In the Blood (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  Once physical contact was broken, his overinflated sex organ rapidly shrank like a deflating balloon. It was the first time in his life he’d been relieved to lose an erection. “Lola...?” he rasped, now that he could once again speak.

  “She’s not Lola,” Sonja said. “Take my hand: see as I see.” Before Palmer could protest, she grabbed his right hand and squeezed.

  Suddenly Lola was gone, replaced by a creature with three pairs of floppy tits, arms as long and hairy as an ape, crooked legs, with a six-inch-long sheathed clitoris dangling between her shanks and tiny horns growing from a sloping forehead.

  The succubus hissed, her lipless mouth hinged like a piranha’s. She stepped forward, growling a challenge to the mirror-eyed intruder that had dared steal her evening’s repast.

  “Jamara!” The voice was as loud as thunder and so deep it sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well. The succubus cringed at the reprimand, automatically presenting her flank in submission.

  Palmer turned and saw the boy called Malfeis rise from his booth in the back, casting aside his mortal guise as he did so. The demon stood over six feet tall, even though the curvature of his spine made him stoop, and was completely covered in coarse, brick red hair, like that of an orangutan, save for his twin-pronged penis. His features were porcine in appearance, complete with curving boar’s tusks and a twitching snout, and he walked on cloven feet.

  Malfeis shouldered his way past Sonja and Palmer and reached behind the succubus and grabbed her tail, giving it a vicious twist. Jamara squealed like a sow dragged to slaughter and tried to break free, only to have Malfeis propel her out onto the street.

  “I’m sorry about that,” the demon said, his manifestation once more assuming the appearance of a young man. “I promised one of my sisters I’d break her in, but I’m afraid it’s just not working out.”

  Chapter Six

  Palmer shifted in his seat and tried to ride out the nicotine fit. He could feel the pack of cigarettes calling out to him from inside his breast pocket, nestled against his heart like the picture of a loved one.

  Sonja sat beside him, mirrored shades in place, nonchalantly paging through an in-flight magazine. His companion was an up-to-date vampire; no crates packed with native earth for her. She believed in traveling first class. “We should arrive in a couple of hours. Pangloss said he’d have his car there to meet us. I have no reason not to believe him,” she said without looking up from the article on Fun-Filled Florida Family Vacations.

  Palmer nodded without saying anything. Personally, he considered the decision to meet with Pangloss suicidal. Part of him wondered if she’d used a devious form of mind control on him to make him agree to come along. He knew she could do stuff like that. In deed, he’d seen her use it against the TSA agents at the New Orleans airport, after her switchblade set off the metal detector.

  “There is no weapon,” she said firmly, holding up the ornately decorated knife.

  “We’re terribly sorry, ma’am. Our mistake. Have a nice flight,” the TSA agents said, in unison, doing everything but tugging their forelocks as they backed away from her.

  It was easier to believe his decision to accompany Sonja was made for him than to accept the fact that he didn’t stand a chance on his own. Like it or not, the safest place for him, right now, was tagging along in a punk rock vampire’s shadow. Disgruntled by where his thoughts were taking him, Palmer glanced out the window, only to immediately wish he hadn’t.

  There were things sitting on the wing of the airplane. At first he mistook them for children, although he knew it was impossible for kids to be clinging to the aluminum skin of a DC-10 at fifty thousand feet. Then one of the frail figures stood up, unfurling its bat-like wings as it embraced the jet stream, and shot up and away into the night sky.

  There were at least six of the grayish-white creatures crawling up and down the length of the wing. Their arms were twice as long as their bodies, with long, bullet-shaped skulls and hairless bodies. As Palmer watched, the things scuttled along, bellies pressed against the plane’s vibrating skin, and, one-by-one surrendered themselves to the winds. One of the things shot upward, only to catch some turbulence and strike the side of the plan, right next to Palmer’s window. Instead of hearing a loud, juicy thump, he was surprised to discover that it made no sound upon impact. The thing peeled itself from the fuselage and peered through the window at Palmer.

  Its eyes were large, lidless orbs the color of rancid butter, which hovered over a tube-like proboscis that dangled from the middle of what passed for its face. A long, worm-like tongue whipped out of the thing’s snout, momentarily tasting the reinforced Plexiglas that separated it from Palmer, before resuming its climb back to the wing.

  Palmer turned to Sonja, cold sweat running down his back. “Am I seeing things?” he asked, gesturing to the window.

  Sonja looked up from her in-flight magazine and leaned forward, peering out into the dark. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she assured him. “They’re real.”

  “Great,” Palmer groaned, pulling the plastic shade down with trembling fingers. “That’s all I need right now.”

  “They’re just afreeti, that’s all. Nothing to get upset about,” Sonja explained with a shrug. “They’re a form of elemental and they like hitching rides on airplanes. They’re harmless, unless you get a couple of warring tribes arguing over who gets to jump off first. The few humans who’ve seen them usually mistake them for gremlins.”

  Palmer never wanted a cigarette more than at that moment. It was a lot easier to tell himself that this was all part of the rich and wonderful tapestry of life if he could soothe his jangling nerves with a double lungful of nicotine.

  Sonja seemed to pick up on his anxiety and leaned forward, resting her hand atop his. “I know what you’re going through is tough right now. I remember the first time I started ‘seeing things.’ I thought I was going nuts! And I didn’t have someone to walk me through it, not at first, anyway. But, believe me, you’ll get used to it. Either that or you’ll go nuts. Most real psychics end up schizophrenic.”

  Palmer stared down at her hand as it lay atop his own. This was the first time she had deliberately touched him, outside of grabbing his arm while saving his bewitched butt from the succubus, since their initial contact. He was expecting her skin to be cold and clammy, like that of a corpse, but it wasn’t. Suddenly the taste of Jimmy Eichorn’s blood flooded his mouth again.

  He jerked his arm away and stood up stiffly, trying to control the tightness in his throat. “Excuse me a minute, would you?”

  He screwed his mouth into a bitter grin as he made his way toward the first class cabin’s toilet. He tried the toilet door, found it locked, and then noticed the OCCUPIED sign. Sighing, he folded his arms and glanced back down the aisle, idly scanning the handful of passengers who could afford to fly First Class. His gaze momentarily settled on a heavyset man in a rumpled business suit rooting through the contents of an attaché case. Wisps of smoke wreathed the businessman’s frowning face. As Palmer stared harder at the florid-faced man, the smoke shifted and roiled, as if coming into sharper definition. Palmer’s heart beat faster as he made out the shape crouched on the businessman’s right shoulder. It looked like a squirrel monkey sketched by a skywriter and left to the mercies of a strong breeze.

  Palmer quickly looked away, unsure as to what it meant but certain a cigarette would help him deal with it, whatever it was. The restroom door opened and Palmer dived into its solitude without waiting for the previous occupant to completely clear the way. His hands were shaking as he slammed the bolt home and pressed his back against the door. Inches from his knees stood the undersized, uncomfortable airline toilet, its stainless steel bowl beaded with droplets of sky-blue disinfectant. The equally tiny hand basin bruised his hip as he searched his pockets for a lighter. He glanced up at the smoke detector above his head and scowled.

  The stewardesses were always making such a big deal about how passengers
shouldn’t tamper with the damn things, so that probably meant they were pretty easy to fuck up. Still, the last thing Palmer needed was to have the bloody thing go off while he was messing with it. The last thing he needed was a snoot full of fire-extinguisher a thousand dollar fine slapped on him.

  Palmer looked at the packet of cigarettes liberated from his breast pocket, then back up at the plastic disc dangling over his head like an electronic Sword of Damocles.

  Fuck it.

  He stuck some of the black cigarillos in his mouth and reached up to disconnect the smoke detector, giving himself a leg up on the edge of the toilet seat. As he did so, he found himself staring into the shatterproof mirror mounted over the sink. What he saw made him snort in self-derision. It was just like trying to cop a smoke in the boy’s room at Mater Delarosa Junior High back in Akron. His hair was starting to gray at the temples and he wore a tailored black trench coat instead of a school jacket, but there wasn’t that much difference between the fourteen-year-old Palmer suspended for smoking behind the gym and the thirty-nine-year-old preparing to hamstring the smoke detector.

  Except for the smoke-monkey perched on the present-day Palmer’s shoulder like parrot.

  “Yaaah!” Palmer shouted, losing his balance and plunging one of his feet into the toilet. The shock he’d experienced at the sight of the smudged gray thing crouched on his shoulder was quickly replaced by the fear of being accidentally sucked out through the toilet’s trapdoor, ala the bad guy in Goldfinger. Swearing viciously, Palmer yanked himself free, falling against the locked door with a loud thump.

  “Sir? Are you all right?” It was one of the stewardesses, sounding both solicitous and suspicious. “Is something wrong? Do you need help?”

  “I’m all right! I just made a little misstep, that’s all!” Palmer replied, glowering at the blue dye staining his lower leg. Luckily, his pants and shoes were dark enough to hide the discoloration.

  He avoided looking in the mirror as he exited the cramped confines of the toilet, for fear of seeing the smoke-monkey again, while smiling sheepishly at the flight attendants grouped outside.

  “Please take your seat, sir. We’re about to make our approach to San Francisco International.”

  Pangloss’s chauffeur was waiting for them at the exit gate, holding a neatly printed placard that read S. Blue. They were shown to a stretch limo with tinted glass and a fully stocked bar in the back.

  Before climbing into the back seat, Palmer’s gaze fell upon a gaunt woman dragging her luggage into the terminal. Although the woman was very frail, a smoke-monkey the size of a gorilla straddled her narrow shoulders. He bit back a laugh he knew would sound too high-pitched and brittle to be mistaken for sane.

  Sonja stuck her head out of the limo and motioned for him to get in. “Come on, damn it! It’s just a tobacco demon!”

  The moment the door slammed shut behind them Palmer popped one of his foul smelling cigarettes into his mouth and opened the liquor cabinet. His hands were shaking.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Palmer snorted, expelling a cloud of smoke. “What’s right about any of this? That bastard Pangloss tried to have my brains turned into guacamole dip, and here we are riding in the back of his fuckin’ limo! We’re walking into a trap, for Christ’s sake! It might as well have T-R-A-P spelled out in flashing neon letters!”

  Sonja sighed and looked out the window. “Don’t worry about Pangloss. I can handle him. He’s not going to bother you. He got what he wanted. Adding you to his stable was merely a little lagniappe, not the main event.”

  “You sound real sure of yourself.”

  “I know Pangloss is crafty. I don’t doubt he’s got his own reasons for bringing me into this, but I don’t care what they might be. The only thing I’m interested in is Morgan.”

  “So who is this Morgan, and why do you want his head on a spike?” Palmer frowned.

  “Ever hear of Thorne Industries?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “Old Jake Thorne is one of the last ‘bootstrap’ billionaires. He started off with nothing and ended up owning two dozen companies. ”

  “Do you remember what happened to his daughter, Denise?” she asked, the corner of her mouth lifting into a bitter smile.

  “Wasn’t she kidnapped or something back in the late Sixties, early Seventies?”

  “That’s what everyone assumed. No ransom demands were ever made and she was never found,” she replied, her voice suddenly wistful.

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “Because a long, long time ago, Denise met a man called Sir Morgan. Turns out he was a Noble alright, but not the kind Denise expected. He coerced her into ditching her friends and taking a moonlight drive in his chauffeured limousine. But once they were alone, he raped her, drank her blood, and, when he was finished with her, tossed her into the gutter from a moving car. She was found and taken to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for nine months. Then I woke up.”

  “You’re Denise Thorne?” Palmer stared at her, open-mouthed.

  Sonja shrugged. “That is open to debate. But something in me used to be Denise Thorne; perhaps it still is.” She returned her gaze to the window, staring at the dim outline of Candlestick Park in the pre-dawn fog. “There are a lot of things I do not know. But I do know one thing: I will send Morgan to hell, even if I have to escort him there myself.”

  Pangloss’s lair was in one of the older downtown skyscrapers, dwelling in the perpetual shadow cast by megaliths like the Transamerica Pyramid building. The limo slid into the underground parking garage, depositing its riders before an old-fashioned elevator shaft secured by sliding metal gates and manned by an operator.

  As Sonja and Palmer stepped out of the limo, the elevator operator, an old man in an ill-fitting uniform, folded back the accordion gate and gestured for them to enter. The interior of the car smelled of old leather, older money and cigars. Upon reaching the penthouse, the elevator doors opened to reveal Kief. The hulking ogre jutted his massive jaw forward as he flared his apelike nostrils.

  “I told you this was a bad idea,” whispered to Sonja behind his hand.

  The ogre’s lips peeled back in a rictus grin, revealing teeth better suited for a shark’s mouth, as he took a step forward.

  “Kief! Heel!”

  The ogre grunted and moved aside, allowing a narrow-shouldered man in a nondescript suit and tortoiseshell spectacles to step forward.

  “I’m Doctor Pangloss’s assistant. He’s in the gymnasium right now. I’ll escort you to the waiting room…”

  “I’ll see him now,” Sonja said flatly.

  The assistant scowled at the clipboard he held in his hand. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  She stepped forward and snatched the clipboard from his hands, snapping it in two like it was a graham cracker.

  The assistant’s pale face grew even pastier. “Follow me, Ms. Blue.”

  The gymnasium was larger than any apartment Palmer had ever lived in, with parallel bars and other athletic equipment scattered about, and a state-of-the- art Nautilus machine crouching in one corner like a chromium spider. In the middle of the room were two men, dressed in the mesh faceguards and starched white tunics of professional fencers, dueling with naked cavalry sabers.

  As Sonja and Palmer entered the gymnasium, one of the duelists drove his weapon through his opponent’s chest, neatly skewering the tunic’s red heart. The wounded fencer, still clutching his weapon, staggered backward, staring at the length of cold steel jutting from his breastbone. The victor gave a dry chuckle and turned to leave, only to have the wounded swordsman leap forward and, with a single swing of his blade, neatly decapitate him in midstride. The head, still encased in the protective face guard, bounced a couple of times before rolling to a stop near Sonja’s foot.

  Pangloss removed his own visor and tossed it aside, revealing eyes the color of garnets, bisected by a narrow, reptilian pupil. “I’m glad that’s over and done with!” h
e exclaimed as he motioned for his assistant to pull the saber free of his chest. “What a bore! Always going on about those scars he got at Heidelberg. Why, I remember when it was called Bergheim.” The vampire winced slightly as the sword was removed, and blood the color of transmission fluid trickled from the wound. “Ah! That’s much better-it was starting to itch.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, Doctor?” the pinch-faced assistant asked.

  “That will be all for now, Renfield. I will see to Ms. Blue and her friend myself.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll have Kief dispose of Herr Grunewald.”

  “That’s not the same Renfield,” Palmer scowled as the assistant left the room.

  “What of it?” Pangloss replied as he unfastened the buckles of his tunic.

  “Because Renfield’s dead. I saw him die!”

  “My dear Mr. Palmer, the world is full of Renfields!” Pangloss sighed. “Just like it’s full of paper clips. You don’t christen each and every one you use with its own name, do you? The operative our charming Ms. Blue terminated in New Orleans was, indeed, one of my Renfields, but far from the only one. But you will soon find how interchangeable such creatures are, now that you’ve replaced the late, unlamented Chaz.”

  Sonja raised her hand for silence. “Stop baiting him, Pangloss. Mr. Palmer is under my protection, but he’s not a Renfield. I’m here because you have something to tell me about Morgan. Now what is it, Herr doktor?

  Pangloss clucked his tongue in disapproval. “The years have not improved your etiquette, my dear. You’re just as blunt as ever. But I suspect that’s what comes from being American.” He shrugged free of the bloodstained tunic, revealing a hairless chest as pale as milk and covered with the faint traces of hundreds of crisscrossing scars. The newest wound, the one piercing his heart, was already puckering into pink scar tissue.

  Without realizing it, Palmer reached up and touched his own chest, tracing his near-fatal flaw. He wondered for a moment if Sonja’s flesh was equally scarred, then hastily pushed the thought aside.