by Jack Conner
"You talk like you've met him. The albino."
"Well, I haven't."
He raised his eyebrows.
"I hear things," she said. "But you changed the subject, didn't you? Hey, wait. Hear that? Show's starting."
“I think I should wait here for her.”
"Come on," she coaxed. "Maybe she didn't locate him right away—maybe she still hasn't. When she's ready, she'll find us; she knows where we are. Okay?"
Ruegger paused, then acquiesced.
The odd assortment of people who gathered for The Rocky Horror Picture Show never failed to intrigue Ruegger. Straights, gays, lesbians, transvestites, transsexuals—they all thronged to watch the horror musical and even interact with it in their own way, performing the movie scene by scene up near the silver screen. As the show began, he realized he was enjoying himself, but soon thoughts of Danielle disturbed him. I should be there for her.
When Rocky ended, many of the congregation departed, but most stayed for the second feature. Towards the end, Ruegger frowned, turned to Veli and said, "I think she's here."
"If she's here, she'll come in."
He frowned. "No," he said. "Not this time. I … feel something else, too."
* * *
After avenging herself, Danielle felt oddly refreshed. Burnt clean, even. She paused in the glowing lights outside the theater to stare up at what sky refused to be drowned out by the metropolis—not much, as it turned out. A picture of Jason Locke swam before her, but she was able to face it now without flinching. You can never terrorize me anymore.
“You are beautiful,” said a voice from the shadows.
She spun. “Who ... ?”
Jean-Pierre emerged from the blackness, green eye shining. "What I feel, just looking at you, Danielle—words fail me."
"Then there is a God." Ever since Ruegger had talked her into returning to New York, she’d dreaded this moment. She held her ground, but it was an effort.
"Not scared of the big bad wolf?" he said.
"Is this business or social?"
He stepped closer. "We both know that if this were business you'd be dead."
"What do you want?"
Another step closer. "You. Only you."
"Too bad."
Within touching distance now, the albino extended an arm towards her face, the colorless hairs of his fingers just brushing her cheek.
"Oh, really?" he said. "Oh, really...?"
Chapter 9
Ruegger found the aisle and flew up it too fast for a mortal to clearly see. It was a trick not feasible outside the darkened room, so at normal speed he pushed out the theater door—and froze.
“Dear gods.”
A small crowd encircled a bloody mass of human wreckage lying gutted and decapitated on the asphalt. It was a man, or had been. His blood pooled around him to encompass the quizzically-expressioned head nearby. He looked as if he were floating on a red sea. The crowd muttered. Some talked on cell phones, summoning the police.
Ruegger staggered up the sidewalk, dismayed, not just for the dead man, but what it meant about Danielle. Jean-Pierre has her, he realized. This is his way of thumbing his nose at me.
Several shapes emerged from an alley. Before he knew it, they had surrounded him.
“Ruegger,” said a voice, and the vampire wheeled to see a dour man with dark hair.
“Kilian. You did that.” Ruegger gestured toward the dead man.
“Actually, I did this,” Kilian said, and with one hand lifted the bloody remains of Danielle’s little black pig, Cerberus.
“Bastard!”
“I killed the man over there,” said another shape. Loirot.
Ruegger bared his fangs. “And now you’ll kill me, is that it?”
“That’s the idea,” another shape, huge and with an Australian accent.
Ruegger braced himself. “Come, then.”
The werewolves crouched, ready to tear him apart. Suddenly, a gun cracked, loud and close, and one of them reeled back. Then another. Before he knew what was happening, Ruegger was jerked by the arm and found himself running up the sidewalk side by side with Veliswa.
“Mon ami!” Veliswa said. “What’s happening?”
“David betrayed us,” he panted. “Luckily you go armed.”
“I’m a New York girl. The bullets are coated in poison.”
“They’ve been to your apartment,” he said. “They know you’ve been helping us.”
She hissed out a breath. “Then my time in the city is done. But where’s Danielle?”
“With Jean-Pierre,” Ruegger said. “If only I knew where he lived …”
Veliswa fell silent, then: “Actually, I have an idea.”
* * *
Danielle fingered the rusted, blood-stained end of a hooked chain that dangled like so many others from the ceiling of Jean-Pierre's apartment. This is his living room. She’d struggled against him, but he was just too strong, and now she was in his lair. Great. She stared up at all the long, black chains that swayed, just slightly, to and fro, the gentle motion making her think of some nightmare anemone that shifted to a rhythm all its own. Jean-Pierre watched her with all the patience of a cat.
"I just love what you've done to the place,” she said.
He seemed neither amused nor offended.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"You’ve said that already.”
"Don't be flip.”
Angrily, she spun away from him. "Goddamnit, Jean-Pierre, this is too much. You've actually stooped to kidnapping now? At least last time I was willing."
"You were ... in love with me."
She crossed to the one open window, the source of the breeze stirring the chains.
"I was afraid," she said, the wounds opening again. She didn't want to play games with him. “You showed me Ruegger’s body, or one that looked like it. You said you'd protect me. Took me away. All lies, Jean-Pierre. Everything you told me, lies. You wanted me for yourself.”
“You loved me,” he repeated.
She paused. “Maybe I came to be fond of you. I envied your nothingness.” When he winced, she added, “I'm sorry. I was crushed when I thought Ruegger was dead.”
She heard him fumbling with one of his Pall Malls, clicking on his silver cigarette lighter—silver to spite the gods, of course—and breathed the acrid stench deep into his lungs.
“I need you.”
Frustration crept back into her voice. "I can't, Jean-Pierre. I love Ruegger—not for any other reason than he's who he is. We're a part of each other, as inseparable as flesh and bone."
"Flesh and bone can part, Danielle. Flesh and bone can part."
She half wanted to hug him and tell him it would be all right and half wanted to gouge out his fucking eyes. She settled for turning back to gaze out the window.
She remembered the faces of the vagrants that roamed the halls as Jean-Pierre had led her to his rooms; adulation and loyalty had swept their faces at the sight of their overlord. She thought to herself that he was a god here. He was the pied piper of the insane, his void drawing them in like flies to a carcass.
"You belong here," she said. "You and your hooks and chains. I don't.”
She turned to catch him with his eyes averted; she saw what looked like a tear in his eye, but it must not have been because he glanced up in the coldest manner he could, and that was very cold indeed.
"Is that it?" he said. "Your final word? Because not even I can save you both, and if you leave right now I won’t want to."
“Fuck off.”
“Just so you understand the terms. What I’m offering you.”
"Either death or life with you?"
He let the cigarette spark between his lips a moment, threw his gaze to a ceiling barely visible through the chains.
"That seems to be the situation," he said.
They watched each other, each waiting for the other to speak or move. The nightmare sea festered hypnotically.
Finally,
Danielle broke the spell. Her eyes still locked on his, she drifted through the rusted metal towards the door, where she could already hear mortals shuffling by the scores: the albino summoning his flock. Too cowardly to kill her himself, he would use them. She could just imagine the tormented faces of those souls who hovered on the other side, puppets to his abilities, ready to tear her apart.
"Goodbye, Jean-Pierre," she said, and opened the door.
There they waited, pinched and filthy, with lips of tanned hide and unblinking vacant eyes, all trained on her. They stood unnaturally still, a legion awaiting the fatal order. Eight stories worth of the mentally disturbed, now all zombies to the albino's will.
"Yes," he whispered. "Au revoir."
She entered the hall, where she could feel the hot ragged breaths of the figures pressing in on her from every side. She shoved her way through them toward a stairwell that she couldn’t even see they were so many. It seemed very far away.
She ran into a man who would not be moved, a towering, unshaven creature with lice crawling through his hair and human feces smeared across his skeletal chest. Flies buzzed about his head.
“Out of my way, asshole.”
He leered down at her, and she wondered whether this man was strong enough to retain his own presence of mind despite Jean-Pierre's influence. Or maybe the albino was choosing to represent himself through him.
Either way, Danielle could tear off his head and be feeding on his heart before he could even register what she was doing, but his murder would incite a riot. The other mortals couldn't be connected to Jean-Pierre by more than a tenuous link at best. There were just too many of them for even him to control in more than a nebulous fashion.
The mortal with the crown of flies spoke: "Kiernevar."
Was that his name? “Fuck you, Kiernevar.”
She pressed her hands into the crusty feces that covered his chest and shoved, sending the mortal and all his merry lice into the mass ahead, creating a corridor for Danielle to pass through, which she did, step by careful step. The minions’ eyes jittered back and forth. Spittle dribbled from cracked lips.
The hand of one woman clutched at Danielle’s elbow. She swiped it away. Unease seemed to be spreading.
Shit. If these mortals started attacking her, she would have to defend herself. If that happened, she would likely kill some of them. Most were too far gone and probably wouldn’t notice the difference, but she would. She did not kill innocents. Ever. Then there was the disturbing possibility that their sheer numbers were actually capable of overpowering her.
“You’re a coward, Jean-Pierre!”
The mortals started to grab at her, tear at her clothes, her hair, long nails scrabbling toward her eyes. The stairwell was so close she could taste its vomit-tinged smell at the tip of her tongue. She lunged for it. The action was too much. The puppets surged toward her.
Hurry. They ripped at her, but she shrugged them off. Plucking the stairwell door from its rotted hinges, she discovered that the minions waited here too. They surrounded her, raking and biting. With a growl, she beat them back, but still they came.
She grasped what would be her last hope: the stairwell itself. It wasn't circular, and therefore she couldn't simply drop the eight floors to safety; she would have to ricochet off the balustrades themselves—painful but ...
She rose from beneath the swarm and threw herself over the edge. Her body crashed into each and every rusting balustrade. She shoved herself on, downwards, feeling at the same time hands from mortals that lined the stairs ripping at her, sometimes digging into her with broken glass or razors.
Her head crashed into something hard, and her mind flickered, though her body still fell ... and fell ...
She landed on them. Their faces upturned, their arms outstretched, waiting for her. When they tore away her jacket, she woke up. She defended herself as best she could, but there were too many.
“Jean-Pierre!” she said, when she could get a breath. “Call them off!”
Their hands and fingers and limbs and teeth and bodies slashed her, pulled her and tore at her. She was going to die. She knew it. There was no way—
Crunch.
The minions fell back. The floor disappeared below her as something hoisted her into what seemed like a different realm. The hallway and the faces of the minions slipped by her as everything faded away …
* * *
Danielle cradled in his arms, Ruegger plowed through the humans to either side of him, here and there a mortal that he'd missed on his way in standing defiantly in his path only to be flung aside. Unlike Danielle, he felt no moral compunction to restrain himself. Tragic though it was, these humans were merely the will of the albino made flesh.
Ruegger burst from Jean-Pierre’s little hell into the warmth of the moonlight and carried Danielle to Veliswa's waiting limousine.
A rear door flung open. "Get in, damnit!” Veliswa said. “Get in!"
Ruegger lowered his precious burden onto the leather seat and slid in himself. With one last look up to Jean-Pierre's wrought-iron balcony—actually seeing the Frenchman staring down at him from the balustrade, cigarette held close to his lips, its smoke wrapping his pale head—Ruegger slammed the door and said, "Let's get the hell out of here.”
As the limo shot off, he turned his attention to the semi-conscious Danielle and stroked her bloody black hair.
She opened her eyes a fraction and raised a hand to trace his jaw. "Rueg," she whispered. Her eyes closed and her hand fell away.
“Is she all right?” Veliswa said.
“She needs blood.”
"She'll be all right, mon ami."
"She'd better be.” He bent to kiss Danielle’s cold lips.
* * *
Expelling smoke from his mouth, Jean-Pierre watched the limousine pull away. When it was gone, he turned to the mortal that stood quiet and erect at the other end of the Hooked Room. Chains rattled, flies buzzed, but the mortal didn't seem to care. Tall, maybe seven or eight inches the albino's senior, with lice-ridden hair and his own excrement smeared across his bare, hairy chest, a stupid, maniacal grin had plastered itself across his sharply-angled face, but his solemn eyes belied some sort of intelligence.
"You withstood me," Jean-Pierre said. “I’ve never had a mortal withstand my will before.”
The man just grinned, his yellowed teeth bared profanely.
"I can't let that go unpunished," the albino said. "But your death would be too much a waste, I think. You're more insane than Laslo, I'd wager. A competitor, at least."
The man watched a fly move from its orbit around his head to his chest.
"What's your name?"
"Kiernevar.” The man’s eyes never left the fly.
"Keirnevar," the albino pronounced. "Russian?"
"Kiernevar," the man repeated.
Jean-Pierre brought the cigarette to his lips and held it there a moment. He hated stupidity; it was the trait that annoyed him above all others. This one wasn't stupid, though, just deranged. Insanity was a trait the albino tended to romanticize. The shit made it hard.
"I won't kill you, yet,” he said. “But I can't let you persist in your present state, knowing you're strong enough to resist my pull.” He paused. “Did you know that immortal blood can cure many diseases, even erase scars sometimes? Maybe once you have my blood you’ll regain your wits. Your power could be harnessed."
Kiernevar started laughing. And continued laughing. The albino frowned.
"Kiernevar!" he snapped, and the man smiled. "Kiernevar—I'm going to make you one of us. I'm going to let you cross over."
"Cross over," the human said. "Become an albino." He scraped at his chest, then flung the excrement at Jean-Pierre. "I don't want to be a werewolf!"
Some sanity, then. Jean-Pierre wiped at himself. "Now that's something I couldn't give a shit about."
He stepped closer. The man screamed.
* * *
The limousine thumped along the slickened street
s, a getaway car without a destination. Danielle had roused at a few sips of Ruegger’s blood and nestled tightly in his black leather jacket, drinking some coffee Veliswa had brewed for her in the car's maker. Danielle felt sick. The horrible thing was that, although she detested him utterly, she couldn't bring herself to hate Jean-Pierre. He was too miserable for that.
“I guess your investigation in New York is over,” Veliswa said. “Thanks to David. And it had to be him.”
“We found out one thing,” Ruegger said. “We’re going to the Clearglass Inn to follow up on it.”
"I think we should split up.”
"No," said Danielle reflexively, reaching for Ruegger's hand.
Veliswa smiled. "No, I meant that I would split away from you two. If I stayed with you, I'd only be dragging you down, and I know someone I think can help us—if only I can get to her."
"But Veli," said Ruegger, "and I mean no offense by this, but you haven't been on the run in years. It's just not something you're used to. You'd be too vulnerable."
"That can't be helped. And I think I could do us more good if I branched off.”
“Who's this friend?" Danielle said.
"Well, here's my plan. I know it may sound far-fetched, but I can't think of anything better. The order to kill you came from Vistrot, this much we know, but Vistrot doesn’t seem to have any particular motive to want you dead. So he’s acting on behalf of someone else. What we need to do is infiltrate his organization, find out who gave Vistrot the order—find out who wants you dead. Then maybe we can do something about it. Until then, we're just going to be dodging Jean-Pierre and whoever else they send to kill you."
"You too," Ruegger said. "Don't forget that. You harbored us, knowing Vistrot had a hit out on us. He's not going to forgive that."
"I know.”
"So who's this friend?" Danielle repeated.
The ghensiv turned to her. "Her name is Sophia, and she may just be our salvation."
Sophia, Danielle thought. The name sounded familiar …
