by Rawlyns, Nya
“General Hayes.” He obviously expected a reaction and when Magda failed to respond, he continued, “Louisiana Tigers, Cemetary Hill. Civil War. Ringing any bells?”
Magda shrugged. They’d been on tour, as Damien dubbed their exile, so she was blissfully unaware and uninterested. She preferred making history, not reading about it.
“Never mind. Quickly now. Let’s not keep our visitors waiting.”
Quick was a relative term. The monuments to necessity and blind faith hindered movement in all directions. With the ground water at levels requiring muck boots for anything other than concrete sidewalks, the tombs rose like tenements in orderly processions, some like the good general’s unadorned edifice, others lavish homages to status… or plain wishful thinking.
Magda dodged a bit of fallen concrete and muttered a curse. “Why pick a tourist spot in the middle of Mardi Gras, it doesn’t make sense.”
Damien chuckled. “It’s called hiding in plain sight. Samuels has wards all around the perimeter.” He swept the area with an elegant gesture. “Do you see any tourists tonight?”
She sputtered, “Wards? He used fucking witches?”
“Voudoun, my dear. De bokor, he be of de dark side, dontcha know, not of de houngans.”
“Christ, Damien, shut it. I hate when you go all Afrikaans or whatever that is.”
Damien paused at a mausoleum decked out with pseudo-Doric columns and an incongruous widow’s walk structure topping the peaked roof. Like all its neighbors, the ‘door’ on the short side appeared cemented in place.
Appearances could be deceiving. Damien inserted a brass key into an inconspicuous slot and pressed inward. As if on oiled hinges the door swung open, silent and unwelcoming. Before stepping through he turned and said, “Is Kreyól, Beb, not African langaj.”
“Yeah, whatever. Let’s do this thing.”
She pushed past, her throat working hard to dislodge the tennis ball that had somehow inserted itself into her windpipe. When fear entered the picture she often regretted the impulse to suck air. It was distracting and a tell she worked hard to get rid of. Two hundred and eight years and counting and still she was subject to the pitfalls of her too human heritage.
Damien was one of the lucky ones, born, not made like her. To the manor as they said in merry old England. And it suited him. He was elegant, equally as aristocratic as the patricians waiting below ground, and until his little peccadillo with the Secretary of State’s daughter Cornelia, on the fast track to first among equals status in the collective.
He might have been forgiven, eventually, for not keeping it in his pants. But making her had been the final straw.
The Council’s motto had always been our way or the highway. One could ask permission. Politely. Bearing gifts. Forgiveness was never an option. Had Damien not been one of the rarest of the rare, they’d both have been nothing more than a grey film coating the few dry bits on the Atchafalaya Bayou.
The burial chamber contained the requisite cement-encased coffin, the lid chipped and flaking in the unrelenting heat and humidity. She bypassed that and examined the wall on the right, tracing the glyphs with a ragged fingernail, pressing at thumb-sized indentations, the rhythm five, two, one, three, one at each. A narrow slab slid sideways allowing ingress to cement stairs leading down.
“Smells like a damn aquarium.”
Damien wrinkled his nose in agreement. “Have Jeeves see to it when we get back, won’t you dearest?” The man only resorted to humor when he was seriously stressed. It usually failed. Miserably.
The dank air also smelled like trouble but Damien already knew that. And the possibility of never walking back up the stairs was all too real.
Running her palm along the ragged, dripping cement, she murmured, “Jesus wept.”
“What, Mags…?”
“Nothing.”
At the base of the stairwell, the landing branched in two directions. To her right lay a meandering tunnel that eventually came out near the levee and escape via one of the delta’s myriad inlets. To their left there was a short hall truncated by another cement door. That led to the Chambers and their new destiny.
This time she approached and waited patiently. The cameras and other monitors, thermal imaging, infrared, devices she had no name for and little interest in, would announce their presence. It would also assure the members that they were indeed alone.
About the hardware decorating her lithe frame, that would also show up. The Council had come to expect some entertainment value from Damien and his pet as they called her.
I wonder what they would call Catrina if only they knew about her.
“Caution, sweetheart. Keep your lovely hands where they can be seen.”
Translation, keep your thoughts to yourself, Magda. They don’t know. They couldn’t. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
She knew he was right. If they knew, if they even suspected he’d dipped his fangs in forbidden fruit… and bound her to his insatiable lust and poor judgment at the same time… they’d already be dead.
But… there was one small niggling concern. Samuels rather liked his pageants gory and spectacular. The vamp was easily bored. The others kept him, by necessity, on a tight leash because if he ever let loose with another rampage, the Spanish Inquisition would look like a Boy Scout gathering of concerned citizens.
Damien had dismissed her concerns that this meeting was going to be a gladiatorial display of Samuel’s prowess, with them the object d’sport, as nothing more than speculation. But why else bring the lot with him? And why risk exposure in such a public place. Why engage the witches… or whatever Damien wanted to call them. Magic was magic in her book,
If evil was the new fast food, the houngan served it up via voudoun like chilled gazpacho on a hot day.
Damien was murmuring, sotto voce, a deep bass rumble she felt in the small of her back.
She was about to suggest they knock politely but the door swung inward, revealing a hollowed out space about twenty by thirty feet. A single long folding table and church basement vintage metal chairs lined the far wall. Electric bulbs in plain sconces decorated walls that appeared stucco’d though she couldn’t be sure. Home decorating, along with personal fashion statements, weren’t her things.
Damien brushed his fingers along her right arm, the gesture oddly assuring.
He pitched his voice low, conciliatory. “Myra, Jenson. Nice to see you again.” He raked his eyes past Samuels and bid the newest members, Ortiz and Rinj, a good evening. Then he bowed respectfully and said, “Samuels, a pleasure to welcome you to my Haven.”
“Our Haven.”
“Yes, of course. We serve the Council in all—”
Samuels dismissed Damien with a wave, then casually lit a cigarette, drawing deep, never taking his obsidian eyes off his adversary.
“It’s too bad, Rochon, that I always seem to find reasons for not believing you.”
“Your Grace?” Damien held to a level of edgy obsequiousness but it was clear to her that he did so with an effort.
Samuels and her maker were two of only a few dozen ‘naturals’, though the truer term was ‘half caste’, offspring of a vampire-human union, generally a vamp male, human female. But not always. Both Damien and Samuels shared the even rarer male human, female vamp genealogy.
It did not make them brothers.
No oracle or seer or historian of their race had ever explained to anyone’s satisfaction how and why those unusual events could occur. That they did was well documented and one of the reasons the Council went ape-shit when one of their own violated their very strict anti-miscegenation laws.
You just never knew who or what might show up in nine months’ time.
Of course, that little rule was honored more in the breach that the observance. Damien called it the three eff’s: find, feed, fuck. He’d always been the poster boy for the angry young vamp, acting out and using charm and ability to overcome any objections to his flaunting the will of the Council.
“I see you have your lovely warrior with you.” Samuels gave Magda a sly wink and beckoned her closer. She shivered, the action involuntary. The man gave her the creeps, big time.
She rubbed a thumb over a razor-edged throwing star, the eight node version, honed with pleasure and purpose. She strode closer, imagining how it would rake across the cornea like a buzzsaw, the spin clockwise, biting deep, lodging into the occipital bone. Not a killing blow, far from it. But it would hurt like a sonofabitch.
“May I see it?” Samuels held out a hand, palm up, fingers curved inward, almost like claws. Not for the first time she wondered if his mother had been a witch, a hag, a seidhr before being turned. Damien’s maman had been mambo, a practitioner slave in service to a wealthy sugar cane baron. Magda had met her once, before the purge.
Damien nudged her from behind, reminding her to mind her manners.
“Of course, my Lord Samuels.” She withdrew the device from its pocket and carefully extended it, thumb and forefinger in a delicate balance on the cool steel.
Extracting the object from her grip, he set it down and redirected his gaze onto her breasts, the outer corners of his lips tilting upwards in recognition of some unspoken jest.
“Do you still play with sabers, my dear?” She hated my dear, it made her feel like a juvenile, a youngling… a girl.
She would not give him the satisfaction of dissing her small pleasures so she gave him a feral grin and spat out, “I prefer sharp blades that pierce true to small blunt objects requiring instruction manuals and lubrication.”
Damien hissed and pinched her hip, hard. Myra, on the left, blanched and lowered her head. The others sat open-mouthed. Only Rinj looked amused. He made some adjustments to his pressed chinos and gave her an intense stare. An interested stare.
That wasn’t quite the effect she was going for.
Damien drew her back and positioned her behind him. “Why are we here, Samuels? Certainly not to exchange pleasantries, as delightful as that’s been.”
Samuels stubbed out the cigarette and lit another, the smoke drifting lazily toward the ceiling. In the background the generator and sump pumps hummed and ka-chunked with a white noise easy to ignore. It seemed like a strange place to die.
Not that she could envision anything good about dying. It was just… she wasn’t quite ready. And she really didn’t want to give the asshole sitting smugly in front of them the satisfaction of dealing that particular card.
“Yes, well, perhaps you are right, Rochon. Let’s get down to business, shall we?” Damien shifted his weight, centering himself. Samuel’s next words made no sense. “As they say my boy, ‘Houston we have a problem’.”
“Problem.” Damien kept his voice flat and unemotional. Magda gave him props for the effort. She was sure she’d not be able to under the circumstances.
Samuels motioned toward the end of the table. “Rinj, if you would?”
Both Magda and Damien shifted right to give their full attention to the man who never spoke during Council business. That he did so now bode ill for their very limited futures.
“Sammy has a way with words,” Rinj said, displaying small even white teeth, the tips of his fangs almost dainty. “As you can see, we are down a couple of members due to unfortunate circumstances. At first we assumed they were accidents.” He did the annoying finger quotes and moved on. “However, lately we’ve been coming to a very different conclusion, particularly after hearing some disturbing news from our counterparts across the Pond.” Rinj counted off on his fingers, “Two of our members die in accidents, a High Council advocate goes missing in Germany, another in Romania.”
Damien tensed, his shoulders going rigid, a definite uh-oh given their very recent history in Roma land.
Rinj tapped a forefinger mindlessly on the metal table, tap tap tappity tap, the sound echoing even over the noise of the machines holed up in some cubby behind the faux walls.
The man sighed and continued, “As you know, not everyone is on board with the Council’s directives and leadership. We have factions disputing our hegemony over keeping our presence secret from the human world, and within them there are cadres with cells arguing over what coming out of the closet might mean to our species.” He glanced down the row, then at the two standing in front of him. “So far no faction has achieved anything other than sideshow status.”
Samuels interjected, “…and that might be changing. Myra?”
Everyone shifted eyes to the petite woman.
“We have had some very public incidents, primarily in L.A. and Vancouver, of extra-curricular Goth and Vamp subculture activities. Their posturing is usually taken with a grain of salt but within the last six months we’ve come across evidence of real feedings.”
Damien said, “So? They’ve always mimicked the cinema and the mythology. That doesn’t sound like anything new. It’s just humans acting out.”
Myra continued, “I agree. And very often the deluge of late fall movie releases will generate a rash of new allegations and sightings. But this time… they’ve drained the victims.”
“You’re sure of that?” Damien sounded skeptical.
“We sent Torrence and his squad to investigate after the first one. The second attack occurred while they were there. His team managed to get on site. The evidence was irrefutable.”
“Still, Myra, it’s one, maybe two rogues. Send the hit squad, deal with it.”
Samuels said, so quietly they had to strain to hear him, “It’s far more than one.”
Damien stilled, considering the implications. “Are you implying that these so-called cells have gotten their shit together enough to be a threat?”
“That’s exactly what I’m implying.”
“Are they coming to my city?” Damien’s voice was pinched, the anger boiling just below the surface.
Rinj said, “No. You have a good organization in place. Your Havens are under control and monitored constantly. We do not believe that this will be their first target.”
Samuels stood, six-foot-two of dark menace, and said, “We believe that Gotham will be their next base of operations.”
“What do you want me to do, Samuels?”
“I want you to come to New York City to manage our system of Havens and to build an infrastructure within the subcultures. We need to strengthen our defenses before branching out to the other nodes.”
“You’re saying we’re vulnerable?”
“Yes. And I need you by my side to fix this.”
“Why me, Lord? You know I don’t play well with strangers.”
“Ah, my boy, but you do play well with humans.” Samuels picked up the throwing star and handed it back to Magda. “And you like them. I don’t know why and I don’t really care. But you are the only one who can do what needs to be done.”
“When do you want us there?”
“Is a week too short to set your affairs in order?”
Magda cringed. She had no problems dropping everything on a moment’s notice. Catrina on the other hand was a drama queen. She was not going to appreciate having to pick up and move.
The Council members all rose, indicating the meeting was over.
Rinj, now that he’d broken the silence barrier, seemed anxious to chatter. “So, my dearest Magda, would you be so kind as to accompany me on a round of your famous jazz bars and eateries?”
Mind? Actually no, she didn’t. The man was strangely attractive, his Japanese American heritage giving him an exotic look and his reputation for… endurance apparently was well-documented.
And having Damien glare at her with disapproval, and dare she say it… jealousy, made the offer even more enticing. She smiled brightly and said, “Tomorrow evening?”
“Perfect.” Rinj joined her and took her elbow, guiding her toward the door.
Damien stomped ahead of them but paused when Samuels called out, “One more thing, Rochon.”
“What?” Damien’s voice shouted ‘last straw’ through clenched teeth.
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“Make sure you bring everyone in your little entourage.”
“I don—”
“Everyone, Damien. Don’t disappoint me.”
Magda muttered, “You won’t like him when he’s disappointed.”
Rinj chuckled low in his throat. “You didn’t really think we wouldn’t find out, now did you?”
Shit shit shit.
The man patted her arm. “There, there, my love, I have enough energy for both of you.”
I’ll just bet you do you muthafu—
CHAPTER THREE
Fais Do Do
“You don’t disappoint, my dear.” Rijn stretched to his full five-foot-eight, using the shackles to brace against. “However, I must warn you…”
Trina looked up, curious. Her English was still hit or miss. She made up for that with inventiveness and impeccable technique.
Rinj groaned, “Don’t… don’t stop.”
Magda’s eyes flicked nervously to the two-way mirror, then back to the examination table Damien had filched from somewhere. She wasn’t comfortable knowing he observed, let alone approved, of Catrina’s tender ministrations to one of the ruling Council’s own.
So much for keeping their prize a secret.
Moaning something guttural in Japanese, Rinj arched his back, hips pumping and swiveling against the sound Catrina manipulated with exquisite ease. With slow movements she rotated the device, then withdrew it, ignoring the hiss of disapproval from Rinj. His penis jerked spasmodically, the tip leaking in anticipation.
Magda knew Damien would be getting off on watching their subject twist and beg for more. Averting her eyes she backed along the wall, hoping to exit without anyone noticing.
Wishful thinking. Catrina sing-songed a command in her native tongue, a mishmash of Romanian and Vlax, the accent peculiarly Hindi in tone. Whatever she said brought Damien out of hiding. He brushed past her and approached the prone form of their captive, his face set in a respectful mask.
