Clan Novel Toreador: Book 1 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Stewart Wieck

  Restlessly, relentlessly, he continued his work. On his hands and knees like an animal, he voraciously sucked, devouring even the finest dew-like film of the liquid.

  He was so dehydrated that he generated no saliva to aid his tongue’s grisly congress with the ground. And because the liquid was so thick, it was difficult to swallow. But he continued to nuzzle at it, grinding his nose and mouth into the narrowest cavities because he smelled more of it. Where his entire face could not reach, his filthy tongue might, and it pressed into tiny hollows where perhaps a pin’s head of the liquid was trapped.

  But every drop was sacred.

  More than that, every drop meant his life.

  Despite his best efforts, though, he could find little of the liquid. A deep-rooted instinct told him there should be more. It was a pre-Kindred instinct. Even pre-Kine. Something from his primordial past before his kind had gained balance on two legs.

  He heeded that instinct and mindlessly groped about for more, his tongue pressing beneath every small object it encountered, groping for every available congealed drop.

  This kept on for an indefinite period of time.

  What was time when life was on the tip of the tongue?

  In the end, he found little, but he found enough. The pain and need subsided. Gradually, the Beast subsided, and gradually Leopold’s senses returned.

  Blood!

  It was his first thought.

  It was the liquid that gave him thought at all.

  Then it became clear that he was squatting on the ground near the edge of a paved road. His situation was clear, but his mind was still cloudy, his thoughts suspended in the humid porridge of the summer night in Atlanta. So he was not startled to find himself thus.

  As his senses continued to clear, Leopold rocked back onto his butt and sat with the high curb bracing the small of his back. He massaged his head, and as sensation and taste returned, he violently spat and then raked his tongue with angry, impatient fingers. The sand and grit from his mouth was tinged with a touch of lightly red moisture. He shook the debris off and then absently sucked at his damp fingers.

  As he recovered further, he became aware of his ridiculous behavior. He plucked a gum wrapper, with tooth-dented putty still within it, from his head. When the gum remained, he furiously tore out a chunk of his hair.

  There was also a lollipop plastered to his cheek. The small purple nub of the candy was stuck to him and the short white stick dangled down. His palms were greasy with the leaked oil of an earlier car, and his elbows and knees were thick with reddish-black filth.

  Blood!

  He leapt upright and looked at the dried outline of the nearly drained puddle that had occupied him a moment ago.

  He felt confused again. Vertigo claimed him and he stumbled back to the pavement.

  Vertigo he did remember, because suddenly he remembered the crashing of glass and a long fall. And pain. Though he must have called upon his blood to heal the worst of his injuries, Leopold’s ribs were still tender, and perhaps still broken.

  He rubbed his mouth, suddenly aware that something was inside it. Something he was sucking on, rolling it smoothly about his mouth with his scratched and painful tongue to calm himself as a child absently seeks a pacifier. He assumed it was a tooth, perhaps jarred by his first, long fall and now sprung loose when he tripped. But it was too soft.

  He stopped swishing it about and looking at the ground where he had recently found himself lapping like a starving dog, Leopold gained a strange premonition about his mouthful, and he was worried to reveal the contents to himself.

  But he did so. He spat quickly before conscious thought could catch him and stay his hand. The roundish object sank softly into his hand and he clutched his fingers about it. It no longer seemed solid to him, and instead felt fragile and flaccid, like an egg yolk.

  He slowly uncoiled his fingers and revealed an oval item a good bit larger than a marble. It was sticky now and he realized a good deal of the grit in his mouth must have come from this before it was washed clean by his tongue.

  He shivered, but still refused to admit to himself what it obviously was. The white of it puckered like gooseflesh when he pulled a finger from it, a motion he carefully repeated over and over again as he maneuvered it around in his fingers until the pupil bore a gaze upon him. An eyeball.

  He flung it aside, and he nervously watched as it jumped and then skittered and then wavered to a stop, once again covered with filth as it must have been before his animalistic needs bade him claim it.

  Leopold shook his head. He could well imagine the frenzy of action that must have driven him here from the High Museum. The Sabbat attack. Victoria’s summoning. The shattered glass. And he recalled the resounding thud that must have been the ground punishing his body. And now the instinct that had saved his life: blood for replenishment.

  Which he ignobly found on this street. But how?

  He dared not turn his head to look up and down the street. Presumably up, to his right, for a slight incline rose that way, and the blood he’d consumed must have washed downhill from something.

  Something? Come to think of it, the blood had seemed to invigorate him rather quickly. But he could not place the flavor. Not human, his usual game. Nor was it any domesticated pet animal. Something far tastier than any of that lot!

  A sudden desire to know the delicacy on which he gorged overwhelmed him, and Leopold looked right and up the slight rise. The shadows were heavy, for the battered lamp lights battled the thick air of a growing humidity, but Leopold could make out the form of what without question was a man. Presumably a dead one.

  Shattering glass.

  It was not the first corpse of the night. Arrayed before his eyes, from a split-second memory of the scene he’d escaped as he plummeted forty or fifty feet from the fourth floor of the High Museum of Art, were the tattered corpses of a dozen Kindred.

  What had happened!?

  He looked left, where he could see the top of the High Museum. He could see no evidence of the attack within. It was probably over by now anyway.

  The carnage was a jumble in his head, and he knew he would have to think hard to piece together any coherent interpretation of the assault. From the many snapshots and sound-bites that whirled through his head Leopold did clearly remember a couple things, like several figures savagely dragging Prince Benison to the ground and someone shouting “Lasombra!”

  If he was correctly recalling either of those events, and Lord help him if both were accurate, then it meant that Atlanta was changing hands. Maybe it was simply one of the primogen making a bid to replace Benison, but clearly everyone attending that party was meant to be killed. That he was alive was a miracle. To remain alive would require another, and the blood he’d found so easily was a delicious start.

  But what of Victoria? Or Stella? He moaned and looked at the High again. Despair was evident in his face as he considered the loss of his few friends, and probably the answers to his past as well. All gone.

  With the exception of Hannah, perhaps. That idea helped him refocus his thoughts on himself. Right now it didn’t matter what had happened at the party. The only important thing was that he reach his haven safely. And maybe later he could venture toward the Tremere chantry.

  He glanced right again. He could use more blood, and he still wondered about the source of his meal.

  Leopold loped up the shallow rise. He reached the prone figure in a moment, and concluded from the quantity of spilled and dried blood that it was indeed a corpse.

  It was a man, and he was naked. The figure’s bare back was turned toward Leopold, and the head propped up on the curb, the legs slightly bent and tucked into the body. The corpse’s left arm—the one on top—stretched away from the body, while the right was folded under its head so the right hand clutched at the face.

  No wounds were evident, yet blood had clearly gushed from somewhere.

  Perhaps there was nothing left to drink. Now in control of his facul
ties. Leopold doubted he could stomach copying his earlier feeding methods. He decided to investigate more closely. He at least had to know if it was this poor fool’s eye upon which he’d sucked.

  Leopold slowly circled the corpse.

  Disoriented and weak though he was, and even though the corpse was bereft of the suit and tie on it earlier, Leopold recognized the dead Kindred instantly. It was the Setite, Vegel.

  Leopold was a little shocked, and he wondered how the Setite had managed his escape from the attack. The Toreador’s fascination was too complete to turn away, though, and he crouched to gain a better view of the dead Kindred’s face. Even from a new angle, Vegel’s lifeless hand shrouded his face, as if Final Death had struck and the Setite thereafter rubbed his lids shut with a post-mortem sense of decency.

  Bile was already rising in Leopold’s throat. Was it Vegel’s eye he had sucked?

  Carefully, Leopold prepared to knock that hand away to reveal the Setite’s face. When he was ready, he moved quickly and with the precise motion of a sculptor chipping off an unwanted bit of marble.

  The revealed face was so terrifyingly inhuman that Leopold’s legs melted from beneath him and he swooned toward the ground. The right eye was intact and strained desperately wide. The left eye was chilling, almost surreal in its obscenity. It too was blankly staring wide-eyed into the distance, but Leopold gained the unnerving impression that it was looking at him too.

  The gruesome orb suddenly seemed less an eye to Leopold than a malignant, perhaps malevolent, tumor fitted with a pupil and cornea. And like a painting of an old spinster in a haunted house, the eye’s baleful glare seemed to follow Leopold no matter how he repositioned himself.

  Leopold shivered, but he looked at the eye more closely. Someone more superstitious than himself would have crossed themselves or whatever they thought might protect them against the evil eye.

  The luminous white of the eye was crisscrossed with deep and brilliant striations of blood. It was perhaps surgically grafted to Vegel, because it protruded slightly more than an eye should and there was patchwork flesh about its edges where it seemed to overlap the flesh of the Setite’s face. In any event, Leopold was certain he had not been so engrossed by his work during their earlier meeting Vegel that he had overlooked something so obvious and disgusting.

  It did indeed seem something a gypsy woman might brandish to curse those who wronged her.

  Perhaps the eye had been implanted in Vegel. But how could such a procedure be done so quickly? Leopold admitted to himself, though, that he didn’t really have a good idea of the time. Who knew how long he’d wandered the streets between his fall from the High Museum and devouring the blood from this street?

  Leopold felt little sympathy for Vegel. Perhaps if the Kindred had shown a bit more interest in his work…Besides, he expected to hear news of many other deaths, and the loss of this Setite would weigh little on his mind.

  Then the Toreador went slackjawed. That was why the blood tasted so different, so rejuvenating: it was Kindred blood! Leopold knew stories of what some others of his kind called Diablerie—Kindred feeding on Kindred—but he’d not understood the temptation. Now he did. Even the sweetest of blood from the juiciest mortal would not compare to the smooth liquor from this cold-blooded Kindred.

  Of course, Leopold had also heard that Diablerists had another motivation as well: power. To devour the blood—to the last drop!—of a Kindred of an earlier generation meant moving closer to Caine yourself. Evidently something of the power of the blood was retained, absorbed by the tissues of the body perhaps, even if the liquid was later lost or expended.

  This idea gave Leopold pause. It also encouraged him to a turn a more critical eye to the dead Setite.

  Dead or alive, Vegel held no favor in Leopold’s eye, but the corpse of the Kindred now enlivened the artist’s eye within the Toreador. The pale yellow of the lamplight obliquely struck the Setite’s body and created ribbons of shadow that highlighted and accentuated what was after all a rather fine and muscular figure.

  What was it he had been trying to tell Vegel as the Setite turned away from him for more important business? Leopold remembered his words. These harder substances still don’t respond well for me. Perhaps I should try something more malleable…

  Like wood, he’d added.

  Or flesh, Leopold mused now.

  At that moment, Vegel ceased to be a once-living, or even unliving, being in Leopold’s thoughts, and the Toreador instead viewed the corpse as the spectacular sculpture it could be. Limbs splayed but powerful-looking. A pool of blood but no heinous wounds. An expression that stared at and through the viewer. And that eye as a centerpiece. What a remarkable work it could be!

  Leopold glanced furtively about, suddenly worried that someone might be noting how much time he spent with a corpse. But more than that, he realized that he coveted this eye. If it had been planted within Vegel’s skull, then it could be removed as well. It would serve as his Muse, the centerpiece of some great work. And Leopold knew with a chilling clarity that such a work would be a masterpiece, something so much more than the technical achievements of his past.

  With a savage determination born partially of fear and partially of greed, Leopold attacked the Setite’s head, shivering as he plunged two fingers of each hand deep along the sides of the hideous eyeball.

  The texture of the eye was at once revolting and fascinating. Spongy, yet somehow inelastic, the eye ultimately delighted his sculptor’s sense.

  Extraction was surprisingly easy. Granted, the Toreador had never gouged out an eye before, but he’d expected some variety of fibrous or at least fleshy cord to connect the back of the eye to the brain or somewhere. But there was none. It slid out like a quick-growing weed that has had no time to gain purchase below the ground. Indeed, the few slender bluish veins that trailed from the back of the eye did branch like fragile roots.

  It was done so quickly that Leopold was surprised to find himself still crouching, but now with the oversized orb nearly filling his palm. As he rolled it over in his hand, fleshy lids began to close over the eye’s pupil. Leopold was startled, and he watched in fascination as first the deeply bloodshot perimeter of the eyeball was covered, and then, gradually but methodically, the lighter, almost apricot color around the dark pupil was extinguished as well.

  Leopold was distracted by a slender rivulet of blood that welled within the shallow depression and promptly flowed from the Setite’s now vacant left eye socket. The Toreador peered briefly into the recesses of the shadowed hollow, but could see nothing other than darkness and the blackness of blood softly welling within.

  And without another thought, Leopold crouched close to the Setite’s skull and his tongue probed the eye socket. The thick liquid was pure, unblemished by the dirt and trash of the street. It was a sweet treat to Leopold and he worked his tongue deep, lapping at the scraps of flesh in the rear of the socket.

  Once the depression was dry, Leopold sat and licked his lips. Then he ran his coarse and abused tongue across his prodigious canines. He still needed blood!

  Desperately, Leopold folded himself around Vegel like an airless parachute and promptly sank his teeth into the Kindred’s pale neck. A trickle of blood eventually grew to a pool that oozed into his mouth, and the Toreador drank a deep draught of the ambrosia.

  Leopold closed his eyes and let the silken elixir drain through his lips and down his throat. When the supply grew meager, he applied some suction, and eventually he found himself inhaling with tremendous force for the benefit of mere drops. But these drops were the most exhilarating of all. Each one set his mouth ablaze.

  Finally, Vegel was so completely drained that his body lost all density and collapsed under its own weight. The beautifully poised sculpture drooped into a jumble of spare body parts that intersected at impossible angles.

  Only then did Leopold back away, his tongue stretching to inconceivable lengths to catch the drops that lingered on his lips or that slid towar
d his chin. He gazed at the collapsed and desiccated Setite and could not dispute the tingling sensation of confidence and energy that radiated throughout his body.

  He knew it was true. Much of what he had heard about Diablerie must be true. He had no doubt that Vegel belonged—had belonged—to an earlier generation, and now he, Leopold, had absorbed some of that might for himself.

  That plus the palpable sensation of power that emanated from the eye he grasped. The Toreador knew he had been near death earlier that night, but now he felt reborn. Potently reborn. He yearned to direct this newfound prowess into his art. Yet at the same time he felt deep within that a greater destiny awaited him. Yes, some miraculous masterpiece was on the fringes of his consciousness. With the depths of resolve and creativity he knew he could apply toward that still unknown endeavor, Leopold did not doubt that he would change the world.

  Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 3:12 AM

  Manhattan, New York City

  There was no single voice. Or single purpose. Or even single sentience. Instead, an amalgamation of impulses, needs, instincts.

  Of course, one being’s instinct was another’s careless assumption. Animals have mysterious means of finding water. Men merely turn their faucets. Kindred merely find men.

  However, the assumptions made now were not careless ones. Instead, they were infinitely complex. So intertwined that conscious thought was too weak to separate the strands.

  It took something greater, and the collective of impulses, needs and instincts was far greater indeed. It was also a dark intelligence that could only be deemed malevolent, if indeed there was anything in existence that could gauge such an unknown.

  Its response was precise and sufficient, put into motion as casually as a sleeper swats a mosquito. Then slumber resumed.

  But the tiniest stone cast into water spreads ripples.

  A half-dozen workers were preparing to reopen subway tunnel 147, when hundreds of swarming rats flooded into the tunnel and left nothing of the workers but picked-clean bones.