Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  I felt a small flare of anger at the society I had thrust myself into. “She was such a loose cannon, why didn’t Jaguar, Gabriel, or somebody, stop her before it came to this.”

  “Her husband was useful, I suppose. He had a good, if incomplete, model of our existence. If she was removed, so was the motive for his work. Also, I am not loved. They may have waited to see what my fate would be.”

  “They let this happen?”

  “To an extent. But, thanks to you, this conflict began attracting too much attention to ignore.” Childe looked up the street, back toward the Ryan house.

  “Jaguar will fix this, as I had to clean my own house.” I looked up and I began to see a flickering glow through the trees.

  “I owe you something,” he said, interrupting the memory.

  “What?”

  He opened the door to the Rolls. “They were mine, those who did this to you. By our law, I am responsible for what happened to you. I may indulge you in something compensatory—”

  Gail hugged herself closer to me, and I said, “You can’t bring Kate back.”

  Childe shook his head. “Do you desire something more within my power than forgiving your violence against my own? That I have already done.”

  What could I want from this creature?

  I looked up at the sky, remembering how the moon looked as it hung low over Lakeview. If there was only one thing I could ask from Childe, I knew then what it was.

  “Cecilia,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If she still lives, free her from her father. Free her and sponsor her.”

  Childe appeared interested. “This will not change what she is ...”

  “She does not deserve Sebastian killing her. Your protection should be worth something.”

  Childe looked at me a long while, then said, “This I’ll do, to cancel our debt.” He slipped behind the wheel and said, “Shall I give you two a lift somewhere?”

  I shook my head and said, “No. We have our own car.”

  I took my daughter and began walking back.

  “Indeed,” Childe said. I heard the door shut behind me, “But perhaps, my dear Raven, you’ll indulge me a moment more?”

  I stopped walking, and without turning around, I asked, “What more is there to say?”

  I heard the Rolls’ quiet engine start, and I heard the tires grind snow as it advanced to pull even with us. The wheel was on the wrong side, so Childe was sitting just on the other side of the door from us. “A story,” he said through the open window, “an old one.”

  “What—”

  “Shh. This predates that American drunkard you’re so fond of by two millennia, and it is just as much part of your soul now.”

  I turned to face him, and Childe looked off, out the windshield. It began sinking in, as he spoke, what Ryan said, about Childe being so old.

  “This occurred in the east, in the mountains there. Perhaps India, perhaps China. I prefer to think of it as Tibet. The thirst came upon a young man in a monastery. There was no one to tell this man what had happened to him, and when it overpowered him, finally, he killed his teacher and drank of his blood. The young monk was horrified by his deed. He ran off into the night, hiding in a cave far away from any other person. He sat in that cave, and vowed to sit there until he died.”

  He paused and stroked his beard. He still didn’t look at me.

  “This monk had a strong will, perhaps as strong as any other man’s had ever been. Stronger when tempered by his horror at his teacher’s fate. He did not move from his spot in the cave. Days came and went, the sunlight never reaching his flesh. He did not feed, nor did he move. Within a month, the monks found him there, after half his flesh had withered. They demanded answers from the young monk, for the death of his teacher.”

  Childe finally turned to look at me. When his eyes met mine, I could picture the scene. The cadaverous monk in a lotus position, and the robed elders, holding candles and shouting questions. I was unsure if the imagined scene was from my mind, or Childe’s.

  “The young man did not answer, and the only part of his body he moved was his eyes. The questioning went on for days, during which he did not move, or eat, or speak. He could smell the blood of the monks around him, but he held his hunger inside. The others saw this, and decided that the young man had achieved enlightenment.”

  Childe grinned as if this were his favorite part of the story. “They left him there, with his hunger. The young monk stayed unmoving for a year, then another. Word spread across the countryside about his enlightenment. Soon pilgrims visited the mountain, to ask their own questions, to which the young monk would offer no answer.

  “The thirst gnawed away at him for a century, withering him away until he was barely a skeleton held complete by the force of his denial. As every day passed, his will strengthened along with the thirst. And the pilgrims still came, dozens, hundreds—all asking questions with no answers.

  “The monks built a shrine around the cave, and the pilgrims began to worship at the young man’s bones. They held him sacred now, though none knew that he still lived, and still kept his vow.

  “A city grew up at the base of the mountain, below the monk’s shrine. Eventually, the cave itself was walled up, for fear of anyone disturbing the young monk’s remains.

  “Slowly, though, the young monk was forgotten. The pilgrims ceased coming. Eventually, it was forgotten why the city was where it was. And, nine centuries after the young monk had walked into the cave, he moved.

  “In the space of one night, every single person who lived within the walls of that great city died. A thousand, ten thousand. A quarter awoke the next night, with their own thirst, and found the shrine destroyed, and the young monk nowhere to be seen.”

  Childe turned back to face the windshield. “You can’t deny yourself, much as you want to.”

  “That justifies all the killing?”

  “It means what it means,” Childe said. “There are hundreds of versions of that story. Will over thirst, thirst over will. Fate, destiny—” Childe shook his head. “There’s just more there than I’ve said, and there’s more here than you’ve seen.”

  He pulled the Rolls away from the curb, leaving us alone in the snow-dusted night.

  “What did he mean?” Gail asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But we’ll work it out, somehow.”

  We walked back to the Chevette. When we reached it, I could hear sirens in the distance, and the Ryan house was already engulfed by fire. I could picture another fire burning in East Cleveland, destroying Childe’s house, burning away everything that might not be mundane.

  I thought of Leia, and Bowie, and Ryan. I hugged Gail’s shoulders and counted ourselves lucky. Leia had been right. Revenge is not a happy pursuit.

  This book is dedicated to Michelle, the love of my life—Loads.

  THE FLESH, THE BLOOD, AND THE FIRE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank everyone who went over this MS at the last minute; Sally Kohonoski, Geoff Landis, Charles Oberndorf, and Mary Turzillo. I’s also like to thank the authors of a number of books that I found useful while writing this; especially Steven Nickel for Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer, John Stark Bellamy III for They Died Crawling and Other Tales of Cleveland Woe, David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski for The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, and Ian S. Haberman for The Van Sweringens of Cleveland: the Biography of an Empire. As always, any errors within are stictly my own.

  PROLOGUE

  April 1934-September 1934

  THE LADY IN THE LAKE

  1934

  1

  Sunday, April 9

  Her name was Laila, and it had been over two weeks since she had fed. Death lingered in the shadows of the iron room where they kept her chained, naked, to a seat bolted to the floor. She could not remember another time when she had felt this vulnerable, and she had a very long memory.

  The
metal room, her prison, was a small chamber with slightly curving walls, ocher with rust stains. There was one light, the bulb wrapped in a hooded cage above her. The hood’s shadow cloaked half the room in darkness. Oil and diesel fumes hung in the still air.

  She was on a ship; the sound of the waves and the rocking of the room around her told her that. That was all she knew. She didn’t know why she was here, or why her captors had not yet killed her. All she knew of her captors came from the few stray bits of German she’d overheard before hunger had completely dulled her senses.

  They had known enough to take her in the day, while she slept. They had known enough not to confront her when she’d first awakened in this room.

  It seemed an age ago, that first awakening. She had been able to escape the chains and attack the walls of this prison. But there were limits to her strength, even before the hunger had gnawed away at her. Her captors would wait for exhaustion to take her, then chain her again while she was unconscious.

  For the first five days it had gone like that, until she had lost the strength to free herself from the bonds.

  It made no sense to her. They had her trapped. If they meant to kill her, they could have done so a dozen times over. Why the torture? Why allow her to exist, allow the hunger consume her body? Why not simply cut out her heart during one of her lengthening periods of delirium?

  She was coming out of an extended period of semiconsciousness when she sensed a familiar presence. At first she believed she was hallucinating, because the presence was from so long ago. Her senses were dulled. It couldn’t be what she thought, no matter how familiar the scent of his blood might be.

  He was dead—dead so long that she might have been the only one alive left to remember who he was and how his blood smelled.

  She raised her head to face the darkness. Hunger had dimmed her once-sensitive vision until she could only make out a shadowy form beyond the pool of light centered on the seat she was chained to.

  The presence did not recede. However impossible it seemed, the scent knifing into her mind was not a hallucination.

  It was real.

  He was real.

  For the first time in two weeks she spoke, her voice a sandpaper whisper. Her lips cracked, weeping fluid as she mouthed the name...

  “Melchior...”

  “Such a long time,” his voice came from the shadows. “Such a long, long time.” The voice was slightly different, but she could feel him behind the words. His mind was like a choking fog filling the room, asphyxiating all that wasn’t his.

  “You... died...” The words came hard for her.

  Melchior laughed. His laugh was condescending, someone laughing at a child, someone who hated children.

  “You mean they were supposed to kill me.”

  She found her voice. She shouted at him. “You defied the only law we have!”

  His voice was like a velvet garrote. “Your Covenant? It was an exercise in self-castration. I thought, once, that I had taught you better. Anyone who willingly cedes power deserves none.”

  Melchior walked into the pool of light so Laila could see him. He had changed his appearance. He was taller now, his hair was blond and longer than any man wore it nowadays. But his eyes had not changed. His irises were colored somewhere between violet and brown, a color close to that of clotted blood.

  In his right hand, he carried a long knife.

  “What has their precious Covenant done for those who condemned me? Who is left of them? Saul? Gildas? Kabir? All dust now, all but you—” He knelt and touched the tip of the blade to where a scar traversed her abdomen. “You still choose to bear the scar where they removed our child? You’re overly sentimental.”

  “You will never understand, will you?” she hissed at him. “Without the Covenant we would all be as dead as Saul, Gildas, Kabir, and your son.”

  “We were kings once,” he said. “I held more power when I was condemned than any one of you dreams of today.”

  She looked away from him and said, “What do you want?”

  “What is mine. What was taken from me.”

  “They won’t let you—”

  “Who won’t let me? Who, aside from you, knows who I am?”

  Laila felt a knot of terror. There was no one else. Even out of those few that were as ancient, there were none left that would have felt his presence, known the scent of his blood. Only her, who had once called him master, and had spit on what she thought were his ashes.

  He drew away from her, as if he knew her thoughts. He probably did. Laila steadied herself and gathered as much of her will as she could, her own presence, together in the face of her old master. “You care nothing for the Covenant. Why didn’t you have your men kill me?”

  Melchior smiled. If the Black Death could smile, its expression would resemble Melchior’s. “Should I say I was sentimental? That I wished you to join me in my new kingdom as you were mine in the old?” He shook his head slowly. “No.”

  Laila watched his grip tighten on the handle of his knife. “No,” he repeated. “You defied me, and this moment has been a long time coming.” He bent so his breath brushed her cheek. “You were saved for me, Laila.”

  She barely had time to see what was coming before the blade swung.

  2

  Wednesday, September 5

  It was still summer, but the dark clouds boiling off the lake seemed to carry the first knife-edge of winter. Detective Stefan Ryzard found himself looking up every few minutes as he walked through the park toward the beach. Occasionally he grabbed the brim of his hat to keep a particularly strong gust from blowing it away.

  From the look of the sky in the direction of the lake, dark as a fresh bruise, they were in for one beaut of a storm. The threatening sky had done a lot to thin out the late-season crowd at Euclid Beach Park, and it was too easy for Stefan to believe he walked the broad avenues alone. The wind seemed to suck up every sound except for the rumble of a coaster, a noise that could easily be faraway thunder, and the insane laughter of the mannequin outside the funhouse.

  The mannequin was a cartoonish female figure looming over passersby. As he passed, it rocked back and forth with an amplified laugh. Between the manic laugh and the cartoonish paint makeup, the thing reminded Stefan of a drunken prostitute, tragic and frightening.

  He walked past it, and the rides, and the Humphry Popcorn stand, until he reached the pier and the walkway along Euclid Beach. Here it wasn’t deserted. Kids, most younger than fourteen, lined the railing overlooking the beach. Half of them had climbed up on the rail and were craning their necks as if a baseball game were being played on the beach below. Standing behind the kids, adults milled around, watching over their heads. Most had the manner of waiting for a streetcar, a few whispered to each other, and a few—the ones with the least pretense, and coincidentally the most shopworn clothes—wore expressions of undisguised curiosity.

  Stefan pushed his way through the crowd to the stairs leading down to the beach. At the bottom a lone uniformed policeman blocked his way.

  “Sir, you have to watch from up there.” He waved a baton toward the spectators.

  Stefan fished out his badge and said, “Detective Ryzard.”

  The uniformed cop looked at the badge and shifted the direction of his baton. “Oh, everyone’s up the beach over there. And Inspector Cody wants everyone keeping an eye on the shoreline, in case anything else washes up.”

  Stefan nodded. “Has the wagon shown up yet?”

  The cop shook his head. “Nope, everything’s still like they found it.”

  Stefan stepped down, past the cop, and let his shoes sink into the sand. The soles of his feet felt an anticipatory itch. Grit was going to fill his shoes before he walked ten yards.

  “Watch it,” the cop said. “Ain’t pretty down there.”

  Stefan said, “Thank you, officer,” and walked down the beach. He wasn’t too worried about what he was going to see. He had seen plenty of bodies in his career. He had been a
patrol officer in the Roaring Third before he made Detective. Even today, that assignment was something out of Dante, and during Prohibition it had been far worse.

  The Third was poor, violent, and just this side of completely lawless. Stefan had started in a place cops usually ended up. Coming from the Third made all the stand-up cops wonder how bent you were, and it made the bent cops—who assumed everyone else was bent—wonder what kind of screwup got you assigned to the Third in the first place.

  In his stint there, he’d seen more bodies than most funeral directors. Corpses had lost their impact on him through sheer repetition.

  A knot of people were assembled a fair way down from the Euclid Beach pier. About half were uniformed officers, about half wore suits. They all seemed subdued, as if something about the crime scene or the oppressive weather made everyone leery of raising their voices.

  When he got within twenty yards, one of the suits waved him over. “Detective Ryzard!” he called. Stefan recognized Inspector Cody. He was holding the brim of his hat and shouting at Stefan through the wind. His tie had gotten loose, and every few seconds would flap toward shore.

  Stefan waved acknowledgment without shouting back. The small crowd parted to let him walk up to the crime scene. He got there in time to see what was left of the victim bathed in the flash from a police photographer.

  The flash dazzled him for a moment, and for a few seconds a part of his mind too primitive to know cameras waited for the rumble of thunder.

  “Washed up sometime last night,” Inspector Cody said, “during the last high tide.”