Pembroke harrumphed. “Well, I have not agreed to that. Benazir and her men need to know they have wounded my pride, and I will have my satisfaction. I shall stand proudly in the street and call the creature for what it is, then let it know what I think of its vile master!”
I put my face in my hands and shook my head. “If I need to knock your legs off so you stay out of the way, I will do it.”
There were a few more grumbles, but he didn’t seem ready to give away our position, so I let it go.
Lyanne, Culverton, Pembroke, and I, all returned to Maura’s former apartment building in Queens and began a stakeout. We would draw attention to ourselves if the group of us was just hanging out in front of an apartment building where we didn’t belong, so Lyanne was watching from the window of the penthouse and she would signal us when she spotted one of our targets coming toward the building. The rest of us were huddled behind the building’s front door, ready for an ambush.
Well, ready for Culverton to ambush, anyway. The best chance the vampire had of sinking his teeth into a golem was with the benefit of surprise.
We had been waiting for most of the day already, and there was some concern that Benazir had already finished with this location as she had finished with Allgeir. However, I confirmed that all the things we had seen up in the oval lab, including the golem blueprints, were still there, so I was confident Benazir would return to at least collet her supplies. Or, as I was gambling on, that she would send one of her golems to do the work for her.
There was a banging sound upstairs that alerted us to the approaching enemy. I opened myself up to my instincts, and after a minute I felt the presence rapidly. It was a familiar presence, one I had felt back at The Dispensary. He was one of the goons that had tried to attack me in violation of the bar’s neutrality.
He was also a golem.
Pembroke and I crept into hidden position near the stairs, while Culverton waited for his big chance near the front door. I thought I heard whimpering as the door came open.
One of the bearded bodybuilders opened the door just to find a small, sickly vampire already lunging for his neck. He had no time to react before he had a full set of fangs embedded deep in his jugular.
The two of them went stumbling down the building’s front steps, toward the street …
Culverton released his grip on golem and spit as he dropped from the ground. “Oh, god, it’s like drinking from the toilet!” He stuck out his tongue and pulled on it with his hands.
Benazir’s creation loomed over Culverton, pulling back its arm for an inhumanly powered strike that might just have knocked the vampire’s head clean off his shoulders.
But I grabbed Culverton with The Night Flail and pulled him back. The golem’s punch cracked into the concrete sidewalk, leaving long cracks running down it with the oversized impression of a fist.
The Night Flail swung around in my hands as I strode toward the golem. “I guess it’s just you and me, Tweedle-Dee, since your partner, Tweedle-Dum, isn’t around. Or do you have a real name?”
The golem stood there, trying to appear stoic but barely suppressing the wide grin on his face. He had apparently been looking forward to this for some time and he intended to enjoy it. “Timur.”
“Alright, Timur, just a quick question: how are you feeling? Any urge to behave unusually? Perhaps bend yourself to that little pale guy’s will?”
He looked over to where Culverton had landed after I pulled him away. The vampire was on the ground, still grabbing his tongue.
Timur laughed, a sound like falling gravel. “That was your big plan? Turn me into a vampire thrall? You are even more foolish than you look.”
“No reason to drag a man’s looks into this. We can’t all have had the same haircut for the past 90 years.”
He lunged at me and I ducked back. I had already learned that confronting the raw force of one of these things head-on with the flail was pointless, so I had to stay fast on my feet and out of his reach. I opened up my sight and looked for the right path. Turned out, Timur was a much more experienced and deadly fighter than the golem who had been sent to attack me in my home. Even with my sight, I could only barely stay out of his grasp. He was clever, too. The moment I evaded one way, my sight would immediately show a shift in his path and a new attack coming my way, even if he was midway through a swing.
Even still, I might have been able to keep up that dance for a while, only I couldn’t find time to launch a proper counterassault. I sent a few swings of The Night Flail at him, but at this close distance and without the time to wind up, I couldn’t strike hard enough to harm him. Every time I backstepped to get a moment to wind up, Timur stepped toward me in perfect sync.
Something heavy soared through the air and hit Timur in the head. It didn’t strike hard enough to hurt it, but it did turn his attention.
Pembroke stood there, puffing out his chest and pointing in Timur’s direction. “Take that, you foul beast! You and that harlot who made you have besmirched my honor for the last time!”
Leave it to a British mummy to work the word besmirched into a speech. It was the essence of his pompous nature, but it achieved one thing.
It bought me time. I performed a quick backstep and started to wind up my attack, spinning the flail rapidly over my head. Timur caught on and took a step toward me.
I swung the flail down hard at the peak angle of its arc. Timur realized this one wouldn’t just be deflected off him and raised his arm in defense. The flail cut a long gash down the length of his arm, sending a stream of blood and leathery flesh through the air like damp rags.
Lyanne reached the apartment building front door and stepped into the street, knives drawn. Nearby, Pembroke had found another large stone to toss. Culverton was slowly picking himself from the ground, still spitting and gagging, but with a focus on Timur that told he was ready for some revenge.
Timur, seeing the odds turn against him, did the sensible thing: he turned to flee. With inhuman speed, the golem thundered down the street and away from his ambushers.
I considered chasing after him and getting rid of another golem before our eventual confrontation with Benazir. A cough from Lyanne caught my attention and showed me why that was a bad idea.
We had just been fighting in the middle of the street. Fortunately, the street itself had been miraculously empty, but there were several faces in the windows of the nearby buildings that had come to check out the source of the commotion. Hopefully they were too far to make out exactly what had happened, but it would probably be a bad idea to keep fighting in public. We would have to deal with Timur another day.
Culverton went back to grabbing at his tongue while swaying dramatically on his feet. “Ah! I’m dying. I knew this was an awful plan! Now I have been grievously wounded! Mortally, even! I swear, my spirit will haunt you to the end of your days for this.”
“You don’t look injured to me,” I said to the over actor.
“I am so injured, you insensitive brute! I demand to be taken to a pub this instant so that I may nurse my wounds with beer.”
I sighed. Not all of his ideas were stupid. “Fine, we need to regroup anyway. Maura’s, anyone?”
“It’s like licking a car battery that had been soaking in ditch water!” Culverton declared as he continued to pull on his tongue while we waited at the bar in The Dispensary.
“Anything useful you can tell us from the bite?” The look I gave Culverton told him that I was not in the mood for any more of his exaggerated complaints. “Beyond your wholly reasonable descriptions, of course.”
He grumbled at that. “He’s at least partially metallic. And he also wears an off-brand cologne that, if it ever became popular enough, would be the end of vampires everywhere.”
Maura finally came back with our orders, setting several glasses down in front of us and a pint in front of Culverton. He immediately proceeded to stick his tongue inside it.
She looked at him curiously. “What’s his deal?”
“I was wounded in the line of duty, madame. I leaped heroically into action for queen and country and have the scars to prove it,” Culverton groused, demonstrating none of the famous stiff upper lip I’d been told was the heart of British honor.
I was about to tell her the true story, but before I could Pembroke raised his own glass and toasted the vampire. “For queen and country!”
With a shake of my head I decided to just let it go and let Culverton have that one.
We gave Maura a basic rundown of the events and what we had learned. She nodded through all it. The results were troubling but not unexpected.
When I was finished, I gave Maura a serious look. “So, I have a question for you, Maura, about your prices.”
“I told you, it depends on what you want to know.”
“And what’s the going rate for saving a bunch of innocent bog people?”
Dumbstruck, she grabbed her bottle of Jameson and took a seat by us at the bar. She drank and smoked with a nervous edge while I explained to her the events at the shuttered factory, and how I was told about the weak state Pembroke’s relatives were currently in.
Then I explained the danger they were walking into, and why I’d taken an interest in seeing that danger snuffed out.
“What about the corpse?” Maura asked.
“What corpse?”
“Allgeir.”
I shrugged. “No one called the cops, and I haven’t seen anything on the news about it, so they must not have discovered the body yet. He must still be there at the factory.”
We decided to confirm that ourselves before alerting the police to his body. Pembroke took Culverton home, leaving Maura and me to return to the crime scene.
It was an awkward drive back to the abandoned Franky and Sons’ building. Something was clearly bothering Maura and she was chain smoking, furiously smoking one cigarette after another while casting the occasional glance at me. Eventually, when it became clear she wasn’t going to tell me what was on her mind, I asked her. “If there’s something bothering you, you might as well tell me now, otherwise we’re going to have to stop to get you another pack.”
She chucked the butt of her latest cigarette out the window. “Don’t worry, I’ve got an entire ‘nother carton in the backseat.”
“You mad at me for some reason?”
Her eyes didn’t drift from the road. “Concerned. Are you certain getting so completely into bed with Pembroke is a good idea?”
It was a valid concern. “He’s the lesser of two evils at the moment, but I wouldn’t say we’re full allies.”
“You certainly act like you are. The two of you seem awfully chummy when you’re together, and now you’re going out of your way to protect his family.”
I gave a shrug, then realized she wouldn’t be able to see it. “He’s aggressively polite, if that makes sense. Makes it tough to not return his manners. But at no point have I forgotten what he is what he is done. What he did to Darcy. Once day, he’ll get his, but for now, it doesn’t hurt for him to consider us close allies while we deal with Benazir.”
Maura didn’t say anything, so I continued. “As for his family, well, they may be innocent pawns caught in the middle, and if they’re not, we can always deal with them later. Right now, I certainly prefer them to not be turned into incredibly powerful and hard to kill golems under Benazir’s absolute control.
She nodded, but her expression didn’t loosen. “Just so long as you don’t forget that, however charming he may act, Pembroke is a monster, and he has been doing this for a long time. While you may think you are using him, he assuredly believes that he is manipulating you, and your ends are not going to be the same.”
We parked a few blocks from the abandoned building and took our time walking, taking a circuitous route and backtracking a few times to make sure no one was watching and we weren’t being followed. Just because the police hadn’t yet caught onto Allgeir’s murder didn’t mean that one of the other immortal factions in the city couldn’t be lurking about. When we were satisfied that we were alone, we crossed through the gate to Franky and Sons’ and back to the scene of the crime.
Or, at least, where the scene of the crime had been. You would have never guessed that the building had seen a single set of human footsteps in the past ten years, much less that a man had been tortured and executed in a grisly fashion just a few nights before.
Someone had been here before us and had cleaned up the crime scene. They had done a near perfect job of it. Even the dust seemed to be undisturbed from its decade long slumber. Only a pattern of scratches on the floor, where something heavy had been recently dragged, gave away that anyone had been here at all.
I knelt down and examined the path, hoping to find a trace of blood or some other evidence of the crime, but came up short. “No wonder the police haven’t reported on Allgeir’s murder. Someone must be covering up his death.”
Maura carefully tiptoed around the corners of the room, making certain she would not disturb anything. “Who cares if anyone knows he’s dead.”
“I can think of three people.”
With no body there was no reason to alert to police, so we left the factory behind and returned to Maura’s car. Several questions raced through my head, and as we pulled out into the street, I knew which one needed answering the most. “Maura, I need you to do some digging for me.”
“More? Well, I suppose that’s to be expected, with the new revelations. What do you need me to find out?”
“I want you to see if there is a connection between Jexie and Benazir.”
It had been a niggling notion in the back of my mind for a while, one that I had ignored because I didn’t want to consider the possibility. Ever since she had all-to-quickly identified the golem’s mechanical core, her involvement and knowledge had struck me as strange. Now Allgeir’s body had gone missing, and Jexie was one of very few who had known about his death. Perhaps I was grasping at paranoid straws, but I had to know.
I could see the focus in Maura’s eyes as her mind made the same calculations. “I’ll look into it. If there’s anything there, I will find it.”
With that out of the way, I turned my mind to the task at hand—namely, rescuing a bunch of undead swamp people from being turned into golems by a crazed desert witch.
At least nobody could claim my life was boring.
16
I wasn’t sure at what point my estate became a hotel, but it seemed we were playing host to a wide number of guests these days. While the amount of time Sara spent here had earned her honorary resident status, Darcy’s request for an extended stay had caught me off-guard.
“The city has become unsafe,” she told me. “I’m afraid to even go about my route. Can I stay here until this all blows over?”
While her presence was a welcome one, the addition of the British undead was less so. Culverton had apparently taken our earlier invitation to mean he could come and go as he pleased. This time he showed up with several large suitcases and announced his intention to “holiday in the country.” I had the impression he meant that literally, and getting him to do any work to help us was going to be an effort.
It was Pembroke who was the most surprising guest. He showed up right after Culverton, claiming that he was uncertain about his safety in the city while Benazir’s golems were running about and he was hoping to stay sheltered for a few days.
“Surely you have a place for an old mummy to rest his weary bones for a few night, old boy? Don’t you worry, I am no poor houseguest. I come bringing gifts: some of the finest tea in the world.”
I was ready to tell him that he needed to find another place to hide out, considering that Darcy was already staying here, but to my surprise it was Darcy who told me we should let him in.
“It would be better if we could keep him where we can keep an eye on him,” she told me after taking me aside. “You know the old saying, ‘Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.’”
An
d that’s how we found ourselves having a meal together among very mixed company. Culverton and Pembroke sat at one end of the table, their accents cranked up to their maximum settings as the two discussed the glory days of the British Empire. After ten minutes, it became apparent that the past was not dead to them—nor was it even the past. They spoke at length about something a Prussian had done two centuries earlier, finishing the discussion by calling the long dead man a thieving bastard, and toasting each other on their entirely righteous anger.
Darcy and Sara sat at the other end, speaking to each other in excited whispers that sometimes broke into glances at me followed by giggles. I sat in the middle, flanked on either side by Lyanne and Eve, who sat protectively close, as if staking their claim on me.
We had just about worked our way through the strange but not unpleasant Eastern dishes Pembroke had treated us to—his attempt to culture us, he claimed—when my phone range. On the other end of the line, Maura’s voice was slightly higher than I was used to. I didn’t think it was possible for her to panic, but if she got close, this was what I imaged she would sound like.
“Kurt, are you certain the body you discovered was of Franklin Allgeir?”
This sounded important, so I put the call on speaker so the rest of the table could hear. “I’m pretty certain. The face was beaten to the point it was hard to identify him, but we found his car nearby, and the body was of his type. Why?”
“Because Franklin Allgeir just walked into The Dispensary.”
The table went completely silent aside from for Culverton’s wheezing. “What happened?”
There was a brief pause as Maura collected her thoughts. “Allgeir just strolled in like he owned the place and demanded I close the bar, or ‘endure the consequences.’ Those were his words, ‘endure the consequences.’ I thought he must have lost his mind, a mortal threatening me in the middle of my own bar, but …”
She hesitated, as if she still couldn’t believe what she had seen. “One of my regulars, a young vampire, was offended by his threats and thought he’d stand up for me, and well … Allgeir punched him in the face with so much force that he nearly died. The kid left an indent in the wall, that’s how hard he was struck. Is it possible Allgeir was actually a mummy this whole time? Are mummies usually that strong?”
Succubus Hunter 2 (The Succubus Series) Page 13
