Palmer moaned in his sleep, shifting uneasily on the narrow bed. Renfield’s pasty face, as wide and pale as the moon, filled his dreams. The dead man’s eyes were as flat and black as buttons, his lips thin and blue. Palmer could hear Renfield’s voice, even though the satellite-sized face’s mouth remained caught in a rictus grin.
She’s going to make you like me. A lap dog. Lap dog. Lap, dog, lap!
Palmer sat up, the sweat running into his eyes. His mouth was dry, his head aching as if the lobes of his brain were dividing like amoebas. He stared at the circular window set in the wall above the bed. He got up and swiveled the window open on its pivot, inhaling a deep breath of Mississippi River-saturated air. Somewhere in the distance, a barge sounded a long, mournful note.
“Will-yummmm.”
No. It couldn’t be. He leaned his forehead against the peeling paint on the wall, trying to find some reassurance that he was, indeed, awake. He knew it.
“Why won’t you look at me, baby?” Lola purred. “Aren’t you glad to see me, honey?”
Palmer bit his lip as the familiar burning tore at his chest. His scar throbbed and pulsed as if he’d been branded with a red-hot coat hanger. He wouldn’t look at her. She wasn’t real. She was a dream. He was awake. He had to be. He opened his eyes, staring out the window for proof that he was, indeed, in the waking world.
To his horror, he saw that New Orleans was on fire; the city wrapped in sheets of flame, yet no one seemed to notice. Burning children ran up and down the streets, smoke and laughter billowing from their lobster-red mouths. Women dressed in crackling aprons swept their stoops clean of ash. Business executives dressed in smoldering Brooks Brothers suits paused to check the melted slag strapped to their wrists before hurrying on their way, smoking attaché cases clenched in their roasted hands. On the balcony opposite Palmer’s window two lovers embraced, oblivious to the blisters rising on their naked flesh, while their wrought iron bower softened and dripped like licorice left in the sun.
The pain grew stronger in his chest, forcing an involuntary cry from his lips. There was no use in denying her. She was going to have her way, no matter how hard he tried to stop her. Groaning, Palmer turned to face Lola’s horrible love.
The smell of the marui roused Sonja from her thoughts. Then she heard Palmer’s stifled cry. She kicked the door to the bedroom open, growling at the sight of the ill-formed creature crouched atop the sleeping man, its claws buried in his chest.
The marui screeched in alarm and spread its membranous wings as it attempted to take flight. Sonja’s fingers closed on its slippery flanks and the creature’s high-pitched squealing became ultrasonic.
Suddenly Palmer was awake, staring in confusion at the combatants wrestling beside his bed.
“Don’t just sit there gawking!” Sonja shouted. “Help with this thing!”
“How?”
“Grab its neck!”
Palmer took one look at the creature’s mouthful of barbed teeth and shook his head. “Like hell I will!”
“Just do it, damn it!”
Palmer grimaced as his hands closed on the thing’s whip-like neck. Its flesh was slick and sticky, as if the wildly struggling beast was composed of animated phlegm. Once its biting end was under control, Sonja was able to pin the rest of the creature to the floor.
“What in the name of hell is this thing?” he gasped in horror.
The beast, weakened by the scuffle, was no longer trying to escape and lay crumpled on the floor like a damaged kite. Palmer stared at its twisted, almost human musculature and tattered, bat-like wings. The nightmare creature’s neck looked like a loop of umbilical cord, its bald, old man’s head dominated by large, fox-like ears and bristling barbed teeth. Just looking at the thing made his scar tighten.
“They’re called marui, “she explained, resting her foot on the brute’s neck. “They also go by night-elves, or le rudge-pula, depending on the part of the world you happen to be in. They batten onto sleepers, manipulating dreams in order to feed on the fear born of nightmares. Judging by its size, this one’s been feasting on you for some time. They only take on corporeal form while they feed.”
“You mean this thing’s a nightmare?”
“Bad dreams exist for their own reasons; marui simply benefit from the negative energy that is released. But they’re not what you’d call smart.” She applied pressure on the creature’s neck, smiling as it wailed in distress. “My guess is that Pangloss sicced this little darling on you, hoping to make Renfield’s job easier when the time came. Isn’t that so, Rover?” She applied more pressure to the marui’s throat. The creature squealed in Lola’s voice:
“Will-yummm, help meee.”
Palmer brought his heel down on the thing’s skull, grinding it into a sticky paste. The marui shuddered once and began to dissolve, the ectoplasm evaporating like dry ice.
“I trust you slept well.”
Palmer put down his mug of chicory coffee and turned to look at Sonja. She was standing in the kitchen door, dressed in a green silk kimono embroidered with tiny butterflies the color of smoke. Her hair was hidden by a clean white towel wrapped about her head turban-style. She was still wearing mirrored sunglasses. It had never occurred to Palmer that vampires took showers.
“Never slept better,” he said. And it was the truth. For the first time in weeks, his sleep had been free of nightmares, allowing him to awake that afternoon genuinely refreshed and rejuvenated.
“I trust you kept yourself entertained while I was... indisposed throughout the day.” Sonja opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle full of dark red liquid. She cracked the seal and brought the bottle to her lips, only to halt upon seeing the look on Palmer’s face. “Forgive me—where are my manners?” She said as she put the blood aside.
“There’s nothing for you to apologize for,” he said. “After all, it’s your place. I’m just a guest here; I have no right to judge.”
Sonja tilted her head to one side, regarding him with her one-way gaze. “You’re quite adaptable for a human.”
“Look, it’s pretty obvious that I’m at a huge disadvantage right now. Everything I ever thought was real has been turned upside down. I need help trying to figure where I fit into all this craziness. I’d like to make a business proposition: I need help with this ham radio set in my skull, right? You need help with Pangloss, right? How about we team up-just for a little while? You could teach me how to use what I got, and I could do whatever it is you need me to do.”
“Mr. Palmer, do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?”
“Not really. But I know that if I don’t get help, and get it soon, I’m going to go nuts. I can’t handle walking around seeing things I know are real, but no one else can.” He could feel his hands start to tremble as he spoke, but he refused to look at them. “Look, I can’t lie to you. You scare me, lady. But it’s like my Uncle Willy used to say: better the devil you know.”
Compared to the day before, the French Quarter was practically deserted. Bourbon Street was open for business, as usual, but the barkers, for once, seemed uninterested in luring the handful of tourists wandering the garbage-strewn streets into their dens of iniquity. The overall mood was a mixture of exhaustion and relief, as if the city was recovering from a bout of fever.
Palmer trailed after Sonja, trying to ignore the stares that followed them down the narrow streets. Sonja moved swiftly and purposefully through the clustered shadows, her hands jammed into the pockets of her leather jacket. She seemed preoccupied, but Palmer had no doubt that she was very much aware of the looks aimed at her. The fear and loathing that radiated from the hustlers, pushers and other Quarter habitués was strong enough to make Palmer feel like someone had liberated an ant farm in his underwear. He ran through the mental exercises for blocking ambient emotions Sonja had taught him before leaving the apartment that evening, and his skin stopped crawling.
“It appears you’re not very well-liked around here,” he observ
ed.
She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “Get used to it. Most humans have an instinctual dislike of Pretenders and sensitives.”
Palmer recalled his own immediate, gut-level reaction to Renfield and winced. “You’ve used that word before: Pretenders. What does it mean?”
“Ever read Lovecraft?”
“Back in high school,” he replied with a shrug.
“Remember that stuff about how mankind is only a recent development, as far as the earth is concerned, and how giant ugly nameless horrors are just sitting around on their tentacles, waiting for when the time is ripe to take over the world?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s kind of like that, except this shit is real.”
“I don’t think I want to know any more.”
“Too late,” she said with a humorless laugh. “Do you believe in hell?”
Palmer blinked, taken aback. “If you mean the Christian hell, where people are tortured by guys with pitchforks and pointy ears, no, I don’t believe in that.”
“Me neither. But I do believe in demons. And that’s where we’re going—to make a deal with a devil.”
“You mean Satan?”
“Are you kidding? He’s way too expensive. No, the guy I go to is reasonably priced.”
Palmer decided at that point that it might be better if he stopped asking questions.
The Monastery was a small, dark bar that had, in a fit of perversity, decided on an ecclesiastical decor. The booths lining the wall had once been pews, and fragments of stained glass, salvaged from various desanctified churches, had been soldered together to create a disjointed jigsaw collage in the skylight. Plaster saints and icons in varying states of decay were scattered about, including a blackened Madonna and Child, smudged by exposure to too many votive candles, who stared down at the Monastery’s denizen’s with flat, robin’s egg blue eyes from their perch over the liquor supply. A battered Rockola jukebox played 1970s era Rolling Stones through a pair of decrepit speakers.
With its cheap prices, slovenly service and haphazard attitude toward hygiene, the Monastery did not cater to the credit card-packing tourists the Quarter thrived on. As Palmer and Sonja entered the bar, the prostitute sipping her sloe gin fizz and the bartender drying a highball glass with a grimy rag stopped what they were doing to stare intently at them.
“What if the guy you’re looking for isn’t here?” Palmer whispered hopefully.
“He’s here, all right,” she replied confidently. “He’s always here.” She strode over to the back booth, where the shadows were the deepest. Her lips curled into a thin, cold smile. “Hello, Malfeis.”
The demon returned her smile, licking his lips with a forked tongue. “Ah, Sonja! Please, call me Mal! There is no need to stand on formalities.”
Palmer frowned. Whatever he’d been expecting to find, it definitely wasn’t a teenaged boy dressed in faded denims and a Shred or Die T-shirt. A skateboard, its belly painted to depict an eyeball wreathed in Day-Glo flames, leaned against the converted pew.
“This is who you came here to meet? Are you joking?” he asked in disbelief. “This kid isn’t even old enough to be in here!”
Malfeis lifted an upswept eyebrow in amusement. “Who’s the new Renfield, Sonja?”
“My name’s not Renfield.” Palmer snapped, fighting the urge to grab the snot-nosed little skate punk by his rat-tail. “What’d you mean by that?”
Sonja waved him silent. “I’ll explain after I tend to business. Wait for me at the bar, Palmer.”
“But—”
“I said wait at the bar.” Her voice was as hard and cold as steel, and as just as unyielding. She waited until Palmer left before taking her place in the booth.
“Quite a change from the last time, Mal,” she said, gesturing to his current manifestation. “Last time I saw you, you were a Rastaman.”
The demon shrugged, smiling slyly. “I like to keep it fresh. So, what brings you back into my clutches, sweet thing?”
“I think you already know that.”
“Do I?”
“Don’t play cute with me, Mal. I don’t have the time or the patience right now. I need to know what Pangloss has up his sleeve.” She pulled the letter from Pangloss from her jacket, sliding it across the table.
Malfeis tapped the folded paper with an overly long fingernail and grunted. “Easy enough. What’s in it for me?”
She produced a black ceramic vessel the size of an unguent jar from her pocket and held it out toward the demon. “Got it in from Katmandu just last week. The powdered skull of a man who killed six Tibetan holy men, then murdered and raped three missionaries. Its good shit, man, as pure as you’ll find it.”
Mal’s catlike eyes filled with a strange fire. His fingers drummed nervously against the tabletop. “Gimme a taste.”
Sonja carefully unscrewed the lid and dispensed a pinch of a fine, chalky yellow powder into the demon’s outstretched palm. The demon daubed a forefinger in the pulverized skull and popped it his mouth.
“So? What’s the verdict? Deal?”
Mal nodded, appreciatively. “Done.”
Sonja pushed the jar over to Malfeis’s side of the table. The demon brought out a gold-plated razor blade and a flat piece of volcanic glass, quickly arranging himself a generous rail of powdered skull. Oblivious to his surroundings, Malfeis lowered his head to the table and inhaled the line with both nostrils, snuffling like a bloodhound. He jerked his head up when he was finished, blowing out his cheeks and shaking himself like a winded stallion. His eyes were too big and the pupils slitted unnaturally, but otherwise he still looked human.
“Cold-blooded! That some true righteous shit!” He grinned, showing a mouthful of shark teeth.
“Glad it meets your approval. Now, about Pangloss...”
“No problem!” Malfeis picked up the letter and tapped one edge between his eyebrows. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, exposing green-tinged whites. A strange, basso profundo gargle rumbled from deep inside his narrow, hairless chest, but no one in the bar seemed to notice. After a second or two he reconnected, his eyes dropping back down like the symbols on a slot machine.
“There’s not much available information concerning Pangloss, outside of his recent attempts to make contact with you. That much seems up front. There does seem to be a bit of a buzz concerning Morgan, though.”
“Really? What about?”
“Sorry, that requires First Hierarchy clearance. I don’t have the necessary power to access that information for you, at least not in detail. I can tell that whatever it is Morgan is doing, it’s generating a great deal of speculation among the First and Second Hierarchies. But whether that means they approve of what he’s doing is impossible to say.”
“Don’t you have some connections? I thought your uncle was a Second Hierarch.”
“Uncle Oeillet? He’s not exactly what you’d call a big wheel nowadays. His star’s been on the decline since the Reformation. He’s in charge of tempting people to break their vows of poverty, for crying out loud! Still, a direct hookup with him rates a blood sacrifice of at least three quarts. I wish I could cut you a better deal on that, babe, but them’s the rules.”
Palmer glowered first at the highball in his hand then back at Sonja, still talking with the fresh-faced punk with the funny-looking eyes. The Black Madonna stared down at him from her place above the liquor. The Black Baby Jesus looked like a doll someone had dropped down a coal chute, its chubby uplifted arms ending in misshapen fists, thanks to fungus rotting off its fingers.
“Hey there, mister,” the prostitute at the end of the bar leered. “You looking to party?”
He shook his head without looking up from his drink. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Are you sure about that?”
There was something in her voice that made him look up, and what he saw was enough to make him gasp in horror. Seated at the end of the bar was Lola. He could feel insanity rushing toward him, yawn
ing like a snake eager to swallow him whole, right down to his cigarillos and library card. She smiled seductively and moved closer to him. She smelled of sloe gin fizzes and something Palmer recognized but could not name. Her fingers were cold and dry against his exposed flesh, but Palmer was beyond shivering. At her touch, his penis became painfully erect, to the point of forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she cooed in his ear. “I’ve been waiting such a long time.”
His dick throbbed as if someone had slipped a piano wire tourniquet around its base and was slowly cutting off the circulation. Palmer wanted to cry out, but his mouth had been sealed from the inside.
“Come on, baby. I got a place we can go and be alone,” Lola said, hooking her arm in his as she pulled him free of the stool. Although she was six inches shorter than he was and barely weighed and hundred and pounds, she was amazingly strong. “When we’re alone, I’ll fuck your brains out!” The way she laughed made it sound like the joke was on him.
Palmer didn’t want to go, but it was as if he was being pulled along by a wire fastened to the end of his dick. Every time he tried to fight it, the invisible tourniquet tightened its excruciating hold on his member. They were halfway out the door before a he felt someone grab him by the elbow.
“Back off, hell-bitch!” Sonja snarled as she yanked Palmer back into the bar.
Lola held firm, hissing like a cat as she dug her nails into his upper arm. Palmer tried to scream, but his mouth was still pasted shut. He pictured himself being ripped apart like a wishbone as the two fought over him. Then Sonja produced her switchblade and neatly severed Lola’s hand at the wrist, weakening her grip on Palmer long enough for her rival to wrench him free of her grasp. Lola calmly picked up her severed hand and tried to stick it back on her wrist. To his surprise, the graft took.
In the Blood (Sonja Blue) Page 6
