On a Darkling Plain (21 page)

The remaining anarchs sauntered into the loft and began to ruin other paintings. Removing his own container of solvent from inside his jacket, Dan moved to do the same. He felt a twinge of shame. Since becoming a vampire, he’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of, things that, by any sensible standard, were worse than vandalizing a bunch of pictures; yet something about this particular act made him feel petty and mean. But he guessed that if he wanted to remain in his companions’ good graces, he had no choice.

As he twisted open the nozzle of the bottle, he casually scrutinized the painting before him, a vision of yellow lions and blue parrots in a tropical forest, rendered in what he thought was a rather childlike style of simple shapes and primary colors. For a moment it merely seemed kind of pretty and kind of strange, and then it seemed to change before his eyes.

Even as he froze in awe, he realized that the picture hadn’t truly altered. Instead, he was perceiving it with a depth of appreciation of which he’d previously been incapable. He saw how the seemingly rudimentary forms and garish hues combined to form a single gorgeous, exquisite gestalt. How the meticulous brushwork created the illusion of depth and texture. He felt as if he’d glimpsed a different world, one infinitely richer and more beautiful than the quotidian reality in which he’d always dwelled.

Something touched him on the arm. Startled, he jerked around so violently that Laurie recoiled a step.

“Are you okay?” the petite former hippie asked. “You were just staring at that picture and then, when I spoke to you, you didn’t hear me.”

Dan
hoped
he was all right; he was damned if he knew. “Sure,” he said. “I was just, you know, checking it out for a second.”

Laurie turned to look at the canvas. Warily, Dan followed suit. He felt relieved when, though it still looked more beautiful than he could have imagined a minute ago, it failed to hypnotize him as it had before.

“It’s a shame to ruin them, isn’t it?” Laurie said wistfully. “But Wyatt says that if it makes the Toreador stupid with rage, or destroys their will to fight, it will be worth it.”

“Makes sense to me,” Dan said. “What the hell, there are plenty of pictures in the world.” Laurie gave him an affectionate pat on the arm, then advanced on a painting of a dilapidated wooden sailboat.

Steeling himself, Dan aimed his bottle at the canvas before him, then faltered again. Finally, squinching his eyes shut, he convulsively clenched his finger on the trigger. When the painting sizzled, he had to strain to hold in a sob.

Fortunately, the act of desecration became a little easier with repetition, though it always felt as if a piece of himself were dying along with the work he was destroying. By the time all the art had been ruined, he was desperate to flee the scene, frantic to escape the sight of the ravaged masterpieces. Fighting to keep his voice steady, he said, “I guess we can go.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Not quite yet.”

“Why not?” Dan said. “Are there more pictures in another room?” He didn’t think he could stand it if there were.

“Nope,” said Wyatt, “or at least, not as far as I know. But can you hear the painter and his family, snorting and wheezing away?” He nodded at the doorway in the left-hand wall. “I’ve been instructed that tonight the war is entering a new phase. It’s time to start killing the Toreador’s pet kine.” He smiled at Dan.

He’s watching me,
Dan realized,
waiting to see my reaction.
Wyatt might
believe
that his newest recruit was a genuine convert to the anarch cause — Dan was almost certain that he did — but that didn’t mean that he was ready to stop testing him. The cell leader was too wary a conspirator for that.

Thirty years of deceiving and preying on humans, of watching them age while he remained young, had hardened Dan, attenuating his emotional bond to what had once been his own kind. Still, the thought of slaughtering helpless innocents sickened him, and the notion that one of the prospective victims had created the beauty the vampires had just finished ravaging made the prospect even more loathsome. But once again, whether he wound up staying with the anarchs or betraying them, it wouldn’t do to reveal his revulsion.

“Good thinking,” he said, smiling back at Wyatt. “After all, what’s the point of destroying the paintings if you leave the artist alive to make more?”

“Exactly,” Wyatt said. He beckoned, and the Kindred stalked toward the doorway. Jimmy Ray’s fangs slid over his lower lip.

As the would-be murderers slipped into the artist’s living area, Dan positioned himself at the back of the procession in the hope that it would keep him from actually having to commit any of the violence. He wound up gliding along beside Laurie. Her expression seemed resolute but somber, and he wondered if she found the business at hand as distasteful as he did.

The vampires passed through a sparsely, shabbily furnished living room, dining area and kitchen, and then into what must have been the bedroom hall. The hiss of respiration and the muffled thud of heartbeats grew louder. Dan smelled the pungent tang of sweat.

Suddenly Jimmy Ray lunged through a doorway. Dan heard bedsprings squeal, and a brief thrashing sound. When his companion reemerged into the hall, he was holding a skinny, naked black boy in each hand, clutching them by their throats. Half-strangled already, the children squirmed feebly.

Wyatt and Felipe darted into a room farther down the passage. The other vampires followed them. By the time Dan made it through the door, the duo in the lead had dragged a black man and woman, nude also, out of their battered, sagging, four-poster bed. Felipe was restraining the man, a middle-aged, partially bald, paunchy guy with paint-stained fingers, by dint of his superior strength. Wyatt was gazing into the slender, trembling, long-necked young woman’s eyes, paralyzing her by force of will.

“No!” cried the artist, mad with fear. “No! No!”

“Sorry, amigo,” said Felipe. “This is what you get for running with the Camarilla.”

“No!” said the painter. “You’re making a mistake! I don’t even know what that is!”

“That’s too bad,” said Felipe. “They should have told you what you were getting into.” He buried his fangs in the immigrant’s neck. The human wailed.

The black woman shuddered more violently and moaned. Her heartbeat raced. “It’s all right,” said Wyatt soothingly. “It will all be over very soon.” He took her in his arms and bit her.

Jimmy Ray handed one of the now-unconscious children to Laurie and ripped out the throat of the other, savagely, wastefully, spattering blood on himself and the floor. The intoxicating scent of the vitae suffused the air.

Laurie shivered and squinched her eyes shut. “Oh, Christ,” she whispered, as if she were mortal and a lover had caressed her. She dropped to her knees, clutched the other boy to her bosom, and began to feed.

Nor was Dan immune to the effects of the spectacle before him. Hard as he tried to stay calm, to cling to his inner disgust, the smell of the blood and the slurping, gurgling sounds his companions made as they sucked it from their prey were kindling his own Hunger. By the time Wyatt offered him the woman, he was eager to finish draining her.

He pressed his mouth to the twin punctures that his companion had made, and the world dissolved into pleasure. Finally he noticed that the woman’s heart had stopped, and her vitae had begun to cool and lose its savor.

As Dan lifted his head, Felipe licked the artist’s wounds closed and carried him to the window. “Take this, Sarasota!” he said, his voice giddy with high spirits, and hurled the body through the glass. The resultant crash hurt Dan’s ears.

No doubt curious to see where and how the body had landed, Felipe stuck his head out into the night. His body tensed. “Oh, shit,” he said.

Dan dropped the woman’s corpse on the floor, strode to the window and looked down. The painter lay facedown on the crumpled roof of a black limousine. Eight men — vampires, judging from the pallor each displayed — who’d evidently just gotten out of the limo and the sedan parked behind it, stared up at Felipe and Dan for another moment, and then reached inside their coats.

FOURTEEN*TH E SAMEDI

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
La Nouvelle Heloise

Dan recoiled, then saw that Felipe had yet to do likewise. He grabbed the anarch’s arm and yanked him back inside. An instant later, a hail of gunfire blazed upward through the window.

“What the hell’s going on?” Wyatt cried. For once the vampire in white looked rattled.

“There are Kindred out there,” said Dan. “Since they seem to be pissed at us for killing the artist, I guess they’re Prince Roger’s people.”

“They must have figured out that we meant to start killing their proteges, and come to take the kine and his family to safety,” Wyatt said. “Not that that matters now, God damn it.” He pulled his shotgun out of his coat. “How many are there?”

“Eight that I saw,” Dan replied, drawing from the back of his jeans the stainless-steel Smith and Wesson Model 669 that he’d commandeered from the anarchs’ armory.

“We could make a stand here,” said Jimmy Ray, peering nervously about.

“We could try,” Dan said, “but we don’t know how many guys there are, or what kind of weapons they have to use against us. You get a dozen vamps dropping through that skylight at once, or the enemy blasting this dump apart with explosives, or setting it on fire, and we could be pretty well screwed. I think we ought to try to get away.”

“If that’s what we’re doing, we need to go now, before they box us in,” Wyatt said. He pivoted, scatter-gun leveled in one hand, the tail of his white coat sweeping out behind him, and strode toward the exit of the apartment. The other Kindred trotted after him.

Reaching the door, Wyatt cracked it open and peeked out onto the landing. Dan tensed, half-expecting another barrage of shots to smash through the panels. Then Wyatt pulled the door all the way open. “So far so good,” he said. “Come on.”

Running with the quiet, sure-footed grace of the undead, the Kindred bounded down three flights of steps without incident. Dan could hear rapid heartbeats and quick, fearful breathing behind the closed doors on the landings. Evidently the gunfire had awakened the residents of the other apartments. He wondered if anyone had called the cops, or if everybody was simply lying low, hoping that whatever trouble was happening, it wouldn’t happen to them.

The vampires plunged onto the second-floor landing. Wyatt grabbed the wooden knob at the top of the newel post and swung himself onto the final flight of stairs. Guns barked and rattled up at him. He grunted, and his feet flew out from under him.

Jimmy Ray and Felipe snapped off shots at the gunmen massed at the foot of the steps. Laurie grabbed Wyatt and hauled him up. Dan spun and kicked one of the doors on the landing. It flew open, crashing against the wall. “This way!” he cried.

As he scrambled into the apartment, he noticed that it was cramped and essentially unfurnished, with ancient, dingy paper peeling off the walls. Mortals lay everywhere, a few on stained, dilapidated mattresses, others on piles of rags or newspaper, and some on the bare linoleum. Most of the humans were content to cower and avert their gazes, but one chunky woman, the scleras of her wide, dark eyes the yellow of a stained tooth, reared up and babbled in what Dan assumed was Creole.

Whatever she was saying, he had no time for her. He brandished his pistol and bared his fangs, and she shrank back from him. Momentarily uncertain of his directions, scrambling over several of her fellow tenants, he made his way to a window. Then he saw that it overlooked the courtyard, and that a pair of sentries were stationed there. Hoping to find a better way out, acutely aware that the gunmen they’d encountered on the stairs were only seconds behind them, he wheeled and led his companions on into a tiny room at the rear of the apartment.

Here the residents were packed in like sardines. He stepped on some of them as he made his way to the window. Peering out, he saw a narrow street which forked into two even narrower ones at the end of the block. As far as he could discern, no one was standing watch on the pavement below.

“Come on!” he said, and hurled himself at the window pane. The glass shattered, and he plummeted toward the sidewalk below, falling in a rain of glittering shards. He landed awkwardly; the impact slammed him down on one knee, tearing his jeans and the skin beneath. He leaped up and spun around —

To see that none of his comrades had followed him into the open. Guns banged, the muzzle flashes lighting up the darkened window, as the anarchs fired at the pursuers swarming after them. For one terrible moment Dan was afraid that his new friends wouldn’t make it out, that he was alone again, alone forever. Then, the white tanktop inside his coat now dark with blood, Wyatt leaped. His friends began to scramble after him.

Dan ran to Wyatt’s side. Up close, the vampire with the mohawk smelled of vitae and gun smoke. “Are you all right?” Dan asked.

“The bullets... hit my lungs,” said Wyatt, smiling, his voice a ghastly whisper. “Good thing Kindred... only use them to talk.” Pivoting abruptly, he raised his gun and fired.

Dan turned to see that Felipe, Jimmy Ray, and now Laurie had jumped to the pavement. Wyatt was shooting through the window to discourage anyone from leaping after them. After pumping off a couple of rounds, he wheezed, “Now... back to the van. We’ll try... to lose the bastards.”

Laurie peered up and down the unfamiliar street. “Do you know which way it is?” she asked fearfully. Wyatt pointed and they started running, turning periodically to fire behind them. Guns barked back from the window, but none of Prince Roger’s people had dared to follow their quarry into the open yet. Dan was sure that would change in the next few seconds.

Wyatt began to stagger. His wounds couldn’t threaten his existence as they might a human’s, but the blood loss and trauma could certainly weaken him. Laurie put her arm around him, but she lacked both the strength and the stature to help him along at anything like the necessary speed.