“We can take you, Kane.”
“The Covenant would frown on my death—”
She chuckled. “Let Childe bear that responsibility, as he’s borne so much else.”
“Would it frown on the destruction of thralls that go to such effort to flout it?” I leveled the gun. “Anyone who stands between me and my daughter is going to die.”
Hel growled, and the punk fondled the loose end of his nose-chain and looked bloodthirsty. Nosferatu smiled up at me with her surreal teeth. The ring piercing her lip glinted red. “That would be painful for both sides, more so than you think.” The glint vanished as she spoke. “Surrender to my master’s authority and I think we can avoid the pain. Both to you, and your Gail.”
“What master is that? Childe, if he is that thing upstairs, appears no master at all.”
The red glint had moved to the ring through her eyebrow as she laughed. “Childe? He’s no longer my master—”
The glint had drawn my gaze to the window on the landing below. Like most of the windows, it was covered with newspaper. Enough had torn away in the scuffle for someone to see in, if they were in the right spot. As she spoke, I saw a tiny dot of red laser light track across some of the newsprint—
“Get down!” I yelled, a fraction too late.
The window exploded inward as a gunshot blew the contents of Nosferatu’s elongated skull out the left side of her face. I never heard the shot.
29
I ran for it. I dashed up the stairs, holding the hole in my gut to keep from tearing open the just-healed wound. I heard growling behind me, and the sound of breaking glass. From somewhere I heard someone kicking in a door.
I passed by the door to the second-floor kitchen and heard a whispery laughing from beyond it. I kept going because I had no desire to confront the thing in the cage.
I shouldered through the door to the attic, dodging past the window on the landing, giving the sniper as little profile as possible. I was lucky. The window exploded, throwing glass, newspaper tatters, and dead flies across the .landing, but only after I’d passed.
I smelled something bad upstairs, but the sounds of chaos below continued to drive me upward.
I ran up into a huge peaked space running the length of the house. Above were naked, uninsulated rafters, covering a floor of loose gray planking. The space was lit by bluish moonlight from the rear window, and the yellow sodium streetlight from the front window. Neither window had glass or newspaper, and the wind blew wisps of snow through the attic.
Staring at me, from places in the eaves, between the beams supporting the roof, were small white faces. There were a dozen children up here, dirty-faced, pale, and looking at me with a feral stare that was becoming too familiar.
None of them looked older than thirteen, and half were naked and nearly as bony as the thing in the cage. The smell up here was appalling, and there was no incense to cover it.
Seeing kids up there filled me with a mixture of horror and pity. The force of the emotion slammed against the panic driving me, striking me still where I stood.
The children did not move, but they watched, and from their combined stares I felt a pressure akin to what I felt when that caged thing spoke to me. I heard the thing’s laughter from behind me, and it finally pushed me forward.
I advanced, slowly, toward the front of the house, becoming aware of how most of the beams up here bore the scars of claw marks. Gunshots and screams came from below, and I no longer heard rap music in the background.
The whispery laugh followed me to the window.
I kept an eye on the children; the sight of them was a weight in my gut. I edged to the window in the front of the house. I took a quick look out, too quick for anyone to get a shot off at me.
What I saw, however, was enough. I saw four cars pulled up down there, and one was a familiar-looking Oldsmobile. I also saw my Chevette, empty, with the passenger door hanging open. Sebastian was as good as his word. He was taking his revenge on the people who had taken his daughter. On Childe. He was going to save his daughter’s soul.
I felt the growing weight of my own guilt. Not only had I drawn my own daughter into this mess, I had led Sebastian to his daughter—and he was going to kill her, unless she had had the sense to run for it.
I had to get out of here and find Gail. She wasn’t here with Childe’s thralls. Where was she, then?
“You know where she is,” he said.
What had he meant by that?
“You are not of the other?” I spun around at the voice, and found myself leveling my Eagle at a naked six-year-old girl. At least, she looked like a six-year-old girl, except for her eyes.
“The other?” I stammered, unsure where to point my gun.
“The one who keeps our master from us,” said a scrawny ten-year-old.
I shook my head, unsure of what they were talking about. I was shaking from the enormity of everything. They were children.
“We are bound here twice,” said another child’s voice.
“Once to Master.”
“Once to other.”
There were more screams from the first floor. Diving out the window was looking more and more attractive. These children frightened me worse than the chaos below me, almost as much as the caged thing. And there was the porch roof one floor below me. I’d made worse jumps. I rubbed the wound on my gut. The skin felt raw, but intact.
The kids were all talking at me, their words running together as if they were one person speaking.
“Are you here to free Master?”
“Or kill him?”
“Who do you bring?”
“Who do you serve?”
“Will you free us from Master?”
“Or other?”
“One must die now.”
Their words pressed me against the wall, even though none of them took a step toward me. The assault was verbal, but there was a psychic pressure behind the words to the point where I wasn’t even sure I was hearing their voices, in the normal sense of the word.
“Stop it!” I yelled, with all the force I could muster.
The babble ceased, and I heard movement below me. Someone was walking on the second floor. Dimly I heard a voice. “Shit, what the fuck is that?”
“Gimme that cross,” said another voice. The whispery laughter below had ceased. In its place I heard that same paper-thin voice say, “Come.”
That one word filled me with dread, despite the fact that it wasn’t addressed to me.
“Come,” the whisper repeated, an undeniable force behind the voice.
The children, all of them, turned away from me, toward the stairs at the rear of the attic. “Master,” said the one nearest me. There was reverence in that voice.
Below me I heard a panicked voice saying, “Murphy, what the fuck are you—get the fuck away from—SHIT!”
There was an agonized liquid scream, and three rapid gunshots.
The children began slowly walking toward the stairwell. “He will come.”
“Free us from the other.”
The kids had begun another monotone babbling. I missed most of it because someone downstairs was putting shots through the floor. Two boards too close to me exploded outward, exposing splintered bullet holes shafted with candlelight from below.
The laugh was back. It no longer sounded like the laugh from a corpse. It was loud, vulgar, unashamed. The man with the gun was screaming something incoherent. It took a moment, between the gunshots, to realize that it was the twenty-third psalm.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death!—” Blam! “—fear no evil: for Thou art with—” Blam! “—rod and Thy staff they comfort me—”
His voice was choked off, and there were no further gunshots. The laughter ceased, and was replaced by a wet sucking sound.
I shuddered, and one of the children standing around the head of the stairs turned to face me. “He will wish to see you, Raven. He will come to free us from the other.�
�
That monotone sentence still hung in the air when I heard the sound of fabric tearing, glass breaking, and wood cracking apart. I looked out the window, below me, in time to see a body tumble onto the porch’s roof. The parts of the corpse I saw were completely dessicated, shriveled to the bone. Its neck hung open, and it left red tracks in the snow as it rolled off the roof to the right, into the driveway.
It had been thrown through the window below mine, and tatters of red velvet drapery and newspaper were still floating to the ground in the front yard. A gold cross glinted in the snow.
If I wanted to move, I had to do it now. I jumped though the glassless window, to the roof of the porch below. I bent my knees as I hit, keeping the gun away from me. The impact shuddered my body, but no bones broke, and my abdomen didn’t split open—though it felt as if it wanted to.
I rolled twice, to the left, slowing. I was just about to jump to my feet when I ran out of roof. There was a sickening lurch as I went into free fall above the driveway of the next house. I fell five feet onto a car below me.
The car’s roof caved in with the impact. Safety-glass exploded underneath me. I froze for a second or two, as the pain of the collision washed through my body and evaporated. The car’s owners, occupants of the neighboring house, were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished with their music.
I forced myself up, out of the concave roof, and the hood below my feet dimpled with a bullet’s impact. The sniper was still out there.
I rolled off of the roof, scrambling to my feet, and ran through the snow in front of the house. The sniper had to be behind the house, somewhere in the cemetery, and Childe’s house offered the best cover I had—
As I ran, I almost collided with more of Sebastian’s thugs, running out the front of the house. I raised my gun, but they barely paid attention to me as they beat a panicked retreat. There were four of them, and two were busy carrying a wounded comrade.
They piled into an illegally parked Dodge, which began accelerating away before the doors were shut.
I ran for the Chevette, thinking, Did I black out for a moment? All the damn cars are gone.
From the looks of it, every one of the cars had pulled away at top speed. Snow had been sprayed across the side of the Chevette.
“What the fuck did you do to her!” I yelled at the now empty street. The Chevette was empty; the passenger door hung open with a shattered window. I was filled with a futile rage at Sebastian and Childe, and I didn’t know if I was screaming for Cecilia, Gail, or the six-year-old girl in the attic.
When did those bastards catch up with me?
I looked up, the car between me and Childe’s house. Standing in the attic window was a naked man. He had a Van Dyke beard and shoulder-length hair that blew in the biting wind. He was soaked in blood from the neck down. The face he wore belonged to the pictures I had seen of Manuel Deité.
He saw me looking, and smiled....
Small forms were darting about in the shadows around the house, larger than rats.
I dove into the Chevette, fear gripping my chest. I fumbled the ignition and accelerated away without looking at the house again.
I raced the Chevette through night-empty streets. I had blown it. I was furious with myself, mad enough that I was halfway to Shaker before my body reasserted its normal appearance. I had led Sebastian’s people straight to Childe’s house.
Hadn’t I?
I had a gut suspicion that the whole scene was staged, from act one up to Sebastian’s untimely arrival. I thought of Cecilia’s story, her convenient imprisonment on the site of the sacrifice I had witnessed.
Where the fuck had Gabriel been? He had been looking for Childe, he had seen Cecilia before I had, and Cecilia had led me straight to the maniac. That whole house seemed designed to piss off Gabriel, the whole unsubtle setup. Childe had been starved in a box so he couldn’t interfere with what was going on, letting his thralls go on a rampage, causing all sorts of havoc.
I now knew where Childe had disappeared to, and where Cecilia had disappeared to—and it didn’t fit.
I could visualize the box trapping Childe. A strong vampire could break out of that thing, but if he’d undergone a massive injury, and was locked in there—I could picture his body feeding on its own resources in the absence of blood, the body wasting away to become the skeletal thing I had seen. From the actions of his thralls, Childe had been in that box since before I’d ever heard Cecilia’s name.
Nothing fit, unless Cecilia was lying. If someone had set Childe up, shut him up in the box up there, that same person had staked out that ritual site for me to witness; that same person had shut Cecilia up in the mausoleum with Joey; that same person had control of Childe’s thralls and had staged the house for Cecilia to lead someone to.
All the talk of two masters was beginning to sink in. I was dealing with another vampire. The person who had transformed Cecilia, who had infected her, wasn’t Childe. She wasn’t the kind of person who Childe would take. Her father was a powerful man who would believe the bloody clues left for him, and would react accordingly.
That was what my wife and I were, bloody clues left to ensure that Sebastian would act. The vampire who had taken Cecilia, who had staged the sacrifice, he was my enemy. He was the one in the cowled robe, not Childe. He was the one who had taken my daughter.
I knew two vampires who had some grudge against Childe. Who would want some summary justice delivered for his breaches of the Covenant. Gabriel was the first and the most obvious, but his world revolved around the Covenant. Would he stage all this to give himself an excuse to dispose of Childe? It seemed unlikely now. More than that, if he had set up this charade, why was Childe still alive?
Someone else had set up Childe for Gabriel’s benefit. And at the last minute, after talking to Cecilia, Gabriel had not risen to the bait. Cecilia had told him what she had told me, but I could see Gabriel talking to her as he had me. I could see him asking who her master was. I could see her lying. I could see him taste her blood, as he had mine—and maybe he could taste who her master really was. The old ones seemed to see, to sense, more than I could.
If it wasn’t Gabriel, that left me one other suspect. The person I’d seen with the thralls, the person who was free to follow Gail to Sam’s apartment, the person who’d been feeding me information on Childe all along....
Bowie.
Bowie had shown up too conveniently at the Arabica right after my run-in with the thralls, he had broken me out of Sebastian’s in a way that was sure to inflame him, he had disappeared right after I had sent my daughter to so-called safety. The bastard had been using me all along, using me to lead everyone to suspect Childe, everyone from Sebastian and Gabriel to the cops.
The demon thrall had said that I knew where my daughter was. I thought of the first time I’d seen Bowie and Leia together. I slammed the brakes and skidded the car around to head toward Shaker Heights.
30
I pulled the Chevette to a halt angled across the tree-lawn of the Ryan house. I threw open the car door and rushed the front of the house. I shouldered my way into the house as Doctor Ryan ran down the hall toward me. He wore a blood-spattered lab coat.
“What’s going on here—”
“Where is she?”
Ryan stopped short, about ten feet down the corridor from me. He eyed the splintered doorjamb behind me. “Who?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Doc,” I said. “I want my daughter, and I want the man responsible for all this.”
“Look, perhaps you should calm down.”
“Fuck calm!” I drew the Eagle and leveled it at the doctor. “I want my daughter or I’m emptying your skull into the wallpaper.”
“Mr. Tyler....” The doctor backed to the wall. I advanced until the barrel of the Eagle was pressed against the white stubble on his cheek.
“Hey, man, you really ought to calm down,” came a familiar voice from behind me.
I whipped around, keeping the barrel of my gun
pressed into Ryan’s neck. Bowie emerged from the den behind us. He stopped and leaned against the doorframe at the foot of the stairs. He looked unconcerned about Ryan.
“Give me my daughter,” I said through clenched teeth. “Give her back, or I swear I’ll kill him.”
Bowie shook his head and tsked at me. “It doesn’t work like that.”
I chambered around and said, “Fuck that, you bastard. You’ve used me to set up Childe, and it ends now—”
Bowie kept shaking his head. “No, it doesn’t. That’s why we have her. With all the pieces out there, Sebastian, the cops... Childe will self-destruct if he hasn’t been killed already.”
“It’s over. Childe’s freed himself, and Gabriel’s on to you.”
Bowie laughed. “Sure he is. But do you see him here? He won’t stick his neck out for Childe. He wants the status for Childe’s head.”
“But—”
“If Gabriel’s the cavalry, where is he?”
I kept the gun pressed into Ryan’s neck, and he muttered, “Please.”
Bowie shook his head. “Put the gun down.”
“Why, damn you?” I shouted. “Why take her?”
“What’s she ever done to me, she’s never hurt anyone, she wasn’t a threat....” Bowie straightened up and took a step toward me. “That’s what you mean, ain’t it? Christ, ain’t it obvious? Sebastian held her over you, and pretty damn soon you’d twig to what was happening, and we couldn’t have you talking to Sebastian or the cops when you figured it out.”
“Who’s ‘we?’ ” I breathed. Anger was twisting a hole in my gut.
“Me and my master,” Bowie said. “And you have her word that no harm will come to your precious Gail if you just subjugate yourself to her.”
Her?
“Put down the gun,” came a voice from up the stairs, between me and Bowie.
I turned so I could keep an eye on the stairs as well as Bowie. Leia stood at the head of the stairs, glaring down at me. She was as pale as ever, and deep in her eyes I felt a tug that could only come from one source.
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