The doorbell chimed again, this time without the lights flashing.
"Who's there?" Deirdre called.
The reply was unintelligible from where I sat, muffled by the door. Deirdre jumped up and moved to the entryway. Now she was blocking my line of fire: I stood and tried to descend the stairs without squeaking like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The door slowly swung back revealing a five-foot silhouette on the doormat.
I stared hard, trying to peer into the human-shaped darkness, hoping to make out a face. Instead I clicked over into the infrared band. The body on the other side of the threshold was cold.
"Vampire!" I yelled, just as Deirdre did the big no-no.
She invited it in.
In it came.
I eased down the remaining stairs, tracking it over the notched sight of the Glock.
The creature looked strangely familiar. Hair as black as starlings' wings swept around her head to fall over her left shoulder. Her almond-shaped eyes were the color of mossed jade but her pupils were crimson, splitting those deep green orbs like a cat's. She wore a red silk pantsuit that looked more like Hugh Hefner's pajamas than public attire. Her crimson lips smiled, parting just enough to show the tip of a single sly fang.
"Hello, Christopher," she said coolly. "Is that a gun in your hand or are you happy to see me?"
Part of my mind was critiquing the mangled punch line so it took another second to recognize her. "Suki?"
She bowed Asian style. "At your service."
* * *
She had been my first babysitter when I arrived at Stefan Pagelovitch's demesne, long on questions and short on answers. For the most part I had amused her then. That was before I got her spine snapped in two and left her in the mental ward of a Kansas hospital.
"Stefan likes you. He says you remind him of when he was young and stupid. He felt that you were in need of additional security personnel." She looked around. "Speaking of which, where are your bodyguards?"
"Standing right here," Deirdre answered.
Suki sat on the sofa; I sat across from her on the edge of the love seat. Deirdre continued to stand despite repeated invitations to take a load off.
Suki looked at her appraisingly. "Hmm. Yes. I heard that you're supposed to be human, now. Nice gun."
"I may be less than vampire but I am more than human."
"I meant no disrespect. It is just a matter of power matching power." Suki turned back to me. "How many have you turned to your service?"
I looked at her. "Excuse me—what?"
"How many vampire servitors have you created to protect you?" I guess I was taking too long to answer: she turned to look at Deirdre and her eyes widened. "None? How many bodyguards do you have?"
Deirdre looked at me.
"No," Suki said, "the dead don't count. Neither does Lupé. Especially for the foreseeable future."
"Stop it," Deirdre said through clenched teeth.
"One?" Suki seemed as disconcerted as my Chief of Security. "Just one human left? And you sent him with the vampire to pick up food on the other side of the river?"
"Get. Out. Of. My. Head!" Deirdre grunted.
I reached out and put a hand on the Asian vampire's arm. "What are you doing?"
"Threat assessment."
"You want to assess some threats?" Deirdre snarled. "Read my mind now, bitch!"
"Ladies . . ." I tried.
"Look, I'm sorry if I'm not taking the time for niceties," Suki continued, "but I don't answer to either of you. My Doman has sent me here to do a job and I may just have a few moments more before I have to make a split-second decision about Chris's safety."
"And what if I just decide to dis-invite you across the threshold?" Deirdre asked.
"You won't do that."
"And why not?"
"Because I have brought you the head of Theresa Kellerman."
"What?"
Footsteps sounded on the front porch. The door opened and three men squeezed through the doorway. You wouldn't think "squeezed" was the operative descriptor as they entered one at a time but they were each that big. And scary-looking. Somewhere there were a lot of beautiful people because these guys had used up an entire gene pool's allotment of ugly chromosomes.
"This is Kyle, Lance, and Beau," Suki said. "Your new security team."
Deirdre gave them the eye. "How will I know that they'll carry out my orders?"
Two of them gave her the eye back. One of them gave me the eye.
"They won't," Suki answered. "They're my human servitors so they'll carry out my orders. You can coordinate your security arrangements through me."
"I think you mean that I will coordinate the security arrangements and you will pass along my orders to your subordinates."
Suki smiled at her. "Of course. That's what I meant to say."
"Um," I said, "back up a moment, here. You were saying something about Theresa Kellerman's head."
"And I'd like to know," Deirdre chimed in, "how you got across the river."
"I brought them," said an unfamiliar voice from the porch.
The front door swung open a little wider and Theresa Kellerman's head floated into the house.
* * *
It turned out to be an illusion: Theresa's "disembodied" head now had a body. A body that was almost invisible in the darkness of the doorway wrapped, as it was, from the neck down in black leather straps. Her outfit looked like Versace Goth Mummy couture. Her long, wavy dark hair had been bobbed and gelled giving her the appearance of something sleek and wet and waiting to return to the water.
Her voice was different—different body, different voice box. It was lower, giving her an air of gravitas in contrast to her girlish tone of three months before. Her eyes should have been the same but they were not. These eyes, though the same deep blue, had gazed upon alien landscapes, terror incognita, and seemed to glow with a spooky, inner light.
But she smiled as she shared the sofa and explained how Suki and her entourage had arrived just in time to catch a ride across the river on her boat.
"You have a boat?" Deirdre asked. As if Theresa having a boat was a bigger surprise than her turning up with a new body from the neck down.
"It's a rental. I have to have it back by morning."
"You've been busy," I told her. "The last time I saw you, you were occupying a box on an old man's lap."
"That was a couple of weeks ago. It takes time to encode the email. And we both wanted me to be able to follow up without a significant time lag."
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "Which makes a question of asking the next question. Do I ask about this Dr. Pipt first? Or start with what your 'follow up' is about? Or should I lead with the most obvious?"
"My body," she said. It wasn't a question for her.
"It isn't yours. You're taller now."
"A lot taller than two weeks ago."
"Ha," I said. "Ha." Somewhere way off in a distant corner of my brain, I made a mental note to tell The Kid to rent Boxing Helena on his next outing to Blockbusters.
"Dr. . . . Pipt . . . is a genius. He knows more about organ transplantation, genetics—"
"Disembodied, still-beating hearts?" Deirdre chimed in.
Theresa nodded. "He wanted to make sure that you understood the scope of his capabilities."
"So," Suki finally spoke up from the other end of the sofa, "this Pipt is not only a surgeon and geneticist, he's a necromancer, as well?"
Theresa shook her head. "Science, not magic."
"Nanotechnology."
Everyone turned to look at Deirdre.
"Well, that's what's keeping it going, isn't it?"
Theresa gave her an appraising look. "Yes. How did you know?"
She shrugged. "An educated guess. Human heart. Still beating. No sign of necrosis. The only scientific explanation? The tissue must be swarming with thousands of tiny nanobots, stimulating the sinoatrial node, feeding and repairing individual cells—"
"Millions, ac
tually." Theresa seemed a little annoyed that the heart trick was so easily deconstructed. "Some of the nanomachines are replicators."
Suki stared at them both as if they had suddenly begun speaking in Farsi.
"Nanotechnology," I explained, "is a science utilizing microscopic machines."
"Just as the white and red blood cells in your body perform different tasks—feeding and oxygenating your tissues and organs, carrying off wastes, fighting off infections—nanobots perform a variety of tasks!" Theresa enthused. No one could enthuse like Theresa. I remembered how she had once enthused about the prospects of torturing her former boyfriend to death. "Each one is simple, rudimentary, microscopic. But, in vast numbers, they can repair damage from the cellular level on up, enhance biological performance, even tinker with genetic material at the RNA and DNA levels."
While she regaled us with descriptions of Dr. Pipt's laboratories and his recent breakthroughs in bioengineering, a half-dozen suitcases and a couple of trunks were carried in by Suki's human servitors.
"Um," I said as Theresa took a rare pause to catch her breath, "dawn is just a few hours away and we should probably arrange accommodations for our guests."
"I can't stay," Theresa said.
"We need to arrange quarters for Suki and . . ."
"Kyle, Lance, and Beau," Suki said hurriedly. I caught her look: she knew I was going to say: "Larry, Moe, and Curly."
I turned to Deirdre. "Go help them settle in."
She walked over to me, saying, "I'm your Chief of Security. I can't leave you alone with strangers."
"They're not exactly strangers."
She leaned over and whispered: "Theresa tried to kill you before she lost her head. And the last time you saw Suki, you left her in a hospital mental ward."
"Actually, I'm very grateful for that," Suki said. "He saved my life."
"How's the back?" I asked as Deirdre flushed to match her hair.
"Fine," the vampiress answered. "It only twinges if I go without feeding for a long time. But then, I never go without feeding for very long."
"I want you to stay out of my head," Deirdre fumed.
"I wasn't in your head, dear."
"It's true," Theresa said. "Your voice really does carry—even when you whisper."
Deirdre looked at me.
I showed her the Glock. "We'll be fine."
She straightened up. "I'll show them where to unpack."
"Show Suki, too."
The Asian vampiress looked at me. "One of us should stay with you at all times."
I thought better of saying, "The shower is going to get awfully crowded," but it was already out of my mouth before I did. I avoided looking at Deirdre.
"I'll be right back," Suki said pointedly as she got to her feet. "I wouldn't want to miss any juicy details."
As Pagelovitch's enforcer and her entourage trailed after Deirdre on a caravan to the carriage house, I turned back to Theresa. "So. You can't stay?"
She shook her head and unclipped a black leather pouch from her black leather belt. "I must leave within the hour."
"Well, as flattering as it might seem, I doubt that you went to all the trouble to rent a boat and drop by in the middle of the night just to say howdy and catch up on old times."
"Yes. I wish I had more time. I could spend the next week apologizing to you for my behavior before we . . . um . . . parted." She got up and came over to sit next to me on the love seat.
Immediately I was enveloped in a cloud of perfume, so thick and cloying that I almost gagged. It would have overwhelmed anyone with a normal sense of smell. The barrage on my enhanced olfactory receptors was out of the comfort zone and moving into painful territory.
"Okay," I said as tears began to gather at the corners of my eyes, "but what do you really want?"
She looked away. "I . . . that is . . ."
"Just spit it out, kiddo; you've got to tell me sooner or later."
She stared down at her lap. The zipper on the leather pouch was halfway parted and something sharp and silver gleamed within.
"I need your blood," she whispered.
Chapter Seven
"There's an old Spanish proverb that says: 'an ounce of blood is worth a pound of friendship.'"
"And an old Italian proverb," Theresa retorted, "says: 'blood alone moves the wheels of history.'"
I shook my head. "You don't strengthen your case by quoting Benito Mussolini."
"But think of all the good he could do with it!"
"Mussolini?"
"Dr. Pipt!" She got up and wandered around the couch. "The man is a genius! The advances he's made in genetics, cloning, nanobiotics—"
"It is a very impressive resume," I said, "but it also underlines the inherent dangers of turning over something that could be so potently misused and exploited. I don't know this Dr. Pipt well enough to trust him with my genetic material."
"He's a good man!"
"I can understand your enthusiasm; he gave you a body. But I've got to wonder: whose body? And how did he obtain it? All I know about this guy is, he's stolen your—er—head from the people I had entrusted it to—"
"For the right reasons!"
"If it's so obvious that he was doing the right thing, why didn't he ask? If he's such a humanitarian, why isn't he sharing his medical breakthroughs with the rest of the world? And I confess to certain qualms about handing over tissue to a man who gets his jollies leaving disembodied hearts on other people's doorsteps."
"Well, if you would come with me, I could introduce him to you. You could get to know him. Decide for yourself."
I got up from the love seat. "I would love to meet this guy-whose-name-sounds-oh-so-familiar-but-I-just-can't-seem-to-place-it. But not right now. I've got major business brewing in New York this week. And I'm getting married—"
"Married?"
"You seem surprised."
She waved her hand dismissively, all nonchalance now. "Just that there's an old adage: 'Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?'"
I felt my eyes narrow. "I'm not sure I like an analogy that compares my fiancée to a cow."
"Or, for that matter," she said, ignoring my response, "why settle for milk when you can have cream?"
"Cream?"
"Whipped cream . . ." She licked her lips.
I was torn between the urge to scowl and to outright laugh in her face. "Look, the point—which we are rapidly digressing from—is that I am very busy right now. Under the circumstances, I'd prefer to get this Pipt's address and go visit him on my own terms, once things are all quiet on the eastern front."
She turned and her face twisted into a parody of a smile. "I can't wait that long."
"Who can't wait?"
"He's getting really old. His life may be measured in months or even weeks. None of us expect him to see next Christmas. He needs your blood!"
I stared at her. Theresa Kellerman had evinced the qualities of a true sociopath on our last encounter but she wasn't that good a liar. And she knew it.
"All right," she said after a moment and tugged at her sleeve as she walked back toward me. She stripped the glove from her left arm, exposing her hand and wrist. She held it before my face and wiggled her fingers. "This is why I can't wait."
Her skin was mottled and discolored, the fingers bruised and swollen. Then I caught a whiff of what the heavy perfume had been trying to mask.
The stink of putrefaction.
"Gangrene?" I asked.
She snorted. "No. Or maybe yes. I always thought gangrene was the process of death in living tissue. If a limb is already dead . . ." She shrugged.
"But a transplant—"
"Do you mean from a living donor?" She smiled a ghastly smile. "My dear Christopher, I thought you would be more squeamish about the medical ethics involved. Besides, my flesh from the neck up remained well preserved without the assistance of the good doctor's nanobots. It seemed logical that the transplantation would work well with a million tiny machines w
orking day and night to keep my tissues oxygenated and under constant repair."
She peeled off the other glove with greater difficulty; the fingers of her left hand were noticeably clumsy. Her right hand was black—not with advanced necrosis but with the pigmentation that denoted a Negroid donor. "This arm was harvested more quickly and attached more recently. It will last longer but, eventually, it will need to be replaced, too." She ran those dark fingers over the ridges of the even darker straps girdling her torso. "If we had time I could show you a woman who epitomizes the melting-pot concept of America. The stitchwork is very fine; nothing like those old black-and-white horror movies on the late show."
"My blood," I said. And stopped. I didn't know what to say. Or, rather, I couldn't quite figure out how to say it.
"It brought me back from the dead, the first time. Kept me alive from the neck up, upon the second. I believe it could keep my body from rotting under me and sending me back to the operating room again and again and again and—"
Deirdre walked back into the living room and Theresa immediately composed herself. "Did I miss something?"
Theresa turned away and pulled her gloves back on. "I have to be going. Will you spare a little for my sake? Or should I go back to Pipt and see if a living transplant works a lot better?"
I ignored the implied threat. "I could give you a transfusion right here and now. No need to go back home and do it."
She shook her head but kept her back to us. "Not now. Not like this." Her voice was unsteady. "My body isn't quite . . . right. At the moment. I wouldn't want to 'preserve' it in its current state."
Little alarm bells went off in the back of my mind but they became distant as she turned and smiled. "I'll have to come back, then," she said as if finding new resolve. "Or hold out for a few more weeks until you can come and visit us on terms that you are comfortable with."
"Theresa, I am sorry—"
Her smile grew in intensity. "How quickly you've forgotten, Christopher. Call me 'T.'"
"I wish—"
"I do have to go, now. I must return the boat, check in at the airport, and return the rental car."
Habeas Corpses Page 11
