by Kim Newman
The trick wouldn’t work with a machine gun.
‘Missy Katana,’ said the commanding voice who’d spoken earlier, ‘should you wave that about? It looks dangerous. And valuable. Self-harm is a regrettable epidemic among Japanese teenagers. I read that in Time Magazine. We don’t want to encourage sad habits. Best put the sword away, eh? Swap it for a breadstick. Or a pull on a piggie. The buffet is stocked with positively delicious treats. You can binge-suck and purge after if that’s your kink. You look like a healthy portion of blood sausage would do you the world of good.’
Nezumi couldn’t make out the person who was speaking.
Beyond the heap of bodies, an overturned kotatsu spilled burning charcoal on the polished floor. The flames imprinted images into her eyes. A spotlight aimed directly at the lifts was deliberately dazzling.
A lot of people were in the ballroom. Alive.
Hostages, she supposed.
And hostage-takers. She had no idea of enemy numbers yet.
‘Nezumi,’ said Mr Jeperson. ‘Stand down.’
‘Yes, do,’ purred the Mystery Voice.
Against instinct, she sheathed her sword.
‘There, so much friendlier,’ said the Mystery Voice, mocking, but blithely in charge. ‘Now, come join the party games, Mr Jeperson of the Diogenes Club, and… ah, Nezumi, wasn’t it?’
Did he really not know who she was? Should she be insulted?
Mr Jeperson paused by the bodies. His instinct was to see if anyone was alive.
A lost cause but he always had hope. Nezumi saw his hesitation and took his arm. Convincing the Mystery Voice that he was a doddering codger might give them an advantage of surprise when they made their move.
Which they would have to. No doubt about that.
‘You too, Madame Van Epp… if you’re quite recovered from that, ah, nasty bump on the noggin. And, why, if it isn’t our chum Tony Peak. Quick of wit, light of fingers. Watch your baubles, ladies and gentlemen. For – whisper it if you must – we have a thief in our midst. A desperate character.’
Nezumi glanced back.
Mrs Van Epp strode out of the lift, steady on her feet. Her bruise was already gone.
Peak snuck behind her, contorting his shoulders to fit into her silhouette so she was a perfect bullet-shield for him. Someone was not too fussed about the ‘gentleman’ part of the gentleman burglar routine.
Light Industries’ security was wiped out. A decapitation strike. The Doragon no Kuchi was taken.
The Aum Draht incident wasn’t an end in itself. It had been a starter pistol. For whatever this was.
The spotlight swivelled, keeping the glare in their eyes. Nezumi could see well in the dark. Not so well, it now transpired, in the light.
Could this be the Princess’s doing?
The Mystery Voice was a man, but this was the Princess Casamassima’s party, her building, her domain (till midnight), and her security, her people, her event in ruins. Like many respectable heads of state, the Princess used to be a terrorist. She might still blow herself up to make a point (if she had a way out). This didn’t feel like her, though.
Someone else then?
Nezumi’s instinct was to blame Dracula. She’d never met him, though she’d run into plenty who had – and could name dozens who’d jostle to be the next King of the Cats if the Son of the Dragon were ever really truly positively most sincerely dead.
The Diogenes Club had a mantra: ‘Not everything is Dracula’. Any number of Awful People lived in the world. She’d met some prize pilchards before she ever heard the name Dracula. This could even be a new breed of horrid. A debutante Nogbad the Bad, making a splashy entrance at the start of a new century.
She made out the person working the spotlight.
A slender figure with a big belt on her hips. Long dark hair.
Drat. O-Ren Blake. Cottonmouth.
Nezumi had liked the vampire, though she’d known not to trust her.
Still, she was sorry. She took people for kind until they showed her otherwise.
She was close enough to see the woman’s sweet smile. She didn’t seem any different. She took her hand off the light and gave a chummy wave.
Nezumi acknowledged her with a nod. Not a nod of forgiveness or submission or anger – just recognition.
She knew Cottonmouth for what she was.
Golgotha’s team were Trojan sneaks. Very disappointing.
She lamented the loss of the people she’d taken them to be – people they would have been happier as. Few villains were finally happy in themselves, no matter how much they bragged about advantage gained through bold wickedness. Bags of gold, buckets of blood, and good-looking lovers were passing distractions. Bad pennies were all sad, waiting to be put out of their misery.
Men in suits and women in party frocks – vampires and warm – grouped in a circle, some clinging together, all shocked and sober. A few had scrapes and slashes. Several were pale, skimpily dressed pretty people, with stents or spigots implanted – hors d’oeuvres on the hoof. Staff lumped in with guests. One vampire woman – an ebony lady in a leopard-skin jump-suit – sat cross-legged holding a messy stomach wound, gnashing tiger-tusk fangs. Three of Golgotha’s gunmen – Furīman, the Butler and Panty-Mask – casually kept the hostages covered. They had taken off the helmets and space suits. Their real uniform was dark commando gear. They’d removed any EarthGuard insignia.
Not a rescue squad. Black ronin. Killers for hire.
Furīman stripped his shirt to show a lean, muscular illustrated torso. A three-headed dragon curled around his ribs, one claw raised over his heart with a rose in its paw. The beast was in apparent battle with an out-of-proportion moth on his hip, a demon-horned pterodactyl on his shoulder, and a fire breathing anteater whose eye was his pierced right nipple. An allegory of a yakuza feud dating back centuries? Or the poster for one of those children’s science fiction films?
Backing up Golgotha’s goons were armed vampires in matching funeral outfits – mourning suits, high hats, tragedy masks. They had come with the luxury hearse. Nezumi had known that crew were wrong ’uns to a man. The brat with the corkscrew curls and the chauffeur with the rusty grin would be in it too.
Ah-hah!
The Mystery Voice must be their principal, the man in the haute couture coffin. His cars flew the Transylvania pennant and bore the arms of Dracula. So, maybe – for once – the Diogenes mantra was off the mark. This time, it was Dracula.
A curved buffet table was set against a row of tooth-shaped slats that supported a safety rail. Guests could graze as they looked down on Tokyo. Standing there, sucking on a spigot stuck into a fat pig hoisted above his shoulders, was a tall vampire in a dark crimson new wave suit so roomy it looked like a padded envelope. He was immaculate, except for a splash of blood-froth and sick on one enormous shoulder-pad.
As if he’d arranged it, a shaft of light fell on his face.
A handsome devil. Flared ears, sensuous mouth, fang-grooved lips, hooded violet eyes. A pointed goatee and moustache arranged in individual curls. No wonder he needed his coffin time. That look took hours of immobility to set. Thick reddish-black hair oiled and shaped on his head. Bristles on the backs of his huge porker-hefting hands. White, diamond-shaped nails manicured to talon points.
He twitched a smirk at the crowd, as if unashamed to be caught being naughty, and casually tossed his empty over the rail.
As the pig soared before its plunge, she saw it was no animal – but a short-limbed, round person in a pig-mask, a row of taps stuck into its belly. A sumo bonsai, fattened to order as a VIV treat, drained and wasted by this grinning greedy-guts.
The donor squealed all the way down. Nezumi heard, or imagined she heard, it explode on impact hundreds of feet below.
By the time Piggy went Splat! their host had introduced himself.
‘I… am… Dracula,’ he said.
Though, to state the obvious, he wasn’t.
DR AKIBA
Somethi
ng slammed onto the prow of the Armourdillo and exploded.
Akiba’s ears popped.
‘Are we under attack?’ he asked.
The driver tried to keep his cool, but was rattled. With the Golgotha Squad deployed around the Plaza and inside the Daikaiju Building, the driver and Akiba were alone, holding the fort in RV-1.
The windshield was completely covered with red, viscid matter. Something organic. The bulletproof glass was cracked. A direct hit from an artillery shell might have done that, but shells weren’t filled with meat.
The driver turned on the wipers, which squeaked against gristly matter.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
Red smears across the window.
Akiba worried that he knew what he was looking at.
‘It came from up there,’ said DK, pointing.
Not a trebuchet outside the Bund, then. An attack from above.
From the Daikaiju Building.
Akiba checked the med-kit he’d been issued. The emergency supplies included ampoules of morphine, phials of vampire blood, and a syringe-gun. He stepped out of the ’dillo, dress pants bunched in the crotch of his HazMat, and waddled around to the front of the vehicle.
He smelled blood.
All around, vampire fangs would prickle.
Whatever – whoever? – had fallen from the skies was mostly on the window and hood of the vehicle, though scraps spread twenty feet from point of impact. Nothing in the first-aid kit would help. A mop-cloth would be more immediate use.
He looked up at the jutting jaw of the monster. A hundred floors or so above the Plaza.
It was a balcony.
Lights glittered like saliva gleams on the dragon’s gums.
Akiba trod on something non-organic. He bent to examine the object.
A spigot on a spike stuck into a chunk of pink flesh. The sort used to tap wine barrels. Bloodletting bars used these gadgets. Surgical steel, sterilised to prevent infection. As much sado-masochist accessory as aid to bleeding/feeding. Fancier than the hollow spikes used on animals.
Rules about the measures that could be drawn from any single tapee were strict. Consent could only go so far. Three pints down, and the law obliged whoever stuck in the tap and took the money (but not their bloodthirsty customer) to consider the health of any warm participant, no matter how willing. A mutually agreed-on act became assault and a donor became a victim. Edgier underground clubs recruited (or procured) teens from cutting listservs and had them fit their own vein-spigots. Management was off the hook if things went too far. Akiba didn’t know why gloomy kids bothered with self-harm when so many others were eager to hurt them.
All safety regulations were out the window here. Or off the balcony.
Infection and exsanguination were not issues. Neither, apparently, was consent.
Akiba heard licking and slavering.
Derelict yōkai – frog-turtle kappa, psittacitic tengu – crawled from the shadows to lap the leftovers. The Bund residents they didn’t show the tourists. Near-mindless alley-rats and sewer-dwellers.
The local police must be overstretched if these creatures were emboldened.
Where were the cops? Like EarthGuard – off somewhere else.
These bottom-feeders were more pathetic than monstrous, but Akiba felt – for the first time – threatened by the vampires of the Bund.
Someone had died. EarthGuard should pay attention.
A tengu raised her parrot beak from the mess and sang-chortled, ‘It’s raining men… hareruya!’
The yōkai was blood-mad.
DK was fiddling with his wipers, aggrieved by the state of his ride. Jets of water played, turning the curtain of gore to runny sludge.
The rest of the squad were nowhere around. Not even Derek.
Akiba had an itchy sense he’d been cut out of the loop – not overlooked in a fast-developing situation, but deliberately skipped over.
‘Keep trying to raise Golgotha,’ he told DK.
The youth gave a fish-sign ‘OK’ and coughed into a CB radio.
More bystanders gathered around the ’dillo, taking care not to step in the splat, looking up at the Daikaiju Building. From this vantage point, low and close, the skyscraping folly was unwieldy. Its main section swelled as if from middle-aged spread. The head was crowned with horns. Pylons and antennae. Light Industries was a communications giant, after all. Eyelights shone, red and white.
Had the monster spat out someone?
Most in the crowd looked up.
Tengu and kappa – historic rivals – tussled over scraps and bayed for another meal to fall from the heavens. A noppera-bō – traditional ofuku hairdo framing a smooth curve of powdered flesh – quietly rubbed her hands together. The faceless one’s hōmongi was embroidered with multiples of the features she was missing – disembodied eyes, mouths and noses. Blooded lips slurped in her palms. Kneeling to dip her mouths into the feast, she’d got circular bloodstains on the front panel of her kimono.
If Golgotha was missing, Akiba should report back to EarthGuard Central. He could contact Gokemidoro.
The driver’s door opened and DK leaned out. He held the receiver to his ear.
‘Message for you, Doc,’ he said. ‘From the Colonel.’
Akiba was relieved. Chain of command held.
He gripped a handle and pulled himself up to the cab.
Something cold sliced across his chest, cutting through the plastic suit, his only tux and his dress shirt. Razor spikes attached to DK’s glove ripped through his skin. A deep wound, not fatal – but a shock.
The driver pushed him and he fell onto concrete.
The fall was worse than the cut.
Worse than either was the rending and tearing as blood-hungry kappa and tengu gathered around to feed.
The pulsing little mouths in the noppera-bō lady’s hands neared his eyes. The woman without a face wanted to tear his off.
‘Over and out,’ said DK, cradling the receiver.
RICHARD JEPERSON
‘I… am… Dracula.’
That hung there.
The speaker paused, disappointed not to get an argument.
‘Usually, people jump on that,’ he said, ‘tell me to my face that I’m pulling their piddler.’
Richard knew exactly who this was.
Not Dracula. But arguably entitled to the name.
‘No harm in trying it on,’ the fellow continued. ‘It’s more a title than a name, you know. Dracula.’
The vampire who’d brought killers to the party got to do the talking.
He could call himself what he liked.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If Dracula doesn’t fly, there are alternatives. I am Ejderhaoğlu Bey. In your English, that might be Lord FitzDragon.’
‘The brother,’ said Richard. ‘Radu.’
The Bey smiled like a little boy. Not sweet, but sly. He liked to be known. Recognised.
Richard understood. An age of resentfulness as ‘the other one’, overshadowed and overlooked. A pinprick of pique, repeated endlessly. Canker festering in his heart till that was all there was to him.
A dangerous man.
‘Radu the Handsome,’ said Richard.
‘If you say so, duckie. For the benefit of the slowcoaches at the back, “Radu the Handsome” is what people called me when I was warm. Radu cel Frumos. I’m not vain, just reporting the opinion of others. I am beautiful. I was a lovely baby, a pretty boy, a gorgeous man, and a divine vampire. It’s what I am known for. I didn’t choose the honorific. It was given me.’
‘By the Turks.’
‘By everybody, Mr Jeperson. It wasn’t meant to flatter. In my day, a Prince would rather be known as “the Terrible” than “the Good”. They smiled – all their teeth were rotten, from Turkish candies, you know – and called me “the Handsome”. What they meant was “the Soft”. It was “Radu the Handsome” to my face and “Radu the Pouffe” to my behind. I took a name spat as mockery and embraced it. I have transce
nded the slur.’
‘You know, I believe that,’ said Richard. ‘I can tell you’re over it by the way you never mention it any more.’
The Bey laughed. Now Richard knew from the way he wasn’t hurled off the balcony that Radu still needed hostages. Doubtless, he’d relish killing him – but would defer the pleasure.
‘In my English we have an expression,’ Richard said. ‘Perhaps you know it. “Handsome is…”’
‘“… as Handsome does”. Yes, very tiresome. Very British. And not meant at all. At bottom, you British are Turks with dreadful cuisine. Maltesers, rissoles, bread and dripping. And no Empire left, boo-hoo. No wonder he doesn’t bother ruling you any more and has pitched his tents in California.’
‘The real Dracula,’ said Richard, prompting, needling.
He felt Syrie Van Epp thinking ‘Are you trying to get him to kill you?’
In the circumstances, it was almost kind of her.
‘Yes, him,’ said the Bey, fangs gnashing. ‘My brother. Know what the Turks called him?’
‘Vlad the Impaler.’
‘Precisely. Vlad Tepes. Vee the Eye. They meant that with respect. If you had a meeting with someone called “the Impaler”, you trembled for days. He nailed turbans to heads. Stuck pointed poles up jacksies. Drank goblets of blood. This, by the way, was before he turned vampire. In contrast, nobody was too fussed about meeting a “cel Frumos”. The less terrifying brother. Vlad Tepes fought the Turks to a standstill. Radu the Handsome came to an – air quotes – accommodation with them. The stories they told! Shameful, I tell you. History is written by those with blood on their hands. Especially those who linger for centuries to insist on it. I’ve given up penning letters to The Times complaining whenever I’m mentioned in a glancing, unfortunate light.’
Richard suspected Radu’s recent clippings file was slim. He wasn’t often mentioned in any light. Come tomorrow, that might change.
One way or another, the Bey would be famous.
If still ‘the other one’.
Absent-mindedly, Radu scraped pointed nails through bloody foam on his shoulder shelf and flicked it away. Someone among the hostages whimpered.