Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “I must admit I was amused by the first seven attempts on my life—” Actually that was a lie but the first rule of intimidation is to never let them see you sweat. My smile turned into a frown. “—but my patience has its limits and I find that I am no longer inclined to be so tolerant. Any further assassination attempts will be dealt with harshly. With penalties assessed for the clan and family as well as the perpetrator.” The mutters and murmurs had faded away. “I just want to make sure that we’re clear on this point before continuing.”

  A tall, aristocratic-looking vampire was standing at the edge of the stage, his handsome features framed by a silky mane of chestnut hair that fell past his shoulders. He stood head and shoulders above the crowd and was able to lean an elegantly cuffed arm across the edge of the elevated platform without stretching. “I have a question,” he said politely.

  I stepped closer and said, “Yes?” And lowered the microphone to make his query audible to the room.

  “If I kill you,” he said, reaching out and grabbing my ankle, “how will you enforce that?” He yanked and I fell backwards. The back of my head smacked the stage and I was as momentarily stunned as my security team. He dragged me into his embrace and his mouth was on my throat before anyone else could take a single step.

  He didn’t just bite me; he tore my throat open with his razored teeth: it was his best hope of killing me before anyone else could reach him.

  It hurt like hell and probably would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been coasting on the edge of shock. As it was, the pain seemed to revive me and I began to struggle. Not that struggling was going to do me a lot of good. As I’ve pointed out before, I’m no match for a full-fledged vampire in either the strength or the speed department. The word had gotten around and this guy knew it. I felt a gush of blood and his mouth was on my wounds, greedily slurping all the high octane Doman blood he could suck down.

  Maybe he was too greedy: he started to choke on the third swallow. As his mouth came away, I licked my palm and slapped my hand over the bloody gash on my neck. My assailant released me and it was all I could do to keep from falling to the floor like a sack of spilled groceries. The stage was against my back and helped to prop me up. The crowd pressed in on either side, cutting off my escape routes and providing additional support. And my attacker was in front of me. I wasn’t about to fall down because I had no intention of getting any closer to him than I was now, total exsanguination or not. I locked my knees, kept a tight grip on my neck with my left hand, and waved at the thickening haze with my right.

  Then the screaming started.

  It started all around me but it was the loudest just in front of me.

  I waved my hand all the more, trying to fan the smoke aside to see what was going on. My attacker stumbled against me and it was suddenly obvious why there was both smoke and screaming.

  His face was gray and black, his mouth a bubbling ruin. White-and-gray fumes issued from his lips, vented from festering sores on his throat, and leaked from a growing red-and-gray stain on his shirt above his cummerbund. His eyes were bulging in their sockets, reflecting a kaleidoscope of confusion, fear, and pain beyond imagining. His hands gripped the folds of my jacket. “It . . . burns . . .” he wheezed, more noxious vapors issuing from his scorched mouth.

  Powerful pairs of hands grasped my shoulders and hauled me back up onto the stage. My attacker held on with a death grip and came along for the ride. We were pried apart and he fell back on the stage where he writhed and moaned.

  Kurt pushed through the semicircle of security people and threw an arm around me. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  I shook my head. I had lost a lot of blood but I could feel my accelerated healing factors kicking in. I might still pass out but I probably wouldn’t bleed to death now. “Not yet.” I nodded at the dying vampire. “Who is he?”

  “Yuler Polidori.”

  “The Polidori Clan?”

  He nodded.

  Oh great. I carefully bent down and retrieved the microphone cord, pulling the mike toward me. It wasn’t easy using just one hand. A bodyguard assisted. “Yuler,” I said, kneeling over the writhing vampire, “Yuler Polidori. Who is your master?”

  “No . . . man . . .” he gasped, “no . . . man . . . is my . . . master . . .”

  In other words, not some fangless wimp who was a pretender to the throne of the New York demesne.

  “Then who is your Sire?”

  He shook his head. “I acted . . . alone . . . saw . . . my chance . . . took it . . . no plan . . . kill me . . .”

  I looked at Kurt. “Can he be saved?”

  Kurt stared down with a face of stone. “What would be the point? This one would not talk.”

  An alpha vampire with close-cropped gray hair shouldered his way through the crowd and leapt onto the stage. The security team moved toward him but Kurt waved them back. “Friederich,” he said.

  “Domo Cséjthe,” Friederich Polidori said, inclining his head to me.

  I gave him a slight nod in return. I was afraid that if I moved my head any more than that, I would reopen my jugular.

  “I am mortified, my lord. Yuler has always been wild and headstrong but I never suspected him capable of treasonous behavior. Had I had any inkling, I would have killed him myself.”

  Funny. It was a nice little apology but curiously flat in the sincerity department. An accomplished liar might have put too much emotion into the speech, punctuating his sentences with exclamation marks. Polidori recited the words without any inflection, as if reading cue cards in an emotionless monotone. Then I got a look at his eyes and felt the prickle in my parietal lobes: ole Freddy was trying to glamour me. He was putting all of his efforts into sugarcoating the message telepathically.

  I turned to my seneschal, who looked a little unfocused himself. “Isn’t that a little odd, Kurt?”

  “Hmm? What?”

  “That a Sire doesn’t know what his Spawn is thinking?”

  “That is true,” he answered, his gaze hardening.

  I turned back to Polidori. “A clan leader knows he has a hotheaded Spawn who has positioned himself right next to the stage where the new Doman is going to speak? A Doman who has been the target of repeated assassination attempts by powerful foes within the enclave, itself? Who then attempts to use mental domination on the Doman and his First while trying to offer an embarrassment of an excuse?”

  “It appears to have all of the markings of a conspiracy,” Kurt growled. There was apparently no love lost between the Polidori and Szekely clans.

  “On the other hand,” I continued, “it may be nothing more than a series of errors in judgment. Of course, for the head of a clan, so many mistakes and misjudgments could spell ruin for the families that follow him—even if he was loyal and true.”

  Polidori scowled. He was angry that a member of his family had been caught in the act of trying to assassinate me. Perhaps he was angry that the attempt failed. He was certainly unhappy to be dressed down in such a manner. But what probably pissed him off the most was the fact that the microphone was still on and our little exchange had been overheard by everyone in the room.

  Perhaps he was tempted to attack me, himself.

  And perhaps the grisly result of the last attempt that smoked and bubbled at his feet was giving him pause.

  “My lord—let me be the instrument of your vengeance.”

  “What? Oh, I see. You wish to prove your loyalty by killing one of your own who is suffering and likely to die anyway.” I shook my head. “That is no gift to me.”

  “Doubtless it would safeguard any secrets you might wish to keep,” Kurt observed.

  Stay out of this, I sent to my majordomo.

  He glanced at me, a flicker of surprise appearing and disappearing across his stony face.

  “Here is my gift to you and your clan, Polidori: I give Yuler back to you alive. I give him to you with the charge to keep him alive.” If “alive” was the proper term for an undead. “Heal
him as best you can. That will be your apology and gift to me. Your clan’s atonement is to heal Yuler.”

  Friederich Polidori was aghast. Well, technically, he was a “ghast” anyway. But this was so outside the pale of his expectations that he didn’t know how to respond.

  “I shall expect a progress report when we meet again tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow? But our appointment is for to—”

  “Tonight. I know. I’m rescheduling you for tomorrow.”

  “But we are first! This is an insult!”

  There was no way I could outdominate a master vampire. The best I could do was take a tone with him. “No, Fred; this is an insult,” I said, pointing at the gurgling, hissing Yuler. “And he’s going to occupy your attention for the remainder of the evening. Now, do you need help getting him back to your domicile?”

  He seemed to come to a decision. “No.”

  I almost said: “No . . . what?” but maybe I needed to cut Polidori some slack. And maybe I also needed to not push my luck past the breaking point.

  He turned and his clan moved as one toward the stage. As Yuler was lifted down and carried toward an exit he turned back to me, clicked his heels and executed a short bow. “Until tomorrow, Domo.”

  “Buh-bye, Fred.” Well, some pushing is instinctual . . .

  As he strode away, head held high, a haughty expression frozen on his aristocratic countenance, Kurt leaned in and whispered, “We can reschedule all of tonight’s appointments.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I murmured. “Just push back my appointments an hour or so. I need to clean up and replace a couple of gallons of blood, that’s all.”

  I walked back to the podium with Kurt and a half-dozen security personnel hovering around me like the Marines bent on raising the flag on Iwo Jima. “Sit down, gentlemen,” I said pleasantly.

  They looked at each other as if I had just asked them to do headstands.

  “Sit down,” I said pointedly. I had to make the fact that I was still on my feet work for me or I would be resting permanently before the night was over.

  They returned to their seats and the standing posts just offstage.

  “Now then,” I said, turning back to the audience, “where was I before I was so rudely interrupted?”

  “You were saying,” answered a woman’s voice from the floor, “that ‘any further assassination attempts will be dealt with harshly. With penalties assessed for the clan and family as well as the perpetrator’.”

  There was a ripple of nervous laughter that turned to murmurs (no mutters) as I turned away from the podium and went down the steps from the dais back to the floor again. A conga line of bodyguards scurried after me as the crowd hurriedly parted and I made my way to the dark-skinned woman who had just spoken. She appeared to be a mix of Eurasian and Negroid stock and her accent suggested that she might be a recent immigrant to these shores. She stood her ground as I arrived, refusing to take a step back as I walked right up and into her face. Neither of us spoke and the room fell silent. I removed my hand from my throat. Blood oozed in a sluggish trickle from tears that were already on their way to forming pink weals. Reaching out, I cupped her chin with my right hand and put my left behind her head.

  “What—” she finally said, and I suddenly wrenched her head from her shoulders before she could speak a second word.

  Tucking it under my left arm, I licked my right hand again and pressed my spittle-soaked palm to my neck. As her headless body collapsed to the ground, I turned and began making my way back to the stage. “Get that off the floor,” I said to the last security man and ascended the stairs again.

  I placed the head on the podium so that it was looking up at me. Then I looked out over the stunned assemblage and smiled. “She was correct.” I patted the head, whose entrails dribbled down the front and side of the podium like gory party streamers. “And I should be grateful to Yuler Polidori for assisting me in making my point.” Confusion suffused some of the faces of those nearest me in the crowd. “What? You think that killing him would have been harsher?”

  “No, my lord; killing him would have been a kindness!” It was another woman who spoke now. A tall, raven-haired beauty, equal in aristocratic bearing to Friederich Polidori: Carmella Le Fanu. “Nor, I suspect, are you finished with the Polidori Clan in this matter.”

  Everyone held their breath to see what I would do next.

  I inclined my head and pulled my hand away from my neck. A hundred pairs of eyes focused their greedy attention on the bloody hamburger effect between my jaw and my ruined collar. “They’ll be getting my bill for the tuxedo tomorrow.”

  More laughter now and less nervousness.

  “However, as Madame Le Fanu points out, the matter is not yet closed,” I continued. “Perhaps you are used to Domans who rule through violence and intimidation. Perhaps you have had leadership that equates brutality with strength. Make no mistake; the guilty will be brought to justice. But a rush to judgment often punishes the innocent. And a Doman’s responsibilities are, first, to protect and serve the welfare of his people . . .”

  “The vampires . . .” I heard someone mutter.

  “All of his people,” I said. “Wampyr, were, demi. Natural, unnatural, supernatural, preternatural.”

  I felt hundreds of eyes glance toward the head by my right hand.

  “Oh, very well,” I said, “bring me the body.”

  A couple of the security team trotted up, bearing the headless corpse. They hadn’t been too far away.

  I lifted the head and gazed into its eyes. “Woman,” I said, making sure we were both close enough to the microphone to pick up the sound of my voice, “I adjure you from the realm of the living to speak from the land of the dead! Tell me your name!”

  Her eyes fluttered open and I had to fight a momentary flashback to Theresa Kellerman’s decapitation as her mouth worked like the Tin Man’s as he prepared to speak his first words after standing rusted for a hundred years.

  “Jhojie Selangor,” she finally croaked. I made sure the microphone picked up every syllable.

  She shouldn’t have been able to speak at all. Never mind being technically dead, the problem, once again, was the disconnection between larynx and lungs. Among the dangling entrails, however, several bladderlike appendages pulsed, pushing enough air through her voice box for a short answer or two.

  “And do you swear fealty to me as your Doman and promise to serve me faithfully?” I pressed.

  “I . . . swear . . .” she gasped.

  I turned and, as the bodyguards held the headless body erect, I eased the entrails and, finally, the head, back into the gaping wound created by her cranium’s sudden departure. Waving my bloody hands in what I hoped looked like sufficiently mystic gestures, I muttered incoherently and hoped that snake oil was in season.

  Stepping back, I cried: “Release her!”

  Everyone stepped back: the security staff, the audience. Jhojie Selangor blinked, reached up to give her neck a minor adjustment, and stepped forward. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Colin Clive was shrieking: She’s alive, alive!

  The audience wasn’t much less restrained as I returned to the podium.

  “I will be looking into a great many matters,” I said, continuing as if my little exercise in head games hadn’t even happened. “Perhaps this will make some of you uncomfortable. Just remember that we are banded together for our common welfare. Our strength and security lies in our combined numbers, our combined efforts, our common purpose. But nothing is ever achieved without sacrifice and the one truism of mutual effort is compromise. To get something you have to give something. If we are all to benefit, we must all be willing to temper our individual and family desires with satisfying others’ needs as part of the bargain. It is my job as your Doman to see to it that the enclave benefits . . . so that you all may benefit.

  “That is one of the main purposes of my meeting with your representatives and ambassadors from other demesnes over the next three night
s. To better acquaint myself with your needs and concerns so that I might serve you all.

  “I look forward to meeting with all of you during the nights ahead. I shall go now and change into something more comfortable and begin my visitations for this night. I urge you all to stay, enjoy the refreshments and the music, party and, perhaps, use this opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new ones. Good evening, my friends.”

  Scattered applause broke out as I backed away from the podium, turned thunderous as Kurt and Jhojie came to my side, and continued as I was escorted off the platform by the small army of Bodyguards-R-Us.

  Out in the corridor I sank gratefully into a cushioned seat on the electric tram.

  “Are you all right?”

  I closed my eyes. “I am so thirsty.”

  “I’ll call ahead and have fresh blood waiting. Any preferences?”

  “Yeah. Have it sent up in a bucket. Tonight I’m not sure I would know when to stop with a living host.”

  We started off with a lurch while Kurt radioed ahead. “You departed from the script tonight,” he said when he finished the call.

  “I hadn’t counted on Yuler.”

  “I’m talking before young Polidori. When you told the bodyguards to sit down and you stepped away from the podium.”

  “I’m not one of them, Kurt. I have to do it my way. This brings me to a couple of things. Just before Yuler’s Sire stepped in, I asked if Polidori could be saved. You didn’t answer my direct question. You presupposed my purpose in trying to save him. Don’t second-guess me. Give me the answers I ask for, not the answers you think I need.”

  “I think you need more than you ask for,” he argued. “As your advisor, it is my place to give you advice. Again I must make the point: because they are stronger, faster, older—”

  “Wiser?”

  “—more powerful, it is all the more reason that you must demonstrate your power.”

  “I thought I just did that.”

  “Your destruction of the young Polidori was most impressive. But you should be demonstrating power instead of mercy.”