“I’m half-human,” Melponeus said. “Some of us are honorable.”
Though Taffy and Cedric looked in another direction, embarrassed, Dahlia met his snowmelt eyes and inclined her head regally.
Cedric said, “What do you suggest we do, Dahlia?”
“This list of properties has to be checked out, as does the membership list,” Dahlia said. “We’ll be spread very thin, but I think we can do it. After all . . . ” She didn’t have to emphasize their responsibility.
“You’re in charge, Dahlia,” Cedric said. “Melponeus, if you will come with me, Lakeisha will write a check.”
“How will we do this?” Taffy asked when they had left.
“Divide into teams. Give each team a short list of properties to search,” Dahlia said. “Each place must be searched very thoroughly but very discreetly. One special team has to kidnap a Fellowship officer, a person without family. This team can’t be averse to forceful persuasion. We need to know if there’s some place not on this list, perhaps a place belonging to one member, that’s large enough to hide ten to fifteen people. The newspaper said that’s roughly how many Fellowship fanatics are missing. We’ll check the people we can find against the list to get a better count.”
Cedric returned in time to hear. He nodded. “This seems sound,” he said. “Especially the torture part.” He smiled.
“Thank you, Sheriff.” Dahlia braced herself. “Someone must be detailed to warn the humans involved in the rescue. They saved lives that night; not just human lives.”
“Some of them were not pleased to rescue vampires,” Cedric said. “I read that in the newspapers, too.”
“However they felt, they did it. We can’t abandon those who’ve done us a service.”
“Are you telling me my duty, Dahlia?”
“Sorry, Sheriff.” Dahlia looked away to compose her face.
“This is very unlike you.”
“I’ve never been hauled out of a pit before.”
“The half demon—the half human—would take no money for his service,” Cedric said. “He told me we were on the same side.” Dahlia tried not to look self-conscious. She mostly succeeded.
Cedric nodded to Dahlia. “All right, go.”
That was how Dahlia came to be walking into the firehouse of the Thirty-four Company at the corner of Almond and Lincoln. Though the night was chilly, the door to the firehouse was open. The men and women inside were washing the fire trucks under floodlights. None of them whistled when Dahlia approached, though she was the center of attention in her black belted coat and black high heels.
“A cold one,” said the biggest firefighter of all, a burly guy over six feet tall. “Whatcha want, vampie?”
To rip your impudent throat out, Dahlia thought. But she recognized his high voice; he had helped the captain haul her up out of hell. “I need to speak to Captain Fortescue,” she said.
That brought a chorus of whistles and comments about Ted’s wife and her reaction to his extracurricular pastimes.
If Dahlia had been a breather, she’d have sighed.
Ted Fortescue came out, wiping his hands on a towel. His men and women fell silent when the captain looked around to meet their eyes. He recognized Dahlia immediately, somewhat to her surprise. “Evening. Have you recovered from your broken leg?”
“I have,” Dahlia replied. Her back was stiff as a poker. “I have come to warn you. The people of the Fellowship of the Sun have said they’ll take vengeance on those who rescued vampires.”
“They’re going to target first responders?” Fortescue was appalled.
“Yes,” Dahlia said.
“They’ll lose all public sympathy for their cause,” he said slowly, “aside from the obvious point, they believe in killing vampires and recruiting humans.”
“I don’t pretend to make sense of what humans do,” she said. “You saved my life. Now I am doing my best to save yours.”
“Well . . . thanks,” he said. The firefighters looked from the captain to the vampire, obviously thinking he should say something else. “You were human, once,” Fortescue said.
Dahlia was taken aback. She fumbled for a response. “I was a human for eighteen years. I have been a vampire for . . .” She shook her head. “Nine hundred years, perhaps.”
There was a little moment of total silence.
“Good luck to you, Ted Fortescue, and to all of you who helped us,” Dahlia said. She looked at each face around her. She would remember each one. “I’ll dispose of them all if I can,” she promised the firefighters, and then she walked away.
“Commando Barbie,” one of the women muttered, but Dahlia heard her. In fact, she smiled a little, all to herself.
Worry was not a familiar pastime for Dahlia, who was more of a direct action person. During the bit of dark remaining, Dahlia and Taffy visited two Fellowship locations, a “church” on the south side and a “meeting hall” on the east. Both buildings were easy to break into, and the two vampires searched both very thoroughly. They were straightforward modern constructions: no hidden passages, secret rooms, or false floors.
The next night similar results were reported by the other search teams.
The Rhodes vampires felt the pressure. By the time they had to retreat to day sleep lairs, they’d only learned where the Fellowship plotters weren’t. Their shame was mounting.
Even the abduction-and-torture team reported failure. True, they managed to find a family-free Fellowship official, and true, they managed to snatch her unobserved, but to their immense irritation, the woman had a weak heart. She died too early in the proceedings to offer any useful information. In fact, the team simply restored her body to her house, and no one was the wiser.
Taffy arrived at the mansion the next night radiating excitement. She made a beeline for the common room. Dahlia was sitting at the table, lost in unhappy thought. “Don says we should look in the tunnels!” Taffy said, seizing her friend.
Dahlia said, “If you shake me again, I’ll break both your arms.”
Taffy let her go with alacrity. “Sorry! I’m just so excited!”
“That’s a very good idea,” Dahlia said. “We should have thought of the tunnels earlier.”
The tunnel system lying below the original city center of Rhodes was extensive, and it had once connected all the major buildings in the area. The tunnels had seen much use in the years before and during Prohibition. In the decades since, some passages had been blocked up as part of new construction. Vampires seldom used the tunnels anymore . . . but they had in years past, along with all kinds of other creatures, including regular humans.
“Do the tunnels run under Field Street?” Dahlia asked Taffy.
“Don’s faxing us a map.”
Don, Taffy’s werewolf husband, had a friend who was a historian at Rhodes’s City University. Don’s friend faxed the map to the little office where Lakeisha took care of Cedric’s correspondence. Lakeisha had been an executive assistant in life, and Cedric had brought her over expressly to be his executive assistant in death. Lakeisha knew her office machinery and had a thorough grounding in modern communications, skills most of the older vampires found baffling.
Lakeisha had had the advantage of knowing she was going to be brought over, so she’d had her hair washed, cut, and styled before her death. She was perpetually cute. “I don’t think you’ve ever gotten a fax before, Dahlia,” Lakeisha said.
“I hope I never get another one.”
“Grumpy, grumpy!” Lakeisha chided. Dahlia snarled at her.
“Did we get up on the wrong side of the coffin tonight?” Lakeisha said.
“It’s annoying that you’re not frightened of me, and it’s a mistake.”
“You don’t want to make Cedric mad,” the young vampire said calmly.
Dahlia snatched up the tunnel map, and she and Taffy retreated to the common room to study it.
“Yes! We gotcha, assholes!” Taffy said, after the two had found Field Street and examined it.
“I’ll give Don something nice,” Dahlia said.
“Not a groomer’s brush, like you sent last time? That shit gets old,” Taffy said.
“No, something really nice.”
“Not another bag of doggie treats!”
“I’m serious; it’ll be very appropriate. Lakeisha, we need you,” Dahlia called. Normally, Lakeisha would have insisted the request come through Cedric, but circumstances were hardly ordinary.
Lakeisha used the copying machine and then the intercom. When everyone had assembled in the common room, she passed out copies of the map.
Dahlia stood up on the hearth, so they could all see her. She was wearing her black leather jumpsuit and was happily aware she was being admired. Melponeus was there; she could see his curls and reddish face in the corner. Good.
“Thanks to Taffy, we’ve gotten a map of the tunnels,” Dahlia said when the silence was complete. “They run under the Fellowship headquarters, and if the leaders entered the tunnels after their attack against us, they may still be there. Has anyone here been down below the city in the last twenty years?”
“I have,” said Melponeus. “I was in the tunnels five years ago, chasing an imp because . . . well, it’s not relevant. There are more dead ends in the tunnels now than your map shows. The Fullmore Street tunnel is blocked with rubble at the intersection with Gill.” Pens moved over paper. “The Banner Street tunnel is divided in the middle. Someone built a bank aboveground, and in the process they made the tunnel impassable—though I’ve heard someone’s cut a hole in that wall.” Melponeus went on to list two more closed or abbreviated tunnels.
“Thanks, Melponeus,” Dahlia said. “We owe you.”
“Oh, I’ll collect,” he said, a gleam in his eye.
It was a measure of Dahlia’s reputation that no one sniggered.
Cedric strolled through, carrying a pipe and wearing a smoking jacket. Taffy rolled her eyes at Dahlia.
“Do you have a plan of action, then?” he said.
“Yes, my sheriff.”
“Good luck. Oh, by the way.”
Every vampire froze.
“You must bring them back alive,” Cedric said. “I know you want to have fun with them. In fact, I’d planned to ask you to bring me one to play with. But I’ve gotten a phone call from the chief of police, who said . . . and I think this is interesting . . . that some of his officers told him they’d been running across vampires in unexpected places, asking unexpected questions, and he certainly hoped we weren’t taking any vigilante action of our own, since the whole Rhodes police department is anxious to bring the Fellowship terrorists to justice.”
None of the vampires cast guilty looks at each other—they were all much too seasoned for that.
“Of course we were planning to kill them,” Dahlia said. “What else?”
“I’m afraid you must alter your plan,” Cedric told her, using his “sympathetic but firm” voice that carried so well. “Think of how wonderful it will look, a picture of you handing over the culprits to the police. Think of how people will say that we’ve honored our commitment to refrain from taking human blood—even the blood of our enemies.”
Dahlia looked mutinous. “Cedric, we’d anticipated . . . ”
“Having a good old-fashioned party,” he said. “I regret that, too. But when you find these murderers, they go to police headquarters. Undrained and intact.”
And, in turn, every head nodded.
Five teams of two vamps each had been dispatched to the five tunnel accesses closest to Fellowship headquarters. Dahlia thought it possible the bombers had blasted or cut through some of the more recent walls. She would have done so if she’d been planning on using the tunnels as a refuge.
These teams were armed with shotguns. None of them were happy about it. Most vampires (especially the older ones) thought carrying a gun implied a certain lack of confidence in one’s own lethality.
Dahlia divided the rest of the Rhodes vamps into two parties. Each would enter the tunnels about a mile away from Fellowship headquarters, one from the east and one from the west. That way, the hunting party could descend without alerting their prey. A couple of cars took Dahlia’s party (Taffy headed the other one) to the east entrance she’d selected. This access happened to lie below a restaurant that had opened before World War I.
The Cappelini’s Ristorante staff was used to parties trailing through on the “Old Rhodes” tour, but they were taken aback when the eight o’clock tour party consisted wholly of bloodsuckers. Dahlia hung back. Though she was tiny and pretty, she was also unmistakably menacing. Lakeisha beamed her perky smile, tipped heavily, and the atmosphere relaxed.
The party, which consisted of Dahlia, Lakeisha, and three male vamps (Roscoe, Parnell, and Jonathan) all passed through a door the teenage tour guide had unlocked. They descended the stairs into the Cappelini basement. The very nervous young woman pointed out how various things were stored, talked about when the building had been erected, and revealed how many pounds of pasta the restaurant had served since it had opened its doors. Though the vampires gave her polite attention, she was visibly nervous as she prepared to enter the old tunnels.
She unlocked yet another door, this one a very old wooden slab. Greeted by a rush of cool air, the party descended a very narrow flight of stairs, then a steep and twisting ramp, and came to yet another door, much lower than modern doors and heavily locked. Their guide unlocked the last door, keeping up her patter the whole time, though with an effort. She flipped a light switch, and the tunnel appeared, running straight for about ten yards before turning to veer right.
Lakeisha said, “Let me ask you a question.” Relieved, the girl looked at the cute dark-skinned vampire inquiringly. Lakeisha said, “See how big my eyes are?” The next minute, the girl was under. “Sit on the floor here and wait until we come back,” Lakeisha said, and the girl smiled and nodded agreeably.
The vampires were all used to enclosed spaces, and they all had excellent vision. Dahlia barely seemed to touch the ground as she began to move forward. At first, two of them could walk abreast. After the jog to the right, the old tunnel narrowed.
The walls were brick, plastered here and there. Every now and then the narrow space widened into a storeroom, littered with old signs, broken chairs, all sorts of debris discarded from the businesses above. From time to time a ghostly door, sometimes with glass panels still intact, offered access to an underground saloon or whorehouse that hadn’t seen a customer in seventy years.
“This is great,” Roscoe said. Though Dahlia didn’t reply, she agreed completely.
They didn’t meet any other tours, because Cedric had booked them all. For two hours, the vampires owned the tunnels below old Rhodes.
Dahlia brought the party to a halt when she figured they were two blocks away from Field Street. She whispered: “You heard Cedric. No killing. If they resist, you can break a bone.” Despite the embargo, they were all tense with anticipation. It had been a long time since a worthy battle had come their way. This was a good moment to be a vampire. With a sharp nod, Dahlia turned and raced down the last section of tunnel.
In the end, the conquering of the Fellowship bombers was almost anticlimactic. There were only seven conspirators below the Fellowship headquarters. Of those, two had been too close to their own handiwork and had been injured by flying debris from the Pyramid. Only three men resisted with any determination, and Taffy, who got to the group seconds before Dahlia, had subdued the largest of these with no trouble at all by kicking him in the ribs. Jonathan and Roscoe took care of the others.
Rather than herd their hostages back to Cappelini’s, Dahlia decided to surface at the closest access point. Lakeisha used her cell phone to call the two vampires guarding that spot, their signal to alert the police that there were prisoners to deliver.
Instead of feeling triumphant, Dahlia found herself doubtful. Surely there should have been more Fellowship people in hiding?
“Wait!” s
he called at the first flight of stairs. She turned. Taffy, right behind her, was carrying the man whose ribs she’d broken. He was groaning, the noise irritating her. To make sure a rib didn’t puncture the human’s lung, Taffy was carrying the man in front of her. Dahlia looked into his unshaven face.
“What’s your name?” she asked, and the man began to recite some membership number the Fellowship had allotted him.
“That’s even more irritating than the pain noises,” she said. “Shut up, asshole.”
He cut himself off in mid-number.
The practical Lakeisha extracted a wallet from his pants. “This particular asshole is named Nick DeLeo.”
“Ever talked to a vampire before, Nick?”
“I don’t deal with hell spawn,” the man said.
“I was not spawned by hell. I met with something much older than myself in Crete, more years ago than you can imagine. I will still be here when your children are dust, if anyone deigns to breed with you.” That seemed doubtful to Dahlia. “Where are the others?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you that,” he said. It was hard for him to look formidable when a woman was carrying him, and he gave up the attempt when Dahlia came even closer. He flinched.
“Yes,” Dahlia said with some satisfaction. “I’m truly frightening. You can hardly imagine the pain I’ll cause you, if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
“Don’t tell him, Ni-aaargh!” A scream effectively ended another hostage’s exhortation.
“Oh, Roscoe, is he hurt?” Dahlia asked with patently false concern.
“Hard to lend his buddy moral support with a broken jaw,” Roscoe said. “Oops.”
Dahlia smiled down at Nick. “I have ripped people apart with my bare hands. And I enjoyed it, too.”
Nick believed Dahlia. “The others have gone to get the firefighters who fished the vamps out of the Pyramid,” he said. “It’s easier to get the firefighters; they’re not armed. Three of us are going to each station around here that responded. They’re going to shoot until their weapons are empty except for one bullet, and then they’ll kill themselves. Holy martyrs to the cause.”
Vampires: The Recent Undead Page 38
