“And as for my financial maintenance, a tithe from your club’s income and a house will be sufficient for my needs, with some servants thrown in: your second-in-command, or your club manager, one of them should do . . .” Pam actually growled, a low-level sound that made my hair stand up on my neck. Clancy looked as though someone had kicked his dog.
Pam was fumbling with the centerpiece of the table, hidden by my body. After a second, I felt something pressed into my hand. I glanced down. “You’re the human,” she whispered.
“Come, girl,” Dracula said, beckoning with a curving of his fingers. “I hunger. Come to me and be honored before all these assembled.”
Though Colonel Flood and Calvin both grabbed my arms, I said very softly, “This isn’t worth your lives. They’ll kill you if you try to fight. Don’t worry,” and I pulled away from them, meeting their eyes, in turn, as I spoke. I was trying to project confidence. I didn’t know what they were getting, but they understood there was a plan.
I tried to glide toward the spangled bartender as if I was entranced. Since that’s something vamps can’t do to me, and Dracula obviously never doubted his own powers, I got away with it.
“Master, how did you escape from your tomb at Târgovişte?” I asked, doing my best to sound admiring and dreamy. I kept my hands down by my sides so the folds of rosy chiffon would conceal them.
“Many have asked me that,” the Dark Prince said, inclining his head graciously as Eric’s own head jerked up, his brows drawn together. “But that story must wait. My beautiful one, I am so glad you left your neck bare tonight. Come closer to me . . . ERRRK!”
“That’s for the bad dialogue!” I said, my voice trembling as I tried to shove the stake in even harder.
“And that’s for the embarrassment,” Eric said, giving the end a tap with his fist, just to help, as the “Prince” stared at us in horror. The stake obligingly disappeared into his chest.
“You dare . . . you dare,” the short vampire croaked. “You shall be executed.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. His face went blank, and his eyes were empty. Flakes began to drift from his skin as he crumpled.
But as the self-proclaimed Dracula sank to the floor and I looked around me, I wasn’t so sure. Only the presence of Eric at my side kept the assemblage from falling on me and taking care of business. The vampires from out of town were the most dangerous; the vampires that knew me would hesitate.
“He wasn’t Dracula,” I said as clearly and loudly as I could. “He was an impostor.”
“Kill her!” said a thin female vamp with short brown hair. “Kill the murderess!” She had a heavy accent, I thought Russian. I was about tired of the new wave of vamps.
Pot calling the kettle black, I thought briefly. I said, “You-all really think this goober was the Prince of Darkness?” I pointed to the flaking mess on the floor, held together by the spangled jumpsuit.
“He is dead. Anyone who kills Dracula must die,” said Indira quietly, but not like she was going to rush over and rip my throat out.
“Any vampire who kills Dracula must die,” Pam corrected. “But Sookie is not a vampire, and this was not Dracula.”
“She killed one impersonating our founder,” Eric said, making sure he could be heard throughout the club. “Milos was not the real Dracula. I would have staked him myself if I had had my wits about me.” But I was standing right by Eric, my hand on his arm, and I knew he was shaking.
“How do you know that? How could she tell, a human who had only a few moments in his presence? He looked just like the woodcuts!” This from a tall, heavy man with a French accent.
“Vlad Tepes was buried at the monastery on Snagov,” Pam said calmly, and everyone turned to her. “Sookie asked him how he’d escaped from his tomb at Târgovişte.”
Well, that hushed them up, at least temporarily. I began to think I might live through this night.
“Recompense must be made to his maker,” pointed out the tall, heavy vampire. He’d calmed down quite a bit in the last few minutes.
“If we can determine his maker,” Eric said, “certainly.”
“I’ll search my database,” Bill offered. He was standing in the shadows, where he’d lurked all evening. Now he took a step forward, and his dark eyes sought me out like a police helicopter searchlight catches the fleeing felon on Cops. “I’ll find out his real name, if no one here has met him before.”
All the vamps present glanced around. No one stepped forward to claim Milos/Dracula’s acquaintance.
“In the meantime,” Eric said smoothly, “let’s not forget that this event should be a secret among us until we can find out more details.” He smiled with a great show of fang, making his point quite nicely. “What happens in Shreveport, stays in Shreveport.” There was a murmur of assent.
“What do you say, guests?” Eric asked the non-vamp attendees.
Colonel Flood said, “Vampire business is not pack business. We don’t care if you kill each other. We won’t meddle in your affairs.” Calvin shrugged. “Panthers don’t mind what you do.”
The goblin said, “I’ve already forgotten the whole thing,” and the madwoman beside him nodded and laughed. The few other non-vamps hastily agreed.
No one solicited my answer. I guess they were taking my silence for a given, and they were right.
Pam drew me aside. She made an annoyed sound, like “tchk,” and brushed at my dress. I looked down to see a fine spray of blood had misted across the chiffon skirt. I knew immediately that I’d never wear my beloved bargain dress again.
“Too bad, you look good in pink,” Pam said.
I started to offer the dress to her, then thought again. I would wear it home and burn it. Vampire blood on my dress? Not a good piece of evidence to leave hanging around someone’s closet. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to dispose instantly of bloodstained clothing.
“That was a brave thing you did,” Pam said.
“Well, he was going to bite me,” I said. “To death.”
“Still,” she said.
I didn’t like the calculating look in her eyes.
“Thank you for helping Eric when I couldn’t,” Pam said. “My maker is a big idiot about the Prince.”
“I did it because he was going to suck my blood,” I told her. “You did some research on Vlad Tepes.”
“Yes, I went to the library after you told me about the original Dracula, and I Googled him.”
Pam’s eyes gleamed. “Legend has it that the original Vlad III was beheaded before he was buried.”
“That’s just one of the stories surrounding his death,” I said.
“True. But you know that not even a vampire can survive a beheading.”
“I would think not.”
“So you know the whole thing may be a crock of shit.”
“Pam,” I said, mildly shocked. “Well, it might be. And it might not. After all, Eric talked to someone who said he was the real Dracula’s gofer.”
“You knew that Milos wasn’t the real Dracula the minute he stepped forth.”
I shrugged.
Pam shook her head at me. “You’re too soft, Sookie Stackhouse. It’ll be the death of you some day.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. I was watching Eric, his golden hair falling forward as he looked down at the rapidly disintegrating remains of the self-styled Prince of Darkness. The thousand years of his life sat on him heavily, and for a second I saw every one of them. Then, by degrees, his face lightened, and when he looked up at me, it was with the expectancy of a child on Christmas Eve.
“Maybe next year,” he said.
BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written more than 120 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, plus five collections.
Recent books include a limited edition from Cemetery Dance of his 1988 debut novel Dark Advent, Mad Dogs from the same publisher, and the tie-in Hellboy: On Earth As
It Is in Hell, along with the collection Picking the Bones.
Hodge lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
The Last Testament
Brian Hodge
A new species dominates, and Dracula emerges as the most powerful man in the world . . .
I
From out of the darkest days of Eastern Europe’s Balkans War, there came sporadic reports of a lone man in priestly black robes who walked the charnel fields and the streets of ruined villages, showing no fear of bullets, bombs, or butchers. Death surrounded him, witnesses would claim, yet he seemed impervious to it. Serbs and Croats, Christians and Muslims . . . all soon came to hold him in awe, in particular those who had not long before tried to kill him for ministering to their enemies, only to find that their rifles would not shoot true.
I promise you this: there is no killer so godless that he fails to recognize a kind of miracle in another’s immunity to the tools of war.
The Father, as he simply became known, was at the center of an ever-expanding reputation for healing the wounded, and with those whose shattered bodies were too far gone even for his powers over flesh and blood, for easing their suffering as they departed life—often, with a kiss. More than once he was seen in two places at the same time, and at least once to levitate. Of the fact that none had ever seen him eat so much as a single bite of food, little was made, except as another possible sign of divinity.
I harbored suspicions about the Father long before they were confirmed by that first blurry picture that the media ran of him; not his identity, precisely, but at the very least his nature.
What could he possibly be up to now, I wondered at the time.
Years later, when some desperate cardinals of the splintering Church of Rome sought him out and brought him to the papal throne, the method of his madness became clearer.
And soon after that, when I was brought to stand before a tribunal of an Inquisition given renewed life by the ferocity of this dying age, a tribunal watched over by none other than Pope Innocent XIV, I wondered if there weren’t some grand design behind this, too. Why now, when for the last five and a half centuries we had managed to avoid each other?
Vlad the Father.
My son.
II
I have forgotten the number of names I’ve gone by over the greatest part of a millennium; have forgotten most of the names, as well, but never the one I was born with: Hugh de Burgundy.
Like my father before me, I was tall for my time, and strong of build, but exotically darker than our fellow Frenchmen, perhaps the bloodline of some rogue Arab having seeped into our own a few generations before. Like my father before me, I was born to wield the sword and the lance, and when it came time to drape over our chain-mail hauberks a tunic sewn with a large red cross, and purge the Holy Land for Christendom, that our weapons cut down men who could have been distant brothers did not sway us from our duties to God and France.
I cannot speak for my father, who died in Palestine before I ever reached the Crusades to fight beside him. But I know I fought to purge that possible Saracen from my own body.
I left steeped in the code of chivalry: to respect God-given life; to cherish women, children, and the weak, and protect them from harm; to honor an enemy’s right to seek sanctuary in a church and sheath my weapons on holy ground. But strange things happen to men in war. To survive you must learn to love the kill for its own sake. To love the kill you must forget all rules except one: Spill blood, first and often. This terrible metamorphosis can make a baser creature of any man who believes himself above it.
Have you ever been unable to lift your arm at the end of a day, having spent its sunlight cleaving the heads from prisoners? Have you ever knelt in the blood and entrails of an entire city’s populace, after slitting their bellies in search of swallowed gold and jewels? I have. I deny nothing, claiming only that the young Hugh who proudly rode east from Burgundy would not have committed these acts. But I have.
And have you ever awakened from some terrible dream, only to find that your circumstances are even worse? Seen your black guilt reflected in the eyes of a burning child?
In the dead of night, I deserted my army, wandering for days through deserts and hills until I found living Muslims I could beg for forgiveness. By the law of retaliation they should’ve killed me. But they were a strangely tolerant people. It would take many generations before the Islamic world learned the kind of savagery we taught them. For my personal penance they had other plans.
I had journeyed east wearing the cross of Christ.
I let those I’d come to slaughter nail me to one, instead.
III
“You have been brought before this tribunal on a charge of consorting with malign entities of unspecified natures; that six evenings ago you did willfully and with full knowledge of intent engage these powers to seduce a young woman and gratify yourself out of her insensibility.”
They wore somber faces and robes. How they love their robes. They always have. If not for my accuser’s reading of the charges from the screen of a laptop computer, this strange moment could have been taking place in the Middle Ages, when their pontiff really was the mortal man they must now have believed him to be.
“How do you plead?”
I looked from face to face, lingering on the gaunt visage of the blood-thirstiest pope ever to occupy Saint Peter’s throne—or anti-pope, according to some. The losers in the schism that had rent the Church had elected their own, but they’d all been driven from Rome. This one watched silently from a separate gallery and I had no doubt that he knew precisely who I was.
“I plead myself completely satisfied,” I told them. “She was a wonderful lover. Now, do what you have to do and let’s get this over with.”
The trial? A farce, of course. Witnesses were brought against me, claiming to have seen one thing or another in the piazza where I’d met the woman. She’d been sketching at an easel at the time and innocently told me I had a familiar face, and could she sketch it? If anyone had been charmed, it was me. The trouble had likely come from my having been followed around for centuries by a pair of malicious but otherwise impotent Welsh ghosts. Quite harmless, unless someone with sensitivity spots them and mistakes them for more than they really are.
Need I say I was found guilty? One witness points out my duo of spirits, shouts, and suddenly they’re seen by all. The herd-like tendencies of human nature have remained a constant for as long as I’ve been alive, and will dog the race until its end.
The state of the world what it is, I give you another decade or two. I mean no disrespect. I say it with sadness and love. In many ways you’re remarkable, but you always fall for leaders who manage to blind you to faults so much worse than your own.
“Having been found guilty of the charge of sexual predation by sorcerous enchantment, one week from today you shall be purified by pain and returned to your creator by a firing squad.”
I asked if we couldn’t get it over with sooner, but they only looked at one another as though they’d never heard such blatant self-disregard. I was only hoping to avoid a week’s boredom while waiting. I’d survived and tolerated plenty of impulsive murders and formal executions in my years, then later slipped quietly away.
Corpses have that advantage.
But Vlad would know that.
Which must have been what prompted that cold, hard smile from his gallery before he rose and left, turning his back on me, the condemned, in a whisper of white and gold robes.
If his minions believed themselves about to return me to my creator, however, they appeared woefully under-informed.
IV
In the early years of the Crusades, those Crusaders whose contact with Saracens went beyond slaughter were swift to learn something quit
e discomforting: for heathen savages, they possessed a refinement of learning far higher than that found in the west.
Out of devotion to your savior you came with hatred in your heart and a sword in your hand, they told me in the village I had found while seeking absolution. Therefore you will bear the wounds of this savior and see if they make a difference in your thinking.
They beat me with fists. They whipped me with metal-tipped lashes. On my head they forced a cap woven from thorns until the blood blinded me, and I could no longer see as they laid me atop a cross I’d fashioned myself, and drove the nails through my wrists and feet. In small details it differed from every painting of the Crucifixion I’d ever seen, which I attributed to their ignorance. It was centuries before I realized they knew far more about Roman executions than we did.
For three hours they let me hang between Heaven and Earth, then slashed my side with a spear-tip, took me down, and carried me into a tent. They washed me, covered me with aloe and myrrh, and wrapped me with linen, then left me to my fevers, to live or die as Allah willed.
Delirium reigned, yet they had indeed made a difference in my thinking. I was now willing to entertain the unthinkable: If this can be survived, then what have we been fighting for?
And Allah willed life.
But neither then nor today could I fathom an Allah that would have anything to do with the creature that came to me during the second night. Perhaps it was lured from its shelter in the desert by the scent of blood and helplessness. A ragged, filthy thing, with jagged teeth and cunning eyes, it broke the soft crust of my scabs like bread and drank at leisure.
I’ve wondered since if it wasn’t some spirit come to avenge the atrocities of the Crusades. If it recognized within my long hair and matted beard the face of barbarians from Western Europe, and decided that death would be too swift, too merciful.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 60
