Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  I soon discovered that coming to Japan had been a mistake. I stalked the human beehives of Tokyo, frustrated in my search for Pretenders. Everyone in the city wore a mask; it is a part of their culture. Their thoughts formed an impenetrable wall I was neither skilled nor ready enough to understand. I felt even more alienated than I had in Europe.

  Still, it wasn’t a complete loss. I was in a mammoth downtown Tokyo department store one busy afternoon where it seemed the entire country had picked that day to come and shop. Despite the crowds, I was able to maintain suitable personal space. I was unsure whether their reluctance to come too close had to do with my being gaijin or Pretender. Either way, I followed the path of least resistance, allowing myself to be buoyed along in the general direction of the shoppers. The Japanese equivalent of Muzak blared from hidden speakers, mixing with the roar of a thousand voices speaking in a foreign tongue.

  I found myself standing near a bank of elevators. There were two young girls dressed in feminine versions of the department store uniform posted outside the cars. Both wore spotless white gloves and spoke in artificial falsetto voices like cartoon mice. The elevator girls smiled fixedly, bowing to the customers with machinelike precision and made what appeared to be ritual hand gestures. Their arms rocked back and forth like metronomes, indicating which lifts went to which departments. I watched the women as they repeated their robotic gestures over and over for an endless stream of shoppers, their smiles never faltering. I was suddenly overcome by the need to weep. I was baffled by the surge of emotion, as I hadn’t cried at Ghilardi’s funeral.

  As I turned away, I was surprised to see a small, bowed man with the wrinkled face of a sacred ape looking up at me. At first I thought I was being accosted by some exotic variation of Pretender. Then I realized I was looking at a very old man.

  “You come away from this,” he said in English. “Not good for you.” He gestured with a crooked finger and began threading his way through the dense packing of consumers. Intrigued, I followed him. The old man’s aura was roseate, but I could not divine if he was of Pretender origin or not.

  He eventually led me to a traditional Japanese house, sequestered from the bustle of the street by ancient stone walls. He showed me his garden, with its intricate patterns raked in the sand, and later shared tea with me. He said his name was Hokusai, and he was a descendant of Shinto wizards and samurai sword smiths. He had been trained in the art of “seeing beyond” by his grandfather and was adept at identifying people and places of power.

  “You shine very strong. Maybe too strong. And sometime there is darkness at the edge of the bright.” He frowned, unable to fully explain himself in English. I suspected that even if I spoke fluent Japanese he would still have trouble finding the right words.

  “Why did you ask me to follow you here?” I asked.

  “I watch you watch elevator girls,” he replied. “The dark was eating the bright.”

  I nodded that I understood and the wrinkled monkey face beamed happily. For the first time since Ghilardi’s death, I found myself at ease in another’s presence.

  The old gentleman told me that as a child his grandfather filled him with stories of the elemental spirits that had once ruled the island kingdom before the days of the first emperor. The old wizard had been adamant that the spirits would return within his grandson’s lifetime and wished that Hokusai be trained in recognizing their signs.

  I was humbled by the old man’s hospitality and what I knew to be uncharacteristic openness to a foreigner. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was sharing tea with a monster.

  “You say you are a sword smith. Would it be possible to reforge this knife into a switchblade?” I took the silver dagger Ghilardi had given me years ago and placed it on the table between us.

  Hokusai put aside his tea and picked up the knife, testing its balance. “There is much magic in this blade.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Of course I can,” he replied with a sly smile. “Magic or not, it is still metal.”

  A week later Hokusai presented me with a handsomely mounted switchblade with a teak handle decorated with a dragon of inlaid gold. The small ruby that was its eye also served as the triggering mechanism that released the blade. The psychic sword smith refused payment, claiming that he owed it to the ghost of his grandfather.

  I never saw or heard from Hokusai again.

  Hong Kong is so different for Westerners, even inhuman ones, that it’s easy to forget your past and your future while you’re there. There is only the now in Hong Kong, and that is what makes it a timeless city. What occurred there was bound to happen, eventually. At best, I had merely forestalled the inevitable.

  I found myself in one of the city’s huge open-air bazaars, if you consider a street jammed with fish peddlers ‘open air’. The noise was terrific, with hundreds of voices yelling, haggling and arguing in as many dialects. Street urchins of indeterminate sex and age waved chintzy, mass- produced gewgaws in my face, shrilling “Yankee! Cheap! You buy!”

  Then I saw him.

  He was an elderly priest, dressed in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk, a neat smear of red on his shaven brow. Though he hobbled with the aid of a gnarled stick, his power was evident to those who could see the Real World. The monk paused in his journey and glanced in my direction. His placid, moon-round face was momentarily replaced by the sharp features of a fox. I tried to go after him, but a group of housewives, haggling over the price of snake, blocked my path. By the time I reached the spot the monk was standing in, he was nowhere to be found.

  “You look somebody?”

  It was a long-haired, seedy Chinese male in his late twenties who’d spoken. He lounged against a nearby doorway, arms folded across his chest. He wore a pair of much-mended American jeans and a faded T-shirt bearing the logo BRUCE LEE LIVES.

  “There was a monk here just a second ago. Did you see where he went?”

  The man nodded. “I see. I know priest. Show you where he live. Ten dollar.”

  Too eager to be cautious, I shoved a bank note in his hand. He smiled broadly, revealing crooked teeth the color of wild rice. He led me through a series of narrow streets that took us away from the main thoroughfares before emptying into a squalid, dimly lit alley.

  “Priest live here. Very holy man. Very poor,” explained my guide.

  I was dubious of his claim, and suspected what was going to happen next, but I couldn’t risk the off-hand chance that my guide was telling me the truth. I took a hesitant step into the alley. “Are you sure this is where—?”

  I never finished the sentence. There was a sharp blow on the back of my skull and the pavement tilted up to greet me. Stupid. My guide’s hands were on me, searching my pockets with the speed of a professional mugger. He found the switchblade and paused to admire its craftsmanship. His thumb brushed the tiny ruby set in the dragon’s eye and the knife revealed itself, gleaming like ice in the dim light. He knelt and pressed the tip of the switchblade against the hollow of my throat, teasing a drop of blood from my skin.

  “Good knife. You got money, Yankee? Dollar? What you got for me?”

  Oh, I had something for him, alright.

  As my right hand clamped around his throat, I saw his eyes bulge inside their epicanthic folds. He dropped the switchblade and tried to pull my fingers away from his windpipe. I felt his larynx break under my hand as I got back on my feet, keeping my erstwhile guide at arm’s length. Normally I would have snapped his neck and let it go at that, but I was in a foul mood. I did not appreciate this dirt bag throwing me off the scent of the kitsune.

  My attacker’s face was turning colors, his tongue so swollen he’d bitten halfway through it. He made a noise like mice trapped in a shoe box. Vaguely curious, I looked inside his head to see what his thoughts might be, now that he faced death. What I found was an open sewer. My guide was a nasty piece of work, as humans go. He’d spent several years in Vietnam buying children orphaned by the war and selling them
to brothels throughout the Pacific Rim. When that no longer proved profitable, he moved on to selling junk to tourists until he was chased out of business for failing to pay bribes on time. Now he lured tourists into dark alleyways under the pretense of sightseeing or sex, murdering them for the contents of their wallets or a wristwatch. It was safer and easier than dealing with the Yakuza or the Triad, and he had a low overhead. I withdrew my mind from his, disgusted by my victim’s lack of humanity.

  Who’s the monster, Sonja? You or him?

  I flinched. I was uncomfortable with The Other addressing me by name. The strangling man at the end of my arm looked like a perverse hand puppet. Spittle, blood, and foam flecked the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Monster’ is such an unfair word, don’t you agree?

  I was aware of the hunger building inside of me. A cold sweat broke across my brow and I began to tremble. I was standing on the mountaintop with Satan whispering in my ear. And I was weak.

  What makes humans so damned wonderful? You’re always mourning your humanity, denying yourself the power and privilege that are yours for fear of becoming ‘inhuman’. You fight to keep from doing what is natural for you, simply because you pride yourself on being human. What is’ being human’? Is it being like him? Why don’t you put him to some use, eh? You’ll be doing society a favor.

  “No. I can’t do this, even if he is murdering scum. I didn’t come halfway around the world for this.”

  Why not? Everything has been leading up to this ever since you first tasted Joe Lent’s blood and found it good. You knew what this piece of shit’s intention was the moment you saw the alley. You knew but you still went ahead. You want this, Sonja. You want his blood.

  “No! I can buy blood on the black market. I don’t have to get it like this.”

  Ah, yes. The blood in the bottles; sterilized for your protection. How fucking bland. You really do disappoint me, Sonja ... Or do you?

  He was so close to death when I took him there was no fear left in him, only resignation. The flesh of his throat was unwashed and tasted of sweat and dirt, and the faint odor of ginger clung to his skin.

  I trembled as if caught in the heat of erotic passion. His skin was taut underneath my lips as I felt his weakened pulse throb against the points of my fangs, inviting penetration. The hunger was a dark bubble in my gut. I could smell the bastard’s blood waiting for me on the other side of his skin. I told myself I couldn’t do it; that I wouldn’t do it. But I did.

  He jerked as my fangs entered the warmth of his jugular. As his blood burst into my hungering mouth, I realized how bland and characterless the bottled blood I had been living on up until then really was. The Other was right: nothing can compare to blood stolen fresh from the vein. It was the difference between flat beer and fine champagne. I drank like a woman rescued from the desert, afraid of wasting a single drop. Wave after wave of pleasure washed over me as I fed. In all the years I had been a prostitute, this was the first time I experienced an orgasm. By the time I was finished with him, my would-be murderer was very pale and very dead.

  I left him in the nameless Hong Kong alley, along with my humanity.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1979: More disturbed than enlightened by my sojourns in the East, I decided to return to the scene of the crime: London. It was ten years after Denise Thorne’s mysterious disappearance and my secret birth.

  Things were very different from the last time I’d been in town. The optimism and hedonism of Swinging London had been replaced by the cynical conservativeness of Thatcher’s England, the hippies and flower children exchanged for punks and skinheads.

  What had once been the Apple Cart Discotheque was now called Fugg’s, where fat tarts in cheap wigs and cheaper makeup did the bump-and-grind for the edification of a handful of hardcore rummies. As the dancers chewed gum and made crude fuck-motions with their hips, the men scattered up and down the runway seemed about as aroused as dead newts.

  I crossed to the bar, my memory decorating the dive with phantom go-go girls and jet-setters in paisley-print shirts. The bartender gave me a sour look.

  “Ain’t hirin’. Business is awful.”

  “I’m not looking for a job,” I replied, handing him a fiver. “Do you know a man called Morgan? Claims to be a peer.”

  The bartender shrugged. “Perhaps. I think that’s what he calls himself. Ain’t been around for some time, though.”

  “How long has it been since the last time you saw him?”

  “Year or two. Suits me if th’ bleeder never shows his face around here again. Every time he does, one of our best girls always ups and quits without givin’ proper notice. Never see ‘em again after that.” He shook his head. “What would a bloke like him want with birds like that? Me, I met the wife at a church social.”

  Everywhere I went, the story was the same: yes, they knew Morgan; no, they couldn’t say when he might show up again and could care less if he did. It became clear to me that Morgan kept to a schedule, at least in London, and I was unlucky enough to have returned during his off-season. I realized it might be another five years before he made the circuit again, since time means little to Nobles. I wanted to have my revenge while I could still feel it. The idea of waiting chafed, so I consoled myself by cleansing London and its neighboring districts of undead.

  Clearing out the revenants was easy enough, although the vampires— the ones with enough skill and brains to pass for human—proved to be a different matter. Most of them posed as nondescript shop girls and junior bank clerks—no one you’d look at twice. Although I had no trouble locating them, many of them succeeded in giving me the slip.

  I was in a small pub in the East End when I spotted a pale young woman nursing a pint at one of the back tables. She was dressed dowdily and was rather unremarkable in appearance. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was just another lower-middle-class working girl out for a glass of bitter. But there was something odd about the way she brought the glass to her lips and how the amount of ale stayed the same. I shifted my vision to see what she looked like in the Real World.

  I saw an ancient crone was seated where the girl had been, her face hideously wrinkled. When she noticed me watching her, she put down her drink and left the pub. I hurried after her. The hag moved faster than I’d expected and was already a block ahead of me. I saw her dodge into one of the mews that riddled the district. I followed, switchblade in hand and eager for confrontation. Instead, I found nothing. Not a trace. But how did she know she was being followed?

  “You mean how did she know you wanted to kill her?” A man’s voice asked sardonically. “Have you had a look in the mirror lately, love? You got ‘big-time predator’ written all over you!”

  He emerged from the fog, dressed in a silk suit the color of reptiles, a foul-smelling clove cigarette hanging from his lower lip. I grabbed him by his narrow lapels. He looked a bit nonplussed about being manhandled, but there was no fear in his voice.

  “Here now! Don’t go wrinkling the material! This is me good suit!”

  “Who are you? How did you—”

  “Read your mind? It’s me job.”

  Something dark and fast with sharp edges scampered through my thoughts. I grunted and let go of the psychic.

  “I’m human, don’t you worry,” he said as he carefully rearranged his clothing. “As if that means sod-all. I see things as well as hear ‘em, you know. Like I can see you’re not human, but you’re not one of them, either.”

  “You can see the Real World?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it; yeah, I see shit. Used to think me mum was balmy, what with her rattling on about the old lady down the row being a werewolf and all. That is, until I started seeing things, too.” He grinned, revealing National Health teeth.

  I didn’t like standing in the open discussing the Real World, and I especially didn’t like the leering youth who’d come out of nowhere, claiming to know my secrets. The Other whispered that there was a quick a
nd bloody solution to my problem.

  Fear momentarily flickered across his face, only to be quickly replaced by a crafty grin. “You’re looking to kill these beasties, aren’t you? I mean, the very sight of ‘em makes you want to heave, am I right? The trouble is, you got way too much mojo going on, duck. They can spot you half a mile off. See?” He produced a small pocket mirror from his jacket and held it so I could glimpse my reflection.

  I’d avoided looking in mirrors ever since the night my reflection had taken a life of its own. I realized it’d been a mistake. My reflection was surrounded by a crimson nimbus like that of an Eastern Orthodox saint, which pulsed with my heartbeat.

  ““That’s why the minute you show your lovely face, they split. What you need is a Judas goat, see? Someone to lure ‘em to you, so you can snuff ‘em real easy like.”

  “What would you get out of this?” I asked cautiously. “Besides money, that is?”

  The psychic grinned and I was suddenly aware that he was an extraordinarily handsome man. “You got a good head for business, I see. Let’s just say I’m in the market for a wee bit of protection. There’s this bloke— couple of them, really—who thinks I burned him on a deal. They’re wrong, of course.”

  “Of course,” I echoed as I retraced my steps back toward the street. My new companion fell in beside me, still talking.

  “So what do you say, duck?”

  “My name isn’t ‘duck’.”

  “Fair enough, duck. So what’s it going to be? Do we have a deal?”