Every nightclub, when distilled, is the same. The Roman dog and pony show is populated by the same players; only the location and music changes. Some women come to dance. Some come to gloat or to reinforce their stature within their social circles. There are decisive women who fully intend on getting laid even as they leave their homes, just as there are women who allow alcohol, drugs, or opportunity to propel them into a liaison that they may or may not regret. Men come for the women. The camaraderie and bonding with friends are just window dressing for the real show. Rarely, there are men among them whose purpose does not revolve around finding a woman, although, in this club, I couldn’t sense a single one of this rare species. The grandiose display between the sexes was in full swing, surrounding me and forcing even the most tin-eared fool to realize that the atmosphere had a purpose. Looking at the strutting crowd, that intent was easy to discern.
I pushed through the crowd to the left end of the main bar. The décor was dark and minimalist, although, to the credit of the owners, the furniture was of high quality and looked comfortable. Low circular tables of black glass sat inside concentric rings of curved couches that reeked of colognes; even from here I could detect the residual glitter from women’s makeup that spattered the cushions in a gaudy accent. Bottle service areas attracted those who could pay, as well as those who could not but had something to offer. It’s a complex, cynical form of social whoring that everyone understood but no one would verbalize, at least not early in the night.
I caught the bartender as she was mixing and said simply, “Bourbon. Please.”
She looked up, a pretty woman under the heavy makeup and tan of someone used to late nights and late mornings. Her dyed blonde hair was pulled back severely into a ponytail and a single, trailing curl that shined red in the lights along the bar.
“Sure. Ice?” she asked. I liked her instantly, as she was an economy of words and motion.
I had my drink in a minute, the small glass resting comfortably against my palm. I felt like I could operate now, so I began to scan for Wally’s face first. I knew Risa would be next to her but invisible among the taller crowd. I found them quickly, dancing together on the main floor not twenty feet away, clearly having fun without reserve. Wally danced with abandon, smiling genuinely and laughing as she threw her head left to right in rhythm with the music. Risa was far shorter but moved with a sinuous athleticism that was watery and erotic. Both were being watched by men and women, alike, but I knew that their fun could only mean one thing. There was an immortal here, and they had identified it. Since they were dancing, it meant that they thought I needed to be here to kill it. One of us is strong, two are powerful and crafty. The three of us together are something entirely different. I sensed nothing, smelled nothing; there was no fear or menace anywhere, and that meant that they had found something new.
Or something very, very old.
Bern, Switzerland
The mark of an excellent banker is discretion. The mark of a Swiss banker is a marriage of that same quality with an intense desire to maintain the privacy of special clients. In a room of muted earth tones, one such customer opened a steel safe deposit box, which had been placed carefully on a black wood table that gleamed from polishing. A substantial lid flipped back without a sound, revealing a green velvet lining. The box was completely empty. Without a word, the customer replaced the lid and pushed the single hasp lock back into its original position with a snick, leaving the box on the table before rising and leaving the private room. Herr Krieger, the manager, waited discreetly outside, and he inquired as to whether his prized customer had completed the day’s business. The mellow voice was neither excited nor reserved but perfectly mannered.
“My business is finished for today. Thank you for your service. I shall require the continued use of the box for the foreseeable future. I’ve authorized an additional signatory for the account; please see that it is recorded promptly. She will be fully authorized in all of my monetary concerns henceforth.”
Herr Kreiger was delighted at this news but exhibited the enthusiasm of a man who was paid to be unobtrusive. In a moment, his client was gone, and, as he re-entered the room and replaced the steel box, his thoughts moved to the next appointment in his busy schedule.
Florida
I didn’t approach Wally or Risa in the club. It was ill-advised, given the unknowns. When my phone pinged a message, I knew that it was time to act. Long hair. Brunette. Tall. Black skirt. W/ single male blue shirt. To front door. Meet outside. I began shifting through the crowd, neither hurried nor allowing myself to be held up or have my view occluded. There she is. With the target in sight, my path to the door became less passive. I saw Wally’s head to my right, which meant that Risa was approaching the door behind me, as well. The target slid out the door with her selection from the herd, a male of medium height. From behind, he was predictably average and alone. His arm was possessively draped around her waist, and he walked with the blissful myopia of a man who was, in that moment, working well above his pay grade. They turned left outside only steps ahead of me, but the crowd had not thinned enough to allow discrete action. I couldn’t get a bead on what exactly was happening. The immortal had body language that was hardly predatory. She turned in profile to me, and I saw a woman in her thirties with fine features and skin bronzed by the sun. She was pretty in a blue-blooded way. I could imagine her in equestrian gear. In a moment of coquetry, she allowed her bland partner to kiss her lightly on the lips. It was brief and chaste, but for her teeth nipping playfully at his lip. I heard her low voice tell him she would see him in a few moments as the jangle of car keys in her hand signaled her peeling off to the dark of the parking lot.
Hold back I motioned behind me. I sensed something different was at play here. Risa and Wally came forward to stand with me, silent but watching with the same curiosity. Our forgettable but charmed target staggered slightly, his balance decaying with each step as he wound his way into the darkening street.
“Is he drained? Wounded?” Wally hissed, voicing our collective confusion. Contact with the immortal had been minimal, but the man was swooning and, after a series of choppy steps, crashed headlong into an alcove. His spastic fall left him on his knees. Risa rushed ahead but pulled up cautiously when he turned to face us, his face a rictus of pain in the sickly yellow of the street’s sodium lights. I took his elbow and helped him to his feet, but a spasm slammed him into a bent position as he coughed in agony, a deep-chested heave that took him onto his toes. The pace of his demise was hideous. With one massive wracking act, he vomited and slipped from my grasp, stone dead, and his body folding in defeat at the base of the building we stood near. I felt pain that this man would be forgotten by the world shortly, an innocent who would be totally erased with the fullness of time. It was enraging.
“What is that? What came out of him? Look. Look.”
We were all staring even as Wally shone her keychain penlight at the wetness on the concrete. In the middle of the repulsive discharge lay three obscenely large acorns, glistening with his blood.
“Acorns? Giant acorns? How did they get in him? Did she force him somehow?” Wally’s litany of questions was a running dialogue of her confusion.
Risa said quietly after a moment, “She bit him. Or put something in his mouth. He was a medium for her--that’s why she said she would be back. She used him as a vessel. And she knew it would only be a matter of minutes before he had served his purpose.”
It made sense. It meant that she had been watching us but was gone. She had been careful. Discreet.
“I know what she is.” We turned to Risa as she spoke. “Acorns. In a human host. This is bedtime story shit, but darker. Far more dangerous, because she must keep seeding her marks. It’s a never-ending cycle. She’s a feeder, just not one that we hear much of. She’s a druid, I think? Remember, two years ago, when we were trading info with that nutjob from Ireland? He was tracking the genealogy of incredibly old family lines that had migrated here to t
he States, but we could never really grasp what he was describing. He kept calling them Keepers and Tenders. I think we’ve met our first. And, judging by how casual she was, old. Old and as wanton about death as anything we can imagine.”
I thought about it for a minute, chewing on the idea of acorns, oaks, and ancient Celts who spread death through germinating seeds inside a victim. I thought we would start with the obvious. I held out my arms to link up for the walk back to the car, away from the body and the scene, but not before putting the enormous seeds into a napkin that lay on the street, then into my pocket. They were still grotesquely warm against my thigh.
“Let’s answer a question. Where do giant acorns come from? Presumably, giant oaks. So . . . where are the giant oaks? And who tends them?”
I sat on the dock with Gyro, listening to traffic across the canal. Lights of different colors smeared the dark water lapping at the pilings, ever in motion, even during the quiet hour, when the tide went slack and the wind was still. After seeing such a gruesome death, we all retreated to our safe harbor to digest the bitter rage that sickened us. Risa would sit in the shower, each stinging minute of spray focusing her hatred of immortals ever more pointedly. Wally would run until she threw up or dissolve into quiet sobs on her bed, clutching her sheets in hands that went white with hate. I chose to sit here, by the water, trying to spare the world my disgust and brittle temper, until the sun began to rise and the first ducks began their endless patrol of the seawall. These were the moments when we were weakest, when our humanity and desire for vengeance subsumed our years of experience.
Defining my existence is difficult. My morality is even less easy to describe, although I like to think that, despite the chaos that removing immortals causes, it is, in fact, serving the greater good. Liberating the personal effects and holdings of our targets may be construed as theft, but those gains are largely applied to continuing our efforts. Beyond the simple removal of evil, we were all personally motivated by loss. For Wally, it was a friend of the family who had been as close as blood. For Risa, it was an uncle she loved so much that the story was something I had heard exactly once in the fifteen years I’d known her. Three murders, three people, miles and years apart. At the time, the crimes only had one thing in common.
Each death turned us into hunters.
Risa
There is never a good day for a funeral, yet the light wind through the bottle brush and palm trees made it bearable, but only just. The early summer Floridian heat had not begun in earnest. It was March, 1991, and the sadness surrounding the open grave of my aunt Ruth had remained intense but studied. We loved her quiet strength and, out of respect for her, we kept our grief as contained as was possible, although, inside, I felt like crying so hard that I would shatter.
For my whole life, she had been near, kind, a presence so dignified that I didn’t know how well any of us would find life without her smiles and caring touch. Ruth was a healer in every sense. She brought unity to the family during arguments that shook the walls, and not once did we feel reproved by her, even though she made us all want to be kinder merely by watching her live. Her husband, my uncle Lev, was her perfect compliment. Wiry, energetic and giving, he found in Ruth the fulcrum upon which he brought his will to bear on the orange grove they had planted by hand, after immigrating to Florida from Israel. His boundless enthusiasm and drive built a sea of trees where, before, there had been scrub palmetto and abandoned pasture. For forty years, he had paced the rows of trees, his dusty chinos stained with the perspiration rings of a man who knew every inch of his farm. When I was sixteen, Ruth felt a twinge in her back while loading oranges onto a scale, and, three months later, she was in an austere medical office being told that the cancer was in her bone and that she might not see another birthday. Lev had nearly broken right there, weeping into his hat outside the room in a crouch while we watched from down the hall. I knew that the wall was the only thing holding him up at that moment, but this was a man who had fought in the Sinai with broken bones in his shoulder from a crashing artillery shell. We watched him gather himself and duck into her room to tell her to fight and live.
And live she did, for six more years. She lost some ribs and her hair, twice, to the chemo, but Lev held her hand while she vomited into steel pans during the grim cycles of near death that we call treatment. Finally, she told Lev that she could not go on, and he sat heavy on her bed with the breath crushed out of him by five decades of memories.
So we streamed out of the graveyard, all sifting our own memories and worrying about Lev, and in a few minutes, Rabbi Frank was led away, his steps tottering and his eyes brown and sad. From within the crush of our family, my cousins, Rebekah and Beth, were holding Lev’s jacket like he would fly away. I caught his eye, and he gave me a smile that made me realize he would again walk his grove. We would have him still. It was something I could cling to, and, for the first time that week, I saw a hint that his life would go on.
Lev announced that he needed a moment as we began to scatter towards the cars parked along the main pathway. He veered off towards the oasis in the middle of the graveyard, where, under a gazebo, a water fountain sat discreetly between planters filled with small gardenia bushes. I stayed back to watch him go, a small man who seemed whittled by grief, his face all planes and hard angles. Only his tears made him seem soft. When he reached the fountain, a silver car slid quietly up the path, its windows tinted nearly black. The door opened and released a woman dressed for grief, her lithe elegance apparent even from my vantage point. What she said to Lev I do not know, but she walked to him and embraced him, perhaps offering words of consolation to a man who had lost everything moments before.
I did not know what I was seeing that day. I do now. Her grace branded her as a Pranic or Sylph, and, had I known that, I would have run at her with murderous intent. But I knew nothing of her world and stood mute as they embraced. She enclosed him in long arms, her bearing one of compassion. Under the shadow of the gazebo, a messenger tendril of light and air emerged from her chest, shimmering so faintly that I could barely see it. The diaphanous probe wrapped sinuously around him, pausing for a hesitant second before plunging soundlessly into his back. Lev stiffened, and his knuckles went white on her sleeves. This was how she fed, his grief and his will being siphoned away while he sagged in her grasp. The appendage swelled slightly with dark sparks and motes, memory and soul all splintered into chaff that she greedily stole. I knew Lev was being consumed; I just could not logically fathom how it could be happening. At a visceral level, I recognized this as murder of the most egregious sort. With a chaste kiss on his cheek, she broke contact and stepped briskly away to the waiting car, all semblance of caring gone in a shift from mourning friend to sated predator. Her car door closed, and, by the time Lev had walked four steps towards me, he fell dead, the screams of my family threatening to obliterate any memory of the woman I had just watched consume seven decades of my uncle’s spirit with the grace of a viper.
I knew in that instant that I could see her, and that meant I could find her. I also knew in my bones that I would never again be an observer, not when parasites like the unknown woman walked among my world.
From that minute, I would hunt. And I had an excellent idea of where to begin.
Florida
Morning found me ragged and needing some separation. Wally and Risa were still in bed when I left to go to the beach, where the water would be painfully bright in the winter sun. It was the type of jolt that I could build upon in order to process what we had seen the previous night. The implacability of the ocean is an excellent base to revive my belief that I can, in fact, defend myself from the rigors of my life. The sea can forget and persevere, regardless of the severity of the storms. I seek that same type of renewal each time I walk the sand, stomach churning at the recurring visions of death that color my memory. It would be capricious to fully dismiss the experiences that I have, and my conscience would not allow it even if I had the availability to dri
nk from the river Lethe. It is this growing hall of impressions that I turn to in order to shift the fantastic into the ordinary. Or at least ordinary to a select few who realize that the wall between civilization and entropy is a thin barrier indeed. The sand, revised with each wave, felt hard-packed and moist under my feet. I thudded with heavy heels, using my steps to purge my body of the fear that I had for the unknown. When I felt reasonably prepared to share my day with the swarm of the city, I turned toward the parking lot and walked. Gulls cried over me, aloft on the onshore wind that erased my footprints even as I dug for keys. My thoughts turned to the problem of forests and oaks and who would bring them here, and why doing so cost a man his life.
Wally and Risa were on the dock when I got home, Gyro stretched between them with a palm frond in his mouth, slobbering contently. Empty cereal bowls sat between them, along with Wally’s phone. Wordlessly, Wally handed it to me. On it was a blurred picture of a tattoo. It was a snake, black and silver, position on the body unknown, but there was a liquid quality to it that was both admirable and unnerving. I raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
“What is it?”
Risa spoke first. “I think it’s African. It’s on the shoulder of a guy that Angel fired last week for being drunk on the job.”
Angel was the last tenant in Hardigan Center, a brown bulldozer of a guy with a shock of black hair and hands like five digit bricks. He stood just over five feet tall but weighed well over two hundred pounds, slabs of muscle a testament to his years as a mason. He was an artisan, too, working river rock, corals and marble with a deft, experienced hand. He never lacked jobs, so he hired crews to do basic brick and block jobs under his supervision, which was exacting. A Cuban immigrant, Angel made the most of his skills, and he would not tolerate lazy or sloppy helpers. Being drunk on the jobsite was beyond the pale for his crew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had thrown the guy into the street.
The Forest Bull (The Fearless) Page 4