Dan hadn’t learned anything by searching Wyatt’s apartment. The experience had merely triggered another wave of regret, leading him to suspect that, irrational though it might be, the remorse he felt over killing the other Kindred was likely to stick with him for a long time. Afterward, he’d been eager to stake out Camelot. He’d hoped that playing spy in the colossal tourist trap, an amusement park as big as Disney World, Universal, or any of Orlando’s other stellar attractions, would take his mind off his troubles.
To some extent it had, but so far that was about the only thing he’d accomplished. Using Wyatt’s scarlet key card, he’d penetrated the miles of brightly lit, antiseptic-looking tunnels that underlay the park. There he’d discovered employee offices, cafeterias, restrooms and lounges. Whirring electric golf carts whisking staff and cargo to and fro. Machine shops. Storerooms full of tinned food, carbonated-drink canisters, costumes, half-assembled audioanimatronic robots and dismantled floats from discontinued street parades. He suspected that, unless he was dead wrong about the park being connected to the war against Melpomene and Sarasota, an enemy base lay hidden down there too; but he hadn’t been able to find it. The complex was simply too large.
Twice during his explorations aboveground, once near the ten-story Firedrake roller coaster and once while lounging outside the Round Table Burger Bar and Pizzeria, he’d glimpsed other Kindred gliding through the crowd, identifiable by their alabaster pallor and the silence of their hearts. Though they might have come to the park merely to hunt, or for diversion, it seemed far more likely that they were enemies. Fearful of discovery, he’d given them a wide berth. But now, frustrated by his lack of investigative progress, he’d decided that his best hope of completing his mission was to shadow another vampire. With luck, the guy would lead him to enemy headquarters, and if he didn’t, well, maybe Dan could jump him and beat some answers out of him.
Around the corner, soft footsteps scuffed along the pavement, unaccompanied by the hiss of respiration or the muffled thud of a heartbeat. Tensing, Dan willed himself to stand absolutely motionless. A moment later, a long-legged, brown-haired Kindred wearing jeans, a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow and a black leather vest strode into view. His pale skin was slightly tinged with pink, as if he’d fed recently, and the faint scent of vitae still clung to him.
He marched past Dan without a glance, pulled a red card like Wyatt’s out of his pocket, and dragged it through the electronic lock mounted on the wall. The door clicked and lurched ajar. The Kindred in the vest went through and pulled it shut behind him.
Dan swallowed. It seemed mad to follow the other undead too closely. As soon as he moved, his shroud of invisibility would dissolve, and, down in the bare, well-lit tunnels, he was unlikely to find the cover or patches of shadows necessary to recreate it. Moreover, it was a good bet that the guy in the vest was Tremere, a member of a bloodline as renowned for keen senses as the Toreador and Malkavians. But Dan was all but certain that if he didn’t follow closely, he’d lose his quarry in the frequently branching service corridors. Feeling like the most reckless fool on earth, he waited only a moment before scuttling to the door and unlocking it himself.
As he’d previously discovered, it opened on a set of concrete stairs not unlike those he’d found in Wyatt’s derelict office building. His quarry’s footsteps clicked and squeaked from below. Dan paused and listened for an instant to make sure they sounded like they w7ere still going downward, then crept after them.
By the time he reached the bottom of the staircase, the vampire in the vest had passed through another door. Cracking it open, Dan saw him striding down a corridor with doors and openings on the right-hand wall.
Dan kept following, trying to move silently without appearing as if he were sneaking. If the other Kindred did turn around and spot him, he wanted to look as if he had legitimate business in the tunnels. To that end, he kept the scarlet card sticking out of his breast pocket. With luck, it would help convince at least any mortal observer that he belonged down here.
Dan’s nerves seemed to thrum with tension. Trying to alleviate the excruciating anxiety, he assured himself that he was going to get away with this idiot plan. The Kindred in the vest obviously didn’t hear him. Either the guy didn’t possess superhuman senses, or he was preoccupied. And at least there were no security cameras in the tunnels. Dan had noticed some topside and made a point of avoiding them, but apparently the builders hadn’t considered them necessary for the parts of the facility the public never saw.
Eventually his jitters grew slightly less severe. Then a stocky, balding, middle-aged mortal in grease-stained blue coveralls stepped out of a branching tunnel just in front of him. Smiling, the human opened his mouth to speak.
Judging from his expression, the mechanic only wanted to be friendly, but Dan couldn’t afford to let him say anything. The other Kindred would surely hear and probably glance backward. Dan lunged at the human, grabbed him by the throat, hoisted him into the air, and squeezed.
For a moment the mechanic clawed feebly at Dan’s forearms, then shuddered and dangled limply. His heart stopped thumping, and he began to smell of feces.
Dan winced. He hadn’t wanted to kill the guy, just choke him unconscious. But, still not quite used to the extra strength that Melpomene’s blood had given him, he’d evidently crushed the mechanic’s windpipe or pulverized the top of his spinal cord.
Scowling, the vampire tried to push his remorse aside. His victim was only a kine — a member of a different species, just as Wyatt had said — and in any case Dan didn’t have time for guilt. He couldn’t lug the corpse along with him, nor would it be safe to leave it sitting out in the open. He had to stash it somewhere quickly, before the Kindred in the vest — fortunately still unaware of the lightning-fast, silent murder that had occurred just a few yards behind him
— got away.
Carrying the dead man in his arms, Dan stalked to the next door along the wall. He couldn’t hear anything moving on the other side, so he tested the knob and found it unlocked. Hoping that he wasn’t about to walk in on a room full of people, he eased it open.
Beyond the threshold was a shadowy storeroom stacked with cardboard boxes. Some had been opened, revealing bundles of postcards, T-shirts stenciled w'ith the Camelot logo, silvery plastic broadswords and plumed, visored helmets, and other samples of the merchandise sold in the gift shops and souvenir stands overhead.
Dan dumped the mechanic behind a heap of cartons in the far corner, where no one peering in from the doorway could see him. Grateful to have resolved at least this one problem so expeditiously, he hurried back to the door, peeked out, and then cursed under his breath. Because the Kindred in the vest had disappeared.
Fighting panic, Dan reminded himself that his quarry had only been out of his sight, for a moment. Surely he could find him again. In all probability the guy had turned down that side passage about fifty feet ahead. Moving faster now, less worried about being quiet than catching up, Dan strode to the opening and around the corner.
The long, straight passage before him was empty.
He scowled. Evidently his quarry had vanished through a door, either one of the few between the storeroom and the intersection of the hallways or one of the several immediately ahead. But by the time Dan peeked through them all, the Kindred in the vest might well have disappeared for good through a second door or around another bend.
Which meant that it was time for a different approach. Time to put his new perceptual powers to work. Closing his eyes, trying to sharpen his sense of smell through sheer force of will, Dan inhaled deeply.
And after a moment, he smiled. Because the sweet scent of vitae, the faint odor that he’d detected emanating from the other Kindred, still hung in the dry, cool, climate-controlled air.
Its presence proved that Dan’s quarry had come as far as this intersection. Sniffing like a bloodhound, reflecting fleetingly that he probably looked pretty silly, the spy followed the scent down th
e branching passage.
But after a few moments he faltered, because the trail ended abruptly amid blank walls. Either his quarry had backtracked, which seemed unlikely, or he’d ducked through a hidden door.
Crouching, Dan sniffed the smooth gray concrete floor and then the painted off-white walls, trying to find the exact point where the other vampire had exited the hallway, or the spot where he’d pushed some hidden button. He couldn’t: even his nose had its limitations. Staring intently, straining now to sharpen his eyes, he began to give the site a visual inspection.
After a moment, peering at the wall, he began to see countless subtle shadings in what had seemed an even, monochromatic layer of paint. Simultaneously, he became acutely aware of the pockmarks in the surface of the concrete blocks. The bands of grayish white and the tiny cavities combined to form complex patterns, like fractal art generated by a computer.
Viewed properly, the designs were amazingly beautiful. So beautiful, he realized abruptly, that they were hypnotizing him like the murdered painter’s jungle scene. Snarling, Dan squinched his eyes shut and wrenched his head to the side.
He simply stood for a few seconds, trembling, imagining what might appen if some of the enemy discovered him standing paralyzed with fascination. Finally, when some indefinable change inside his head told him that he might be out of danger, he peeked at the wall through slitted eyes. Though he continued to see it more clearly than any mortal could, it was once more just a nondescript, indeed a rather homely, piece of masonry.
Monitoring himself, lest he fall under the same spell again, he kept looking around. And finally he spotted a pale gray shadow, five feet up the left-hand wall.
Or at any rate it looked like a shadow and not anything carved or painted on the concrete block beneath, but there was nothing hanging in front of the surface to cast it. It was a square encased in a circle, with a triangle jutting like an arrowhead from the upper right-hand side of the ring. The combination of the circle and triangle made it resemble the astrological symbol for Mars or maleness, but any Kindred, even a clanless, ostracized one like Dan, would have recognized its true significance. It was the emblem of the Tremere.
Even as he wondered why he hadn’t seen it earlier, it suddenly blinked out of view. He stared at the space it had occupied, and after a moment it wavered back into existence. Obviously non-Tremere weren’t meant to see it, but his superhuman vision had finally penetrated the magical screen masking it.
Okay, thought Dan, I found something. Now what1 The obvious move was to touch the symbol. He gingerly proceeded to do so and then, startled, snatched his hand back instantly. The shadow felt cold as ice.
Steeling himself to bear the chill, he pressed his palm firmly against the sigil. The section of wall behind it evaporated, revealing another hallway.
Except for considerably dimmer lighting, the new corridor didn’t appear much different from the one in which he was standing. But it smelled different. The musky scent of incense and a noxious odor that he associated with high-school chemistry hung in the air. And it felt different. The air seemed to buzz and crawl against his face, as if it were charged with electricity.
Apprehensive but curious as well — it was a rare Kindred who hadn’t wondered about the occult mysteries of the Tremere — he stepped through the opening. It sealed itself behind him like a vampire’s wound healing with unnatural speed. He made sure that there was a shadow-symbol on this side as well, that he had a way out, and then skulked deeper into the Warlock haven, resisting the impulse to take out his automatic. Displaying a gun would destroy whatever forlorn hope he might otherwise have of convincing one of the magi that he belonged here.
Most of the doors along the passage were closed. From behind one came a faint, regular rasp, as if someone were honing a knife, and broken sobbing; a strange, arrhythmic chanting in a language Dan didn’t recognize droned through another.
Feeling horribly exposed in the open corridor, he nevertheless paused to ponder his next move. He couldn’t simply open doors and search rooms at random, not when the Tremere were manifestly all around him. He’d blunder in on somebody; and even if he didn’t, it would take too long. He needed to locate a command center, or the boss’ office. That was the kind of place where the enemy would store the information he needed. Wishing that the Warlocks had seen fit to supply a building directory complete with a you-are-here marker at the entrance, he stalked on.
Eventually the corridor opened out into a broad, gloomy, high-ceilinged chamber lit only by the wavering light of scattered candelabra. Covering one wall was a bookcase crammed with leather-bound volumes, many of which looked and smelled as ancient as the tome he’d found in Wyatt’s haven. The side of the room nearest the shelves was carpeted and furnished with armchairs; it looked like Dan’s notion of a Victorian gentlemen’s club. The other half of the hall was empty, and its bare concrete floor had a drain in the center. He suspected that the magi used the space when they had to draw large pentagrams for group rituals.
It occurred to him that the information he needed might conceivably be written in one of the books in the library, but he was sure that he didn’t have time to examine them all, not even just the modern-looking ones. It seemed smarter to search elsewhere and come back here only as a last resort. He started for one of the doorways in the far wall.
Inside the murky opening something shifted, and cloth rustled. Someone was walking toward him! He hastily stepped away from the doorway and crouched behind a high-backed chair in the shadow of a softly ticking grandfather clock, willing himself to blend with the darkness.
Ponderous footsteps carried the newcomer into the chamber. His heart thudded slowly, like a bass drum beating out the cadence of a funeral march, demonstrating that he wasn’t Kindred. Despite his lethargic tread and heartbeat, his flesh threw off heat like an open fire, as if he were burning up with fever. Even shielded by the armchair, Dan could feel the warmth ten feet away.
Cautiously, he risked a peek around the side of the seat, then stiffened in surprise. Superficially, the hulking figure standing in the middle of the room appeared human, but one close look was enough to dispel the impression. Its skin was too smooth, utterly unlined and unwrinkled, and subtly luminous, as if it were a thin-shelled mannequin with a lamp glowing inside it. Multicolored tattoos, cryptic hieroglyphs like the symbols in Wyatt’s grimoires, mottled its face and the backs of its hands. Lacking both iris and pupil, its eyes shone fiery orange.
Dan supposed that the creature had started out human. He wondered fleetingly if it was a magically transformed ghoul, some sort of zombie, or something stranger still. Then it abruptly turned to stare directly at him.
Dan nearly gave a violent start — nearly hurled himself at the creature, or made a grab for his pistol. But another, cooler part of his mind overrode those impulses, told him to remain motionless until he was absolutely certain that the tattooed figure truly did see him. I’m not here, he thought, silently chanting the phrase as if it were a mantra. I’m not here.
And after a moment, the creature tilted its head as if it were puzzled. As if it had glimpsed something strange from the corner of its blazing eye but, when it lurched around, the oddity had disappeared. Shuffling, it turned in a circle, looking over the room, and then trudged out the doorway through which Dan had entered.
The vampire shuddered as the tension bled out of his muscles. Then he rose and skulked on, hoping that the library represented some sort of dividing line in the communal haven. Perhaps the rank-and-file Tremere occupied the rooms he’d just passed, while officer country was in the tunnels still ahead. He had no evidence that such a thing was true, but it seemed like a reasonable hunch. In any case, he had to start snooping somewhere.
He started down the next hallway, a relatively short one with a black door at the end. For three paces he was all right, and then he felt a sudden jolt of alarm.
Thinking that the creature with the fiery eyes was sneaking up behind him, he spun around. Excep
t for himself, the corridor was empty.
He grimaced. Maybe he was imagining things. God knew, all this cloak-and-dagger crap had scraped his nerves raw. But on the other hand, just because he didn’t see a threat didn’t mean there was nothing there. He hadn’t spotted Wyatt’s homunculus at first, either.
Peering about, still seeing nothing, he hesitated for a moment, then decided that he might as well go on. Now glancing backward even more frequently than he had been, he proceeded toward the dully gleaming ebon door.
Without warning, agony throbbed through his chest and knee. He stumbled as his leg nearly gave way underneath him. The magical wounds the Samedi had given him had healed long ago, but now, evidently, they’d burst open again and were as rotten as before. He could smell the decay, feel the deliquescent flesh slipping away from his bones.
Terrified, he fumbled out his .38. He almost started blasting at shadows, for all that he knew the noise might bring every Tremere in the place down on his head. Instead, struggling against the impulse and the fright that had produced it, he blundered back out of the corridor into the library. Perhaps his tormentor was hiding there.
As he exited the hall, the pain and stink of his injuries vanished. At the same moment, panic loosened its grip on him.
Looking around, he failed to see any sign of an attacker. With shaking hands he tore open his denim work shirt, showering blue plastic buttons on the carpet. His chest was unmarked.
Even a Kindred couldn’t heal that fast. Dan began to suspect that he hadn’t really been injured in the first place. Perhaps someone had woven a kind of illusory magic in the hall that would fill an intruder’s mind with terror, to keep unauthorized personnel from passing through the black door. If so, then that was probably exactly where Dan needed to go. Holstering his gun again — the weapon couldn’t help him against the intangible — he ran,through the doorway, intent on passing through the torture zone as quickly as possible.
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