Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  “Or they’re not saying,” Calebros speculated.

  “But why would they—?”

  “He’s antitribu, but if other clans were after one of our blood, wouldn’t we want to get to him first?”

  “I see,” Mike said thoughtfully, then added, “But I thought, according to our sources, all the Tremere turncoats had…disappeared.”

  “Vanished, yes,” said Calebros. “That’s far from a definitive conclusion, and there does seem to be at least one on the loose. If we can manage to—”

  “Calebros! Calebros!” cried a small, scratchy voice. Pug wove his way through the milling crowd to tug on Calebros’s sleeve. “Calebros. Jeremiah—he’s missing. I took him some rats, but he wasn’t there. I tried to follow his trail, but I lost it.”

  “You lost it?” That was not what Calebros expected to hear from Pug. The urchin could find anything.

  “He’s crazy,” Mike said. “Gone in body is as good as gone in mind.”

  Calebros couldn’t argue about the first part of that statement, but still he felt a certain responsibility for Jeremiah. Calebros had been the one to send him away with Anatole. After he asked for the same thing, he reminded himself. But there was no time for these distractions. And here was Pug…

  “Emmett needs you,” Calebros said. “I just sent Sneeze after him, that way. You can find Emmett, can’t you?”

  Pug seemed embarrassed by the rebuke. “But what about Jeremiah?”

  “Are you in the habit of questioning your elders, boy?” Mike asked impatiently. “And in a time of war?” Pug shrank back and turned to go.

  “No, wait,” Calebros said. “He’s right.” He sighed heavily. “Emmett will have to make do with Sneeze. Pug, take…” Calebros glanced around the crowded chamber to see who exactly was coming and going. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone approaching by whom he especially did not want to be bothered at the moment. “…Take Hilda to help you look. Check back by sunrise. That doesn’t give you much time at all. Do you understand?”

  Pug nodded and then shot off. Calebros watched surreptitiously as the youngster intercepted Hilda and then, after a brief explanation, led her away.

  “Might as well throw him to the wolves,” Mike said.

  “She’s all talk,” Calebros reassured Mike, and himself. “And Pug is…well, Pug.” He couldn’t imagine anyone’s libido being kindled by the boy. Although Hilda did seem more fervent than choosy.

  “I’d best be going,” Mike said, looking over Calebros’s shoulder.

  Calebros turned and saw Cock Robin making his way across the chamber. Amidst the noise and chaos, a path cleared for the justicar as he marched limpingly along. “Understood,” said Calebros.

  Cock Robin came very close; he pulled on Calebros’s sleeve so that the warren chief would lean down. The justicar whispered unnerving clicking and choking sounds in Calebros’s ear.

  “Yes,” Calebros said, “we will be ready should the opportunity present itself. But I must warn you, the Eye seems to be the only link we have, and it has disappeared before and not reappeared for—”

  “Gk-gk-gk-girik-gk!” Cock Robin raised a claw to silence Calebros. The justicar wanted nothing of excuses.

  “I understand,” Calebros said, and he did understand, only too well. It had been his success thus far that had brought the justicar here. There was to be continued success. The justicar expected nothing less. “I understand.”

  Thursday, 11 November 1999, 8:15 PM

  Haubern Estate

  Chicago, Illinois

  Warm bloodwine. A tad too sweet, but with enough of a bite to be pleasing nonetheless. Victoria sipped leisurely. Unlife was more orderly, less surprising, here in the Midwest. There were all the schemes, of course, the slights remembered for hours or decades, and to be sure, the lupines lurked beyond the city gates—but that was all out there. Victoria was in here, safe if not content. For the many weeks now since she’d first arrived, she’d had very little contact with anyone beyond the household; she’d done little but sit and think and brood.

  “You’ll give yourself wrinkles if you’re not careful,” Dickie had warned her.

  “If I give myself wrinkles tonight,” she’d said, “they’ll be gone tomorrow night.” Dickie had tittered at that. He’s such a fop, Victoria had thought. But any port in a storm, and all that…

  Dickie Haubern, of the Chicago Hauberns. Publishing, investing, industry, race horses; more recently insider trading, industrial espionage, counterfeiting, extortion, pornography, prostitution, drugs. He was the black sheep of the family, and it seemed unlikely the family would survive him. He had cornered the market, so to speak, on Hauberns three generations back by disposing of all rival inheritors, and since then had cultivated a single, mildly incestuous branch of the family so that the estate could be passed along legitimately every fifty years or so. All that aside, he was a dear.

  He had welcomed her into his household, no questions asked, when she had arrived on his doorstep unannounced. Politics and warfare bored him. Atlanta, Baltimore—he claimed he wouldn’t even be able to find them on a map. “Why bother with other Kindred at all, except to keep them at an arm’s length, or several arms’?” he would say. “Clan and sect rivalries be damned. It’s the kine we’re put here to enjoy, to oversee, to—”

  “To dominate, pimp, and live off?” Victoria suggested.

  “Don’t forget violate. A good violation cannot be overestimated.”

  His renunciation of Kindred society was, of course, a bold-faced lie. Dickie was a brutal player of the game, if his interests were threatened, or if he stood to gain at someone else’s expense. But he was sweet and convivial, and he favored Victoria. Always had.

  “Victoria,” he called to her as she sipped her warm bloodwine. “Victoria, I just received a call from Robert. I’m afraid the old boy is not at all well.”

  “Robert?”

  “Robert Gainesmil,” Dickie said, rolling his eyes. “He had to move. Infestation.”

  “Really? Termites?”

  “No. Sabbat. They ate his staff, burned the house down. Poor Langford.”

  The bloodwine suddenly went cold on Victoria’s tongue. “The Sabbat, in Baltimore? In the city?”

  “Oh, yes. Hasn’t Alyssa brought you today’s paper? Honestly, I don’t know why I keep her around.”

  “I think because she’s your cousin.”

  “Cousin. Is that what I told you? Cousin, niece…it all gets so complicated and tiresome after a generation or two.” He wandered off in search of the newspaper, leaving Victoria to ponder Gainesmil’s fate and that of the Camarilla.

  Is it over? she wondered. Has the Sabbat taken it all? Or could this be Dickie’s idea of humor? He returned shortly with the paper.

  “Did you tell Robert I was here?” Victoria asked.

  “Of course not, dearest. I never so much as mentioned your name. I gave you my word, and my word is my bond.”

  “Oh, please don’t make me gag, Dickie.”

  “Well, all right. I might have mentioned your name in passing.”

  “Dickie…”

  “Very well. I told him that you were here…and when you arrived…and that you were terribly unhappy and distracted, and that he should come visit, and we’d all have a fine time.” He sighed. “I am such a horrible liar.”

  “You are a casual and habitual liar, Dickie, which is not at all the same thing. And quite practiced, I might add.”

  “You say the sweetest things.”

  He had brought two papers, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. The Tribune had a front-page article, below the fold, on an industrial accident in New York City, an explosion and a spill into the East River. The Times had a large feature about the accident, as well as a great deal of coverage of other ‘natural’ civic disasters: a subway accident, a botched demolition… Victoria could imagine the rest. Buried in the paper was also a story on the spate of fires that had swept through various portions of Balt
imore, which would be what Gainesmil was talking about.

  “Where did Robert call from?” Victoria asked.

  “New York,” said Dickie. “I hear it’s quite the place to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it seems all your friends from Baltimore abandoned ship… Oh, wait. The ship was already blown up, wasn’t it? Along with that brute Garlotte. Anyway, they gave the city up, and while the Sabbat’s back was turned, waltzed into New York. Although Robert doesn’t make it sound that inviting—lots of fighting, killing, Brujah field day. Robert says none of the important Gangrel are helping, but I say good riddance; they’re only half a step up from lupines…”

  While Dickie regaled her with his view of current events, Victoria’s thoughts wandered. The fighting was taking place hundreds of miles away. It had nothing to do with her anymore. She had faced down the fiends, had returned to the place of her torture; she’d attempted to find out something useful about Leopold—she had to believe that she’d failed at that. She could not believe otherwise.

  And yet, word of the fighting tugged at her. I am not a warrior that I must rend flesh and bone, she told herself. What good could she, of all Kindred, do anyone in the midst of the carnage? Her hand rose to her jaw, to the tiny self-engulfing dragon. She had done her part. She had survived.

  She thought of her moment of decision on the drive from Atlanta, her attempt to cheat the gods, her need to deceive them. Yet she had ignored her own test. If she chose chance as her god, so that no other creature could guide her steps, how could she so profane the deity? That was what ate at her soul and kept peace at bay.

  “Victoria!” Dickie said peevishly, “you haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  “Of course I have. You were saying that New York is far too cold this time of year.”

  “I said no such thing.”

  “Oh, very well,” she said, putting her fingers abashedly to her lips. “I am such a horrible liar.”

  Dickie tittered. “Well, no wonder you ignore me, when I bore you with talk of politics. How many times have I said it? Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull.” He took the glass from her hand, took a sip of bloodwine, then returned the glass. “But come, let me show you something you will like.”

  Victoria followed him. The mansion was beautiful. The exquisite Persian rugs, the elaborate chandeliers that shimmered like ice on a chill winter morning, polished woodwork and sparkling tile—some nights walking amidst the finery improved her mood somewhat, and she could forget thoughts of her past…and of her future. This was not one of those nights. Dickie chattered on incessantly, but her mind was churning with disturbing visions of gods and elder powers. Chance would have taken her to Baltimore, and then what—to New York? Yet she was here.

  Dickie led her to the parlor, where he pushed open the door with a grand flourish. “My latest triumph,” he said.

  She stepped past him into the octagonal room. The furnishings were all mahogany and crushed red velvet, but what drew Victoria’s attention was a sculpted figure resting on a pedestal in the center of the room. She stepped closer.

  The figure was a dancer, one arm raised above her head, the opposite leg bent counter-balancing. Details were minimal. The slight hint of breasts and the gentle curve of hips indicated she was female, but the emphasis of the piece was the strength of form, the suggestion of fluid movement. Victoria had never seen the sculpture before, yet she knew it.

  “I knew you’d like it,” Dickie, pleased with himself, said from the doorway.

  Victoria laid her fingertips lightly against the stone. It was cold. She recognized the hand of the sculptor. “How…?”

  “I lucked upon it, really,” Dickie said. “And then I almost lost it to some dreadful Ravnos interloper who thinks he’s taken over the city, but I persevered. Some local artist, bankrupt or dead or something like that. You know how it goes. They’re selling off his effects, and there were a few wonderful pieces. This was my favorite. It reminded me of you…”

  Victoria heard his flattering lie for what it was and laughed. She found that once she had begun laughing, small silent spasms that shook her body, she could not stop. She bit her lip as a blood tear traced the curve of her cheek. “What was his name, this artist?”

  Dickie paused for a moment. “Pendleton…or Pennington, or something. You’ve never heard of him, but he had some simply delightful work.”

  He was right that Victoria did not recognize that name, but she knew the artist well enough. The gods mock me, she thought. They point to where chance would have taken me and then laugh that I am here instead, here where they would have me. She wiped the tear from her face. She sighed and covered the indistinct face of the dancer with her own hand, leaving a crimson smear across the white stone.

  “Um…Victoria…?”

  “Call Robert back,” she said without turning to face Dickie. “Tell him to meet me at JFK. He should know which hangar.” She would do what she must to regain control of her destiny; she would prostrate herself at the altar of chance and beg forgiveness.

  Thursday, 11 November 1999, 8:35 PM

  Beneath Brooklyn

  New York City, New York

  Cock Robin did not enjoy riddles, as Calebros had discovered. It had seemed a simple enough thing: Anatole had left them a riddle; shouldn’t they all take a crack at it in hopes that someone might solve it? Perhaps it was because the justicar’s emaciated frame made it possible to mistake him for a child—if one did not notice his grossly misshapen head. Whatever the cause, when Calebros had recited the riddle, Cock Robin’s crumpled lips had begun to quiver and twitch. His eyes had burned, and he’d made queer warbling sounds, like a frustrated cat separated from its prey. Calebros had apologized. Profusely. And excused himself as quickly as possible.

  That had been last night, just before they’d retired for the day. Tonight, Cock Robin had not spoken—to anyone as far as Calebros could tell. But the justicar had made it clear that the hunt would continue. If there were no new leads, they would scour the city. They would check any and every location that had the slightest connection to any Tremere antitribu. Calebros did not relish nosing into those places, what with the certainty of traps and the unpredictability of sorcery. He would have preferred waiting, watching, planning for the eventuality of Nickolai’s discovery.

  But it was difficult if not impossible, once the inertial surge of events had begun, to slow them again. Not until they had run their course and the momentum was spent. Cock Robin was not one to be swayed or put off. The hunt was on.

  They were a silent band of deformed corpses, a macabre parade routed through the sewers. Cock Robin led them. Some of the others had started calling him ‘the silent one’. They never meant to say it within the justicar’s hearing, but Calebros recognized the tendency to confuse mute with deaf. The voices were sometimes a bit too loud, or the speaker not aware of his proximity to Cock Robin. Surely the justicar knew. Perhaps that was but kindling for his burning fury. Calebros had come to wish his elder were completely silent. The warren chief dreaded the whispered comments, the strangled, tattered sounds that were Cock Robin’s voice.

  Let this be done, and he will go his way, Calebros told himself. If it was ever done. If they survived the hunt. But whether it was this hunt or the next, or the next, Calebros knew that justice would be done. The Nosferatu did not forget.

  Friday, 12 November 1999, 2:39 AM

  Crown Plaza Hotel, Midtown Manhattan

  New York City, New York

  Mustn’t make it too easy for them, Nickolai thought. Toward that end, he had not sent Leopold out tonight. Not until now. He’d left the boy to his catatonia. Was the Eye literally eating away at the brain? Nickolai idly wondered. Such a pity that there was not more time for study.

  Leopold was on the street again. The excursion south had gone admirably last night. Nickolai had decided upon north for tonight. He’d forced himself to wait this far into the night. Must pace myself, he kept thinking over and
over again. Last night had taken a great deal out of him, and his stores of blood were not unlimited. Hunting was not an attractive option, not with the city fairly crawling with Camarilla. They’re coming for me, he knew. Let them come. But he had to pace himself, conserve his strength. He must be ready for them.

  Nickolai looked into the tall mirror and saw Leopold lurking among the darkness between rows of dilapidated tenements. The Eye glowed faintly, a malevolent red. Blood red. Leopold looked ghastly; he looked broken and crazed. All true. Nickolai vaguely supposed that he should feel some sort of regret or loss at the degradation of his own blood, his only progeny. But it had been necessity, not sentiment, that had driven him to Embrace in the first place. Why should he experience such emotions now, when he had already, almost two years ago, sent away his childe, devoid of true identity?

  It had seemed the prudent thing to do after that doubly cursed, self-important justicar had discovered that Nickolai, unlike all the others of his line, had survived the catastrophe, the slaughter beneath Mexico City. If they knew he still existed, if anyone knew, then the demon that had slain his kin would find out and would come for him. Nickolai had been sure of it, and he could not stand the idea of facing that again. The very thought nearly made him tremble. So he had sworn to himself that it must not come to pass.

  For such a foul creature, the Nosferatu justicar had retained an incredible streak of vanity. It had been so simple to have Benito—dear Benito, who was always happy to extend any favor that he would be able to call due later—arrange for Petrodon’s sitting with the mortal sculptor. And what a stroke of genius to provide a picture of the justicar’s former self, so that he might be entranced by the evolving marblescape. Had it ever been completed, the beast would have shat itself in ecstasy.

  Bur it never was completed. Instead, Nickolai had struck down Petrodon, and Benito, again proving himself cursedly resourceful, had fled rather than stay and perish like a good little Giovanni. Once the smuggler’s guard was up, he was nigh untouchable, nestled away in the bosom of his infernal family. And if there was no convenient killer to be slain at the hand of the valiant, failing justicar, then the sewer dwellers would search and search and search.