by J. F. Lewis
Claws sank into my shoulder and Tabitha hurled me at the wall of my bedroom at the Pollux. I spread my arms and legs, letting my impact hit in as wide an area as possible. It hurt like a bitch, but at least I didn’t go through the wall.
“If you hadn’t had her learn—”
“I know.”
Her hands were in my hair and suddenly she was using my noggin for a battering ram.
“What happened in Paris. What happened here. It was all your fault.” Each word acted as some strange punctuation, spacing out each new meeting of my head and my bedroom wall.
“Right again,” I managed to choke out.
“Damn it!” She climbed off my back and I rolled over. She sat on the edge of the bed, crying real tears.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry, you dumbass.” She wiped at her eyes, makeup smearing. “Of course you’re sorry. If you weren’t sorry, I’d know what to do. It would be the last straw, but this . . . What am I supposed to do with you apologizing? And meaning it?!”
I sighed. “Maybe this will help.” I slid to a sitting position. “I’m going after Marilyn. I saw her down there and . . . I can’t let her stay down there, even if I have to destroy her soul. I bought her some time, but it’s just another kind of torture . . . and I can’t just charge in after her—there’s that whole deal with Scrytha.”
“Well obviously.” Tabitha threw her arms up. “It’s you. The rules don’t apply to you. You just do whatever the hell you want and—”
“I’ll understand if you want a divorce,” I said softly. “I mean, I don’t know if Rachel was already controlling you or not, but if you want one, I—”
Tabitha got up, and I winced despite myself because letting your wife beat the shit out of you without taking a swing back at her is harder than you might think—even if you have it coming and know it. “You can have pretty much whatever you want, but . . .”
She put a finger to my lips.
“Wait here.” Tabitha pulled me to my feet.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to Hell in these shoes.” She kissed my cheek and turned to go.
“Like I said, I can’t go down there again, not to fight,” I said, “but it’s nice to know you’re in.” It’s official. I will never understand women. “Let me go run it by Magbidion.”
“Don’t get kidnapped,” Tabitha called after me as the door shut.
“You don’t deserve that one,” said a ghost with a familiar southern drawl. “She went to Hell and back for—”
“No.” I scanned the hallway and saw a figure by the rail at the top of the stairs. “That’s what I did for Greta.” It could have been John Paul, but his clothes were untorn, and his neck was all in one piece. Clean-shaven except for his mustache, the cowboy wore a blue button-up shirt with clean pants. Even his coat was clean and whole. The hat and cigar were the same, though.
“John Paul.” I gaped. “How the hell?”
“That’s fer me to know, son.” He smiled and took a puff off his cigar, the last puff, and this time the cigar burned down. His eyes closed as he let the smoke out through his nostrils, the vapor pooling around his body. “I ain’t one to tell tales what ain’t mine to tell. Let’s jest say you ain’t likely to be borrowin’ that gun o’ mine agin fer quite some time. She ain’t likely to do ya much good, the shape she wound up in, anyhow.”
“So you’re free?” I laughed. “That’s great!”
John Paul looked at the cigar before setting it on the rail as if he hadn’t heard me. “That was one fine cigar.”
“So—”
“Nope,” he cut me off. “That ain’t the word I want to hear. I want ta hear the one you interrupted me with a moment ago.”
“No?”
“That’s the one.” He nodded, touching his neck selfconsciously out of years of habit. “But it ain’t a question. Say it like you mean it.”
“No,” I said halfheartedly.
“Like you mean it, I said,” Courtney barked. “Like Greta is asking you if she can come along on the little vacation to the underworld that you’re plannin’.”
“No!”
“Fine.” His eyes lit from within, and the light was warm and pleasant like sunshine and fresh-cut grass. “That’s jest fine. You remember that word, them two important letters, and you jest keep sayin’ them when you talk ta the lady waitin’ for you downstairs.”
“Lady?” I looked over the rail, saw no one, and glanced back, but he was gone, leaving nothing but his still-smoldering cigar on the railing.
I smelled brimstone and started down. Faint at first, the odor grew as I neared the doors to the theater. Pushing the doors open, I saw a woman in a white dress and started toward the stage.
“Hello, Mr. Courtney.” Lady Scrytha stood center stage, lit by a single spotlight, the jewels studding her twin ram’s horns sending sparkling sprays of color out from her face. Her gown was low cut and she wore it well, like a movie star. Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not maybe . . . except when Bacall wore high heels, they weren’t cloven.
“No.”
“You can’t say no to a hello.” Her tail twitched, peeking out below the hemline of the dress. “We got off to a bad start earlier, and I’d like to make amends.”
“No.” I turned on my heel, heading up the aisle.
“You and I both know that you’ll be coming for Marilyn.”
I stopped.
“You’ll find a way, but while you’re down below, I’ll wreak havoc above, and when you come back they might all be gone.”
“You don’t want to go there.” I turned back to her, hands clenched into tight fists.
“No, I don’t,” Lady Scrytha agreed. “It’s a waste of effort on both our parts. You see, Mr. Courtney, I finally understand what my father and certain other supernatural beings see in you.”
No. I tried to say it, but the word didn’t come. My mouth was dry, even of blood.
“Do you have any idea how many prophesies you’ve invalidated, without even meaning to, over the last few decades?”
“No.” See, there it was, I could still say it. It’s an easy word. Two letters.
N + O = NO.
Simple.
“It’s a large number.” She walked off the stage, down an unseen stairway, shocks of fire sparking from her hooves at each step. “You see, I thought you were completely unimportant, because none of the prophesies are about you. You aren’t pivotal in any great battle. You don’t lead an army of light or an army of darkness. But what you do is even more astonishing.”
“I’m good in bed,” I told her, “but I wouldn’t say it was world-altering.”
“Never underestimate the importance of those talents, Mr. Courtney, but those are far from your greatest assets.” She set foot on the aisle, and I winced, but there was no fire; my carpet was safe. “You can change the game. Bend the rules. You can affect the whole.”
“Now, there you’re wrong.” I shook my head. “I’ve never been a very good masseuse. I do okay, but—”
“Heroes are a dime a dozen, Mr. Courtney,” she said impatiently. I noticed the spotlight had continued to follow her under the mezzanine, at an impossible angle, and I searched for the source but couldn’t find it. Magic. “Villains are a penny a pound, but those who can alter the status quo on a fundamental level, redraw the board as it were. Well, those—”
“A whole quarter?”
She gave an exasperated laugh, a sharp exhalation of air. “Far more than that.”
“Well, I ain’t for sale.”
“Obviously, but perhaps.” Her voice went low and husky, and she reminded me of Bacall all over again when she asked Bogie if he knew how to whistle. “Perhaps you are for rent?”
“No.” I began to relax. Maybe John Paul had been worrying about nothing. Maybe.
“Not even if I gave her back to you.”
My heart beat twice and Rachel was dead, so I knew it wasn’t her doing.
“Marilyn. Your Marilyn. Maiden name Robinson.” She stepped closer, her voice dropping in volume, her body leaning close to mine, her cheek touching mine as she whispered in my ear. “You proposed to her once and you died two weeks before the wedding day. She cheated on you with your best friend and regretted it for the rest of her life. The woman whose soul my offspring used to try to trick you into losing your own. That ‘her.’”
“She’d have to be young again.” I reached into my wallet and pulled out the picture of Marilyn on the Duo-Glide. “This young.”
“Easily done.”
“And she’d have to be healthy again and stay healthy.”
“I can make a true immortal of her if you wish, like your dear old war buddy James.”
“And she can’t be mind-controlled or hypnotized or under some sort of geas. She’d have to be her own person.”
“Of course.”
“What do you want me for?”
“What does it matter?” Scrytha laughed. “This is Marilyn. I won’t pit you against Greta or any of your creations, but I will use you for what you’re good for: to break prophesies. Those ‘best laid schemes o’ mice and men’ of which Robert Burns spoke. You will help ensure they go awry. Does it matter how?”
“When do I get her back?”
“If you say yes now, I can have her here tomorrow.”
My heart beat two more times, stuttered, and kept right on beating. I heard the sound of feet pounding down the stairs, then Tabitha threw open the lobby doors.
“Eric,” she said, chest heaving. “Don’t you dare.”
I looked away from Tabitha, unable to meet her eyes, so when I spoke, my words were directed at the floor. When it comes to vampires across the years in books, in movies, or on television, there are certain rules:
Buffy loves Angel.
Louis loves Lestat.
Bella loves Edward.
And Eric . . . Eric loves Marilyn.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Whatever it is.” I put my hand in Lady Scrytha’s and shook it firmly. “I’ll do it.”
EPILOGUE
AS TOLD BY EBON WINTER
WINTER:
I WIN AGAIN
They came into the Artiste Unknown like rats fleeing a storm. Confused. Lost. Panic in their eyes and shrillness in their whispers. Panic. Marvelous! Marvelous! MAR-velous panic!
One by one I sensed them, giving Andre telepathic instructions from my bed in the ductwork, above the sprinklers. Hidden. With a friend. We watched, my friend and I, as Andre shifted the vermin from one portion of the club to another, quietly sorting out the Vlads and Masters from the general populace, sending them to the Velvet down below where quarters were more intimate.
“Mother Goose,” I said into my microphone. “This is Rockstar.” Melvin does so love code names.
“I copy you, Rockstar.”
“How are the preparations?”
“Everything’s okay on this end, Rockstar.” Static and the sound of a van engine filled a long pause. “You’re sure you’re well above the red line?”
“Why, aren’t you the overprotective hen, darling? I had Andre draw a blue line two feet above the red line and I’m half a foot above that one.”
Most vampires don’t sleep in coffins, but I do. Concealed in what many would presume to be a central portion of the exposed ventilation system, I rest snugly in a soundproof steel box complete with a Sealy Posturepedic mattress (custom fitted, of course), a high-tech surveillance system Melvin made for me (it even picks up vampires), room for a second occupant, and a six-hour supply of oxygen . . . for those who need that sort of thing.
Father Ike, my friend, watched the monitors, light from the black-and-white displays moving like shadows on his stern priestly visage.
“And this is half the vampires in the city?” he asked.
“Closer to sixty percent,” I crowed, “but the best part is, it represents ninety percent of the Masters, eighty percent of the Vlads, and the most powerful of the Soldiers. Almost no Drones, but who can bear to be around them in the first place?”
“And it will work?”
“How dare you, Ike?” I swatted his shoulder, giddy at the tinge of flame that warmed my fingers upon contact, however brief. “It’s an open secret that Melvin works for me, and when I told a few discreet friends (all the most incorrigible gossips) I’d warded the establishment and had a plan for dealing with the failure of the Veil of Scrythax . . . well, it guaranteed they’d come, didn’t it?”
“This is why you had me agree to marry Eric and Tabitha?” Father Ike sniffed at the burned smell of my fingers.
“No, Ike.” I clicked the walkie-talkie button. “Rockstar to Mother Goose. Phase one of Operation Dorothy Gale is complete. Prepare to begin phase two.”
“Dorothy Gale?” Ike asked.
“Of course. We dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East.”
“The Highland Towers on Lord Phillip?”
“While displacing the other most politically important vermin in the city.” I nodded, hands clasped beneath my chin. “And now, we deal with the metaphorical Wicked Witch of the West.”
“Is Pretty Boy clear?” Melvin asked.
“Just a moment.” I watched my best thrall, Andre, conversing with Lady Gabriella.
“Winter,” Andre thought at me, “she suspects something.”
“Let her go, then,” I whispered telepathically. “In fact, see her out and offer to drive her to Sable Oaks.”
“Of course, Master.”
She seemed agreeable to that, the greedy little rat. I watched Andre lead her out. I focused on the door as it shut, the click of the lock.
“He’s clear, Mother Goose.”
“Spikes and sunlamps are set for the Velvet, Rockstar.”
“How does that fit into the Wizard of Oz?” Father Ike asked.
“It doesn’t.” I watched my waiters and servants exiting the building, none at the same time, all through different exits. I observed closely as the exits shut. “The Velvet is more along the lines of Indiana Jones, a riff on the temple sequence at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everyone knows that Dorothy threw a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“That would take holy water, Winter, and I haven’t—”
“Of course not, Ike,” I purred. “You’re far too squeamish. I had the Lycan Diocese send some down. They were quite amenable.”
“Mother Goose.” I blinked my eyes rapidly to ensure I wouldn’t need to blink again during the show. “Shields up.”
A thin red glow spread out from along a red line two and a half feet below our hiding space in the ductwork. Unseen by those without particularly acute mystic sight, the ward rolled down and trapped them all.
“Shields up, Rockstar,” Melvin said.
“Make them dance for me, Melvin.” My words rushed together, excitement rippling through me, heightening my senses. “Start the double feature.”
Screams can make a kind of music, a terrible symphony of pain. Mine was writ in treachery and surprise, in sizzling skin and wood-pierced hearts and bubbling blood. It’s saddening to admit Father Ike seemed to lack the refined ear I have.
“I know you hate them, Winter, after what they did to you and to John,” he said finally, “but this—”
“Is just the beginning,” I crowed. “I know. We’re going to kill them all, Father. And then, Eric Courtney is going to help us whether he wants to or not.”
“Us?” Father Ike pulled away from me as far as the close quarters would allow. “I’m helping John through this, Winter. I cannot be a party to this kind of slaughter. Not all vampires are evil. Some, like you, who have never given in to the urge to feed on human blood . . .”
“Not you, Father, I know that.”
I held up my treasured possession, a small crystallized orb. “The immortals may have seized his head from the Knights Templar, but they did
not escape with all of him.”
“All of who, Winter?”
“Scrythax,” I answered smoothly. “I have his eye, and with it . . . oh, the futures I can see.”
