“Then a Ventrue elder seduced me into accepting the Embrace. I guess she saw something in me that convinced her I’d make a useful addition to her brood, and frankly, it wasn’t that hard to sell me on the idea of obtaining immortality.” He smiled wryly. “I wasn’t entirely idealistic, you see.
“Anyway, the world of the Kindred took me completely by surprise. Dreamer that I was, I’d believed that vampires, virtual demigods with centuries of accumulated wisdom, must have created a perfect society, an even grander and nobler version of the nation my fellow rebels and I had been striving to build. You can imagine my disgust when 1 discovered the tyranny and cruelty with which the old dominated the young. The never-ending violence and intrigue. The unquestioning acceptance of institutions like torture, the duel, and trial by ordeal, which mortals were coming to abhor as barbaric even in the eighteenth century.
“I never regretted becoming a Kindred — eternal youth is nothing to sneeze at, even in a fascist oligarchy — but I rapidly began to despise my fellow Ventrue. How could 1 not, considering that they’d created the Camarilla and were its most fervent supporters? When Salvador Garcia founded the Movement, I ran away to join, and I’ve been fighting for it ever since.”
Wyatt grinned. Once again his revolutionary ardor seemed to give way to a more boyish, even mischievous, zest. “And it’s a pretty cool life! It’s exciting, and you make true friends.” He beamed at the other vampires. Laurie took his hand and squeezed it. Somewhat to his dismay, Dan felt a twinge of affection himself for the youth with the mohawk. “In my sire’s brood, I never had that. Everybody was always stabbing everybody else in the back, jockeying for the old gorgon’s favor.”
“I think we might be getting somewhere,” the driver said.
All the vampires in the back of the van tried to rear up and look out the windshield at the same time, a maneuver which crowded them together. Dan noticed that no one pulled away from him with a reflexive wince or shudder of distaste.
Craning to peer over Laurie’s brunette head, he saw that the character of the streets the Van was traversing had changed. Now the narrow, twisting avenues, scarcely more than alleys, really, were empty, their gutters choked with trash. There were few lights burning, and many of the shops w'ere vacant, with whitewashed or boarded windows. Little Haiti, assuming that the Kindred had indeed reached their destination, was manifestly far less lively and considerably more impoverished than the Cuban immigrant quarter it abutted.
“Can anybody see any house numbers?” the driver asked.
Turning, Dan peered through the window closest to him. A few of the doorways they were passing had had numbers once, but time had largely worn away the paint. In the dark and at a distance, even his newly enhanced vision couldn’t make the numerals out. “Sorry,” he said, “not from here,?’
Rounding a bend, the van encountered the blackened shell of a burned-out convertible which completely blocked the way. The ghoul stamped on the brakes and the panel truck lurched to a stop. “Shit,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Wyatt said, reaching for the handle of the door. “We can hoof it from here. I’m tired of being cooped up, and I think that we might find the place we’re looking for faster that way. You just turn the car around and be ready for a fast getaway.”
“You got it,” Cassius replied.
As the vampires climbed out of the van, Dan smelled a strong odor of combustion. The car obstructing the road had burned only hours ago, and it stank of charred meat as well as singed metal and paint. Moving closer, he felt the heat still radiating from it and saw the two black husks sitting in the front seat. Each had been dusted with pale yellow flower petals and a sprinkling of crimson powder.
“I wonder,” said Dan, “whether these stiffs are still here because nobody called the cops, or because the police won’t come into Little Haiti after dark. Either way, I’m guessing that this isn’t a great neighborhood.”
“I think you’ve got a point,” Laurie said. Peering warily about at the dark alleys and doorways, the heaps of rotting, stinking garbage that shifted and rustled as rats burrowed through them, and the claustrophobic passages that ran between the buildings into impenetrable shadow, she looked more like a timid mortal girl than a predator on humankind. “They say Miami is contested territory. The Camarilla and the Black Hand both claim it. I wonder if these deaths have something to do with that. The petals and the powder make them look like some kind of ritual murders.”
Wyatt put his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said gently, “whatever happened here, it’s got nothing to do with us. We’re going to be fine. We’ll nail the target and be out of town before anybody even knows we’ve been here. I mean, who’s slicker than we are?”
She gave him a game smile. “Nobody.”
“Damn straight.” He brushed a stray strand of her brown hair off her glasses. “So let’s get to it.”
Circling the burned car and its grisly contents, the vampires set off down the street. Everyone, watching not only for street signs and house numbers but any sign of trouble, peered about in a manner that reminded Dan of his old platoon making its way through the jungle.
His fellow Gls had been his last real friends — until the anarchs had made him welcome. Though he’d only known them for a couple of nights, he already felt close to them. Perhaps it was because they’d faced death together. In any case he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of selling them out.
The Kindred neared an intersection where a street sign, which some vehicle had apparently jumped the curb and run into, leaned drunkenly. Squinting at it, Wyatt read, “Southwest Thirtieth Street. All right, we’re nearly there!” Heading right, the vampires turned the comer. The cross street was as black and empty as the last one.
Why, Dan wondered, should he betray his friends? In recent years, he’d become a little too cynical to believe now that the anarch cause would ever actually improve the lot of the common vampire; but on the other hand, he didn’t have anything against it, either. Certainly its dogma was more congenial than the authoritarian strictures of the Camarilla. Nor did he have any particular desire to aid Roger Phillips and his vassals against their enemies. The bastards had certainly never done anything for him!
A chalk drawing, a double circle quadrisected by a cross, with cryptic symbols incised in the four sections, gleamed on a crumbling brick wall ahead. Jimmy Ray, an anarch with a hillbilly twang in his voice and an Elvis haircut, whom Dan had yet to see without his black wraparound sunglasses, muttered uneasily: “More voodoo stuff.”
Dan reflected that he’d undertaken this mission because
Melpomene had promised him a place in vampire society. But now he already had one. Why, then, should he follow through?
Ultimately, he could only think of one reason. He’d given the Methuselah his word. But his infiltration of the anarch cell had required him to pledge his loyalty to them as well. Therefore, he was going to be a liar and a traitor no matter what he did.
He was still mulling over his dilemma when he and his companions came to a doorway sealed with a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the bars was a sort of tunnel that led to a small courtyard with a dry, fungus-spotted fountain in the center. The air inside smelled of cooking, of roast chicken and goat, conch chowder and fried plantains.
Wyatt pointed at the numerals someone had crudely scratched on the wall beside the gate. “Seven ninety-five,” he said. “We’re in business.” He smiled at Dan. “Would you care to open this?”
“Sure,” said Dan. He gripped the gate and pulled. After a moment the lock broke, and the barrier lurched open.
When the vampires skulked into the courtyard, it became apparent that they’d found an apartment complex. Clotheslines ran back and forth between windows and rickety balconies, slicing the square patch of sky at the top of the enclosure into sections. Dan could hear people snoring, and a rhythmic squeak of bedsprings that indicated that somewhere a pair of insomniacs were making love.
r /> “This way, I think,” murmured Wyatt. He led his companions toward a shadowy doorway on the left. Dan wondered if the anarch leader was responding to a bit of psychic inspiration or a more mundane source of information.
The doorway opened on a staircase. As the vampires climbed, the risers flexed beneath their feet. Now the air smelled of dry rot and mice. Dan could hear the rodents and other vermin skittering through hollows in the walls.
At the top of the stairs was a single door. Wyatt stepped up to it, touched his fingertip to the keyhole, closed his eyes, and froze. After a moment, Dan whispered, “What are you doing?”
For another second Wyatt didn’t answer. Then, blinking like a mortal awakening from slumber, he said, “Just trying to see if one of my skeleton keys will fit this. I think it will." He put his hand in the pocket of his white leather coat, paused again and then brought out, not the ring of keys that Dan had been expecting, but a single brass one. He eased it into the lock and twisted it. The bolt disengaged with a click.
“Why didn’t you try a skeleton key on the gate downstairs?” asked Dan.
“Outdoors, I wasn’t as worried about being quiet,” replied Wyatt, grinning, “and hey, with a moose like you around, why should I do all the work? Shall we?” He pushed open the door.
Beyond the threshold was a spacious loft, an artist’s studio redolent with the sharp smell of turpentine, illuminated by the silvery moonlight cascading through the skylight. Canvases stood on easels or, completed, leaned against the walls. Inside another doorway along the left-hand wall, hearts thumped slowly and breath hissed softly in and out of mortal lungs.
“Let’s trash us some art,” said Jimmy Ray, pulling a plastic spray bottle out of his pocket. He sauntered to one of the easels and spritzed down the canvas it held. The harsh tang of the solvent stung Dan’s nose. The paint steamed, bubbled and ran, reducing the picture to a meaningless smudge.
The remaining anarchs sauntered into the loft and began to ruin other paintings. Removing his own container of solvent from inside his jacket, Dan moved to do the same. He felt a twinge of shame. Since becoming a vampire, he’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of, things that, by any sensible standard, were worse than vandalizing a bunch of pictures; yet something about this particular act made him feel petty and mean. But he guessed that if he wanted to remain in his companions’ good graces, he had no choice.
As he twisted open the nozzle of the bottle, he casually scrutinized the painting before him, a vision of yellow lions and blue parrots in a tropical forest, rendered in what he thought was a rather childlike style of simple shapes and primary colors. For a moment it merely seemed kind of pretty and kind of strange, and then it seemed to change before his eyes.
Even as he froze in awe, he realized that the picture hadn’t truly altered. Instead, he was perceiving it with a depth of appreciation of which he’d previously been incapable. He saw how the seemingly rudimentary forms and garish hues combined to form a single gorgeous, exquisite gestalt. How the meticulous brushwork created the illusion of depth and texture. He felt as if he’d glimpsed a different world, one infinitely richer and more beautiful than the quotidian reality in which he’d always dwelled.
Something touched him on the arm. Startled, he jerked around so violently that Laurie recoiled a step.
“Are you okay?” the petite former hippie asked. “You were just staring at that picture and then, when I spoke to you, you didn’t hear me.”
Dan hoped he was all right; he was damned if he knew. “Sure,” he said. “I was just, you know, checking it out for a second.”
Laurie turned to look at the canvas. Warily, Dan followed suit. He felt relieved when, though it still looked more beautiful than he could have imagined a minute ago, it failed to hypnotize him as it had before.
“It’s a shame to ruin them, isn’t it?” Laurie said wistfully. “But Wyatt says that if it makes the Toreador stupid with rage, or destroys their will to fight, it will be worth it.”
“Makes sense to me,” Dan said. “What the hell, there are plenty of pictures in the world.” Laurie gave him an affectionate pat on the arm, then advanced on a painting of a dilapidated wooden sailboat.
Steeling himself, Dan aimed his bottle at the canvas before him, then faltered again. Finally, squinching his eyes shut, he convulsively clenched his finger on the trigger. When the painting sizzled, he had to strain to hold in a sob.
Fortunately, the act of desecration became a little easier with repetition, though it always felt as if a piece of himself were dying along with the work he was destroying. By the time all the art had been ruined, he was desperate to flee the scene, frantic to escape the sight of the ravaged masterpieces. Fighting to keep his voice steady, he said, “I guess we can go.”
Wyatt shook his head. “Not quite yet.”
“Why not?” Dan said. “Are there more pictures in another room?” He didn’t think he could stand it if there were.
“Nope,” said Wyatt, “or at least, not as far as I know. But can you hear the painter and his family, snorting and wheezing away?” He nodded at the doorway in the left-hand wall. “I’ve been instructed that tonight the war is entering a new phase. It’s time to start killing the Toreador’s pet kine.” He smiled at Dan.
He’s watching me, Dan realized, waiting to see my reaction. Wyatt might believe that his newest recruit was a genuine convert to the anarch cause — Dan was almost certain that he did — but that didn’t mean that he was ready to stop testing him. The cell leader was too wary a conspirator for that.
Thirty years of deceiving and preying on humans, of watching them age while he remained young, had hardened Dan, attenuating his emotional bond to what had once been his own kind. Still, the thought of slaughtering helpless innocents sickened him, and the notion that one of the prospective victims had created the beauty the vampires had just finished ravaging made the prospect even more loathsome. But once again, whether he wound up staying with the anarchs or betraying them, it wouldn’t do to reveal his revulsion.
“Good thinking,” he said, smiling back at Wyatt. “After all, what’s the point of destroying the paintings if you leave the artist alive to make more?”
“Exactly,” Wyatt said. He beckoned, and the Kindred stalked toward the doorway. Jimmy Ray’s fangs slid over his lower lip.
As the would-be murderers slipped into the artist’s living area, Dan positioned himself at the back of the procession in the hope that it would keep him from actually having to commit any of the violence. He wound up gliding along beside Laurie. Her expression seemed resolute but somber, and he wondered if she found the business at hand as distasteful as he did.
The vampires passed through a sparsely, shabbily furnished living room, dining area and kitchen, and then into what must have been the bedroom hall. The hiss of respiration and the muffled thud of heartbeats grew louder. Dan smelled the pungent tang of sweat.
Suddenly Jimmy Ray lunged through a doorway. Dan heard bedsprings squeal, and a brief thrashing sound. When his companion reemerged into the hall, he was holding a skinny, naked black boy in each hand, clutching them by their throats. Half-strangled already, the children squirmed feebly.
Wyatt and Felipe darted into a room farther down the passage. The other vampires followed them. By the time Dan made it through the door, the duo in the lead had dragged a black man and woman, nude also, out of their battered, sagging, four-poster bed. Felipe was restraining the man, a middle-aged, partially bald, paunchy guy with paint-stained fingers, by dint of his superior strength. Wyatt was gazing into the slender, trembling, long-necked young woman’s eyes, paralyzing her by force of will.
“No!” cried the artist, mad with fear. “No! No!”
“Sorry, amigo,” said Felipe. “This is what you get for running with the Camarilla.”
“No!” said the painter. “You’re making a mistake! I don’t even know what that is!”
“That’s too bad,” said Felipe. “They should have to
ld you what you were getting into.” He buried his fangs in the immigrant’s neck. The human wailed.
The black woman shuddered more violently and moaned. Her heartbeat raced. “It’s all right,” said Wyatt soothingly. “It will all be over very soon.” He took her in his arms and bit her.
Jimmy Ray handed one of the now-unconscious children to Laurie and ripped out the throat of the other, savagely, wastefully, spattering blood on himself and the floor. The intoxicating scent of the vitae suffused the air.
Laurie shivered and squinched her eyes shut. “Oh, Christ,” she whispered, as if she were mortal and a lover had caressed her. She dropped to her knees, clutched the other boy to her bosom, and began to feed.
Nor was Dan immune to the effects of the spectacle before him. Hard as he tried to stay calm, to cling to his inner disgust, the smell of the blood and the slurping, gurgling sounds his companions made as they sucked it from their prey were kindling his own Hunger. By the time Wyatt offered him the woman, he was eager to finish draining her.
He pressed his mouth to the twin punctures that his companion had made, and the world dissolved into pleasure. Finally he noticed that the woman’s heart had stopped, and her vitae had begun to cool and lose its savor.
As Dan lifted his head, Felipe licked the artist’s wounds closed and carried him to the window. “Take this, Sarasota!” he said, his voice giddy with high spirits, and hurled the body through the glass. The resultant crash hurt Dan’s ears.
No doubt curious to see where and how the body had landed, Felipe stuck his head out into the night. His body tensed. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Dan dropped the woman’s corpse on the floor, strode to the window and looked down. The painter lay facedown on the crumpled roof of a black limousine. Eight men — vampires, judging from the pallor each displayed — who’d evidently just gotten out of the limo and the sedan parked behind it, stared up at Felipe and Dan for another moment, and then reached inside their coats.
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