Who would ever have imagined that such a danger could lurk behind a cloakroom door, or around the corner from the famous horseshoe bar?
The other main tunnel, nicknamed the Sutton Place Express, led up along the East River. It communicated to ten or twelve escape hatches that opened into the river. Vampires were strong swimmers; they could stay underwater for an amazingly long time without becoming incapacitated. They would come up to the street out of their tunnels, take a victim, and fade back into the system, taking the remains with them. The bones would be crushed to splinters and tossed in the river.
The Miriam Blaylock house, radically different from the dirty lairs where most of the vampires lived, also communicated with the East Side tunnels. This was why they’d come to be called the Sutton Place Express by his team. It was into the East Side system that Blaylock had escaped on the day she’d almost succeeded in killing him in that house of hers.
Paul sat down with his gun. The big, highly specialized pistol was a dull, gleaming blue. It carried a twenty-bullet magazine, and the bullets were fat, mean magnums, capable of blowing a human—or vampire—head into four or five pieces upon impact. Three shots would tear a vampire to bits. The French had an even better weapon, but this would have to do. Paul dropped it into his underarm holster.
“Charlie was a hell of a draftsman.”
Paul turned. Becky was supposed to be in East Mill with their son. “Where’s Ian?”
“In his room with the door locked, feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t doing X, by the way.”
“Momma believes.”
“He says the tab was dropped on him during the raid, and Momma does believe.”
“You know something, Momma? I believe him, too.”
She looked at him sharply. An instant later, realization dawned. “You bastard,” she said quietly.
“I had to!”
“You—” She stopped herself. Her eyes flashed with rage. But then she, also, saw the necessity.
“You did it before you knew about the new vampire.”
“I did it because I didn’t want him in the same damn city with Leo. The blood attracts, you know that.”
“Paul, you crushed him. You just plain crushed him.” She strode to the window. “Jesus, you are a piece of work.”
“It wasn’t even a real tab. When they tested it, he’d’ve been let go, even if he got sucked up in the system.”
“You had no damn right to do this! You and your damn cop friends. Jesus Christ, you just cut the kid’s heart out!”
“He’s up at home instead of down here with these damn vampires, and I don’t happen to think I cut his heart out at all. I think I saved his life.”
She hated it, he could see it in her face. But she was also grateful. He could see that, too.
He pressed his advantage. “What would we have done? ‘Hey, Ian, there’s a big old vampire here in New York, and if you see it, you’re gonna fall in love, and ain’t that just dandy? Bullshit, Becky. Bullshit! I did the right thing.”
Her silence was blue with rage. But she swallowed it. What other choice did she have? “Okay.”
“So now I’m gonna go in there”—he indicated the tunnels—“and I’m gonna repeat the sterilization protocol.” He hauled out his gun, slapped it against his palm.
“You’re not going in there alone.”
“I am.”
“That vampire is going to be desperate and well aware of the danger.”
He shrugged. “I’m gonna be just as well aware.”
“Paul, you stay out of there.”
He loved her. But he would not do that. “Unless I destroy that animal, people are going to start disappearing again. Maybe it’ll be somebody’s kid—a kid like Ian, out to have a good time. He takes a shortcut down a side street, and Mom and Dad spend the rest of their lives waiting. Or a father—some night watchman from the Dominican Republic, got three kids and a wife in Bushwick, he evaporates into thin air.”
“Like your dad.”
“And his wife and his kids are sent to hell, and they didn’t do a damn thing to deserve it!”
“Just like you and your mom were. Paul, I love you, and I respect your motives immensely. With all my soul. But you are NOT going down there, because you cannot go up against a vampire alone and win, and you know that, and I know that, and I am not going to lose you.”
“I have a sworn duty.”
“What about your duty to me? Your sworn duty? Or to your son—the duty to that wild blood you two have lurking in your damn veins?”
He gazed at her, his brilliant eyes telling her that he thought he would checkmate the monster that was down there. “The way I figure it, the thing’s gonna spend a day or so exploring. It’s going to find all the vampire remains down there and get real worried. It’ll hole up in some dark corner.”
“This thing came from God only knows where, when we thought they were all gone. Extinct. But here it is, one hell of a survivor, you ask me. It doesn’t seem like the holing-up kind.”
“It came from Cairo.”
“You know that for certain?”
“A trail goes cold there, picks up here ten days later. Bocage has it pegged as a female, about five-eight, blond, blue-eyed. Also weak on street smarts. It lived somewhere in the desert, all right.”
“Feeding on what?”
“There are people in the desert. Bedouins.”
“Too noticeable.”
“It’s a wanderer. That’s why we’ve never caught it. It stayed ahead of us.”
“Paul, have you ever considered that it’s surviving because it’s better than the others? It knows we’re here. This public kill is bait on a hook.”
“That had occurred to me.”
“No vampire would do a kill like that and not hide the remnant, not unless it was stupid, and they don’t come that way, or it was inexperienced, and this thing is probably thousands of years old, or it had another purpose altogether. And Paul, I’ll tell you right now what that purpose is, because I know. That purpose is you.”
“Becky, I’m going down there, and you aren’t. That’s the beginning and end of it. I’m doing a recce from Sutton Place to Fulton Street, then working my way up Condo Row all the way to the end. If I don’t have an encounter, good. I’ll find another way. If I do catch up with it, even better. We can send the damn skin to Briggs.”
“That’d be a masterstroke of diplomacy.”
He closed his jacket. He was going. He was doing it right now.
She backed toward the door, staying in front of him. You never gave up your ground, not if you wanted to win a confrontation with Paul Ward. “I’m going to cover your back,” she said carefully, putting as much force into her voice as there was.
He tried to get around her.
She stayed in front of him. Just. “We never defeated one of them if it was ready for us. Not one.”
“Miriam Blaylock was ready for us.”
“She died to save her baby.”
“By getting herself killed? I doubt it.”
“By surrendering to his father! She knew what you’d do.”
A long silence.
“And you brought home a wonderful son! Please, Paul, we need you. Especially your son. You’re the only person in the world remotely like him. He’s going to have to learn to control one hell of a powerful and very alien personality. I can already see it growing in him, Paul. He’s struggling with some amazing demons, and if you aren’t there to help him make it, he isn’t going to make it.”
Now he would push her aside. He would be gentle, but there would be no point in resisting. The hard eyes glittered. “If we both go down there, he could lose us both.”
“You admit it. You’re risking death. What if you die, and the vampire doesn’t?”
“You’re next.”
“Back to back, we have the best chance. One by one, we are defeated in detail. If we’re going to survive, we have to do this together. If it can get you, it can sure a
s hell get me. You know that as well as I do.”
“There is no other way!”
“We’re going in together.”
“And Ian?”
“Maybe he gets us both back, and maybe just one. But we win down there, if we go in together, and you know that’s the truth.”
“I know I can do this vampire.”
“And I agree! With me rearguarding you.”
Long sigh. Cold, steady look. Admission that she was right, expressed as a slight softening in the corners of the eyes.
The best place to enter the tunnels would be the Blaylock garden, but that wasn’t a real good idea. They had to do it from an unexpected point, somewhere that the vampire wasn’t likely to be waiting for them.
“I’m planning to go in through the subbasement of the Royalton.”
“I know the location. We got a family of five down in there.”
“Five,” he said in a hollow voice.
They took a cab up to the hotel, entered the lobby. The Royalton was high Manhattan glitz above ground, but its basement was a very different matter. Billy Rose had built the Horseshoe Bar in the 1930s. The place had served everybody from Eleanor Roosevelt to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. It had been closed down in the 1950s.
They had found it by accident, going up one of the tightly wound staircases the vampires used to access their grab stations. Instead of emerging into some basement that used to be a speakeasy, they had ended up in this wonderful, ruined room.
“Should we involve the manager?”
“Why?”
“He’s gonna get told that we went through. What if he calls the cops?”
In a few moments, they were sitting in the office of Gene Forrest, general manager of the hotel. Forrest was both carefully and casually dressed. He looked exactly like he belonged at the ultra-cool Royalton. Paul showed him an artificial credential.
“Office of Environmental Analysis? I’m not familiar.”
“We’re planning a rodent sweep.”
“We don’t have rodents.”
“There’s a space under your subbasement that does.”
“There’s that old bar down there. But it’s sealed.”
Paul nodded. “If it isn’t, we’ll seal it. Just want to let you know we’re going to be doing a little testing down there.”
“We had some guests go down there the other night. Drunk. One of them was in costume.”
Becky could feel Paul’s tension rise. It didn’t sound like it meant anything, but maybe it did.
“Do your guests often go down there?”
“God, no. They had to get keys. How they did it, we don’t know. We’re still investigating.”
“You got their names?”
“They were dinner guests, unfortunately.”
“They made a reservation?”
“The Smiths.”
“What exactly happened?”
“They were first noticed when they burst out into the kitchen, screaming.”
“From below?”
“Four of them. Nobody had seen them go down, so the staff were quite surprised. One of the women was dressed like Sarah Bernhardt or somebody. A turn-of-the-century ball gown.”
“Did you see them?”
“Actually, yes. I stayed on that evening. We had an important table. Catherine Deneuve, with four guests. Lovely, lovely woman. I wanted it all to be absolutely wonderful. But then this group—I hadn’t noticed them when they were at their table—suddenly they burst into the dining room. They actually turned over tables. It was fantastic. A disaster.”
“You called the police?”
“Immediately. We had an officer here in about three minutes. Plus our own security people. But they were already gone.”
“All four of them were gone?”
He nodded.
Paul sighed. “We’d like to do our survey, anyway. We’ll be down there for about an hour.”
The manager had become so tense, he seemed almost coiled, his face compressed. “You’re not that.” He gestured toward the fake ID card.
Paul remained silent.
“Is there some kind of drug operation going on down there? I’ve always hated that place. We keep it locked. We don’t know how they got in.”
“We’re not cops. The hotel isn’t going to be raided.”
“It was horrible. They were horrible.”
“Yes, I’m sure they were.”
They went down through the hotel’s glittering, shadowy dining room and its pristine kitchens, then down through the pantries and the storage basement. The manager showed them a steel door, securely locked. He took out a key and opened it.
“Can we take that?”
“Of course.” He handed them the key. “But lock it behind you. We never leave it open. Ever.”
“You’ve had trouble?”
“I don’t like it down there. I’m going to have this door sealed. Absolutely. I’m walling it up.”
“That’s a good idea, mister. A very good idea.”
They went through into the darkness of a cave.
“Why are we here?” Becky asked. “The vampire’s probably gone.”
“We’ll see.”
Paul opened his briefcase, which contained an array of compact but powerful devices. They strapped new light-amplifying equipment on their faces. This system bled out tiny quantities of infrared light to compensate in areas where the darkness was complete. They put on their overshoes, specially designed with wide, hollow rubber soles to minimize sound. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. All the old training and familiarity had returned the moment they got into this place.
Becky shone her light around the large, low space. There were chairs jumbled against one wall, a broad floor, and a small stage. The famous bar dominated the room.
Paul said, “What the shit?” He vaulted the bar with the ease of a powerful athlete, landing behind it without a sound. He was looking down at a body. There were things running on the dead skin. The one visible eye was heavily involved with insects.
Becky saw gray hair, wrinkles. “It’s an old man.” But he was wearing the T-shirt and sneakers of a kid.
“We don’t know what it is, Becky.”
She gasped when she saw, in the zinc ice chests under the bar, legs and arms stacked as neatly as cordwood. “Oh, God, Paul.”
There was a can of Sterno and a little griddle. A spilled saucepan lay on its side nearby. Bits of gray material were scattered around it on the floor. They looked organic, but the insects weren’t bothering them.
Paul squatted. He remained there for a long moment. Then he stood up. “He was eating the remains of the vampires we killed here.”
“Jesus. And somebody broke his neck.”
“The vampire.”
“What would happen if you ate them? Would you become young?”
“Sure, for a while. Be my guess.”
“That explains the clothes. He was living as a boy. The corpse returned to its real age after he died.”
Paul went to the far back of the room, into the club’s old kitchen. He felt along a wall in the liquor safe. She saw his hand move slightly, watched the darkness thicken as the concealed door he was looking for slid open. She gave him some light. The blackness in the tunnel beyond seemed to absorb the beam, to suck the life right out of it.
She had the urge to take out her cell phone and call Ian. They might be in here for hours, maybe all night. He would be frantic.
“Paul, I want to know something. I want to know why you came here to this specific place.”
He slowly turned. In the powerful beam of her flashlight, his face was shockingly changed, the skin powder-white, the blue eyes like glass. The lips were set hard and straight. He lifted his hand, waved it past his eyes.
She moved the light. “Sorry.”
He stared down into the dark of the tunnel.
“Paul, what I want to know is, why are we here? How did you know to come here in the first place?”
He came toward her, three steps. There was in the movement a quickness that made her see what he normally hid, and hid well—the thing about him that was so very different—the sense of an alien presence that lingered about him like smoke; the animal that peered from behind those slow eyes of his. “I just know,” he said. “It’s the way I am.”
“You deduced it. Hit it right on the button.”
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and no time.”
“Can I call Ian first? I’ve still got a little signal here. But down below—”
“We’re not going down there.”
“So it’s out?”
“It’s out.”
It was loose in the city.
* * *
Leo was crying, and she couldn’t stop crying because the flashlight was getting dimmer and dimmer and she couldn’t find her way and she had been a damned fool to come down here in the first place. What had she been thinking, that she could guide some vampire up to the surface and take care of him and maybe there would be love? Is that what she’d been thinking? Because now that seemed like a very stupid thing to be concerned about, especially when she was going to be onstage in a few hours. If.
The truth was, she hadn’t been thinking at all, she’d been acting on impulse, doing just what she wanted to do in that particular moment. That was why she’d let Miri blood her, because it had been a sensational experience, the combination of being totally surrendered to Miri, feeling the boiling cold of Miri’s life force going through her veins and making her heart race so fast it seemed about to explode, and feeling like she was going to become eternal and powerful and just as incredibly glamorous and wonderful as Miri.
This was the same kind of decision—impulsive, crazy, and wrong. The thing that she could never understand about herself was why she would suddenly do something like this. She didn’t lead her life this way. Absolutely not. She led her life like a marine drill sergeant with a chess pro override. You don’t become a superstar any other way. It’s never a damn accident. So why was she here? What was driving her?
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 21
