What Goes Around

by Rollins, Jack

  Leo watched contentedly from the safety of his mother’s arms, making what sounded like an unnervingly large purring noise with each exhale.

  Queen B by Rose Garnett

  The young man screamed as the pointed end of the stake was driven up his rectum, a coloratura performance that reached heights Morgana hadn’t believed possible for any mere human.

  Leaning into the bloodied face, she stared into his remaining eye and said, “All this fuss over such a little prick.”

  A susurration, like the first spark of a forest fire, swept through the assembled vampires. Morgana motioned to the pair restraining the victim. They loosened their grip, features warped and distorted like wax facsimiles held too close to the fire.

  Some of the dull-eyed human hangers-on tried to turn their faces away, only to have them yanked back by their chittering vampire hosts. Morgana had never understood why humans were so fascinated with her kind, squandering their freedom for the mere promise of illicit thrills which in reality meant being used as blood bags and then death.

  This particular specimen hadn’t stood a chance from the moment he’d stepped over the bin-bag strewn threshold in search of adventure and a name for himself. He hadn’t been the first, and the huge basement of the house bore testament to that, carpeted wall to wall with their bones, skulls stacked to the ceiling.

  “So you wanted to play the big vampire hunter, did you?” Morgana crooned, trailing a sharp fingernail down the side of his face and parting skin from bone. “Something to brag about to your friends, perhaps? True, you ended up on the – I almost hate to say – shitty end of the stick, but on the plus side your disappearance will be a hot topic of conversation, for a little while at least. And let’s not beat about anyone’s bush – it is what you were planning to do to me, isn’t it?”

  He gurgled; blood flooded his mouth and sprayed onto the stained wall. This one was done and she felt that old familiar disappointment. He’d been filled with bravado at first as they all were, but he hadn’t even lasted the hour and now he was broken, a dumb, useless slab of meat not even fit for her to eat.

  It had started well enough when they caught him, boasting and blustering about how he was going to annihilate the nest and Morgana with it. But that ended as it always did after Morgana had prised his teeth out with pliers, scattering them on the floor to be crunched underfoot by the milling crowd along with any spirit he might have had. Early promise had yet again faded to the same old routine, and somewhere along that familiar continuum she had lost all interest.

  Blood and urine dripped in long lines from the filthy kitchen table where he was pinned, pooling together on the rubbish-strewn floor. The smell of excrement hung thick and sickly sweet in the air, almost but not quite disguising the rank, reptilian odour of vampire.

  Home, sweet home.

  The young man convulsed as though an electric current had passed through his body, reminding her of an old game. Easing the stake from the meat with a delicacy belied by the shrieks, she motioned to the crowd to back off. They obeyed like a well-drilled army and withdrew as one from the table.

  She paused to glare at her assembled nest for a brief moment and then, without a backward glance, hurried into the hallway towards the lounge, drawing them and their blood-bags with her as though she was the moon to their tide. It made no difference where she was in the house; her senses were so acute she was aware of everything from the scratching of mice deep within the walls to the scent of old blood and fresh corpses in the basement. To the victim, however, it made all the difference in the world, bringing as it did the possibility of escape. Did he have it in him to try?

  Listening from her new perch in the bay window of the vast, dilapidated lounge, the wheeze of his breathing in the kitchen complemented the howling gale outside and the intermittent buzzing of dying blue-bottles against the newspaper-covered windows. Was he already in his death-throes? No; a desperate scrabbling followed by a loud crash told a different story. Small, animal sounds of pain ensued – he had fallen onto his own extracted teeth. She cast her mind back to when they’d taken his eye, gouging it out with a rusty nail, and then left it sitting on his cheekbone, optic nerve and all, asking him if he could see into his own head.

  This had proved to be too much for one of the vampires, who had made a grab for the eye, stuffing it into her mouth and chewing with greedy relish until Morgana raised an admonitory eye-brow. Spitting the jellied mass onto the floor as though it was molten, the vampire stamped it under a high-heeled boot for good measure.

  Morgana pictured the French windows at the far end of the kitchen. They led out onto the back garden and were the obvious escape point. Obvious, that is, if he still had his wits about him, but he’d struck her as a dim-witted sort and she wasn’t confident his wits stretched very far at the best of times, never mind now in extremis.

  Sounds of stumbling and then sobs, full-throated, piteous, erupted from the kitchen.

  “Is there no end to the tedium?” Morgana muttered. She swept back into the room to find him collapsed against the French windows, forehead pressed against the glass, a bloody trail of handprints charting his journey from the table. He really should have known better than to think she’d let him escape. She was Baobhan Sith, after all, the most savage of vampire breeds. If he’d really done his research he’d have known that the Sith were no mere blood-suckers. True carnivores, they shredded meat and crunched bone, only pausing to suck the marrow dry. The blood-bags, toyed with as cats did mice, would suffer the same fate. They just didn’t know it yet.

  “Pleassh,” he wheezed against the glass covered in blood and snot.

  Morgana gazed into the arctic night, oblivious to the snow flurries covering the unkempt back garden, waiting for the prey to realise there was no way out. Even if he did manage to break the door open and flee into the dark beyond, no one would hear his screams.

  This was Ann Street, after all, one of the most exclusive areas in the city where multi-millionaires laid their well-groomed heads and houses were separated by too many acres of lush lawn for the sounds of murder and mayhem to travel. She had wanted him to try, though. Nothing flavoured the meat like the death of hope just before the death of the flesh. It wasn’t good enough for her, but the nest would accept it with relish and be grateful, for now anyway.

  “Take him, children,” she commanded.

  And they did, ripping the limbs off first like children with a fly, keen to keep him alive until the very last, carried away with bloodlust. One of her brood pierced the man’s lower intestine and the stench become overpowering, even for Morgana.

  “Don’t wait up,” she whispered, slipping out into the night and the hard, dark heart of a Scottish winter.

  ***

  She wandered down Ann Street, unheeding of the worsening storm. She was coatless but felt no cold. The thin cotton shift she wore was covered in no time with big, fat flakes, but she did not increase her pace, merely brushed her fingertips along bushes and fences as though on a lazy, dawdling summer stroll.

  She headed up to Queen Street, past the gated gardens that only the wealthy residents could access. She’d had more than a few wild nights of sport inside and was familiar with its secret spaces guarded by mature trees and shrubs. She was an outdoor girl at heart, and, just as she had planned tonight, liked the prey to think they had escaped after a mad headlong dash, a few moments of fevered delirium, before she swooped in for the kill to put them right. Or at least she used to. Tonight had been a perfunctory attempt to recreate that thrill and she had failed. Again.

  She walked up the steep hill to Princes Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, sodium lights the colour of old blood visible through the icy sheets descending from a black sky, gravid with more of the same. Princes Street was also where the New Town confronted the Old. The New Town was the playground of the wealthy, leaving the poor to rot in Old Town, where the world’s first sky-scrapers had not so long ago overflowed with contagion, death and the soured milk of
human misery.

  The storm was so bad that even with her more than human sight, she struggled to see that ultimate symbol of the Old Town: Edinburgh Castle, a gothic monstrosity perched atop a chunk of volcanic rock. If the extinct volcano had erupted at that moment she would have laughed as she plunged into the boiling lava, glad to at least have felt something, however fleeting, before death took her.

  She was headed for the Snake-Pit, a club in the Old Town’s Grassmarket where no questions were asked and no quarter given. It had been owned by a black warlock called Mortimer Crowe, a devil worshipper of the lowest order, until he had been killed by one of those he had professed to worship: the demon Lukastor.

  Lukastor was the ultimate predator in an increasingly long chain but she was not many rungs below. Even in her current state of ennui, she was more than a match for anything. Lukastor himself had no taste for clubs and nightlife so there was nothing to fear; he was too busy playing hide and bleed with his own victims to spare any thoughts for her.

  As she walked, a babble of voices competed in her head. Some were victims long gone; some occupied that shadow land between the real and dreamed. She was usually comforted by their presence, reliving her favourite kills even as she planned more. Tonight, however, they were no match for the growing rage, the appetite for carnage that threatened to burst its banks and jeopardise her survival.

  Which was probably why she walked without a care into the oldest trap in the book.

  ***

  She entered the hot, steamy foyer of the club, listening without interest to the pounding beat of the Cramps’ The Way I Walk. A small, dark-haired man put a hand on her chest.

  “Esther says you’re not allowed back in,” he said.

  Before he could say more, she broke his neck, flung the body behind the cashier’s desk and stalked into the club. Esther was a voodoo priestess of no insignificant power, but she wouldn’t try anything here and now. True, she’d have to keep watch for a while for whatever slithering thing Esther decided to send her way, but there was no danger of an immediate confrontation. For most people that was worse, but Morgana welcomed it. Anything to fill the bottomless pit of boredom that consumed all.

  The Deftones’ Change In The House of Flies erupted from the speakers as she walked across the dance floor toward the glittering horseshoe-shaped bar. People parted to make way for her as though they knew what she was and what was good for them. It was busy tonight, and most of the crowd were under twenty-five and as high as their expectations. This was where you could get all tastes and drugs of choice catered for without comment or so much as a second glance.

  “A double vodka,” she said to the barmaid, a cherubic blonde girl stuffed into a short dress two sizes too small.

  The girl glanced at her, a nervous flick of the eyes, and did as she was told without bothering to ask for money. And with good reason: a fine rage was on Morgana tonight, her veil of humanity thinning as it grew.

  Her vampires were imperfect copies of her own cool blonde beauty and not one of them could pass for human. She, however, was able to not only pass but also attract the humans of her choice. Of course, she had to do it before they noticed the vacuity in her pale blue eyes and lack of empathy in her conversation, but she was more than equal to the job when she put her mind to it. She raked sodden hair back from her face and downed the drink in one, slamming the glass on the bar.

  “Another,” she ordered the barmaid, not needing to raise her voice to be heard.

  The drink appeared. As she was about to pick it up, a warm brown hand covered hers. Unable to believe such a gross violation, she whipped round to be confronted by a tall man with eyes like chips of polished obsidian and long black hair. He was shirtless, smooth brown chest toned and broad. He laughed, and Morgana’s lip curled as she fought the urge to rip his throat out.

  “Well, hello there, gorgeous,” he said, Glaswegian accent thick enough to carve out and eat. “To what does my humble club owe the honour?”

  “You,” she said. “You own this?” She gestured at the room.

  “I certainly do. So maybe there’s something I can help you with…” It wasn’t a question and his meaning was plain as his hot brown eyes travelled the length of her body in the soaked shift.

  Morgana smiled. How long would this one last on her kitchen table? He clearly thought he was a player, and this was the type that cracked first, giving it all up in a hot, screaming rush. He was also lying because she had an up close and personal knowledge of the real owner.

  “Liars tend to get set on fire where I come from,” she said, running a sharp fingernail down his breastbone hard enough to draw a little blood but not enough to hurt. Not yet.

  He shivered as though someone had walked over his grave, easy manner slipping. “Okay, okay, maybe I don’t. I was only having a laugh. What the hell’s your problem anyway?”

  She gave him a look that silenced whatever else he had been going to say. “What’s your name?” she asked. Names had power – of a simple elemental sort, perhaps, but power nonetheless.

  “Noah,” he told her, frowning.

  “Noah,” she repeated. “What is it with the modern fad for Biblical names? A desire for Armageddon, perhaps? Still, at least it isn’t Obadiah, so it could be worse.” She had mastered a semblance of what passed for conversation, even humour, on a good day. It drew the food in. After all, who would suspect the pretty girl with the long honey-blonde hair?

  His pupils contracted, a movement so minute she might have missed it had she been human. This was not just a chance encounter with someone who fancied the look of her. There was something else going on here. What that was, she had no idea. It didn’t matter, though, because it was a welcome reprieve from the hollow echo-chamber of her thoughts and maybe, just maybe, it would lead to something more interesting.

  “Have a drink,” she said, motioning for more of the same to the little barmaid, “and tell me all about yourself.” She patted the seat next to her and grinned.

  He seemed to relax, but something about him was off. At first glance, there was no hint that he was anything other than human, but there was a glow and a draw to his dark eyes that gave the lie to that. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said at last, smirking. “Here, let me,” he continued, getting his wallet out and raising an eyebrow. “Why don’t you grab a table and I’ll bring these over? You look like you could do with a real drink.”

  “I don’t think you could handle my idea of a real drink,” she said drumming her long nails on the marble bar. “But hey, have it your way.”

  Some of the shine came off his bravado but he did as he was bid. He was handsome, too. Handsome in that obvious way some of them had: a lustre that faded with age and left the once proud possessor bereft of any other selling point.

  Morgana’s appetites were red in tooth and claw, and sex did not figure high on that particular totem pole. Vampire reproduction was functional and without pleasure: every hundred years or so she selected a male drone from another nest, and the fruit of their brief – and, for him, fatal – union was a new nest, useful not least because the old one had usually expired. Vampire society, nominally matriarchal, had precious little in the way of nurturing for its young.

  She shrugged and wandered to the nearest table. Four young men sat around it and the crowded assortment of pints and shots told the story of their night so far.

  “Move,” she told them, smoothing down her dress.

  “Go fuck yourself,” one of them said, ignoring her and rolling up a pound note to snort a line on the table.

  She cleared the table with a sweep of her arm. The rain of glass and alcohol finally got the table’s occupants’ full attention, if not the entire club’s. Snake-Pit or not, she would normally have made more of an effort to blend in, but not tonight. They could take her or leave her; this was as good as it was going to get.

  “What the fuck?” a bull-necked youth roared, jumping up, face
bloodied by glass shards.

  She leaned over the table and raked its now empty glass surface with her nails, leaving furrows in their wake. The four froze, mouths agape. She snarled and they fled in a clatter of falling chairs and tinkling glass. There were a couple of beats of silence, and then it was business as usual as Highway to Hell blasted from the speakers and the revellers turned their attention to more important matters.

  “I suppose that’s one way to get a table,” said Noah, putting her drink in front of her.

  He was charming enough, she supposed, although the way he kept flipping his hair over his shoulder had a practised air about it, as though he had spent quality time in front of the mirror checking what worked best.

  She downed the drink in one.

  “You don’t mess about, do you? Wait here,” he said, downing his own. “I’ll get us another.” He grinned and ambled off to the bar, looking back at her with a sidelong glance he clearly thought was seductive.

  The world seemed to have softened around the edges and the screaming rage that sang through her veins softened with it. What was going on? Booze never usually affected her much.

  “Here,” he said, appearing as though out of nowhere, almost startling her. “Bottoms up and all that.”

  “More,” she said slinging it back.

  “Always happy to oblige a lady,” he said, winking.

  “Quite the Casanova, aren’t you?” she said with the faintest slur of words.

  “Casa what now?” He laughed, showing too many teeth and the tip of a sinuous pink tongue.

  She decided he looked good enough to eat after all and waved him off to the bar to fetch her another.

  And that was the last thing she remembered before slumping forward and sliding out of her seat in a boneless heap.