“Some night,” he whispered, “there’s going to be nothing else but you and me.”
When the song was over, I had to go back to the table and have a long, cold drink. Lots of ice.
As the time drew closer to midnight, the vampires gathered around the blood fountain and filled the crystal goblets. The non-vamp guests also rose to their feet. I was standing beside the table where I’d been chatting with Calvin and Colonel Flood when Eric brought out a tabletop hand gong and began to strike it. If he’d been human, he’d have been flushed with excitement; as it was, his eyes were blazing. Eric looked both beautiful and scary, because he was so intent.
When the last reverberation had shivered into silence, Eric raised his own glass high and said, “On this most memorable of days, we stand together in awe and hope that the Lord of Darkness will honour us with his presence. O Prince, appear to us!”
We actually all stood in hushed silence, waiting for the Great Pumpkin—oh, wait, the Dark Prince. Just when Eric’s face began to look downcast, a harsh voice broke the tension.
“My loyal son, I shall reveal myself!”
Milos Griesniki leaped from behind the bar, pulling off his tux jacket and pants and his shirt to reveal ... an incredible jumpsuit made from black, glittery, stretchy stuff. I would have expected to see it on a girl going to her prom, a girl without much money who was trying to look unconventional and sexy. With his blocky body and dark hair and moustache, the one-piece made Milos look more like an acrobat in a third-rate circus.
There was an excited babble of low-voiced reaction. Calvin said, “Well . . . shit.” Colonel Flood gave a sharp nod, to say he agreed completely.
The bartender posed regally before Eric, who after a startled instant bowed before the much shorter vampire. “My lord,” Eric said, “I am humbled. That you should honour us... that you should actually be here ... on this day, of all days ... I am overcome.”
“Fucking poser,” Pam muttered in my ear. She’d glided up behind me in the hubbub following the bartender’s announcement.
“You think?” I was watching the spectacle of the confident and regal Eric babbling away, actually sinking down on one knee.
Dracula made a hushing gesture, and Eric’s mouth snapped shut in midsentence. So did the mouths of every vamp in the place. “Since I have been here incognito for a week,” Dracula said grandly, his accent harsh but not unattractive, “I have become so fond of this place that I propose to stay for a year. I will take your tribute while I am here, to live in the style I enjoyed during life. Though the bottled Royalty is acceptable as a stopgap, I, Dracula, do not care for this modern habit of drinking artificial blood, so I will require one woman a day. This one will do to start with.” He pointed at me, and Colonel Flood and Calvin moved instantly to flank me, a gesture I appreciated. The vampires looked confused, an expression which didn’t sit well on undead faces; except Bill. His face went completely blank.
Eric followed Vlad Tepes’s stubby finger, identifying me as the future Happy Meal. Then he stared at Dracula, looking up from his kneeling position. I couldn’t read his face at all, and I felt a stirring of fear. What would Charlie Brown have done if the Great Pumpkin wanted to eat the little red-haired girl?
“And as for my financial maintenance, a tithe from your club’s income and a house will be sufficient for my needs, with some servants thrown in: your second-in-command, or your club manager, one of them should do ...” Pam actually growled, a low-level sound that made my hair stand up on my neck. Clancy looked as though someone had kicked his dog.
Pam was fumbling with the centrepiece of the table, hidden by my body. After a second, I felt something pressed into my hand. I glanced down. “You’re the human,” she whispered.
“Come, girl,” Dracula said, beckoning with a curving of his fingers. “I hunger. Come to me and be honoured before all these assembled.”
Though Colonel Flood and Calvin both grabbed my arms, I said very softly, “This isn’t worth your lives. They’ll kill you if you try to fight. Don’t worry,” and I pulled away from them, meeting their eyes, in turn, as I spoke. I was trying to project confidence. I didn’t know what they were getting, but they understood there was a plan.
I tried to glide toward the spangled bartender as if I was entranced. Since that’s something vamps can’t do to me, and Dracula obviously never doubted his own powers, I got away with it.
“Master, how did you escape from your tomb at Targoviste?” I asked, doing my best to sound admiring and dreamy. I kept my hands down by my sides so the folds of rosy chiffon would conceal them.
“Many have asked me that,” the Dark Prince said, inclining his head graciously as Eric’s own head jerked up, his brows drawn together. “But that story must wait. My beautiful one, I am so glad you left your neck bare tonight. Come closer to me ... ERRRKF’
“That’s for the bad dialogue!” I said, my voice trembling as I tried to shove the stake in even harder.
“And that’s for the embarrassment,” Eric said, giving the end a tap with his fist, just to help, as the “Prince” stared at us in horror. The stake obligingly disappeared into his chest.
“You dare . . . you dare,” the short vampire croaked. “You shall be executed.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. His face went blank, and his eyes were empty. Flakes began to drift from his skin as he crumpled.
But as the self-proclaimed Dracula sank to the floor and I looked around me, I wasn’t so sure. Only the presence of Eric at my side kept the assemblage from falling on me and taking care of business. The vampires from out of town were the most dangerous; the vampires that knew me would hesitate.
“He wasn’t Dracula,” I said as clearly and loudly as I could. “He was an impostor.”
“Kill her!” said a thin female vamp with short brown hair. “Kill the murderess!” She had a heavy accent, I thought Russian. I was about tired of the new wave of vamps.
Pot calling the kettle black, I thought briefly. I said, “You-all really think this goober was the Prince of Darkness?” I pointed to the flaking mess on the floor, held together by the spangled jumpsuit.
“He is dead. Anyone who kills Dracula must die,” said Indira quietly, but not like she was going to rush over and rip my throat out.
“Any vampire who kills Dracula must die,” Pam corrected. “But Sookie is not a vampire, and this was not Dracula.”
“She killed one impersonating our founder,” Eric said, making sure he could be heard throughout the club. “Milos was not the real Dracula. I would have staked him myself if I had had my wits about me.” But I was standing right by Eric, my hand oh his arm, and I knew he was shaking.
“How do you know that? How could she tell, a human who had only a few moments in his presence? He looked just like the woodcuts!”This from a tall, heavy man with a French accent.
“Vlad Tepes was buried at the monastery on Snagov,” Pam said calmly, and everyone turned to her. “Sookie asked him how he’d escaped from his tomb at Targoviste.”
Well, that hushed them up, at least temporarily. I began to think I might live through this night.
“Recompense must be made to his maker,” pointed out the tall, heavy vampire. He’d calmed down quite a bit in the last few minutes.
“If we can determine his maker,” Eric said, “certainly.”
“I’ll search my database,” Bill offered. He was standing in the shadows, where he’d lurked all evening. Now he took a step forward, and his dark eyes sought me out like a police helicopter searchlight catches the fleeing felon on Cops. “I’ll find out his real name, if no one here has met him before.”
All the vamps present glanced around. No one stepped forward to claim Milos/Dracula’s acquaintance.
“In the meantime,” Eric said smoothly, “let’s not forget that this event should be a secret amongst us until we can find out more details.” He smiled with a great show of fang, making his point quite nicely. “What happens in Shreveport, stays
in Shreveport.”
There was a murmur of assent.
“What do you say, guests?” Eric asked the non-vamp attendees.
Colonel Flood said, “Vampire business is not pack business. We don’t care if you kill each other. We won’t meddle in your affairs.”
Calvin shrugged. “Panthers don’t mind what you do.”
The goblin said, “I’ve already forgotten the whole thing,” and the madwoman beside him nodded and laughed. The few other non-vamps hastily agreed.
No one solicited my answer. I guess they were taking my silence for a given, and they were right.
Pam drew me aside. She made an annoyed sound, like “tchk” and brushed at my dress. I looked down to see a fine spray of blood had misted across the chiffon skirt. I knew immediately that I’d never wear my beloved bargain dress again.
“Too bad, you look good in pink,” Pam said.
I started to offer the dress to her, then thought again. I would wear it home and burn it. Vampire blood on my dress? Not a good piece of evidence to leave hanging around someone’s closet. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to dispose instantly of bloodstained clothing.
“That was a brave thing you did,” Pam said.
“Well, he was going to bite me,” I said. “To death.”
“Still,” she said.
I didn’t like the calculating look in her eyes.
“Thank you for helping Eric when I couldn’t,” Pam said. “My maker is a big idiot about the prince.”
“I did it because he was going to suck my blood,” I told her.
“You did some research on Vlad Tepes.”
“Yes, I went to the library after you told me about the original Dracula, and I Googled him.”
Pam’s eyes gleamed. “Legend has it that the original Vlad III was beheaded before he was buried.”
“That’s just one of the stories surrounding his death,” I said.
“True. But you know that not even a vampire can survive a beheading.”
“I would think not.”
“So you know the whole thing may be a crock of shit.”
“Pam,” I said, mildly shocked. “Well, it might be. And it might not. After all, Eric talked to someone who said he was the real Dracula’s gofer.”
“You knew that Milos wasn’t the real Dracula the minute he stepped forth.”
I shrugged.
Pam shook her head at me. “You’re too soft, Sookie Stackhouse. It’ll be the death of you some day.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. I was watching Eric, his golden hair falling forward as he looked down at the rapidly disintegrating remains of the self-styled Prince of Darkness. The thousand years of his life sat on him heavily, and for a second I saw every one of them. Then, by degrees, his face lightened, and when he looked up at me, it was with the expectancy of a child on Christmas Eve.
“Maybe next year,” he said.
<
~ * ~
BRIAN HODGE
The Last Testament
BRIAN HODGE is the author of ten novels, including Dark Advent, Deathgrip, The Darker Saints, Prototype, Wild Horses, Mad Dogs and World of Hurt, along with the Hellboy novel, On Earth as It Is in Hell.
The author of close to a hundred stories, his short fiction has been collected in The Convulsion Factory, Falling Idols, Lies & Ugliness and Picking the Bones.
By the time you read this, he’d damn well better be finished with his next novel, a sprawling thing that seemed to never want to end.
He lives in Colorado, where he ricochets between indulgences in music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and mountain air.
A new species dominates, and Dracula emerges as the most powerful man in the world ...
~ * ~
I
FROM OUT OF the darkest days of Eastern Europe’s Balkans War, there came sporadic reports of a lone man in priestly black robes who walked the charnel fields and the streets of ruined villages, showing no fear of bullets, bombs, or butchers. Death surrounded him, witnesses would claim, yet he seemed impervious to it. Serbs and Croats, Christians and Muslims ... all soon came to hold him in awe, in particular those who had not long before tried to kill him for ministering to their enemies, only to find that their rifles would not shoot true.
I promise you this: there is no killer so godless that he fails to recognize a kind of miracle in another’s immunity to the tools of war.
The Father, as he simply became known, was at the centre of an ever-expanding reputation for healing the wounded, and with those whose shattered bodies were too far gone even for his powers over flesh and blood, for easing their suffering as they departed life—often, with a kiss. More than once he was seen in two places at the same time, and at least once to levitate. Of the fact that none had ever seen him eat so much as a single bite of food, little was made, except as another possible sign of divinity.
I harboured suspicions about the Father long before they were confirmed by that first blurry picture that the media ran of him; not his identity, precisely, but at the very least his nature.
What could he possibly be up to now, I wondered at the time.
Years later, when some desperate cardinals of the splintering Church of Rome sought him out and brought him to the papal throne, the method of his madness became clearer.
And soon after that, when I was brought to stand before a tribunal of an Inquisition given renewed life by the ferocity of this dying age, a tribunal watched over by none other than Pope Innocent XIV, I wondered if there weren’t some grand design behind this, too.
Why now, when for the last five and a half centuries we had managed to avoid each other?
Vlad the Father.
My son.
~ * ~
II
I have forgotten the number of names I’ve gone by over the greatest part of a millennium; have forgotten most of the names, as well, but never the one I was born with: Hugh de Burgundy.
Like my father before me, I was tall for my time, and strong of build, but exotically darker than our fellow Frenchmen, perhaps the bloodline of some rogue Arab having seeped into our own a few generations before. Like my father before me, I was born to wield the sword and the lance, and when it came time to drape over our chain mail hauberks a tunic sewn with a large red cross, and purge the Holy Land for Christendom, that our weapons cut down men who could have been distant brothers did not sway us from our duties to God and France.
I cannot speak for my father, who died in Palestine before I ever reached the Crusades to fight beside him. But I know I fought to purge that possible Saracen from my own body.
I left steeped in the code of chivalry: to respect God-given life; to cherish women, children, and the weak, and protect them from harm; to honour an enemy’s right to seek sanctuary in a church and sheath my weapons on holy ground. But strange things happen to men in war. To survive you must learn to love the kill for its own sake. To love the kill you must forget all rules except one: Spill blood, first and often. This terrible metamorphosis can make a baser creature of any man who believes himself above it.
Have you ever been unable to lift your arm at the end of a day, having spent its sunlight cleaving the heads from prisoners? Have you ever knelt in the blood and entrails of an entire city’s populace, after slitting their bellies in search of swallowed gold and jewels? I have. I deny nothing, claiming only that the young Hugh who proudly rode east from Burgundy would not have committed these acts. But I have.
And have you ever awakened from some terrible dream, only to find that your circumstances are even worse? Seen your black guilt reflected in the eyes of a burning child?
In the dead of night, I deserted my army, wandering for days through deserts and hills until I found living Muslims I could beg for forgiveness. By the law of retaliation they should’ve killed me. But they were a strangely tolerant people. It would take many generations before the Islamic world learned the kind of savagery we taught them. F
or my personal penance they had other plans.
I had journeyed east wearing the cross of Christ.
I let those I’d come to slaughter nail me to one, instead.
~ * ~
III
“You have been brought before this tribunal on a charge of consorting with malign entities of unspecified natures; that six evenings ago you did wilfully and with full knowledge of intent engage these powers to seduce a young woman and gratify yourself out of her insensibility.”
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