"Let me tell you the way it is with us. We're like wolves, and the toughest wolf gets to lead the pack. But if he shows weakness, instability, insanity, the pack will shred him. He must be strong and his actions must be in our best interest. Attack him, show his weakness, and they will kill him for you." "I see."
"Yes," she hissed. "You do. Once Edward is truly dead and I am in charge, I will, of course, be very, very grateful."
Something crawled over my skin. Twitching my gaze aside, I caught a red thread of movement in the Grey and pulled back from it, taking a deep breath and shaking my head. The red thing slid away, dissolving onto the air. I blinked rapidly, shedding a sudden sleepiness, but unable to get the ringing of Alice's voice entirely out of my head.
"What's to stop him from killing me first?"
She laughed, and I tried not to cringe. "You don't look like a threat. Who regards the twitching of insects? Once the mud is stirred up, it'll be too late and killing you off won't clear his waters. Quite the opposite. He'll be far too busy to squash you. When the pack turns on him, they will rend him limb from limb." She paused and licked her lips before taking another sip of her drink. She shivered and smiled horrors at me. I swallowed bile.
"I don't see how Cameron benefits from Edward's demise."
"By my gratitude," she growled.
I shook my head. "No. I don't think so. Not inclined to rely on the generosity of vampires, considering Edward's example. Who protects me from you?"
She ground her teeth. "I assure you you'll come to no harm if you do what I say."
I managed to shake my head. "I won't kill anyone. I'm not a hired gun and I'm not interested in playing in your political pool."
Alice leaned forward and her eyes blazed. "Then what good are you to me?"
"I'm not here to help you. I'm here to help my client. I'll find Edward's weaknesses, his mistakes, rake up the muck, but the rest is up to you. And you'll owe me."
She laughed and stabbed out her cigarette with a hard jab in the ashtray. She sipped her drink and watched me over the rim, smiling razor slashes. "All right, we'll do it your way, for now. But I will still be watching you." Then she sat forward and put out her hand, palm up. "Let me see your list."
"What list?"
"The list of names. Cameron must have given you one, else how would you have found me? Hand it over," she demanded, beckoning her crimson-clawed fingers at me.
I dragged out the list. Alice snatched it and read it. A new gleam entered her eyes. "Oh, very interesting…" She pulled a fountain pen from her tiny purse and wrote a new name at the bottom: Wygan.
"There," she said, flinging the page back to me as dismissal. "Start with Carlos. That should loosen up the dirt under Edward's feet. And don't worry—I'll keep Edward's attention off of you. I did promise. By the time you've finished with that lot, his problems will have just started."
I got up from the table and walked out. I could feel her gaze on me all the way to the elevator, like freezing water rolling down my back.
I did not want to follow Alice's orders, though I felt a mental nudging to do so. I stared at the list as the elevator descended. Unfortunately, the closest vampire was Carlos. If I was going to talk to anyone else tonight, it would have to be him.
I was crossing the lobby when my pager went off. I used a desk phone to call the number. Cameron answered at the other end.
"Where are you?" I asked. My head throbbed and a matching ache had grown in my innards.
"I'm at Sarah's place. Uh, she says to say hi and she got two ferrets instead of one."
"I'm happy for her. I just finished talking to Alice and things are… well, they're trickier than I thought. Could you meet me tonight?"
"Not tonight. Tomorrow. Call it an hour after sundown, which is… eight twenty-seven, so, nine thirty?"
"All right. I'll see you then. For now, I'm going to see Carlos."
"Oh, man… be careful, Harper. If I don't see you tomorrow, I'll know who to ask, at least."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Cameron."
I checked my watch as I left the lobby; it was twelve thirty-nine and dread was twisting in my stomach. I did not want to precipitate a palace coup, but Alice's point about the protective behavior of vampires was giving me an idea. I didn't know if I could manage it, but my other options seemed feeble. I had to trust Alice to cover my tracks as she'd said. If she hated Edward enough, she would. I was banking on hate.
The list said I could find Carlos at Adult Fantasies, a sex shop just behind a strip of businessmen's motels from which they probably culled most of their clientele.
Less than ten minutes' walk from the swanky shops and condos of downtown, the tangled area of odd-shaped blocks housed a strip joint, two all-night bar-and-grills, and Adult Fantasies in their own little commerce park of public embarrassment and private greed. Efforts to move them off or shut them down were never completely successful. Even a plan to make the area into a park had come to naught; eighty years of industrial dumping had made the ground too toxic. So the nighthawks' wasteland remained and Seattle's history of making money off sin continued in all its tawdry glory.
The Adult Fantasies building was a sharply pointed triangle. Full-height windows at the point opened up a view right through the fetish wear and lingerie. I pulled open the plate glass door, went past the stairs that led to the video parlor and "home of live girls," and into the store proper. To my left was the clothing: on my right, the stuff even a sex shop doesn't put in the window. Ahead was a glass counter of X-rated impulse items, guarded by a cash register and a Goth girl.
Her hair was deep, oily purple, her face rice-powder white around black lips and battered-raccoon eyes. Two small, black niobium rings pierced her right eyebrow and a fine silver chain connected the ring in her left nostril to one in her left ear. For balance, the earring on the right was a heavy black spider web with its ruby resident dangling within. A studded leather collar with swags of chain imprisoned her neck. She glanced at me over a notebook she had spread on the countertop. Realizing I was coming straight to her, she closed the book and put her pen down on top of it.
She looked midtwenties, though she sounded like a teenager. "Hi, did you have a question?"
"Is Carlos in?"
"Oh, he's around. Probably upstairs. Just a second." She looked around the store and spotted a young man over in the only dark corner the store had, crowded between vibrating plastic penises and the green-painted dressing-room doors.
She called to him. "Jason, is Carlos upstairs?"
Jason raised his head out of a cardboard shipping container filled with videotapes and looked in our direction. "I… um, yeah, I guess I saw him go up there about half an hour ago. One of the girls came downstairs to get him."
"Would you go up there and tell him someone down here wants to talk to him?" she asked, displaying the kind of patience mothers have for backward children.
"What about my box?"
"I'll keep an eye on it," she assured him. "OK?"
"Sure. OK. I'll go get him." Jason slumped off toward the door.
We stood there in the vague thump of music from the rooms upstairs. Her gaze kept flickering down to her notebook. "You can look around, if you want. Sometimes it takes a while for the guys to get back downstairs. I don't know why. I mean, they've seen tits before."
I nodded. "What are you studying?"
"I'm writing an article for The Stranger, about safe sex."
"That should be a winner." I wondered what qualified as safe from the point of view of someone who felt the need to chain her nose on. Not wanting to cramp her writing style, I wandered around.
I was examining a black and purple leather bustier with marabou feathers around the top when I felt my stomach fall toward the floor. I turned my head. A slab-bodied, bearded man strode toward me. He wore a clot of darkness like a cape, riding on the broad shoulders of his black leather jacket. His eyes were a couple of pits under lowering, cliff like brows. He stoppe
d a scant two feet from me and looked me over. The desire to run far and fast, shrieking, electrified my legs and caught at my throat. I quashed the urge and pivoted to face him.
He clasped his hands in front of himself. "You wanted to see me?" he rumbled.
The breath. I tried not to flinch. "Alice sent me," I stated.
"Alice." Glaciers react more.
"Liddell." I stared right back at him, even though it racked me. A tremor of fright moved under my skin.
He grunted. "Let's go to the office." He turned, assuming I would follow him. As we passed the counter, he glanced at the Goth girl.
"Keep Jason out."
"OK," she agreed, barely raising her head from her page.
A door next to the dressing rooms led to a small storage room with a desk and a couple of chairs shoved in among the boxes and files. Carlos went behind the desk and pointed at the chair on my side.
"Sit down."
I did.
He folded his arms on the desktop, cupping his left elbow with his right hand. His fist was as big as a billboard against the black leather sleeve. "Now. What do want with me, ghost girl?"
I bridled. "Excuse me?"
"You got 'em hangin all over you," he growled, reaching toward me. I shied, but he hooked something out of my hair and pulled it back to the desktop. A wisp of Grey, like a steam-spun cobweb, wafted from his fingertips. He wadded it up and shoved it into his inside breast pocket. "Now, what do you want?"
"I–I'm a private investigator and I'm working for Cameron Shadley."
"Edward's little blond toy? That Cameron?"
"Yes, that Cameron." I gave a sharp, annoyed nod. "But he's not Edward's 'toy, as you put it, anymore."
He sketched a shrug.
"I need to know more about Edward before I attempt to meet with him about Cameron," I continued. "Alice suggested you might have something to say that I could use."
Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.
"You have an ax to grind?" I prompted. I was quaking inside.
He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. "You bet I've got an ax to grind, and when it's good and sharp, I'd like to bury it in that bastard's skull."
"Why?" My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.
"You wouldn't like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable."
"I can't ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client's sake." I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.
"What do you plan to do with this information you're seeking?"
"Raise trouble."
Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.
"You will tell no one what you learn from me."
I fought the compulsion to agree. "I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward."
His stare ripped into me. "The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward."
I swallowed dust and shuddered. "Yes. All right." I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.
Chapter 21
Carlos leaned across the desk and pinned me to the chair with his gaze. He spoke in a low, intense voice that enthralled and smothered me. "It's not mere blood that sustains a vampire, but the life force that flows with the blood. Our own is weak. We must take this life force from others or we fade to crippled shadows, fall into madness, and drown by slow agony to the true death.
"The most vital and powerful of creatures offers the greatest quality of life. That is why we prey on daylighters, like you. You offer us so much that we need not hunt too frequently and death is not always necessary to acquire what we need. A vampire uses this energy to replace what he cannot produce himself. All creatures need it. Some rare few can give up this energy by will and use it for other purposes. When it is given up, it eats your own life as well. If the power required is great enough, it may devour every shred of life and death within you. You must have other lives—other blood—to draw upon. If the undertaking requires great power, it may require many lives. Or the blood of a vampire, which commingles life and death. Neither blood nor this power are to be coerced or commanded. The price for them is too high. But Edward demanded them—ripped then—from me.
"We met in Lisbon. Edward was still young, but his ambition burned like an equatorial sun. He schemed and clawed to raise himself, but only antagonized the rest of our kind. He had few friends but I—fool—was among them."
His voice fell into older rhythms as he spoke, and I felt the past rise around us in a Grey curtain I could not turn back.
"He had a plan to destroy his enemies at a single blow, but it required that power which he, himself, did not command."
His words began to press on me.
"He brought his plan to me. I told him it was too risky. The blood required, the deaths, would be noticed, and the spells were dangerous. We argued over it. I would not give up blood for him—nor would any other—but he agreed to a smaller conflagration bought with mere human lives.
"I went a safe distance, to Seville, and began gathering the men and women we would need, the materials, the place… I kept our prisoners and began to craft the great spell into the very walls. Edward arrived and I helped him to build the machine until I was near exhausted. He sent me away to rest until we were ready."
Something half memory and half vision coiled around me. I shied from it, but it clutched me. I could see shadowy faces of the men and women in eighteenth-century rags and feel his labor burn in my own muscles.
"On All Hallows Eve, he came for me. We walked to the cathedral and descended into our cellar near La Giralda. New symbols lined the walls and floor in chalk and charcoal, gold and blood. I did not study them, for I was distracted by the sight of what we had built."
Excitement. A hundred arcane words and shapes hemmed me in, hammering on dark stone.
"Deeper in the cellar, the two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine which poised silver blades to their necks, holding them in the spell, directed toward a single instant and purpose." Cold, the edges kissed the back of my neck and the hair rose.
"They would know no pain nor the horror of watching their fellows die. I did not require torment, only death. Some had whimpered and moaned in distress as we entered, but they fell into enthralled silence when Edward passed them. Such has always been his power. We walked into the center of the room, to a place in the floor which was the focus of the machine and of the spell's power. All the symbols in the room led to it and from it and already it throbbed with the potential of magic."
I felt the humming of it in my bones, the sudden calm of the men and women smothering Carlos's anticipation and creeping unease.
"He stopped beside a rope which hung from the ceiling, well away from the machine, leaving me to stand at the focus.
"A few of the glyphs disturbed me—black things, like mourners at a wedding feast—but I had no time to protest.
" 'Begin! he commanded.
"I spoke and the threads of the spell wove together, ghostly, in need of power. I opened my arms to the machine and Edward pulled the rope."
Power thrummed and shook, then roared, and I felt the quick shock of the blades.
"Their heads tumbled and the hot, liquid force of their lives gouted forth, drenching me. My skin drank them, my body and mind absorbing them in life and death conjoined in that shocked instant. Their unvoiced gasp pushed into me and out my own mouth, staggering me, shivering through my flesh. The power of them flooded me and I reached into the spell, giving it their life through me."
I trembled with his memory, quivered with the orgasmic fl
ow of life and death through a body that was and wasn't mine—then shocked into pain and despair.
"The ecstasy of their swift, clean deaths shattered as Edward drove a blade into my back. He spoke a word and flung the black blood which welled from my wound into the focus. The final, dark symbol flared and I fell to my knees.
"Edward stood above me and plunged his knive into my chest."
"I cried out and the newly murdered cried within me. He twisted the knife, ripping into my heart which beat with them." Agony. No way to scream. He continued.
"I screamed and died for them. Died each death at once, more horrible than they had died, each screaming, all screaming. Their blood, now my own, poured out again. And the power of their souls flashed like white fire, flooded into the cellar, blazed into the symbols, and the cellar erupted in the phosphor white burn of the spell, blinding me as it spent." Silence.
"I felt something break within my chest. Darkness shrouded me, but I heard him, moving, laughing. He knelt beside me and touched my head.
"'You have done very well, he said. Even blinded, I could see the fleeting nimbus of his stolen power pulsing around him.
"I reached for him, and agony tore through my chest. I fell to the floor like an injured babe, unable to move or speak.
" 'I shall always be in your heart. He laughed again and left me." The touch of his telling began receding, draining me as he finished.
"I was awakened by the earthquake and the pealing of La Giralda's bells as the tower shook. The sun had risen, shining through rents in walls and ceiling. I crawled to a niche in the basement to hide from the overwhelming fury our spell, powered by their deaths and my blood, had poured into the earth. It was far more, far worse, than I had meant. It was a grandiose and pointless rage of destruction fit to Edward's own spite. Lisbon collapsed beneath the earthquakes, flood, and fire that swept it. Sixty thousand of your kind and mine ceased. And all for naught. Those of our kind who remained in Lisbon left the city and Edward was king of nothing.
"He ripped the sweetness of their souls from me and used it for himself, bled me, then left me bound to die. The tip of his knife is still lodged in my heart. When I find a way to remove it, he will die those two dozen deaths for me. One by one."
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