"Come now, Sinjon! For someone who spent so much time immersed in secret societies, haven't you figured out who he's really worried about?"
Sinjon's eyes widened. "Of course! The Council of Vienna!"
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"Exactly." The stranger smiled, tapping the side of her nose. "He's afraid his family will find out what he's been up to."
***
"Who th' fuck is it?"
"It's me, Cloudy."
The sawed-off was quickly withdrawn. The door closed again for a moment, then reopened, allowing her to slide inside. Cloudy stood in his book-cluttered front parlor, dressed in a pair of tattered jeans and a bowling shirt that hung open to his waist, his wispy white hair still tousled from bed. Along with the sawed-off, there was a Buck knife tucked into a holster on his hip. There was no such thing as sleeping easy in Deadtown.
"Where's Ryan?"
"He's asleep. He usually crashes an hour or two before dawn. He might as well be nocturnal, for the hours he keeps." Cloudy motioned to the kitchen. "C'mon, I'll fix us some coffee. Oops—sorry! I forgot.
You can watch me drink my coffee, then."
The stranger eased into the spare chair as Cloudy busied himself with filling the teakettle and lighting the pilot light. Ryan's bed under the sink was curtained off by a piece of discarded drapery, giving the boy a little privacy.
"How did it go?"
"I got inside both Esher's and Sinjon's strongholds. Of the two, Esher is definitely the more dangerous quarry. He is young, as Kindred judge such things, and exceptionally ambitious."
"A 'lean and hungry look', eh?"
"Exactly. And those are the most dangerous vampires to contend with. They have much to win—and much to lose. Sinjon, on the other hand, is what could be called 'a reasonable monster.' He has what he wants, but fears losing it. It makes him easier to manipulate. He is a museum piece, but is loath to admit it. I've dealt with many of his breed: anachronisms clinging to the era that saw their greatest glory. Still, I would be a fool to underestimate him. Elder vampires such as Sinjon came of age during times far harder and more punishing than any born of this century could possibly know. His foppery hides a will of iron and a heart of coal."
"Sound like real sweethearts." Cloudy lowered his voice, glancing over at Ryan's sleeping nook. "What about his mother? Did you see her?"
The stranger tried to keep her face neutral. "I saw her."
"Is she okay?"
"She's alive."
Cloudy raised an eyebrow, but before he could say anything, the kettle began its shrill wail. He quickly snatched the pot off the boil, not wanting to wake Ryan. He spooned instant coffee and powdered creamer into a cracked mug that read WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA, then sat down opposite the stranger.
"She's bad, huh?"
"Do you want it straight?"
"Do I have a choice ?"
The stranger ran her fingers through her hair, and for a split second Cloudy glimpsed the utter weariness inside her. It was the kind of deep-down tired you see in veterans of trench warfare. "I think I can get her away from Esher. But to tell the truth—it might not do any good. She's heavily tranced. Plus I think he's been drugging her—and not with the usual street crap either. He's got a bokor working for him."
"A what?"
"Voodoo witch doctor. A mean-ass motherfucker named Obeah that carries a machete. He's a displaced Tonton Macoute. Nasty customer."
Cloudy paled and his coffee mug trembled slightly. "I know the bastard you're talking about. But what's that have to do with drugs—?"
"Esher's got Nikola strung out on zombie dust."
"Zombies—? Aw, c'mon, man! You're pulling my leg, right?"
"Look, you're living in a neighborhood swarming with the living dead, and you can't swallow zombies?
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) Besides, it's not like the crap in the movies. Witch-doctors use the stuff from blowfish. The shit's a neural toxin. Normally it'll paralyze you so thoroughly your heart can't beat and you can't breathe. But in the right amounts it's a powerful drug, and under certain circumstances it can be used to induce a deathlike state.
"Let's say a bokor gets crossed by some schmuck, and he puts a curse on him in public. Then he manages to slip the zombie dust into the poor schmuck's Wheaties. Next thing you know, there's a dead schmuck—but he's not really dead. He just looks it, right? So he gets stuck in the ground, and the bokor hauls ass to the graveyard, where he digs up the schmuck and feeds him the antidote. Next thing you know there's a dead man walking around—except he's not really dead. But he is a zombie now.
"Usually they suffer from a hell of a lot of brain damage, what with the oxygen deprivation from being underground, so they end up a little slow— hell, they're actually a lot slow! They can't feel much in the way of pain, nor can they communicate very well. About the only things they want out of life from that point on—if you can call it life—are food and zombie dust. I guess they're the only pleasures they can still feel. And they'll do anything to get those two things. And since the bokor pretty much has the zombie dust thing sewn up, they end up becoming his personal slaves for the rest of either his or their lives, whichever comes first."
"And this is what Esher's trying to do to Nikola?"
"Not exactly. He's got her messed up on it, but he doesn't want to zombify her. He's trying to turn her."
"Turn?"
"A lot of the lords, when they decide to take a bride or companion, select a human they feel has the potential for evil and corruption. Sometimes the human's dark side responds eagerly. Other times it may be buried so deep that a rigorous campaign, lasting years, is necessary to nurture its growth and encourage its ascendancy. However, not all of these turnings are successful. Some humans refuse to let their dark side win out and die at their own hand. I suspect that may be the case with Nikola—it's why she's being drugged. Esher wants to keep her susceptible to his influence, but he fears what she might do to herself when he's not there to control her."
"Then if that's the case—there might be some hope for her, after all," Cloudy pointed out.
"Perhaps. But as long as Esher is nearby, she's completely and utterly his creature. That kind of mind control does serious damage. If I get her away from him, she may very well remain—how shall I put it?—highly susceptible—to those with a stronger will. And at this point, Skippy the Kangaroo has a stronger will than she does."
"You don't exactly paint a rosy picture, do you?" Cloudy grunted.
"You asked for it straight."
"Yeah. I did, didn't I?" he sighed, draining the last of his coffee. "So what do you propose doing?"
"The only way both Ryan and his mother will be safe is if Esher is well and truly dead."
Cloudy lowered the mug, eyeing her as if she'd suddenly grown a second head. "You planning on killing him?"
"That was my intention from the very beginning, even before I met you and Ryan."
"Honey, you don't happen to have an army I might have missed stashed in that gym bag of yours, do you?" Cloudy chuckled in spite of himself.
The stranger stifled a yawn as she stood up, stretching like a cat. "Killing him will be easy. Not getting myself killed in the bargain—that's the tricky part! Now, if you'll excuse me—it's been a long night, and I'll need my rest if I'm to keep on top of what's going down tonight. Are there any other squatters in this building?"
"Not anymore. Since things started jumpin' round here, most of the squats moved to the outer fringes of Deadtown. No one wants to be in the thick of it."
The stranger gathered up her belongings and headed for the door. "I'll bunk down in the attic, if it's all the same to you. I like being close to rooftops. They're handier than back doors, when you have unexpected visitors."
Cloudy frowned and fidgeted with the keys. "It's daylight out there—!"
"I'm well aware of that," she replied.
"But the sun's up!"
"It usually is when it's daylight. So?"
"Are you sure you wanna go out right now?"
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"Cloudy, I appreciate the concern, but open the fuckin' door, okay? I'm not gonna bust 'n' bake."
Cloudy looked unconvinced, but he unlocked the door anyway. The stranger patted his shoulder as she slipped past the threshold into the morning sunshine. "Don't worry about me," she chided. "I've got my sunscreen on."
***
The only window in the attic was an oculus set on a hinge, so that it could be tilted open for ventilation.
As she dropped onto her haunches to root through her gym bag, she glanced out the window—and found herself staring at the bell tower of a church.
Although it was at least a block or two away, the view was unobstructed; the surrounding tenements were only three or four stories tall, as opposed to the one she was in, which dwarfed its neighbors at six stories.
She dimly remembered passing what might have been a church on her way to the Black Lodge the night before, but she hadn't realized it was so close to Cloudy's squat.
Although strong light proved bothersome, if not painful, her eyesight was still five times sharper than the average human's. As she squinted against the sun, she could see that the church bells had been removed. While God might not have turned a blind eye to Deadtown, his earthly representatives were another matter.
Something moved in the deep shadows of the belfry—something too large to be a bird or a bat. This made her look closer. She knew someone trying to avoid being seen when she saw it. At first she thought Esher had discovered her duplicity and sent one of his minions to spy on her, but she quickly discarded the idea. She was sure she had not been followed, certainly not by any human agency. And the skulker in the belfry certainly couldn't be Kindred. No, whoever it was watching her was probably one of Deadtown's hapless human citizens.
She was too tired to let the problem of the peeper's identity occupy her for more than a few seconds.
Although she could move around during the day and was immune to sunlight, that didn't mean she relished it. She needed to go to ground in order to recharge her energy stores and allow her body to repair whatever damage may have been done to it. Besides, she'd put in a long, exhausting night's detective work, and she needed her rest.
As she dropped onto the mattress, her blood pressure plummeted like a stone, as did her respiratory and heart rate. To all outward appearances, she was dead.
At least until the sun went down.
In the dream, she can see herself get into the car.
Only, it's not really her; it's the person who existed before her creation and gave birth to her as she died, raped into oblivion by a demon prince. Denise Thorne.
In the dream, she watches Denise get into the car. She is but a ghost; mute and intangible, observing as her former self steadily plods toward her fate, unable to change the course of events. Surely this is a taste of what Hell must be like.
For the thousandth time she watches as the dashing and debonair gentleman playboy Lord Morgan metamorphoses into a leering vampire, red of tooth and claw. She watches as the pallid, ruby-eyed monster takes the terrified Denise's young mind and body and rapes them with cruel abandon. She watches as he slakes his unnatural lusts by violating and biting her at the same time, flooding her womb with dead sperm and contaminating her bloodstream with the taint of the undead.
She watches as Denise Thorne, her mind shattered and soul destroyed, disappears behind a wall of shock—and she is born, emerging like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. She watches as Morgan tosses her naked and abused body from the back of his vintage Rolls-Royce as if she were an empty fast-food wrapper, leaving her for dead in the gutters of London's East End. She is only moments old, but already
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) she is beginning to learn the name of the game: Survival of the Fittest.
Her surroundings warp and time speeds up, as it tends to do in dreams. Although she cannot see what is transpiring during the time lapse, she knows what is occurring behind the scenes. After all, it happened to her, didn't it? Now she is standing atop the Empire State Building. Decades have passed. She is there with Lord Morgan—only he is no longer the dashing debonair playboy who seduced Denise Thorne so long ago. His face is scarred. His lips are pulled into a permanent, disfiguring sneer, the left eye white as a boiled fish's. The stranger watches as she caresses the vampire lord's ruined face as gently as a lover's—then buries her fangs in his throat. Morgan looks surprised—then scared—as she drains him of his life force. He struggles and tries to escape her embrace, but it's no use—his limbs have already begun to wither. He screams and flails his wasted arms and legs in protest as she reduces him to an animated scarecrow.
Above them, the sky turns the color of a ripe bruise and lightning stitches the bellies of immense thunderclouds. Sated, she lets the desiccated remains drop. He looks more like a puppet than a man.