Paint It Black (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  But, first, she had to tie up a couple of loose ends...

  The ogre guarding the door of the Black Grotto moved to block Sonja’s path as she approached. She had gone up against more than one of his kinsmen over the years, and knew they were damn near impossible to take down in hand-to-hand combat. However, all things, Natural and Supernatural, have their weakness. And the ogres’ was their complete lack of psychic powers. For all their fearsome strength, they were even weaker than humans between the ears.

  The whites of the ogre’s eyes filled with blood as she squeezed his mind. He made a snuffling noise, like a hog at its troth as cerebral fluid spurted from his nostrils and ears, before finally collapsing in a boneless heap. Sonja stepped over his splayed body without a second glance.

  The human chandeliers moaned as she entered the main room; whether in greeting or alarm was impossible to tell. The eyeless chamber musicians halted in mid-performance of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, sniffing the air nervously, like hunting dogs that have caught scent of a predator circling their camp. Lady Hedera was seated in a throne-like chair, dressed in knee-high stiletto boots and a black Merry Widow corselet as she oversaw the flaying of what had once been a stock analyst from Connecticut in

  “Who let you in?” the Black Grotto’s owner snarled, her voice slightly dipping lower as Luxor’s features threatened to emerge from their hiding place. “And thanks for upsetting the décor, by the way; we’ve only just got them to quiet down!”

  “I realize I promised I wouldn’t come back until I’d settled with Morgan,” Sonja replied, “but I changed my mind after you sent your spawn to the Cherub Room last night.”

  Lady Hedera barked a humorless laugh and cast a knowing look to her surrounding brood. With a single nod of her head, all twelve rose as one. “You must really have a death wish.”

  “That may very well be true,” Sonja agreed as she flicked open her switchblade.

  “Is that supposed to intimidate me?” Hedera sneered. “Do you think you can stab us all with your little silver knife before we bring you down?”

  “No,” Sonja admitted. “I’m only planning on killing you with it.”

  “We would say you are droll, Ms. Blue; but we are not amused. Kill the bitch,” Lady Hedera commanded, with a languid wave of her manicured hand.

  Luxor and Hedera’s spawn moved forward, their eyes glowing in the darkness of the speakeasy like those of a pack of hyena on the hunt. As they drew closer, Sonja reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a large aerosol can with a ring attached to its top. Grabbing the ring with her teeth, she gave the canister a hard yank and then tossed it onto the floor between her and the advancing brood. The vampires came to an abrupt halt. Even though a hand grenade would not be enough to kill them, none of Luxor’s gets were particularly eager to have their legs blown off.

  There was a loud hissing sound, like that of air escaping from a punctured tire, immediately followed by a thick blue-white smoke. Thinking it was merely a smoke-bomb, the vampires exchanged disdainful smirks amongst themselves…until the one closest to the canister abruptly sank to the ground, clutching at his throat as huge blisters filled with yellowish fluid rapidly appeared on his face and his eyes burst and ran down his ruined cheeks like bloody tears.

  As identical blisters appeared on their exposed skin, the other vampires screamed in pain and alarm and began to frantically backpedal away from the rolling cloud. In their hurry to escape, they became entangled in the chains tethering the human ‘vintages’ to the walls of the speakeasy. The ensnared vampires slashed and tore at the hapless, latex-encased slaves as well as each other as the toxic mist closed over them like a phantom fist.

  “Wretched creature!” Lady Hedera wailed as blisters rose like loaves of bread on her face. “What hell have you unleashed?”

  “You like it?” Sonja grinned. “I got the idea from the aerosol grenades firefighters use to knock-out fires. But instead of releasing a cloud of pressurized free radicals, it uses vaporized colloidal silver. I paid an inventor guy I know to make up a batch for me. This seemed as good a time as any to give it a test run.”

  Lady Hedera gave a dreadful shriek, like that of a wildcat, and launched herself at Sonja, fangs exposed and claws extended. The vampire-slayer leapt forward to greet her, the two colliding in mid-air like battling eagles. Hedera grabbed Sonja’s knife-hand by the wrist, blocking her blow while digging manicured talons deep into her throat. Sonja’s free hand snatched one of Hedera’s apple-like breasts free of the corselet’s cup and gave it a vicious twist. As the Noble screamed in pain, her voice dropped in register, and her breast dwindled like a deflating balloon as Lady Hedera hastily fled the field of battle and Baron Luxor made his return.

  “There you are,” Sonja grinned.

  “I’m going to tear your head off and shit down your neck,” Luxor growled as he dug his nails even deeper into her throat.

  Sonja struggled for breath as her blood squirted out from between the vampire lord’s crushing fingers. As her vision started to dim, she grabbed at Luxor’s hair with her free hair and yanked as hard as she could, only to have his entire scalp slough away in her grip like wet newspaper. As she hurled her trophy to the floor, Luxor cried out and dived to retrieve it, surrendering his grip on Sonja’s throat. The vampire knelt down, frantically trying to re-arrange the sodden clump of hair and skin, so it covered his exposed skull, sobbing “My hair…my beautiful hair…my lovely, lovely hair!”

  Grimacing in disgust, Sonja leapt onto the distracted Noble and quickly pinned Luxor to the floor. Although vampire’s entire face and upper body were covered in huge, swollen blisters as if he had been dipped into boiling oil, and his eyeballs were beginning to swell in their sockets, his physical strength was not in the least diminished. Luxor bucked and flailed as they grappled, frantically drumming his stiletto heels against the floor like a toddler throwing a tantrum, but Sonja refused to let go. As she drove the silver switchblade into the vampire lord’s heart, he screamed like a diva going for the highest note and then went still. Upon getting to her feet, Sonja could see that the Noble had died mid-transition, with one side eternally Hedera, the other Luxor. Although expending so much energy taking out a powerful vampire before meeting with Morgan might not be the smartest move, she had felt compelled to do so, just in case her rendezvous with her Maker did not turn out as planned.

  She glanced about at what remained of the speakeasy. While the silver fog from the aerosol grenade had left the Black Grotto’s human servants and living ‘décor’ untouched, the same could not be said for its clientele. The vampires closest to the grenade when it deployed were destroyed instantly; their bodies liquefying where they dropped. Those farther away were equally doomed, if expiring at a slower rate of speed. They moaned piteously as they crawled about on their hands and knees, every inch of their exposed skin covered in oozing boils, leaving trails behind them like slugs. Sonja quickly moved among them, dispatching them with quick, efficient stabs to the base of the neck.

  Mixed amongst the dead vampires strewn about the floor were a good number of Luxor and Hedera’s human servitors, who had the misfortune of getting caught in the stampede to escape the gas. From the looks of it, they had been mauled to death by the panicked vampires. Sonja recognized Luxor and Hedera’s gimp, the one she had momentarily freed on her previous visit, among the casualties as he had managed to pull the hood off his head before he bled out. The rest of the surviving Renfields and gimps were milling about with dazed, shell-shocked looks on their faces. She saw Luxor’s cup-bearer, his party frock now torn and coated in blood, whimpering like a child who has gotten lost at the mall.

  As she continued to look around, her attention was drawn to one of the Black Grotto’s ‘private stock’—in this case, a woman in a black latex cat-suit and mask—who was desperately yanking on the chain welded to the corset cinched about her waist. As Sonja stepped forward to help, the captive woman spun about to face her, her
eyes filled with terror.

  “Go on—get out of here,” Sonja said as she snapped the length of chain with her bare hands.

  The woman reached up and pulled the latex mask from her head, revealing a painfully young, terribly pale face, then turned and dashed for the door. However, halfway there, she stopped and turned back to stare at Sonja with haunted eyes.

  “Why did you stop them?” The girl croaked, her voice rusty from disuse.

  “Someone had to,” she replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The observation deck of the Empire State Building, located on the eighty-sixth floor of the most famous once-tallest skyscraper in the world, was officially closed after two in the morning. But nothing is off limits to creatures that can walk unseen by mortal men.

  At street level, the wind was not particularly strong, but over eighty stories up was a different matter. Even with the Art Deco windbreaks that also served to keep the suicides at bay, the wind could not be denied as it tugged at Sonja’s hair and clothes like an insistent child demanding her attention.

  Morgan was already there, waiting for her, the opera coat he was wearing flapping and snapping like a flag. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out over the city that lay spread before them like stars reflected in a still pond.

  “I knew you would come,” he said without looking at her. “I have to ask: Are you still determined to kill me?”

  “What else is there to do?” she replied with a shrug. “I don’t play cards.”

  Morgan turned to look at her, favoring her with a twisted smile. “So you do have a sense of humor, then.”

  “About some things,” she conceded. “But you’re not one of them.”

  His gaze dropped to the eight-ball pendant hanging about her neck, and his contorted smile grew even wider. He nodded to himself and then returned his attention to the city.

  “The city is beautiful, is it not?’ he said, gesturing to the horizon. “It’s alive, you know, not unlike a coral reef. Hundreds upon thousands upon millions of humans eating and shitting and fucking and dying in such a cramped physical location, their life forces united on an occult wavelength that they are unaware of.” He pointed in the direction of the Lower East Side. “Right now a drunken husband, enraged by his wife’s refusal to give him sex, is strangling his three-year-old stepson.” Warming to the subject, Morgan moved to the opposite side of the deck, waving a hand toward Central Park. “Police are still searching the park around Harlem Meer for a toddler belonging to a pair of Iowa tourists, who reported snatched the child snatched from his stroller by a Black man. In truth, they accidentally beat the child to death three days ago and buried him in a shallow grave in their backyard before leaving for New York.” Spinning on his heel like a demented weathervane, Morgan pointed at the southwest corner. “A balding closet queen with some minor political clout is chatting up a handsome young man in a piano bar in the West Village. He doesn’t know it yet, but the object of his lust has raped and killed eight older gay men over the last three years, chopping up their bodies and disposing of them in plastic bags along lonely highways upstate.” Morgan swerved again, like a compass needle being drawn to true north. “In Spanish Harlem eight children between the ages of a few months to five years old are locked inside a one-room apartment with nothing but a television set while their parents work minimum wage jobs.” He grabbed one of the pay telescopes mounted on the edge of the railing and swung it about with a laugh. “God, I love this town!”

  “I don’t need a tour of the city,” Sonja snarled. “Why did you ask me to meet you here?”

  “Because I wished to continue our previous conversation in a location where we’re less likely to be so rudely interrupted.”

  “I can guarantee Luxor’s brood will not be showing up unannounced again,” Sonja said with a crooked smile.

  Morgan cocked an eyebrow in surprise. “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. Nothing has changed between us, Morgan.”

  “If that is indeed the case, then why haven’t you attacked me yet?” he asked. “There are no witnesses here, no crowds of innocent bystanders to stay your hand.”

  “Maybe I just do not feel like it right now,” she replied tersely.

  “Surely you can find a better reason than that!” Morgan chuckled. “We both know you are lying. Are you sure the reason for your lack of action isn’t the fact you realize there is no longer a point to your vendetta?”

  “What makes you think you know what’s going through my head?” Sonja snorted, fixing him with an angry glare.

  “There is a current that exists between us— do you not feel it? You and I are far more simpatico, far more than any get I’ve Made. We are left hand and right hand; the tide and the shore; yin and yang. We are the same, you and I.”

  “I’m nothing like you!” Sonja exclaimed, grimacing in disgust.

  “Have you tasted the blood of the living? Answer me truthfully.”

  Sonja frowned and looked away. “I try to keep to the bottled stuff, but sometimes it can’t be avoided…”

  “Have you ever taken pleasure from the sufferings of others?”

  “Yes, but they deserved it…”

  “The only difference between you and me, Sonja, is that you still cling to the illusion of your humanity. Indeed, you hold yourself to ideals that the vast majority of them have discarded. I, on the other hand, look at humans and see nothing but mindless, cud-chewing cattle perpetually on the brink of a stampede. But you have somehow gotten it into your head that humans are to be envied instead of used.

  “You seem to forget that it wasn’t our kind who invented the Nazi concentration camps, or the Russian gulags, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Serbian rape camps. Humans had no problem creating those living hells all on their own. Can you blame us for exploiting such fertile sources of nourishment? And it’s not as if you are innocent of feeding on the misery of innocents.”

  “I’ve never done anything like that!” Sonja protested.

  “Are you so sure of that?” Morgan countered. “Why do you spend so much time in the inner city? It is not just a matter of camouflage. Don’t you feel a high every time you prowl a ghetto neighborhood—the more crime-ridden the better? Doesn’t it make you feel more alive— more alert—to trawl for prey in the most hopeless sectors of town? Oh, I’m sure you tell yourself you are stalking those neighborhoods because that is where your prey is most likely to be. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  Sonja shifted about uncomfortably. Morgan’s insights were proving both disturbing and compelling. Part of her wanted to punch him in the mouth to make him shut up, but another wanted to keep listening.

  “Do you know what it is like to be lonely, Sonja?” Morgan’s voice had become very intimate as if they were standing by a country lake instead of high atop a skyscraper. “Do you know what it’s like to be surrounded by people, yet still be painfully, horribly alone? Do you fear that you might someday disappear into the emptiness that once held your heart?”

  “Yes,” she replied. Her voice was so quiet she wasn’t sure shed had spoken aloud.

  “You know nothing of loneliness,” Morgan hissed, his voice suddenly growing a hard, rusty edge. “You won’t even begin to have an inkling for another century! To stand outside the flow of time and watch those you once called friends and lovers wither away and die is a unique form of Hell. No matter how many servants and consorts you surround yourself with, in the end, you will always be alone. But the worst part is the realization that you have no equal; that there is no companion who can challenge your expectations, or understand what drives you—unless you Make one yourself.

  “The problem is finding a suitable candidate. The humans who are drawn to our kind are attracted to our inhumanity, our monstrosity if you will. They love us for what we are not, not for what we are. Those who seek us out are not worthy vessels, yet we Nobles fear Making a strong-willed human in our image. In our so
ciety, there are only two positions: master and slave. To not be one is to be the other. So our instinct is to infect the subservient, and avoid those with the inner strength that results in a fellow Noble. We do so out of fear of what might happen when the time comes for them to claim their place in the Ruling Class. To be a true Noble, one must break free of their Maker, if not actually destroy them.”

  “You did not kill Pangloss,” Sonja pointed out.

  Morgan fell silent for a moment, his face unreadable. “Pangloss did not require killing. When the time came, he recognized me as his better and surrendered his control. As I said, ours is a society of masters and slaves. That is why, in the five centuries since I threw off Pangloss’ yoke, he was never able to harm me.”

  “Are you sure it’s not because he still loved you?”

  Morgan’s response to this line of questioning was a bitter bark of laughter.

  “His last words were of you,” she said. While not completely truthful, neither was it a lie.

  “He’s dead, then?” Morgan asked, sounding only slightly surprised.

  “Let’s just say the Pangloss you knew no longer exists,” Sonja replied.

  Morgan shrugged. “The old bastard has not meant anything to me since the Medici were popes. You, on the other hand, intrigue me. You possess a vitality I find most invigorating. Perhaps it is your extreme youth that inspires me so? All I know is that whenever I think of you, whenever I am with you, I feel as if the world has been remade anew and that it is mine to conqueror.

  “I have had numerous brides in my past, but I have yet to take a queen. We could rule the vampire and human worlds alike, you and I,” Morgan said, gesturing to the carpet of winking lights spread before them. “With your immunity to silver and daylight and the power and influence I have accumulated over six centuries of existence, we would be invincible. Every Noble on the face of the earth would either swear allegiance to us or be destroyed. We will be unstoppable. We will be forever.”