Blackfeather’s words. But had he spoken to her as she’d been, or to her as she was now? Were the words for Ramona alone, or for the larger collection of which she was merely a part? She felt the fire he’d created burning within her. She could smell the smoke. And she, the lone great wolf, saw the world with the ghost sight he had given her. Blackfeather had pressed the ritual ashes to her eyes, and now she could see.
Alone yet never more complete, she ran through the forest primeval. There was only the hunger and the hunt. Saliva ran over her fangs, dripped from her mouth.
They completed the third loop of Table Rock. Xaviar veered south again. The Gangrel all raced after him. Ramona could feel them all around her. More than she’d thought had come. Their slaver smelled of frenzy, of carnage, of death.
Toreador. Ramona’s thoughts kept time to her footfalls. Weak. Pathetic.
There would be blood for blood. Jen. Darnell. Zhavon.
Amidst the press of her clanmates, Ramona could taste vengeance, and for the first time in two years, she embraced the future with gleeful anticipation.
Monday, 26 July 1999, 3:09 AM
Upstate New York
Ramona expected Xaviar to address the Gather, to discuss plans or give out assignments. But as the assault commenced, everyone seemed to know what to do. Everyone except her.
The raucous stampede near Table Rock had quickly fallen to silence as the Gangrel approached the meadow, and the ghost sight had receded, allowing Ramona her normal view of the world. She guessed now that there were twenty-five or thirty of her clanmates involved in the attack. Some circled around either side of the meadow. Apparently, Xaviar and Tanner were among those. Ramona had lost track of them and didn’t see them nearby.
She hung back with several others near the ridge opposite the cave opening across the meadow. She wasn’t far from the spot where she’d gone to earth three nights before—the same spot where she’d put an end to Zhavon’s life. Ratface was near. Snodgrass and Renée Lightning were there. Joshua Bloodhound and three others Ramona didn’t know were off to her left. No one spoke. The entire assault seemed to be orchestrated by instinct, although Ramona was relieved to see some of the others glancing about looking for guidance as well. Following Joshua’s lead, the eight concealed themselves several yards up the hill toward the ridge, with just enough elevation that they could see the cave entrance across the way.
Ramona barely had time to wonder what would happen next before she saw Tanner and four others—she recognized Emil among them—entering the meadow at the far end and edging toward the cave. She concentrated and listened for any sound of their passing. Although they were a fair distance away, she’d heard smaller disruptions from farther since her change. Already, she barely noticed the once-strange sensation of her ears pricking up as she listened. This time, however, she couldn’t pick out any telltale sound. Tanner and those following him moved skillfully, silently. Ramona suspected that, had they been worried about anyone seeing them, she might never have known when they slipped into the cave. As it was, she and Ratface and the others on the ridge did see as Tanner’s assault party achieved the unremarkable stand of pines at the opening, and then disappeared into the darkness.
Within moments the silence grew unbearable.
Ramona felt like she was holding her breath, not that she breathed anymore, but the urgency and the need for silence tapped into certain distant memories, made her feel that she was doing something she shouldn’t. But then her thoughts shifted to Tanner and the four Gangrel with him. She thought of just a few nights before when she, Darnell, and Jen had snuck into that cave…and what had happened.
But this was Tanner, she reminded herself. He was infinitely more experienced than she was with the deadly vagaries of this world of darkness, where death was such a casual and frequent occurrence. And he was with other old-hand Gangrel. They would take care of the business that Ramona and her friends had bungled.
What would she do, she wondered, if Tanner came out with the Toreador as a captive? He’d probably want her to strike the final blow. That would be just like Tanner. And though there was no question that the Toreador had to pay for Zhavon, for Jen, Ramona didn’t know if she could kill in cold blood. Since arriving at the meadow, the fury of Xaviar’s run, of the loops around Table Rock, had largely evaporated, giving way to memories and fear.
Maybe Darnell’s still alive, she hoped. He would rip off the Toreador’s head without a second thought, and Ramona wouldn’t be faced with that decision.
All the uncertainties, all the questions of two years were penned up within Ramona. They all wanted release, as she crouched on the hill not needing to hold her breath. The screams that broke the silence were almost a relief. They echoed eerily through the entrance of the cave, then filtered through the pines and gained release to the night.
But the screams were not those of the Toreador.
Everyone around her pricked up instantly. Ramona couldn’t distinguish the cries one from another—the sounds were hopelessly muddled by the time they reached her—but she recognized attack snarls abruptly cut off, cries of surprise and pain.
“My God,” said Joshua Bloodhound. “What’s happening?”
Ramona did not answer him—her mouth was too dry, her jaw locked; words could not pass the lump in the back of her throat—but she knew.
The chaotic screams and the muffled sounds of combat went on and on. A fight at close quarters rarely went on for more than a minute, Ramona knew. Maybe no more time than that had passed, but it seemed like forever. Like those around her, Ramona was standing, though she hadn’t meant to rise from her hiding place. Uncertainty gripped them all. She could feel the others looking one to another. Should they charge the cave? Surely Tanner didn’t need help. But the sounds from within…
And Ramona couldn’t help but remember….
The noise of struggle was growing, if not fainter, less confused. Fewer combatants were adding their voices—their snarls, their grunts, their screams—to the cacophony. Another strain of sound joined the din, however—low, drawn-out wails, moans of those in pain, moans of the dying. Ramona’s mind was racing furiously, but at the same time getting nowhere. She tried unsuccessfully to refuse the conclusions that thrust themselves upon her: If the struggle continued, the Toreador was still alive; at least some of the screams and moans must be those of Gangrel, of her clanmates.
But the moans, one by one, fell silent. First one voice then another lapsed, and almost as suddenly as it had been shattered before, silence returned. The slight breeze coming down off the ridge seemed thunderous to Ramona’s straining ears.
They’re stalking him, Ramona thought. He’s hurt, and they’re closing in for the kill.
But just then, a figure stumbled out of the cave and put the lie to Ramona’s optimism. He grabbed hold of one of the scrawny pines at the entrance and leaned against the tree for several seconds. It was Emil, Ramona saw. He didn’t rest long. He heard something, glanced back into the pitch-black tunnel, then turned and fled. He tried to run, but something was wrong with his left leg. It wasn’t holding his weight. He staggered, then tumbled down the incline before the cave. As he climbed back to his feet, Ramona saw that his face was blackened and burned. She absently raised a hand to the gouged scar on her own face.
There was little time for distraction, however. Out from the cave stalked the Toreador. He looked around for a moment, as if the existence of a world beyond the subterranean tunnels and caverns surprised him. Even from across the meadow, he seemed larger than Ramona recalled. The eye, too, his left eye, seemed larger—or maybe only the eye was larger. It appeared to glow in the starlight. It throbbed and twitched, looking somehow like a living thing, quite separate from the rest of the body around it.
As had been the case three nights earlier, Ramona viewed the Toreador with mixed reactions. At first glance, he seemed innocuous enough—he was scrawny, and had a big nose, and could anybody with hair that bad really be dangerous? Art fag
, ran through Ramona’s mind.
But then he would turn, and the eye, that hideous eye, cast him in a different light. Suddenly he was larger than life, deadly, terrifying.
Probably the Gangrel around Ramona were struggling with similar impressions. In a way, it seemed almost laughable that this particular vampire could pose a threat. But Jen wasn’t laughing.
Nor was Emil.
The Toreador’s disorientation was brief. That was our chance, Ramona realized, but it was too late. Something terrible had happened in the cave, she knew, but perhaps the close quarters had worked to the Toreador’s advantage. He couldn’t know what waited for him out beyond the pines shielding the entrance.
The eye fixated on Emil. Even with a distance of several yards between them, the Toreador seemed to tower over the fallen Gangrel.
Watching Emil, a paralyzing question gripped Ramona: Where’s Tanner? He’d led the group into the cave, but so far only Emil had emerged, and him beaten and burned. Suddenly, even among the other Gangrel, Ramona felt completely alone and afraid. Where’s Tanner? she wanted to shake Emil and shout at him. Why did you leave him inside?
“He’s yours,” said Ratface, next to Ramona, but his words were for Emil. “That’s right…let him get closer…now spill his guts!”
Emil had risen to his knees, and the Toreador was indeed moving closer, but Ramona could tell that the Gangrel would not strike a blow. She could see the tension in his stance; she knew that he wanted only to flee, but he wouldn’t manage even that. The eye kept Emil’s will from directing his muscles, just as it had done to Ramona. Tanner had been there for her. “My God,” muttered Joshua. The others stared in silent disbelief.
With a few strides the Toreador closed the distance to Emil and, without hesitation, grasped the immobile Gangrel by both sides of his head. Seconds later, Emil’s head no longer existed. It melted and oozed away between the Toreador’s fingers. The creature, its throbbing eye casting about more than should have been possible, stood with blood and liquid flesh dripping from its hands.
The Gangrel around Ramona were shocked beyond words. To a person, their eyes or mouths or both gaped wide in astonishment. Ramona had seen something similar before—Zhavon deformed almost beyond recognition, Darnell’s arms stretched from their sockets—but even she gawked in horrified fascination. For the second time that night, she felt the need to retch, tasted blood rising in her throat. But there was no time.
“Look!” Ratface was the first of their ineffectual band to find his voice. He pointed across the meadow toward the cave. From two directions, groups of half a dozen or so Gangrel were charging from the trees and bearing down on the Toreador.
What took ’em so damned long? was Ramona’s first thought. Had they, like she, watched in rapt horror as Emil had died? Or like Ratface, had they underestimated the Toreador and expected Emil to finish the affair with the single swipe of a claw?
Not until Joshua ran yelling down the hill did Ramona realize that she should help as well. She’d been expecting Tanner and the self-important elders of her clan to take care of this problem—but they didn’t know what they were getting into, and now she was being dragged again into the fray.
Ramona and the others followed Joshua. They had no specific plan, but they couldn’t simply stand by and watch; they sped down the incline and raced toward the Toreador. With the first step, however, Ramona felt that she was moving in slow motion, that the scene was unfolding before her, and that she was plucked from it to become merely a spectator. For the second time that night, the ghost sight descended upon her; it was an unnerving filter laid over her hyper-alert senses. Unlike before, she felt no unity with her clanmates, but was filled only with dread.
Ahead, the Toreador’s back was to the cave entrance. To his right was the closest group of Gangrel, led by Stalker-in-the-Woods. His blood was up, and there was nothing about him that looked human. He propelled himself forward on all fours; his face was a monstrous, fanged snout. Frothy strings of spittle trailed from his mouth.
More Gangrel charged from the Toreador’s other side. Edmonson was in the fore, with Mutabo on his heels. Their easy manner of before was gone. Murder shone in their eyes. They saw no need for stealth and cut a rapidly advancing swath through the tall meadow grass. To Ramona’s shifting vision, her clanmates were blurs of motion, golden sparks trailing fiery comet tails in their wakes. No creature could stand against so many Gangrel.
Despite the odds, Ramona’s sense of dread only deepened.
Your road will be a difficult one.
The three converging packs of Gangrel drew closer to the Toreador, but Ramona’s knees buckled as the immensity of the ghost sight struck her full force. She stumbled, lost ground on Ratface and the others. For a moment, she thought she was blacking out, so overwhelming were the sprays of color and light. The muted blacks, blues, and grays that had come to be her darkened world were replaced with illumination brighter than that of full day. The stars in the sky above burned with the intensity of countless suns. The nearly full moon loomed almost close enough to touch.
Ramona staggered. She reeled. Firm footing eluded her. She was forced to choose each step with care. Around her, a battle was unfolding, and it was her duty to take part—she was one of the reasons it had come about. But she had to look so hard to make sense of the ghost sight. The creatures around her assumed bestial forms—some wolven, others like badgers, or mountain lions, or feral dogs. But they were her brethren; a fact reinforced when her vision flickered, and she saw them again in more human guises. Ramona touched her face, touched her eyes, and her fingers brushed over the residue of dried ash and chalk.
The Final Nights are at hand.
Ramona looked around, almost expected to see the old man Blackfeather, but the meadow was filled only with grasses and wildflowers and creatures of death. She cast her newfound vision toward the Toreador, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was all she could do to resist the urge to turn and flee.
As she watched, the Toreador grasped its protruding eye and wrenched it from its socket. A bloody, fibrous nerve from the rear of the eyeball pulled free of the socket and flailed about in the air like a blind eel. As the Toreador raised the eye above his head, the nerve continued to twist and writhe. It wound around and down his arm. At the same time, the tendril stretched and grew longer—more than a foot, two feet and on—until finally it contacted the ground and began to burrow.
It all seemed to happen very slowly. Why aren’t they on him? Ramona wondered of the other Gangrel, but in fact they were not much closer than they’d been just before. Those of Ramona’s own group were only a few steps ahead of her, though she felt she had first staggered some time ago.
Again her knees buckled, but this time, she realized, not her knees but the very earth was shaking. The Toreador loomed increasingly large in her sight—no, not larger, she saw but higher. He was rising into the air. A massive protrusion of stone, a rounded hill unto itself, thrust up from the earth and lifted him many feet above the floor of the meadow. The tendril from the Toreador’s eye wriggled like a frantic leech as it bore into the stone. It turned ruddy and dark, then swelled until Ramona thought it must burst.
Stalker-in-the-Woods must have seen the erupting monolith, but he did not ease his headlong gait, nor was his murderous intent deflected. Then the Toreador turned the eye to face that closest group of Gangrel. Instantly, a stone spike shot up from the earth, and Stalker-in-the-Woods’s own momentum carried him full onto the tip. Ramona flinched—images of Jen flashing through her mind—as the spike carried him off his feet. Dangling above the ground, he jerked spasmodically as blood from the tip of the spike ran down from the top of his head.
The Gangrel with him rushed past his twitching corpse. Two met a similar fate within a few steps.
With each deathblow, Ramona staggered as if the stone had struck her own body, and though Stalker-in-the-Woods was already beyond even his death twitches, she saw an ephemeral vision of him as he
lifted his monstrous face to the sky and howled defiantly: I am Stalker-in-the-Woods. I die for my clan this night!
In the same way, from the two others who shared Stalker’s fate, she saw and heard that which before would have been hidden from her:
I am Ronja. I die for my clan this night!
I am Peera Giftgiver. I die for my clan this night!
The remaining three Gangrel who’d begun with Stalker paused as a wall of rock erupted directly in their path. The first of the trio, a visibly muscled woman, launched herself onto the wall and began to scurry up it. The other two had not yet reacted when the earth fell away beneath them. Just as suddenly, the wall and the woman on its downward face toppled over into the pit. The screams were crushed out of the trio within a few seconds, but their unvoiced final cries rang in Ramona’s ears:
I am Louisa… I am Crenshaw… I am Bernard Fleetfoot… I die for my clan this night!
Ramona’s steps slowed to match the tempo of the litany.
At almost the same time, nearly a dozen stone megaliths, irregularly shaped columns jutting at random angles, rose from the ground to the other side of the Toreador. Edmonson and the second collection of Gangrel, moving more cautiously than their unfortunate clanmates, wove their way among the newly sprung pillars. Mutabo was the most careful. He slowed and circled wide of the stones; he watched closely for spikes rising to claim him and megaliths toppling to crush him.
The Toreador turned his eye to those Gangrel now. His face was etched not with animosity but with a businesslike grimace. Ramona thought also that she saw madness in his normal eye. How could such an abomination not succumb to madness?
Ramona, strangely detached from the scene, was struck by the vivid hues of her clanmates’ sacrifice— crimson blood draining along the impaling pikes, pale flesh tones of vampires drained of unlife, sickly gray skin of the Toreador, veiny orb held aloft with its gelatinous ooze and ruddy, pulsating nerve. She knew in that instant that no one else saw what she did, that no one else could. For them the night sky and the stars were as they’d always been. The impossibly bright stars, the light of day itself—these were for Ramona alone, for the ghost sight Blackfeather had imparted to her.
Clan Novel Gangrel: Book 3 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 19
