Tucking it under my left arm, I licked my right hand again and pressed my spittle-soaked palm to my neck. As her headless body collapsed to the ground, I turned and began making my way back to the stage. "Get that off the floor," I said to the last security man and ascended the stairs again.
I placed the head on the podium so that it was looking up at me. Then I looked out over the stunned assemblage and smiled. "She was correct." I patted the head, whose entrails dribbled down the front and side of the podium like gory party streamers. "And I should be grateful to Yuler Polidori for assisting me in making my point." Confusion suffused some of the faces of those nearest me in the crowd. "What? You think that killing him would have been harsher?"
"No, my lord; killing him would have been a kindness!" It was another woman who spoke now. A tall, raven-haired beauty, equal in aristocratic bearing to Friederich Polidori: Carmella Le Fanu. "Nor, I suspect, are you finished with the Polidori Clan in this matter."
Everyone held their breath to see what I would do next.
I inclined my head and pulled my hand away from my neck. A hundred pairs of eyes focused their greedy attention on the bloody hamburger effect between my jaw and my ruined collar. "They'll be getting my bill for the tuxedo tomorrow."
More laughter now and less nervousness.
"However, as Madame Le Fanu points out, the matter is not yet closed," I continued. "Perhaps you are used to Domans who rule through violence and intimidation. Perhaps you have had leadership that equates brutality with strength. Make no mistake; the guilty will be brought to justice. But a rush to judgment often punishes the innocent. And a Doman's responsibilities are, first, to protect and serve the welfare of his people . . ."
"The vampires . . ." I heard someone mutter.
"All of his people," I said. "Wampyr, were, demi. Natural, unnatural, supernatural, preternatural."
I felt hundreds of eyes glance toward the head by my right hand.
"Oh, very well," I said, "bring me the body."
A couple of the security team trotted up, bearing the headless corpse. They hadn't been too far away.
I lifted the head and gazed into its eyes. "Woman," I said, making sure we were both close enough to the microphone to pick up the sound of my voice, "I adjure you from the realm of the living to speak from the land of the dead! Tell me your name!"
Her eyes fluttered open and I had to fight a momentary flashback to Theresa Kellerman's decapitation as her mouth worked like the Tin Man's as he prepared to speak his first words after standing rusted for a hundred years.
"Jhojie Selangor," she finally croaked. I made sure the microphone picked up every syllable.
She shouldn't have been able to speak at all. Never mind being technically dead, the problem, once again, was the disconnection between larynx and lungs. Among the dangling entrails, however, several bladderlike appendages pulsed, pushing enough air through her voice box for a short answer or two.
"And do you swear fealty to me as your Doman and promise to serve me faithfully?" I pressed.
"I . . . swear . . ." she gasped.
I turned and, as the bodyguards held the headless body erect, I eased the entrails and, finally, the head, back into the gaping wound created by her cranium's sudden departure. Waving my bloody hands in what I hoped looked like sufficiently mystic gestures, I muttered incoherently and hoped that snake oil was in season.
Stepping back, I cried: "Release her!"
Everyone stepped back: the security staff, the audience. Jhojie Selangor blinked, reached up to give her neck a minor adjustment, and stepped forward. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Colin Clive was shrieking: She's alive, alive!
The audience wasn't much less restrained as I returned to the podium.
"I will be looking into a great many matters," I said, continuing as if my little exercise in head games hadn't even happened. "Perhaps this will make some of you uncomfortable. Just remember that we are banded together for our common welfare. Our strength and security lies in our combined numbers, our combined efforts, our common purpose. But nothing is ever achieved without sacrifice and the one truism of mutual effort is compromise. To get something you have to give something. If we are all to benefit, we must all be willing to temper our individual and family desires with satisfying others' needs as part of the bargain. It is my job as your Doman to see to it that the enclave benefits . . . so that you all may benefit.
"That is one of the main purposes of my meeting with your representatives and ambassadors from other demesnes over the next three nights. To better acquaint myself with your needs and concerns so that I might serve you all.
"I look forward to meeting with all of you during the nights ahead. I shall go now and change into something more comfortable and begin my visitations for this night. I urge you all to stay, enjoy the refreshments and the music, party and, perhaps, use this opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new ones. Good evening, my friends."
Scattered applause broke out as I backed away from the podium, turned thunderous as Kurt and Jhojie came to my side, and continued as I was escorted off the platform by the small army of Bodyguards-R-Us.
Out in the corridor I sank gratefully into a cushioned seat on the electric tram.
"Are you all right?"
I closed my eyes. "I am so thirsty."
"I'll call ahead and have fresh blood waiting. Any preferences?"
"Yeah. Have it sent up in a bucket. Tonight I'm not sure I would know when to stop with a living host."
We started off with a lurch while Kurt radioed ahead. "You departed from the script tonight," he said when he finished the call.
"I hadn't counted on Yuler."
"I'm talking before young Polidori. When you told the bodyguards to sit down and you stepped away from the podium."
"I'm not one of them, Kurt. I have to do it my way. This brings me to a couple of things. Just before Yuler's Sire stepped in, I asked if Polidori could be saved. You didn't answer my direct question. You presupposed my purpose in trying to save him. Don't second-guess me. Give me the answers I ask for, not the answers you think I need."
"I think you need more than you ask for," he argued. "As your advisor, it is my place to give you advice. Again I must make the point: because they are stronger, faster, older—"
"Wiser?"
"—more powerful, it is all the more reason that you must demonstrate your power."
"I thought I just did that."
"Your destruction of the young Polidori was most impressive. But you should be demonstrating power instead of mercy."
"Abraham Lincoln said: 'I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.'"
"Yes? Well, Shakespeare wrote that 'nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.' Show them your power first. You can then afford mercy later."
"Mercy is power, Kurt. In showing the Polidoris mercy, I was showing everyone else my strength. I don't think ole Freddy felt I was being kind. And I doubt anyone getting a good look at Yuler thought he was getting any kind of charity, whatsoever."
My seneschal nodded grudgingly.
"I'm not going to play the role of brutal dictator here. If I can't do it my way I'll walk away."
I could feel him shaking his head inside the pounding of my own. "You cannot walk away."
"I won't be another Elizabeth Báthory. I won't become Vlad Drakul the Fifth."
"No," he said sadly. "You are somewhat cleverer than either in your own way. And, in a sense, they are both your parents. You are already turning into a monster. Someday you will be more terrible than the two of them joined together."
Now there was a happy thought. I had come to New York to face down my enemies. With apologies to Pogo, my most dangerous foe waited for me in the future.
Myself.
Chapter Eleven
"An hour's rest," the doctor was saying as he closed his medical case. "And I want the lights off. You'll heal much quicker in the dark."
I nodded abs
ently. I had the telephone receiver to my ear and was having a simultaneous conversation with another doctor, Dr. Burton, who was inexplicably back in Seattle.
"It sounds as if the silver compounds in your tissues and bloodstream have intensified in their toxicity," he was saying. "Some unique quality in your hemoglobin appears to be transmuting its properties in ways that human or vampire or lycanthrope blood wouldn't. Perhaps when you ingested the blood of Elizabeth Báthory—"
"She wasn't the Countess Báthory," I corrected, "she was a demon posing as my great-great-ancestor. And it wasn't her body that I drank from; it was one of her meat-puppets."
"Yes, I know," he said. "But as the demon moved from host to host, that body was physically transformed, right down to the cellular level. She was onboard and fully invested when you drank from Chalice Delacroix's body. You drank demon's blood, once removed, charged with preternatural essences that we can't even begin to dream of, much less categorize. Perhaps your body is utilizing the silver as a defense mechanism."
"Against Lupé? Look, Doc, mixed marriages are hard enough without us not even being able to touch each other. You gotta do something!"
"I can't come to New York without my Doman's permission. Why don't you ask Stefan? But I have to warn you, I'm really operating in the dark, here. And New York has labs and doctors—"
"Yes, we do," agreed the other doctor who was standing by the door. "And we'll be happy to start working on your problem once you've fully recuperated. Now hang up the phone and rest before your first appointment."
I held up my hand to show I was getting there. "What about Lupé, Doc? How is the baby?"
There was a long pause. "We don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"She's gone. And we don't know where. We think she's gone back to her pack, her family." I saw the New York physician's highly sensitive ears prick up at that.
"Just a moment." I turned to the doctor standing at my door. "Is there anything else, doctor?"
"I—er—that is—I just want to say that you were very clever in stopping your own bleeding tonight. The clotting sacks under your tongue are unusually developed and your enzyme output must be triple that of any vampire I've ever examined."
"Yeah, well, that's because Mother Nature has designed us to make things bleed. Rudimentary clotting sacks are just an evolutionary afterthought if you ask me."
"Well, you are unique. And it was sheer genius to use your own saliva to accelerate the mending of your throat. I'd like to study—"
"I'd like to finish this call," I said harshly. "Please turn off the lights on your way out, doctor. And I'm sure I don't have to remind you that anything heard inside this room is privileged information."
"Oh, yes. Patient confidentiality is a staple of the medical oath."
"It's more than that, Sawbones. It's the most powerful member of your enclave giving you a warning."
"Yes. Yes, sir! Good night!" He flipped the wall switch and closed the door, plunging the room into darkness.
I put the receiver back to my ear. "Gerald . . . don't leave. She's not hereslf right now and I'm not sure her family is really going to help her."
"Ask Pagelovitch. He'll be visiting in the next day or two."
"I will. Tell her . . ."
There was the sound of breathing on the connection—mine, not his.
"Christopher?"
"Just call me if you hear anything." I hung up.
I stared at the soft glow of the phone's touchpad floating just above the nightstand and considered fumbling down, next to it, for the bucket on the floor. They had taken me at my word when I requested a pail of blood. I had spoken in hyperbole but I ended up drinking most of the contents like a man dying of thirst. How anyone could ingest that much at one sitting was beyond my understanding.
But not, apparently, beyond my need.
And I was still thirsty!
I no longer felt weak, just tired. There was a difference. And I no longer hurt, I just ached. Another difference. Like Bilbo Baggins, I felt thin and stretched, only instead of butter I felt like strawberry jam spread across too much toast. Once a healing blanket, the darkness was now like an empty vacuum, a starless void in the deepest regions of space. I felt nebulous, dissipated in entropic heat-death. Fading into eternal oblivion.
Only there was a star.
A single point of light that flickered and grew like a distant nova.
The star became a nebula, a nebulous display of the Northern Lights.
Lime green . . .
Rippling into a distortion of . . . a suit and tie and broad-brimmed hat!
The Kid was materializing in the darkness like the midnight reflection of neon lights in a dark puddle. My subconscious guilt manifesting on the borderline of consciousness? An undigested bit of blood, a blot of plasma, a crumb of platelets? Manifestation of gravy or of grave?
"How now, spirit," I croaked, "whither wander you?"
The apparition made no answer but flickered at the sound of the door whispering open. It disappeared and all was darker than dark as I heard the door close again with a quiet click.
Bare feet padded across the floor and I was momentarily distracted by the fact that I could actually hear the difference between shod and unshod footsteps on the carpet.
Now another sound: a rustle. Clothing, sliding, dropping to the floor.
An intake of breath.
And the rich, warm smell of blood!
I could still detect the scent of the cold, coagulating remnants of the bucket's contents. This, however, was a heady brew of meaty odors, the juice of life, still living, still vital, immediate and hasty from the vein!
It drew closer and the edge of the mattress depressed as another body joined mine on the bed.
Deirdre had come to offer me the enhanced healing properties of my untainted blood, my former gift that now circulated in her transformed body.
Her hand touched my bare chest and she moved to straddle me, both of us performing a blind dance in the dark, our hands scouting ahead to show us the way.
She pulled my head to her throat and I licked at the flow that had already collected in the hollow between her collarbones.
The blood filled my mouth, washing over my tongue like a tsunami of napalm. I swallowed liquid fire and, for a moment, I recalled Yuler Polidori's contorted face, his steaming mouth blistered and bubbling as my own blood burned him from the inside out. But this was different. This blood was potent and cleansing, like a whiskey astringent, revving up the tiny motors of each cell it touched. I felt like a volcano erupting in reverse and knew that this was something that passed beyond the psychosexual excitations of undead bloodlust. A steady diet from these veins would either burn me up in six months or keep me young and vigorous for a thousand years!
And that is when I realized that I couldn't be tasting my own recycled blood in Deirdre's body.
That blood had its own potency. Mine had resurrected the dead and turned the undead back into the living. It was powerful and unique and, according to some, even sacred.
But this was something different. It had a different brand of potency. It tasted forbidden. Felt secret and nearly unattainable. It was an elixir untasted by the wampyr or they would have kept stories about it. Hell, they would have written songs about it, fought wars over it, razed empires to acquire it.
It wasn't human blood.
And it wasn't Deirdre that I was drinking from.
It took every bit of willpower I possessed to pull my bloody lips away and gasp: "Who . . . ?"
"Meow," answered Suki's voice.
* * *
Jhojie Selangor was nervous. She kept looking around the private reception room at the security guards that Kurt had insisted on posting.
"Don't worry about them," I said, smiling and trying to put her at ease. "They're just here for show. They're really nothing more than Teletubbies with fangs."
Deirdre smirked. She lounged in a chair to my left. Kurt wa
s ensconced in the chair on my right, trying to suppress a scowl. I had agreed to their presence on the condition that neither would speak unless spoken to. I wasn't worried about the two-tailed cat that was curled beneath my chair. She had plenty of room to stretch: if I ever got back home I would have to tell Boo that the whole "throne" issue was literal as well as metaphorical.
I knew I wasn't endearing myself to my bodyguards with the Teletubbies remark but I had other people's feelings to consider. The Szekely Clan had served as the demoness Lilith's enforcers—sort of an undead Gestapo who kept the malcontents in line and performed whatever unpleasantness was required to prop up her reign of terror. Given the fact that the New York (or any other) demesne was made up of scary creatures, it naturally followed that the enforcers had to be even scarier.
Now that ole warm and cuddly me had taken the place of the Blood Countess from Hell, there was still the issue of the Szekely reputation. The junkyard might have a kindler, gentler owner, now, but the junkyard dogs were the same old, rabid pit bulls.
To a certain degree that worked in my favor. As long as I could trust the Szekely oath of fealty, that is. But it also had its drawbacks. As long as my subjects suspected that I was nothing more than a puppet or a tool of the Hungarian mafia, they weren't about to get real confidential. So my first order of business was to work at gaining the trust of the various clans as I met with their representatives.
This wouldn't be easy with the head of the Szekely Clan sitting at my right hand.
I had to convince some that I wasn't the Devil incarnate.
I needed to assure others that I could be utterly ruthless when necessary.
And I had to figure out when to be what to which.
As a succession of private audiences with the various clan and demesne representatives progressed through the early hours of the morning, I found it necessary to wear a number of different faces and take a diversity of different tones with my various supplicants.
Right now I was trying to be all reassuring. The last time I had been this close to Ms. Selangor, I had stepped in and yanked her head off. Of course we had rehearsed the whole thing a couple of hours before the reception, but she still wasn't quite sure what sort of a devil she was making a deal with.
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