Bloodfire (Empire of Fangs)

by Andrew Domonkos

  “Bad dream?” Zara asked, touching him lightly on his cheek.

  “Yeah,” Twig replied. He reached under his seat and found a water bottle, uncapped it, and took a long drink. “I was someone else. I was chasing someone.”

  “Damon?” Zara asked. Just saying the name sent shivers down her spine. During the ride to Silverthorne Twig had told her everything about his encounter with Damon: his frightening speed, his power…how he had batted Twig around like a toy. While listening, Zara remembered how strong Micah had been, how she was only able to defeat him when she let all the primal anger within her boil to the surface. If Damon or Drake came for her, she might have to summon that inner monster again. But there was something else too. When that presence had overtaken her, it had killed a small part of her, and afterwards she had changed. More and more she was feeling resentful to those who would try to control her, both human and vampire alike. More and more she wanted to lash out and teach these people a lesson.

  Twig fished out his smokes and lit one up. He took a long drag and it lit up his worried face. He leaned his head back on the seat and blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Not Damon,” he said softly. “A man…he had different eyes. We were chasing him in a canyon.”

  “Different eyes?” Zara asked with a tinge of alarm in her voice.

  “Yeah. One blue and one red. We were trying to kill him…”

  Zara sighed and touched her hair. It surprised her when she remembered that Twig had cut it. She looked in the side mirror and was startled by her visage. She was starting to look like a stranger. “We should go,” she said flatly. She didn’t want to worry Twig. She didn’t see much of a point to telling him that she had dreamt of the strange man too. Only she was in a forest, running with the strange man from an army. She was the hunted, not the hunter. She wondered if those were the only two roles left to play.

  Twig started the truck and let it idle for a moment while he played with the radio. He finally found a station that wasn’t playing country. The chorus of Live and Let Die was being crooned by Axl Rose. Twig laughed and gave the radio a puzzled look. He mumbled something about some things not dying on their own.

  Back on the highway, they rode in silence until they turned onto an off-ramp and were soon on a dirt road. The road was rough, the ride was jarring and it seemed to Zara to go on forever. Twig stopped the truck where the road finally forked. He hopped out and ran around the front of the truck towards a sign that read Lost Valley with an arrow pointing towards the other road.

  “What are you doing?” Zara asked through the window. She couldn’t help but laugh a bit at Twig as he grew frustrated and started bouncing against the thing. She could have got out and helped him—a light push from her would probably send the thing flying—but she didn’t want to emasculate him. She knew he was having a tough time dealing with everything, and she could sense that he was having trouble reconciling with the fact that he hadn’t been able to stop Damon or Micah, or even Vivian.

  The sign finally broke free from its base and fell over, taking Twig with it. He cursed as he fell over and disappeared in the grass. He got up and pulled several thorns out of his jacket and then returned to the truck. “That should make it a little harder to find us,” he said proudly.

  Zara looked worried and he added: “If they are even looking for us, that is.” Twig nodded and turned the wheel, towards Lost Valley.

  The main thoroughfare of Lost Valley was dusty and deserted. Twig drove slowly through the old town, looking out into the night with tired eyes.

  “Wow,” he said looking at the old western buildings. “Wooden sidewalks and everything. I bet this place was pretty happening about a hundred years ago.”

  Zara lazily gazed out at the dark structures—a gift shop with horseshoes puzzles and wooden toy rifles displayed in the window; a little restaurant named the Silver Star; a barbershop. Everything was closed and dark accept an old saloon where a few cars were parked out front. A soft and lonely western tune drifted out from the place.

  “I hear one banjo and I’m gunning it,” Twig said, giving the bar a suspicious look.

  They drove to the end of the strip and found a three-story Victorian hotel with a row of blue pillars holding up an awning over a sizable porch. The hotel was painted twenty different bright colors and the sign outside was purple with elegant golden letters spelling out “The Alistair.” Under the sign a smaller sign hung that said “Vacancy”. Twig looked at Zara with his weary eyes. “Maybe they were worried people wouldn’t see it.”

  “Looks good to me,” Zara said. She was so sick of running and fighting and lying. All she wanted to do was lie down on a real bed and pretend to be normal for as long as she could get away with it. Maybe when she woke she would be back in her apartment, playing spades with her dad in their tiny kitchen and waiting for the pizza guy. Her former life seemed less boring and sad now. She missed her friends from school and even her homework. She missed being herself.

  They got out and stretched in the cool night air. It was much colder than it had been in Denver, and Twig shivered even under his heavy jacket. He looked around at the other cars in the parking lot. There were a few newer cars with out of state plates. There was a minivan from Utah with a donut-shaped rock formation on it, and the phrase, “Life elevated”, displayed at the bottom. Two other cars sported plates of Oregon and New York respectively.

  “Must be a nice place for people to drive across country to get to it,” Twig remarked. “Better for us anyway. Maybe they won’t recognize us, I’m sure we’re as famous as Bonnie and Clyde by now.”

  Zara didn’t answer. She was staring off into the hills that swelled before the mountains, at something small and distant. After a moment of squinting Twig deduced by its shape that it was a water tower.

  “What is it?” He asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know…” she said. She looked back at him and shook her head. “Nothing I guess, let’s just get a room.”

  7.

  The police had interrogated Mark Lane for an interminable amount of time. It felt like days. The light they kept on him was disorientating, and he couldn’t be sure how long he had been in the catacombs of the Denver City Jail. He wasn’t told what he was being held for. They wanted to know about his daughter, Zara. Where was she? He had no idea.

  Before the cops had kicked down his door, Mark had gotten a strange call from James Sollero, Twig’s father. James wouldn’t go into details, but the kids were in trouble. Mark had reacted poorly and started shouting at James, blaming and panicking. He was infuriated that James was being so cryptic. All James would say is that the kids had pissed off some “powerful people,” and that Mark had to get out of there and come hideout with him in some safe-house. The crazy bastard wanted Mark to get in his car and drive to Utah, where this supposed safe house was located. Mark chalked most of this up to delusions, and had the terrified thought that James himself had done something to the kids. He was, afterall, batshit crazy.

  Mark had hung up on him out of frustration and then proceeded to punch a wall. After he had iced his sore hand, he called his brother.

  The two hadn’t talked in years, but Leo was a lawyer and Mark had a sudden desire for some legal advice. They had a rather nasty falling out over some shady business involving their father’s bequeathing of his lifesavings to Leo from his deathbed. Leo, the lawyer, had gotten everything in writing. It was how he had gotten it was a much debated subject among the rest of the Lane family.

  So Mark called his brother, and after a few heated minutes of recriminations and accusations, the two men put aside their animosity and discussed the matter at hand. Leo asked his brother if he had been watching the news. Mark admitted he had not. He had been working the graveyard shift and had forgotten to bring his phone. By the time he had gotten home he had found his front door wide open, the apartment trashed, and his phone blinking with about fifty messages from an unlisted number.

  Maybe his
brother smelled a high profile case. He said he was getting on a plane immediately. He said that everything the DA had was circumstantial, except for a rather unfortunate surveillance video of Zara entering a mental hospital shortly before a large explosion went off and several patients went missing. It sounded like Leo had already done quite a bit of research. Mark had no idea what he was talking about, what is she accused of? What mental hospital? He was full of questions.

  It was while he was stammering and pacing his apartment that the front door suddenly launched off its hinges and a team of armored SWAT police came storming in with machine guns trained on Mark. Mark went completely limp immediately, but a cop tazered him just the same. It had hurt like hell. He could hear his brother shouting from the cell phone, “Don’t say a word!” and then he repeated loudly several times. “I’m coming!”

  And Mark had kept quiet as instructed while every cop who watched too much television had made a go at Mark with their best CSI impressions. They shouted and banged on the table. Mark said nothing, and they accused him of everything. They threatened him with stories of terrorism.

  But Mark held firm and bit his tongue. He sweated and squirmed while they circled him and flicked his ears and occasionally showed him pictures of a beautiful young woman. Dead now because his daughter had killed her. Blown to bits. Not even a body left to bury, they said, shaking their heads with disgust at him. They told him he would fry for this.

  When Leonard Lane finally came into the room, the cop’s faces drooped like they both had gotten a whiff of some noxious gas. Leo shoved court orders in their faces and began to take pictures of Mark with a little digital camera he retrieved from his briefcase.

  “Oh yes, this is good. Very good,” he said musically. “Nice work gentlemen, just the type of savagery I’ve come to expect from the DPD. You guys are really going for the gold medal in brutality this year.”

  The two cops bristled and folded their arms. “He got that resisting,” the big one said. “We have our interrogations on video.” The shorter bald cop pointed up to a camera in the corner of the room.

  “We’ll see how a judge feels about it. What’s this? Spit?” Leo touched a wet spot on Mark’s shirt. “You should know better than anyone that spitting is a form of assault, right? You should. How many people you put away for it last year for assault by saliva? However many you needed to validate your existence?” Leo shook his head as if the absurdity of things was too much to bear. “Now since the DHS has ruled out terrorism, nice try by the way, you have no grounds to hold my client. We’re leaving. Let’s go Mark.”

  Mark looked around like a little kid who had two parents giving him contradicting instructions. One of the cops shrugged and opened his hand towards the door. “This isn’t over. I would stay in town if I were you,” said the red-haired man who had been breathing his coffee-breath all over Mark for hours.

  “My client can go to the moon if he feels like it,” Leo said confidently. “His trumped-up charges have been dropped. Why don’t you spend your time looking for the real criminal here, Nicolas Sollero, he’s got a mental history you know. So does his father. Zara is an exemplar—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the big cop said. “Save it for someone who gives a rat’s ass. We know what’s what.” He then stomped out of the room with the other cop in tow.

  Leo patted Mark on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, I’ll have both those Micks swinging from the rafters before dinner. They don’t know who they are messing with. C’mon little brother, we got a lot to go over.”

  Mark followed his brother out in the hallway. Leo wore a ridiculous ponytail that hung over the back of his suit. Mark imagined what his father might think if he could see this: Leonard getting Mark out of jail instead of the other way around. The old man would keel over all over again.

  8.

  Outside of the Blue Bunny hotel off Martin Luther King Boulevard a few dozen miles south of the nation’s capital, gun shots were ringing out.

  Jonathan was unaccustomed to the sound, and each shot, both far and close, made him broil with anxiety. He had spent the first hour hiding in the bathroom, where he thought the extra fortification would at least slow the bullets down some if they came in his direction. There seemed to be some kind of war going on in the streets outside of the dirty little motel room but nobody seemed to care. But why would they? Jonathan mused. These skirmishes were a drop in the bucket when compared to the wars and discord being waged in the capitol. One pen stroke in those big stone buildings could level entire countries.

  Occasionally a cop car’s siren would whine, and the battle would grow quiet for a while, and then about a half an hour later the shots would begin to ring out again.

  Jonathan got up from his chair and checked the deadbolt again. The little lock seemed very insufficient to separate him from the viciousness outside. Sleep, was of course, impossible in such accommodations. There was also the problem of the roaches. He had seen a few darting about. He could hear them talking too. Murmuring really, he couldn’t quite make out the words.

  But there were other things keeping him up besides the territorial disputes outside. Being around Damon had begun to weigh on his nerves. He pined for the days when he only knew the man through the impromptu photo-op at Whispering Pines, or an occasional phone call or email. But now that he was Damon’s errand boy, he felt like his life was placed on the edge of a precipice, and that even the lightest touch would send him tumbling into oblivion, where more punishment undoubtedly awaited.

  He knew what Damon was. He was a demon sent to torture him. To break his mind into a million scattered pieces. He remembered the years he spent in seminary, before he was ousted as a deviant by that nosy deacon. He had forgotten much of the preaching that went on there, but not the sermons that talked about hell and the creatures that dwelled there. Perhaps Damon had come as some sort of ironic penance. He had done very bad things in his life, so bad that he once thought himself a demon, until he saw the real thing. Now he knew he was but a whelp to be manipulated. A tool to be tossed aside the second his use ran out.

  And now with Norah at his side, Damon had even more political power than before. She was plugging him into all sorts of new networks of corruption.

  More shots were fired outside and a few men began yelling and Jonathan could even hear their footsteps as the rushed past the door. His urge to flee was becoming unbearable. He was far too spineless to resist the demons up close, but if he could just get away…Mexico maybe, they wouldn’t bother to chase him. Would they? He stood up with all the intention of getting in the little car Damon had given him to run errands in and putting a few thousand miles between himself and the Casparis, but someone had come to the door and was lightly rapping.

  “I have no money! I have gun!” Jonathan shouted, ducking behind the bed.

  “Calm down,” the voice said. “It’s only your generous benefactor.” It was Damon’s calm and honeyed voice. Jonathan swallowed hard and went to the door. The roaches were laughing now.

  Damon gave the man a long hard look. “You appear to be melting doctor, are the lodgings not to your liking?” Damon cracked a smile and looked around at the interior of the dirty room.

  “No, no, it’s great. I love it here,” Jonathan said, his voice cracking. A shot rang out and tires screeched. Jonathan ducked down cowered. Damon looked curiously back into the night, scanning the dark streets for the source of the noise. He shook his head and looked back at Jonathan. “Are you going to invite me in or what?”

  Jonathan blubbered, “Yes, yes, of course, come in, sir, mister Caspari, yes come in.” The words rushed out of him like a flood, and he even bowed a few times like a servant. His visions of a sunny beach in Mexico evaporated in the moldy air of the room.

  “Enough of that. Have a drink, see if it hardens that noodle of a spine. Do you realize how terrible you look? If you weren’t already an eminent psychologist I would bring one here to take a long look at you.” Damon produced a bottle of wine he
had hidden behind his back, and two little glasses he had in his pocket, which Jonathan received with shaking hands. Damon walked over to the little table in the corner of the room and had a seat on the ugly orange and beige chair. He slid a long cigar out of his breast pocket and lit it up. “Make me one too,” he said, and Jonathan fumbled with the two little glasses and set them on the table. “Gads, pour it straight man,” Damon complained as Jonathan tried to steady his hands.

  “Sorry, it’s the gunshots, I’m sorry sir but it sounds like a war out there.”

  “Yes,” Damon agreed nodding his head. “And what do you suppose it’s over?”

  Jonathan sat and took a hard slug of the whiskey. It burnt his throat and he gagged, and then quickly took another one.

  “That’s the spirit,” Damon said.

  “I guess…it’s over money. Or drugs,” Jonathan said carefully.

  “Maybe for the leaders of these peasants. But not for their soldiers. They fight for something far less tangible. Pride…honor…ego, take your pick. War is this way, it hasn’t changed in a thousand years and won’t change in a thousand more,” Damon sipped from his glass and stared at the sweating heap Jonathan had become. “And in war we all become devils. And no true solider is not haunted by himself. No wound festers quite like memory. But as a healer of memories, I’m sure you are aware of this truth.”