Chicks Kick Butt - Rachel Caine, Kerrie Hughes (ed)

by Chicks Kick Butt (mobi)

  * * *

  “Stop. Stop! I won’t be caught between you! I won’t be the maiden victim again and again. I won’t be silent. I will sing. I’d rather die than be torn between the two of you. Monsters! I am a nightingale and I will not be caged.”

  A pretty woman wearing a pale, long gown now stood among us, a figure of hysterical anguish.

  She threw back her slim soprano’s neck and lifted an even slimmer glass vial to her gray silver-screen lips. A thin stream of mercury slid oysterlike down her throat. Then she screamed, screeched, writhed, clutching her vocal cords as they corroded and cracked, and vanished along with her ability to make any sound.

  “You did this,” the Wolfman snarled at the Phantom. “You told me she was dead, that I had no mother. But the mercury poison destroyed her vocal cords, not her life.”

  “Her vocal cords were her life!” How odd to see the Phantom of the Opera scorning a woman for using her gift, but the character had been a control freak too. “Cleva wanted to perform, and you were a young boy, Creighton,” the Phantom argued. “You needed a mother with you, not one off in nightclubs singing for far less than emperors.”

  “Creighton. That was her surname,” Larry Talbot remembered, “given to me as her firstborn. She tried to kill herself because of you.”

  “I had theatrical work, boy, a rising career! Cleva refused to give up her singing to stay with you.”

  “Others could have tended me. They already had.”

  “Yes, her voice was sublime, beyond incredibly sweet.”

  “And it never was so again. You cared nothing for her gift, her talent, so she seared it from her throat in front of you,” the Wolfman said with a guttural whine of pain. “And then you told me she was dead. I was just a boy of seven. You kept us apart for years until she found me again.”

  “Once you knew of her existence, you left me, Creighton. You went off with her.”

  “Which was fine with you. You never wanted me to go on the stage, on the screen, as you never wanted her to sing. She destroyed her gift in her pain at your not valuing it. Or her.”

  “You called yourself ‘Lon’ and tacked a ‘Jr.’ on your name at the order of the studio bosses after I was dead.”

  “I didn’t want to. I wanted to be my own man, as my mother wanted to be her own woman, but your legend mired us both in paths that hurt us.”

  “I didn’t put the bichloride of mercury in her hand.”

  “You put the despair in her soul.”

  “Our divorce was overdue.”

  “As I was born prematurely. I guess,” the Wolfman said, straightening into the sad, human, but familiar form of Larry Talbot, “I guess our timing was always off, Dad.”

  I held my breath, caught up in the family tragedy. Sure, they were all CinSims, so it was like watching ghosts play out some long-dead script. But the drama was true to life.

  “I died young, Son,” Lon Chaney admitted, “alone, before age fifty, from cornflakes, of all things, used to make snow on a set. I lost my voice at the end, as Cleva had, as my deaf-mute parents had before their births. A throat hemorrhage silenced me forever, seventeen years after Cleva’s mad attempt at self-destruction.”

  “So why is she singing now?” Lon Jr. asked.

  They turned to me, as if I were the image of Cleva. I was brunet, as the printout photo of her had been, but my hair was closer to jet-black. She’d looked high-hearted smart in a top hat and a monocle from some forgotten vaudeville or nightclub routine. We hardly resembled each other, but to the CinSims’ eyes, we were the eternal woman, heroine, victim, mother, child, lover, supporter, opponent.

  “She wanted Creighton to hear what she had been,” I said to the Phantom. “And,” I said to the Wolf Man, “she wanted to see what you had become.”

  “Yet,” the Wolf Man said, “she lived to a riper old age than either of us.”

  “But … you’d never heard her sing,” I pointed out. “Now you have.”

  The Wolf Man nodded. “The pack sings. It’s part of our heritage.”

  “Are you the actor or the role?” I asked.

  I gestured at the Phantom. “This is an inspired and impassioned instructor. You have a chance to replay all your roles over and over again, with Cleva as an invisible audience. I don’t think you’ll see or hear her again, except in your CinSim hearts.”

  Frowns. The moment had passed. They resumed their roles, utterly alien to each other except in being monsters. Phantom and Wolf Man. Larry Talbot vanished into his woodland arena. The Phantom limped back to the bowels of the theater.

  I reported to the head monster in the penthouse soon after.

  * * *

  “So you’re saying I leased a pair of CinSims with unresolved relationship issues?” Cicereau demanded. “What is the Immortality Mob pushing these days?”

  “Leasing illusory surfaces of human beings is a dodgy business, even in these post–Millennium Revelation days,” I told him.

  “And the ghost of the Chaney wife and mother decided my hotel-casino was the place to sing bloody murder about stuff that went down a hundred years ago, when she and Lon Chaney got divorced? Women! They never give up. Why me?”

  “Perhaps you own daughter’s haunting created a channel for another woman who felt a trusted man had taken her life, one way or another.”

  “I didn’t hire a psychoanalyst-investigator, Street. Out, out, damn Joseph Campbell! You quit the psychobabble and concentrate on being a babe and just guarantee that psycho siren is outta the Gehenna and my hearing for good.”

  “Oh, she’s gone, and I will be too. Once you fork over what you owe me.”

  He pulled a wad from his pin-striped pants and peeled off Benjamin Franklins, snapping the hundred-dollar bills to the desktop like he was laying out playing cards.

  At three thousand, he paused for my reaction.

  “I banished one ghost and reunited two CinSims, not to mention tussling with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Phantom of the Opera.”

  He resumed, slapping down hundreds until he reached five thousand. It made quite a pile.

  “Tell me you don’t sing,” he asked with a beady eye on my throat.

  “I don’t.”

  “Fifty-two Benjamins for the whole deck of cards, covering a maintenance visit if the Chaney boys act up again.”

  * * *

  Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces and reluctant postmortem “Sr.” to his son Creighton’s studio rechristening as Lon Chaney Jr., had hoped his feats of grotesque disguise proved that “the dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals and the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice.”

  Cleva Creighton had sacrificed her sublime voice in her tormented fight for the right to use it.

  Lon Chaney had learned to “speak” so eloquently in silent films by growing up with deaf-mute parents, and then died speechless of throat cancer.

  Creighton Chaney had rejected the father who’d deprived a young boy of his mother, but fate had turned him to walk in the same career shoes.

  Speaking of shoes, I left the Gehenna with a couple months’ salary, a satisfyingly “happy” ending for two icons of film history, and a kicky new pair of leopard-pattern flats with full-blown roses on the toes in honor of poor, deluded, but talented Cleva Creighton.

  “Need a lift back to the Inferno party?” a voice asked as its owner fell into step with me as I strode through the din-filled Gehenna lobby.

  “I’ve had enough unwanted transportation today, thanks,” I told Sansouci. “I think I’ll walk.”

  The daylight vampire might claim to feel no regrets for his centuries of survival on other people, but I guessed he had more in common with tormented Larry Talbot than a mobster like Cesar Cicereau would ever perceive … or believe.

  Alone, I pushed open an entry door and walked out of the intense hotel-casino air-conditioning to mingle with the throng of tourists heading like lemmings for the Strip under the hot-syrup
warmth of the Nevada sun pouring down.

  Something was snuffling at my new shoes.

  I stopped, looked down, and spotted a big black wet nose.

  Quicksilver, my ever-shadowing wolfhound-wolf guard dog, was grinning up at me with fangs and panting tongue on equal parade display.

  “All’s well that ends swell, boy. We can head home to the Enchanted Cottage and the DVD player now. How’d you like to settle in with an Awesome Gnawsome chew stick, some jalapeño popcorn, and a couple of really prime vintage monster movies? The Wolf Man is a must, but, after that, do you go for heroic bell ringers or demonic organ players?”

  His sharp, short bark indicated he was ready to eat up anything.

  WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

  by L. A. Banks

  Tanya took a deep breath, collecting her thoughts as best she could before speaking into the small, handheld digital recorder.

  “Being dead sucks, especially if it happened on the job. Okay, true, I’m not what you technically call dead, but the fact is, I don’t have a heartbeat. I’m this in-between kind of being, sorta the way I’ve lived my whole life: Really smart but couldn’t conform to school. Really sexy, if I do say so myself, but hated that guys couldn’t get past my rack to look me straight in my eyes. Stood up for justice at every turn and broke the so-called law every chance I got. Yeah, all right, I admit it, I’m complicated. And so what? Why would I think dying would be a straightforward two shots in the back of the head in a parking lot or something?”

  Tanya clicked off the tiny digital recorder she held in her slender palm and then tossed it on her desk. “This is bullshit.” Tears momentarily filled her eyes and then burned away as she stared out of her office window at the new moon. “What was I thinking? A book? Stop dreaming.”

  Leaving a legacy had never been her plan. Until last month, Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse had been her motto. That had been the original plan.

  By twenty-nine, she was one of the best bounty hunters, and sometimes hit woman, in the biz. She’d always thought that one day someone would get to her before she got to them, if she got sloppy. But she’d also felt that, if she did manage to live long enough to get old and sloppy, then having a faster gun put her out of her misery wouldn’t be a totally bad thing.

  But having a long-range plan that meant leaving some sort of legacy was never anything she’d dwelled on. Hell no. Life was too unpredictable for that. After her own disastrous childhood, trying to have a couple of kids and win the Mother of the Year Award would have been a disservice to the planet. No, rather than be a procreator she’d elected to be an eliminator, wiping the city streets clean of the kind of scum that had made her childhood hell.

  Tanya hugged herself. It had been so easy to get into the business. Maybe too easy. Work with bail bondsmen was her entry point. It was good money, fast money. The bigger the fish she hauled in, the more side jobs would come in, until one of the casino boys realized that she had the body of a black widow. Most of her targets were male. All of them were dirty as sin, so she didn’t get into the politics of justice. She just served it.

  Regardless of nationality, her targets were always wary of other men casing them, but not of a female who looked like she did—five seven, satiny brown skin, mahogany-hued hair that swept her shoulders, intense Egyptian kohl-rimmed eyes, with thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-eight dimensions. That was always good for a conversation opener. Slipping them a roofie made hand-to-hand combat a less likely thing, albeit she was prepared to go there if she had to.

  Then in one night, the night that would have been her largest takedown, everything went wrong.

  Dimitri wasn’t like her other targets. He didn’t drink. He didn’t bend to her feminine charms. He did seem amused by her, though. That should have been her cue. But she’d gotten cocky. Had never missed her mark. Had become the thing she promised herself she’d never be while still young: sloppy. That would never happen again.

  Even now thinking back on it, the memory gave her a chill. Somehow Dimitri had gotten her to actually drink … and chat … and had turned her on. Now she knew why. There was something hypnotic about his dark, intensely piercing eyes.

  Back then, it was all still a strangely exciting mystery. It was a shame that the people who’d hired her wanted him dead. The man was seriously fine, but had been fleecing their blackjack tables, and when they’d stepped to him, he’d killed several of their guards. The people who ran Vegas beneath the shimmering lights didn’t want to wait for law enforcement. They wanted justice served the old-fashioned way: cold and immediately. They thought they’d be sending a message to the Russian mob and had no idea that it was an invitation to war with a seriously old vampire.

  Tanya looked around the expansive Manhattan brownstone that she now owned, courtesy of her last job. Dimitri had old-world tastes, but had a fully functional vaulted crypt in the basement. At some point when she cared more, she’d have it all redone.

  Still, the one thing that bothered her was how quickly the mission had gotten blurry and how she foolishly wasn’t afraid of the interesting, dark-haired Russian. At that time he seemed like he was just a man. After sex, they all fell asleep. At some point, they all had to eat. Poison. A silenced bullet. Whatever. It didn’t matter. She was patient. Unfortunately, so was he.

  Tanya closed her eyes. This was the part that she wanted so badly to write about. This new awareness of a life beyond life was what she wanted to chronicle. That would be her legacy, the only thing that maybe she’d be remembered for.

  But then she’d also have to tell how he’d toyed with her as though playing with his food. Humiliating, but true. She was human, then; he was not. He’d brought her back to his suite; she thought she was in a good position. He just smiled and remained the perfect gentleman … pouring her a merlot. And she found herself getting naked for him while he watched from across the room. His eyes held more fascination than desire—an enjoyment of the hunt that she’d recognized too late. And that’s when everything began going badly.

  Tanya unconsciously covered the side of her neck with her palm and walked away from the window. He’d tranced her to come to him and then he’d stood, caressing her throat with the softest kisses that instantly turned into blinding pain. Panic swept through her, but survival instinct kicked in and sent her hand clawing his groin. She was rewarded with a backhanded bitch slap that sent her sprawling across the room to shatter the small oval coffee table by the sofa.

  Clearly enraged, he glowered down at her for a moment, her blood staining his mouth. He then cursed at her in a language she’d never heard, and then suddenly he laughed. That’s when she saw his teeth. It was a cruel laugh of unchecked power. His eyes were no longer intense and darkly sexy; instead they were all black, no whites showing. The eyes of a demon. The eyes of certain death.

  “You will die tonight, my lovely,” he’d said. “Such a disappointment, I know—especially when you had come all this way to kill me. Ah … the vagaries of fate.”

  Tanya squeezed her eyes shut and rested her forehead on the wall, still hearing his voice echoing in her mind. Then he’d lunged at her; she’d used the broken table leg like a knife to defend herself and to ward him off. It gored his heart and left her beneath a pile of burning embers. Everything from that point forward became a blur. She knew she had to move, had to get out. Up in an instant, she covered her mouth to keep from screaming, found her dress and her purse with the gun in it, and was gone.

  Fifty large they’d paid her, but that wasn’t enough money in the world for what her life was suddenly to become. Others followed Dimitri, looking for his killer. At first they thought it was another vampire—she could feel them, hear their thoughts. All those he had made were looking for his heir apparent. Everything that Dimitri was and had learned bled into her mind over the days she lay dying in her dark apartment by the bay. Then one night her heart stopped, but her eyes opened. The hunger came, and with her first feeding came the knowledge that she
’d never see daylight again.

  Everything he’d owned, she inherited, even at times the way his words threaded through her mind and changed her normal patterns of speech. She now owned his made men, too. But in the vampire world that also meant that she owned the late Dimitri Andropov’s problems as well, namely those who had wanted to wrest power from him for a long time. And that meant a nightly vigil against those who wanted to take her down and not knowing whom to trust … not that living that way was any different than her human life had been. But still. The constant paranoia was wearing and she was new to the vampire way of life.

  In the vampire world, to the victor go the spoils. This was not the legacy she’d wanted. And for all its opulent, everlasting glory, when the time came for her assassination, all that she ever was would turn into a smoking pile of embers, her memories and knowing suddenly owned by her killer. But for the moment, membership did have its privileges.

  Now she understood her kind’s fascination with history and building monuments. She understood why they were so erudite in the arts. For beings that lived for an eternity, knowing that they would disappear from the annals of time by a simple assassination had to be maddening. To be both timeless yet ephemeral, therein lay the paradox.

  Tanya glanced back at the small silver digital recorder and then up at the moon. She had to get out of here. Dinner and danger were on the streets.

  * * *

  “Pyotr, do not grow arrogant and lose your life for it. Dimitri was a centuries-old vampire and lost his life to a mere mortal.”

  “My friend, your words bring comfort that you have my best interest at heart, but this human girl is only a month old to the ways of Vampyre. We will find her. We will kill her. It is already decided and quite a simple task.”

  Pyotr stopped walking and leaned against a tree in Central Park for a moment, taking his time to light a cigarette and slowly exhale the smoke. “Do we yet know how many are still loyal to their bond to Dimitri?” When Vikenti didn’t immediately answer, Pyotr stared at his ancient friend. “Just as I thought. There is no way yet to know.”