And over that, came that whine.
Ahead of me, across a room furnished from a nineteenth-century garbage heap, was a trunk, or a table, concealed underneath a tasseled red cover. Gold thread had come loose from the cover, leaving random stitches as almost-comprehensible hieroglyphs.
I took a step and I saw one of the tassels move.
That sound, an exhausted anguished cry, came from under that cover. And something underneath it was moving.
“Gail?” I whispered so low that I didn’t hear my own voice.
Whatever the covered object was, it was set so its top was at waist height. It was at least seven feet long, maybe a yard wide. I approached it, hands shaking, feeling perspiration for the first time since the sewer.
I saw that the object was not perfectly flat. The edges were higher than the center, some sort of frame ...
Within a foot the smell was almost intolerable. Not just from the incense-burning braziers that flanked this thing, but from the rot the incense was trying to cover.
The sound died. It didn’t trail off so much as sever itself. Something pushed the red cover, brushing it slightly from underneath. It was a weak motion, and only the thought of Gail kept me from backing away.
I lightly tugged the cover away from the rectangular object. It only took a slight tug before the cover slid off under its own weight.
The object uncovered was as much a discard from the last century as the rest of the room. But it belonged in an insane asylum, or a torture chamber.
I reeled from the box, as the thing inside began keening again.
It was a flat cage of wood and iron, two feet by three feet by seven. The box sat, like an offering, on an antique table supported by a set of cracked jade dragons. The creature imprisoned within could not move more than a few inches in any direction.
It wasn’t my daughter; the thing inside that cage had been trapped for much longer....
Exposed, the thing within began thrashing and jerking, screaming louder. It was naked, and reduced to nearly a skeleton. Ragged holes were worn in its flesh, and the skin in its face had tightened to form a rictus grin. The eyes had sunken too deep in the skull for me to see more than shadowed holes. Its teeth were fangs, and its fingers formed six-inch claws—
I kept backing away from it.
It shook as if having a seizure, the claws on its hands slashing its sides. As I watched, the wounds tried to heal, seal themselves shut. However, the flesh would fester and boil instead, and leave another crater in its skin.
I had retreated all the way to the kitchen door when the caged thing arched its back and tore at a gaping wound that scarred most of its shriveled abdomen.
It screamed as it sank claws into its gut, and when its hand withdrew and slapped against the bars, it dropped something that fell through the bars and to the carpet. It was a rat, coat slick and black. It scurried off into the darkness to join its brethren.
I wanted to vomit.
The imprisoned thing sank into quiescence, not breathing, not moving, as silent as a corpse. Just looking at it made me feel filthy. Who would do this, to anyone? To anything?
I took a step forward, and it didn’t move.
I walked back up to the cage. The creature was as physically devastated as a mummy. It was nearly impossible to determine sex—determining age was hopeless.
When I reached its side, the flesh the rat had fed upon had aged to match the other old sores that perforated its flesh. The motionlessness was so complete that it was hard to believe that I wasn’t looking at an inert corpse.
“Raven?”
I jumped at the breathy whisper. It shocked me badly enough that I nearly put a bullet through the cage.
“I see your name. ” It slowly turned its head, eyes burning red in its deep sockets. The voice was weak, paper thin, and it terrified me. I leveled the Eagle, aiming between those red eyes, but I didn’t fire.
My hands shook.
“Let us sup, you and I,” it said. I felt gore-spotted talons clawing into my mind. I could feel its will pulling me down toward it.
Strength, I thought.
“No,” I whispered, raising my gun and tearing my eyes away from the gaze of that thing.
“Sate my hunger and I will be yours,” it whispered. I kept backing away, into the kitchen. I was relieved when I finally slipped away from that thing. There was something very special about that creature in the cage—
Before I had enough distance to think, I was interrupted by the sound of voices outside, behind the house. The thing in the cage must have heard them, too, because I heard something that might have been a laugh. The sound it made was little more than a whispery cough, but there was a malignant humor woven into it, a weight of malicious unreason.
It was hard to retreat into the stairwell. The corpse-thing pulled attention to itself, even when it had receded from view. It was hard to concentrate on anything else, knowing it was there.
The voices behind the house were close enough to be intelligible over the music blaring next door. It was the hard rhythm of gangster rap more than the voices that pulled me back into the present.
“—the fuck’s the matter with Joey, man?” The voice was fast, high-pitched. It came from almost directly under my feet and I edged up next to the window across the landing from the kitchen door.
“Wake up, Joey. Say something!” Female voice, deeper, rougher than the first. When I was next to the window, I peeled some yellowing newsprint away from the window, so I could see down into the yard. The paper came away in a shower of dead flies.
I saw six figures, struggling along the path between the back door and the cemetery. They were half-dragging a bald man with staring eyes.
“What, Hel? Like Joey said anything before? We had to lock him up, remember?” This was another woman, back to me, who was leading the bald guy by the arm.
“Shut up!” said the first female voice. There was a paleness to that woman, to all of them except the bald guy, more than makeup could account for. Their skin was near-translucent. Hel’s skin was white enough to make her lips appear black by contrast.
Everyone’s hair was black as well, again, except for the bald guy. The bald one was dressed in the same Goth-punk outfit as the rest of them, but rattier, mud-spattered.
It wasn’t until they were close enough for me to see the hole blown in his shirt that I realized that I was looking at zombie-boy. That shocked the hell out of me, because there wasn’t any of the leprous rot on him anymore. He wasn’t even pale, like his escorts. Joey’s skin was now smooth, pink, and as blemish-free as a baby’s. I didn’t see a speck of hair, or a sign of the bullet holes I had put into him.
However, his eyes were as blank as a dead television set. He stared straight ahead, being led by his fellows, showing no sign of anyone at home.
“We are vulnerable,” I whispered. I had shot this guy in the head and all the mechanical damage, even to the brain tissue, had regenerated. The mind, it seemed, had not.
I swallowed, thinking about what would have happened to me had the late detective fired an inch or two higher into my face. I’d be dealing with more than a little amnesia.
However, the fact that the body had returned to a state healthier than when I had shot him, that I had trouble figuring.
I had two choices—run for it, or force a confrontation.
With Gail missing, I had one choice. The Eagle didn’t counterbalance being outnumbered like this, but these were the beings responsible for the disappearance of my daughter, more so than Childe—whose fate I was only now beginning to comprehend.
I didn’t want to meet with the cage-thing again, so I started down the stairs for the first-floor apartment. I listened to the two women argue over Joey as I ran down two flights of stairs. “Joey’s nuts, Hel.”
“Shut up. We’ll get him better—we’re promised that much.”
“Yeah, for sitting on the missing newbie. Did you forg—”
“Shut up!”
/> I had reached the landing behind the kitchen door on the first floor when I heard a new male voice say. “Girls, we’ve got a problem.” With the voice, I heard the rear door creak open. It was a voice I had heard before, from the rear of Sam’s car, and Childe’s answering machine tape.
I braced the Eagle in both hands as I approached the landing.
I heard one whisper from the woman who wasn’t Hel. “Stace, stay with the geek.” Then the voices silenced themselves.
The shadow from the door below slid by the wall next to me. I backed to the far corner from the door and tried to become part of the shadows. My Eagle was focused down the flight, toward the back door. Next door, amplification distorted a voice rapping about natural-born killers.
Three figures slipped into the stairwell. Even in the dark, the albino skin on the trio lifted their images out of the shadows. The clothing they wore faded into the blackness, making their heads and hands gray and disembodied.
The one in the lead, the male, looked directly toward me and said, “So what the fuck’s this?” It was eerie to see this guy close up. He looked like someone playing at being undead, someone who could blend in with all the other teenagers who’d read Anne Rice once too many times. However, at this distance it was obvious that the pale skin wasn’t makeup. I could see the shadow of his veins weaving under the surface. The vivid mouth could have been lipstick, but I suspected a play-actor would have chosen pure black or red, and not a shade exactly the color of clotted blood.
“Where is my daughter,” I said to him.
The guy laughed. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, do you?”
I kept my gun leveled at him. “Neither do you. I’m supposed to be dead, remember? Where is she?”
I looked past him at the two women. One, with hair long and black, was wearing a floor-length dress that looked extremely impractical for anything other than hiding bloodstains. The woman next to her was more punk than Goth. She had shaved the sides of her head, and wore about a pound of jewelry through various holes in her face. Like the lead guy, she wore a studded motorcycle jacket, self-consciously abused black denim, and a pair of Doc Martens.
Thirty years ago, Childe’s disciples probably wore tie-dyed peasant shirts, granny-glasses and love beads.
The guy took a step forward, up the center of the stairwell. The two women slid to the walls and followed, a foot or so behind him. The punked-out girl was giving me a hungry, long-toothed smile.
“I’d stay where you are,” I said.
The guy shook his head. “That gun can’t do anything to us.”
It was my turn to smile. These kids were more ignorant than I was. “Joey would tell you different if he could still talk.”
Hel screamed and leaped toward me, and I would have put a bullet through her if the guy hadn’t blocked her. Punk-woman was no longer smiling.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, his words slurring a bit behind a long grimace.
I felt a shriveling in my gut as I realized I was watching them change. Their skulls were shifting, favoring an inhumanly long jawline and carnivorous teeth. Their nails were lengthening, turning into black claws. The punk one was turning into a pierced version of the vampire from that silent German film, Nosferatu.
The moment I noticed, I could feel the skin in my face tightening in sympathy.
“A slug through the brain,” I said. “The nerve tissue might grow back, but I doubt it knits into anything really complex.”
He took another step, and Hel was pushing to get by him. Her eyes had gone blood-red with fury. She snarled like an animal, her skin had gone gray and twisted, and her skull was forming a muzzle.
“Stop!” I put what will I could into the word. I tried to force down the trio with my stare, as I had tried with Joey. I pushed, but with the three of them it was barely enough to force a pause in their advance. “I took third in marksmanship. I’ll drop one of you, probably two, before you reach me.”
They stopped advancing; even Hel stopped snarling for a moment.
“Where’s my daughter?” I said.
“You know where she is, Kane.” His voice had become high and hissing. Where Hel was changing into something animalistic, he was turning into something demonic. His forehead had distorted into a shape that suggested a crest and horns.
“Where’s Gail?” I yelled at them. My own voice was slurring, my tongue was too thick in an oddly formed mouth.
There was something wrong. The demon laughed and I realized that it wasn’t my will forcing them back. They were waiting for something.
It struck me all at once. There’d been six of them. Joey was guarded by someone out back. Werewolf, Demon and Nosferatu were in the stairwell with me—
Where was the last vampire?
I tensed, expecting it, and when the door to the kitchen exploded open, I fired the Eagle into the Demon’s face before I began turning. I was tackled by a punk nightmare before I finished my movement. I had a visceral glimpse of chain and leather, then my back slammed into the wall, crushing plaster and splintering lathe. Claws pierced the wrist of my gun hand, pinning it to the frame of the window next to me.
More claws pierced my abdomen, just above the groin. I felt its hand slam against my spine in a white-hot explosion of pain.
My vision fogged red. I watched its face, which seemed small and distant through the pain, despite being an inch away from mine. He was somewhere between Nosferatu and the Demon, ugly, but still vaguely human. Even more jewelry hung off his face than the other punks. Rings and chains jingled, almost touching my face.
Its jaw levered open, revealing carnivore teeth in a waft of carrion breath. One gold tooth remained disturbingly human.
I forced myself to move through the shock. I reached up to push its face away with my left hand, and found myself with my hands on a chain that dangled between its right ear and the bony ridge that used to be a nose. I yanked to the left, toward the wall next to me.
The chain came free of the ear instantly, it seemed, and its jaw snapped shut short of my neck. Its nose was more durable, especially with the cartilage that seemed to have grown around the end of the chain.
Its head snapped to the side, following the chain, slamming into the wall, going through the plaster. Its hands fell away from my gut and my wrist.
I stumbled back, away from everything, up the stairs toward the second floor. I faced down the stairs, leveling the Eagle two-handed as the flesh knitted on stomach and my wrist.
I heard Hel before I saw her—a feral growl to my right, behind the wall separating the stairwells. I’d stumbled halfway to the landing above when the growling thing rounded the wall into view. Whatever it was, it was no longer even vaguely human. It was wolflike, a wolf with sickle claws and sharklike teeth. It loped toward me, clumsily, on all fours.
The Eagle barked in my hand, drowning the thing’s growls. The kick from the gun slammed spikes of pain into my still-healing wrist. The wolf-thing was close enough to the muzzle-flash that I smelled its coarse fur smolder.
The shot took out a chunk of its shoulder above the left foreleg. It tumbled backwards into the punk I’d slammed into the plaster, who was just now unwedging itself. They both tumbled into a heap under the window on the landing below me.
I scrambled up on the landing behind me, my gut leaking despite my body’s efforts to repair itself.
My ears still rang from the gunfire as Nosferatu rounded the corner. She was still recognizable, even with the long clawed fingers and the vast forehead, and that made the transformation seem even worse.
I realized I was snarling as badly as the wolf, and my remade hands were making it difficult to keep the gun level.
What the hell have I turned into?
Nosferatu looked up at me and held a hand back, gesturing her tangled comrades still. “Everyone chill the fuck out!”
Amazingly, her voice was unchanged, despite the radical dental work her front teeth had undergone. Everyone stopped movin
g. I was grateful for the pause, because I could feel parts of my stomach moving around by themselves.
“Now what?” I asked, keeping the gun leveled at her skull. I had to lean against the wall to keep my hands steady. It was a standoff, and they knew it. I was pretty sure they could take me, but only with a high cost. The trio gathered at the foot of the second stairwell; it was just wide enough for two of them to rush me.
No sign of the demon, or the one guarding Joey.
That one must have heard the shots, and I was worried about being blindsided again. I was next to another window on this landing, facing the driveway. I tried to keep an eye on it, as well as the half of the stairwell going up to the second floor. I was too exposed where I was, but I couldn’t keep retreating upward without losing sight of the vampires below me.
“You better put the gun down, Kane,” Nosferatu finally said. “You aren’t getting out of here.” I felt a dominating pressure behind the words, but it was almost perfunctory. It didn’t even compare to the thing in the cage, much less the one glimpse of real power I had seen in Jaguar.
“My chosen name is Raven.” I smiled, which felt odd with my altered jawline.
“You’re outnumbered, in our domain. You belong to us—”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that. Your horned friend might have chewed on my neck, but I took nothing from him. I own my own blood.” I shook my head. “Nothing here belongs to you. It all belongs to your master.”
I felt a wave of contempt wash up the stairwell. I couldn’t tell which of the three it was coming from, or if it was inner- or outer-directed.
“To our master, then—”
“No one’s my master.” I slurred my speech, but it was becoming easier to talk. I was getting used to the shape of my jaw, which was good, since no one seemed to be changing back. I hoped that it was related to stress, and I wasn’t stuck as whatever I was now.
“That can change.” Nosferatu had slipped easily into the spokesman role. I suspected she wasn’t that unhappy that demon-boy had taken a bullet in the face.
The thought reminded me of Joey and his keeper. Where were they? For that matter, what about Cecilia? If she had any brains, she’d run for it, or had swiped the Chevette.
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