“You are speaking of theories here, Doctor,” Bassarab reminded her.
“True. But it fits all of the known data and answers a number of questions.”
“But,” he stroked his chin and turned to look at me, “in theory, then, I should be able to complete Mr. Csejthe’s metamorphosis by biting him, now.”
“Now hold on here,” I said, easing back against the headboard.
“Only with your permission, of course,” he added with a smile.
“Theoretically, yes. . . .” Mooncloud turned and looked at me with a speculative look that gave me chills.
“It would certainly go a long way toward proving your theory,” Bassarab said.
“Yes. . .”
“No!” Lupé snarled. The hair on her forearms was standing up, and she was positively bristling.
“My, my, I am impressed,” Bassarab remarked mildly. “Even though you are not fully transformed, you command great loyalty in your servitors.”
“Mr. Csejthe has no servitors here,” Mooncloud said icily.
He smiled. “You are joking. You would have me believe—what?—that you are in charge of this mission?”
I leaned over and murmured to Lupé: “Define this for me—are we witnessing an exhibition of misogyny, racism, or some kind of multispecies/class superiority prejudice thing?”
She still bristled, but I saw the hint of a smile and a little of the tension seemed to ease from her trembling frame.
There was more of a smile on Dr. Mooncloud’s face as she steepled her fingers and bit back. “Mr. Bassarab—or Vlad Tepes or Count Dracula or whoever you claim to be—I think the fact that we are allies,” she smiled more broadly, “and you are certainly in need of allies these days, entitles us to a little more courtesy on your part.”
While all of this was going on I was shaking off my emotional lethargy. My black pit of forgetfulness was unsealed now, and ugly memories were starting to crawl out.
“Allies? How dare you!” Bassarab was standing now, his long, pale features white with anger. “I am the Drakul, Voivode of Walachia and Warlord of the Transylvanian Unity! It was I who time and time again beat back the numberless hordes of Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians, winning victory after victory against insurmountable odds! My name is synonymous with terror, I have outlived my foes and their progeny even unto their great-great-grandchildren! I wield powers and forces that are unknown and unthinkable to mere mortals! I am deathless! To my enemies I am Death!”
“And yet,” Mooncloud interrupted, “you are on the run from a carful of thugs.”
“I have my reasons for my present actions. I owe you no explanations. I owe you nothing—except for Mr. Csejthe, whose blood-bond—”
“You owe me my wife and my little girl, you son-of-a-bitch!” I was halfway across the length of the bed of a sudden, IVs popping from my arm and whipping about the room. “I want them back! I want my life back!”
Lupé caught me, held me back. Had I not already been seriously weakened, even her lycanthropic strength would not have been able to restrain me.
“But you can’t!” I panted. “They’re dead and there’s nothing you can do to bring them back!” I strained against Lupé’s grasp. “So what good is your fucking blood bond to me . . . or. . .” To my own horror I sagged in her arms and began to weep.
The old vampire seemed to rise off the floor, spreading his cape wide like the unfolding wings of a great, ancient bat. “As Warlord I slew tens of thousands of my people’s enemies. As voivode of the unliving and, later, as Doman of the New York demesne, I personally took hundreds more, thousands through the actions of those whom I made dark immortals. Blood is spilled, Mr. Csejthe, among the innocent as well as the guilty. I cannot feel an obligation to a victim each time I must feed. I owe nothing to any mortal, save Victor here, and he is well compensated for his service.
“But you and I, Christopher Csejthe, share a blood-bond for our life-forces have been mingled. And, according to the code that our society has adopted from necessity, I must take responsibility for you until such time that you are fully assimilated.
“And I am sorry for the loss of your wife and child: it was needless and served no purpose.”
“But that happened after the blood-bond was forged,” Mooncloud pounced, “so you are not without responsibility in the matter!”
Bassarab turned on her with a scowl. “Will you play the barracks lawyer with me, Doctor? Very well, let us split hairs and strain at gnats! If Mr. Csejthe is not truly wampyr, not fully undead, is the blood-bond fully in effect? If he is still mortal, then I owe him nothing and may do with him as pleases me!”
“Yeah?” I struggled to get past Lupé’s arms and my tears and was only half successful. “Come on! Float your candy-vampire-ass over here and take your best shot! We’ll settle all debts right here and now!”
“Shut! Up!” Mooncloud yelled at me. “It was an accident, Chris! There is nothing that any of us here can do that will bring them back! And you!” she continued, rounding on Bassarab. “If you would pretend to be Vlad Drakul Bassarab, called Dracula, it would serve your little masquerade to remember than the Voivode of Walachia was a man of honor! Further victimizing this man will not serve his memory or help your cause! What we must do, here and now, is forge an alliance that will prove mutually beneficial, insure our mutual victory, and bring death and vengeance down upon our enemies! To accomplish that we must begin with a truce and a modicum of mutual respect!”
Bassarab lowered himself back into his chair. He still glowered as he turned to Dr. Mooncloud, but his lips twitched as if fighting a smile and there was a suspicion of respect in his voice as he spoke.
“Perhaps I was wrong about you, madam. I begin to believe that you may indeed be voivode and warlord in your own demesne.”
Fifteen hours later we were back in Kansas City buying a new Ford Bronco. With cash.
“Who’s Salmon P. Chase?” Lupé asked as she slid behind the steering wheel.
“Who?” I mumbled groggily. The infusion of blood by IV had helped a great deal, but I needed a good day’s sleep. It was now eleven a.m. and my biological clock was insisting that it was hours past my bedtime.
“Salmon P. Chase. He wasn’t a president. All the others were presidents.”
I pushed the felt-brimmed fedora up off my face and adjusted my wraparound sunglasses against the glare of the midday sun outside the Bronco’s tinted windows. “What are you talking about?”
“These bills. . . .” She fanned the thick stack of grey-green paper at me.
“Federal reserve notes,” I corrected, “not ‘bills.’ ”
“Look here,” she continued, pulling individual notes from the stack. “William McKinley on the five-hundred-dollar bill, Grover Cleveland on the thousand. . .”
I yawned. Felt my incisors to see if they’d grown. Nada.
“ . . . and here’s James Madison on the five-thousand. All presidents.”
“Ben Franklin’s on the hundred-dollar bill,” I said, studying my indistinct reflection in the vanity mirror on the passenger-side visor. Picture Indiana Jones trying to pose as a Secret Service agent. “He’s not a president.” The sunblock I had slathered on felt like ancient cold cream gone bad and starting to curdle. But . . . so far, so good: I hadn’t burst into flame or started crumbling to dust, yet.
“Franklin I know,” she retorted. “But this guy on the ten-thousand-dollar bill I never heard of.” She turned the key in the ignition and the Bronco’s engine growled into a purring idle.
Dr. Mooncloud tapped on my window and I lowered the glass. “Here’s a list of the sporting goods dealers that carry crossbows,” she said, handing me a list. “Victor and I have the other half of the list, and we’ll meet you back at the motel as soon as we’re done.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Have you tried to call the Doman, yet?”
Lupé nodded. “Twice. Every time I get within ten feet of a telephone, I want to throw up!”
“Mental dom
ination. It’s like a post-hypnotic suggestion.”
“Damn vampires and their mind control!” Lupé patted my hand. “Present company excepted.”
“Well,” Mooncloud said, “if you can think of anything else that will help, get it. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” I said, jerking my thumb, “Lupé wants to know who Salmon P. Chase was.”
The doctor frowned quizzically. “He was a lawyer, politician, and an antislavery leader before the American Civil War—three-term senator, governor of Ohio. Tried to win the Republican candidacy for president twice, and the Democratic candidacy once. He served as Secretary of the Treasury on Lincoln’s war cabinet. He was instrumental in establishing a system of national banks that could issue notes as legal tender. Ended up being the fifth—no—sixth chief justice of the Supreme Court.” She smiled. “Anything else?”
I shook my head. “Let’s get this done so we can get back and get a little shut-eye.”
She nodded and headed back over to the Duesenberg where Wren was waiting.
“Still seems a funny choice for a picture on the ten-thousand-dollar bill,” Lupé muttered as she shifted gears and headed toward the lot’s exit.
“She left out the part about him running against Lincoln,” I said, leaning my seat back into a thirty-degree incline and pulling my hat back down over my face. “He put his own face on most of the denominations and the ten-thousand-dollar note as a campaign gimmick. The ten thousand is the sole survivor.”
“How—”
“I watch a lot of Jeopardy.”
“Jeopardy?”
“Call me old-fashioned and Trebek is fine, but he’s not Art Fleming.”
“I hate you now.” I couldn’t see her smile but I could hear it in her voice. “So, do you think he’s legit?”
“Alex Trebek?” I grunted.
“Count Dracula. You know: Mr. Death to his many friends and admirers.”
“Hmmp. For a servitor, you seem to be lacking the appropriately reverent tone in discussing a member of the Master Race. Particularly the Grand Prince of said race, himself.”
“If himself he actually is.”
“Does it really matter?”
“Well, it is a pretty incredible story: Dracula as head of the New York demesne. . . .”
In addition to claiming that he was the Count—excuse me, Prince—Dracula, our host had told us that he had ruled the New York demesne for over a century. Eventually, he explained, he had grown tired of the responsibilities: the intrigues, plots, the infighting. One of the factions had become involved with organized crime, opening a Pandora’s box that even the self-styled Prince of Darkness found distasteful. There had been attempts on his life (or unlife, if you prefer) even by his own kind—the ancient tradition of advancement by assassination.
There had finally come a day, he’d explained, when he had grown weary of the games and decided to live free, once more.
Of course, one doesn’t “retire” from a vampire enclave any more than one retires from certain covert governmental agencies or the Mafia. Especially if you are the Vlad Dracula.
“And so I had to disappear,” he’d told me on the long, night drive back up to Kansas City. “I planned it very carefully, liquidating selected assets that had been accumulated over the centuries, preparing a dozen different safe-houses with sheltered networks of investments and income, hoarding equipment and supplies, building false identities and essentially creating a secret demesne for myself that would be as invisible to the other underground enclaves as they were to the world of mortals.
“And so, I reasoned, where would one look for the Voivode of Walachia, the Prince of Darkness, the king of the wampyr? London? Paris? Monaco? One of the world’s great cities with a never-ending night life and millions of human cattle to hunt and hide among?
“Ah. Maybe someday. . . .
“But for awhile—and what are a few years when one has lived for centuries, may live for millennia?—it made sense to lie low and regroup where no one would think to look for the legendary Dracula.
“Kansas.”
Now one might think that Count Dracula would stand out in the cornfields of Kansas like Liberace at a black tie and tails affair.
Especially since Liberace is no longer among the living.
But as Blowfeld once said to 007: “If I destroy Kansas, Mr. Bond, it will be two years before the rest of the world would notice that it’s missing.”
Well, it’s not really quite that bad: hardly anyone really believes that Eisenhower is still president and a few of us have heard rumors that we might be putting a man into space almost any year now. But Kansas still provides the opportunity to drop out of the cultural and social mainstream if one so wishes, and neighbors tend to mind their own business. There are farmhouses adrift on vast tracts of fenced land where God-knows-what has gone on for generations. Don’t get me wrong; Kansas is full of good-hearted, friendly, and even wonderfully wise and talented folk. . .
. . . but there are certain lonely dirt roads that you should hope to never run across by day and God help you should you run out of gas by night. The southeast corner of the Sunflower State has more than its share of tales murmured around campfires at night—stories of drifters and hitchhikers and pits and hungers and abandoned houses that weren’t quite empty. . . . Away from the gatherings in the cities and towns, a man’s privacy is respected and certainly never challenged without risk.
Bassarab had chosen carefully. And it had almost worked.
But some ancient wiring in an old Kansas farmhouse had nearly done what time and armies and assassins could not. And, even though he had survived the fire, there was something in the aftermath—a fireman’s story, a hospital record, a police report, a newspaper article—that had been enough to flag the hunters back in New York. The privacy screen of eighty acres of fenced pasture land had failed.
When Mooncloud and Garou had turned up in Pittsburg, Kansas, it was to rope a stray and solve a medical mystery. New York’s retrieval team had had a different agenda: I was their best clue to finding Dracula.
But now the hunters had become the hunted.
“Yes,” I said to Lupé, “I think he actually is who he claims to be.” I smiled, picking up the huge roll of bills from between the seats. “But, as I was saying before, it really wouldn’t matter. He’s providing us with everything we need to finish this mission and he solved the big mystery about my own circumstances and condition.” I looked out the window. “And maybe given me a few ideas of my own. . . .”
The crossbows were easy.
We found a dealer who carried the Barnett International line from England. We started with six Trident models with single-hand pistol grips. Their forty-five-pound draw had an effective range of forty-five feet and would hurl a bolt approximately one hundred and twenty-two feet per second.
We then selected four Ranger models with a one-hundred-fifty-pound draw and a bolt speed of two-hundred and thirty feet per second.
Lupé was comparing the Desert Storm model for its additional ten yards of range and ten feet per second bolt speed when I noticed a unique-looking rifle with a spear protruding from the muzzle.
“It’s an Air Bow,” the dealer explained, noting my interest. “Uses liquid carbon dioxide or compressed air as a propellant and has a muzzle velocity of two-hundred and twenty FPS. There’s a fishing attachment that puts fifty feet of seventy-pound braided line onto a barrel-mounting reel and attaches to a special fishing arrow. And you can get a twelve-gram quick-change unit that will give you extra shots and make changing your propellant bottles quick and easy.”
“I’ll take the rifle and the quick-change unit,” I said, “but I don’t think I’ll need the fishing stuff.” I tried to imagine reeling in a vampire once I had nailed him. Ugh.
“As you wish. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
I nodded. “I notice all bolts and quarrels are primarily aluminum or plastic. Do you have any wooden ones?”
&nbs
p; “A few. But I think you’ll find the aluminum ones perform just as well and hold up a lot better—especially with repeated use out in the field.”
“Oh,” I said casually, Lupé watching me like a hawk, “I prefer wood. Especially ash, if you have any.”
He shook his head. “No ash. But I can call a couple of places in town that specialize for archery tournaments.”
While he did that, I picked out a couple of Splatmaster Rapide Semi-Automatic paint pistols, a Spartan Paintball rifle, twelve tubes of paintballs, and five dozen CO2 cartridges. “What do you think you’re doing?” Lupé hissed as I dumped our additional purchases on the counter.
“Trust me,” I said, as the shopkeeper came back with an address.
“They may be able to help you with ash dowels for your bolts,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”
“Well, we’d like carrying cases and four belt-mounted quivers. . . .”
Lupé grinned wolfishly and leaned across the counter. “And we’d like all of these outfitted with your best hunting scopes.”
Two hours later we were ready to head south, loaded down with two additional compound bows, seventy-three ash dowels, six fletching kits, five hypodermic syringes, four bottles of solvent, two bicycle tire repair kits, five knapsacks, four handbags, and two dozen small glass bottles.
“Pull over,” I said.
Lupé looked up at the cathedral as she parked at the curb. “You don’t need to do this,” she said. “Taj already has it on her list.”
“I want to try something and if it works, we’re going to need more.” I opened the door and stepped out onto the curb. “This shouldn’t take long.”
The sunlight seemed to hit me with a palpable force and I felt vaguely nauseated as I climbed the stone-blocked steps that stretched across the front of the church. At the top I hesitated, realizing that I hadn’t really spent enough time thinking this one out.
For openers: did the “welcome” sign constitute an invitation to cross the threshold, to enter? Of course it did—but in terms of a personal invitation? To a vampire? Or half a vampire? Maybe a halfway invitation was sufficient for a halfway undead person.
One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I Page 23
