reached around herself with the other for any kind of weapon. Hers was a warrior’s hand, and it would have a weapon.
And as if the Black Palace tilted for her, a handle rolled to her fingertips. She gripped it and swung the thing into the vampire’s throat.
It stuck.
There were sudden sounds of screeching and gurgling, and she knew that the thing had stuck. It was some kind of blade on the end of the handle that she held, and she had managed to dig it deep into the vampire’s flesh. She stirred the handle around and dug it deeper.
The screeching stopped.
The pressure eased off of her slowly. Her lungs could pull in air again. She breathed. The sounds around her opened out of their tunne
l. She could hear elsewhere now—screaming and shooting that came to an end.
The vampire no longer moved. She felt the top of its bald head. With a deep breath, she heaved it off to the side. It sagged to the ground, lying beside her, its teeth still deep in the metal of the shotgun. She pulled at the stock to free it, but it wasn’t coming loose. Still on the ground, still with her grip on the stock of her shotgun, she placed her feet against the vampire and pulled. It gave with a weird snap. The shotgun was hers again, though a tooth remained embedded in the side of the chamber. She reloaded with exotics.
She checked her stomach to see if she had been gutted, but she was whole. She checked the tears in the skin on her legs, and they were numerous, and they bled, and they hurt like hell, but she was able to stand. She was dizzy not from loss of blood it seemed but from the lack of oxygen, and that meant her head would clear soon, so that was good.
She bent down and grabbed the handle of the thing she had stabbed into the vampire’s throat, and she yanked it out of the fleshy mess. It was the Trident of Paracelsus that Sledge had given her, which she had thrown away here in the gallery. If he were here, he would be laughing about it. She wished he were here with her. Even as she stood here, blind and unearthly over the mutilated body of a Medieval, Sledge would have laughed and said, Didn’t I tell you I knew how to make them right? And then he would have asked her what she was just standing around for. He would have said, Go on, kid, and give this world all kinds of hell.
So she focused on where the others were. The Black Palace oriented around her again, and she saw farther ahead that only two men were standing, not three. There was a third vampire, on the floor, unmoving, oozing cold clumps of blood onto the tiles. And there was another body on the floor, a human one. He was spilling hot blood, and he was dead.
She feared that it was Jan, that the third vampire had gotten him. She ran to them, yelling for Jan, asking if he was okay, asking what happened. Then she turned the corner into the wing. Now she saw with certainty: two men stood before her, and one of them had his face pressed against the wall, in the corner. But she was still blind to which two men they were, seeing only that they were there in the darkness before her. “Jan,” she yelled. “Talk to me!”
“Set the guns down slowly,” a voice said. It was Valentine.
DiFranco held onto the guns and said, “Jan! I need to know you’re alive. Talk to me.”
“Let her know you’re here,” Valentine said. “Say you’re here.”
“I’m sorry, DiFranco.” It was Jan’s voice. He strained.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“You really are blind, aren’t you?” Valentine said. “Good. Then let me paint you a picture. Your little art-show freak here has the muzzle of a loaded scattergun pressed against his right carotid, and he’s about to be displayed on the wall like a Jackson Pollock if you don’t drop your guns right now. Is that vivid enough for you?”
She said, “Is he telling the truth, Jan? Does he have you?”
“Go ahead,” Valentine said. “Tell her anything you want.”
Jan said, “The Medieval came down, and Valentine pushed Tango into it, but I killed it, and then I turned around and Valentine caught me. I’m sorry, DiFranco.”
“That’s pretty good, except for one thing. My name isn’t Valentine. I’m a commissioner now, in case you forgot, and I’m just about to earn my promotion. The guns, DiFranco. You know I won’t say it again.”
She didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t even try firing a last-ditch shot at him to save Jan, not while she could only sense his location vaguely ahead, and not while her only readied weapon was a shotgun loaded with white oak slivers. And she knew he would certainly kill Jan in the next couple of seconds if she did not comply.
She set down the shotgun. Then she set down the submachine gun.
“Keep going,” Valentine said.
She drew the pistol from her holster and set it down too, along with the knife she had taken. “That’s all I’ve got,” she said.
“Oh, that’s not all you’ve got, honey. Maybe I should have you take your clothes off too.”
Jan cursed at him but then groaned to the clicking of Valentine’s tongue. He must have been pressing the muzzle harder into Jan’s throat.
“Get serious,” she said. “I know you’re wounded. You probably don’t have much time. What’s your plan, Valentine?”
“It’s commissioner to you, DiFranco. And I’ve got a solid half-hour on this leg now,” he said. “That’s all we’ll need. You’re going to tie yourselves up and come with me. We’ll stroll right back out of the Black Palace, and I’ll hand you over. Hell, by the way you two look, there won’t even be a trial. You’ll be brought to justice. I’ll be a fucking hero. Here you go.”
Something light hit her shin. She reached down for it. He had tossed her some zip-ties already looped and ready to tighten as cuffs.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Behind your back.”
She took the zip ties. She was not going to flee and leave Jan, and she saw no other options. All her training and years as a field agent were useless here. She didn’t know what she had left. So she cuffed herself with the zip-ties.
“Good,” Valentine said. “And where’s Sledge?”
She said, “Sledge is dead.”
“I figured as much,” he said. “Or we would have already heard from that old bull. Tell me, DiFranco. Is he dead because of you?”
“No,” Jan said. “He was an actual hero, unlike you, you sick bastard.”
Valentine laughed. “This one’s stupid, but he’s loyal. I see why you kept him around. Seriously, DiFranco. Tell me. Sledge died because of you, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I just knew it,” he said, laughing again. “Don’t ask me how I knew it. I just did. I knew guys would keep dying over you.”
But he only laughed at her now because he felt safe. He knew she was nothing to him without weaponry and technology and free-moving tactics. But she saw how weak and small his cruel laughter was in the immensity of the Black Palace, and she realized that he was wrong. She was more than that now. She said, “You’ll die because of me too, Valentine. This is your end. We know that. The whole Black Palace knows that.”
Jan began whispering something, though she could not make out his words. Valentine didn’t sound like he was paying any attention to him anyway.
“Even now, like this, no one’s good enough for you,” Valentine said. “And just look at you. You’re a freak. But I guess you always were, weren’t you? And now you’re helpless, and I finally got you. I don’t even need you two alive, not really. I’m just being nice for old times’ sake. It’s easier than dragging your bodies out of here, and I’d prefer yours to stay warm just a little longer, DiFranco. I just want to hear you say it once.”
Jan’s voice was getting faster, getting away from him, shuffling through languages, saying she knew not what.
She said, “What do you want to hear me say, Valentine?”
“Tell me. Tell me how bad you want me.” There was no longer even sick joy in the sound of his voice. It was all tense and tight-toothed anger. “I’ll let him go if you say it. You’ve been driving me crazy for years, and you knew exactly what you were doing. I just know it. Tell me, DiFranco. Tell me. Tell me the truth.”
“That is not the truth,” she said. “And my name is not DiFranco.”
Jan’s voice grew louder, and his languages were beyond him. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the floor. He kept repeating, “Ca iooan in titlatoa.” And she finally understood what Jan was speaking. It was an old language. It was the language of her mother, of her people, of herself. It meant, We speak in darkness.
And something was happening within her obsidian vision. She saw the strange dark of her blindness rolling before her like storm clouds. It was changing. The grid of mortar between the huge stones became as apparent as lines of lightning. She saw how the wall of the corner besid
e them was balanced like a boulder at the tip of a cliff, needing no more than the nudge of a butterfly’s wing. She saw the Black Palace aching to move for her, aching to move like her own limbs.
“Shut up!” Valentine yelled at Jan.
But Jan would not go silent, for his voice was not his own. It came from this place, and it was this place, for Itzpapalotl could see it all around her, for she was this place too. And those words were hers too, for now he said, “Ca njxpopoiotl ca njtlaiooalli ca njxomolli ca njcaltechtli.”
“Shut up!” Valentine screamed.
“Ca njxpopoiotl ca njtlaiooalli ca njxomolli ca njcaltechtli. Ca njxpopoiotl ca njtlaiooalli ca njxomolli ca njcaltechtli!”
And then Itzpapalotl said it with him. “For I am blind. I am darkness. I am the corner. I am the wall.”
And then she brought it down.
Chapter 21
Hava pressed on through the cave, back the way she had come. She had scooped some moss in her hands as she had crawled, and she held it low, and it illuminated the stone floor with the faintest ghostly glow. She saw the sand disturbed before her in many places, and she saw her own footprints too, so she moved with confidence that she was following her own trail rather well.
On her way out, she scraped her hands and tore parts of her dress at the knees as she crawled up and down the path in places, but this bothered her little. She imagined that when Gróa had gone the same way, these climbs would have been mere steps for her feet.
It had seemed to take ages to find her unknowing way into the cave to the Seat of Gróa, but it seemed like only a little hike to make the way back out again. Soon she saw the light of night beyond the distant mouth of the cave. As she got closer she pushed Gróa’s moss into the deep side pockets in her dress, for she did not need the glow it offered any longer. As she got closer to the end, she saw the form of Seph, a white figure so small, light coming through her body, and she was standing in wait. Beside Seph she saw the silhouette of Moses, who once seemed like a colossus to Hava but who now seemed so small as well. Hava worried that everything in the world would seem smaller to her now after having spoken with Gróa.