He grinned. “Probed, huh?”
“Talking above the eyebrows, Dennis. What are you doing here?”
“Do you mean here in New York or here in your bedroom?”
“Both, actually. Though it looks like you’re attempting psy-coitus interruptus at the moment.”
“Well,” he said, pulling up a chair, “as you may have heard, a new Doman is being elevated to the throne of the New York demesne and all the other enclaves are sending representatives to the ceremony—”
“Or bloody coup.”
He nodded as he sat. “Obviously, whoever sits on the throne when the dust settles will be a power to reckon with. So, there’re going to be a number of ambassadors lining up to reckon, negotiate, and curry favor. I’m just presuming on our friendship to push my way to the front of the line.”
I nodded. “And?”
“And,” he reached inside his suit coat and pulled out a thick envelope, “my Doman sends this with his compliments. He hopes you will find the information useful and will remember Chicago favorably in any future business dealings.”
“What is it?”
“Intel on your enemies.”
I broke contact as I reached for the package. Bethany fell back across my lap with a gasp as I took the envelope and opened it. There were thirty or forty pages, typewritten, all on very thin, slick-feeling sheets.
“Flash paper,” Smirl said as Bethany heaved and thrashed a bit. “A match, a candle flame—and the evidence is all gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that!”
Bethany sat up, startled at her emergence from the interior world to the exterior.
“Just in case I don’t come out on top,” I observed.
“Might be safer for you if your enemies don’t find it in your possession.”
“Yeah, that’s Chicago, the city of altruism.”
“I wouldn’t be comparing urban reputations if I were you.”
“Where am I?” Bethany gasped.
“New York, New York,” I said, “it’s a hell of a town.”
Chapter Ten
I read over the material and tucked it away before Kurt returned for my briefing. If I could trust the intel—and there were at least a half-dozen reasons why I shouldn’t—my best hope lay in playing the various families against one another. The pages contained psychological profiles of both known and suspected leaders as well as lists of closeted skeletons, literal as well as figurative. It was a blackmailer’s dream.
This wasn’t what I signed up for, however.
I wasn’t risking my neck to be monster-in-chief like Vlad Dracula or Elizabeth Báthory. Maybe it was a fool’s pipe dream but, if I had to rule through terror and bloodshed, I might as well turn the reins over to the rest of the fiends. Unfortunately, idealistic missions to change the system all too often end with the system changing the idealist. What shall it profit a man that he gain the whole underworld but lose his own soul?
But then, I hardly thought of myself as an idealist any more.
Kurt, ignorant of my Chicago cheat-sheet, provided much of the same background material, drawing most of the same conclusions in terms of viable strategies: undermine the strong, elevate the weak, divide and conquer. And the iron glove for my hand of power would be the Szekely Clan who had historically served as the demesne enforcers and was presumably loyal to me.
Through Kurt.
Who was most concerned with my positions on the issues. He kept pressing me for details on what I would tell the various clans and ambassadors when tonight’s meet and greet began.
He was not alone in his concerns. By signing on as the new ringmaster for this circus of the damned, I was gambling that mostly human me was still the best chance for the rest of humanity. Better, anyway, than something whose blood had cooled to below room temperature. But mostly human me wasn’t as human as I’d been a few months ago. And getting less human as time went on. How much longer would I remain a preferable choice to the other monsters?
What would happen when my blood cooled sufficiently?
“You understand,” Kurt was saying, “that you simply can’t order an entire species to voluntarily starve itself to death.”
“There are blood banks.”
He shook his head slowly. “It has worked in isolated situations, serving a few here and there. You are suggesting soup kitchens to serve hundreds on a nightly basis.”
I planted my elbows on the table and rested my forehead against my palms. “Supply and demand would be problematic. And the volunteer wine cellar—”
“Even more impractical,” he finished for me. “And it’s not just logistics and delivery issues. We are, by nature, hunters. Predators. It is our nature and cannot be permanently denied.”
“Yeah, yeah; it’s your inalienable right to keep and bare fangs. But the demesne system has managed to restrain that so-called nature. There are laws. There are rules. The demesne sets limits on the hunters as well as on the hunt. You’re not even allowed to sire more family members without the Doman’s permission.”
“Which the Countess granted quite liberally as long as she was assured of clan loyalty. The rumor is that you intend to impose a policy of zero population growth.”
I rubbed my chin. “Now there’s an interesting idea: undead birth control. What other rumors are making the rounds?”
“Almost anything that you can imagine. The more popular ones suggest you are a ‘Sin-eater.’ That you will return the dead to life, that you will teach us how to walk in daylight—pseudo-religious nonsense and wishful thinking. The more troubling ones claim that you will take away their rights to hunt and reproduce, that you will free the lupin from their servitude, and that you will trigger the great Apocalypse between the People of the Day and the Clans of the Night.”
“Which reminds me,” I said, sidestepping several issues at once. “How come I haven’t met any lycanthropes, yet? Are they all on vacation?”
Kurt’s eyebrows raised a couple of millimeters. “How do you know that you haven’t?”
I looked him in the eye, waited the requisite six seconds, and said: “I know.” I didn’t add that, when you’re marrying into the family, you learn to pick up on a number of things the furophobes don’t.
His shoulders twitched in a negligible shrug. “The first three nights are scheduled around meetings with the families, private audiences—nothing pertaining to the underclasses. It was deemed less volatile to send them away until basic issues get sorted out.”
“You mean safer than putting them in the position of having to choose sides in the event that my coronation suddenly goes south.”
Now it was Kurt’s turn to give me the long stare. “I think I know you better than most but there is a great deal that I still do not know. I know that you resist violence and abhor killing. I believe that you still feel a greater loyalty to the living than the undead—though I expect that to change with time. I know that you do not seek power and that the only reason that you are here must be to protect the living as best you can.
“Be careful, Domo. Many are glad that you are not the monster the last Doman was. But even they will turn on you and destroy you if you seek to deny them their nature.”
“Nature, red in tooth and claw? Tennyson spoke of animal nature. Are we not men and, therefore, may rise above animal nature with will and reason?”
“Are we truly men, Domo? We possess the teeth and claws of the predators. Man does not but even he may echo the poet, red in bomb and bullet. No, my dear Christopher, you may be a kinder, gentler ruler but you must content yourself with what accommodations the clans are ready for. Do not expect evolutionary leaps: you are Doman but you are not God.”
* * *
The meeting ended with little resolved beyond the fact that long, involved policy decisions should wait until the clans and I had become better acquainted. For Kurt that meant I might be better persuaded of the futility of my vision. For me it meant a chance to peruse the battlefield and scout the enemy fo
r weaknesses.
For both of us it meant avoiding major unpleasantness for just a little bit longer.
To that end, I put off asking more nosey questions, such as how the enclave acquired its immense wealth.
No question I had stepped off of the high ground and was wading into a moral morass. If there was a path between losing my life and losing my soul it was a very narrow and convoluted one. Too bad I hadn’t the opportunity to have said a proper goodbye to Lupé before coming here to play the part of Napoleon Custer at the Little Waterloo.
As I adjusted my cummerbund and checked my tux in the mirror I felt something brush against my leg. I looked down and saw a tan-and-brown cat. It might have passed for a Burmese breed except for one thing—if its possessing two tails counted as “one” thing.
I reached down and picked her up. She was heavy for a cat. “Hello, Suki; long time no meow.” She purred as I scratched her behind her ears. “Let me guess. You have nothing to wear?”
“Actually, she thought she could serve you better in cat form,” Deirdre said from the doorway. “She’ll dress if you prefer.” Deirdre wore a green satin gown which, with her red hair, made her look all Christmassy and like an elegant present ready to be opened on an intimate holiday eve.
I set the two-tailed cat down on the bed. “A man always feels that he has more status if there are two beautiful women on his arm.” The cat purred loudly. “But I fear I would be twice as distracted and I am already distracted enough.”
“Oh my.” The redhead sauntered over and took my arm. “You’re very good at this diplomacy thing! You honey-tongued devil, you!”
“That’s silver-tongued devil,” I corrected as we started toward the door and a waiting army of bodyguards. The cat jumped off the bed and padded along behind us.
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Chris. I know a sweet tongue when I taste it . . .”
I had no comeback. As far as Lupé was concerned, I was a silver-tongued devil.
And all of the connotations were negative.
* * *
A phalanx of security types—some even human—escorted us to an underground ballroom several city blocks away. My best guess was that we were under Central Park now.
Over the previous century and a half some eight-hundred-and-forty-three acres between 59th and 110th Street had been repeatedly dug up and laced with a succession of conduits, tunnels, chambers, and underground passages for channeling a succession of lakes, lagoons, aquifers, flood plains, water supplies, fountains, telephone cables, electrical conduits, and maintenance access routes. As new landscaping projects were developed, old drains and tunnels were closed for new channeling systems. At present there were more forgotten and unused channels under the park and museum than there were official passageways on the current city blueprints. Stories were told and legends grew about what might creep through the subterranean paths beneath the city. Truth be told, the stories averaged out to be half right. There were few beauties but many beasts. And, while there were no such things as Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, there was a monster under Greenwich Village that the inhabitants had nicknamed “Shredder.”
Tonight the population under the Great Lawn had trebled even as half of the subterranean residents had fled in terror. Vampires and Monsters and Weres, oh my!
Except there were no Weres: they had been sent away.
Just as well. If I was to believe my beloved’s dire warnings, I could well be fighting a battle on two separate fronts when they returned.
Our entrance to the cavernous ballroom went unnoticed. The lights had been dimmed and images were playing out on a large screen at the far end of the room.
Familiar images.
The monstrous creature with the steel fangs was frozen in mid stride, bashing its way into my dining room. A small readout of numbers designating the date and time was displayed in the lower left-hand corner. It was a freeze frame from my home’s video security system.
“Best estimates put the creature’s height somewhere between eight and nine feet,” a woman’s voice was saying, “its weight somewhere in the twelve to fifteen hundred pound range.” Her voice emerged from speakers all around the chamber so it took me a moment to locate her up on the dais, standing behind a podium to the right of the screen. “A cybernetic organism, or cyborg, it appears to be a reengineered human. Surgical enhancements are confirmed. Genetic enhancements are presumed though we are waiting to obtain tissue samples for confirmation.”
There was something about the woman—even at a distance—that seemed strangely familiar. I moved forward to get a better look, pushing at my forward guard to break a path through the crowd.
“In addition to steel and Kevlar implants and skeletal augmentation, the creature may have had its strength and reflexes artificially enhanced. As you can see from selected portions of the security video, it is as fast as it is strong.”
On the screen a series of herky-jerky edits showed it selectively taking out my security personnel as well as my home’s structural architecture.
“Even though the creature killed one vampire and three humans and injured another vampire with ridiculous ease . . . your Doman managed to defeat it single-handedly . . .”
I was pissed off to find security video from my home being shown to a bunch of strangers, some of whom were heavily invested in getting rid of me. And I was grieved to see a replay of the deaths it had caused, particularly that of The Kid.
And I was majorly annoyed that Deirdre and Suki’s parts in the battle were largely left out.
But I had to admit I was impressed with the spin.
The editing of the video and the narration worked to underscore the monster’s invulnerability and then my parts were intercut to make me appear heroic and invincible. Either Kurt had just discouraged the next assassination attempt or he had convinced my enemies to multiply their efforts by ten.
“And so,” the speaker was concluding, “there is an unknown entity in the game, which has moved against the interests of New York. We are fortunate to have a Doman who has experience in dealing with what even we would call the unusual and extraordinary!”
The audience response to that seemed evenly split between the mutterers and the murmurers.
“The Doman has authorized a one-million-dollar reward for information leading to the identity and location of this mysterious Dr. Pipt.”
Deirdre leaned toward my ear and whispered: “Does that include me? I’ve done some more research.”
“Research?” I whispered back. Given the background noise, whispering was easier to hear than muttering or murmuring.
“I’ve read more of The Patchwork Girl of Oz.”
“And?”
“Am I eligible for the reward?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t even know there was a reward until just now. But I don’t see why not.”
She nodded. “Well, I found out that this Dr. Pipt gave away a whole batch of his Powder of Life to Mombi the Witch in exchange for a Powder of Perpetual Youth. Only the Powder of Youth was a fraud. It didn’t work.”
“Of course.”
“So Pipt had to make more powder—Powder of Life, that is, since he had given it all away to the old witch.”
“And what did she do with her portion?”
“Made Jack Pumpkinhead, for one.”
“And how does any of this relate to the real Dr. Pipt?”
She looked at me. “I don’t know. Yet. I’m still researching.”
“By reading an old Oz book?”
“It beats what you’ve been doing this afternoon.”
I was spared having to come up with a reply by a blaring introduction from the sound system. “And now I’d like to introduce the new Doman of the New York demesne, Christopher Cséjthe!”
Showtime: the queen is dead, long live the king.
The security team hustled me up on stage and I was escorted to the microphone. The podium gave me the illusion of a shield. Likewise the two large bodyguards flan
king me to either side. A large, Plexiglas screen served as both a teleprompter and a bulletproof barrier for my upper torso. The only way I could’ve been better protected was to have addressed the crowd from another room. I looked down at the audience. Anyone harboring thoughts of taking me out right here, right now, could see the futility of making such an attempt. They would either be exposed or need to use something that could harm the other occupants of the room, thus negating the political advantage of such an act.
I pulled the microphone out of its cradle on the stand and stepped around the podium. “Go sit down, boys,” I said to my bodyguards, “I won’t be needing you in this room.”
The guards were in a quandary: Kurt had given them specific orders to be all over me like white on rice. Yet, their Doman was giving them a direct counterorder. And to disobey me in front of the clans was as dangerous to me as it was to them. I helped resolve matters by giving them a little mental nudge. They stumbled out of my way.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” I said as I walked to the center of the dais. “I think I’ll dispense with the teleprompters. If a leader can’t speak from his own heart, he shouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else, either. And I don’t think I want anything to come between me and you. If we can’t work in harmony, bulletproof glass and armored barriers aren’t going to solve the problem.”
Kurt was hovering stage-left looking positively apoplectic. He shouldn’t have been surprised. It was no secret by now that I was no good at following other people’s scripts.
“I apologize for not coming to New York sooner but I have had other business to attend to.” I paused. “Part of the delay has been due to unscheduled visitors interrupting my work. While the mysterious Dr. Pipt sent this most recent emissary, there have been other intrusions as well. Some by representatives of people within this very room.”
The mutter-mutter/murmur-murmur volume rose to a new level. I let it build and then pulled the microphone in close for more volume.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 17
