by Raven Hart
When we got there, the joint was already jumping. A queue was even forming outside. Werm had set up one of those velvet rope lines like in the movies, complete with a bouncer with an earpiece and a clipboard. The sign on the front of the place read THE PORTAL. Whatever. When the doorman saw us, he immediately unhooked the velvet rope and motioned us in. Good for him.
Werm had said he envisioned that his club would be like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca. To me, it looked more like the alien bar scene in Star Wars. There were goths, gays, straights, punks, preppies, and, thanks to the irregulars, rednecks. And, just to round things out, vampires, werewolves, and one cockeyed zombie.
Jerry, who was a double threat as a werewolf and a redneck, had the delightful Wanda on his arm, and they were followed closely by Huey, who evidently was taking his bodyguarding responsibilities with dead—and I do mean dead—earnestness. He hardly took his eyes off Wanda. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. His eyes wandered off Wanda with the same frequency that they wandered off everything else, but he was trying awfully hard to keep her in focus.
I caught the eye of Ginger, who was tending bar, and bought the irregulars all a round. Tami, one of the other whores, brought out a tray loaded with amber bottles of beer. I handed one to Connie.
“I’m glad the working girls have found an honest way to make a living,” she said. “I hope they don’t go back to turning tricks, so I won’t have to bust them.”
“I hope so, too. But if worse comes to worst and you do have to wrestle Ginger to the ground, I want to be there to see it.”
Connie laughed and swatted me on the arm just as Rennie walked up. “Police brutality,” he charged. “You hate to see that.”
“He wishes,” Connie quipped.
“Who’s minding the store?” I asked him. “I had no idea the whole gang would be here.”
Rennie gave me a guilty grin, but not too guilty. “I decided to close up for a while. We wanted to come and stay for a couple of hours just to support Werm. It doesn’t look like he needs any help from us, though. The place is packed.”
“That it is. They’re going to have to start turning people away at some point or expect a visit from the fire marshal. They must be close to capacity.”
“And the entertainment hasn’t even started yet,” Rennie grinned. “Well, actually it has.” He inclined his beer bottle toward the end of the bar where a tall, gorgeous blonde with an unusually large Adam’s apple stood between Otis and Rufus, one arm linked through one each of theirs. The boys looked as happy as a couple of dead pigs in the sunshine.
“Don’t tell me…” I said.
“Ain’t love grand?” Rennie observed. “I hope she picks one of them to go home with.”
“Don’t you mean he?”
“Whatever.”
“I hope they live happily ever after,” I said.
Rennie sighed. “I want to be a bridesmaid.”
“They’ll make you wear a tacky dress you’ll never want to wear again. One with those puffy sleeves.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Rennie agreed.
“Forget the wedding. I want to be a fly on the wall on the wedding night,” I said.
“I’ll drink to that.” Rennie took a big swig of his beer.
“You two are awful,” Connie said, laughing. Her laughter always sounded like music to me. She looked as carefree tonight as I’d ever seen her. She could have passed for a teenager. I made a mental note to thank Melaphia. Whatever she’d said to Connie must have been just what she needed to hear.
Connie inclined her head toward the dance floor. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”
Jerry and Wanda were boogying the night away with Huey do-si-doing right along beside them. “Two werewolves and a zombie cutting a rug?” I asked. “What’s so unusual about that? I see it all the time.”
“Uh-huh. You’re a terrible liar.” She studied the trio on the dance floor. “Zombies just don’t have any rhythm to speak of, do they?”
“Are you kidding me? They’re doing good if they’re able to walk a straight line. Actually, now that I think about it, Huey’s dancing will probably improve the more he has to drink.”
“It sure couldn’t get any worse.”
The music changed and Huey modified his motions in an attempt to try and match the tempo. He looked like he’d been set upon by a swarm of invisible killer bees. “I hope his arms and legs are attached real good. I’d hate for his parts to go flying off. Halloween is over and people might ask questions if a finger wound up in their Jell-O shot.”
“We’re going to have to start calling Huey by his Indian name,” Rennie remarked.
“What’s that?”
“Dances with Werewolves.”
“Hey, Rennie, what are Jerry and his date doing out in public? I thought he was bound and determined to keep her under wraps.”
“He was,” Rennie said. “But she whined and pleaded so long and loud that he finally gave in. The woman likes to party.”
“Don’t she, though?” By the look of her, she was already three sheets to the werewolf wind. She was almost as unsteady on her feet as Huey.
Werm came by with a small entourage of his goth friends. He had gussied up his usual black attire with an old-fashioned ruffled dress shirt and a long jacket that flared out from the waist. He looked like a cross between Prince and your garden-variety pimp.
“Wow, you look great,” Connie said without a trace of sarcasm.
“Thanks,” Werm said. He touched his cheek to hers and shook my hand. “Welcome to The Portal.”
“Why did you decide to call it ‘The Portal’?” I asked him.
“’Cause the first time Mel saw it, she said it was special. She thinks the ground it sits on has some kind of spiritual significance. She said she can feel it in her blood. Isn’t that cool?”
“Yeah. Cool,” I muttered. I barely heard him as he made introductions all around. What he said about Melaphia was kind of strange.
Werm moved on to greet other patrons and I finished off my beer. I couldn’t much relate to the crazy music they were playing. Give me classic country anytime. Merle Haggard is my troubadour of choice. Marty Robbins was a close second, God rest his soul. I tapped Souxi on the shoulder as she moved past us with a tray of cocktails. I put a ten spot on her tray and whispered in her ear, “Ask the disc jockey to play something you can slow dance to. Something old and sappy.” She gave me a wink and disappeared.
I set my empty beer bottle on the bar to the opening notes of Elvis’s “Fools Rush In.” “May I have this dance?”
Connie favored me with a flirtatious smile. “I’d love to,” she said.
I took her hand, led her onto the floor, and pulled her close as Mr. Presley cautioned about fools rushing in. At least that’s what all the wise men said. I’d been called a lot of things in my time, but wise wasn’t one of them.
Maybe Melaphia was right about this being a special place. With Connie in my arms I could feel the pull of something elemental, something greater than the two of us. When she laid her head on my shoulder, I forgot all my troubles and just for a minute all was right with the world and rivers were flowing gently to the sea.
I held my woman’s warm, vibrant, living body next to mine and something very much like happiness coursed through my undead being. No less an authority than Elvis Aaron Presley crooned that some things were meant to be. Take my hand, he said. Take my whole life, too.
When Connie tilted her face up to mine, I couldn’t help falling in love with her. Forgetting myself, I gathered her closer and bent to kiss her. Just before our lips met, a force arced between us that drove our faces apart again. A thin blue flame sparked in the air in front of us for a split second and then was gone.
A few of the dancers nearby noticed, but they must have thought it was a bar trick, because they turned right back to their partners. Over Connie’s shoulder I happened to make eye contact with Seth, who was standing at the bar sipping
a beer and wearing a poker face. He’d seen it, too.
The music changed to something with a primitive beat like drums in the jungle, and Connie and I walked back to the bar trying to pretend we weren’t shaken by what had just happened.
“What are you drinking?” Seth said casually.
“Beer,” Connie said.
“I just love a woman of refinement and good taste,” Seth said and held up three fingers for Ginger. He passed us our bottles and kept one for himself. “Who’s that with Jerry?” Seth asked. Any new werewolf in town was always of interest to him.
“It’s the woman I’ve been looking for.” Connie lowered her voice and narrowed her eyes at him meaningfully.
“The one you told me about the other night at the swamp?” Seth asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Has she been with Jerry the whole time?”
“Yep,” Connie said.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Uh-oh,” Connie said. “Look who just came in.”
That would be Nate Thrasher—with Sally on his arm. “That kid just doesn’t have a dab of sense,” I said. “I told her he was dangerous.”
The music stopped and Werm jumped up on the tiny stage. “Welcome to The Portal. I hope everybody’s having a good time!” The crowd cheered its approval and Werm waited for the noise to die down before he continued his introduction. “For our opening night, we have somebody really special to entertain us. Please give it up for the Lady Chianti!” The crowd cheered again and Werm hopped down from the stage.
“The Lady Chianti?” Seth asked skeptically.
“They say she’s a poor man’s Lady Chablis,” Connie explained.
Speaking of poor men, I saw Otis and Rufus on the edge of their bar stools, clapping like a couple of lunatics. Otis put his thumb and index finger to his mouth and whistled. I’d bet the garage that their bar tab would wrap around the building twice.
“Where did Werm find her?” Rennie joined us again and set a plate of wings down on the bar.
“Double-damned if I know,” I said.
“He looks so familiar,” Connie said. “Oh, I know where I know him from. I busted him one time.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Solicitation,” Connie said, glancing at the barmaids meaningfully.
“Ouch,” Seth said.
“Well, maybe he—she…whoever, has decided to go straight,” I suggested.
The three of them rolled their eyes at me. “Or not,” I said.
The lady, dripping with emerald green sequins and spangles, began by belting out some obscure Johnny Mercer tune that I doubt the twenty-somethings in the crowd had ever heard. Still they gravitated forward to get a better look at the performer, who was strutting from one end of the stage to the other, pausing now and then to fling the ends of her fluttering feather boa behind her.
It was right about that time that Nate got a gander of Wanda with Jerry, and Jerry got a good look at Nate looking at him and Wanda. What Sally was lacking in judgment she made up for in eyesight, and she spied all three of them. Poor Huey’s googly eyes went every which way.
Seth and Connie and I just looked at one another.
“Oh, shit,” we said as one.
Twelve
William
“What did that helpless girl ever do to you?” I demanded.
The demon before me looked nonplussed. “Why, whatever do you mean, dear boy?”
“You didn’t merely feed. You dismembered her.” I peered into his eyes. I desperately wanted to understand the depths of his evil. This creature was one of my own kind. Was he the aberration or was I?
“I did it because I could,” he said. “And because it amused me.” He smiled broadly, showing a pair of stiletto-like fangs so long I realized he must be the most ancient blood drinker I’d ever encountered. I now realized why I’d seen a hint of his fangs in the public house. He wasn’t just being careless. They were hard to disguise because they were large—and he was very, very old.
“Yes, I am,” he answered my unspoken question. “Very old indeed. I walked these streets as a Roman centurion, boy. You do not wish to make me angry.”
Did he dare to speak to me of anger, that which fueled me, drove me, sustained me? If he had never seen me, he had never seen anger. I seized him by the shoulders and hurled him backward once again. This time he struck the brick wall hard enough to crack the masonry.
He looked at me in shock. “What the devil?” he said. “Why are you so strong? You can’t have been a blood drinker more than a few centuries.”
I saw no need to enlighten him about my special gift and where it had come from. Though this most ancient vampire possessed the strength of ten blood drinkers due to his years, my voodoo blood, powered by my anger, made no worthy adversaries. He might kill me anyway. But since I cared little for my life, I might as well die fighting the kind of inhumanity I despised.
I pummeled him with my fists until his face dripped with blood. Still he caught me by the throat in one viselike hand and shook me like a cat shakes a mouse. “This grows tiresome,” he said, and flung me out onto the street. He dusted himself off, his wounds already healing. He ran an index finger across a gash in his chin right before it closed, put his finger into his mouth, and sucked as an urchin would suck a stick of penny candy.
“You never answered me,” he said in the tone of a schoolmaster. “Why are you so strong?”
I scrambled to my feet and launched myself at him. I hit him in the midsection and sent him sprawling back into the alley. I continued forward and leapt on him. My palm struck something hard and I felt the outline of a weapon inside his coat. He made to grab my wrists, but I was too fast for him. I had the blade in my hand before he could stop me.
“Is this what you used on her?” I asked.
He drew back his hand to strike me, but I blocked the blow and brought the blade down on his neck. Blood spurted from his carotid artery and he clutched at it with both hands as if he could staunch the flow.
As soon as I’d cut him, a searing pain doubled me over. I was swept up in confusion. He hadn’t punched or kicked me. Luckily he was in no shape to take advantage of my distress.
I knew that his knife wound would heal as well, though not as quickly as the superficial cuts I’d inflicted on him. I was determined to sever this madman’s head.
I drew back for the killing blow but he flung me away from him. His head lolled to the side like that of a ghastly doll. Before his body collapsed back into the dirt, I could see that his head dangled from just a small scrap of sinew. As I advanced on him again I felt another thunderbolt of pain. Then I heard behind me the cry of “Murder!”
I sprang to my feet and raced down the alley as best I could despite my agony. I did not look behind me. I could hear footsteps, but knew that no mortal could catch me even in my weakened state. When I reached the head-high wooden fence at the end of the alley, I vaulted it. Cries of “God save us!” echoed behind me as I continued running through the winding passages between the tenements until I was far away.
Now my thoughts were brought back to the present by a cry of pain from Diana. It was evident to me why I had been struck by sickness all those years ago outside that Whitechapel tenement. Ulrich, the demon known then as Jack the Ripper, was my grandsire. If I had succeeded in killing him, I would most likely have died. Had he been my sire, my death would have been certain. With one generation removed, I might have survived killing him, but I doubt if I ever would have fully recovered.
Diana screamed again. The sadistic monster she was having congress with was hurting her. In that moment I knew that the love for her that I’d carried with me for centuries had died a slow and agonizing death.
When I thought of her innocence on our wedding night, her eagerness to learn how to please me with her body, I was sickened. There was no way to reconcile the woman she was in life with the blood drinker she’d become. And why should there be? Weren’t we all demons in t
he end?
I thought of myself when I was living. I’d had a kind of innocence as well. As a young man, my vision of evil was the antique, hand-illustrated picture of a serpent in the family Bible, inked by one of the monks at the local monastery. Later, when I met Reedrek, I came face-to-face with evil incarnate. But Reedrek himself was like an altar boy compared to his own sire. Ulrich was a Satan unto himself.
I wondered about we who are loath to hurt anyone beyond the temporary sting it takes to drink a human’s blood, and those vampires who relish the kill enough to veritably bathe in blood. Clearly, the vampire Diana and I were not the same kind of blood drinker, and any dream I’d had of our reconciliation in undeath was pointless. Forging an alliance with Ulrich put her solidly in the camp of evil.
What troubled me now was not knowing with certainty on which side my son, Will, resided. He’d committed unthinkable savagery, and yet he’d shown tenderness for a small, defenseless human. I must watch him carefully.
As for Jack, my other “son,” I knew without a doubt that he would retain his love for humankind even as a blood drinker. In the hundred and fifty years, give or take, since the night I first saw him, he had never disappointed me in that regard.
More screams brought my thoughts back to Diana. Where was Hugo, the vampire who had protected her for five hundred years? When they were in Savannah, they had been so inseparable that it had been difficult to get her alone to talk to her privately, but lately she’d appeared to abandon him in favor of her new benefactor. It seemed that my lady whore would open her legs for whichever male could help her to build her power and advance her ambitions.
When his grunts of release indicated their foul coupling was over, I peered back through the darkness. If I had any doubt this was the same blood drinker I’d nearly killed in the late nineteenth century, they vanished when I saw the deep scar along his throat.
“There,” Ulrich said, zipping up his trousers. “That should give you an extra boost in power for the second part of your proposal to the Council. You should be able to ‘knock them dead,’ as the humans say.”
