Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “You waiting for an invitation? Come on, let’s move it!”

  20

  Seeing Bowie here stunned me a moment. Gail stared at me from the corner of the kitchenette, watching me for a reaction. I was still trying to digest the fact that Bowie was a vampire. There wasn’t much else that could explain the gaping hole in the front of his shirt, or how he’d taken out Bishop unarmed.

  What the hell was happening here?

  “Come on,” Bowie said. “Before these fucks get their act together!”

  Bowie’s entrance didn’t give me much of a choice. I ran for my gun.

  Outside, the night was waking with the sounds of men and dogs. I cursed.

  “Come on!” Bowie urged. He shook like a coiled spring.

  I holstered the Desert Eagle and held my good hand out to Gail. She hesitated briefly, then took it.

  Then Bowie took off down the stairs, out of the gatehouse. I pursued with Gail. “How ... why ...” I began. I stopped when we reached the driveway.

  Gail bumped into my side, and stared. Next to the road lay the guy I thought of as Mr. Gestapo. His body was immaculate, and the same blue-white as the snowdrift he’d fallen in. I saw the edges of a wound, but most was hidden because he’d fallen face first into the snow.

  “Bowie, damn it! I’m supposed to be working for Sebastian!”

  “Not since you joined the dance, my friend,” Bowie yelled, without turning or slowing.

  Behind me, too close, I heard a canine growl and the scrabbling of claws across the driveway. I started running again, pulling Gail along and pushing her ahead of me.

  I dropped back a few feet, so the dog reached me just as Gail reached the gate. Bowie was through it, ahead of her, when I heard a growl directly behind me. A Doberman, out of nowhere, clamped its jaws on my right wrist. The sudden pain ignited a flare inside me, a coal of rage I’d been husbanding since Sebastian had taken my daughter.

  I growled back.

  I turned. For a moment my gaze locked with the animal’s. The dog’s eyes were empty of everything, like the eyes of a machine. My will burned through those eyes, flashing through the tiny space that was the animal’s mind. The dog froze under the onslaught. Something that might have been an abortive whimper died in its throat, behind my arm.

  In response, I whipped my right arm toward one of the concrete pillars marking the edge of the gate. The dog’s jaws remained attached to my wrist, even as its feet left the ground. It hung on until its back slammed into the pillar. I heard a crack as, about four feet off the ground, the corner of the square pillar put a mortal crease in the Doberman’s spine.

  All the strength left its jaws, and my wrist ripped free. I ran through the gate as the dog fell to the ground. It hit with a spastic jerk and ceased moving.

  Gail wasn’t running; she had turned and was staring at me.

  I grabbed her as I passed and I heard her whisper, “The world’s gone crazy.”

  I silently agreed with her.

  My car, the Chevette, was sitting at the curb, idling, the door open. Bowie was already behind the wheel. He began shifting gears as I shoved Gail in the back seat. Bowie floored the accelerator as soon as most of my own body was in the vehicle.

  A Chevette wasn’t meant to attempt screaming acceleration on icy pavement, but somehow Bowie managed it. I had to hook my left arm over the passenger seat to keep from tumbling out of the car. My legs dangled over the curb, and the door tried to slam shut on them without quite succeeding.

  I managed to lever my legs inside. “What the hell are you doing? Sebastian is—”

  “I know, I know.” Bowie kept staring ahead, as the Chevette swerved. The passenger door swung widely, but I had my hands full holding myself in place. I kept staring behind us, waiting for the Olds, or some other car, to slide out of Sebastian’s estate after us.

  “Shut the door, no one’s following us.”

  “How do you know?”

  There was a snick next to me. I turned to see Bowie holding an illegally long knife. “Hard to drive with four flats.” With a flip of the wrist the knife disappeared.

  “What’s going on?” Gail finally said with all the angry confusion I felt. “Who is this guy?”

  “Friend of your father, sweet-cakes.” Bowie said.

  I slammed the door shut. “That remains to be seen. This is one hell of a bonehead stunt. I should throttle you for endangering my daughter.”

  “It’s my life, Dad.” Gail said. “I’ll throttle him.”

  “Hey, man, it’s your skin you should worry about. You were in there with the man most likely to drive a stake through your heart.” Bowie looked at me. I stayed quiet. “You’re damn lucky I followed you.”

  “Was that man dead?” Gail asked.

  “What man?” Bowie asked.

  “The man, back there, in the snow.”

  Bowie laughed. “Of all the—Of course he’s dead.”

  “Why did you have to kill him?”

  “He was an asshole, he shot me, and I was hungry. That’s two more reason than I needed.”

  “What about the Covenant?” I asked.

  Bowie gave me another look, as if he was measuring me. “What about it?”

  “You know what about it. The second law, ‘No one who holds to the Covenant may reveal those of the blood.”’ Bowie smiled. “You been talking to people, ain’t you?”

  “Damn it, you’ve left corpses all over the place and you’re blabbing all ...”

  “All this in front of your all-too-human daughter? Tsk, tsk.”

  I looked back and saw Gail shrink back a little in the seat. She was pressed all the way behind my seat, as far away from Bowie as she could be within the Chevette.

  “Look man, first off, I am not leaving ‘bodies.’ I left one body for Sebastian, who is already too aware of what’s going on, and who certainly isn’t going to anyone else with the corpse. He’ll probably decapitate it, stake it, burn it, or something. Second, you got the abridged version of the Covenant.”

  “Abridged?”

  “Fuck, yeah. Three lines are easy to remember. But we’re talking about something older and longer than the Magna Carta. Whoever enlightened you probably saw no profit in describing all the exceptions.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, humans can join the Covenant. Hell they have to if you don’t want them to have one hell of a shock when you bring one over.”

  “Lord, you have no idea,” I whispered.

  “I knew what you were going through when you stumbled into the Arabica. The doctor I was going to take you to, he’s Leia’s grandfather.”

  “Why?” Gail said from behind me.

  “Why what?” Bowie asked.

  “Why are you helping my dad?”

  “Kane’s hunting down a guy named Childe.” Bowie’s face got a serious cast then. “Got my own thing with Childe.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Personal,” Bowie said flatly. “You find him, so would I.”

  I rubbed my forehead. We were rolling out of Bratenahl, and back toward Cleveland Heights.

  After a long pause, Bowie asked, very gravely, “What do you remember about being brought over? Who did it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Bowie repeated slowly.

  “You said you knew a doctor?” Gail asked.

  Bowie nodded, still looking askance at me, as if he didn’t trust my answers.

  “Then you’ve got to take Dad there, he needs help. His hand is injured.”

  “What?” Bowie asked. When I pulled my bandaged hand out of my pocket, Bowie added, “What the fuck is that smell?”

  I noticed it as well. A sweet-rancid odor was suddenly very noticeable. It was thickening in the air, and when I looked down, I could see a damp stain spreading on the elastic bandage covering my left hand.

  Gail started coughing.

  “My hand,” I said. Breathing in the odor made me gag.

  Bowie roll
ed down the window and leaned away from me. I stared at my hand. It was swollen and misshapen under the loose bandage, except where the stain centered around the base of my thumb, where it appeared the flesh had collapsed.

  “What happened?” Bowie shouted into the wind.

  “Sun?” Gail said, speaking through her hand.

  I rolled down the passenger window.

  “Of all the idiot things—” Bowie coughed. “Yeah, sweet-cakes, we’re going to see the doctor.”

  Bowie drove through Cleveland Heights, and into Shaker. He pulled us to a stop in front of a large brick house set about thirty feet back into its lot. It had large windows and a Tudor design that reminded me of Childe‘s—or Deite’s—apartment building. Even though it was a common style—a lot of the buildings in Shaker and Cleveland Heights wouldn’t be out of place in Lakewood, a lot of them built around the same time—the similarity put me on edge.

  Bowie parked my car on the curb. He piled out as soon as he killed the engine. I could smell why. Without the constant wind through the open window, the reek from my dead hand was overpowering. The bandage was crusted with seepage and the form underneath was only barely hand-shaped.

  I stumbled out, and Gail followed with her hand over her face. “My God, Dad.” She looked on the verge of throwing up, and the tears in her eyes had to be as much from the smell as from sympathy.

  The ache in my wrist had gotten worse, and I was rubbing it unconsciously. I could feel an ugly give to my skin, even though the sleeve of my jacket.

  “Come on,” Bowie said. “Got to fix that hand.” He made a face when he said it.

  He walked up to the house, and I was disturbed when I realized that the place was familiar. More than the accidental similarity to Childe’s apartment. The place in Lakewood was just another building. I felt as if I had been here. However, with the holes in my memory, I had no idea if the familiarity was significant. I didn’t know if it represented something that had happened in the last two weeks, or if the feeling came from some fragment of the prior four-and-a-half decades that I had yet to remember fully.

  “What kind of doctor?” Gail asked. He voice was muffled under the handkerchief she held to her face.

  Bowie chuckled, “Someone with an interest in our kind.”

  I wondered what kind of medial school someone went to, to specialize in “our kind.”

  My unease was becoming difficult to ignore. What did I know about this place? What was I trying to remember? I felt my good hand moving toward my holster as Bowie leaned on the doorbell. After a minute or so the door inched open. A redheaded woman looked at Bowie through the crack, Leia.

  “Yes?” she said in her high, breathy, English voice.

  “Leia? Could you get your grandfather for me?” Bowie nodded back toward where I stood back from the doorway. I stopped reaching for the gun.

  She looked past Bowie, at me. “You found him!” Her accent made me think about Childe again, redoubling my sense of nervousness. She looked about the age Childe was supposed to prey upon. My hand found the butt of my gun. “Who’s the girl?”

  “His daughter—Look, we got to do something about his hand.”

  She looked at me, and I saw something alive in her eyes. Not the fires I felt in Sebastian‘s, or the machinery I felt behind the Doberman’s, but something moving, living, and writhing in pain. When she spoke, her hand went to the collar of the black turtleneck she wore. A single blocky earring glinted from underneath a tumble of red hair. “What happened to his hand?”

  “Bad dose of sun,” Bowie said.

  She nodded, and I lost sight of those pained eyes. I felt no desire to see whatever those eyes had seen. “I’ll get Grandfather. Wait here,” she said, closing the door.

  As we waited, Bowie said, “Good looking babe, ain’t she?”

  “Hadn’t noticed.” That wasn’t quite a lie. I repeated Gail’s question, “So what kind of doctor is Leia’s grandfather?”

  “He was a medic in World War Two, when he got involved in—”

  The door opened again. Standing there was a broad, white-haired man in a blue bathrobe. “This better be good, I was—”

  He had begun by addressing Bowie but as he spoke he slowly turned, and I could see his nose wrinkle. “God,” he said. “How much tissue is affected?”

  He addressed the question to me. “My hand,” I said. “About six inches up the wrist.”

  He shook his head. “Come around back. I don’t want that smell infecting my house.”

  PART THREE

  THE CONQUEROR WORM

  By a route obscured and lonely,

  Haunted by ill angels only,

  Where an Eidolon, named Night,

  On a black throne reigns upright,

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule—

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

  Out of SPACE-out of TIME.

  —“Dream-Land”

  21

  Bowie nodded and waved us along. I followed. As we walked up the driveway, we passed a black BMW with vanity plates, “Ryan 1.”

  “Ryan’s a first or last name?” I asked Bowie.

  “Last, I think. Always call him Doc Ryan.”

  We came up on a patio around back, and stopped at a pair of storm-cellar doors abutting the house. The doors were new and set in fresh cinder block that appeared to have been built in the past two years or so. Bowie stopped by the doors, which—conspicuously—had no external handles.

  “Come here often?” I asked.

  “Doc’s been practicing a lot longer than I’ve been nocturnal.”

  Not a real answer, I thought. “So how long have you been ‘nocturnal?’”

  “Half a year or so.”

  “Who ‘brought you over’?”

  Bowie looked at me askance again. “If we get the time, I’ll tell you the story.”

  Gail spoke up from behind us. “Is this Doctor Ryan one of ... one of you?” she asked Bowie.

  Bowie shook his head. “No, the Doc ain’t one of us. I thought I mentioned that.”

  “He’s not?” I said.

  Bowie shrugged.

  “He knows what he’s doing?” Gail asked.

  “I suppose so,” Bowie said. “The gentry pay him enough for services rendered.”

  Gail squeezed my shoulder. I felt her concern. But, it was my hand and I couldn’t help feeling that it was wrong for her to be here. Even if there was some family exemption, some loophole in the Covenant that let her be here, it was wrong to drag her along—

  But what choice did I have? Did either of us have?

  With Bowie’s little asides, I felt my daughter being ensnared by the same nocturnal society that had ensnared me. Bowie, with nearly every sentence, was dropping references to a culture I barely knew and Gail was totally ignorant of.

  Ignorant of, and already trapped within. Just the fact that she knew meant she was ensnared in the web of relationships Gabriel had disclosed to me.

  Which made me wonder where Bowie fit within that web. With the easy way he talked about the Covenant, he must have a role within that society. Being only six months a vampire meant he was almost certainly a thrall to some older vampire. Which meant that, when I dealt with him I wasn’t dealing with Bowie. As far as the social rules were concerned, I was dealing with Bowie’s unknown master.

  A master whose name he’d avoided mentioning.

  I had an awful thought. What if Bowie belonged to Childe?

  Before I could worry any further, a short buzzing sound escaped from the doors. Then, after about two seconds, they swung outward. The wood exterior panels were only veneer. On the inside, the doors were thick, plastic and metal, with a rubber gasket surrounding the edges—airtight and soundproof.

  At the foot of the concrete stairs stood Doctor Ryan. He had dispensed with the bathrobe. He now wore jeans, a flannel shirt, and a long white lab coat. He still wore a pair of slippers.

  H
is hand rested on a metal box mounted on the wall, pressing a green button. Bowie led us down the stairs and once we all cleared the doors, Ryan pressed a red button and the buzz repeated itself, louder this time. The doors shut behind us with a hydraulic whisper of air.

  It wasn’t any warmer down here than it was outside. Combined with the white tile walls and the stark fluorescent lighting, the place felt like a morgue. If he treats vampires, maybe that’s what this is.

  “What’s your name, son?” Ryan asked with a puff of visible breath.

  “Kane,” I said.

  Ryan looked a little disappointed with my name. “And you, miss?”

  “Gail—can you help my dad?” She was still talking through a handkerchief.

  “I’m certain I can.” To Bowie he said, “You go upstairs, I don’t need company while I work.”

  “Sure, Doc. Maybe Leia can get me something to eat.” Bowie grinned and left before Ryan could answer him.

  To Gail, Ryan said, “You should go with him.”

  Before I could raise an objection, Gail straightened up and said, “I’m not leaving my father.”

  Ryan looked at her and said, rather gravely, “This is not going to be pleasant.” When she showed no sign of backing down, Ryan said, “Well, stay out of my way.”

  He led us down halls that were all concrete and white tile. Every ten feet or so we passed a blank stainless steel door, like the door to a commercial-sized freezer.

  “Quite a setup,” I said, cradling my hand and trying not to inhale the smell.

  Ryan seemed preoccupied. “What I do can be quite lucrative with the right patient.” We stopped in front of a door like the others. “Now I need to see that hand.”

  He opened the door. I expected to see lines of meat-hooks, hanging slabs of beef, or the like. Instead the room looked fairly normal, if stark. It was populated by stainless steel cabinets, chromed fixtures and spigots set into the walls, carts of medial equipment I couldn’t identify, and an examination table under an intricate-looking set of operating lights.