The blood-wizards lunged at one another, their hands locking onto one another's shoulders. To the uninitiated, it looked as if they were engaged in nothing more than a vigorous bout of Indian wrestling, but the look of pain on the combatants' faces told a different story.
The air inside Dance Macabre grew heavy as the stranger felt her skin prickle, as it does before a lightning strike. There was a crackling sound, like that made by an arc welder going full blast, as a tongue of red energy enveloped the battling wizards. The stranger swore and was forced to cover her eyes. The smell of burning blood clogged her nostrils, making her grimace in disgust. She had heard stories of the Tremere and their occult arts, but she had yet to see blood-magic in action. It was rumored that the adepts could boil their enemies' blood with just a touch, control others with a few drops of their life essence as a charm, or cause hemorrhages and clots with a whispered incantation. As a vampire, she knew the intrinsic power of blood—but she had never seen anything like what was transpiring on the stage.
As Esher and Caul strained against one another, crimson tears began to form in the corners of their eyes and run down their cheeks. As the blood-tears struck the wooden floor of the stage, they hissed. Then blood began to drip from their noses and bubble from their ears.
"Let go, Caul!" Esher growled. "Let go, or I'll boil you like a lobster!"
"Only if you agree to return to Vienna with me!"
Esher's response was to close his eyes, set his chin and push even harder than before. Caul cried out as he was hurled across the stage, sliding the length of the runway on his back. His eyes were gone, the sockets full of blood that bubbled like liquid sugar on the boil. Blood was pouring from his mouth and nose and ears, turning his face to a crimson mask.
There was genuine regret in the vampire lord's manner as Esher stood over his dying friend, wiping the blood from his own face with the back of his hand.
"Why you? Damn them, why did they have to send you? When they send their next proxy, he shall find me ready! I will not be stopped by a handful of ancients!"
Caul chuckled—it made a wet gurgling sound deep in his chest. "You fool," he gasped. "You blind fool.
The Tremere need not raise a hand to swat you down. Your doom is upon you, but you cannot see it for what it truly is. You nurse a serpent at your bosom, Esher."
"What do you mean?" Esher glowered, but Caul was beyond responding to questions.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ESHER
Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual would have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base.
While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound; like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silent over the fragments of the "House of Usher'".
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)
— Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
"Cloudy! Open up! It's me!"
The old hippie's eyes were wide and frightened as he peered past the security chain. "Man, this is getting fuckin' weird, even for Deadtown!" he whispered as the stranger slipped across the threshold.
"Did you get what I asked for?"
"Yeah—they're over there," Cloudy said, pointing to a florist's delivery box. "You've got some strange friends, lady. The woman who ran that freaky all-night flower shop—if I didn't know better, I'd swear she was green under all that makeup she was wearing!"
"Gaea's what you might call an Earth Mother," the stranger chuckled. "Has anyone come in or out of the building recently?"
Cloudy nodded, looking like he just swallowed a lemon. "Yeah. That's another piece of high weirdness!
This dude was leaving just as me and Ryan were coming back from that errand you sent us on. Big guy.
Had to be seven feet tall. Wore a bulky trenchcoat and porkpie hat. Funny thing was, he looked like he was missing an arm. And he had boar's tusks. Other than that, he looked pretty normal."
"Sounds like Mai sent Grendel. Did he say anything to you?"
"No, but he gave Ryan the fish-eye. Kind of like the way a dog does a piece of steak. Fucker gave me the creeps."
"Yeah, well, you should see his old lady. Excuse me a minute, Cloudy. I need to go upstairs and check on something."
Cloudy frowned and tugged on his beard. "You said things were gonna be comin' down fast—"
"The wheels of the juggernaut are in motion, Cloudy, and I'm doing my best to see that none of us are crushed beneath them, that's all I can tell you," she said as he unlocked the door.
She returned a few minutes later, carrying her gym bag. She knelt amid the jumble of books and removed several sheaves of neatly bound hundred-dollar bills, stacking them on the floor next to her.
Cloudy whistled in astonishment and bent to pick up one of the stacks. "Jesus Christ on a sea beach!"
"I need you to stash this for me until I get back," she said.
"No prob!"
The stranger removed the bouquet of black roses from their container. She frowned at the long stems for a moment, then used her switchblade to trim them back to a manageable length before stuffing them inside her gym bag. Several thorns punctured the flesh of her hands as she worked, but she did not seem to notice the blood dripping from her wounds.
"Where's Ryan?" she asked as she strode toward the kitchen.
"Here I am!" the boy chirped, sticking his head out from under the sink.
"You're supposed to be asleep!" Cloudy chided.
"But I might miss something!"
"That's the point," the stranger said as she opened the refrigerator. She took out one of the plastic plasma containers and shook it. She glanced down at the boy, who was watching her with rapt attention. "Kid, you don't want to see me do this."
"Yes I do!"
"Ryan!" Cloudy barked. The child's head promptly disappeared back under the sink.
The stranger snapped the seal on the container and upended it, chugging the chilled plasma like a blue-collar worker in a beer commercial. The blood was nourishing, but little else. Compared to life taken directly from the vein, the bottled stuff was bland and stale. The difference between the two was that between Dom Perignon and generic beer. When she finished, she licked her lips like a cat after a bowl of milk, then turned to find Cloudy watching her with ill-disguised disgust. Embarrassed, he quickly looked away. She pretended not to notice.
"There's less than an hour before the sun comes up," she said as she picked up her gym bag. "Look for me come the dawn."
"And what if you don't show up?"
"Take the money and the boy and get the hell out of Deadtown and never come back."
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) Obeah sat and stared sourly at the TV set. Normally he played cards with Webb when things were dull, or they swapped sleep shifts. But Webb was no more—his brains now decorating the street he had spent most of his short life on—and Obeah was without anyone to talk to or play cards with. He grimaced as pain shot up his leg from his shattered kneecap. Cursing under his breath, he pulled a prescription bottle out of his shirt pocket and popped a couple of Dilaudids. Obeah hoped he could get a handle on the pain before his supply ran out.
The Pointers had knocked over a pharmaceutical warehouse a week or two back, to replenish the supplies in the gang's makeshift "infirmary." Unfortunately, most of the boys involved in the heist weren't rocket scientists, so they only made off with a few bottles of actual pills—the rest of the haul consisted of morphine sulfate suppositories. He could always dip into his mojo bag if things got to be too much, but he needed his wits about him, and besides—zombie dust could fuck you up bad if you weren't careful. Obeah picked up the remote and began channel surfing. One of the perks of being Nikola's bodyguard was satellite TV. He particularly liked Nick At Nite and the Sci-Fi Channel.
Another surge of pain made him curse Esher, but not loud enough for anyone—or anything—that might be lurking to hear. Esher was the only man he respected and feared more than he had Papa Doc. After all, Papa only played at being a servant of Baron Samedi, the Lord of Cemeteries. Esher was the real thing.
Although he had been in the Tontons Macoute, Obeah was not a native-born Haitian. He had been born and raised in New Orleans, the son of an illiterate dock worker. His mother came from Haiti as a young girl, to find her fortune in the white man's world. What she found was a job as a laundress. An intensely proud woman, she told her only son stories of the land she had left behind. In the mid-sixties Obeah received a draft notice inviting him to Viet Nam. Unwilling to fight the white man's war, he left the United States for his mother's homeland—and soon found himself embroiled in the voodoo societies, which in turn led to gainful employment with Papa Doc's secret police force.
In the years been 1968 and 1986, when Baby Doc fled his homeland for France, Obeah had been responsible for so many murders, mutilations, rapes and beatings he'd given up count. On one foray he and his fellow Tontons Macoute had stormed an opposition party meeting and hacked the arms off everyone in the house—men, women and children alike—then piled them in the street for the neighbors to see. He remembered how he'd laughed at the sight of the fingers on some of the freshly severed limbs twitching spasmodically, as if trying to wave bye-bye. Those had been good days.
Now he was in the country he'd turned his back on nearly thirty years ago. The last ten years had been rough—with Baby Doc gone, the citizenry of Port-au-Prince he had helped terrorize for so long suddenly found themselves free to exact revenge. The upshot of which was that Obeah discovered himself out of a job and his home burned to the ground. Although General Avril seized power in 1988, it did him little good, as he and Avril had clashed several times in the past. Fearing for his safety, Obeah fled Haiti—ironically enough, he had hidden among the thousands of boat people struggling to make it to Florida in leaky tubs cobbled together out of little more than desperation and sealing wax.
Things had changed quite a bit in America during his absence. His parents were dead, his father crushed by a runaway freight container and his mother from washing other people's clothes. There wasn't much call for a professional death squad leader, so Obeah became a professional killer— and a conjure man on the side.
Then, a few years back, he met Esher. The minute the white man walked into the botanica that served as the front for his death-for-hire business, Obeah recognized him for what he was. You didn't traffic with the Invisibles for twenty years and not come to develop a feeling for the Unseen World. The vampire lord was in the market for a human enforcer with knowledge of the occult, and Obeah came highly recommended. Two years ago he teamed up with Webb, and he and the younger white man did most of the dirty deeds that needed doing. Then, six months ago, Esher assigned them to be his new bride's bodyguards.
It was a cushy job, mostly. They spent most of their time in the brownstone that served as Nikola's safe-house, watching TV or playing cards or swapping bullshit. It wasn't like the bitch did anything. At least not anymore. The first few weeks she kept trying to escape, and when it became obvious she wasn't going to be able to do that, she tried killing herself a couple of times. That's when Esher told him to start dosing her with the zombie-dust. After that, their job became even easier than before. Which suited Obeah just fine. Webb, being younger, tended to get restless and resented the monotony, but Obeah was of an age
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) where constant danger and action had lost most of its appeal. Still, Esher did send them out, now and again, on those errands he could trust no one else with, such as the business with Dario Borges.
He checked his watch and frowned. It was time for him to check on the bitch. He tried to lever himself out of the easy chair with the length of pipe he was using as a staff, but the pain shooting up his leg made him cry out and drop back. Fuck it. The bitch wasn't going anywhere.
He hoped Esher would find someone competent to replace Webb, but he doubted it. The Five Points Gang was the biggest bunch of scrambleheaded fuckups he'd ever dealt with. Compared to his homeys back on the island, they were a bunch of snot-nosed kids in baggy pants and expensive sneakers playing at being bad. Every now and again one of the punks would try and make his bones by messing with the witch doctor, to show everyone what a bad mother he really was. It always ended with the punk getting a taste of machete. If he was lucky he just lost a nose or an ear. The little fuckers were like a cottonmouth snake: you had to stand on their collective neck every second so they wouldn't whip around and bite you. Most of them were too whacked to be of any use except as cannon fodder. He didn't trust any of them to wipe their ass, much less watch his back. Webb had been more than a little nuts, but at least it had been bad-ass nuts.
He grimaced and took a swallow from the bottle of Olde English tucked between him and the upholstery of the chair. Things were going to shit and fast. Esher was losin' it, big time. He still had the juice to make things happen. If anything, he was more powerful now than he'd ever been. No, that wasn't the problem.
The problem was pussy. Esher wasn't thinking straight on account of that bitch Nikola. And for what?