by P. N. Elrod
The first result was the total shattering of Frank Paco’s sanity. I saw it in his eyes, watched the devastating change take place when my white-hot rage slammed through him like a train.
It didn’t mean much to me at the time, even seemed to be a kind of justice for what he’d done to me, but then I didn’t want it to mean anything more than that because of my hatred for the bastard for killing me. I still hated him, but now more for what he represented than what he’d done. He was a reminder of my ignorance, of a lapse in judgment and loss of self-control. A living reproach.
The second incident was when I found myself alone with that woman I needed to question. It started the same as others before her: just get the information, then leave was the plan, but it didn’t work out that way. She was temptingly attractive to me, and I was hungry. Even as I hypnotized her I got caught up and lost in her total vulnerability to me, with the heady realization I could do anything I wanted to her and get away with it. Then I gave in to that temptation and started kissing her throat.
It was like someone else was running things for me. I knew it was wrong and did nothing about it until it was almost too late. Instead of pulling back, I bit hard and began taking her blood into me. Seductive, irresistible, and entirely illicit, it was the best I’d ever had, and in my greed I wanted all of it—even if it killed her.
My conscience tardily kicked in, waking me out of the fever in time to stop. She was weakened, but never knew what really happened, of how close she’d come to dying. I did, and it made me ashamed and disgusted with myself and terrified of repeating the experience.
And here I was, alone with another attractive, tempting woman.
I’d killed before, but not by draining another’s life away to feed my own, to feed something as ephemeral as appetite and desire. I’d come close, too damned close already. Those other deaths were hard enough to live with, I didn’t want this hovering over my shoulder as well.
But what else could I do? I had to hypnotize Angela and make her call off the hit on Escott. An easy job—unless I killed her.
The assurance I’d given him about my being careful now seemed like so much hopeful bullshit.
4
IT’S a hell of a thing being a vampire with a conscience; maybe I wasn’t so far gone as Bobbi feared.
And I’d better stop thinking so much and do something quick about Angela before anyone came in.
What hit first when I faded back into the real world was the bloodsmell. Dunbar had bled a sizable smear all over the floor. While my corner teeth didn’t automatically bud, it was still a lousy distraction, exactly the wrong kind for me, considering the situation.
Next I took in a glimpse of the room: a small, seedy office with the usual furnishings except for the bloodstain and a broken bowling trophy lying under a dent in one wall.
Finally there was Angela herself. Her back was to me, and she had one hand on a desk phone, but hadn’t picked it up yet. Maybe she was just thinking about making a call. Right by it was a nickel-plated .22 semi-auto, and I could guess that the muzzle was still warm from the shot. Must have been Dunbar’s, I knew Angela usually favored a much larger caliber.
A tiny young woman wearing a dark print dress, she was delicate of bone and body, but with the soul of a grizzly bear and twice as mean. I could tell myself that in my brief contact with her I’d only ever seen her bad side, but it was such as to make me wonder if there were any others. There might not be room for them. Sure, she cared about her father, but it was hard for me to balance that one good point against her easy willingness to kill people and still try to make it all come out even. My very first sight of her was to stare in disbelief as she put the muzzle of a .45 to the back of a man’s head, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains over the street. For all the emotion she showed then and afterward, she might as well have been filing her nails.
Then there was the business of last night, when she’d been tossing hand grenades around like firecrackers. The shrapnel had nearly been too much for me on top of all the other damage I’d taken, and even with me trying not to look like I was dying and failing miserably, she’d not batted an eye except to flirt in an attempt to get information from me. She was cold as that damned lake where she’d arranged to have my apparently dead body dumped.
Yet for all that, she was cute as a ladybug, small features, short dark hair that curled around the edge of her face; she had Frank’s big heavy-lidded eyes, but on her they were attractive, bee-stung mouth, and a little mole just over there. . . .
She turned. Saw me. That sweet mouth opened in shock. Her hand scrabbled for the gun.
No more time to think. I drew a fast breath and locked my gaze hard and fast onto her dark brown eyes.
“Don’t move, don’t speak,” I whispered.
She forgot about shooting me and rocked back on her heels from the force of it. Her eyes went too wide. I eased off from full pressure and waited, but she did nothing else. Her face ceased to express fear and went blank. Not a comforting sight, but better than before. I realized my emotions had started to get in the way, emotions like my own inner terrors, just what neither of us needed.
I took another shaky breath and a few more besides. Found my shoulders were hunched up almost to my ears. Forced them down again. It was enough to make my concentration slip and I was too spooked to grab it back again.
Angela shook her head like a drunk trying to get sober fast. “You—you’re not . . . what the hell . . . ?”
“Never mind that, just be quiet.”
“No, you—”
“Angela, you will be quiet and listen to me. That’s the most important thing you can do right now.”
Another head shake. She was really fighting this; I wasn’t used to such resistance. She either had a hell of a lot of will-power, had been drinking, or I was going too easy with her.
The last, I thought. If I wanted to get anything done, I’d have to hit it harder than this. After a moment to collect myself I moved in close until we almost touched. She had to look straight up to see me, making a long graceful line of her throat. I could hear her heart. . . .
Don’t go there, buddy.
But I didn’t have to do anything; all on her own she put both her hands on my chest. They were so small, but even through my clothes I could feel, or thought I could feel, the quick pulsing of her blood just beneath the pale flesh. Sweet Jesus, I could smell it and tell the difference between the dead stuff staining the floor and the living stuff rushing through her veins.
No.
Backward step, my own hands out to keep her in place. From the floor below, the band struck up a slow tune. We could have danced to it. She even followed me a pace or two until I ordered her to hold still again, my voice thick and hoarse. I backed up more and kept going until the desk was between us. Might have felt silly about doing it but for the fact my teeth were out; we were both in danger. I looked anywhere in the room but at her and caught myself shuddering with a perilous combination of fear and arousal.
Dammit, but this was too much. It was past time I got square with myself again on this once and for all. I wasn’t a mindless, ravening animal; I wasn’t a rapist. I didn’t have to give in to this kind of appetite; I didn’t have to lose control. Hypnotizing men sure as hell didn’t do this to me, only women, women who attracted me, and all this was because I knew I could get away with it.
Taking all her blood would be great, the finest, I’d had enough of a sampling from the other woman to know just how fine it would be, but then I’d have to live with myself and the consequences for a very long, long time. A few minutes of ecstasy followed by God knows how many years of regret. I had enough of those already from the normal events of living to be making new ones to throw on the pile.
Yes, indeed, it’s a hell of a thing to be a vampire with a conscience, but then why not? Better to have a brief twinge of it now than decades of it eating away at my soul later, of wishing I could undo things. Better not to indulge to start with
.
I took a long moment to mentally catch my breath, and it seemed to work. I got a lot calmer inside. My teeth gradually receded. The next time I looked at her I had myself reined in, but she was half-awake and still fighting.
“Angela.”
She stopped blinking and shaking her head, her attention arrested on me. I looked hard for a few seconds, then stared past her. That helped. So long as I kept the contact brief with pauses in between I might just be able to get away with this.
“Saw you . . . saw you dead,” she whispered.
“I know you did, but it was a mistake. You’re going to listen to me now.”
“No . . . why. . . should I?”
I said her name again. Damn, but she was a tough cookie.
“Because you have to.” Which was a pretty lousy reason to give, so I improvised a better one. “Because it will help your father.”
There, she stopped fighting me so much. The part of her that was still thinking was at attention. “How?”
“Just listen and do as I ask. First off, I want you to cancel the hit on Charles Escott. I want you to forget he even exists.”
“Escott?”
“Charles Escott, the tall, skinny guy with a big nose, you’re gonna leave him completely alone. Far as you’re concerned he’s nothing and nobody, not worth your time. And tonight you tell your boys to do the same. Got that? Tell it back to me again.”
She did so, but it was a struggle. I made her go over it twice more, then a third for good measure, until she was saying it smooth with no faltering. Only then did I relax with a sigh of relief. The really important item was finally out of the way; the rest was going to be my own personal ingenious plan. Not that it wasn’t important, but I had some doubts about being able to force it through. With this kind of hypnosis you can get anyone to do anything, and I mean absolutely anything, right up to jumping off a building to admire the view on the way down. The normal kind used by doctors and in sideshows you can’t take so far because it’d be against the nature of the person you put under. That was something I never had to worry about, but my version only lasted for a short while; any orders I gave against a person’s basic instincts would wear off with time unless I reinforced them.
On the other hand, if I found a way of getting around a person’s natural objections, so they wanted to go along with me on something, then it’s back to anything goes again, and I already knew what angle to try on Angela.
“Now, about this Sean Sullivan and what you’re planning to do . . . ” I began.
Commotion downstairs. Couldn’t ignore it, not when the music suddenly stopped and the shouts and screams started. Didn’t know what the hell it was, a fight between the patrons, a fire, or worse. I told Angela to stay put and went to the door to see.
In the hall outside were a bunch of other men like me, craning their necks toward the source of the noise, trying to figure out what was happening. A few of them decided not to wait and were moving fast toward exits. The shouts got louder and at the far end of the hall I spotted a knot of bouncers tearing up the stairs, pushing men roughly out of their way. They were closely followed up by another knot. Those boys were in dark blue coats and carrying fire axes.
“Raid!” someone yelled a fraction too late. Maybe Angela had skimped with her payoffs to the cops this week. Everyone had the idea by now and was trying their best to escape. A dozen of them stampeded right at me. I tried shutting the door, but they bulled in, cursing and breathless, heading for a second door at the back of the office.
With all this going on, Angela woke right up and made a grab for the .22 on the desk. I swatted it out of her hand before she could bring it to bear. It thumped against the wall without going off and landed by the bowling trophy.
“None of that, sweetheart, we’re getting out of here,” I said.
She replied with a ripe and very unladylike word or three, the general meaning being for me to get out of her way. Her usual method of handling emergencies would put people in the casualty wards, so I slipped a quick arm around her waist, lifted, and threw her over my shoulder, intending to carry her out like a sack of potatoes if necessary. She swore and squirmed and clawed and kicked, but I gave her behind a couple of stinging swats and told her to shut up and behave. She squawked with sincere outrage and called me a really nasty name, adding in more verbal vitriol for good measure. At least I assumed as much from her tone of voice since she was cursing me in fast Italian now. I didn’t know any of it, but was willing to bet hers weren’t the kind of phrases that would show up in a Berlitz course.
With her under control, I joined the growing crowd flowing through the office. They oozed into another hall and stairway, which were both choked with flailing bodies trying to get out. Some of the escapees were trying for the fire exit and crowding around an open window. Cold air blasted its way in, mixing with the stink of sweaty desperation.
“Not this way, you idiot,” Angela snarled at me, beating a fist on my back to get my attention.
“Where, then?”
“Toward the office.”
I looked. “We are not gonna get in there again.”
“Not in the office, toward it. Put me down and I’ll show you.”
What the hell, why not? I thought, and did so. She eeled through the bodies, heading upstream with me right behind her, but instead of the office, she veered to the right and yanked open a door sporting a sign that read JANITOR. Maybe she was figuring to hide out there until the worst of the fuss was over. Seemed a fine idea to me. We could block ourselves in, and if there was any kind of light inside, maybe I could finish what I’d started with her then call it a night.
Crashing, splintering noises, and an odd, out-of-tune ringing sound. The cops with fire axes were making short work of the slot machines. Funny, you’d think they’d hold off on that for later. The usual routine was make arrests first, then chop up the property for the reporters and their cameras so the paper-reading public could see they were being well protected from the ravages of vice. More shouting, but no gunfire, not yet. All I had to do was keep Angela out of things and maybe it would stay that way.
She dove inside the janitor closet with me at her heels. I slammed the door against further interruptions. The place smelled dank and dusty from the mops, buckets, and brooms. Angela found a switch and flicked on a twenty-five-watt bulb overhead. I looked for some kind of inside latch or lock, but had no luck there, just an empty keyhole. I’d have to jam a foot against the door and lean on it.
Angela glanced up at me, her face alight from the excitement of the moment. Oh, but didn’t she remind me of Escott and the way he liked living on the edge? He should be the one alone in a closet with her, not me. She bent, reaching for a thin cloth rug to drag it out of the way. A rug? Why would anyone put a rug in here? She twitched it to one side, revealing the rectangle of a trapdoor.
“Help me pull it up,” she said.
“Where’s it lead?”
“Where do you think? Jeez, were you born yesterday?”
I hauled at a rope handle and the thing came up on its hinges. Not as smooth or subtle as the one in Escott’s kitchen, but it worked well enough. Within was a glimpse of steps going down into utter darkness. Even my eyes couldn’t get past it. Unhesitating, Angela swung her legs into the narrow space.
“How far?” I asked.
“Find out,” she answered, going in.
I followed, thinking this was a really lousy idea, especially with my claustrophobia trying to kick up. The walls were so close here I barely had room for my shoulders to squeeze in. Once away from the dim illumination of the closet above, I felt a fist going tight around my heart. God, but I hate small dark places.
“How far?” I repeated. There was a distinct whine in my tone.
“Don’t be such a baby. Hurry.”
I could hear her clattering away from me. Had to take the stairs by feel now, couldn’t see a damned thing in this pit.
Then she stumbled. That’s what i
t sounded like. Thumps, heels cracking on the wooden steps. She cried out.
“What?” I called.
“Help!” she called back, desperation and pain in her tone. “Oh, God, help me!”
I pressed forward, heart galloping up to my throat. Going too fast and likely to stumble myself. “I’m coming, hang on.”
Something solid caught me around the ankles and pushed up hard and fast. It was too quick, too unexpected; I toppled forward. Hell’s bells, I was falling. Panicked, I lashed out with my arms to try to stop my momentum, but there was no banister to grab, I just slammed them into the walls. The solid thing pushed higher against my legs, and I tumbled headlong. At the last, the very last second, I managed to vanish so I wouldn’t crush her when I landed.
Damned convenient talent, but invariably disorienting. I spun faster than before, couldn’t get out of that part of it just yet. Damn, damn, damn—
The spinning slowed, I got myself in check, finally stopping to bounce lightly between the walls, trying to figure which end of me was up. My first guess was wrong as I floated one way and concluded I was heading toward the ceiling. Wanted to call out to her, find out what had gone wrong, but no voice in this state. A moment later I located the regular right angles that marked the steps. No sense of Angela, though, I must have floated well back up above her or had gone ahead and was below wherever she was. One way to find out. If she noticed anything odd I’d fix it later.
I materialized cautiously. Dark piled on top of dark met my eyes. I looked up, saw a very faint dim light. Rectangular. The trapdoor. Then it suddenly slammed down and the darkness got as bad as it could get without my actually being in hell. Ironically, that’s when the dawn started to break in my brain.