A Passing Curse (2011) (50 page)

If she could get one hand free, get hold of the needle, she might have a chance.

“Fresh blood,” he said calmly, admiring her blood, swirling it, smelling it, taking the first sip. “I’m getting used to it again. I recall when I could not keep myself from it. Nearly my downfall.” With a linen napkin he dabbed the blood, her blood, off his lips. “I was forced to refine my feeding habits. But now, this close to the end, I find that fresh blood revives me in a way it never did before.” He sipped again, actually smacked his lips, and licked them clean. “If not for the little bit I’ve taken recently, I don’t know if I’d still be walking.”

She tried to think of something besides her blood in his mouth. She stifled the urge to vomit. “How old are you?”

“In three days I will celebrate 1227 years on this world. Near the end of the trail for my kind, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll bake you a cake.” No, she thought, don’t taunt him. Agree with him. Get him to trust you. “Are there many of you left?”

“Not many. A few, I suspect. There will always be a few of us. It happened during the dark ages, in a nameless frozen village north of Budapest, little more than a rural slum. I was the only one left after the bubonic plague swept through. I was the only one standing. A poor, miserable, filthy little waif living like a rat in garbage. I think, although I’ve never proved it, that the plague changed my blood. It took me years and years to refine myself. To define myself.” He finished the glass and licked the bottom with his obscenely, long tongue. She gagged uncontrollably, finally caught her breath on the edge of puking. “I have come a long way.”

“I’ll see you get help. I won’t press charges.” She saw a glistening in his eyes. A softening? “You won’t go to prison.”

“Yours is very good blood,” he said. “There’s a cleanness, a residual, ah, did you have waffles this morning?”

“Belgian,” she said and felt crazy for saying it.

“Very nice. The glucose gives a certain temperament, a certain elegance.”

She kept thinking that Reese had been right. Ajax was the killer. It still made no sense. He had to be crazy. Twelve hundred years old? That explained a lot, but made little sense. “Reese knows I’m here. He’s coming.”

“I’ve counted on that. When one reaches the age of 1227, one develops an ennui of legendary proportions. I have been watching Reese for some time. I want him to come. I welcome the challenge.”

“I’ll find you a nice home, you can rest - ”

He looked around. “But I have a nice home.”

“You need to go somewhere, Ajax. You need help. And when you get out, I’ll help you look for Dracula and Alexander the Great. We can go together.”

“Dracula.” He nodded. “I’m the same person of course. You see, we cannot have children. First, I appeared as Drac, then Dracula, the son of Drac. The Turks were a murderous lot in those days and they threatened to overrun my small principality. Our small principality. You don’t remember?” He looked at the red-stained glass and sighed. “It’s a long story, but we have time. I know how much history interests you.”

She had to keep him talking - no matter how ridiculous the subject - as long as he was talking he wouldn’t be drinking her blood. “Tell me about Father Delgado and Raul Pavoni.”

“I came to the new land with Junipero Serra, a fine man, if a bit strict with himself, a weakness for most Franciscans, I’m afraid. Before that, I had a hand in the Spanish Inquisition, a minor player. I was an interrogator looking for vampires. The irony of it. But I soon became a suspect and had to come here as the faithful Father Delgado.

“I was wicked,” he continued in a philosophical tone. “Very wicked to the Indians. They knew who I was, of course. They tried to tell the priests. They tried to tell the soldiers. But who would listen?” Ajax paused for a short cackle. “Who ever listens? No one’s listened to Reese, either.

“Raul Pavoni you ask? He got a little carried away. All that fresh blood, I suppose. The bright lights. The fame. I was eventually killed, according to the story, by a Los Angeles policeman. One of Reese’s brothers in arms. Poetic that I now face another of LA’s finest. Anyway, it was a good time for me in the thirties. Blood as a commodity was realized. The world war came along and suddenly I was very rich selling the same thing with which I needed to live. And merely a hundred years earlier I’d been a doctor in London bleeding people to cure them.” Ajax licked his lips again. “All the best people in London came to see me.”

“You were in Romania.”

He laughed. “You see how easily a plan can be ruined? And by three morons, the soldiers. I had planned to introduce you to the wonders of your future in the crypt. All ruined. And you were almost killed to boot. And then, later, an international incident. I thought about taking you with me, I had my jet at Otopeni, but I could not risk being involved with three dead soldiers and the guide. I knew you would survive.”

“You cut their heads off?”

“Ted can be so…indelicate.”

“Ted? Ted was there?”

He ignored her question. “But they’ll get theirs, the Romanians. I have a little shipment for the Red Cross in Bucharest. They don’t screen their blood at all,” another cackle as he wagged his finger, “and I have warned them.” He gazed at her. “Do you find it hard to believe that I can love?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” She hadn’t thought about a lot of things. Especially not this. Keep him talking. As long as he talked, she was safe.

“Certain remembrances become very dear. You had an ancestor that I was very much in love with. A Carpathian Princess. I traced the bloodlines and found you. Did you really think I picked you out of thin air? Did you think you’re that good of an archeologist? We were married in that very same Romanian castle, believe it or not. You look so much like her that I can’t believe you are not. It takes my breath. You have no idea. But then you are her. As long as one drop of her blood runs inside of you, she lives….”

“What happened to her?”

“Poor thing. The Turks had us under siege. She feared capture and flung herself off the battlements of my castle - ”

She remembered that bit of Transylvanian folklore. “Killed while you escaped on a horse with the shoes nailed on backwards to trick your pursuers.”

His smile faded. “You’ve been reading the lies. I tried to save her. She killed herself before I could get back. Always impulsive. That’s why I loved her.”

“But the story goes that the Turks finally caught up with you. They took your head to Constantinople.”

“They took someone’s head to Constantinople,” he said slyly.

“If you were Dracula, then whose bones was I looking for? Or was that all a lie to get me under the castle. Get me into some half-assed wedding. Ted was going to be best man?”

Ajax shrugged. “It was a sublime idea. A rerouting of time. A marriage in the old homestead. The old manor castle. But for a few careless moments and actions, it might have been accomplished.” Ajax shook his head. “Plans.”

“You picked me because of some ancestor? My ancestor?” Her grandmother had been Hungarian, but that line, her mother’s, had been, for the most part, rounded up and killed off by Hitler. She recalled her father talking about one of her mother’s great aunts who had immigrated from Hungary after the war. The aunt had disliked him, her father said, and had sat up nights mixing potions. She’d died a year after being in the country, but not before casting several spells on him and many hours of giving him the “evil eye”.

“You are her. Don’t you see? Your blood, her blood, are the same blood. The blood never changes. It is life’s one constant. You will be my new queen. Think of it,” he murmured.

That she was some kind of back door relation to Ajax seemed ridiculous. “I’ll have a crown? Maybe a tiara? Maybe a few footmen to help me with the household.”

He frowned slightly, then recovered, boasting, “A crown fit to help me rule my new world. We will be on equal footing you and I. We will rule together.”

“Your new world?”

“This time I’ll be in charge.”

She almost laughed, but stopped herself. Keep him talking. At least, she thought, get the conversation away from her future coronation. “Did you kill Thomkins? The policeman?”

“Alas, I did not.”

“Ted? Ted did it?”

Ajax did not reply.

“Reese is coming.”

Ajax twirled his hand in the air, as if Reese were of little importance. “I’ve had my eye on Reese. Poor Homer. I sent him to Los Angeles to test a few things for me, but he lost control. I was lucky Reese came. He’s so unpredictable. I couldn’t have asked for a better adversary.”

“Reese knows about the vials. You want to poison the world. Kill everyone.”

Ajax held up his hand as if the suggestion were ludicrous. “Kill everyone?” he said. “I’m lonely enough as it is. I merely want to change things a little. I’m tired of being in the background.” He pointed at her. “Your life is trying to understand history; I’m trying to make it. And now you will be a part of history. It will be as it was. We will be history, you and I. It is so much better to be the doer than the writer.”

“Alexander the Great? More lies?”

“I wanted you.”

He’d baited a sweet trap, she thought. “Reese says you’ve already started. Four people killed in a nursing home. But they’ll eventually trace the blood back to you. As you said, blood never lies.”

He mocked her. “Reese says. Reese says. I wish it were that simple, contaminating the blood supply, but it isn’t. If you only knew the trouble. The madness.” He stamped his foot. His eyes flared. “I won’t kill many. Just enough to cause panic. Once the fear sets in, it will be my privilege to offer an antidote. The antidote will make all the difference.”

“The antidote will turn them into vampires?”

“Vampires?” He shook his head. “I hate that word. The first antidote won’t be right, it will change people, but also drive up the price of clean blood. I’ll introduce a subsequent antidote that will work. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand.”

“A world of vampires?”

“A lesser form.”

“A lesser form?”

“Exactly.”

“How much blood shipped?”

He ignored her and picked up a remote control. He clicked on the TV set hanging from the wall. “The house is wired to the security monitors. I can watch movies and simultaneously check the grounds. Picture in a picture. It’s really very nice.”

The screen was grainy but clear. Reese climbing the gate. Snagging his jacket on one of the iron points, working it free. His car in the background, the engine rumbling through the speakers.

She strained against the straps. “Reese!”

“Have you ever seen a man jump?” Ajax asked and with a long forefinger delicately touched the remote. “I mean, really jump?”

“Goddamn you!” A sharp crack through the speakers, lightning, sparks, and Reese jerking wildly. She threw herself at Ajax, held short by the straps. He smiled, stepped back, and kept holding down the button. She closed her eyes.

It felt like molten lava. The fence wavered. The wrought iron vaporized. Sparks swirled through his mind. He flew.

The sound exploded like a gun next to his ear. Burning cobalt and sawdust filled the air, the taste of liquid metal. The pavement rushed by. A sudden, sickening nasal snap when he hit.

The asphalt warmed his face; he wanted sleep. He came off the asphalt. He flopped. His back arched. Post-electric convulsions racked him. His eyes flamed. Down again. Puking.

A raven drifted at the edge of a very blue sky. The raven circled down, the sky clouded. When the raven dropped close enough for him to touch the tight black feathers, he passed out.

“Don’t worry,” Ajax Rasmussen told her a few minutes later. “Ted checked his pulse. The ten thousand volts did no more than flatten him temporarily. It’s the amps that kills you, not the volts, remember that. Besides, it’s really too early in the game for anything lethal. Ah, there’s Ted again.”

She watched the freak come from the left side of the screen and kick Reese violently in the side. Ted was smiling, enjoying himself. He put the boots in hard. The bandage had slipped from this ear, revealing a wet bloody wound that she hoped was from Thomkins or maybe Reese.

Reese seemed to draw up inside himself. He groaned like a sick horse.

“Stop him!” she yelled.

Ajax winked and touched the remote control. Zoom shot. Reese’s hound tooth jacket and the freak’s black leather boots sinking in. Over the speakers a grunt from Ted each time the boots dug in and the sound of Reese moaning. Deflating. Dying.

“Stop it,” she said. “Or, I swear to God - ”

Ajax laughed. “God has nothing to do with this, my dear.”

Now Ted was rolling Reese with his foot. She got a quick look at Reese’s face: peaceful, lips slack, eyes half open, blood clotted, and unseeing. She saw the edge of the road, a steep hill. Then Ted reached down and flipped Reese over the side. Branches flattened and limbs broke as his body crashed down the hill and out of sight.

33

Boots kicked his side. Hands pushed him along the pavement. He was flying again. He flew over the town, barely missing roofs, the spire of a church. He flew along the beaches, skimming the heads of sunbathers, smelling their tropical oils, their burning skin. He flew until he was higher than the mountains, until the air was thin and fragile.

He descended slowly and saw the raven at the edge of the sky, flying in black whispers of electric sound. Gray light floated over him. He was weightless. He ascended the black heights.

He came into the world slowly. His mouth dry. He asked for water. Pleaded, then held his lips tight. He wasn’t begging.

The manzanita branches formed cracks across the night sky. The moon was gone. Stars lit the cold ground. His mouth was full of dirt, the salty taste of blood. He tried to stand but rolled further down the cliff. Grabbing a passing branch stopped him.

The slope was forty-five degrees and covered with sandstone pebbles. He crawled up five feet and slid down ten. He had to get to the road. He had to keep going.

He had to find Rusty. His knees were bloody. His side throbbed where someone had tried their best to kick him to death. He touched his ribs. No sharp pain. Tender but not broken. He didn’t have to worry about ribs slicing a lung. Just make it up the hill.