by Bryan Camp
So he picked it back up, then put it into his satchel with all the others of its kind.
Jude quickly explored the rest of the upstairs, a series of closed doors that opened onto empty, unused rooms, wondering how much, if any, of his experience with the revolver Regal had seen, how much she’d have understood if she had seen it. He supposed it didn’t much matter. After tonight, he’d either trust her enough to tell her about the doubloon and the thunderbolt and everything else, or he’d be leftovers in Scarpelli’s fridge. He crept down the stairs to the first floor, footfalls silent on the thick carpet, where—now that his eyes had adjusted fully to the darkness—he found a small door set beneath the stairs.
He eased the door open, wincing at every creak and groan, and found the last thing he expected: stairs leading down.
The jokes and comments about New Orleans being below sea level were not hyperbole. That fact, combined with the absorbent clay that made up much of the subsurface geology of the area, meant that the architecture of the city simply did not include basements. Sewers and foundations might delve beneath the surface, but nowhere in the city would building beneath the earth be anything other than an exercise in both futility and stupidity. If it didn’t flood outright, the walls would buckle from the constant pressure of rainwater during the first summer.
And yet, here were stairs carved out of stone leading down into an eerie blue light, and the taste of blood was more powerful here, twisting Jude’s stomach. The stone walls bore regularly spaced, crypt-like alcoves, though they were filled with ornate carvings—re-creations of Renaissance pietàs or depictions of martyrs’ deaths—instead of the piles of bones and skulls he’d expected, which made it feel like he was descending into some perverse chapel as much as a catacomb. The strange light came from blue flames dancing in wall sconces that seemed to produce no heat; Jude’s breath misted in the frigid air. The taste of blood grew stronger until his saliva felt thick and warm and viscous in his mouth. He fought the urge to spit.
Abruptly, the tunnel leveled off and widened into a large, circular space—what he’d call a cavern if he didn’t know he was beneath Uptown New Orleans. In the center of the room, a squat table of rough-hewn marble rose from the floor.
The vampire named Umberto Scarpelli loomed over a naked tattooed woman, who lay on the table like a sacrifice upon an altar. She was thick, her flesh rounded at her hips and stomach, that particularly sexy shape of a New Orleans woman nurtured by rich foods and a sensual palate. The tattoos covering her body seemed to be abstractions at first. Evenly spaced rectangles of gray marked her belly and thighs, large swathes of green and brown curved and undulated from her large breasts down the length of her body, a web of lines spread up her neck and across her shaved head. When Jude saw the unmistakable white eggshell swoop of the Superdome on her stomach, the rest of the images fell into place. She was tattooed with the city, partly the skyline, partly a map, partly something else.
A slurping, gurgling sound hung in the air. Scarpelli’s back bunched and flexed as he fed. Jude flashed on a memory of a night years ago in City Park, grunting noises and a van rocking back and forth on its shocks. Burning flesh and inhuman strength and two small bundles of meat that had once held innocent life. Eli had always said you’d never forget your first vampire. Ice ran through his veins. Scarpelli looked up from the naked woman’s neck, his eyes pools of crimson, the lower half of his face a black stain. And then he did the most terrible thing of all.
He smiled.
The horror of it freed Jude from the shock that bound him. He dropped to one knee and dug in his pocket for his chalk. He used it to trace a circle around himself on the floor, forcing his hand to be patient. If he broke the line by lifting his hand, or by scuffing it with his shoe, or letting his concentration waver, or any of a hundred ways, the magic would be useless. He sucked in one long, continuous breath as he drew, stopping only when it was complete and his lungs felt like they would burst. He held this breath as he wrote four symbols at the compass points, released it as he placed the stump of candle at the seam where the circle had begun and joined itself. With a snap of his fingers, the candle burst into flame. He tossed the chalk behind him, outside his drawn circle, said the word that meant close, and the spell was complete; he felt its protection tighten around him, a pressure against his skin.
When Jude looked up from the marks on the stone floor, the magic that Eli Constant had taught him so long ago, Scarpelli stood a few feet away, tucking his shirttails into a pair of trousers that strained to contain his bulk. In the short moments it had taken Jude to draw his ward, the vampire had dressed and had even cleaned the blood from his face. “Finished?” he asked.
Jude had counted on the amused contempt he heard in Scarpelli’s voice. The dead god could have interrupted Jude at any point, snatching him out of his half-worked spell before Jude could flinch, much less escape. The trick, Jude had hoped, was in how pathetic he must have looked crawling around on the floor, how weak and hastily erected his magic must seem. Jude nodded, not yet wanting to reveal his voice.
Scarpelli crossed the distance between them with a shiver’s quickness, a flurry of teeth and shadow. He struck what appeared to be thin air with a wet smack, recoiling with an expression of shock that would have been comic if not for its immediate shift to one of malice. Scarpelli hissed past yellowed fangs and pounded his fist against the barrier of Jude’s magic. In order to hide the terror that wormed through his belly and to spite the pain that flared in his temples each time the vampire lashed out against his spell, Jude flashed the vampire a bright grin and winked right in the dead god’s face.
Rage drained away from the vampire’s expression, replaced by something unreadable and cold. “Well, well,” he said. His voice grated in Jude’s ears, high-pitched and harsh. “How interesting.” Scarpelli stretched his head back and inhaled deeply, his jowls flattening and expanding like the throat of a toad. A bloated tongue slithered across moist lips. “Oh, sweetmeats. Something has changed about you. Something . . . delicious. Something familiar.” Red-tainted eyes rolled to the ceiling for a moment as he sniffed the air again. He clicked his tongue and grinned. “Oh, of course. You haven’t changed, have you? You’ve just brought along a friend. Appetizer or digestif?” He raised his voice and spoke over his shoulder. “Oh, Friend Appetizer? You smell delightful. A bit familiar, even. Have I eaten anyone you know? A brother or father perhaps?”
Even though he was desperate to know that she hadn’t run away, Jude didn’t dare look away from the vampire to see if Regal really was in here with them, or if Scarpelli could merely smell her on his clothes. Nor could he entirely blame her if she’d fled. She didn’t have the protection of his circle, only the thin armor of her pseudo-invisibility. If he made any move to reassure himself and she was here, though, it would be the end of her.
“Don’t blame yourself,” the vampire said, his tone mockingly conciliatory. “It was a good trick, however you did it, sneaking your naughty conspirator in here. Almost fooled me. But the nose knows, no?” He pressed one nostril closed and giggled, that high-pitched tittering sound that put Jude’s teeth on edge. “Yes, a good trick,” Scarpelli said, continuing as if Jude weren’t there. “Not nearly as good as this, though.” He pressed a long-nailed fingertip against the invisible barrier of Jude’s spell. “No mere half-breed could keep me at bay with such a simple working. What are you truly, I wonder?” He held up a hand when Jude opened his mouth to speak. “No, don’t tell me. I want to savor it. I want your taste to be a surprise.” He ran the tip of his bloated tongue along the tip of one of his yellowed incisors. “I want you to know that I’m really going to enjoy this,” he said. “Not just feeding off whatever power lurks in your veins, although that’ll be nice, too. I’m going to enjoy watching the light go out of your eyes. Soon, precious. Soon. That candle can’t have more than twenty minutes of life left in it. Just like you.”
Jude darted a glance down. The flame sputtered above a lump of wax t
hat had seemed much larger not long before. The piece of chalk had vanished. The vampire giggled once again and pulled a white cloth from his sleeve, shaking it in the air like a celebrant at a second line. “Now that we’ve taken care of that,” he said. “Come. Come and let me introduce you to the city of New Orleans.”
Jude’s gaze traveled to the stone pedestal where the painted woman lay. Had he killed her? No, her breath plumed in the cold air. He also saw scabs at the woman’s neck, on her thighs, in the crook of her elbow, in a line down her belly, and in her groin just above her sex. They were not the dainty puncture marks of a Hollywood vampire but wicked tears in her flesh, the ravening bites of a savage, hungry beast.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Scarpelli said, running one monstrously elongated finger across the woman’s cheek, a horrific parody of tenderness. “She will be my greatest achievement.”
“Funny,” Jude said, his pronunciation a little hesitant with the pearl clutched beneath his tongue. “All I see is more death.”
Scarpelli’s titter dragged a cold blade down Jude’s spine. “Not death,” he said. “I am giving her life. The life she has always wanted.” The vampire was, Jude realized, drunk on the woman’s blood, his eyes heavy, his speech sluggish. Like a tick, he had fed and now needed to curl up and sleep. Then things clicked for Jude—the ritualistic, half-healed bites on the woman’s flesh; Scarpelli’s swaggering claims that the game no longer mattered; his mother’s painting of a fanged, monstrous New Orleans skyline—and he understood what Scarpelli was doing, spoke the words as soon as he thought them.
“You’re turning her, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re trying to make the city a vampire.”
“Not trying, sweetmeats. Doing. It’s going to be glorious.” Scarpelli dipped a finger into the woman’s still gaping wound, licked the blood from his elongated nail. “And the best part is, no one will notice. She already lures people in with sex and drink and the promise of freedom, and grants them those things even as she drains the life from them.” He turned a burning red gaze in Jude’s direction. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”
Jude could see the bleak poetry of it. He knew, as everyone in the city did, of at least one person who had fallen into the very trap Scarpelli described. Especially since the storm, people here let the drinking or the drugs or the sex, once a celebration of life, become the purpose of life. The night took over, and they grew thin and wasted, as though something ate them from the inside out. Most didn’t last long. The simple, predatory beauty of Scarpelli’s plan was that he wasn’t changing anything. He was just making it literal.
“You about a dumb motherfucker,” Jude said. His balls tightened as soon as the words left his lips, but he tried to keep his diction ignorant, to push forward with his bluff. “Couple of tattoos don’t mean shit. She ain’t a city just ’cause you say she is. How you figure she any kind of special?”
The vampire tilted his head to the side, as though he hadn’t fully understood the question. After a moment, he shook his head. “You think like such a mortal,” he said. “Observe.” Scarpelli lifted the woman’s legs, bending each first at the knee and then at the hip, curling her limbs into the lotus position. He crossed her arms as well. Each movement seemed to realign the lines and colors on her flesh into some new combination, as though she had been painted with not one map but many.
What he did next gave Jude a headache just to watch. The vampire pressed one hand into the crease of her groin and lifted her leg with the other hand, bending the joint at an impossible angle. Instead of breaking, though, the woman folded. The vampire continued with her other leg and the rest of her body, collapsing the woman in on herself in a kind of grim origami. Jude looked away when he realized that at some point in the process she had become weightless and paper-thin. When he forced himself to look again, the woman had vanished, replaced by a book, its spine shimmering with a soft intermittent glow.
The vampire turned a look of absolute victory toward Jude. Behind him, Jude saw a chalk X on the stone wall that hadn’t been there a moment before. His pulse raced. Now or never.
“No,” Jude said.
Scarpelli set the book down on the altar and caught his tongue between his teeth in a leering smile. “No to what?”
“To all of this. To your offer of employment, to this perversion of my city, to anything and everything you stand for. The answer is no. I won’t allow it. I’ll kill you here and now if I have to.”
Scarpelli laughed, high and tittering and filled with glee. “Kill me? Me? Please, precious, tell me how.”
“I’ve dealt with your kind before.”
“You may have killed some fledgling with the dirt of the grave still moist beneath his fingernails, but don’t think we’re all such easy prey. I am so very old, and you are so very human. Stronger beings than you have tried to make an end of me, and I can still remember how each one of them tasted.”
Jude forced a smile onto his face. He reached behind his back, the way he’d seen Regal do time and again when reaching for her dagger. “Vampires rise at noon and sleep at midnight,” he said, “or you used to, back when people woke at dawn and slept at dusk. You cannot cross running water, or abide the scent of garlic. In the hands of a true believer, a symbol of faith will weaken you. Stakes carved from the heartwood of an ash tree will bind you, silver will cut you, and fire will destroy you.” The words poured out of him, slick as a sheen of oil. He felt the old Jude’s confidence filling him, the swagger that came with always having an ace up his sleeve.
Or a pearl under his tongue.
Scarpelli rolled his eyes, made a masturbatory gesture. “Thank you for the lesson in folklore, but what does that have to do with anything? You have none of those things, and even if you did, I am faster and stronger and more powerful than you will ever be.” Despite his words, the vampire’s gaze was focused on Jude’s arm, on the hand out of sight.
“It’s not about the objects themselves that matters. It’s what they represent. It’s what they reveal about your nature. Silver, garlic, running water, fire. All symbols of purity. That’s what hurts you. That’s what will unmake you. Something pure. Because you are nothing but a corruption of life.”
Scarpelli’s grin slid from his face. He licked his lips with his thick hanged-man’s tongue. “Maybe you’re right,” Scarpelli said. “Maybe. But you’ve evaded my question. What weapon of purity did you bring?”
With his free hand, Jude tapped his chest, right above his heart. “Right here,” he said.
Scarpelli laughed again, his condescension returning. “You? Oh, Jude. Your blood is diluted with mortality. You have no faith; you believe in nothing. I can smell the taint of sin on your soul. Purity? Oh no, precious. Oh no.” He chuckled. “You nearly had me going.”
At Jude’s feet, the candle’s flame succumbed to the inevitable and snuffed out. The vampire, bluffed by the empty hand behind Jude’s back, didn’t move.
“As you say,” Jude said, “I’m not pure. But my hatred of you? My desire to watch you burn?” He let some of his magic slip from him, felt his words burning in the frigid air. He smiled the old Jude’s fuck-you smile. “That’s pure. And if you don’t believe me . . .” He spread his arms wide, showing his empty hands, betting it all on one turn of the cards, on one throw of the dice. “Come and have a taste.” He stepped backward across the chalk line he’d drawn, pointed to the floor, and shouted the word that meant close, putting all the force of will behind it he could summon. Then he looked up, met the vampire’s red glare, and waited to see if he would live or die.
Scarpelli looked down at the book on the stone altar, caressing its cover before turning away. Just as before, the vampire launched himself through the air faster than the eye could follow and, as before, slammed into the barrier of a protective circle. This one wasn’t a three-foot loop around Jude, though. While the vampire had been focused on gloating and threats, Regal had used the chalk to make a larger circle around the entire room connected to the original
one Jude had drawn.
Not to keep the vampire out, but to cage him in.
“You are a clever little meal,” Scarpelli said, once he’d lashed out at the barrier a few times. “I don’t know if it’s your arrogance, or your naiveté, or the pleasure I get waiting for you to stumble. Whichever it is, I find your fumbling little efforts so endearing. What can you be plotting?”
“You’re talking a whole lot of shit for someone in a cage.”
Scarpelli clapped his fleshy hands in a gross imitation of childish glee. “Oh, I love this game.” All pretense of amusement slid from the vampire’s expression, leaving nothing behind but cold, naked rage. “How long do you really think this pitiful ward will hold me?”
“Just long enough,” Jude said, “to fuck with your plans.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Scarpelli said, shaking an admonishing finger. “I think you overestimate your own talents.” He stalked the confines of the chalk circle like a jungle cat at the zoo, drawing his nails along the empty-air barrier with an unnerving screech. “I won’t bother to ask if you’ve considered that by locking me in here with this”—he gestured toward the altar and the book he’d unfolded into a woman—“you’ve done nothing more than assure that I’ll continue to turn the city uninterrupted. Surely you’ve thought of that already, clever boy that you are. I won’t ask if you’ve any idea of the powers aligned against you, or if you know who you can trust. I won’t even ask you, out of the goodness of my heart, to consider my offer one last time.” He tsked and shook his head. “That one you’ve already answered. No, what I want to know most is”—he cupped a hand around his ear in exaggerated pantomime—“do you hear what I hear?”
In spite of himself, Jude held his breath and listened. From the top of the stairs came a rhythmic pounding: thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, thump-thump-thump.
