by J. L. Doty
The two young thugs were taking turns throwing their shoulders against the stairwell door as she and McGowan skidded to a stop next to Karpov. McGowan ignored her and started shouting at Karpov, and of course the Russian shouted back. The hospital, like many hospitals, had been built at the intersection of two ley lines. She pulled power, lots of it, fed it into her words as she threw voice at all of them. Stop, now, I command it.
The two thugs froze in place and blinked dazedly, while McGowan and Karpov, more powerful and less vulnerable, merely hesitated. Karpov shook off the effects of her voice and snarled, “Don’t use those Druid tricks on me, woman.”
The ley lines were still flooding her with power. She glared at him, took a step forward and let him see some of that power trickle out through her eyes. He took an involuntary step back as she said, “Something doesn’t add up here. Didn’t you see the little people?”
The two older wizards looked at her uncertainly. She added, “There were two of them, helping the young man. The little people wouldn’t be helping a rogue who traffics in demons.”
McGowan and Karpov both tried to speak at the same time. She threw the voice at them again. Silence.
Karpov’s lip curled up in a snarl, but he held his tongue. She said to him, “You made this mess so you clean it up. I’ve spelled a nurse and two orderlies on this floor, so no one’s yet called the police. Clean it up and make sure they remember none of this. Walter and I’ll try to find Katherine and the young man.” Karpov started to say something but she cut him off. “And if he is a rogue, we’ll help you kill him. But no more guns until we know why the little people are helping him. Agreed?”
Karpov hesitated.
“Wizard’s oath,” she growled, “or one of us dies here and now.” With the ley lines feeding her power she knew she could take him, and he knew it too.
Karpov looked as if he’d just swallowed a mouth full of sour milk. He snarled, “Agreed.”
Karpov watched McGowan and Colleen run back toward the elevators. He turned to Alexei, swung as hard as he could and caught him in the side of the head with a roundhouse slap that probably hurt his hand more than the young fool’s face. “You idiot,” Karpov said in Russian.
Vladimir stepped back, clearly hoping his boss’ anger would stay focused on Alexei.
Alexei lowered his eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Karpov. I didn’t mean to shoot the place up, or to anger the Druid.”
Karpov slapped him again and growled, “That wasn’t for shooting the place up . . .” He slapped him again. “ . . . or angering the Druid, you idiot.” He slapped him again, and Alexei was smart enough not to protect himself. “That was for missing when you had the rogue in your sights.” He slapped him again, and though it hurt his hand it yielded considerable satisfaction.
Karpov held out his hand. “I gave her my oath. No more guns.”
Alexei looked at the open hand for a long moment, then, pouting like a recalcitrant child, he reluctantly placed his gun in Karpov’s hand. “Good,” Karpov said. “Now use your hands.”
Alexei frowned.
He’d never been a thinker, so Karpov helped him out. “I gave my oath no more guns, but I didn’t promise you wouldn’t kill him with your bare hands. While Vladimir and I clean up this mess, go find the rogue and finish this.”
Alexei thought those words through carefully for a few seconds, then smiled happily, almost eagerly. He looked down at the trail of smeared blood leading into the stairwell. He’d have no trouble tracking Conklin.
“Vampire!” Paul shouted. “What the fuck are you talking about? She’s a god damn doctor.”
They found another stairwell at the far end of the second floor hall, ducked into it and stumbled down the concrete stairs. Katherine stopped on the first floor landing and leaned heavily against the banister breathing rapidly, gulping for air as if she’d just run a mile. “That’s no doctor. That’s a vamp, an old one.” She looked at him, looked in his eyes, and he made no attempt to hide his disbelief.
“You don’t understand any of this, do you?” she asked.
Paul was bleeding from a dozen new wounds where chips of masonry, ripped up with considerable force by the bullets, had punched shallow holes in his face and arms. He was probably carrying a few bullet fragments also, and rolling on the floor of the hospital dodging bullets had torn out all his stitches and opened all the old wounds. He hurt, and he was scared, and there was no way to explain away all he’d seen in the past several hours. But he still wasn’t going to buy into this bullshit about spells and vampires. “I’ll tell you what I do understand,” he growled. “I understand there’s no such thing as vampires, and witches, and spells and leprechauns—ok, midgets in clown suits but no leprechauns. You people are just fucking nuts.” Paul’s own words reminded him of his visions, and that he too was fucking nuts.
Still struggling to catch her breath, she growled, “That vampire fed on me.”
He demanded, “What happened to Count Dracula in a tuxedo?”
She shook her head. “That’s for the movies. Real vampires don’t suck blood, they suck life force. They suck the very essence out of their victims. They feed on their souls.”
He shook his head, didn’t want to hear any of this shit. But she grabbed him by both shoulders, pushed him against the wall, looked unflinchingly into his eyes and continued relentlessly. “Ok, time for Vampire Basic 101. A demon from the Netherworld, Secundus or Tertius caste—Primus caste don’t need a human body—possesses a live mortal, feeds on its essence until there’s only a faint spark left, leaves that spark untouched, which must be a forever living hell for its victim. Over time the demon’s nature warps the body into a disgusting, human-sized bat thing. It’s not any kind of vampire like you’ve ever heard of in stories. It’s a demon from hell, but we call them vampires because they feed on humans—human souls actually.”
It sounded too much like the monsters that climbed out of his mirror.
“Listen to me,” she snapped angrily. “Our lives depend on this.
“Now if the vamp is stuck in the Netherworld and can’t feed on mortals, it remains a wasted, bat-thing. But if it gets loose on the Mortal Plane—usually because some idiot sorcerer summons it without the proper protections—we call that a rogue—then it can feed on humans, and in doing so it gains power. Feed on enough humans on a regular basis and it gains enough power to cast a glamour and look like us, maybe live for centuries among us, feeding on us. But its real body is still that disgusting bat-thing. Never forget that. No matter what it looks like to your eyes, it’s really that monster.”
Paul tried to wrap his mind around such alien concepts. “And that doctor upstairs is one of these old vampires?”
The door in the stairwell on the floor above creaked open. “Shit,” she said and grabbed him by the arm. “For some reason it’s after you. Don’t look in its eyes. Don’t let it touch you.”
He started to tell her it already had, wanted to tell her about the pull he’d felt, but before he could say anything she pulled on his arm painfully and dragged him out into a hallway on the first floor. Guiding him down the hallway she spoke as they limped down its length. “If you have to face it remember your one advantage: it can’t just kill you then feed; you have to be alive while it consumes your soul.”
Paul knew the two of them made an odd sight, her skirt and blouse torn badly, both smeared with blood, most of it Paul’s, she weakened by the vampire feeding—he couldn’t believe he was believing this crap—he weakened by blood loss and pain. He wondered if either of them could walk on their own, if the only way they managed to remain standing was by leaning heavily on each other, limping together through the halls of the hospital and leaving a trail of blood smeared on the floor behind them. The receptionist at the front desk looked at them fearfully as they staggered by, hurriedly picked up her phone and started punching in numbers.
They stumbled out into the dark of the wee hours of the morning. Her knees started trembl
ing and he realized she was about to collapse, and in the odd position in which they supported each other, leaning heavily on each other, the only thing he could do was wrap his arms around her in a lover’s embrace to hold her up as her knees gave way.
She smiled up at him. “I like you too, Mr. Conklin. But is this really the right time or place?”
He felt his face flush and she laughed. “You’re blushing.”
He eased her over to a concrete bench to one side of the hospital entrance and lowered her onto it carefully. She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out one of those little black, plastic car-alarm things, pressed a button on it and a car in the parking lot nearby flashed its lights and honked its horn. “My car,” she groaned, almost pleading. “We have to get to my—”
Looking up at Paul her eyes suddenly widened and focused on something behind him. Thinking it must be the vampire, he pushed her over into the bushes behind the bench, trying to push her to safety. He spun to face the vampire, but a big meaty fist slammed into his cheek . . .
He didn’t recall going down, didn’t recall the act of falling, didn’t recall the time it took to go from full upright to prone. One instant he was standing there as Joe Stalin’s sledgehammer of a fist closed on his face, and the next instant he bounced painfully off the concrete bench and onto the sidewalk in front of it. Head spinning, cheek throbbing, ribs aching, he rolled over and saw Joe standing over him. The big Russian reached down, grabbed him by the tattered remnants of his shirt and lifted him like a child’s doll.
A fist slammed into his ribs, another into his face and Paul went down again. Joe Stalin stood over him, drew his foot back to give him a good kick, but Katherine landed on his back screaming like a banshee, legs wrapped around his waist, one arm around his throat, the other swinging a rock the size of a baseball.
Paul crawled painfully to his feet as Joe spun around blindly, swiping ineffectually behind his own head trying to dislodge her, while she slammed the rock into his face and head. Paul waited until Joe’s spinning brought him around one more time, then kicked him as hard as he could in the balls. Joe grunted, stopped spinning and bent forward into a crouch, Katherine still riding him like a cowboy on a rodeo bull. She raised the rock one more time and slammed it into the side of his head. He curled up and crumpled like a deflated balloon. Katherine rode him down and hit him one more time in the back of the head with the rock.
Her legs were tangled in Joe’s so Paul helped her free them, then helped her struggle to her feet. The ground beneath Paul swayed and he staggered away from her drunkenly, staggered toward the concrete bench. He had to sit down before he fell down, but as he turned to do so he saw two identical Katherines standing over Joe Stalin, who lay between them groaning. One Katherine kicked Joe hard in the head and he stopped groaning, then the two Katherines looked at each other and their jaws dropped. Both Katherines wore the same torn and ripped suit, torn and ripped stockings, torn and ripped coat and blouse exposing a black lacy chemise, blood trickling from identical cuts and bruises on their faces, makeup smeared and hair in wild disarray, with bits of twig and bush tangled into it. It occurred to Paul that seeing double meant he had a serious concussion, but then he realized he wasn’t seeing double Joe Stalin, or double anything else for that matter.
The two Katherines backed warily away from one another, one toward the hospital entrance, the other toward the bench and the bushes. Both turned to Paul, said in identical Katherine voices, “It’s the vamp, throwing a glamour.”
Blink; the image of the Katherine standing in front of the hospital entrance did that strange little flash of something not quite real. Behind her, Paul saw McGowan and the hippie-woman inside the hospital running their way.
The Katherine in the entrance took a step toward Paul and both Katherines said, “Let’s get to my car.” They both turned and pointed to the other and said, “Don’t trust her, it’s the vampire.”
The Katherine in the entrance took another step toward Paul, reached out carefully toward him and said, “Trust me, Paul.”
The Katherine near the bench cringed back and said, “Don’t let it touch you.”
Paul looked at the Katherine in the entrance; blink, and again blink, and again blink. And with her hand only inches from his cheek he had it, the image in the blink, the black, leathery bat-like thing.
At that moment Paul reached the limit of his patience, reached the end of any sanity or reason or forbearance he might possess. The world no longer made sense, was filled with strange and completely inexplicable creatures. He just wanted Suzanna and Cloe back. He just wanted everyone to leave him alone so he could understand how they had come back to him, or, if he was nuts, the certainty of which seemed more and more likely every day, he wanted them to leave him alone in his insanity so he could at least enjoy their return. It all finally boiled up in him, coalesced into his fist as he swung a wild, roundhouse punch. He put his shoulder behind it, put every bit of strength and frustration and anger he had into it, heard the real Katherine shout, “Nooo don’t touch it,” felt her hand grab his left wrist just as his right fist slammed into the vampire’s cheek, heard a satisfying crunch as it connected, felt a not-so-satisfying pain in his fist that shot up his arm. A blinding flash exploded from his fist where it connected. A thunderous clap accompanied it, numbing his arm to the shoulder and lifting him off his feet. Reality shifted and slid along a sideways track, a strange sensation at the same time both sickening and thrilling. Then he landed face down in the dirt. It was warm dirt, uncomfortably so.
He could recall no dirt in the hospital entrance, just concrete sidewalk, the blacktop street, and across the street a paved parking lot. As he lost consciousness his last thought was that there was no reddish-brown dirt in front of the hospital; he shouldn’t be lying on dry dirt . . .
The explosion had shattered the glass in the front entrance of the hospital. McGowan struggled painfully to his feet, noticed Colleen sitting on the floor nearby, her back against the wall, her legs splayed out in front of her. She shook her head dazedly and mumbled, “What happened?”
McGowan helped her to her feet, trying to recall what he’d seen in the instant before the explosion. He and Colleen had been following Conklin’s smeared trail of blood, had spotted him and Katherine just outside the entrance to the hospital and begun running toward them. Katherine had been standing with her back to the hospital facing Conklin, saying something to him. And then without warning Conklin had drawn his fist back, and McGowan realized he was about to punch Katherine, a heavy blow that could hurt her seriously. But an instant before his right fist slammed into her face another Katherine stepped into view and grabbed his left wrist, shouting something McGowan couldn’t hear. And then Conklin’s fist connected with the first Katherine, and a searing, white-hot light, accompanied by an explosion, erupted from the point of contact. That was all McGowan could remember. And now both Katherines and Conklin were gone.
Colleen leaned heavily on him for support as he said, “There were two Katherines.”
“I know,” she said breathlessly, sounding like someone who’d just sprinted a mile. “Had to be a vampire, old one, under glamour. But where did they go?”
McGowan thought he knew, but to say the words was a death sentence for his daughter. No, possibly not a death sentence, but death would be preferable to the alternative. “I think it dragged them into the Netherworld.”
“Oh dear God!” Colleen said. “We have to get them back.”
McGowan shook his head. “We may not be able to.”
Something tugged at his pant leg. He looked down to find two leprechauns standing there. “We can help,” one said excitedly.
“Ya,” the other said with a big grin on its face. “Isn’t this fun?”
Baalthelmass stood in a glamour of deep shadow across the street from the hospital. The Lord had dragged the stupid Tertius and the young woman into the Netherworld, either a very cunning move, or a very stupid one. Baalthelmass would try to br
ing Trogmoressh back, but Its protégé might now be beyond hope. In any case, if the Lord made it back from the Netherworld still possessed of his soul, and that was by no means a given, then Baalthelmass would have to reevaluate Its entire approach to this Lord-of-the-Unliving, perhaps something less direct. Cloaked in Its shape and identity as a human mortal, It could draw on many resources. It could afford to be patient and careful.
Chapter 6: Oh Hell!
Paul scrambled to his feet and stood there unsteadily, his right fist surrounded by a pale blue halo. A hot wind howled overhead in a dirty brown sky lit by a sun Paul had never before seen. The vampire, no longer draped in a glamour of human disguise, climbed awkwardly to its clawed feet a few paces from Paul, one leathery wing twisted at an odd angle. It faced him for a moment and hissed at him angrily, exposing a snouted mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. His heart climbed up into his throat as he took an involuntary step back, instinctively putting more distance between him and that thing. But it turned away from him, turned almost casually as if he didn’t matter, turned toward a dark form lying in the reddish-brown dirt at its feet. A slimy ichorous drool dripped off its chin as it bent over the form, which Paul suddenly realized was Katherine lying on her back with her arms and legs sprawled at odd angles.
Blind panic tugged at him. His primitive fight-or-flight instincts told him to take to his heels and run, screaming hysterically like a madman. In his present state of mind he thought he could probably let out a good girlie scream as he ran, but he owed her. She’d come to his rescue in the hospital. She’d warned him this monster was a monster, even when it looked like a nice middle-aged female doctor, and she’d fought by his side in front of the hospital, fought this thing and fought homicidal Joe Stalin.
As the vampire bent down over Katherine’s still form he charged, screaming hysterically, ran straight at the monstrous creature, trying to convert his fear into anger, trying to turn it into a hard and determined fury. He slammed into the vampire’s back at full speed and hit it with a shoulder block.