The dwarf cracks a short whip behind her, driving her forward and across the courtyard. Toward the great, black iron cauldron.
An hour ago the fire beneath it had burned brightly, the water within bubbled merrily. Now the fire is banked, only a wisp of smoke suggests its previous existence; the water inside is already slushy with ice.
Two women move to the cauldron and dip buckets into its stew of water and ice. Like the dwarf, they are well wrapped against the piercing cold.
Their prey can only shield herself with blistered hands.
The women step forward and fling the contents of their pails as the girl tries to change direction. The water breaks over her like a wave, plastering her dark hair against her shockingly pale skin, sluicing her wounds so that they weep pink, washing away the last vestiges of warmth from her goose-dimpled flesh. She slips and falls upon her back, disappearing in the deep snow. She does not get up and the women turn back to the cauldron.
“This unnecessary cruelty will be your undoing, Betya,” says a familiar voice.
I turn my face up to a window in the great tower. Even though they are hundreds of feet away, I can hear them over the howl of the winter wind as if I stand in the chamber, beside them.
“You are a fine one to lecture me, Old Dragon. Your atrocities were the excesses of legend a hundred years ago and time has done nothing to redeem your reputation.”
“My so-called ‘atrocities’ were acts of war. Against superior forces. If I had not struck terror in the hearts of my enemies, Wallachia would have been overrun.”
She dismisses his argument with a shrug. “Did any of it really matter? The Turks are everywhere, now. I barely see my husband because he is always off fighting the Ottomans. On the battlefield,” she adds archly. “I seem to recall certain events that were closer to home. Ambassadors at court and the use of nails, the poor locked up in burning buildings, forced cannibalism—”
“One’s enemies are not confined to the battlefields, Betya.”
“I know. Oft they can be found in the bedroom,” she says with a red smile.
Down below, the two women raise the naked girl to her feet. A third woman joins them and helps the dwarf douse the pale, limp form with more buckets of water.
“In your bedroom, my dear, everyone is the enemy.”
“Not so, dearest Vladimir. Unlike you, I do not fear those I take to my bed. I love them.”
“To death,” he agrees. “But they fear and hate you so that makes you the enemy. It makes your own bed a battleground.”
“Oh please! You seduce your lovers with mind control and pretend they come to you of their own free will. You are such a poseur!”
“I do not torture them, Betya. I do not make new enemies when there is no need. As voivode, I served a higher cause than my own vanity. What do such cruelties serve here?”
The women release the girl and she now stands unsupported, her white flesh touched with a translucent blue sheen. The water has formed a transparent cast over her features, the mouth frozen open in a silent scream, the eyes dark and empty like piss holes in the snow, the wounds like jeweled adornments of rubies and tourmaline. An ice sculpture of torment frozen in time.
“I serve The Darkness inside me, my prince. I must feed it or it will surely devour me. As it would devour all of my bloodline. We are bound to its dark service.”
“You serve the witch, Betya. She will betray you. She will betray you all.”
The countess laughs. “Does she frighten you, my lord? You of all people?”
“You should kill her,” he growls, “before she can make her power over you complete!”
I turn away and stumble into the extended arms of another young woman, her face a mask of frozen blood, her embrace the iron bands of winter. Cold limbs leech the warmth from my sides and I fall against the ice shelf of her bosom. I try to push away but my hands can’t find purchase on the downhill slopes of shoulder and hip. I twist away and am drenched with another bucketful of icy water . . .
. . . icy sweat. I pulled at a cold arm and disentangled myself from her flaccid embrace.
Deirdre stirred and murmured something, lost in her own crimson dreams. I slid from my bed and pulled a sheet over to cover her snowy nakedness. Then staggered down the hall to the guest bedroom, shedding the clothes I had fallen asleep in earlier that morning.
I crawled into the empty bed.
Stopped and then got back up.
Went to the door.
Locked it.
Staggered back to the alien sheets.
And slid into a hazed and confused slumber where I crawled through a dreamscape of parched desert sands and over dunes of ground glass.
* * *
At some point the dream changed and I had become Quasimodo, perched precariously on the castle ramparts.
A mob storms the walls with scaling ladders while a semi-organized phalanx shoulders a great log and uses it as a battering ram.
“Sanctuary!” I shout down at them, “sanctuary!” I can barely hear myself over the noise. The bells peal in the bell tower above me while the pounding against the great gate below grows louder and louder.
“Leave me alone!” I cry. “Go away!”
But they won’t go away. I will have to kill them to make them stop coming after me.
And, God help me, that is no longer a guarantee.
I opened my eyes to see Deirdre bending over me.
The doorbell continued to chime and the pounding on the front door reverberated throughout the whole house.
“Someone’s at the door,” she said.
I groaned. “Thank you, Lucas Buck.”
“What?” She was still naked.
“Never mind.” I sat up and felt something slosh inside my brainpan.
“Why are you in my room?” she asked.
“Why were you in mine?”
“Send whoever is downstairs away and I will show you,” she answered lasciviously.
“Oh God . . .” I groaned my way off the edge of the bed and up and onto my feet. I stumbled back into my pants and fumbled into my shirt on the way down the stairs. Heedless of the afternoon sun, I yanked the front door open.
She was putting her full—if not particularly considerable—weight into her pounding. When the door gave way, so did she. I ended up on the floor with the diminutive woman sprawled across my lap.
“Detective Ruiz,” I observed. “I see you favor the Lady Shaft line of faux leather trench coats. To what do I owe this . . . pleasure?”
She scrambled back onto her feet. Behind her, out on my doorstep, Detective Murray smiled affably. I thought about lending him one of my hats: the little Tyrolean number he was sporting today was especially hideous.
“The ‘long arm of the law’ is meant to be a figure of speech, Captain,” I continued, starting the process of finding my own way back up. Murray extended a long arm of his own and grasped my hand. I was standing in no time.
“I’m still a lieutenant, Mr. Haim.”
“Please, let’s not stand on formalities, Detective. Just call me ‘skel’.”
“You took a long time to answer the door, Haim,” she said finally.
“This is the middle of the night for me, ma’am.”
“We were making enough noise to wake the dead.” Her eyes lit up when she saw that that phrase slide under my skin.
“Why don’t you just mace me and get it over with?” I asked with a scowl.
Murray cleared his throat. “Dorcas . . .”
I looked at Ruiz. “Dorcas?”
“We wanted to ask you a few more questions,” she said hurriedly.
“Always happy to assist the police,” I said, “but your tone suggests I may want to consult a lawyer.”
“All we really want to do is have your permission to look around your property,” Murray continued in a rare burst of verbosity.
“The grounds or inside my house?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Ruiz wanted to know.<
br />
“A dead body was found in the woods adjacent to my front yard. The murderer may have left evidence in the vicinity and there’s always the possibility that some of it ended up over the property line. I’d certainly look around if I were you.”
“Then you—”
My face hardened. “But the only reason to look around the inside of my house is if I’m considered to be a suspect.” I gestured out the door. “Be my guest, tromp around my yard, crawl through my bushes, go around back and wade in the bayou. But you’ll need a warrant if you want to come into my house.”
“Something inside you don’t want us to see?”
I stared down at her. “I have company right now. You’re interrupting.” I cocked an eyebrow.
She glared back up at me. “A lady friend?”
“Ever hear of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?”
Murray started humming the theme from The Flintstones.
“Depends,” Ruiz said, “on whether your ‘company’ is alive or dead.”
I struggled to keep my expression neutral.
“Oh shit,” said Murray. He was looking down into the flower bed beside my porch.
We all looked.
Between the impatiens and the creeping phlox was a ridge of white toadstools.
Then I saw that they weren’t five little toadstools in a row: They were toes.
* * *
Curtis “Pops” Berry didn’t look like a lawyer. Unless you were thinking of a lawyer from the 1800s who was taking a week off to go camping. His graying hair looked as though he’d missed his barber’s appointment two months in a row and his beard hadn’t seen a pair of scissors in two years. As usual, he was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans and work boots. The tee shirt was emblazoned with the message: “Jesus Is Coming!” in bold red lettering. Beneath this platitude, in smaller, gold typeface was the addendum: “And boy is He pissed!”
He hadn’t felt it necessary to don his denim ("working") blazer, he explained, since I was being released without bail, without even an arraignment. Apparently my whereabouts were fully checked out and accounted for during the period of time that Kandi Fenoli had once again disappeared from the morgue. My alibi appeared airtight.
It took Pops a little longer to get my hat and sunglasses out of lockup than it did to spring Yours Truly. He handed them to me before escorting me out into the late-afternoon daylight.
Outside the sky was heavily overcast and it looked about three hours later than it really was. I kept the hat and sunglasses on: clouds don’t mean diddley when it comes to UV radiation.
“They did a quick search of your house,” Pops said as he shepherded me across the street and fished for the remote in his pocket.
“They what?”
“Detective Ruiz is citing ‘probable cause.’ Says you alluded to a potential accomplice in the house. I say it’s pretty damn weak even if there had been another party present and you may have grounds for a lawsuit.” He found the remote and a purple Lexus chirped a row away from us. Pops liked comfortable things—clothes or cars, cost wasn’t the determining factor.
“Did they trash the place?”
“Nope. Checked it out, myself, on the way over. They just looked around enough to ascertain that no one else was inside. The real damage would seem to be to Detective Ruiz’s ego: she says you deliberately set her up.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen the last of Dorcas.”
We opened the doors and slid in, buckling up.
“Now that we’re out of earshot I want to ask you the same question they did, and remind you that anything you say will fall under the umbrella of lawyer-client privilege.” He started the engine and navigated us back out into traffic as a few random drops began to kamikaze against the windshield.
I sighed. “I know: do I have any enemies? Any enemies who would replant a corpse right next to my front door?”
“Son, I’ve seen a lot of weird shit during my life—especially the last five years—and I don’t think anything would totally surprise me anymore.” He looked at me sidewise. “You may be keeping a couple of surprises from me and that’s okay—I have a sense about most people and I won’t abide a crooked client. You may have a couple of kinks in your closet but I don’t read you for anything crooked. But I can’t help you unless I know what kind of trouble you’re really in.
“Speaking of which, you want to stop by the emergency room on the way home? You look like hell on roller skates!”
* * *
We stopped by the blood bank instead. My “medical condition” is just vague enough to most people for them to accept that I self-medicate and require occasional infusions of whole blood. Being owner of the blood bank and having all kinds of official-looking paperwork was sufficient to have me in and back out the door in five minutes. I wouldn’t have to come back after closing with my passkey.
“Looks like you have a welcoming committee,” Pops observed as we motored up my driveway.
Theresa-call-me-Terry was sitting on my front step.
* * *
“Two dead bodies were found on your property,” she said as I tried to keep her from noticing the blood labeling on the box I was sliding into the refrigerator.
“Just one, actually,” I said, trying to figure out how soon I could get her into a cab so I could tear through a packet of blood. “They found the same one twice.” I filled a pan with water and set it on the stove to heat up.
“Really?” she said, eyes opening wide.
Oops—not thinking clearly at all!
“It’s complicated,” I said. “Look, Theresa—”
“Call me ‘T’.”
“—I’ve had a really rough day and I’m not feeling too well—”
“Is that why you brought home that blood from the blood bank?”
“—and I need to go to bed. Please go home.”
She stared at me, daring me for an explanation.
I stared back, gearing up to erase her memory of the last ten minutes. The trick was to be precise enough so that she didn’t end up wondering how she suddenly ended up here in the first place.
The telephone rang. The answering machine picked and went into its “leave a message” spiel.
“After this call, I’m calling you a cab.”
Terry-call-me-T cocked her head to the side and studied me as if I had spoken in tongues.
“Sam?” Chalice’s voice. Interesting: we were on a first-name basis, now. “I’m still at the lab. I’m sorry I haven’t called sooner but I’ve stayed over and run every test I can think of on your blood and—and—I don’t know what to say!”
I looked at my uninvited guest, whose attention had shifted to the answering machine: Uh-oh.
I dodged toward the telephone as Chalice said: “I never would have believed your story about vampires and werewolves if I hadn’t been responsible for the results, myself. Your blood—”
I snatched up the receiver. “Chalice, I’m here.”
“Sam! This is incredible!”
Unfortunately, answering the phone did not immediately disconnect the answering machine: both of our voices were now amplified through the little speaker, producing squealy feedback.
“We’ve got to bring other researchers in on this!”
“No!” I said, looking back at Terry-call-me-T. “And I can’t talk right now.”
“But the genetic mutations in your hemoglobin, your DNA—you may be the key to all of our research projects! The more people we bring in on this—”
“Absolutely not!” I pushed, straining sub-vocals to impress my point. “You cannot tell anyone else!”
“I won’t,” she said, the pout evident in her voice. “But running samples through the analyzers and sequencers is a guarantee that someone is going to notice sooner or later.”
Shit! “I cannot stress this enough, Chalice: no one else must find out! It could well mean my life!”
“What about my life? If you bit me would my blood—”
“
I can’t talk right now!” I slammed the receiver down and leaned over the machine with my back to my precocious eavesdropper.
“How about if you bit me?” she said after a moment.
“Nobody’s biting anybody here.” I turned around. “And you are going home.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Look into my eyes.”
She looked. “Oh, I see. You’re going to hypnotize me—use mind control. Like you did with Rod.” She positively beamed. “Was I right about you or what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because you won’t remember any of this. In a moment you’ll be leaving. You won’t remember anything about coming here. You won’t remember anything you heard or saw. You won’t ever have the urge to come back and visit my house.” I hesitated. “And you will go to the Registrar’s office tomorrow and drop my class.”
She turned away from me and walked back into the kitchen. I heard the clack of the stove burner as she turned it off and then the sound of a drawer opening. She returned with a paring knife.
“You know what?” she said with a bright and chipper tone, “you’re the one who’s getting sleepy. You can hardly keep your eyes open. You don’t need that warmed-over stale plasma. You want the real deal, fresh and hot from the heart.” She drew the blade across her forearm, and rivulets of red welled up in its wake. She extended the arm (the flow, the feast!) toward me as an offering.
I took a step, staggering. “No,” I said. “Let me get you . . . some . . . bandages,” I whispered. The world faded around me, Terry receded. The arm was all that was left. The ribbon of life, precious life—flowing, cresting, surging!
“Hello,” said a voice from the stairway. “Are we having company?”
I forced my eyes away from the blood (the blood, yes, the blood) and looked over at Deirdre who was drifting down to the first floor. She yawned, putting three-quarter-inch fangs on display. “Planning on starting without me?”
Terry’s eyes had grown large. “Coool!” she said.
Chapter Twelve
“I’m not hungry!” Deirdre pouted as I dragged her up the stairs and into the guest bedroom.
“Fine,” I said. “But you’re still coming. I need a date.”
“You don’t need a date. You just don’t trust me to stay here with her!”
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 19