by Jack Conner
“Junger and Jagoda request your services, and that of your crew. They have a job for you.”
“I ... don’t know.” Swallowing with some difficulty, he said, “We’ve already made plans.”
“Oh, shut up,” snarled Kilian, and Loirot wheeled to see the Killer in the doorway to the bathroom.
“Fuck!” Loirot said. “How long have you been there?”
Kilian smiled for the second time that day. He turned his charm over to Lyshira. “Long enough to grow curious as to what our new friend has to say.”
“But ... we were going to Lereba—”
Kilian raised a hand, commanding his subordinate to silence but never taking his eyes off the lady in the tub. “As you said, Loirot, Lereba has its faults. Junger and Jagoda, on the other hand, soon stand to become kings. And if we can get in on the ground floor of that ... well, honey—”
“Lyshira,” she corrected.
“Well, Lyshira. What exactly did the Balaklava have in mind?”
* * *
Danielle swore and struggled, trying to jump over the railing to pursue Ruegger, but Kharker and Jean-Pierre held her back.
“Let go of me! Ruegger! Ruegger, goddamnit, don’t go like this! RUEGGER!”
Far below, the vampire turned back, his head tilted up toward the balcony, and she could see his face, so stern and sad. His expression made her tremble. She could tell how determined he was, how unwavering. How could she hope to make him change his mind?
“Ruegger,” she said, still struggling against the albino and the Hunter, “if you go, they’ll kill you! I know it, Ruegger. Please, Ruegger. Junger and Jagoda won’t let you sway Malie; she’s their meal ticket.”
“Just wish me luck,” he said, “and know that I love you.”
“If you love me, don’t do this. It’s suicide! It’s not noble, Ruegger. It’s not noble, it’s ... it’s ...”
He turned into a wet blur and disintegrated before her eyes, as did the rest of the world. With a start, she realized she was crying, leaning against the railing for support. No longer were Kharker and Jean-Pierre holding her so tightly ...
With a warrior’s cry, she broke free of them, and vaulted over the railing—
And was caught by Francois Mauchlery before she’d fallen a foot. Grabbing her by her black leather jacket, he reeled her back in, gave her a stern look and released her to the care of Jean-Pierre and Kharker once more.
“Bastards,” she said, her voice choked and made liquidy by her running noise. “How can you let him do this! Can’t you see, he’s going to his death!”
“No,” said Roche Sarnova. “He’s trying to save us all.”
“And he’s going to his death to do it!”
When no one denied it, she turned back toward the railing, back toward Ruegger, who was now standing before the great boulder that hid the Sabo. As she watched, the boulder lurched outward from its settlement, causing a stir of rocks and dust and snow, then rolled to the side. Ruegger seemed to brace himself. He was leaving this world and everything in it, including her, behind.
Danielle started to shout towards him, to scream and wail until he relented, but, looking at him now, she realized it was futile. What’s more, she realized that perhaps ... perhaps ... he was doing the right thing.
With a final surge of determination, Ruegger disappeared into the darkness of the Labyrinth.
The boulder rolled shut behind him.
Chapter 14
While Ruegger was entering the Sabo and Danielle was trying to get ahold of herself, while Loirot and Kilian were making a deal with the Balaklava, Harry Lavaca was finishing a drink in the bar.
After four martinis in the tavern, Harry had had enough of both alcohol and gossip. He was also sick of thinking about Cloire, which is where his mind had mostly been. His decision reached, he paid his bill and carefully walked to an elevator, which took him two floors down. From there, he staggered over to Cloire’s room and entered.
She perched on the bed, her back propped up by pillows, smoking a cigarette distractedly, as if in deep contemplation. When she saw him, she tried on a smile, but it didn’t work, so she dropped it.
“What’s up?” he said, tossing his coat onto a nearby chair.
“Byron just left.”
“What did Byron say?”
She shrugged half-heartedly, and for the first time he could see that she’d been crying.
“The usual,” she said. “Wants me back—with him and with the crew.”
Harry pulled a chair close to the side of the bed she was lying on and sat down. He was drunk, he knew, but he’d had enough practice at pretending to be sober that he was confident she wouldn’t see it in him.
“I told him no,” she said. “On both accounts.”
Harry’s tension ebbed, then, abruptly, returned. If she’d rejected Byron and the death-squad, why had she been crying?
He clasped her hand. “Honey ... shit, I don’t know how to say this ... Here. Don’t ... don’t let me drag you down. If you want to go off with them ... I’ll understand.”
“Yeah, but will you forgive?”
“Damnit, Cloire.”
“What?”
“I love you. And I’ll fight to keep you if you want to stay. But you don’t.”
“You’re wrong, Harry.”
“Then why the tears?”
With his free hand, he traced the salty trail drying from beneath her amber eye. She stubbed out her cigarette and clutched his hand to her face as if drawing strength from him. Slowly, she started to cry again.
When she could speak, she said, very deliberately, “Harry, I’m not sure that I’ve ever said this before, to anyone, ever—but … I love you. Never forget that.”
“I won’t,” he promised. He knew how much those words meant—she had just laid bare her soul to him—but he also knew that her soul was divided, and he could not have it all. “I won’t let you sit around here ripping yourself apart, Cloire. You want me. You want them. You want to have fun, killing and causing chaos wherever you go. But you have feelings for me that you can’t explain, much as I do for you. We’re exact opposites. Maybe that attracts, and may be that kind of relationship can even function—if, that is, the opposites don’t destroy themselves getting over each others’ differences, which is what we’re doing.”
He kissed her palm. “I’m drinking endlessly and you’re sinking deeper and deeper, feeding only off of humans that you can’t kill and that’ll be resuscitated later by shadeblood. There’s no satisfaction in that for you and you hate it, and hate me because I’m keeping you from being true to yourself. You love battle. So do I, but I fight ... or at least I used to, against creatures like yourself.”
“You killed a friend of mine once, a long time ago.”
He looked at her strangely. “You never mentioned it.”
“If I’d been thinking, I wouldn’t have said it just now. But I’ve forgiven you for it, darling. Water under the bridge and all that.”
“Honey, I would’ve killed you. And you me.”
“Darling—”
“Don’t say it’s not true. Admit it; if Vistrot had hired you to kill me ten years ago, or even one, you’d have done it without a second thought.”
After a long pause, she said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing. And if I’d been aware of you, and of any weak spots you might have, I’d have killed you. And here we are now ten years later, in love with each other, and for no good reason. Honey, it’s just not working. There’s good love, and there’s bad love. If you won’t end it, I will. It’s over. There.”
“No!” she said with surprising force. “I won’t let it. You’re the only good man I’ve ever met that I can remember ... and more than that, well ... you know. I’m not going to leave you, Harry. If that means changing your diapers when you turn eighty, fine.”
“And meanwhile? You think you’re going to be content staying with me in my post-Slayer years? Where’s the adventure, the h
ellraising?”
She smiled. “I never said I wouldn’t raise a little hell.”
“I could never let you kill an innocent,” he said.
“No one’s innocent, Harry. Besides, you couldn’t stop me. Shit, I’m sorry. I should’ve have said that.”
“No, Cloire. You’re right. I couldn’t stop you. And more to the point, I don’t think you could stop yourself, just like you couldn’t stop me drinking.”
Fiercely, she clenched his hand and leaned in closer to him. “I won’t let you go, Harry. Don’t you see? I’m tired. Tired of the killing, of the crew, of everything. Without Vistrot and Jean-Pierre, it’s no fun anymore anyway.”
“I’m sorry, Cloire. It’s over.”
He released her hands, but she did not release him. He had to tug against her to break free, and when he did he stumbled backwards, toppled the chair and fell heavily to the floor. Immediately, she was over him, helping him up, dusting him off, kissing him on the cheek—
He pushed her away.
“No,” he told her. “I love you, but it’s got to end.” He paused, letting the racing of his heart slow a little. “Maybe ... someday ... when things are different, we can be together again.”
“Fuck that! I swear, Harry Lavaca, if you step out of that door right now, never expect to be allowed back in!”
He left. As the door shut closed behind him, he could hear the sounds of chairs and cabinets being torn apart and thrown against the walls, splintering noisily. Then, softly, he heard her crying into her pillow, and he wondered if she could hear him, as well.
Stiffly and drunkenly, he ambled away.
* * *
Ruegger proceeded directly to the immense chamber in which the Collage had killed the horse, as well as many of the Sabo’s parasites. The room was vacant. Damn. The Balaklava had moved their encampment further into the Labyrinth, then, protecting themselves and making Ruegger’s self-assigned mission more difficult.
He counted on a chaotic aftermath of the battle to keep Junger and Jagoda occupied for awhile, and he was fairly certain that they wouldn’t be able to sense his presence while thus occupied. However, it might take quite some time for him to locate their new base of operations, giving the Balaklava that much more space to find him. He didn’t doubt Danielle’s warnings; Junger and Jagoda, if given the opportunity, wouldn’t allow him to reach Maleasoel—unless, that is, they judged her completely on their side.
He could only hope they were wrong.
Leaving the immense chamber with all its dangling chains and cages, he pushed deeper into the Sabo. Everything lay still and dark. He tried to keep his movements as silent as possible.
As he crept toward a large archway, fins shot out of the ground in front of him. A mud-shark hurled itself toward him, wide fish-mouth open and long teeth dripping saliva.
Ruegger jumped to the side, rebounded off a wall, and ended up closer to the archway than he had been before the parasite’s arrival.
The worm—zombified, Ruegger noted—brought itself about to face him again.
“Knock it off,” Ruegger warned. “And Junger and Jagoda, if you bastards can hear me, I suggest you call off your little pet here unless you want to lose it.”
As if in answer, the mud-shark charged again, this time rising even higher out of the ground. To Ruegger, its whiskered face almost seemed to be grinning.
Blades shot from his sleeves into his hands, and he crouched low in preparation. When the worm was too close for it to turn back, he released the scimitar and dagger from his hands and let his new and improved powers of telekinesis do the dirty work for him.
The blades bored straight into the shark’s dull gray eyes, ripped through its body and shot out the tail. The creature howled in pain, but its masters did not call off the attack, and it closed the distance between it and Ruegger.
Ruegger leapt up into the air, landing on its finned back. As he settled himself, his blades returned to his hands.
“Gettiyup!”
Just as he began to wonder how far the beast would take him, the worm began sliding back into the earth. In a few moments, it would drag Ruegger with it.
He threw himself clear, and the parasite disappeared into the ground.
Ruegger dusted himself off and glanced around. There didn’t seem to be any other threats looming, and he was confident that he could proceed. But where to? There were so many archways and tunnels and dead-ends, he didn’t know where to start.
A thought struck him: the parasite had attacked him as he’d approached a certain archway. To him, it had been no more than an arbitrary choice, but maybe, just maybe, the worm had been sent to distract him. Perhaps the Balaklava didn’t want him to pass through that archway.
He smiled.
When he again found the opening, he entered it, and, almost instantly, fins rose out of the ground, as did half the body of a badly deteriorated but very large parasite. Ruegger sighed, recalling his blades.
“Alright, this time I won’t be so nice.”
The blades whirled out of his hands and, in a dizzying blur of metal and zombified flesh, began slicing through the thick hide of the mud-shark with dizzying speed.
He sliced up the parasite like someone cutting up a carrot, from one end to the other—only this time the carrot was nearly thirty feet long and had a diameter as long as that of a very tall man. The scimitar and dagger rapidly whittled the mud-shark into thin ribbons of blood and gore. The whole process didn’t take more than ten seconds, and it left a gigantic steaming pile of putrescence behind.
In order to keep going, Ruegger would have to either climb over or wade through the mud-shark’s remains.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said to the ceiling.
Another mud-shark blasted out of the ceiling directly overhead, its whiskered face split wide by a fearsome maw. Ruegger had no chance. One second, he was crossing through a dark tunnel. The next, he looked up to see long flashing fangs and a groping gray tongue.
“Hell,” he managed to say before the parasite swallowed him whole and disappeared into the floor.
* * *
“Where the fuck is Ruegger?” demanded Danielle, staring at the other shades that had been on the balcony when her beloved had vanished into the Sabo. All were here, seated in Sarnova’s lavish chambers, except Roche Sarnova himself—who, true to his word, had stayed behind to coordinate the retreat and debriefing of his troops. “Where? Only off trying to save us, while we sit here and do nothing!”
“We’re brainstorming,” Kharker said.
“Yeah, and that’s getting us how far?” Danielle tried to steady herself. These people were her friends, she reminded herself—or at least they were the closest things she had to such. More calmly, she continued. “We’ve yet to come up with a single solid plan to get us and the rest of the kingdom out of the fire.”
“We’re trying,” said Jean-Pierre, staring into the fireplace that dominated Sarnova’s den.
“Yeah. Trying, not doing. We’ve been out-maneuvered by Malie and her allies, and we’re in a pretty damn big mess that we can’t see our way out of.”
They all hunched in a semi-circle about the fireplace, with her on one end and the Ambassador on the other. So far, he’d been very quiet, and Danielle didn’t like that. In her mind, as their leader, he should be in unquestionable control of the situation—or at least trying—but he just sat there, his eyes locked in middle-distance, pondering.
Danielle plowed on: “Another problem is we’re all trying to think of rational, logical approaches to solve this madness. But it’s not going to work. Malie’s already thought of them. Evidence: her counter-ambush just a little while ago. We tried to defeat her logically, by counting on the distrust between Subaire and Malie, and it didn’t work. Why? Because Malie and Subaire trust each other.”
“What’s your point, Danielle?” Sophia said.
Frankly, Danielle said, “I think all of us are feeling a little defeatist
at the moment. I don’t place any blame for it. But we’ve got to square our shoulders and fight anyway. Mauchlery, you there?”
He looked up. “I’m here.”
“Why don’t we bring in some of your advisors or Council-members to help us brainstorm? We could use some new life in here.”
Francois opened his mouth to respond, but Kharker interceded. “We can’t bring in anyone else, Danielle,” the Hunter said.
“Why?”
“Because we can’t trust them. Subaire and the Balaklava have this place riddled with spies—and we suspect several to be high in rank. Strange as it may seem, the only people Blackie trusts are in this room.”
Sophia barked a laugh. “Why does he trust me? He doesn’t even know me.”
“You’re the daughter of my adopted son and soon to be the mother of his child, and my adopted grandchild. That’s enough.”
“Anyway,” resumed Danielle, “if the future of all immortal-mortal relations rests on our shoulders, I suggest we start thinking about how to fight. I think we should abandon all rational approaches. That’s what our enemies will be expecting. The only way out for us is to think of something unpredictable, something drastic. And if we five have to personally suffer for our actions, then we should just accept that.”
“Explain,” said Kharker.
“In a minute. For now, I want a vote: do we all agree that drastic action is called for?”
“Okay,” nodded Sophia. “I’ll agree. But, Danielle, we’ve just started. Surely we can think of something between now and nine tomorrow night.”
“Yeah? Take a look around you. All of you, look at each other. See any solutions there?”
“Except for you, I suppose,” said Mauchlery.
“Goddamn right!” she flared, his contempt suddenly getting the better of her. “I’m not gonna sit by and let this place go to hell, not when there’s something I can do about it—something we can do about it. And no, Sophe, I’m not content to sit here hashing it out till nine tomorrow. We need to do something now; we need to pull out all the stops.”
