The Strigoi Chronicles Box Set

by Nya

  I, on the other hand, wore a Bertolini black with white, narrow pinstriped suit with a form-fitting, banded collar silk blend shirt, the black-on-black giving me a sinister air. The minion had called it ‘mob-chic’ but I wasn’t sure what that meant. It sounded vaguely derogatory.

  Whoever coined the term ‘clothes make the man’ was barking up the wrong tree. I looked and felt like a peacock, and not in a good way. I’d have been better served to don my habit with the tunic and undyed scapula. That way I could have masked my identity with the attached hood, gracing my diminutive frame with an aura of anonymity and saving us all the awkwardness of wondering why someone hadn’t thought of putting telephone books on the chair on which I slumped.

  Papa-san exchanged pleasantries with his underlings until our minion set matching plates of bloody roast beef in front of us. The meat was raw to the point of making its way back to pasture under its own power, and my gut rumbled appreciatively. The server also included a flagon of still-warm O-neg, the bouquet that of freshly squeezed virgin and I marveled at how many young maidens remained unsullied in this day and age what with one thing and another.

  “Was everything to your satisfaction?” Pops wasn’t inquiring after the entrée.

  “Yes.”

  Oh hell, yes.

  I wriggled, trying to find a spot that didn’t scream in agony, the slouching in my seat more a measure of my body’s desire to fold into a tiny package of oh shit, it hurts so good than as a reminder of my former career as a scribe.

  Using his eyes to quickly scan the assembly, he bid me pay attention to the conversations. My Vampyr hearing gave me an advantage over even demon enhanced sensibilities. It would not matter that the snippets recorded made no sense to me. Michel du Velours would put whatever I discovered in context, along with Rafe and probably Jefrumael.

  That nine centuries of mimicking a copy machine should come in handy for the Lord of the Lower Realms did not escape my sense of irony.

  Karma truly had a sense of humor.

  Chapter Five

  There had to be some kind of demon etiquette, something that tip-toed around ‘he was the one with the forked tongue and pustules on his proboscis’ when referring to one’s dinner guests.

  There’s this thing with frame of reference. A proboscis is a nose which should have made it easy to use that term—because, after all, most humanoids had them—but in truth such a common word for a breathing apparatus didn’t exactly suit the description.

  Pops liked precision in all things. Ergo, I drummed up a simian reference because… well, it fit. Besides which, it made the old man chuckle, a full out belly laugh that nearly cracked his stern Euro-trash veneer into bits of ‘he’s a really nice guy when you get to know him’.

  For the guest in question, his name was Eduardo and he spoke with a Castilian accent, apparently not an affectation as his home base topside was a villa in Burgos, a little hideaway constructed by the House of Trastámara during the fifteenth century.

  Rafe asked, “So you know him?”

  “Indirectly. We’ve never met but I was in Isabella’s court for a few years, in service to her … well, it’s difficult to explain.”

  Mine Père lounged on a settee, drink in hand, face blank, but he concentrated on every word. It would have been flattering had I not felt the unseen presence of a firing squad somewhere off stage left.

  I continued the history lesson. “When Isabella ascended the throne, the kingdoms were in disarray. There was no such thing as public peace. She arranged for municipalities to form brotherhoods of peacekeepers.”

  Ever perceptive, our liege-lord asked, “Like the Mafiya?”

  “Exactly. However, they were legitimized into a Santa Hermandad, headed up by the monarchs themselves. Isabella took an active interest in the organization. They appointed officials to carry out their brand of justice, mostly noted for summary jurisdiction, even in capital cases. It was effective. And lucrative.”

  Jef asked, “What does this have to do with Eduardo?”

  “Isabella needed someone to consolidate her authority. She chose Eduardo.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “He was successful beyond anyone’s expectations.” I fondled the tumbler of brandy, holding it up to the candlelight, admiring the amber glint, remembering. “As these things go, Eduardo overstepped his original mandate to the point where the towns rebelled against the excesses. It splintered the groups, but not his control over the factions. It was, as they say… a very organic situation.”

  Rafe clearly wanted me to move the discourse along. “So how long was he involved…”

  When I assumed academic lecturer mode, I was a hard train to derail. However, Rafe was right, not everything was pertinent to today’s little conundrum and the whispers-of-interest I’d gleaned from me being a peeping Dreu, in an auditory sense.

  “The Holy Brotherhood managed to wheedle their way into the taxing system under a servicios.” I paused, trying to recall the proper term.

  My Sire said, “Papal bull.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” I nodded my thanks but Pops was off in his own private space again. “Anyway, these indulgences came with the full weight of the church and permitted collection of funds by force if necessary.”

  Michel stood and stretched. When he looked over at the cluster of three bodies—me, Rafe and Jef grouped around a glass coffee table holding drinks and ashtrays—he had a calculating stare I wasn’t able to fathom. Even Rafe looked askance at our lord and master’s expression.

  New and unusual in Michel du Velours’ body language bode ill. For someone. And the three of us were in his direct line of fire.

  Rafe, the brave one, asked, “Sire?”

  He refilled his glass and towered over us. Jef mumbled, “Shit,” but the demon liege-lord simply waved for me to continue. It felt like a stay of execution and I wasn’t sure if I needed to jazz up the narrative with a few juicy factoids about living large in España, but I’d been on the outer edge of the fun and games through that century, keeping my head down and cloaking my identity.

  What better place to cower from a few minor indiscretions than in the court of the queen of spiritual unification.

  Continuing, I said, “By the mid-eighteen hundreds, the various brotherhoods had fallen into such disfavor that they were officially banned.”

  “Officially.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “And unofficially?”

  This was where I trod on shaky ground. I’d done a google marathon after the banquet, trying to find evidence of the Hermandad, even to the point of expanding my search to the Netherlands where the term was still used as a nick-name for the cops.

  I offered my best guess. “The shell of the organization fractured into smaller units. Local police forces that eventually became legitimized and organized under local and provincial control.”

  “And Eduardo?”

  “Nothing.”

  His Most Royal lifted an eyebrow but if was Jef who said, “He can’t have just disappeared. Certainly not after being such a conspicuous…”

  “That’s the thing. Even when Isabella and Ferdinand made the Santa Hermandad official, Eduardo operated below everyone’s radar, to use a modern expression. He covered his tracks and avoided direct involvement.”

  “Except for the cash flow.” This from Rafe.

  “Yes, except for that.”

  Michel finally spoke up. “And what can we assume he carried forward from this … shall we say, proving ground?”

  “I have no proof…”

  “But, you have an informed opinion.”

  “There’s been no evidence of mafia connections in Spain since the brotherhood disbanded. There are terrorist cells and Moroccan cartels that specialize in the skin trade. That’s not Eduardo’s MO, to use another expression.”

  Jef growled, “The bastard prefers to blow shit up.”

  I continued, “And that’s why I think he moved his financing and his interests to Latin Amer
ica. The drug dealers wage constant war on each other. I think Eduardo has set himself up as the arms supplier to the cartels. He has connections with the French and the Basque Separatists. That gives him access to high quality weaponry and well-established trade routes for moving arms around.”

  Michel said, “Leave us,” and waved Jef and Rafe to the door. My gut told me father and son had suddenly tuned onto the same wavelength.

  When the two demons exited, Papa-san said, “Walk with me,” and led the way onto a balcony that overlooked the Black Sea. It was high morning but the clouds had grown thick and heavy with the promise of rain.

  Solicitous, he asked, “Will you be all right?” and nodded to the overcast sky.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The walls have ears.” He grimaced with distaste and a frisson of sympathy niggled at my consciousness. I could not imagine living a life under such constant surveillance, even if it were of the friendly fire kind.

  We sat at the table with the granite top, angling our chairs toward the low railing and letting the wash of sea and gulls deaden the air around us.

  When he spoke, it was barely at a detectable level, even for my enhanced hearing.

  “You said that you were taken from a cave near Yalta, is that correct?”

  He knew the story but apparently there were details to consider that I might not have been aware of at the time. I had been, after all, bereft over the loss of Fane and not particularly interested in bringing my sire up-to-speed on current events.

  “Walk me through it again.”

  Shutting my eyes, I explained that I had put myself in stasis, in a makeshift coffin, a wooden box I’d found amongst the stash of Soviet era arms.

  Pops interrupted with, “To escape me, isn’t that right?”

  “Um, sort of.” He seemed to find that amusing. To fend off the logical question of how long was I in there, I explained, “Stasis is what it is. I had no sense of time passing. And no clear recollection of intermediate events.”

  “Extrapolate.”

  Crap, I hated making things up but the old man seemed to think the devil was in the details, a little factoid that I could have found amusing but given my situation, the reality was … not hardly.

  “Ukraine has very little control over the movement of arms. All I can tell you is that it was probably a local group of thugs who raided the cave and the stash of Soviet ordnance and shipped it from Yalta for parts unknown.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They were working their way down the east coast of Africa on a small freighter. When I woke up, the ship had been taken by Somalian pirates and I was nailed shut in a box with a tactical nuke.”

  “And you knew this how?”

  I explained that the device had several warning labels on the outside of the box. One was a radiation danger sign that I recognized immediately. It didn’t take long to put two and two together. As for the pirates, they were prone to chatter.

  “The bozos were counting their blessings in the hold. A couple spoke English so I was able to figure out what was going on. But stasis is as stasis does. I floated in and out of consciousness and then some new players joined the party.”

  “The weres.” Pops was ticking off some mental bullet points, putting it all together.

  After that I was on solid ground. I quickly summarized the bits leading up to me storming the compound in Romania and my sire hoofing it to parts unknown and sealing up that portal. Or whatever that inter-dimensional highway was.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Dad asked, “Did anyone ever say where that shipment was headed?”

  “No. At least not in my hearing.”

  “But you have an idea.”

  “I did some research on where the cartels might be getting their arms. The Mexicans point the finger at the US but the fact is, most of the weapons do not have serial numbers so their provenance cannot be verified.”

  “So either a Ukrainian or Somalian connection would not be off the table, am I correct?”

  Connecting the final dot, I said, “You have a missing nuke that I can verify does not reside with the weres. They think I have it, or I know where it is and can get it for them.”

  Elliot was predictable and stupid to a fault. If he thought I had the ability to conjure the weapon of mass destruction out of the aether, then by damn nothing and no one was going to convince him otherwise.

  What surprised me was that Samuels appeared to buy into that fiction. But then, with Samuels, things weren’t always as they seemed.

  It was time for me to ask a few questions. “Do you think Eduardo engineered the buy?”

  “Possible.” He rethought that and amended his statement with, “Probable.”

  “Is he the one who lifted the device while shit was going down at the dacha?”

  We both paused to down the rest of our brandies. Pops went off-topic and said, “I liked that place.”

  “Me too.” I did have small regrets, even after beating feet to escape the wrath of Khan, but I wasn’t about to remind Mein Herr about that reduction in minion forces.

  The first drops of rain splatted on the granite tabletop. Neither of us would melt, but getting soaked wasn’t much fun. It was time to draw a few conclusions, dot the I’s and cross a couple of t’s.

  “I thought maybe Samuels had taken it. It’s something he would do. He’s with Elliot and his band of wolves only so long as it suits. The thing is, if he has it, then why let Elliot drag him all over the Transylvanian Plateau chasing down my sorry ass?” And Fane. They took Fane out for reasons that still did not compute.

  “Do you not believe that you have value?”

  “I don’t know…” The word choked in my throat, the argument a long and depressing litany of self-worth or lack thereof. But what if I were wrong? I spit out, “Shit.”

  “Shit indeed.” My Sire stood and said, “Let’s go for a drive.”

  Great. A road trip. With Michel du Velours that might mean a quick hop over to the local inn to slum with the locals, or it most likely meant a blast through smog and re-emergence on one of the levels of Hel.

  He confirmed my suspicions with, “Maybe you shouldn’t eat.”

  Dammit.

  Now that we were tight, almost colleagues, I trolled for enlightenment.

  “Where are we going?” There were nine levels, not all of them devoted to women’s lingerie, though at one time in my long life that might have been a real turn-on. My tastes and inclinations had changed significantly.

  Except for Nurse Kinky. What good were rules if there were no exceptions?

  The only two vehicles I’d seen were the Porsche and muscle car. The dacha had additional parking in an outlying building at the uppermost level. I had assumed that either Jef or Rafe would keep their vehicles there. Jef had a killer crotch rocket. Rafe had a mom-mobile van decked out as a triage unit.

  It turned out that it was a three-car garage. We took the third vehicle, a black Mercedes SUV, the compact European-sized version, but carrying a few upgrades like darkened bullet-proof glass, aggressive tread on the tires and a built-in metal box with some hand-held flamethrowers, sniper rifles and assorted handguns.

  I had to ask, “Are we going into enemy territory?” That was a fair question. I’d visited level five, now rendered a toxic waste cleanup site after my little peccadillo, and levels two and nine. It never occurred to me that there might be a reason that the old man hadn’t given me the whole fruit-of-his-loins tour on either of my visits to Demon Central.

  One assumed that the liege-lord had control over all his realms.

  Apparently on that … one would be mistaken.

  Mr. Enigmatic replied to my question with, “It’s best to be prepared.”

  Yes, yes it is.

  Except, riding shotgun into oh, what … lava flames, the pit of despair, the vale of tears, Mordor … didn’t qualify me for anything other than collateral damage. I said as much.

  He smiled.
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  It warmed the cockles of my heart that I, his only son, Dreu of no parentage worth a surname, could entertain the Demon King of Hel.

  I lived to serve.

  What I wasn’t in the mood for was an early demise doing Pop’s dirty deeds when I had weres to torture and kill and then a final exit in a blaze of glory to rejoin my dearest Fane in some glorious hereafter.

  I needed to keep my eye on the prize. Michele du Velour had an uncanny knack of derailing all my best laid plans.

  Not that I expected an answer, but hell, what’s the worst that could happen? So I chewed on each and every syllable, demanding, “Exactly what the fuck is going on?”

  The silence was deafening.

  Then he spoke softly, keeping his eyes on the road but directing his total attention to me.

  “I have enemies.”

  Whoa, there was a bulletin, alert the press.

  “They desire two things that I care about. Do you know what they are?”

  Fine, another quiz, the man was totally sold on teaching to the test. He’d have made a terrific minister of education.

  Thinking on it, in truth I only came up with one. His throne, if that’s what it was called. If the mysterious ‘they’ had their way, they’d control vast realms with the ability to create mayhem topside and who knew where else. There were a lot of ways to do it. Assassination was one but sometimes cutting off the head of an organization only caused more to sprout. Pops wasn’t without supporters. You couldn’t get to his level of power and influence without a few eager sycophants clearing the way. There were always B-leaguers too lazy to go for the whole enchilada themselves, but more than willing to reap the largesse from well-placed campaign contributions.

  I read a lot of political theory. It wasn’t hard to figure out how things worked.

  So I offered the only answer I had, “They want your throne.”

  “Very good. What else?”

  “I don’t know. What else do they need? They can off you but they don’t have to. All they need to do is control you.”

  Or … shit. Put me on the throne instead. Dreu had ‘puppet’ written on his forehead in neon letters. It never occurred to me that my mere presence might cause a ripple effect that could bring down the entire demon power structure.