“Fine,” the vampiress answered. “It only twinges if I go without feeding for a long time. But then, I never go without feeding for very long.”
“I want you to stay out of my head,” Deirdre fumed.
“I wasn’t in your head, dear.”
“It’s true,” Theresa said. “Your voice really does carry—even when you whisper.”
Deirdre looked at me.
I showed her the Glock. “We’ll be fine.”
She straightened up. “I’ll show them where to unpack.”
“Show Suki, too.”
The Asian vampiress looked at me. “One of us should stay with you at all times.”
I thought better of saying, “The shower is going to get awfully crowded,” but it was already out of my mouth before I did. I avoided looking at Deirdre.
“I’ll be right back,” Suki said pointedly as she got to her feet. “I wouldn’t want to miss any juicy details.”
As Pagelovitch’s enforcer and her entourage trailed after Deirdre on a caravan to the carriage house, I turned back to Theresa. “So. You can’t stay?”
She shook her head and unclipped a black leather pouch from her black leather belt. “I must leave within the hour.”
“Well, as flattering as it might seem, I doubt that you went to all the trouble to rent a boat and drop by in the middle of the night just to say howdy and catch up on old times.”
“Yes. I wish I had more time. I could spend the next week apologizing to you for my behavior before we . . . um . . . parted.” She got up and came over to sit next to me on the love seat.
Immediately I was enveloped in a cloud of perfume, so thick and cloying that I almost gagged. It would have overwhelmed anyone with a normal sense of smell. The barrage on my enhanced olfactory receptors was out of the comfort zone and moving into painful territory.
“Okay,” I said as tears began to gather at the corners of my eyes, “but what do you really want?”
She looked away. “I . . . that is . . .”
“Just spit it out, kiddo; you’ve got to tell me sooner or later.”
She stared down at her lap. The zipper on the leather pouch was halfway parted and something sharp and silver gleamed within.
“I need your blood,” she whispered.
Chapter Seven
“There’s an old Spanish proverb that says: ‘an ounce of blood is worth a pound of friendship.’”
“And an old Italian proverb,” Theresa retorted, “says: ‘blood alone moves the wheels of history.’”
I shook my head. “You don’t strengthen your case by quoting Benito Mussolini.”
“But think of all the good he could do with it!”
“Mussolini?”
“Dr. Pipt!” She got up and wandered around the couch. “The man is a genius! The advances he’s made in genetics, cloning, nanobiotics—”
“It is a very impressive resume,” I said, “but it also underlines the inherent dangers of turning over something that could be so potently misused and exploited. I don’t know this Dr. Pipt well enough to trust him with my genetic material.”
“He’s a good man!”
“I can understand your enthusiasm; he gave you a body. But I’ve got to wonder: whose body? And how did he obtain it? All I know about this guy is, he’s stolen your—er—head from the people I had entrusted it to—”
“For the right reasons!”
“If it’s so obvious that he was doing the right thing, why didn’t he ask? If he’s such a humanitarian, why isn’t he sharing his medical breakthroughs with the rest of the world? And I confess to certain qualms about handing over tissue to a man who gets his jollies leaving disembodied hearts on other people’s doorsteps.”
“Well, if you would come with me, I could introduce him to you. You could get to know him. Decide for yourself.”
I got up from the love seat. “I would love to meet this guy-whose-name-sounds-oh-so-familiar-but-I-just-can’t-seem-to-place-it. But not right now. I’ve got major business brewing in New York this week. And I’m getting married—”
“Married?”
“You seem surprised.”
She waved her hand dismissively, all nonchalance now. “Just that there’s an old adage: ‘Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?’”
I felt my eyes narrow. “I’m not sure I like an analogy that compares my fiancée to a cow.”
“Or, for that matter,” she said, ignoring my response, “why settle for milk when you can have cream?”
“Cream?”
“Whipped cream . . .” She licked her lips.
I was torn between the urge to scowl and to outright laugh in her face. “Look, the point—which we are rapidly digressing from—is that I am very busy right now. Under the circumstances, I’d prefer to get this Pipt’s address and go visit him on my own terms, once things are all quiet on the eastern front.”
She turned and her face twisted into a parody of a smile. “I can’t wait that long.”
“Who can’t wait?”
“He’s getting really old. His life may be measured in months or even weeks. None of us expect him to see next Christmas. He needs your blood!”
I stared at her. Theresa Kellerman had evinced the qualities of a true sociopath on our last encounter but she wasn’t that good a liar. And she knew it.
“All right,” she said after a moment and tugged at her sleeve as she walked back toward me. She stripped the glove from her left arm, exposing her hand and wrist. She held it before my face and wiggled her fingers. “This is why I can’t wait.”
Her skin was mottled and discolored, the fingers bruised and swollen. Then I caught a whiff of what the heavy perfume had been trying to mask.
The stink of putrefaction.
“Gangrene?” I asked.
She snorted. “No. Or maybe yes. I always thought gangrene was the process of death in living tissue. If a limb is already dead . . .” She shrugged.
“But a transplant—”
“Do you mean from a living donor?” She smiled a ghastly smile. “My dear Christopher, I thought you would be more squeamish about the medical ethics involved. Besides, my flesh from the neck up remained well preserved without the assistance of the good doctor’s nanobots. It seemed logical that the transplantation would work well with a million tiny machines working day and night to keep my tissues oxygenated and under constant repair.”
She peeled off the other glove with greater difficulty; the fingers of her left hand were noticeably clumsy. Her right hand was black—not with advanced necrosis but with the pigmentation that denoted a Negroid donor. “This arm was harvested more quickly and attached more recently. It will last longer but, eventually, it will need to be replaced, too.” She ran those dark fingers over the ridges of the even darker straps girdling her torso. “If we had time I could show you a woman who epitomizes the melting-pot concept of America. The stitchwork is very fine; nothing like those old black-and-white horror movies on the late show.”
“My blood,” I said. And stopped. I didn’t know what to say. Or, rather, I couldn’t quite figure out how to say it.
“It brought me back from the dead, the first time. Kept me alive from the neck up, upon the second. I believe it could keep my body from rotting under me and sending me back to the operating room again and again and again and—”
Deirdre walked back into the living room and Theresa immediately composed herself. “Did I miss something?”
Theresa turned away and pulled her gloves back on. “I have to be going. Will you spare a little for my sake? Or should I go back to Pipt and see if a living transplant works a lot better?”
I ignored the implied threat. “I could give you a transfusion right here and now. No need to go back home and do it.”
She shook her head but kept her back to us. “Not now. Not like this.” Her voice was unsteady. “My body isn’t quite . . . right. At the moment. I wouldn’t want to ‘preserve’ it in its current state.”
>
Little alarm bells went off in the back of my mind but they became distant as she turned and smiled. “I’ll have to come back, then,” she said as if finding new resolve. “Or hold out for a few more weeks until you can come and visit us on terms that you are comfortable with.”
“Theresa, I am sorry—”
Her smile grew in intensity. “How quickly you’ve forgotten, Christopher. Call me ‘T.’”
“I wish—”
“I do have to go, now. I must return the boat, check in at the airport, and return the rental car.”
I frowned. “There are no commercial flights out until six a.m.”
“Private jet. Will you walk me to the boat? You could at least do that. For old times.”
I wasn’t sure what old times she was referring to but I nodded.
“We’ll both walk you,” Deirdre said.
“There’s no need to go to all the trouble.”
“Don’t worry, honey. As long as Chris is armed, I’ll hang back at a discreet distance. You can whisper all the endearments you like as long as I can keep him in a fifteen-foot line of sight.”
Theresa looked back at me. “I must say, Chris, your fiancée is either very open-minded or very secure in your relationship.”
“Uh, Deirdre is not my fiancée.”
Theresa’s eyes widened. She looked over at my Security Chief. She looked back at me. “Really? That’s . . . interesting . . .”
“Isn’t it?” Deirdre opined. She turned to me. “Check your clip.”
I pulled the Glock from my shoulder holster. “How many times do I have to tell you, it’s not a clip, it’s a magazine. Clips are loads for the long bores.”
“Long bores, huh? Well, that would be you.”
I ignored that but ejected and reinserted the ammo magazine so she wouldn’t keep on. Deirdre picked up her shotgun as we headed out the door.
Outside, the air smelled fresh and clean, washed clear by the showers of the morning before. The combined stench of T’s perfume and decay evaporated but I felt a shiver as her black-clad body disappeared in the darkness, leaving her head to seemingly float through the night like a glimmering apparition.
“So, who is the lucky lady?” Theresa asked over her invisible shoulder.
“How about an exchange of information? I’ll give you a name if you give me an address.”
In spite of my attempts to match her stride, she still managed to walk just ahead of me. “I’m sure the doctor will send you directions shortly.”
“Tell him to send it snail mail; I seem to be having trouble with my ISP.” We reached the end of the front lawn and she started down the stairs.
I hurried to catch up. One flight down she slowed and leaned back against me as I matched her pace. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to persuade you to come with me?” she murmured suggestively.
Maybe her brain had starved for oxygen: that approach hadn’t worked back when she still had her original body. And, while I might confess to one or two mild kinks in the boudoir, borrowed, putrefying flesh just sort of kills my amorous inclinations.
“The steps are kind of slippery with the night dew,” Deirdre called down. “You might want to use the handrail.”
Theresa took the hint and hurried down the stairs. Mostly to annoy my Chief of Security, I hurried after her.
The boat moored next to the dock was larger than I expected, certainly larger than a lone individual required for crossing the river for a hasty visit. Suki and her entourage had been lucky: there was plenty of space aboard for them and room to spare, as well. The craft was twin-hulled for stability and that gave her the added advantage of a shallow draft, allowing her to berth so close to the river’s bank. A tarp covered a pile of something amidships and I remembered our visitors’ luggage. It looked like Suki and Co. had left some of their gear behind. Which meant Deirdre and I would probably have to hump it all up the stairs if Theresa was in as big of a hurry to depart as she claimed.
The problem was the tarp covered a big pile.
Worse, the pile was getting bigger.
The tarp rose into the air until it was as tall as a man standing erect.
And it didn’t stop there!
“Chris!” Deirdre bellowed. “Get back!”
Like to where I once belonged and you can call me Jojo: I moonwalked back up three steps as the tarp fell away and I looked up at a vaguely man-shaped silhouette. Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone’s love child, bottle-fed on steroids and beaten daily with an ugly stick for thirty-some-odd years . . .
This thing might have been his scarier, older brother.
“Fall back to the house and I’ll cover you!”
“Nothin’ doin’, Red,” I growled as I squeezed past her and grabbed her belt from behind. “We’re gonna run this like a three-legged race!”
She twisted and shoved me up to the top of the first landing. “Then don’t slow me down! Run!”
We ran but I couldn’t keep from looking back. As it stepped over the side of the boat, the dock settled low in the water as if the creature weighed a ton.
“What the hell is that?” I asked as we turned onto the second landing and started up the final flight of stairs.
“It came here on that psychopathic bitch’s boat,” Deirdre grunted at my hip. “She kept it hidden until she could lure you down to the dock. That means it’s something very bad!”
“That’s it,” I puffed, “she’s officially off the guest list for the wedding.”
The thing was on the stairs now, bounding up toward us, taking three steps at a time. The wooden treads cracked like gunfire beneath its ponderous feet.
I pulled the Glock from my shoulder holster and fired a couple of rounds into the air.
“What are you doing? It’s behind us, not above us!”
“Thought I’d let Suki know company was coming.” We reached the top and nearly stumbled making the transition to softer ground. “Besides, shooting it might make it mad.”
“Let’s test that theory.” She turned, shoving me behind her, and pumped a shell into the chamber. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” she bellowed as the thing reached the top of the stairs.
The creature stopped and you could see the fear reflected in its eyes—the fear on our faces, that is. It wasn’t hesitating; it was merely posing for effect, giving us a chance to really see what we were up against.
Mary Shelley’s description of the creature in her magnum opus remarked upon “its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity . . . the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I (Victor Frankenstein) had given life.”
This thing was bigger and uglier. It wore clothing of sorts, pants and a shirt of some gray canvas material. Its color and the creature’s misshapen form were such as to make it impossible to discern where one left off and the other began.
Then it opened its mouth and displayed a pair of three-and-a-half-inch fangs.
“Holy shit!” I cried. “Frankenstein meets Dracula!”
Deirdre discharged the shotgun and the phosphorus load dazzled us with its actinic, bright flash. As my eyes recovered I could see patches of the thing’s bare flesh where the ragged shirt had burned away to reveal a crazy quilt of stitch lines and multihued patches of skin. It casually swatted at peppered patches of smoldering hide as if the fiery pellets were mosquitolike annoyances.
She jacked another shell into the breech but the monster was upon her in two quick bounds and closed its massive hands around the smoking barrel. I saw the muscles bunch in her arms as she tried to twist the weapon out of its gray-green grasp.
“Guess . . . what?” it intoned in a deep funereal voice.
“Uh,” she said. “Hulk smash?”
It shook its great, blocky head. “Hulk . . . splash!” And flicked the shotgun to the side so fast that Deirdre didn’t have time to let go. She was suddenly airborne and disappeared over the edge of the bluff before she could even scream.
<
br /> “Crap!” I said, hoping that saying the word would keep me from doing it. I turned and ran for the house as fast as I could.
It let me get there first.
I slammed the door behind me, turned the bolt and knob locks, and slid the restraint chain into position with a fumbled flourish. Technically, it was all unnecessary as vampires cannot cross a private threshold without an invitation—even if the door is wide open. But I wasn’t thinking rationally. Something that big and that hideous was bad enough. The fact that it possessed a quick wit and matching reflexes suggested that it was even more dangerous than it looked.
Maybe it was pen pals with Madame LeClaire, as well.
I closed my eyes and tried to think past my panic: Deirdre was still out there and, even if she survived the fall with minor injuries, the thing was still between her and sanctuary. How could I help her? “I . . . hate . . . monsters,” I sighed.
“Well, you’re not always so lovable, yourself,” Suki said from behind me.
I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder. She was standing in the doorway wearing an abbreviated silk robe. Her hair was damp and she was barefoot.
“I took a quick shower,” she said in answer to the question in my eyes. “I thought I heard some kind of racket. Where’s Deirdre?”
“In the river, I hope. Where’s your security goon squad?”
As if in answer to my question, Lance came hurtling through the glass window adjacent to the front door like—well—a lance.
Suki’s face changed.
I had seen her in inhuman form before, but only as a cat. Some Japanese vampires can manifest in feline form, the extra tail being the one characteristic that tends to separate them from the rest of the breeds. But this was different. Asian vampires have a more demonic aspect in their arousal state. Her face contorted into something resembling an ancient ceremonial mask with teeth and tusks and eyes that glowed like fanned embers. Her fingernails grew into curved talons and her robe parted to reveal a Picasso-like distortion of the human form.
“Who dares?” she roared in a voice that was suddenly an octave below my own. “Who attacks my human servant?”
I was trying to think of an abbreviated response when the other nightmare voice chuckled just outside the door. “Little pig, little pig, let me in . . .” it singsonged.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 12
