by Garon Whited
“I apologize. Originally, I intended only to examine business opportunities. Later, I considered establishing an actual residence.”
Edwin nodded. LeSange seemed satisfied. I considered how sensitive Edwin’s ability might be and how it might be foiled. Was he seeing my aura? Was he accessing something like the Ribbon? If I had time and privacy, I’d try my full array of cloaking spells and see if they hid me adequately. I didn’t activate them from my amulet because I was worried Edwin might observe the process.
“What sort of business opportunities?”
“Smuggling gemstones to the Looney Gang. Las Vegas would be a drop point. Sire.”
“I take it you are unaware of the tariff for illegal trade?”
“I was. I sort of still am. What’s your percentage?”
“Five percent.”
“Do I also get help with local law enforcement if they run afoul of my dealings?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Sire. Do you want it in gems or in cash?”
“Cash, please. It’s not an illegal trade until you’ve traded.”
“Your Majesty is wise.”
“Now,” he said, leaning forward, “what is this I hear about you and some of the vampire-hunting groups?”
“I don’t know, Sire.”
LeSange glanced at Edwin. Edwin did not comment. I thought I knew why. LeSange asked about what he heard. I had no idea what he heard, so I told the truth.
“I understand you have something of a grudge in Los Angeles with the Espada de Cristo.”
“I’m not even sure what the Espatta del Crisco is.”
LeSange kept glancing at Edwin. I was starting to feel offended. It was like he didn’t trust me, or something.
“The Espada de Cristo,” he said, enunciating it with special care, “is a religious organization, rather than a purely mortal one. The name is somewhat misleading. It means, ‘Sword of Christ,’ and although it is predominantly Christian, there are many faiths involved. It is my understanding you are involved in some sort of conflict.”
“Um,” Mary began. We both turned to look at her. “I apologize. Sire. That’s my grudge.”
“Do go on.”
“A local mobster—in Los Angeles, I mean—was our contact for smuggling diamonds. There was some disagreement—long story—and I wound up getting staked and buried. It was an unpleasant experience and I wanted him to, ah… feel my pain, as it were.”
“I see. You refer to Salvatore Castiglione?”
“That’s him,” she agreed. “I compliment you on your intelligence services, Sire.”
“And his status?” LeSange asked, ignoring the compliment.
“Deceased. Completely.”
“How many mortals do you think are now privy to the factual existence of vampires?”
“As far as I know, none. Hold it,” she added, pointing at Edwin. “I infer the question to mean ‘How many more, besides existing vampire hunters who already know the truth.’ No new exposures is what I meant.”
Edwin nodded. LeSange sighed.
“Very well. Now, tell me more about these other groups with whom you seem to so freely associate. The incident on the I-15, for example, involving six police cars and a four-mile stretch of burning highway.”
“They managed to capture Mary,” I told him. “They also caused me considerable personal injury and left me to die in the sun.” I left out the part about how, exactly, the sun would be fatal. “I managed to escape—I’m stronger than I look—and stole a car to chase them. They had Mary in a large tank of gasoline. Between the car chase and freeing her, most of the gasoline spilled from the tank before I got her out. I think most of those hunters are dead. I’m not entirely certain, but I’m pretty sure.”
“You trouble me, Halar,” LeSange admitted. “You do know we are trying to be less than conspicuous? We try to avoid the public eye? You know a world-wide resurgence of belief in the dark power that moves us would result in a corresponding rush to the various faiths? There would be crosses on every streetcorner, stars of David in every business. Five billion people would suddenly be alert and armed specifically for us—and among those billions we are, at most, some tens of thousands. Who do you think will win a genocidal war?”
“Humans, probably,” I agreed. “Sire. They also have all the fun weapons—incendiary bullets, flamethrowers, blessed silver buckshot. That sort of thing.”
“I’ve never heard of this silver buckshot, but it disturbs me that it may exist. Do you have personal knowledge of it?”
“No, I’m merely thinking worst-case. Imagine kids with holy water in their squirtguns. There’s something to keep you awake days.”
“No doubt,” he agreed. “Well, you have been busy, haven’t you? And busily raising Cain and Abel, in the bargain. I am not entirely certain a formal punishment is in order.”
“For what, Sire?”
“That’s the trouble. Lacking more proof of feeding on tourists, formal charges seem difficult to place, yet there has been tremendous disruption in the quiet of our state. Degas?”
“Master?”
“Escort our guests to the chapel, please. We shall let them be Observed.”
“As you command, Master.”
LeSange rose and walked away, exiting stage left. Degas and the four vampire guards encouraged us to exit stage right. Edwin sat quietly while we all trooped out.
In the elevator, hemmed in by suits and a steel box, I asked a question.
“Degas? Where are we going?”
“The chapel, sir.”
“It’s not in the penthouse?”
“Few are aboveground, sir. No outside light is permitted in a chapel.”
“Of course.”
Degas turned and frowned at me. He considered me for several seconds, brown eyes narrowed almost to slits, then turned his attention to the elevator doors again, waiting.
The floor indicator turned itself off, but the last thing it read was P3—three parking levels below ground—and continued to descend. We finally settled on a deep floor. I doubted the lowest, hidden floor was up to fire code. Leaving it might be impossible without the elevator or several tons of mining equipment.
The doors opened and we filed into an antechamber. Each of the guards selected a torch from a steel barrel—an honest-to-goodness wooden torch, complete with rope head soaked in pitch—and lit them. A long hallway headed off to our left, curving to the left, and we followed it into a much larger chamber. I was struck by a sense of familiarity.
Our guards moved around the room to light wall-mounted oil lamps and place their torches in sconces. The room was circular and quite large, all concrete and arched ceiling. A few items of furniture were against the walls—some heavy, wooden worktables, a chair, and a coffin. Dominating the center of the floor were hand-drawn designs, many of which were familiar from recent research. I couldn’t be specific about their functions with more time to examine the layout, but it definitely had to do with energy-state beings of some sort… probably the equivalent of fallen angels, if I was any judge of Degas’ character. A passing glance gave me the impression it involved summoning and containing, with some necromantic overtones.
The four rotting corpses standing along the wall beside the door reinforced my impression of necromancy. Fragments of spirits, bound into the flesh, animated the bodies. Zombies.
Cages were racked and mounted against the lefthand side, containing a variety of small animals, mostly dogs, but a couple of berserk cats yowled and screamed and clawed at the wires keeping them pent. Degas frowned at them and moved to examine them. I spoke up, raising my voice a little to be heard.
“Cats don’t like me. I don’t know why. They avoid me like we avoid the sunrise. They won’t calm down as long as I’m here.”
Degas nodded and selected a long, thin blade from the equipment on the nearest table. The blade itself was black, but it was heavily tarnished. Blackened silver or brass? Probably.
With q
uick, precise movements, he stabbed each of the cats, killing them. The blood dripped down through the cages to the concrete floor. It would have flowed toward a drain, but, again, I was in the room. Degas watched the progress of the blood with considerable interest. It moved faster the closer it came to me, until it dripped up my shoes, through my socks, and into my skin.
“You are troublesome,” he noted, frowning.
“I’m sorry.”
“How am I to make an invocation of blood if it’s all going to run to you?”
“Um. Okay, I have a counterquestion.”
“Oh?” he encouraged, raising one grey eyebrow.
“Yes. Is this a religious ceremony or a magical one? I mean, I recall a discussion about being cautious of mortals with supernatural powers. The implication was there was no evidence, only some strong indications. If this is some sort of religious practice meant to achieve a material, obvious effect, I’d like to know in advance,” I told him. Degas dropped his cultured accent for a much thicker Cajun French accent.
“Why, Mistah Halar! Don’ you be tellin’ me you believe in all dis voodoo, do you?”
“You bet your steely-grey afro I do.”
“Den you ain’t gon’ be happy ’bout what come nex’, no suh, nah a’tall.” He nodded. Four vampires grabbed us, one to each arm, twisting them slightly with a hand on the wrist and the elbow. Very neat. Not the best restraint in the world, but sufficient. The local vampires are full-on magical entities, bordering on demonic. They may be many things, but weak isn’t one of them. Any human being would be immobilized. They were a serious hindrance even to me, but their poor choice of holds told me they relied solely on having much greater strength than a human being.
I do prefer it when my opponents are incompetent.
The vampire thugs were supplemented by the corpses. Zombies aren’t fast, but they’ve got a grip like iron. These creatures each wrapped themselves around a leg, like a quartet of oversized toddlers demanding Mummy not go anywhere. They weighed less than I expected, but a mummified corpse tends to lose moisture. The smell was still less than pleasant. I wondered just how well-preserved their bones were.
I considered putting up a fight. I seriously considered it, playing it out in my head. While I was unarmed, I was pretty sure Mary smuggled a knife in somewhere—I know her. She brought a gun just so they could be happy taking it away. I was pretty sure Mary and I could do sufficient damage to get free and run for the elevator. We would have to fight the survivors once we reached it, since the doors would slow us down. If the elevator wasn’t on our floor, we could open them, no problem, but we would have to climb an elevator shaft while holding off four, possibly five vampires, and possibly as any zombies functional enough to climb.
I extended a tendril to Mary, touching her, taking her tendril in one of mine. Wordless communication echoed down our psychic link. We would wait and gather more information, see what Degas had in mind, and fight if we had to. If we did have to fight, I would start with zombies while she dealt with her two vampire thugs. Instead of running immediately, we would stay long enough to discourage pursuit. If we disabled or killed enough of them, we might simply walk out instead of sprinting for our lives.
Neither of us saw cameras, buttons, or wires. There might not be a way to signal for help down here. It’s possible Degas never felt the need for an alarm button down in his private sanctum.
Degas smiled and produced an ancient bronze knife, deep green with the patina of age everywhere except the edge. He tugged on my hair, cut a lock of it free, and tossed it in a wooden bowl. Then the chanting started as he circled around the diagram on the floor, calling up his spirits.
In the religion of voodoo, the spirits are revered entities. A male priest is called a houngan, and his job is to facilitate communication and communion with them. On the other side of the coin, there are bokor, who are less priestly and more wizardly. The bokor are the ones who give voodoo a bad name. Hollywood keeps showing us how awful voodoo magic is, all the while confusing people on the difference between a priest and a wizard.
I admit, being a quasi-avatar, I tend to blur the line a bit, myself. Seeing Degas do his work, I thought I understood why he was the power behind the vampire throne of Las Vegas. Was he controlling LeSange? Was LeSange an apprentice? Or was there some other relationship?
At any rate, I watched for a while as Degas did his voodoo hoodoo and did it well. He had some problems with the blood sacrifice portion of the spell, but he found a workaround. Lots of powders, potions, and other things I lump under “messy bits” went into his ritual, so it was rather hard to follow. There was no mistaking it when he finished rattling his rattle, chanting his chant, and burning his burnables, though. Red smoke from the various bowls on the floor swirled in a quite unnatural spiral, spinning tighter and tighter, funneling down into—you guessed it—a little doll in the center of the circle. Mine was the first one, wearing a brand-new wig of my own hair. No doubt Mary’s turn was next.
My biggest concern was the unfairness of it all. Mary’s hair grows back every sunset to the same length. Mine grows out at normal speed, but only during the day. In the meantime, my brand-new haircut was a joke.
Larger concerns soon reared their ugly heads.
The spell process Degas used was interesting. Rather than gather magical energy together, it called directly on the power of a spirit. On an Earth-world, scraping together enough energy to do anything was a long-drawn-out exercise. Degas bypassed this requirement by summoning up a spirit and asking it to provide the energy. It reminded me in some respects of the spell-prayers of the Church of Light when I first came to Rethven. It’s a decent system, provided you stay on good terms with the spirit serving you… or the spirit you serve, depending.
His invocation first conjured up the spirit, gaining its attention, then directed the force of the conjured spirit into the doll. I had a peculiar moment of bilocation. It seemed I could feel myself lying on the concrete floor in the middle of the room, even though I had several hands on me, holding me still. Disconcerting and unpleasant, to say the least.
Then I felt the spirit’s attention. It looked at me, really looked at me, instead of simply delivering on Degas’ request and departing. Instead of withdrawing, mission complete, it manifested more strongly, churning like a cloud of reddish vapor in my mystical vision, thickening, deepening. The cloud did its work on the doll before boiling upward again, filling the space inside the diagram up to the curve of the ceiling.
I doubted our physical captors could see it. The smoke was present, but all the fancy manifestations would require Mary’s training, my talents, or Degas’ spell to perceive. Technically speaking, it was an invisible, non-material manifestation of an extra-planar entity projecting into this world, not a cloud. Those of us with eyes sensitive to the appropriate spectrum saw beyond smoke and vapors.
A faint crimson glow began inside it, moved in my direction as far as the border of the diagram, and breached the surface of the cloud. Bright eyes like burning coals inspected me.
Degas, meanwhile, backed away from the diagram until he bumped up against a table, rattling everything on it. This was utterly unexpected and, I’m guessing, unprecedented. He stared at me, stared at the cloud, licked his lips, and stayed quiet to avoid attracting attention.
What was that rule for cultists? Ah, yes: “When the Black Mass goes awry, avoid the cult leader. Enraged demons always go for the pompous.” Degas must have read the manual.
“I see you.”
“Stealing dialogue from Sauron the Great, are we?” I asked, in my most insolent tone. Whatever it was, it was still contained by the sigils on the floor. If it blew its top and exploded the wardings, I wondered if it would have any physical effect. “You’ve got too many eyes for that. I see you, too, if it matters. You could use some eye drops.”
“You think to hide in such a world? You think My power does not extend beyond your pitiful flat place?”
I don’t have
glandular reactions at night. Biology doesn’t mean to us dead folks what it does to the living. Nonetheless, I felt my hackles rise. A manifestation of a spirit—an energy-state being. A projection of power into a terribly low-magic world. Dozens of small things clicked in my head as I watched the roiling, spiritual miasma of hunger and fury. I knew a manifestation could take any shape, any form. It wasn’t a bearded figure of a glowing, mace-wielding warrior, but it had a psychic tone—a voice—I finally recognized.
“You’re the Lord of Light!” I snarled, in Rethvan.
“Only now do you begin to suspect. You are a fool, but a dangerous one.” The eyes swung around through the cloud, pinning Degas to the wall with a glare like a furnace. “Kill him!”
Degas fell to his knees, hands clasped, and screamed at his servants, verbally relaying the psychic command.
He was too late.
When the Lord of Light said, “You are a fool,” I recognized the finality of the tone and started ramping up into hyperdrive, sharing my apprehensions and anticipations with Mary through our tendril-touch. Or maybe she shared hers with me. It’s hard to tell through our sort of link.
I released Mary’s tendril. She might need it. I needed to focus on using mine. My tendrils coiled out, wrapping around zombies. By the time Degas got around to shouting, I was already squeezing and sawing, slicing like fine wire through rotting flesh, all the way down to the bone and sometimes through. Zombies fell to pieces, mostly because I concentrated my efforts on shoulder joints and hips. The zombies were still functional, from a technical perspective, but disarmed. Dislegged, too.
With our fleshy manacles dealt with, we only had the vampires left. Mary kicked in a fast one-two movement. First, to smash her foot into the side of a vampire knee. That captor partially fell, but still held her arm. The second part of the movement brought that same foot across and up into the other guy’s face. He tried to catch her foot, releasing the arm he held, and things began to go seriously downhill for him and his partner. Mary started doing even more brutally unpleasant things at the same lightning speed.
As for me and my two vampire thugs, one of the problems people often encounter when dealing with me is the fact I’m somewhat slim. I stand six feet tall, but I look like I should weigh somewhat less than two hundred pounds. In reality, I weigh about five hundred, roughly three times what a comparable mortal would. Even during the day, I’m at least three times as strong. I definitely don’t look the part.
