by Tal Bauer
In fact, she was being eaten.
The polizia who’d busted down the door came face-to-face, for the first time in their lives, with an evil entity. Shocked, they’d frozen, watching as the ghoul’s claws slashed through her thigh and she slipped backward in a pool of her own blood, struggling to escape. Her screams had stirred them on, and the two officers unloaded their pistols into the ghoul.
Thirty rounds of lead later, the ghoul snarled and snapped, but didn’t fall. It had lunged at the officers, blood smeared on its jowls, on its gnarled lips and jagged teeth, and its burning breath had filled the air with the stench of rotten meat.
Sirens closing in had spooked the ghoul. Roaring, it leaped for the window, breaking through the glass and then scaling the side of the building until it disappeared into the shadows of the Roman twilight.
Angelo had arrived first, steering the officers to his car for a debrief. They’d shaken for hours, were still shaking when Alain and Lotario had arrived.
The woman’s name was Madelena, and she had adamantly refused to be transported to the hospital for her wounds. The medics on scene cleaned and bandaged what they could, glued together her deeper cuts, and gave her a shot of antibiotics. But she had refused to leave her apartment, and she drank from a plastic bottle of whiskey with a label that could only have come from the bottom shelf of a petrol station’s cooler. Her cigarette-stained hands shook as she lowered the bottle, clutching the warped plastic between her spindly, bandaged thighs.
She wasn’t one for questions, either.
“Get out!” she had shouted in curt Italian. “I don’t want anything to do with you! Just leave me alone!” She’d thrown the empty whiskey bottle at their heads. It bounced off the wall after Alain had ducked.
Outside her apartment’s warped door, Lotario and Alain had heard her ragged voice mumbling, a low chant that sounded like prayers or pleading.
Leaving her be, they’d tried to track the ghoul instead, following a trail of blood and an infrared spectrum scan down one of the narrow, twisting alleys between the run-down tenements. Dried vines clung to the soot-covered stone of the old building. The alley was claustrophobic and fetid. Rust stains mixed with the grime of Rome that stretched in long smears down the dank, forgotten bricks.
Alain had walked in first, into the darkness.
They’d thought they had it pinned. Without a manhole cover or a sewer entrance, the ghoul was trapped in the alley. It should have wanted to get back to safety, back underground. It’d penned itself in, though, pinning itself without an exit in its mad rush to flee.
The ghoul came out swinging. It took down Alain with a claw-filled bellow, slamming one heavy paw against his face. Alain had grabbed the ghoul’s arm, trying to spar with the beast.
Their brawl was short. And bloody. Alain ended up flat on his back, bleeding from his face and side, gasping for breath as his ribs and his lung had exploded in searing agony. Through the blood gushing from his forehead, he’d watched the ghoul escape as Lotario chanted an incantation over him to heal his wounds.
Lotario had flung out his hand as Alain started to breathe again, palm facing the fleeing ghoul, and tried to launch a tracking charm after the dark creature.
His ribs knitted together beneath Lotario’s touch. The tracking charm didn’t stick to the ghoul.
They’d hunted for hours, trying to track it. Alain shook off Lotario’s offer to heal him further, insisting they get back to work. In the end, though, the ghoul had vanished, probably back underground. They’d called it after three in the morning, and Angelo left a team outside Madelena’s apartment for the rest of the night. Lotario had driven Alain back to the Vatican, where Alain stopped by the canteen for an ice bag before heading home.
But then Cristoph…
After packing up and hiding everything in his apartment, boxing away his tools and his relics and his weapons from any wandering eyes, he and Lotario had spoken quietly over the phone, coming down from the adrenaline together and trading theories on the ghoul, on the risings cropping up more and more in Rome. Lotario had been smoking on his rooftop, he’d said. Alain had his feet propped up on his mattress, and he’d traced the lines of Cristoph’s sleeping expression over and over again with his gaze.
Had that only been hours ago? Don’t come back.
He wanted to vomit.
Lotario filled him in on Angelo’s call in between puffs of his cigarette and honks of his horn as they sped across Rome, back to the Campo.
Back to Madelena. Or what was left of her.
The polizia officers from the night before had gone back, wanting to pray with Madelena. A sour stench—warm copper and the sticky smell of melted sugar and rotten meat—made the officers shoulder open the door. They’d found Madelena ripped to shreds. Her blood, still warm, was spreading out from her exsanguinated body.
Those polizia officers weren’t going to stay on the force. Alain just knew it. He’d seen enough young officers get spooked by the true darkness, had seen that haunted, hunted look. Priests were born on those nights, and occasionally he thought he recognized a seminarian sporting a fresh Roman collar, a starched black suit, and that same terrified expression as they darted panicked looks over their shoulders, on the streets of Rome.
Lotario swerved to a stop in the Campo, brakes squealing as the Bug bounced on broken shocks. Alain’s head ricocheted off the steel frame of the door. If he had a nickel for every time, he could retire a wealthy man and leave all this hunting business behind. He’d have enough to bring Cristoph along, too—
Alain heaved himself out of the car as Lotario ground out his cigarette and ran past the Roman polizia’s crime scene barricade. The officers ignored him, as if he wasn’t even there. They never even looked his way. They didn’t look at Alain, either. He was a ghost in the sunlight, unseen, unacknowledged by the world.
Angelo waited for them at the landing outside Madelena’s apartment. “It’s not good.”
He refused to go back inside, pushing open the door to her apartment with his foot.
The taste of dust and snakeskin hit them first, dry sand slipping through their fingers, the stench of damp earth cradling rotten flesh. Grave dirt and river fog and a parched scream scratching over the back of their throats.
“Vampire,” Alain choked out. He bit the inside of his lip until he tasted copper and salt at the back of his throat. Anything to get rid of the vampiric energy.
Lotario’s eyes slid sideways. “You gonna be—”
“I’m fine.” Alain cut him off. He spotted a foot, bare and bruised, peeking out from behind a tattered yellow sofa. “Let’s get going.”
They stepped carefully, avoiding blood splatter and destroyed furniture. End tables had been shattered, the wood splintered apart by some crushing force. Mirrors were cracked, and glass shards lay scattered over the worn throw rugs and the scratched wooden floors. Blood arched on the walls, arterial spray, and pooled on the carpet in splashes and splatters. Her death had not been easy. Or quick.
Madelena lay behind the sofa, flat on her back, her eyes open. Her neck was savagely torn, like an animal or a beast had ripped into her. Bloody smears around her wrists told of a struggle. Gashes marred her soft abdomen, visible from where her stained shirt had ridden up. She wore cutoff jean shorts, and beneath the fraying hems, blood streaked down her thighs.
Lotario sighed. “A ghoul and a vampire. Where there is one, there is the other.”
“We should have prevented this.” Alain’s gaze traced the pool of blood beneath Madelena’s body.
“We were coming back tonight. She should have been safe during the day.” Ghouls didn’t move during the day, and vampires stayed in their nests until it was night. They could move in sunlight, at least some of them could, but they looked so obviously unnatural, so clearly demonic, that they kept to the shadows and to darkness. They hadn’t heard of vampires moving during the daylight in decades. Maybe a century.
Alain glared. “Not this time.”
“Why?” Lotario frowned at her shabby apartment, at the run-down space and the cloying pull of despair and degradation that clung to her home. “Why attack her?”
“This has to be deliberate. She must have been targeted. She’s too far off the main sewer access points for this to be a random, opportunistic kill.”
“And it’s all backwards. Ghouls feast on vampire kills. Vamps don’t trawl ghoul attacks.” Ghouls occasionally feasted on the vampires’ leftovers. They mostly fed on rotting corpses. They slunk in the tunnels and hid in the darkness, carrion demons waiting to swoop in. Where there were ghouls, there were vampires, and vice versa. Both had appeared in the space of two days, attacking the same woman. Why?
And why had the ghoul struck first? Opportunistic bottom feeders did not hunt on their own.
Hairs prickled at the back of Alain’s neck, standing on end, vibrating. Pressure behind him filled the room, almost popping his ears. He wanted to turn around, to check the dark corners and under Madelena’s bed, satisfy that primal, human urge to make sure there weren’t monsters hiding in the shadows, waiting to strike. He exhaled, closing his eyes. It was only leftover terrors in his soul. “We need to turn her life upside down. Who is she? What did she do? Who did she know? Why did the darkness come for her?”
“You think she called out to it?”
“We won’t know until we investigate. And, we need to track the vampire that did this. We need answers. This is well outside the bounds of the pact.”
Lotario squinted. “You sure you—”
“The sooner we start the better chance we have. It’s daylight. We can find this killer while they’re resting. Did you bring your tracking tools?”
Lotario unshouldered his bag and slung it over the back of Madelena’s sofa. He unzipped it with too much force, wrenching the bag open and rummaging inside before pulling out a crystal tied to a coil of braided twine, a plate of glass with sigils etched around the edges, and a worn and weary map of Rome. Alain took the map and unfolded it, laying it out next to Madelena’s body. He stayed clear of her cooling pool of blood. The edges of the map had already collected enough brown and rust-colored stains. It didn’t need any more.
Lotario swiped the tip of the crystal deep inside the tears and gashes in Madelena’s throat, deep inside her severed carotid artery, where the vampire’s fangs had torn her apart and where it had left behind some of its own essence during the kill. The mark of a vampire was indelibly fixed onto its prey, as long as one knew where to search.
Black vampire blood soaked the crystal, dripping from the tip, as Lotario pulled away and slid the glass plate beneath the pendulum.
Passing everything across her body to Alain, Lotario stood back. He watched while Alain moved the glass and bloody pendulum over the map of Rome, muttering under his breath and speaking the words to the incantation. Alain repeated them in his mind, closing his eyes.
He opened them when he felt he pendulum swing. Blood welled at the tip of the crystal, and when it swung to a certain point, the stream of blood fell to the glass etched with runes. The bloody tell quivered on the plate, hovering above the map.
Lotario shared a long look with Alain.
They knew that place.
Alain wiped away the blood on the glass and the crystal and silently folded the map. All the while, he kept repeating to himself that there wasn’t a vampire behind him waiting to strike, and the pressure and presence were only his fear. Were only a shadow of his mind, of his bloody memories wreaking havoc.
Alain let loose a breathless exhale when they slipped out of Madelena’s apartment, back onto the landing with Angelo. Dizziness stole through him, but he hid his stumble from Lotario as they plodded down the stairs and back outside, into the sunlight.
* * *
Across the alley, hidden in the grim shadows and squeezed between a refuse bin and a rusted-out fire escape, a pale figure shrouded in darkness watched Alain. Yellow eyes glittered, following the hunter and the priest as they disappeared into the backstreets of Rome.
Chapter Ten
They followed the old city’s cobbled back alleys and narrow side streets until they ended up on the Lungotevere, the tree-lined avenue overlooking the banks of the Tiber. Walking fast, they dodged scooters and bicyclists and Romans laughing into their cell phones, keeping their gazes on the river on their right. Heading south, the Tiber curved around the Isola Tiberina, and just after the snub end of the island, the Ponto Palatino bridge stretched across the river, connecting the east and west banks. Nearby, the Ponto Rotto, the oldest stone bridge in Rome, stood in ruins, a single arch hovering in the midst of the Tiber.
Trampling in a rush down the stairs leading from the Lungotevere to the walking path on the river’s shore, Alain tried to steady his frantic heart. His chest ached, as if his chest were clenched in a vise. It had been twelve years since they’d had last tangled with vampires living beneath Rome, but he remembered every single moment of that last encounter.
Push it all down. Push it all away.
Vampires didn’t usually venture out, certainly not deep into the heart of Rome. When they hunted, it was always on the periphery of the city, near the sewers and the grottos and the catacombs. They snatched the homeless, the indigents, and the lonely—people who wouldn’t be missed. Twice a year, Alain and Lotario found bodies dumped by river outflows or moldering in marshes. Victims of a vampire.
And yet, there hadn’t been a single missing person report or a cry for help from any friend or family of the victim. In the end, there was only a silent silver circle and a lit match in the dank cellar beneath Angelo’s polizia station.
The vampires’ stayed out of sight. They kept their feedings to a minimum. They didn’t penetrate the inner city. They didn’t make a scene. It was part of the pact made twelve years ago. The nest of vampires in Rome had been silent since, keeping to their end of the agreement. Stay on the edges. Stay hidden. Do nothing that required the hunters to come for them.
Why murder a woman deep inside Rome now? Why break the pact?
Alain slipped on the bottom step, sliding on the damp slick of the river’s spray on the stone carved stairs. The blocks beneath their shoes could have a hundred years old or a thousand, worn smooth from years of feet slapping against the steps. Lotario grabbed his elbow, steadying him, and left his hand on Alain’s arm even after Alain found his feet.
Lotario had been there that night. They’d never spoken of it since, but Lotario knew. He knew the hatred in Alain’s marrow, in the cells of his existence, toward vampires.
He shook off Lotario’s lingering hold. He didn’t want anyone’s pity. Not now, not ever. Lotario’s quiet concern and his searching gaze grated on Alain’s soul.
The obvious opening to the Roman underground, the ancient sewers stretching back to pre-Roman days, arched across the Tiber’s bank. The Cloaca Maxima’s outflow to the river was a crumbled arch of brick half submerged beneath the waterline, surrounded by dirt and trees on a sheltered segment of the riverbank. Homeless Romani made camp on top of the outflow’s arch in the dirt-packed shelter beneath the Lungotevere overhang, sleeping on pallets and scraps of cardboard and playing wailing tunes on a fiddle missing two of its strings. The Romani waved to Alain and Lotario as they approached. When they recognized them, they made a warding sign, an evil eye, and shouted at them to move on in a mixture of Russian, Romany, and French.
Lotario waved back, a jaunty salute with two fingers that told them to fuck off. Roaring with laughter, the Romani watched the two seeming priests head down the riverbank.
Not far down, a secondary entrance to the sewers, an access tunnel, opened into the riverbank. Lotario looked up and down the river, then ducked inside with Alain. A gate swung inside the entrance. Lotario picked the lock and pushed through it, the bars near the bottom raised off the riverbed to let the sewer waters pass through to the Tiber.
Alain hopped across the low stream, landing on a narrow brick catwalk. Lotario staye
d on his side and dug out a headlamp from his bag. Alain did the same, fixing the elastic over his head and shining the light into the sewer’s darkness.
“Ready?” Lotario asked.
Alain stepped forward.
The free-flowing stream slowed twenty feet in, mucked up by a pile of sewage. Loose, slimy offal oozed through the narrow waterway. Alain’s eyes watered, and he tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth. A rotten shoe and a football bobbed and squelched against the blockage. Another day, they might have found a corpse dumped by a vampire, or by some other nefarious—but human—presence.
The sewers continued. A dark recess opened to the left, heading north underground. Lotario shined his headlamp into the opening. The tunnel’s pitch-black swallowed his beam, an impenetrable stillness. He turned back to Alain. In the harsh illumination of their bobbing headlamps, the gaunt lines of his face looked almost skeletal, and the gray in his hair shone like a beacon.
Alain hopped back across the passage and onto the narrow catwalk skirting the edge of the sewer’s flow of waste, taking the lead as they pushed into the northbound sewer. A wave of stench hit him hard, and he coughed, burying his face in his shoulder. Still, he stepped forward, moving with Lotario.
They walked for what felt like ages in the dark. Twisting and turning, their headlamps bobbing in the blackness, time seemed to stretch on, every second lingering between breaths. The watery waste trudging through the trench between them slowed and turned to a trickle, and then into wet muck. Millennia-old brick from ancient Rome arched overhead, some crumbling as they passed beneath. Dust rained on their shoulders in soft whiffs.
The passageway narrowed until they were practically shoulder to shoulder across the damp trench. Wet earth mixed with ancient offal and the detritus of antiquity kept the air dank and humid. Rust and moss hit the back of Alain’s throat.
