Clan Novel Ventrue: Book 5 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  “Christof! Frankie!” she yelled. She could hear car doors opening.

  “Pop the trunk, Bubby,” said somebody who sounded like he was holding a broken jaw.

  Fuck this, Lydia decided. She grabbed the .38 from her pocket and jumped to her feet firing. The Buick’s back window shattered. A second later, Christof’s booming, long-barreled .44 joined the fray. Frankie and Baldur were right with him. Each had a 9mm, put to good use. The Buick rocked as the bullets struck home. Glass sprayed in every direction. Customers were screaming, running, throwing themselves behind cover.

  But somebody inside the Buick had reached the lever for the trunk. It popped open…and the thing unfolded itself from inside.

  Its head and torso were vaguely human, but as it stepped free of the car, its lower half resembled a five-legged spider. Long, jointed legs stretched out until it stood nearly eight feet tall. It scuttled straight for Lydia.

  She fired her last two bullets into its chest. It didn’t even slow down. Lydia reached into her pocket for more bullets, but the metal casings slipped through her suddenly clumsy fingers. She couldn’t take her eyes from the charging monstrosity, not until one of its legs caught her across the chest. Suddenly she was airborne. She crashed to the pavement on her face, felt her nose crushed, skin scraped away. She tasted blood. Her hands were empty, the .38 gone.

  Lydia looked up at the spider-thing above her—how could it move so quickly?—but she was too dazed to roll out of the way.

  The flash of steel blinded her—that and the spray of blood across her face. The spider shuddered and bellowed in pain. Another flash. More blood.

  Lydia made herself roll away from the monster. Christof was there. Instead of his .44, he was wielding his sword—the sword she had teased him for carrying around under his duster.

  Then Lydia was wiping her hands across her face and licking the blood from them. She should help Christof, but he seemed to have things under control. And she couldn’t help herself. There was so much blood. She was covered in it.

  The bullet ripping into her leg got her attention. Christof might have dispatched the spider-thing, but there was still the small matter of Sabbat vampires. In fact, the sounds of combat had apparently gotten the attention of several other carloads of the fuckers on the other side of the gas station.

  Someone nearby gunned an engine. A car—her car—was coming right for Lydia. It swerved and screeched to a stop right by her.

  “Let’s go!” Frankie was behind the wheel. He barely waited for Lydia and Christof to jump in before peeling away.

  “Get on the phone!” Lydia yelled. “Get Theo!”

  Monday, 12 July 1999, 11:43 PM

  The Sunken Cathedral

  CranberryBogs, Massachusetts

  From the moment he had first fallen into the hands of the Nosferatu, Benito Giovanni had fully expected to be tortured.

  He had been resigned to it, prepared for it. Almost, he was looking forward to it. Not out of some perverse titillation, but rather in the same way he hung upon the handshake that sealed a tricky business deal. It was the serenity of closure he longed for—in this case, an end to the years of secrecy and anxiety.

  They had snatched him from his penthouse office, his private sanctum, the very pinnacle of his worldly power.

  His influence—the influence of the Giovanni family—overshadowed the city of Boston. It was their city. The Giovanni had held it against the advances of both the Camarilla and the Sabbat. The mayor, the police commissioner, the captains of industry, the archbishop, the old-money families—all of these powers could be summoned to Benito’s aid at the tap of his speed-dial. He had been enthroned at the very center of the intricate web of connections and manipulations that made up the subtle framework of his domain.

  And the Nosferatu had walked right in and taken him.

  They would torture him, that much was certain. And he, in turn, would tell them everything he knew about this whole unpleasant business.

  Unfortunately, Benito admitted, the sum of all he knew about this deal still amounted to very little. Too little, he feared, to satisfy a determined Inquisitor.

  He had arranged the commission, of course. But he was just the deal broker, the matchmaker. It was no great secret in Kindred circles that Benito Giovanni’s connections in the art world were extensive. He had something of a reputation for conjuring up masterpieces that were widely held to be lost to the depredations of time and political upheaval. This reputation was due, in no small part, to Benito’s crusade in the years following the close of World War II to quietly liberate many priceless works of art that had been plundered by the Reich. A steady stream of these treasures found their way to Boston and from there into the hands of a very select clientele of museums and private collectors.

  Among the Toreador clan, with their almost religious devotion to the arts, Benito was romantically viewed as something of a cross between a saint and a rumrunner. If the truth were known, Benito found this tribute more than a bit embarrassing. He went to great lengths, however, to cultivate and maintain the goodwill of the Toreador. Although individually, les Artistes could be fickle and capricious, their knowledge and contacts were a peerless competitive advantage in his line of work.

  One of the many benefits of his de facto partnership with the Toreador was the unending stream of invitations to the great fetes, balls and galas with which les Artistes marked the unending progression of the seasons. These decadent outlets for their ennui provided Benito with unrivaled opportunities to come into contact with the real powerbrokers—the princes and primogen of the major cities on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Benito allowed himself a muttered curse as he tried to check his watch. It had been confiscated, of course, at the time of his abduction. This was perhaps the thousandth time he had caught himself in the middle of this little ritual. He had been thinking about missed appointments, about the Summer Solstice party that Victoria Ash had given in Atlanta. It was long over by now.

  Missed opportunities.

  Victoria was an up-and-comer, someone to watch in the nights ahead. She had only recently relocated to Atlanta in a bold play for a recently vacated spot on the city’s primogen council. The Solstice gathering was something of a coming-out party for her—the opening volley in her bid for the big time.

  As valuable a contact as Victoria was, however, she was not the sole attraction of the Solstice party. She had given him to believe that not only would the mad Prince Benison of Atlanta be present (which might be expected), but also that Julius, the Brujah archon, would be making a special appearance. This volatile combination threatened to explode dramatically, raining down shards of power, prestige and influence upon those bold enough to grab them. Benito keenly regretted not being on hand for the fireworks, but the phone call and that voice—that damnable voice that he’d hoped never to hear again—had necessitated that Benito cancel.

  How ironic, that he’d again been assaulted by that voice and then fallen victim to these captors. Ironic, but certainly not coincidental.

  His captors, the Nosferatu, had a reputation for extracting secrets. Benito had no illusions about playing the hero, about spitting in the face of his Inquisitor. They would learn all, of course, in due time.

  And still, they would demand to know more. Knowledge was a compulsion for them, an addiction. They would press him ever more closely, driving home their pointed inquires with fire and the stake. He would shamelessly blubber forth all he knew. Then he would progress to further details conjured from pure fancy and desperation.

  Still they would pry deeper.

  Benito had one hope, and that a feeble one. He would give them everything they asked for. He would ration it out over a gratifyingly long period of time, long enough that they might be convinced of the veracity of his confessions—or at least the veracity of their instruments of extracting confessions. He would then throw himself on their mercy and beg the deformed, the hideous, the grotesque outcasts to have pity upon his poor
broken body and suffer him to live.

  It did not seem a likely thing to hope for, but it was all he had.

  To maintain this fleeting and ephemeral hope, Benito first had to convince himself that, above all, the Nosferatu were true devotees of knowledge. If he could only bring himself to believe that their highest—in fact, their only—concern in this matter was learning the truth, then all was not lost. Once they had discovered the role that Benito had played in this matter—and that he was blameless of the blood spilled—they would release him.

  The one nagging doubt that threatened to collapse this fanciful construct was that he was not entirely convinced the Nosferatu paid more than passing lip service to the altar of Knowledge. Deep down, he harbored a tenacious suspicion that their idol was, conversely, the stunted god of Secrets.

  Secrets, a very specialized form of knowledge—the power of which was diminished by the number of people who possessed them.

  Once Benito shared his knowledge of these events with his Inquisitor, the true power of the revelation would be diluted, diminished by half. The only way to restore the secret to its full potency would be to eliminate one of its keepers. It was not difficult to calculate the exact probability of Benito’s surviving an encounter with the cult of secrecy.

  Benito was prepared for hot irons and wicked knives and barbed stakes. What he was not prepared for was the maddeningly steady advance of the canonical hours.

  The bell was tolling the office. Matins, he imagined, although it was difficult to say with any certainty. The muffled footfalls of countless comings and goings never seemed to slow, much less cease. But surely even the Nosferatu, bred to endless generations of subterranean existence, must still be subject to the primeval progression of day and night.

  The bells were only the primary player in the complex tapestry of sound that filled his captivity. At times he heard whispers from beyond the confines of his ascetic cell. At other times, chanting. At other times still, the sharp scratch of pen on parchment.

  But at no time did he hear the sound he most expected: the turning of a key in the lock. The unmistakable sign that he was, at last, in the presence of his Inquisitor.

  Entire nights, weeks, had passed, if the tolling of the bells was to be believed. Thus far, he had yet even to catch a glimpse of his circumspect captors. Benito, suspicious by nature, was not yet willing to rule out the possibility that the tolling of the hours might itself be a subtle form of torture—a way for his captors to play with his perceptions, to muddle his sense of time, to fuel his desperation. The cumulative message of the bells was clear enough. If his trail were already several weeks cold, Benito could have little hope of outside assistance, of rescue by his family or their many agents. With each clanging of the bells, it became more obvious that Benito was utterly alone, cut off from his resources and totally at the mercy of his captors.

  The church bells had an additional effect of which his abductors certainly could not be ignorant. The holy clamor tended to ward off any possible intervention by allies from beyond the Pale. Benito had tried several times to reach out through the pathways of spirit to make contact, to send a message, to summon aid. But to no avail. The denizens of the spirit realm gave this sacred ground—though fallen into ruin and disuse many generations past—a wide berth.

  With each passing night, the anxiety, the desperation and the hunger grew. Benito counted out the period of his captivity in missed appointments and lost opportunities.

  And all the while, the Beast grew bolder, gnawing away at reason and straining at its tether.

  Monday, 12 July 1999, 11:49 PM

  Main lobby, Lord Baltimore Inn

  Baltimore, Maryland

  “May I get anything else for you, ma’am?” Victoria raised the glass of rich, red wine and wet her lips, then deigned to acknowledge the costumed young man. “Not at the moment, thank you.” He bowed and backed away, as pleased as if she’d handed him a hundred-dollar tip. Victoria, ensconced in the padded armchair in the lobby of the Lord Baltimore, was holding court, of sorts, as various of the inn employees saw to her every need.

  What’s the point of having mortals around, she wondered, if they’re not performing the menial little tasks that make them feel so useful? It was a situation that left everyone rewarded, not the least of all Victoria. She was in her element with others fawning over her, and it was a pleasant and innocent enough diversion from how she’d been spending most of her time the past nights—gathering information, and none of it too awfully helpful.

  The flow of refugees into the city had now slowed to a trickle, two and a half weeks after the Sabbat had rolled into Washington, three weeks since her sabotaged social gala in Atlanta. And it must have been sabotaged. Of that, she was certain. And at least two other ideas were certainties in her mind: first, that she would discover who was responsible for her betrayal; second, that they would pay.

  The primary suspects seemed to be Rolph, the Nosferatu sewer rat she’d invited out of the goodness of her heart, and Erich Vegel, the Setite antiquarian whom Victoria had toyed with to such effect. Each had seemed to be missing shortly before the Sabbat attack fell, neither having taken proper leave by informing the hostess. Rolph’s disappearance was not necessarily sinister. The Nosferatu were always skulking around on the fringes of respectable Kindred society and, truth be told, Victoria might have just missed him while he was still there. Vegel’s case was the more perplexing, for it was a call from his master that had alerted Victoria to her guest’s absence—if it really had been Hesha on the other end of that conversation, and if the call itself was not a ruse to suggest that Vegel’s exit was spontaneous. Possible. A scheme within a scheme. But then the Setites who had inadvertently rescued Victoria from Atlanta had been seeking Vegel. That seemed to imply that he was in trouble as well. Unless the rescue, like the phone call, had been orchestrated to impart to Victoria exactly that impression! Could Hesha be so wily? Or could Vegel have gone rogue—if that was possible for a Setite—and given both Victoria and his erstwhile employer the slip?

  Her investigations into these matters had gone…well, nowhere. Mainly because, as of yet, she had encountered no other survivors from Atlanta. None. From Gainesmil, eternal font of information that he was, she’d learned that Hesha actually kept residence in Baltimore—a situation to which Prince Garlotte had not completely resolved himself. But so long as the Setite kept a low profile, the cost of a full-fledged snake hunt seemed prohibitive.

  There was also Benito Giovanni, who at the last moment had cancelled his trip to Atlanta for the party. Could he have known something about the Sabbat attack? Victoria would never rule out the possibility of a member of the treacherous Giovanni clan colluding with the Sabbat, but finding out anything about the tight-knit clan was next to impossible. She had heard rumors—through Gainesmil, again—that Benito had disappeared sometime around the party. With the Giovanni, however, who knew what that might really mean?

  Otherwise, Victoria had busied herself in meeting many of the refugees. On the whole, they were touchingly grateful, but Victoria felt certain that if she had to empathize with anyone else within the next, say, ten years, she would throw up. The masses would provide some support for her at the next conference, only four nights away, but the key players, the individuals who would determine the outcome of events, lingered beyond her control.

  Once the flow of refugees had begun to slow, Prince Garlotte had visited her more frequently. Victoria raised a hand to her neck, slid her fingers along the chain to the locket that was never far from her. The prince seemed to take pleasure in seeing her wear the piece. Victoria, in her own way, took comfort from the soft metal resting near her heart. Despite Garlotte’s obvious affection for her, however, the prince remained wary. Victoria didn’t expect him to turn over his city to her—not that she would quibble if he did—but she did hope for more forthright support from him in public gatherings. If that support did not materialize, and soon, she might be forced to take stern measur
es. For now, though, he actively sought her company; he considered himself strong enough to resist her selectively, and perhaps he was. For now.

  Gainesmil, on the other hand, was a clay pigeon that Victoria could pluck from the air whenever she pleased. She left him enough free will that he could imagine he was independent, and watched with amusement his noble struggle of conscience between his loyalties to his prince and to his clanmate. Victoria knew there was less of conscience and more of weather vane to his moral dilemma. Whichever way the wind blew, there would be Gainesmil.

  The Malkavians, as usual, were irrelevant. Aside from Prince Benison of Atlanta, she’d never met a member of that clan who was worth a thimbleful of vitae.

  She’d had no opportunity to speak with Theo Bell and suspected that he would not accept her invitation to a tête-à-tête, even if occasion did arise—which was not likely to happen. The brute had stayed busy with his rabble patrolling the stretch of real estate between Washington and Baltimore, and had even gone so far as to lead minor incursions into the hostile capital. Good for him, Victoria thought. His was the type of dedication that would keep her safe, and rightly so. Additionally, he seemed to be one of a rare breed of Brujah—those who know their place.

  Marcus Vitel, prince of that other city, former prince—Victoria saw little hope of wresting the city from the Sabbat, despite all Brujah zeal—seemed to be in mourning, for his city or for his childer, Victoria didn’t know. Rumor had it (and Gainesmil confirmed) that Vitel was responsible, at least in part, for the martial law that had been imposed in Washington and made more difficult the Sabbat’s consolidation of control in the city.

  Vitel had taken up residence in a private townhouse, and though he had not turned away Victoria’s visits over the past two weeks, neither had he proven particularly talkative. Still, she had begun the process of feeling him out, of determining what it was that would open his inner desires to her. Perhaps it was sympathy for his poor childer that would hook him.