by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
Nightlady: U both had been through so much. Technofeak: I know. And he’s using meth like there’s no tomorrow. He gets cut from the team, drops out of school. He has a habit like $300 a friggin’ day. He’s robbin’ me. Stealing from old roommates. Selling everything he owns. Selling himself. Man, it was bad. Eventually, Nightlady, he overdoses.
Nightlady: What is a person’s limit on loss? I am so sorry, Technofreak. So that’s why U R so against drugs.
Technofreak: I try to hack into and destroy sites that promote drugs. Sites that tell kids in high school how to make meth. Sites that R just bad news. I couldn’t save my mother. I couldn’t save my brother. But I fight the good fight. From the four walls of my apartment. So, what’s your story? Nightlady: It’s complicated. A lot of secrets. I once loved a man so much that seeing him made me feel like I was spinning around, dizzy. It was so intense, and as much as I would tremble when I would see him, I also knew a peace with him I never had with anyone else. And he got addicted to drugs. At first, he just smoked to relax. Then—Well, it’s all the same story isn’t it? It all spirals down to the same place one way or another. He died. Overdosed. And since then, I have the money and the means, the will and the ability to destroy every dealer I come across. I take no prisoners. I don’t care if I die, or others die. Like you say, I fight the good fight.
Technofreak: You’re a vigilante?
Nightlady: Kind of. So what do U think of that? Of me? Do U judge me?
Technofreak: No. Let me help U. I can hack into anything. Any computer. Any system. NYPD. Federal government. I can fight the good fight from here. And you can go out there and bring them down.
Tessa nicknamed him Hack, and learned more about his special skills. Soon, he was seeking out files from the NYPD, from the medical examiner’s office and from a reporter at the Daily News who seemed to have an edge when writing stories on drug wars and crimes—he always had the scoop first. But that wasn’t all. As the first case of Manhattan Special arrived on Hack’s doorstep (if indeed he lived where he said he did) Hack revealed to her that he also combed the alternative drugs sites, and visited dozens and dozens of newsgroups and sites frequented by addicts and users. In this way, he was able to check out rumors and find out the latest street names for the club drugs that had become so fashionable—special K, Ecstasy, MDMA—as well as learn about places where buying drugs was like going to an open market.
Tessa thought back on all the information he had given her over the last couple of years. He was invaluable to her, a part of her, though they had never met. He never asked, when he read, as he surely did, about a drug dealer’s death, or a shell of a ghetto building that housed an Ecstasy operation going up in flames. He didn’t ask if she was a killer or an angel. A sinner or a saint. Somehow, he simply accepted her, and accepted that together they were a team, united in grief.
Tessa stretched across her bed. The room was windowless; a series of intricate locks decorated the door, making it akin to a “safe room” in the mansions of the rich. Like the entire apartment, the room was wired for security. Once the door was locked, the room was soundproof, silent, and, for Tessa’s purposes, safe. From daylight. From intruders.
She had memories of the sun. They were fuzzy, out-of-focus memories from her childhood. Vague flashes of sun dazzled in her daydream but conveyed no warmth. She often found herself watching the Travel Channel for its shots of the beaches of Bali or the sunny shores of Hawaii. She felt a longing for the sun on her face. Something about the fact that she couldn’t, ever, see the sun, made her crave it. It was an ache, like the mourning she felt for Hsu, and it had taken many years to grow used to it. She once heard someone say, about grief, that you never get over missing a person, you just move to different kinds of missing. That was how she felt about Hsu…and the sun. First it was a sharp pain that took her breath away, and now it was only a mild throbbing, like a dull headache.
Instead, Tessa tried to revel in the night. The night allowed her to carry out her mission. The night hid her in the shadows. It had been so long since she’d seen the sun, but the memory, like memories of Hsu, of her home in Shanghai and the gardens was still with her, however faded.
The phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“Are you feeling remorseful, my Buddhist friend?”
“Shut up, Lily.”
Lily and Tessa were, in a sense, sisters, both “sired” by the same vampire, Marco. Both under similar circumstances, in London, though Tessa was the daughter of a landholder, and Lily a servant. They had escaped Marco as his appetites grew stronger and the sense of evil about him increased. But, though friends, their similarities ended there.
Tessa was determined not to lose what threads of humanity she had, however tenuous. She would never become like Marco. She embraced Buddhism, in her own fashion, a spiritual mixed bag, and meditated and chanted nightly to keep her appetites from consuming her. Lily, on the other hand, found Tessa’s sympathy for humanity, her quest to eradicate drugs, amusing. Lily also wasn’t like Marco. She didn’t radiate darkness. She enjoyed Tessa’s company, as well as singing at the Night Flight Club on Tuesdays and some weekends. She would feed on whatever victim suited her, but out of deference to Tessa, she kept to Tessa’s odd code: dealers, pushers, pimps, murderers, child abusers. Lily’s reasons weren’t as pure, but she was along for the ride.
“You’re always such a bitch when you just wake up. All I’m asking is, are we going hunting tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Meet you on the roof of your place at midnight?”
“To fight the good fight.”
“To feed, Tessa. To feed. But if you want a fight, you know I like kicking ass as much as the next vamp.”
“Meet you at midnight. It’s a full moon.”
Tessa rose, checked both her watch and three clocks in her room, both battery-powered and electric, to confirm it was truly dark out, and unlocked the bedroom door, turning off the alarm. She stepped out into the hallway, which still afforded her shielding from the sun, and then the living room—with its custom blackout blinds. The place was in total darkness. She turned on a Tiffany lamp and then, walking through to the kitchen, the halogens that illuminated the kitchen island.
Her eyesight was keen, as were some extra senses that let her maneuver in sheer blackness, but she found lighting her loft was comforting in some way, a connection to her old life. The life before she could see in darkness. Before she lived in darkness.
She sat down at the breakfast bar and turned on her laptop, then scrolled through her e-mail for anything from Hack. Over time, she had come to really care for him. She had even offered to pay a top Manhattan shrink to do home visits, to the tune of five hundred dollars an hour, in the hope of curing Hack of his agoraphobia. But after a time, she had just accepted Hack, as he did her.
He, of course, did an Internet search on her, she learned later. He could find nothing on Tessa Van Doren. Sure, there were gossip column snippets where she was always termed “the elusive Ms. Van Doren,” “the stunning nightclub owner” or “the beautiful lady of New York’s nightlife.” But after that, nothing. No college records. No driver’s license—she never did learn to drive. No record of anything. She wondered what he thought; once he even called her “Lady Dracula” because she never ventured out in daylight. But he said nothing, just as she no longer asked Hack when he had last eaten real food or tried to step foot in his hallway.
Hack had forwarded her a couple of news articles on a new “club drug” that seemed to be making the rounds. Deemed more intense than Ecstasy, it allowed party-goers to dance all night—and make love all night. They might also die, because the new drug was so untested, so pure, that guessing how much to take in one hit was like Russian roulette.
Tessa stretched her arms skyward, then picked up the remote and tuned in to the news on her plasma flat-screen TV. Then she rose, showered and dressed in her hunting clothes. She kept those clothes in an armoire under lock and
key. Black leather pants and vest, black leather gloves, black boots with steel toes. A dagger strapped to her hip. She braided her long black hair. The braid fell halfway down her back. She added black makeup around her eyes so that she bore no resemblance to Tessa Van Doren, the elegant mistress of the velvet rope. She was someone else. She was a huntress.
Chapter 3
At midnight, the view from the rooftop of Tessa’s building afforded her a look at the hordes of party-goers vying to get into her club. They were all well-dressed, and long, black stretch limos lined the street. For club kids, getting beyond the velvet rope was like reaching Nirvana. Wind whipped at Tessa’s face, but she stared out into the night, waiting to feel the arrival of Lily.
Tessa’s senses operated on a heightened level. That was another reason her master bedroom was silent, vaultlike. She could hear minor annoyances like the drip from a faucet or the far-off beeping horn of a yellow cab. So, in a city that never slept and was never quiet, she sought silence, a retreat from the way in which every noise reverberated—including her own pulse, which grew louder when she needed to feed.
She felt Lily before she ever saw her. Both of them had the ability to leap from rooftop to rooftop, looking, to those below, like flashes of black on the darkness of the sky. They moved so fast that anyone who saw them and looked again would see nothing, and would assume a trick of the eye, a flutter of pigeons taking flight.
“Lily.” Tessa smiled as her friend landed silently beside her.
“Tessa, you look ready for the hunt. Shall we fly?”
“In a minute.” Tessa stared up at the night sky. “I was enjoying the stars. The stars and the moon. That’s all we have.”
“You’re always so dramatic.”
They were a study in contrasts. Tessa, dark and green-eyed, with pale skin and aristocratic features; Lily, a platinum blonde with spiked hair and a diamond nose-piercing. She wore purplish lipstick, and her cornflower-blue eyes gazed out from beneath heavy mascara and black eyeliner. She wore a black scarf over her head to hide the platinum color, attempting to blend in with the night, though little spikes still poked out from beneath, fighting the confines of the scarf. On Lily’s right breast, just showing in the cleavage of her black jumpsuit, she had a tattoo of a Chinese symbol. She had asked Tessa to come with her and draw the symbol for the tattoo artist, a burly former Hell’s Angel called Boulder with a parlor down by New York University. The symbol Lily chose was for revenge. In Lily’s case, she had no desire to pay back drug dealers for the havoc they wreaked on humankind. Instead, Lily wanted to kill Marco, and she knew, as Tessa did, that eventually he would find them. But this time they would be ready for him. This time it was him…or the two of them.
They stared up at the night sky, its stars obscured by cloud cover and the reflected lights of Manhattan. Tessa invoked Buddha and asked for forgiveness. Then they leaped over the alleyway to the next roof, seemingly frozen in the air, and landed almost in slow motion.
“Race you.” Lily smiled over at her friend, not even breathless. She bore no resemblance to the fair-haired, rosy-cheeked, naive servant girl she had once been. The modern Lily loved to shock. She liked to race. She liked speed and danger and power. She liked to walk into a room in over-the-knee boots and a miniskirt and to straddle a man—any man—who was appealing to her. Lily liked to tempt and tease. And now she wanted to race across the rooftops of Manhattan.
“You know I love a challenge,” Tessa said. The two friends eyed each other. Then Tessa winked.
Without another word, they flew. They ran across rooftops in fast strides, a blur of black, then took huge leaps to the next building, racing on, faster and faster. Occasionally, Lily let out a squeal of delight. She loved rushes of adrenaline. She had even been skydiving, at night. Lily had once even convinced Tessa to break into the confines of the Bronx Zoo at two o’clock in the morning one November, where they had stealthily crept from the giraffes to the wolves, to the edges of the pride of lions. They had sat there, in the grasses, and listened to the lonely roars of the lions, knowing the lions would prefer the grassy plains of Africa, just as they would prefer the daylight and delights of their own home country.
Lily, especially, loved to leap between buildings, delighting in the one gift being a vampire afforded her. In her immortality, her fears of lifetimes ago, fears of height and darkness, and even of sex, no longer mattered. She was invincible. She was powerful.
Tessa, though, always beat her friend. For a time, decades before, the two women had been separated. In their time apart, Lily had succumbed to her appetites, and she had lived the hedonistic life—or walking death—of a vampire. But in that time apart, Tessa, instead, had honed her fighting skills. She fenced. She practiced ancient martial arts and swordplay. She acquired samurai swords and ancient weapons and learned how to use them. Those years of training had paid off with a precision in her fighting skills and an effortless grace in her flights.
When Tessa was first sired, she had no skills as a fighter, even less skill as a huntress. But she would be ready to face down Marco this time. He would never again imprison her—in body, mind or spirit. She swore this on Hsu’s soul.
Tessa and Lily continued their race until they reached the very edges of a scarred area of Alphabet City, those New York City streets with letters in their addresses. Long a place inhabited by fringe elements of society, it had a rough reputation, though certain buildings and streets had been rehabilitated during Mayor Giuliani’s term, when cleaning up New York had been his vow and community policing had brought results. But Tessa and Lily also knew apartments that housed crack dens.
Standing on a rooftop, they looked down, watched cars hurtle down the street—New York City drivers were fearless. Outside the building across the street, two homeless men were passed out, leaning against each other. A cluster of men nearby seemed to be keeping watch on the front door of that building. Hack had told Tessa he’d tracked the address from the file of a crack addict arrested eight weeks ago.
A fairly steady stream of traffic entered the building, its windows fronting the street blacked out, boarded up, or simply pitch-black on black in the darkness.
“You ever think…” Lily asked, “that if we weren’t so intent on doing what we do, fighting this kind of crazy shit, that we might be just like them? Just drugging to get away from what it is we are?”
Tessa shrugged. “You know my story. If I didn’t do what I do, I think I would climb on the roof of my building one day and wait for the sun to kiss my cheek…and then kill me.”
“That’s a scary thought.” Lily shuddered.
“No scarier than letting your soul get swallowed alive by the smoke curling up from a crack pipe. When it was opium, they called it ‘chasing the dragon.’ That’s all it is.”
“You ready?”
Tessa nodded. “Dealer’s name is Baby Rock.”
“Poetic.”
“I know. A regular William Wordsworth.”
“Let’s do it, Tess.”
Tessa nodded, and they leaped from their vantage point to the brick building across the street, undetected, as part of the wind that seemed to pick up, howling through the canyons between apartment houses.
Using the fire escape, they entered through a hall window on the third floor of the building. Hack’s information was that Baby Rock kept a place on the third floor; actually, Hack said Baby Rock kept all of the third floor.
Tessa and Lily crept down the hallway in synchronized silence. Tessa knew they were as invisible as shadows to the crack addicts, some slumped against walls that were painted a dull, almost military gray. Tessa and Lily paused outside the door of what had once been 3B, but which now was simply the entry to the maws of hell for anyone caught in the throes of addiction. Baby Rock had quite a business, Hack said. Crack wasn’t all of it. He had a veritable stable of whores who worked the streets in exchange for drugs. Lily had seen their type before, often leaving their children in the care of relatives or the ov
erburdened foster care system, or even on nearby sidewalks, sleepy and hungry. These women were hollow-eyed, as much zombies as Marco’s slaves. She pitied them—but pitied their children more, often pressing money into the hands of sleeping youngsters, hoping beyond hope that they could escape this life lived in darkness and emptiness. She knew what darkness was like. She knew what it was like to lose your soul to it through no choice of your own.
Tessa and Lily silently read each other’s signals, then Lily kicked in the door in one swift motion—Bam!—while Tessa immediately flew at one of the drug-addled bodyguards of Baby Rock, crushing his right kneecap with a sickening crunch of bone with her boot as she landed a strong roundhouse kick. He screamed in agony and fell to the ground, spitting fury.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa sensed and saw, in the same moment, two men drawing semiautomatics up near their chests. Bullets flew as crack-dazed addicts shrieked and fell to the ground, taking cover beneath tables and behind ripped easy chairs and stained couches. Panic and confusion reigned in the room as gunfire blazed, but Tessa and Lily moved with practiced, methodical, cold fury.
Lily spun with such speed, she became just a blurred whirlwind, ripping the gun from one man’s hands as she broke his ribs with an accurately landed elbow. She sank her teeth into the soft flesh of his neck. Tessa knew that Lily always felt empowered with the first kill, knowing that the fear generated by this act alone would stun, then scatter most of the rest of their prey—in this case the foot soldiers of Baby Rock.
Tessa watched as the second gunman aimed for her and let loose a blast of ammunition that echoed in her ears. Her vision was so accurate she could see bullets in the air. She hit the floor and rolled to avoid being shot, even as she felt her canines growing from the very roots of her bones, felt the pain of that transformation. She rolled and then rose to standing, seizing the shocked man. She snapped back his neck by pulling on his hair, and bit his throat. His last words were a prayer for salvation. Even as she tasted him, she knew he had killed many times in the past. Maybe it was the ability of killer to sense killer. Salvation would elude him—at least this time around.
