When the Priest finally drew his hand back and turned to leave, Anastasia picked up the map and narrowed her gaze on the circle upon it.
“Why there? Why me?”
The Priest had already vanished from her sight but his words echoed through the rotted corpse of Piney Point Hospital. “Before we leave our fate entirely to that boy, you will search the treasures of the last vampire kingdom.”
Chapter 24
I Have Three Sisters
This is the fairy tale that Uncle Priest had all vampire children memorize about our kind:
If there was an actual creator, he did not take nothing and make it something. The universe has a default order to it - the “patient zero” starting point of which is always black.
Darkness.
My ancestors were quite satisfied with this. These floating bits of unpolished rock they lived on in the jetsam of the cosmic wake.
They moved about easily through it and enough sustenance clung to the rocks for them to live. Our religion was quiet ever-night, rock crags, deep caves. My people were not interested in the least in the human god.
But they were powerless to stop his loud crashing as the flame lit about the curtain and the light beamed down burning my ancestor's naked flesh to cinder. They lost so many then. Daylight came without warning and we've had a problem with god ever since.
Most killed themselves, refused to run or couldn't stop staring. It was hard for the first to look away.
Yet the voice came, not your god, but the chronicler. God was too busy making his stars, fixated on them just as our ancestors were.
The chronicler called into the caves. The world was bright, yet still quiet and he did not have to speak loudly.
“I am Claushtane. If you hear my words know this: the ark awaits. This place is no longer for you. This is your only chance to flee.”
Some left; we know not where he took them. Those who remained would venture out only in night from then on. They would watch the new monkeys as they slept, fat on their mother's warm milk. Covered in hair like the new beasts born all about the new world. Their daylight dripped down upon the ancestor's mushroom ambrosia, killing all they found sacred.
The ion-laced sunbeams shriveled what was called the knowledge well, the food, and our ancestor's very minds. The new monkeys thrived during this time of agony.
These hairbags of bone and flesh that learned to stand on two legs as our people did, ever mocking. The bastard man was ever disgusting to the first of our race – but how best to rid the world of humanity was the question.
“We will make them our food,” said the first of my race.
The caves became noisy with the sounds of our ancestors filing sharp their teeth.
Our people have been called many names. Nightspawn, demon, lich, goblin.
Vampire.
These are labels given us as you monkeys followed our lead and sucked the mushroom and fruit we brought forth to you, fattening you up.
My people tempting you in your gardens. Making you see that which you should not have known. Realizing that your world is not as perfect as you lie yourself into thinking.
Our darkness lived first, long before there was light. This darkness will live alone again when light has passed.
II
They were not at all hard for Anastasia to find. They had left a trail of blood, money and hipster glitter that even the most mentally challenged monkey detective could have sniffed and scratched out. Either they were far too arrogant thinking it didn't matter or much too stupid to possibly call themselves Anastasia's relations.
Sadly, they were Anastasia's sisters.
The humans had constructed the place and left it for rot as all of their palaces and wonders eventually do. Vampires build nothing; they have always let the apes do the heavy lifting and moved in when humans are least expecting or too tired or enamored to care.
This place had been one of their hospitals, or an asylum. To Anastasia's kind there really wasn't much difference beyond the words on the marquee.
Clea had let herself get fat. Really fat. She met Anastasia in the dark hallway and barely seemed to have the energy for a sisterly exchange. She gnawed the blood from something that Anastasia thought might be a femur. Her face was stained in blood and she offered it to Anastasia as if they had just gotten into the late night Thanksgiving leftovers.
Anastasia thought she might belch up iron wine when she opened her mouth, but actual words somehow found their way from her hole. “Anastasia, you look starved.”
She stank.
“Clea, you are horrendously large. Like a pervert farmer dressed a lusty pig in a wedding gown.”
Clea continued to gnaw and the insults passed over her dirty-red hair. “I've missed you too.”
Anastasia barely stopped for the exchange and continued down the corridor past overturned gurneys and rats running for whatever the fat piglet dropped.
“You're not allowed here you know.” Clea strained to raise her voice, as if she talked too loud she might burst like an opera singer's wine glass.
“I can't imagine why not. We've always been so close.”
Anastasia pushed a vampire boy down who tried to stand in her way. He wore leather pants and jackboots and carried a spear.
“This is your sentry?” Anastasia looked back at Clea.
Clea smiled. “One of many, our army grows.”
The boy hissed at Anstasia with his little fangs and pierced nipples. He wore a gold chain and had a blonde mohawk.
Anastasia took little pleasure in it all, even when her boot heel pushed into his eye socket. He was so frail, and Anastasia thought maybe she was getting fat too when her full weight turned his snarling, crying head into a broken gourd.
The blood leaking from what remained was black and overused. They weren't hunting; they weren't smart enough to hunt. They were sharing each other's blood. Cannibalizing and trading, passing sap from one to the next. Blood grows stale, and this army was running on slim rations.
It made them diseased and slow. Anastasia could regard none of these new warriors as her kin; they were a cancer.
A parasite unto themselves.
Clea seemed sad but did nothing to stop Anastasia. “He was my favorite,” she intoned with as much emotion as she could summon.
“Well Clea, darling, you can eat him now.”
Clea seemed to be into that idea, and Anastasia moved on with her sister in tow.
A waiting room had been fashioned into a forward nest, but the rest of the great vampire army had most likely heard all the screams and crying from Mohawk and decided to not cross Anastasia's path.
From shadowed alcoves, Anastasia heard her name whispered and got a delicious chuckle from it all.
The recreation room was their throne chamber. Fitting, as all they seemed to be good for was to relax and siphon dirty blood from one another. They were no better to Anastasia than the rats licking the runoff from the walls.
Sabiya had kept herself up and this pleased Anastasia. The beautiful Persian vampire was Anastasia's older sister, all of them from the same father but different human women who had either sold themselves into the life as would a drug addict or had been stolen from the humans and never missed. Their mothers were playmates of the month, and eventually they all conceded to the births willingly.
Some took more prodding than others. Sabiya's mother had been royalty somewhere down the line and the older sister had always regarded herself as a princess and leader of the gang of kindred schoolgirls. At one point, she had been better at simply everything, and Anastasia regarded her as the most cunning among them. This until Anastasia realized Sabiya wasn't cunning in the least and only unashamedly evil.
It wasn't hard to surpass her in that regard once Anastasia made her mind up. When the praise came to the younger sister, Sabiya loathed Anastasia, which made both of them very happy as it gave Sabiya someone to hate with all her putrid heart and it gave Anastasia giddy goosebumps knowing she was the obj
ect of such tremendous hatred.
Sabiya was taller than Anastasia was, but most of that had to do with the shoes she chose. She wore a very expensive gown and a tiara that she'd stolen from who knows where. There was a lot of gold going on in her outfit and everything else going on with it had to do with accentuating her legs, her cleavage and her ass, thankfully unseen, as it rested in the throne of her high backed leather chair.
Sabiya always had the prettiest blue eyes, and still did, although she wasn't getting enough good blood to keep her complexion smooth, and Anastasia's own dark eyes were crisply focused on the tiny crow's feet around Sabiya's eyes.
The bags under them weren't hidden well with the make-up. She wasn't sleeping right, again mild blood poisoning. Not enough physical activity: she was sending her underlings out to hunt and they were doing a bad job of it.
Were it not for her sheer will and the off chance that Anastasia would come stumbling into her wasp's nest one night, she'd already be twice as fat as Clea.
But the sisters always knew they would see one another again.
Sabiya straightened her tiara.
“Anastasia, I place you under arrest.”
“Sister, you look…” Anastasia searched for the right word. “Unrested.”
They both smiled to one another. “You are an outlaw and traitor to our race and you are most unwelcome here in the last kingdom of the Vampires.”
Anastasia casually looked around. “Is that what this place is?”
“You know full well that we are the last. Had you not burned down our home and our brothers and sisters and by your own hand killed our Master, we would be years ahead in our mission. Therefore you can leave now.”
Sabiya waved her hand at Anastasia as if to shoo her back up the corridor.
“Mission. It sounds even sillier coming from your lips than it does his.” Anastasia smiled big; they both knew who she was referring to.
The last sister, Augusta, found the back of Sibiya's chair. She looked the most well physically of all of them, but the craziness she had mostly kept to herself when they were children was unrestricted in this place. If their new home had not been an asylum in its previous life, it most certainly was now.
Augusta was long and beautiful, tall like an old time movie starlet with hair straight and white flowing down towards the floor to match the gown of the same shade. Augusta had always focused on the death side of the vampire nature much more than the human part passed to them from their mothers. Her own mother had been a psychiatrist, which was ironic considering she was bat-shit insane. “We never were alive,” she declared to Anastasia one evening when they were children. “We are ghosts of changing form.”
Augusta smiled and waved and made the hand motion of a telephone at her ear mouthing the words, “Call me.”
Anastasia's sister, the Persian witch Sibiya, rose from her chair. “How is Billy Purgatory?”
Anastasia snarled.
“The Master always blamed him for the problems which plagued us. Maybe one day you'll actually kill him and set us free. Of course, you've been at that a long time, sister.”
“Billy Purgatory has little to do with why you hold court as you do, or how the Master pretended with his grandiose plans to overtake the humans and rule the world. Do any of you even know anything about Billy Purgatory?”
Augusta chimed in, “The Anti-Christ to us vampires, that's Billy Purgatory.”
“What does that even mean, Augusta?” Anastasia asked disgustedly.
Augusta made the 'call me' motion again.
Sabiya continued to ramble. “We've taught our army that he is the dragon and he must be vanquished. They are most excited to lock swords with his armies.”
Anastasia turned from her and clenched a fist. “He's an unemployed skateboarder who has no army. Billy Purgatory is not the devil of the end times and had nothing whatsoever to do with anything that happened to vampires. How you live at this moment in your kingdom under that dime store tiara is far more a problem than that literal grease monkey.”
Clea piped in, “You were right. She's still all into him.”
Sibiya smiled and Augusta laughed. “Oh devils! You totally want to have his babies!”
“And that, Anastasia,” sang the queen of the blood hive, “is why you are an enemy of the state.”
“You realize that it was your all-perfect Master who sent me after him in the first place?” Anastasia crossed her arms and felt her nails grow sharp.
“You realize, Anastasia, that it was you who barred our doors, set our Master and our kingdom on fire, and watched it all burn. So, who's having you follow him now?”
Augusta beamed. “You know Anastasia, I'm in love too.” She caressed an imaginary heart in the air between her breasts.
“I have FIVE new masters.” Anastasia shot a cutting look. If Sibiya didn't know this already, then the shame that they had come to recruit Anastasia and not her would be crushing.
And crushing it was as Sibiya, enraged, sliced her own throne in half. Augusta held onto the portion she had been leaning on and watched the rest of the chair collapse into a broken mess.
“I have an army!” Sabiya's fangs slid into kill-mode.
Anastasia's laugh dripped with satisfaction.
“Well, then you should have little trouble overtaking the demon-child Purgatory and laying waste to the humans. I applaud this campaign. When does it begin?”
Sibiya's eyes grew darker. “It is well underway.”
“Its stealth is impressive, because I see no movement. Only grand talk. The humans will never know what hit them.” Anastasia's expression mocked her sister as she began to walk further into the lair of value-bin evil.
“Get out of my house! You are not welcome here!”
“Come stop me or lower your voice. You're screaming louder than the caged, and that's sad, for they feel their very lives depend on their screams.”
Anastasia half-expected her sister to leap and attack and was let down when she did not. She welcomed that fight once and for all and in truth had tried to provoke Sibiya into it. Alas, her sister wasn't as confident as she once had been, hence the surroundings and the buffet blood that flowed through her army.
Sibiya was smart enough to know it was over for vampires; these displays were merely pretenses for the benefit of her own ego. Anastasia had crushed the life out of all that posturing by no greater action than being unimpressed.
Anastasia looked over as she went down the new hall to find Augusta at her side. Both sisters ignored the horrid calling to creators and heroes, neither of which would ever come to save any of the poor souls Sibiya had locked away down there.
Anastasia felt sorry for Augusta: she was insane and that wasn't entirely her fault. It could have happened to any of them really. Augusta just drew the short femur.
“Augusta, I told you when we parted ways long ago that we must all part. Did you not listen?”
The smile never left Augusta's face. “We're rebuilding the kingdom of the Old Fathers. We can't hide like you do.”
“You make yourselves targets in the war which approaches.”
“What war?” Augusta was confused, but still smiling like a puppy. “How do you know of a war?”
“He told me.”
“That human that you just made plainly clear to us all is of no consequence? Of course a human would say such a thing. All they know are wars. When have their wars ever affected our kind? Beyond providing an environment conducive to feeding?”
“Augusta, it's not going to be safe much longer.”
“We're all goddesses now.” Augusta was happy about this.
“You said we were ghosts,” corrected Anastasia. “Remember?”
Augusta whispered, “All goddesses are ghosts too.” Then she raised her voice, echoing the words she'd heard in courts since she was a child. “Our kind grows strong again. Soon it will be our time.”
“You are madder than I had judged if you believe that. We are the las
t. There is no place for us in man's world now. You live as vermin in this place; why not retain your dignity? We belong in shadow. Embrace this and blend in.”
Augusta considered a bloodstain on the wall as they walked past, and the light above ever flickered.
“Anastasia, who can't you save us from? The humans?”
“It's not the humans you should fear. Abandoning one decorated hovel for another won't matter when the FIVE start checking things that don't fit off their list.”
Augusta's smile finally left her face. “Anastasia, you're serious? This life is all we know.”
“Augusta, should I ever be forced to return here, be vanished. Tonight we should go our separate ways forever.”
Anastasia stopped Augusta in the hall then and wrapped her arms around the mad sister and held her. When she pulled away, Anastasia gripped Augusta's shoulders and looked into her ever-maddening eyes and tried to express dire seriousness.
“Go and find a life. Find a passion. Live and use your human side to your advantage. We have it not to be them, but to trick them. We are enough of them so what we can get close to them.”
“But,” came Augusta, “We are not to love them.”
Anastasia broke from her then. Augusta obviously understood more than her insanity let on.
“Ana, wait! That was wrong; go to him if you love him.”
Anastasia looked back at her. Augusta showed surprisingly lucid sadness to have hurt her sister's feelings. Anastasia remembered her for a moment, all of them actually, before they were twisted so. When the sisters were just mischievous and slightly evil.
The good old days.
“I'm in love too,” Augusta stated. She opened a door and pointed within. “He's in here.”
Anastasia looked, even though she knew better. A decaying body lay on the floor. It had been there for years and was constantly restitched together by Augusta. Anastasia could see the threads, the wire, the tape, anything Augusta could scavenge to keep the thing from collapsing in on itself.
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird Page 22
