Johanus stepped forward to the edge of the infernal abyss and tested fire against fire. The acolytes joined him, gave their strength to him, as Sturbridge probed the walls of the fortress itself.
They were erected with no little skill, towers and abutments, wards placed much as she might have placed them. And therein lay the weakness. Though the hand of the builder was foreign, the architect was the same, and what Sturbridge comprehended she could destroy. Thus was the power of death over life and the secret of the Children.
She called her flock back from the chasm. There was no need after all to quench the flame. Instead, she called upon it, and it responded. The beast of blood and fire rose and spread its glorious wings. For a lingering moment it stood towering above the children, above the city, above the boneyard…and then it fell upon the walls.
Fire and blood engulfed the fortress, swept against the walls and drove the defenders from the battlements. The fortifications were strong, and it appeared that they would stand firm for quite some while.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, cracks formed along the walls. A giddy cheer arose behind Sturbridge, and the beast, smelling blood, roared at the prospect of triumph. Tongues of flame licked at the faults. Harmless clefts became gaping fissures. Once the first tower collapsed, the end was quick to come. Walls collapsed inward. The beast scourged the earth within, and the blood of the moat was purified by fire.
Saturday, 13 November 1999, 2:40 AM
Crown Plaza Hotel, Midtown Manhattan
New York City, New York
The initial explosion gutted the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, and twenty-seventh floors of the hotel. Glass and fragments of granite were flung outward with such force that they would be found in buildings across the street the next morning. The blast shattered windows as far as two and a half blocks away.
The fire swept through floors down to the twenty-third and up to the thirtieth before emergency teams could arrive at the scene.
Saturday, 13 November 1999, 2:45 AM
East 4th Street, the East Village, Little Ukraine
New York City, New York
Ramona, frozen where she stood, palm leaf in hand, marveled at Hesha. He might not have possessed the same blinding speed as did the larger Theo Bell, but just the same he avoided Leopold’s attacks with a mesmerizing grace and fluidity. Ramona wasn’t sure if the scales that seemed to cover his exposed skin were real or of her ghostsight. And his body appeared to move in ways it should not, stretching farther than possible when he leapt for a signpost, twisting as if not constrained by joints as he dodged fragments of pavement hurled at him by bucking waves of street.
After the first few seconds, her watching became almost detached, for to care about the outcome, about Hesha or Theo, was to open herself again to fear. She was discovering that her thirst for vengeance might not be so strong as that fear.
Maybe Hesha could beat Leopold. Maybe he didn’t need her to destroy the Eye after all. As she watched his desperate dodges and attacks—rolling, firing, twisting, firing, many of his shots tearing ragged holes in Leopold—she knew her false hope for what it was. Hesha, like the other man before him, was holding his own, but making little headway. He survived, but barely.
Theo, she noticed, seemed to have recovered his wits. He was still wrapped tight by the coiled lamp post, but, taking advantage of the respite Hesha’s attacks created, the larger man was now struggling. He was straining against the metal, but the coil grew tighter as he pressed against it.
But then, suddenly, before Ramona’s eyes, the coiled metal went stiff. At the same instant, the sound of a distant explosion reached them, and Leopold staggered. Not in response to Hesha’s bullets, and no one was close enough to have attacked, but still Leopold’s legs seemed to fail him. To Ramona’s ghostsight, he seemed paler and less substantial, diminished somehow beneath the Eye, which along with its umbilical nerve was throbbing more fiercely, desperately.
It’s hungry, Ramona realized. It’s not as strong as it was. She took a step, sneaking closer. It’s not as strong as it was a few moments ago, arid even then it wasn’t as strong as the night at the cave.
Before her, Hesha was advancing on Leopold, and Bell was still straining against the now-rigid, curled lamp post—except now he was bending it. Not a tremendous amount, but enough that he was able to slip free of it. He staggered to his feet, picked up his shotgun, and fired a blast that caught Leopold square in the chest. It knocked him back and left a large patch of smoldering flesh. He did not fall, but he was hurt.
Ramona saw images from that other night: wave upon wave of Gangrel charging to their deaths, erupting monoliths, and pools of molten rock. Something was different tonight. Something that allowed two battered Kindred to hold their own against Leopold, against the Eye. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Maybe her terror had blinded her, but it was true. They were advancing on him now, Hesha’s face inscrutable, Theo’s gaze red as blood.
Leopold seemed hesitant, unsure. No new pits opened before his assailants. No wave of pavement rose to break their bodies. Ramona saw her chance and charged. She was behind Leopold. If Hesha’s bizarre plan didn’t work, then she would rip the nerve and the Eye apart with her claws and her fangs—but she would not be a prisoner to her fear, to her past.
As she rushed forward, headlights appeared up the street. High beams, a car approaching at high speed from beyond Leopold, beyond Hesha and Theo. Ramona felt as if a spotlight were cast on her alone. She hesitated…and as she paused, her ears caught a strange sound, a sound she’d heard before—the wet split of flesh torn asunder. To her shock, she saw sharp bones slice through Leopold’s clothes—his own bones, piercing his skin and protruding from his emaciated corpse. The ghostsight—that must be why she saw that. It couldn’t be real. His bones couldn’t actually be stretching out beyond his body.
The car was roaring closer. Two blocks away. One block. Ramona shot forward, blood in her heart and the names of her dead on her lips. She was mere yards from Leopold, from the phantom nerve she must sever, when the bones, Leopold’s ribs, lashed out and struck her like a collection of scorpions’ tails.
The impact stopped her in her tracks. The bone lances pierced her arm, her chest, her stomach, her legs. She was joined to Leopold, attached to him by his own impossibly long bones. Shock gave way to raging pain and to the sick, churning realization of failure. She was leaning forward but could not move. He didn’t even bother to look at her. The pulsing nerve was feet away, but the palm leaf slipped from her hand as her fingers went numb, her own nerves severed rather than that of the Eye.
In her despair, she looked to Hesha and Theo. Only then did she see that they were impaled as well. Leopold had lashed out with his body, or the Eye had resorted to using him as a weapon. Either way, Hesha’s chest was pierced by one large bone spear that had run him through. Theo was pinned more like Ramona. Ribs had punctured his knee and belly, his shoulders, and one ran through his upper lip and out the side of his face.
Ramona hung limp. She was surrounded by bent and broken streetlights, craters, asphalt and concrete rubble. She and Hesha and Theo were flies entangled in a web of bone. All the while, the car was barreling toward them, bounding over broken pavement. Finally it plowed into a hole far deeper than those preceding it. The nose of the car bottomed out and the vehicle came crashing to a halt.
Once the engine died amid the echoes of crunching steel, a strange quiet fell over the street. Ramona looked helplessly at Leopold, so close. He was sagging where he stood, pale and shriveled, the three Kindred he was joined to holding him upright as much as his deadly bones held them. The only sounds in that instant were the fizzing discharge of the Eye, Hesha’s moans of pain and frustration as he writhed on his spear, and the hiss of steam escaping the car’s ruptured radiator.
Then one of the car’s doors opened, and an incredibly beautiful woman climbed from the wreckage.
Victoria could not believe the devastation she stepped into. Wreckage as if the
street had been bombed, strange rolling hills of pavement. And Leopold, weak, palsied, his own bones somehow splayed out a freakish distance impaling three Kindred: Theo Bell, bleeding and stunned, closest to her; some dirty child the farthest away; and to the side she recognized Hesha Ruhadze, whose man Vegel she’d spoken to what seemed now like so many years ago. And in the center of it all stood Leopold, dwarfed by the malevolent Eye that she’d seen in the sketch Sturbridge had brought to Baltimore.
“Leopold,” Victoria said gently. She set her gaze upon his face—not the Eye, but his face, his other eye. She looked for signs of the artist that had been so desperate to win her good graces back in Atlanta. She looked for any sign of herself.
The young wizard’s sire is within the clay.
“Leopold,” she said again, stepping forward past Theo, past Hesha. They watched her, Hesha struggling, Theo beginning to take stock of his situation and pull against the bone. She continued walking slowly and calmly toward Leopold. She slipped off her heels so as to make her way more easily across the rubble.
He watched her approach, warily, longingly. She came very close to him, close enough to scent the vitriol as it dripped from the Eye and sizzled on the broken pavement.
“I never knew, Leopold,” she said. “You have to believe me. I never knew. Everything would have been different.” She couldn’t tell if he heard her, if he understood, if he believed. All she could see was that he was completely drained. He was a hollow shell, a pedestal of flesh upon which the Eye perched. Slowly, she reached out a gentle hand to him. “I never knew. I am your sire.”
Leopold was trapped, entangled by the barbs of an unbreakable thorn tree. Before him the red river flowed through the streets of the dragon’s graveyard. The teacher was gone. His wisdom and power lost. But she was rising from the crimson water. Leopold could not remember if this was precisely as he remembered her. Her visits had always been so fleeting, her beauty real to his Sight, but ephemeral nonetheless.
She was reaching out to him with her delicate hand. Be careful of the thorns, he wanted to say, but words failed him. She had been part of every creation he’d given life, and her mere presence brought back to him the rapture of his masterpiece. How long he had struggled, despite her help. She had teased and abused and cajoled him, but she was here with him now, ready to embrace him.
She spoke, and her words dripped blood and honey. “I am your sire.” She claimed him as her own. It was not her blood but the teacher’s that ran in his veins, he knew in that instant. She was not his sire but his Muse. None of that mattered, though. She claimed him as her own. They were of one spirit for eternity. And Leopold knew peace.
Ramona could hardly see the woman walking slowly toward Leopold. The Gangrel was lost amidst her own private agony, of body and of spirit. She was run through in five places. She had failed her dead again. It was small comfort that this time she would join them, this time she felt their pain in her own body. She hadn’t run away.
But she had hesitated. With her strength fading, she was still capable of accusing herself. She had stood frozen in fear, she had waited for the perfect moment—a moment that would never come. She had failed her dead, but at least she would join them. She owed them that.
She looked up again, to Hesha. He still struggled, though the bone that entered his chest and exited his back was curled upward behind him. There was no way he could pull himself from the spear, yet he fought on.
Theo, too, she saw, was fighting still. She could see the anger, the hatred in his eyes. One of the ribs had skewered his face. Grimacing against the pain, he pulled his head back. Slowly at first, and then with a rush, his skin slid over the intruding bone. That one rib, at least, did not extend far beyond him. Unable to maneuver the rest of his body, he craned his neck to the side. Inch by inch, he pulled his face back over the bone. His eyes were squeezed shut. Broken fragments of teeth fell from his mouth—and then he was free. Of that bone. Four others held him firmly in place.
Ramona, through the haze of pain, was amazed by Hesha’s determination, and by Theo’s will. They had no chance of freeing themselves, not in time to help. Ramona remembered the woman. She was as close to Leopold in front as Ramona was behind, as close as Ramona was to the nerve. But Leopold hadn’t struck down the woman. Ramona’s pained thoughts drifted from wondering if the woman needed help to resenting that she hadn’t been attacked. He hadn’t flung metal posts or waves of pavement at her. What about the acid? Ramona thought. She’s close enough to spray with the fucking acid!
And now the woman was talking to Leopold. Talking! Ramona couldn’t make out what the woman was saying. Her own ears were ringing, complaining of the damage done her body. Don’t fucking talk to him! Ramona raged. Tear his fucking heart out! The Eye! Slash the Eye! But the woman stood close and spoke kindly to him—to the monster that had destroyed Ramona’s people. The woman reached a hand out to him…
That was more than Ramona could take. She strained against the rods of bone that pierced her body. Pain flashed through her like fire from every point of intrusion. Her right arm was numb, skewered at the shoulder. But she leaned hard with her left. She was already leaning forward, propped up by Leopold’s bones. The palm leaf—part of Hesha’s plan, Hesha’s stupid, insane plan—lay upon rubble just below her. She felt her skin tearing, the wounds stretching. Her taut fingers were razor claws, pincers closing on the large leaf. She had it! But now what?
She looked down at the bones impaling her, the five ivory spears. Despite the pain, or maybe because of it, she laughed grimly to herself. Guess he ripped me five new assholes.
And then she drew on her rage. Theo was fighting, but he couldn’t have as much reason to hate as she did. To hate and to fear. Ramona began telling over the names of her dead: Eddie. Jen. Darnell. And with each name she thrust herself forward on Leopold’s bones. They protruded too far behind her for her to free herself, so she’d be his lunch and make sure he fucking choked on it.
Ronja. Peera Giftgiver. Ramona forced her body, inches at a time. Crenshaw. Bernard Fleetfoot. Mutabo. A stake through her heart, sun burning away her flesh, acid eating at her face—all of it was happening at once. Lisa Strongback. Aileen Brock-childe. Brant Edmonson. Tanner. Blood was running from her wounds, pooling on the ground beside the sickening, pulsing nerve that drew strength from the earth. Ramona’s blood, blood she had stolen…
Zhavon.
With the last of her strength, Ramona’s hand fell forward. She clutched the palm leaf as surely as pain and death and fear. It passed through the nerve, not cutting into the fibrous sinew. Ramona could feel no resistance to the leaf. She must have missed. She had to strike again. But the leaf was a leaden weight in her hand, her arm dead. Her fingers failed her, and the leaf slipped from her grasp. She screamed in outrage.
Or was it the other woman who screamed? Ramona wasn’t sure. Her strength was gone. She was falling… Falling? But the bones?
Ramona slammed into the rough ground face first. She looked up and saw the bones, like a path to Leopold’s heart, from outward in, turning to ash. And from the three paths of ash, jagged bursts of lightning shot into the sky, streaks of gold, red, and green. For an instant the streaks met above Leopold, and there standing above him was a towering, monstrous apparition, its dark face a demonic snarl, its sole eye bulging with malevolent glee. Then, as Ramona watched in pain and horrified wonder, the figure was gone, and Leopold’s frail body crumbled to dust.
Theo fell to his knees and then forward, face first onto the rubble. Every part of his body was in agony. He was exhausted. But he couldn’t spare any time. Not yet. He tried to direct what blood he could to his knee. The gut shot was painful, but there was nothing much he needed in there. And his fingers all seemed to work, so the shoulder wounds could wait. His face felt like it was ripped off. Never was much of a looker, he thought.
Slowly and not very steadily, he climbed back up to his knees. He spat teeth onto the rubble. If he’d been kine, his face would�
��ve been gushing, and he’d have been choking on blood. He made it to his feet. Hesha was already staggering toward Victoria. The other chick was lying on her face behind…behind where Leopold had been. Now there was just a pile of dust—no, not just a pile of dust. There was something resting in the dust.
Theo saw his shotgun lying on the ground nearby and had to make a concerted effort to bend down and pick it up. The walk to Victoria felt longer and harder than it should have been. Every gouge in the street seemed a deep trench, and every pile of rubble a mountain. Theo wanted to hurry—they should get away from here before cops started to show, or kine in the neighborhood grew overly curious now that all was quiet—but it was all he could do to keep moving.
“You’re back,” he said to Victoria when he reached her side, and before he realized quite how much talking was going to hurt. He clamped a hand over the left side of his jaw.
She didn’t speak to him. The Toreador just stood and watched as Hesha, kneeling by the Eye and the dust that had been Leopold, took a Kevlar case from his backpack. The Eye, perched atop Leopold’s remains, was bluish purple. It no longer throbbed or moved at all, and a lid-like membrane had closed around most of the orb. Victoria seemed disinterested in what was going on. She was still a beauty, in that uptown kind of way, but she seemed empty, lifeless—even for a Kindred. “Fate plays its cruel tricks,” she said to no one in particular.
Theo gave her a sideways glance. “Uh, yeah…right.” After a moment, she turned and, without so much as looking at Theo or acknowledging Hesha, walked away. She seemed consumed by a tired, cold anger, or maybe it was just regret. Theo didn’t understand either way, and didn’t care. He was too exhausted at the moment to worry about a Toreador’s hurt feelings. He wasn’t sure why she’d shown up, or how the hell she’d managed to face down Leopold. It seemed to have been the scrawny kid that had finished him off, but Victoria had gotten his attention all right.
Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga Page 20
