Edward Andrassy sat in a bar as night descended, waiting for an old man. It was ironic. He had spent most of his adult life waiting for old men of one sort or another. If not for himself, then for the women or the boys who occasionally worked for him. It was a life few would envy, and he had spent the last few months trying to get out of it. He had been offered something that was pretty much unbelievable, and priceless if it were true.
Eternal life, he thought, sipping beer that was strangely tasteless now.
Listening to Him the first few times, it seemed so simple. It was impossible to say no, even when He started feeding them His blood. It wasn’t even hard to call Him Master after that. What bothered Andrassy was when it came to others’ blood.
He was still human, apparently, bound to Him, but not close enough to ignore the taste of someone else’s blood in his mouth.
Now he waited for an old man, someone an age older than anyone he had ever met save his Master, Melchior. He hoped that this old man would be able to tell him a way through to where he was going, a way that wasn’t lined with so much death.
The man he was meeting was his Master’s enemy, but Andrassy was past caring. He had seen all the people who had come under Melchior’s control become less and less human, more and more extensions of Melchior. Even Flo, who had started off the most human, even she was less moved at the carnage that Melchior fed them upon.
Andrassy set aside the beer, unfinished. He watched the sky darken outside and wondered how many sunsets he would see.
Eventually a presence filled the crowded bar, a pressure at the back of his neck that told Andrassy that the man he’d been waiting for was here. One of the blood who didn’t belong to Melchior. It was reassuring to think that there were others that weren’t of his master; it meant that the Master’s way wasn’t the only way.
A hand touched his shoulder, and a voice said, “Let us walk away from here.”
At the touch, it seemed that Andrassy had entered a world that only contained him and the old man. The bar and the crowd inside it seemed to fade away, and no one noticed their exit. The old man he left with was named Anacreon, and Andrassy suspected that he was one of the most powerful ones of the blood in this city. Physically, he didn’t look like much. He was short, dumpy, middle-aged.
The old man was nearly six hundred years old.
Andrassy didn’t believe that just because the old man said so. He believed it because he could feel the centuries in the old man’s presence. He believed it in the sense of power he had next to him. He believed it because in Anacreon’s presence was the only time he didn’t fear his Master. In Anacreon, he saw someone who could protect him, someone who might be on a par with Melchior.
They walked through the streets of the Roaring Third, past the bars and tenements, past the hustlers and the prostitutes. None paid them attention, as if they weren’t quite real.
As they walked, the old man spoke, “You must tell me everything you can now.” The old man was insistent, and waves of the old man’s will pushed against Andrassy’s.
But Andrassy wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t going to cave immediately. He had enough of his own will to act against his Master; he wasn’t going to give anything to the old man without something in return. The old man wanted Melchior, and information was all Andrassy had to bargain with.
“You know what I want,” Andrassy said.
“You don’t realize what you ask.”
“I want what He’d give me, without the strings. You want me to roll over on someone without getting something in return?”
The old man shook his head, “You ask me to warn your Master before I have anything to convince the Council to move against him.”
“I gave you the corpse. Ain’t that enough?”
“For me,” he said; “Laila’s death is enough. Your Master has violated the Covenant in a grievous manner. But for me to act without first convincing the Council would be little more than another violation of the Covenant. Taking you over the threshold now would warn him of what is to come.”
“So why am I talking to you, old man?”
Anacreon turned and placed his hands on Andrassy’s shoulders. The touch was like a lightning bolt through his body. Andrassy’s mouth snapped shut as he felt the strength behind Anacreon’s withering gaze. Under that stare, Andrassy felt as if his shoulders were being peeled apart.
Despite a gaze that struck Andrassy like a blow, Anacreon did not raise his voice. “Listen. You are thrall to this killer. You will not be free until he is dead. As for what you ask, you have it already. Enough of the blood runs through your veins that were you to fall now to mortal death, you would be reborn. Reborn a thrall. All I need is the Council to act against him, and when he is gone you would be born of your own blood. Give me what I need.”
They stood like that, and it seemed hours before Andrassy realized that the street life had abandoned them. The streets were empty of people now. They stood between a deserted warehouse and a vacant lot. Andrassy had never felt more alone.
“What do you want?”
“Very first—Your Master. In his secret heart, what has he named himself?”
Andrassy’s lips moved to form the word, but he never had a chance to speak it. From the darkness around them, the wind carried a whispered name, “Melchior.”
The old man let go, and Andrassy fell to the ground as if those hands were all that had been holding him upright. Anacreon turned around, facing down the street so fast that Andrassy barely saw him move. He faced an area of deepening shadow at the end of the street.
“You think to surprise me?” The words floated on the wind, sinking so deep into Andrassy’s brain it hurt. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, in the way his heart tried to tear free of his chest. His Master was here, and Andrassy had led Him here.
Anacreon faced the darkness, and his body radiated strength, a bright flare of unseen light. His body twisted like water, muscles rippling, bones shifting. “Melchior,” the thing that was Anacreon said. “An old name.”
“Yes,” replied the wind.
“An arrogant name,” Anacreon said. The old man was no more. What stood in his place was a form that was somewhere between an angel and a demon. Its skin seemed to glow with an inner light, and its claws seemed metallic in the streetlight. The perfection of form was painful for Andrassy to look at.
“The last name you will hear.”
Anacreon spread its wings, and the darkness descended upon him.
The light and darkness tore at each other. Andrassy, on the ground, felt every blow as if it was falling on his own body. He should have moved, run, done anything to get away from what was happening. But he stayed there, frozen.
Melchior seemed little more than a shadow. But Anacreon’s metal claws tore into it and tore pieces away. For a few eternal moments, it seemed that his Master was no match for the angelic thing wrestling him. Then something changed. The shadow seemed to wrap itself around Anacreon’s head, and there was a gleam of metal that wasn’t from any claw.
Something tore through flesh and Andrassy closed his eyes.
In the darkness he heard something drink.
Andrassy didn’t run. There was nowhere he could have gone. When he opened his eyes, his Master stood there, over a body that was just the old man again. In his hands Melchior held Anacreon’s head. Scars raked across Melchior’s body, flesh torn so badly that it was a miracle that he still stood. As Andrassy watched, the wounds closed up.
“That was ... inconvenient,” Melchior said. “You brought me to this too soon, Andrassy. I’m still gathering myself. You will have to pay.” He walked up to Andrassy, and his will clamped down on him. In the man’s mind there were no longer any thoughts but those of his Master.
He would be punished, and the Master’s children would feed.
3
Sunday, September 22
On Sunday, the Church descended on Stefan’s Gomorrah. Cleveland, one of the midwestern strongholds of Catho
licism, was host to the Seventh National Eucharist Congress. A religious fervor gripped the city in a mood that was more appropriate to a Rome or a Jerusalem.
Few were immune from the force of the event, whatever their faith. Tens of thousands of onlookers crowded Euclid Avenue, lining the streets to watch the procession. They packed the sidewalks, in some cases spilling onto the lawns of the remaining handful of old mansions on Millionaire’s Row.
No one objected to the tide of immigrant labor trampling once-luxurious lawns. The mansions that didn’t stand vacant were mostly occupied by some charitable institution that closed on Sunday.
As the procession marched past the remnants of nineteenth-century aristocracy, only one of the grand old houses turned other than a blind eye toward it. A massive stone structure, isolated from its cousins on the avenue, a building that seemed to resist the oncoming century by a combination of inertia and force of will.
High in one of the third-floor windows, a man who called himself Eric Dietrich, one of the first millionaires to occupy Millionaire’s Row since the end of the Great War, stared down at the procession.
“All they need is a wounded Christ dragging his cross in front of them,” he said.
The man seated in the room behind Dietrich winced and said, “Please, can we do without the blasphemy?”
Dietrich turned and faced the man, smiling slightly. “You are in my house, Mr. Van Sweringen. If I say they should nail a Christ up in Public Square in front of that Tower of yours, what right have you to complain?”
Oris Paxton Van Sweringen sat in the dusty wing-backed chair and glared at Dietrich. It had been a long, long, time since he had to endure people talking to him like that. He and his brother were two of the most powerful men in the United States.
Except, for the moment, they weren’t. All Oris Van Sweringen could do was nod politely and agree, “Yes, this is your house. But you could be more accommodating to a guest.”
Dietrich let loose a humiliating laugh. Oris shrank under the weight of it. It was as if this man, this evil bastard, had seen into his mind and had taken all the laughter, all the derision that had ever been heaped upon the odd pair of brothers and had focused it into a single sound.
Oris couldn’t take it any longer. He stood. “I think this will be all, Mr. Dietrich.”
Dietrich walked away from the window, shaking his head. “Are you in a position to walk away from me, Mr. Van Sweringen?”
Oris stayed silent, his face burning. He knew he should be talking through a lawyer. He knew he wasn’t at his best one-on-one, especially without his brother’s support. “You can talk to our lawyers,” he said, trying to force some iron into his voice.
Mr. Dietrich kept walking around the room, forcing Oris to turn to remain facing him. Framed by furnishings out of the last century, Mr. Dietrich seemed almost spectral. He was six inches taller than Oris, with pale skin that, by contrast to the muddy colors of the old furniture, almost appeared bleached. His face was framed by hair of near-invisible blondness.
Dietrich stopped walking and tapped his fingers on an oak sideboard. His fingers smeared arcane patterns in the dust. “Why would I wish to talk to an intermediary?”
“You’ve made a rather complex offer, Mr. Dietrich,” Oris said, regaining some of his composure. “We need some time to evaluate it. It needs to be handled by our lawyers and accountants. We’re talking about the control of a three-billion-dollar—”
“I know exactly what we’re talking about.” Dietrich’s voice was as cold and characterless as the skin of a corpse. He ran his hand across the sideboard, erasing the marks he’d made in the dust. “I know how adept you and Mantis are at manipulating the illusion of money. You stand upon a mountain of paper.” Dietrich slowly turned to face Oris. “No lawyers. No accountants.”
Oris shook his head. “This is different than the license we granted you. That was just space in the terminal, right-of-way on some track. That was something a handshake could settle. This is so far beyond that it is beyond comprehension.”
Dietrich spun around and stared at Oris. His eyes were purple-red, which Oris had always taken as a sign of albinism. Right now those eyes seemed to burn. The feeling was so intense that Oris felt his skin heat up. He reached up and loosened his tie.
“Enough,” Dietrich said. He didn’t raise his voice, but the word felt like a blow.
He took a step toward Oris.
“What will happen in New York if you do not have the capital? If your backers fall through?” Dietrich made a dismissive gesture with his hand, spreading a cloud of dust that settled slowly to the ground.
“They’ll come through. We’ve drawn up contracts—”
“More paper,” Dietrich said. “If I say so, you will go to New York naked.”
“You have no right to interfere—”
Dietrich laughed. The sound burned into Oris’ skull. “You have two choices. Agree to my terms, and you will go to the auction seven days from now, make your bid, and walk away with most of your empire intact. Or walk away from me, find your backers changing heart, and go to New York penniless.” He took a step closer. Oris wanted to back away, but he couldn’t move. “I am leaving for New York tonight. You will answer me now.”
Oris felt the world crumbling away beneath him. Everything he and Mantis had built was teetering on a precipice. The whole empire—railroads, real estate, the corporate glue that held it all together—was being torn from his grasp again. It was humiliating enough to admit to J. P. Morgan that they couldn’t meet the debt that bloomed in May, to watch as the bankers organized their public auction of everything the Van Sweringens had struggled to build. But the brothers had consented, after organizing a plan to retain what they had built.
Oris was supposed to go to New York on the 30th on behalf of a newly incorporated entity under the Van Sweringens’ control. They already had the financial backing necessary to bid on the collateral being auctioned. It was a deal that had taken months to put together.
And now this shadow investor, a man who dealt in cash and handshake deals, was telling Oris that all that preparation was for nothing.
He wished Mantis was here. Facing this man without his brother for support was more than he could take. “We spent months putting the deal together. How could you undo it?”
Dietrich stared into Oris’ eyes, and Oris couldn’t turn away. There was a searing heat deep inside them, an intensity that terrified him and held him spellbound. “You are going to incorporate Midamerica with money from Mr. Ball and Mr. Tomlinson. How accommodating do you think their heirs would be?”
Oris wanted to back away. He wanted to run. He wanted anything other than to be here facing this man. But no matter what he wanted, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even turn away or lower his gaze from Dietrich’s burning stare. Every shred of doubt he had about Dietrich’s will, his intent, his ability to carry out on his threats—all of it was torn away from him. Oris believed.
“You shall accept me as the unwritten part of Midamerica, won’t you?”
Oris nodded, unable to speak.
As if the gesture broke a magic spell, Oris was suddenly able to move and break eye contact. He stumbled away toward the sideboard, leaning on it with one hand and rubbing his neck with the other. He was out of breath and felt as if someone had been trying to strangle him.
“Why?” he asked in a hoarse voice. A crystal decanter sat on a tray on the sideboard. He grabbed it with a shaking hand and filled a glass. It was water. Oris drank it, wishing for something stronger. “Why torment us like this? You have the resources to take it whole yourself....”
Dietrich laughed. “You hired a man whose sole job is to keep your name out of the papers. You should understand when someone wishes to keep his privacy. That mountain of paper you built your empire upon, it provides me with shade from unwanted eyes.”
Oris put down the glass and nodded. “Send me whatever arrangements you want, Mr. Dietrich. I’ll be going now.” He picked u
p his jacket from a chair by the door. It came away gray with dust.
“One last thing,” Dietrich called after him. It was the cold conversational tone again, the corpselike voice that made Oris’ skin crawl.
Oris stopped in the doorway and said, “What is it?”
“Never assume that I will take secrecy over power.”
Oris shuddered as he left.
Stefan Ryzard was driving home to Lakewood after a long day of public service. All the talk at the Central Station was about how the Catholics were taking over the city, and Stefan was glad to escape. It wasn’t the talk about the Eucharist Congress that bothered him, so much as the event itself. It was as if the descent of faith upon the city somehow brought his own deficits into greater relief.
It was after eleven now, and darkness had claimed the city for its own. Nothing seemed to stir this late on a Sunday. The stillness was probably why, as his car approached the Detroit-Superior Bridge, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. There was ominous movement down Huron, toward the Flats of the Cuyahoga.
He rolled to a stop where Huron descended from Superior. Below, where Huron bottomed out on the shores of the river, Stefan saw a congregation of the derelicts and vagabonds who populated Cleveland’s industrial bottomland. Normally it wouldn’t rate any attention, it was a sign of the times, like a peeling NRA poster.
But there was something definitely wrong about the collection of tramps down there.
Stefan stopped the car and checked his revolver before he got out. He stood at the top of Huron, looking down, trying to interpret what he saw. Half a dozen men formed a semicircle around a lone figure. Some of the men carried boards, bottles, and one carried a length of pipe. The focus of their attention was a colored man who had backed up against a wall facing them.
Stefan descended, at first thinking he was about to break up a nasty lynching. But as he closed on the scene, he realized that whatever was going on here, it wasn’t that simple.
The men in the circle, while they gripped their makeshift weapons as if they had murder in their hearts, had fear in their eyes, and were backing away. The man at their focus seemed terrified, whipping his head around, staring wild-eyed at his potential attackers. But as Stefan approached, it seemed almost as if he was looking beyond the men with the weapons.
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