After a time, the hearts were completely gone, the silver melted down into two pools each three or four feet across. It cooled and hardened on the stones, and that was all that remained of those who had sacrificed themselves, one of whom had given himself up for his people a second time.
Cody looked at Allison and Peter then, his lover and his brother. Seeing them there, in the sunshine, his heart was a little lighter, and though tempted, he did not turn to look back at where the demon had died. Instead, he thought of the future, of the new world they must face. There would be more blood, more fighting. They would be forced to hide from the humans, and to hunt Hannibal and his new coven.
But they would not be alone. And they had the strength of faith now. So long ago, it seemed, Peter had said, “Find out what we are.” Now they knew, and it was that knowledge that would sustain them. They could love one another now, without reserve, without the specter of an assumption of their own evil hanging over their heads.
There were still many vampires out in the world, and it would be a race now, between them and Hannibal, to gather those survivors. But Cody and his clan had a message of hope and truth. Though they were products of Heaven and Hell, they were, like the first among them, inherently good. The true vampire’s bite had given the Stranger a devil’s heart, but he would always have an angel’s soul.
That was their legacy.
Peter was having a rough time walking, the demon’s poison in his leg giving him quite a bit of pain. But Will and Allison held him up. It would be Peter who would lead them, Will knew that, and he was comfortable with the thought. Comforted, really. For even while he was in Hell, and they did not know whether he was dead or alive, still it was Peter’s leadership they had followed, his quest they had embraced.
“We’ll be on the run now,” Allison said. “To the humans every shadow is like Hannibal.”
“Not all humans,” Cody reminded her for no matter what the dangers, Allison would live and die a human being.
“I love you,” Allison said.
“Me too,” Peter’s voice cracked as he said it, and then all three of them were smiling.
“Now that’s the Octavian I remember,” Cody laughed.
“Will,” Peter said, his face mock-serious, “I know how much you’ve enjoyed your vacation, but could we go home now?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cody said and nodded. “Oh, yeah.”
“Where is home now?” Allison asked.
“New Orleans,” Cody answered.
As they made their way out of Residence Plaza, they could hear military helicopters over the city. Cody knew the choppers were returning for the cleanup, that they would try to destroy any vampire they found alive. But he also knew the city could be saved, that the nukes were not coming. Another block and they found Stefan, weeping by the white and bloodless form of the emperor Charlemagne. When Peter put a hand on his arm, Stefan looked up.
“I don’t know if he’ll make it,” Stefan said. “I don’t know if he wants to.”
With Cody’s help, Stefan managed to pick Charlemagne up again, and together they left.
Somewhere in the city, church bells rang, and Will realized that some of Salzburg’s residents had never been evacuated, and yet had survived. He was happy for them and though he didn’t quite understand why, proud of them as well.
Allison counted aloud as the bell rang twelve times.
High noon, William F. Cody thought, but the showdown was over.
Epilogue
The folks were white and stricken, and each tongue seemed weighted with lead;
Each heart was clutched in hollow hand of ice;
And every eye was staring at the horror of the dead,
The pity of the men who paid the price.
They were come, were come to mock us, in the first flush of our peace;
Through writhing lips their teeth were all agleam;
They were coming in their thousands—oh, would they never cease!
I closed my eyes, and then—it was a dream.
There was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet glittering street;
The town was mad, a man was like a boy.
A thousand flags were flaming where the sly and city meet;
A thousand bells were thundering the joy.
There was music, mirth and sunshine; but some eyes shone with regret;
And while we stun with cheers our homing braves,
O God, in Thy great mercy, let us nevermore forget
The graves they left behind, the bitter graves.
—ROBERT SERVICE, The March of the Dead
New York City, New York, United States of America.
Monday, June 12, 2000, 2:31 P.M.:
Roberto Jimenez was grim-faced as he prepared for his new assignment. In a well-guarded office of the United Nations building, he scanned hundreds of international military files, and thousands of résumés and letters already received on-line from civilians, mostly mercenaries, who were offering their services in the hunting of vampires.
And that, Roberto knew, was his new job description, the new definition of his life. He had become, sometime in the last week, the world’s most powerful vampire hunter.
Upon his return from Salzburg, Roberto had been dogged by every media personality in the world. After that first day, he had disappeared. In modern times, you weren’t supposed to be able to do that, but Roberto was not Commander of the UNSF for nothing. He had gone underground, and only the secretary general, Rafael Nieto, and the new President of the United States knew where. And even that had been a mistake. The two men had spent four days playing “Berto in the middle,” as each vied for his political support.
He didn’t know which of them he hated more. Secretary General Nieto was a pacifist, who had made extraordinary strides toward world peace during his tenure as the most powerful man in the world. He was personally repulsed by the vampires—even he wasn’t calling them shadows anymore—but he insisted that, like humans, they were a basically decent race with an inordinate number of bad apples.
President Galin, on the other hand, was a madman. Every day that passed, Roberto became more and more incredulous that the world media hadn’t picked it up yet. Galin was certifiable, and Nieto certainly thought so. But on the other hand, Galin wanted to wipe vampires from the face of the Earth, and Roberto couldn’t argue with that philosophy. In Roberto Jimenez’s mind, the Venice Jihad and the Massacre at Salzburg would not have happened if the vampires had not existed. He couldn’t help but blame them.
Though he’d sensed a certain nobility in a couple of the vampires he’d dealt with, they were too dangerous to be allowed to survive, to multiply, and Hannibal had declared war, after all. Roberto thought the creatures should be taken out like rabid dogs, and Galin was the number one proponent of that side of the issue. Problem was, Galin was rabid, too, and Roberto didn’t trust him at all. Luckily, politics had forced Nieto to at least meet Galin halfway, and that’s where Jimenez had come in.
His new orders were to assemble an international tracking and investigation team to find vampires, as well as a corps of one hundred 8-member strike teams, eight hundred people whose job it would be to terminate individual vampires. They had assumed that most of the vampires would go back to their old patterns, mainly hiding in plain sight, alone. But some would gather in packs, or covens, as Allison Vigeant’s book about the Venice Jihad explained. In that case, the strike teams could operate in hundreds of combinations.
According to Nieto, the whole thing had been set up just to track down Hannibal’s coven and eliminate it, and him. But Galin had assured Roberto, and Nieto had quietly admitted, that this was merely the beginning. Commander Roberto Jimenez was setting up a worldwide search-and-destroy mission—a mission with no time constraints, few legal parameters.
Killing vampires had now become his life’s work.
London, England, European Union.
Monday, June 12, 2000, 11:59 A.M.:
Marie Wilkins was
looking for a new job. She was a pretty woman, though not as smart as most people thought. With her jet-black hair and formidable figure, she stuck out in a crowd of fair, thin British women. It had definitely helped her on interviews so far. So what if she couldn’t type more than thirty-five words a minute. As far as she was concerned, with her legs, that wouldn’t matter.
As she walked down Tottenham Court Road, still several blocks from her next interview, Marie’s mind was on Kev, the new man in her life. He smoked too much and drank too much, he liked his sex rough and tumble, and his every word to her outside the sack was sharp and biting. They’d only met a couple of nights ago, but already Marie thought she was in love.
He was a big wanker, was Kev, and she liked them big. Strong. Bullies had always been her get, and that’s the way she liked it. Oh, she didn’t want them to hurt her, really. Not unless she asked for it. But she wanted to know they could if they wanted to. She wanted to be with a man who was a danger to her, who could overpower her and beat her bloody anytime he wanted.
That was why she’d gone after Rolf Sechs originally, and why she’d lost interest long before the vampire disappeared. When Marie had taken the job as receptionist/secretary for the Shadow Justice System offices in London, she liked the mute right away. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t speak, what thrilled Marie was that he was far stronger, far more dangerous than any man she’d ever been with. The pay hadn’t been great, but she’d taken the job just the same, and Rolf had been an excellent lover.
If you went for that sensitive, gentle stuff.
Sure, he could have killed her in a flash, but Marie knew there was no chance of that ever happening. She’d lost interest in Rolf pretty quickly. At the same time, the office politics between him and Hannibal had been so interesting that she’d kept sleeping with Rolf just to infuriate the old man, who clearly wanted a poke at her himself.
And that wasn’t going to happen. Hannibal didn’t just feel dangerous. Marie liked men to be cruel to her; it made her feel wanted, needed. She was sure that had to do with Daddy. But she didn’t want to die. And look how that had turned out. Hannibal and his flunkies had been blamed for hundreds of murders in the past five days alone. Office politics had become global politics. She’d been questioned by UN investigators and just about everyone else she’d ever heard of, not to mention plenty she hadn’t. Most of those people had been mean to her, but not in any intimate way.
Ah, but Kev—she’d known the moment she’d seen him in the pub. One look at the scowl on his face and she knew he’d be coming back to her place. Her friends were all uptight bitches, though she loved them still. But they couldn’t understand her, in fact denied that she could truly enjoy being with men like Kev. They just didn’t get it. These men were powerful, were dangerous and cruel. But when they were inside her, no matter how rough they were, no matter how she whimpered, she was in charge. They had to have her, and that was the real power.
Her girlfriends just didn’t understand. In fact, some of them were ashamed of her. Fuck ’em, Marie thought, I know what I like.
The morning had started out sunny, but the clouds had rolled in almost right away, and now it had started to rain. It was just a drip drop at first, but she knew that it would be pissin’ down in no time.
Heaven forbid I should take the tube!
Two blocks from the Mackeson Building, where she hoped to find a job, since they were paying better than the others, it did finally begin to pour, and now she tried to run in her heels without falling on her face. Only a block-and-a-half to go, and then she’d take a taxi home after. She put her leather bag on top of her head, trying to keep her hair as dry as possible under the circumstances. God, she was going to make a horrendous first impression, she thought. She could probably kiss the job good-bye.
Marie was dodging now, around other people who were trying to get in out of the rain. And then suddenly she couldn’t dodge. There was a man in front of her and there was no way she could get around him. Instead, she plowed into the bastard and sent them both tumbling into the rain-filled gutter along the pavement.
“Uhhfff!” Marie gasped as she hit the ground, closing her eyes as the dirty water splashed into her face. She was soaked to the bone in half a second, and she shook her head to try to sort out her thoughts.
She could hear the chuckles over the clumsy scene even with the rain absorbing and replacing most of the sounds around her. Marie tried to sit up, wanting to be away from the water as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t. The man she had run into, who was wearing a long raincoat, had landed with his legs across her lower torso. His hair was silver-gray—an old man, then? She worried for a moment that she might actually have hurt him. Even though she was furious about her clothes, about the interview she would now have to cancel, Marie felt guilty.
“Here, you,” she said, tapping on the man’s shoulder even as he pushed himself off the ground with both hands. “Are you all right, then? I didn’t mean to—”
And then, rather than pulling his legs off her, the old man pushed himself over onto her, trapping her arms and legs, her body, beneath him, like so many of her lovers had done. She had enjoyed it then, but now . . .
Marie saw his face, finally, and she screamed as his teeth sank into her neck, there in the gutter, in the cold rainwater. People all around began to yell, rushing forward to punch and kick the man, but he did not move away. Marie Wilkins stared down into the ice-blue eyes of her own death, into the eyes of Hannibal. After a moment, her screaming stopped, and her eyes felt as if they were going to burst from her face as she watched the vampire drink her blood. She heard the whistle of a bobby on the way, but she knew he would come too late.
“I will never be denied again!” Hannibal told her triumphantly, the smile on his face terrible. Cruel.
He punched a clawed hand through her chest and crushed her heart.
Her brain could not understand, but her eyes still recorded the vampire’s transformation to mist.
And then they were both gone.
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America.
Monday, June 12, 2000, 8:37 P.M.:
In a three-story home with terraces that hung out over Decatur Street, four blocks from Jackson Square in the French Quarter, a small group of humans and shadows crowded into their living room. They shared this home, living together, in peace, and if anyone on the streets of New Orleans knew that vampires lived on Decatur Street, they weren’t saying. They were used to the presence of shadows, and not much interested in politics. As long as their sons and daughters didn’t go missing in the middle of the night, they weren’t about to start trouble with the neighbors.
The room was Old South, as befitted the house. Will Cody and Allison Vigeant snuggled together on the love seat. Peter Octavian looked at his reflection in the window and ran a hand through his long hair to flatten it, a familiar gesture which only reaffirmed his identity to those in the room. Erika Hunter shared the long couch with Rolf Sechs, and Joe Boudreau sat on the floor with his back against it. They all looked up as Stefan came down the stairs.
“How is he?” Peter asked, his eyebrows knitted with concern.
“Sleeping fitfully,” Stefan said. “Even with the blood we’ve all given, his legs have barely begun to grow. I wonder . . .”
Stefan left the thought unfinished, but they all knew where he was going with it, for they had wondered as well. Charlemagne was to have been their leader now. If he had given up, if his will was not strong enough to heal him, to replace his amputated limbs, then Peter would lead them. And they all knew, as well, that Peter didn’t really want the job. The mood in the house was somber.
Will, Peter and Allison had arrived only a few hours earlier, with Stefan and Charlemagne in their care. Erika and Rolf had been there a full day, and had been met by Joe Boudreau and George Marcopoulos, who had already begun to ready the house for them. It was a new beginning, set up for them by Meaghan Gallagher. Now that the others had arrived, and
though George was not yet home from making a most important phone call, they finally had time to mourn, together, everything and everyone they had lost.
They mourned for Alexandra Nueva, for Meaghan Gallagher, and for Elissa Thomas. They mourned for Martha, Isaac and Jared, and for John Courage. They mourned for Lazarus, who might be dead or trapped forever in the bowels of Hell. They mourned for an old king who lived in agony, and his faithful warriors, who had been resurrected only to truly and finally die, but whose valor had been instrumental in their salvation. They mourned for Annelise and Carlo, whose last names Rolf and Erika were forced to admit they had never known. They mourned for all those nameless soldiers and civilians, humans and vampires, who had died at the hands of Hannibal and Mulkerrin and the lords of Hell. And they mourned for themselves, forced to live in a world where they would be hunted by both humans and vampires, trapped between two sides in a war, like all others, without a victor.
They rejoiced to have discovered the true nature of shadows, to know their history, to have obtained a foundation for the future. They planned for the future, together, and spoke excitedly about their proselytizing mission, to seek out shadows across the Earth and bring them to their cause, to enlighten them with the truth about themselves, to undermine Hannibal’s barbaric efforts.
They worried about the new American President, his hatred for shadows, and George Marcopoulos’s contention that the man was insane. They hoped that one day humanity’s leadership would have more vision, better perception, and see that for all their power, vampires shadows—were more like humans than not like them. They wished they didn’t have to hide, and secretly, sometimes, that they had remained hidden.
“If wishes were horses,” Allison said when that was mentioned, and a light chuckle filled the room.
“There’s no going back,” Cody added. “We move forward or we die.”
“I’m not prepared to die again,” Octavian said.
“So what then?” Joe Boudreau asked. “We just hide out, wait for the humans to hunt us down?”
Angel Souls and Devil Hearts Page 39