Turek was permitted to move freely about his little crypt except when it was time to sweep out and replace the straw, at which point half a dozen burly guards armed with torches— for they’d been told of the lunatic count’s aversion to fire— would lock him into manacles and leg irons embedded in the walls of weeping rock. There were no windows in his cell, just an iron door with a barred opening and a slot through which his food was pushed by the few guards who knew of his existence, and who were forbidden to speak to him or to speak to others about him.
The food wasn’t bad—they fed Turek what they fed the other prisoners—but it wasn’t enough to sustain him. Or di nary food is low-grade fuel to an Upír. It will keep his bodily functions slogging along, but without regular infusions of high test—without rich human blood—he will grow steadily more emaciated and dehydrated, as indeed Turek did.
By July 14, 1789, when the Bastille was besieged by a horde of rabid revolutionaries looking for weapons, Turek was gaunt and frail, with a ragged beard down to his waist and a great shock of long, strawlike hair. Even in his little subterranean wormhole, he could hear the muffled drone of a huge, excited crowd surrounding the prison. He heard the pounding of battering rams and bursts of gunfire, sometimes followed by shrieks and groans.
Isolated as he was from the world at large, he had no idea at the time who these attackers were, only that, for some unfathomable reason, they seemed to want in. After several hours of this assault, there came a triumphant roar and the thunder of hundreds of feet overhead as the attackers swarmed into the building. He heard people yelling about freeing the prisoners and realized he had an opportunity to escape from that stinking hole if only he could make his presence known. Standing at his door, he screamed through the little barred window until, at long last, a man and a woman appeared in the torchlit gloom of the antechamber beyond his cell.
The woman, thick-boned and with a great froth of red hair, carried a bloody ax and a ring of keys; her cohort, a large knife. He was berating her for having killed one of their fellow vainqueurs for those keys just so that she might have the glory of finding the mammoth cache of gunpowder, a dozen tons or more, rumored to be secreted somewhere within those thick stone walls. He called her a murderess who would get her comeuppance when he revealed what she had done. She called him a sniveling, traitorous coward.
The man barred Turek’s cell door with his body when she went to unlock it. “This one’s name isn’t on the list. We don’t know who he is or what he’s done.”
“I made myself the enemy of an important person,” Turek said in a voice rusty from disuse and all that screaming. It was the truth, if only a minuscule portion of it. “They don’t want anyone to know about me.”
“You see?” the woman told her companion. “We’ll be heroes if we free him. He’s unjustly imprisoned, a martyr.”
“Or a very great villain who is also a great liar. You’re mad to want to unlock that door. You’re mad to have killed Guillaume. I’m going to report you to the Assembly, and then we shall see how heroic you are.”
“Pascal,” she said softly, reaching out to stroke his cheek. “Put down that knife, mon chéri. You wouldn’t use that on me, would you? You wouldn’t hurt a woman.”
He hesitated, then lowered his knife and started to say something.
She stepped back and swung her ax, catching it in his neck. He fell, twitching and kicking, but not a sound issued from him. She kicked him out of the way, unlocked the door, and swung it open.
She said, “You’re a free man, comrade. How long have they kept you here?”
“Forty years.”
“Mon dieu! You haven’t seen the sun in forty years?”
“And glad of it. It’s not the sun I’ve been craving.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
Turek grabbed her head and slammed it against the wall just hard enough to knock her out without cracking her skull. He managed to get her wrists locked into the manacles hanging from the wall over her head, thus lifting her off her feet. She started screaming as she came to and realized what was happening to her, so he gagged her with a strip of blanket before he began to feed.
She struggled at first, of course, especially when he shoved her skirts up and rammed himself into her, but then the blood-haze overtook her, and she fucked him with wanton gusto. What sheer heaven it was to relieve four decades of pent-up hunger and lust as he drained her dry.
Thus rejuvenated, Turek used Pascal’s knife to hack off his hair and beard, stole the murdered man’s sans-culotte revolutionary garb—pantaloons, short jacket, clogs, and red “cap of liberty”—and disappeared among the howling throng.
The Anton Turek who’d been “liberated” from that hellhole was not quite the same Anton Turek who’d been locked up there four decades before. The lingering remnants of civilized humanity that he’d retained following his vampiric conversion in 1348 had withered in the face of his consuming fury.
He had thought about Lili ceaselessly during that interminable captivity, her taunts echoing in his skull, stoking his rage. You’re just some vile little bloodsucking insect, a mosquito with delusions of magnificence… a bedbug, scuttling about in the dark, antennae twitching at the scent of blood…
He’d spent hundreds of hours, thousands, imagining how he would end that bitch’s existence if he ever crossed paths with her again. With most Follets, the only sure method of execution was thorough combustion, with the flesh not just charred but roasted past the point of regeneration. Almost all vampires were susceptible not only to fire but to the ultraviolet light emitted by the sun. Some vampire subraces had other weaknesses, as well. There were bloodsuckers, for example, who could be killed by decapitation, by driving a stake through their hearts, or by other, more esoteric means. Turek and Galiana were more fortunate; they could be done in only by fire or lengthy exposure to sunlight.
Lili’s only Achilles’ heel, as far as Turek knew, was fire. He had envisioned a hundred different scenarios in which she would burn to death slowly, writhing in well-deserved agony.
For some time after his release from the Bastille, he’d tried to locate Château de la Grotte Cachée in order to exact his revenge on her, but it was remarkably secluded for a castle of that size, tucked deep into a valley in the volcanic highlands of Auvergne. Despite his previous visit, he’d found himself utterly at a loss when confronted with the tangle of unmarked roads that crisscrossed the densely forested region—which was particularly irksome, as he’d always prided himself on his sense of direction. The local inhabitants were useless. Time and again, he heard the same refrain, accompanied by a Gallic shrug. Un château? Non, je suis désolé, monsieur. Je ne sais pas un château.
After an exhaustive and perplexing search—it was as if Grotte Cachée had been sucked into the very earth—he’d finally come to accept that he would never see Lili again, never make her pay for what she’d done to him.
And now, here she was at last, all these many years later, quite literally leading him right to her doorstep. There were no thick stone walls to hide behind here, no Swiss Guards to do her bidding. There was Elic, who had proven a formidable enemy in the past, preternaturally strong and determined to protect Lili at all costs, but if Turek was clever, he could think of some way to take that bastard out.
And then, at long last, Ilutu-Lili would be his to do with as he pleased. He would torment her as Galiana tormented her pigeons. He would make her suffer. He would revel in her screams of anguish.
And he would smile as the flames reduced her, after thousands of years of existence, into cold, gray bone and ash.
OU GOTTA BE KIDDING,” Doug said when Elic and Lili paused before a gray-painted, age-scoured wooden door, sans doorknob, which was squeezed ignominiously between a St. Mark’s Place brownstone and a brick apartment building with a record store on the ground floor. “This is your place?”
As Turek watched from behind a tree across the street, grateful for the nearly full moon and cloudless sky
, Elic pressed his thumb to a metal plate on the door jamb. Lili produced a remote control from her clutch purse and pushed a series of buttons, causing a little green light on the top edge of the door to wink.
“Holy shit,” Doug said as the door popped open an inch, painting a ribbon of light onto the sidewalk. “What is this, like your secret spy lair or something?”
“It’s Penumbra Court, a private residential quarter,” Elic said as he swung the door open, gesturing them through. It was a heavy steel door; the gray-painted wood was just a façade.
Turek squinted, trying to see beyond the doorway, but all he could make out was a weathered old brick wall and cobblestone paving. At a casual glance, the door would appear to provide access to the apartment building housing the record store. Looking up to the roofline, however, he saw a tangle of razor wire about five feet wide where the roof above the door should have been.
The door clicked shut. Turek sprinted across the street, scanning the area to make sure he was alone. After hauling himself up by the pipe frame supporting the record store’s awning, he clambered swiftly up the building’s four-story fire escape and onto the roof.
Galiana probably could have leapt the whole five stories from a standing start. With a backflip and a silent ten-point dismount thrown in for good measure. Turek had seen her bound along rooftops like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat; once, she leapt from one roof to another across the Champs-Élysées. She called that kind of shit her “wireless wire fu,” like in those cheesy kung fu movies she couldn’t get enough of. Turek called it obnoxious hot-dogging.
Not to her face, of course.
From above, Turek could see that the brownstone next door and the apartment building on which he stood were separated by an alleyway, to which access was gained by the knob-less gray door with the state-of-the-art locks. A series of motion sensor lights turned on one by one as Elic guided the others down the narrow passage, leading Nicky by her leash as he dug a key ring out of his jeans pocket.
The alley opened into a courtyard so heavily treed that Turek could barely make out the three-story town houses huddled around it. Tucked within the embrace of the surrounding buildings—all of them, including that on which Turek stood, rimmed in razor wire with no windows overlooking the court—the little cluster of houses would be indiscernible from either St. Mark’s Place to the south or East Ninth Street to the north.
Turek could see little of the houses aside from four gabled, slate-shingled mansard roofs, their flat surfaces carpeted with roof gardens of juniper, boxwoods, and holly. All of the plantings were conifers, like the trees in the courtyard, most of the latter towering over the roofs. Shrouded by evergreens, Penumbra Court would look like any other East Village backyard on one of those satellite maps, even in the dead of winter.
“Dave will go apeshit when I tell him about this place,” Doug told Nicky.
“Dave?” Elic said.
“My buddy writes this blog about the little hidden remnants of old New York that people walk right by and don’t even notice. You won’t mind if I bring him here and let him take some pictures.”
“You won’t remember where this is,” said Lili, exchanging a look with Elic as they paused at the end of the alley.
“Sure I will.”
“I don’t think so.” Elic touched Doug’s forehead, then Nicky’s.
They both blinked.
Nicky frowned at Doug. “What did you say?”
“What?”
“You said something.”
“No, I didn’t. And the next time you speak out of turn, or fail to address me as ‘Master,’ you get five hours gagged and bound in the fucking corner.”
Ah, Turek thought. So his failure to locate the château all those years ago wasn’t entirely due to having inexplicably lost his sense of direction, nor had it been swallowed up into the valley. It would seem that Elic’s bag of tricks included the ability to impose selective amnesia upon those who may have learned just a bit too much for comfort.
The foliage muffled the group’s conversation as they disappeared into it. Turek had to strain to hear Elic say “That’s our house, the one with the red door. It was the first one put up here in the early eighteen forties. The others were built later, for friends.”
“Who lives in them now?” Doug asked.
“Individuals who value their privacy, as we do. Entrez vows.”
A door creaked open, and a few seconds later, Turek heard it close. Singling out the closest of the tall spruces, he backed away from the edge of the building, mentally calculating distance, speed, and trajectory. He took a running leap, feeling a snag in his right jeans leg as he almost cleared the razor wire.
Gottverdammt. Turek grabbed a branch and held on, grimacing as a barrage of spruce needles scourged his face and hands. His right loafer slipped off and thunk-thunk-thunked to the ground as he scrambled for a foothold. The shoes were no doubt scratched beyond recognition. Ditto the jacket; the black silk scarf he’d worn insouciantly draped over it had flown off in midleap and fluttered to the ground.
Turek paused for a moment, watching and listening, but his blundering foray into this exclusive little enclave had evidently gone unnoticed. Of course, it was late at night. Even if the other residents of Penumbra Court were Follets, as Turek suspected, they were probably fast asleep. To his knowledge, it was only the Vampire race that was primarily nocturnal—and even among their ranks, there were those, like Turek and Galiana, who could go about during the day with minimal discomfort if they were properly outfitted, especially if it was cloudy or they could keep to the shade.
Vampires had varying tolerances to ultraviolet light on their skin and eyes. With some, it was like what you see in movies, with the poor doomed bloodsucker basically frying to a crisp in short order. Thankfully, the Upír, while still vulnerable to direct sunlight, and therefore repulsed by it, experienced a less dramatic physiological reaction. Most of them had to be exposed to it with no protection for at least five minutes before their skin began to blister. With prolonged exposure— each individual’s UV vulnerability varied—came a progressive, systemic sun poisoning known as solar cremation. As with exposure to fire, once the body was damaged past a certain point, recovery was impossible.
For this reason, in the past, the Upír had traditionally slept between sunrise and sundown and done their prowling at night. However, recent technological advances enabled them to mingle with humans during daylight hours with little risk to their health—specifically, high-SPF sunscreen and either good-quality sunglasses or glasses with photochromic lenses, the kind that react to UV rays by turning dark. Turek, who favored the latter, owned upward of fifty pairs of designer frames fitted with nonprescription Transitions lenses; he never left the house, even at night, without a pair tucked away somewhere on his person.
He climbed down, located and replaced his scarf, shoved his foot back in the loafer, dusted off the needles, and finger-combed his hair so that the long, layered front fringe—he hated the word “bangs” in relation to men’s hair—was swept off to the side, where it belonged, and not hanging in his eyes.
Dark figures shifted in a pair of ground-floor windows of the house with the red door. By their glow, Turek could see that the courtyard was actually a little deep-shade garden, with vines and flowers growing around the base of each tree and iron benches on the cobblestone paths winding this way and that. The house itself, like the other three, was the type of bourgeois brick town house that had been all the rage in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, more majestic in design than in size, although it appeared to be the largest of the four.
Turek crept closer to the house, crouching behind a rhododendron bush between the two windows, which were hung with semisheer yellow curtains that afforded a soft-focus view of the room and its occupants. Through the right-hand window he saw a pair of tall bookcases bracketing a fireplace with a painting over it; through the left, more bookcases and a cozy little arrangement of Victorian furniture—couch, coffee
table, and a couple of chairs, all upholstered in dark green leather.
Lili and the other couple were in that area of the room, she sorting through bottles at a liquor cabinet as Doug settled into one of the chairs, loosening his tie while he surveyed the room. He’d taken the pink leash back from Elic, and he tugged Nicky down onto the floor at his feet. She sat with her legs curled under her, hands in her lap.
Turek ducked as Elic whipped open the curtains over the window he was looking through, flipped the lock, and tugged it open.
“Good idea,” Lili said. “It is a little stuffy in here. I hope no one minds, but I’m suffocating in this velvet.” She slid down the side zipper of her dress, pulled it over her head, and tossed it over the back of a chair.
“Single malt?” she asked Doug.
He nodded, gaping as she poured a couple of fingers of Cragganmore into a glass.
Turek gaped, too. Lili’s undergarments, all black, consisted of a g-string beneath a tube of stretch lace that hugged her like skin from the strapless push-up cups to the hip-length hem, to which sheer black stockings were attached by means of satin garters. With those fuck-me eyes, the ornate gold earrings, and the sex-kitten heels, she looked about fifty times hotter than the hottest Victoria’s Secret model Turek had ever seen.
She handed the glass of scotch to Doug, who stroked her hip as he took it, his boner stretching the fly of those elegant trousers.
Elic opened the other window and paused, frowning out into the night. Turek heard him take a breath in through his nose. “Smells like someone spilled about a gallon of Bijan for Men out there somewhere,” he said.
A gallon? Turek was wearing Bijan, all right, but just a few splashes applied hours ago, when he was dressing to go out. Its scent had long since faded.
Some Follets had heightened senses. Lili’s eyesight, for example, was extraordinary. It would appear that Elic, like Galiana, had the nose of a bloodhound.
In the Garden of Sin Page 15
