Half Past Hell

by Jaye Roycraft

  IT WAS NINE-THIRTY when they arrived downtown at the First District station on State Street. It was the first time Kilpatrick had ever been here, and he was impressed. The building looked old, but in a way that looked solid and indestructible, not out-of-date and rundown. As the downtown district, he knew that Chicago’s First District, like Chi-No’s District 1, dealt largely with special events and tourists, but that in no way detracted from the old-fashioned aura of unyielding might. Kil was glad to see that the station was one thing that had survived the change of the past couple decades.

  They checked in with the desk sergeant, who showed them to the district commander’s office. Kil was again impressed. In Chi-No, district stations were commanded by captains, who usually chose to work day shift hours only, leaving the command of the station during the nighttime hours in the hands of a lieutenant, or sometimes a sergeant in the role of acting lieutenant. But Chicago was the third largest city in the country, and Chi-No, even with the Great Migration, was by comparison just a bump on the shore of Lake Michigan.

  Commander Ahern greeted them and shook his and Duvall’s hands with equal enthusiasm. He looked to be in his late fifties, a distinguished looking man with a trim blond mustache. “Welcome, Detectives. I hope you had a safe and pleasant drive down.”

  “Yes sir, thank you. We appreciate the invitation and the cooperation of your department,” answered Kilpatrick.

  “By all means, gentlemen, you have the complete cooperation of the Chicago Police Department. I was saddened to learn of the recent events in which members of the Brothers of the Sun committed acts of violence in your great city. Politics aside, we don’t condone or tolerate such acts here. I’ll have an officer escort you upstairs to the Detective Division. Detectives Starling and Ratkovich have been notified of your arrival. They’re two of our resident experts on the BOS, and I’m sure you’ll find them to be knowledgeable as well as accommodating.”

  Kil could see there was a good reason Ahern was a commander. He was as smooth as his impeccably styled silver-gold hair, and his political correctness was letter perfect. Kil wondered what the man really thought about vampires, the war, and the Brothers of the Sun. He glanced at Duvall. Was the same thought going through his partner’s mind?

  As promised, an officer led them upstairs and turned them over to the two CPD detectives. Len Starling was human, and Ivan Ratkovich was a vampire, who, except for the dark eyes, could be Duvall’s twin. There were friendly handshakes all around, but Kil got the distinct impression that the two vampires already knew each other, for they exchanged words as well, too soft for Kil to hear.

  A clerk brought Kilpatrick a large coffee, they made themselves comfortable in one of the shared offices, and Det. Starling began.

  “There are three hundred and sixty-six known members of the BOS in Chicago, about forty of whom we consider hard-core. We keep close tabs on all of them. Our Gang Squad has several officers whose sole job is to monitor BOS activity. As a result of this diligence we’ve had very few problems since the end of the war and not a single burning in the past three years. To say we were not happy to hear the BOS has shifted its activity to Chi-No is an understatement. Usually when a problem moves out of our jurisdiction, we cease to consider it a problem, but not so with the BOS. We take it personally when a Brother shoots an officer in Chi-No. So, rest assured, we will assist you in any way we can.”

  “What we need is information,” said Duvall. “We need to know who’s behind the hit on me and the distribution of the flyers in the neighborhood of the homicide. Do you have a mole in their organization?”

  “We used to have a few. Not any more. Carlos Silgar dropped out of sight several years ago. Since then, the BOS have decentralized into a number of smaller chapters. Even having a mole now in one chapter wouldn’t necessarily help us in knowing what the other chapters are up to. But we think we can still help.” He smiled and nodded toward his partner, who tapped a foot-high stack of files on the end of the table.

  Ratkovitch continued. “A number of BOS members have outstanding warrants. We’ve made a conscious choice not to pick up the men with warrants out on them for the so-called victimless crimes—vehicular offenses, drug charges, and the like. I’m sure you do the same thing.”

  “Sure,” said Kil. “We save warrants for a time when it’s to our advantage to either take someone off the street or put pressure on them.”

  “Well, this lot here has warrants out. I think the time has come to pick ‘em up.” Ratkovich slid the stack of files toward Kilpatrick.

  He took the first file off the top of the pile and looked through the man’s package. He was forty-six years old, and the list of offenses he’d been arrested on in his lifetime was seven pages long. Kil skimmed the list. Aggravated assault. Vehicular endangerment. Heinous battery. Threatening a public official. He would have been in his twenties during the war, but his arrests began when he was sixteen. One of Kil’s “heroes.” He picked up the next file, this time reading some of the arrest charges out loud. “Aggravated intimidation. Hate crime. Cyberstalking.” The man had been twenty-two when the war started. Another hero. And at twenty-two he’d already been a two-time felon. The men had spent a few years in prison for various offenses, but most of the charges had been dismissed.

  He looked up at Duvall, grateful that there was no I-told-you-so look in his eyes. He picked up the next file, and the next, and the next. It was a smorgasbord of Illinois state statutes, everything from first degree murder to tattooing the body of a minor. He closed the files and met Starling’s gaze. Starling looked to be in his thirties, not far from his own age. Had these men been Starling’s boyhood heroes as well?

  Duvall broke the silence. “If we are successful in picking them up, will they talk?”

  “Some will. Maybe not all of them, but some will,” said Ratkovich. “This is Chicago. We pride ourselves on our . . . interrogation techniques.” He smiled, baring the tip of one fang.

  Duvall leaned over and whispered in Kilpatrick’s ear. “That smile is what’s called a vampire’s promise, my friend. It means it won’t be broken.”

  VALL SPENT A FEW private moments with Ratkovitch before leaving for the hotel with Kilpatrick. Vall remembered Rat from his time in Chicago when the two of them worked the underground together. Rat had known and hated the BOS as much as Vall had, so it was no surprise that Rat was now one of Chicago’s resident experts.

  Duvall swept the walls and ceiling with his gaze. “This is all very impressive. So tell me. Is the reality as good as the image?”

  Rat shrugged. “Is it ever? Starling and I will never be bosom buddies, but we’ve worked together for a year now. We still don’t see eye to eye on everything, but we respect each other. It works.”

  Vall thought about Kilpatrick and wondered if respecting a vampire could ever be in his capacity. “Is the peace all Ahern says it is?”

  “Yeah. You know Chicago. It’s a can-do city. When there’s a problem, it gets fixed.”

  Duvall smiled. By fair means or foul. “One way or another, right?”

  Rat answered with a fangful smile. “Exactly. But the peace isn’t all CPD’s doing.”

  Only one person in Chicago had as much power as the Chicago Police Department. “Cade?”

  Rat nodded.

  “Do you think Cade’ll talk to me?”

  “I don’t see why not. You always were his favorite.”

  Vall was surprised by that. He’d never considered himself one of Cade’s favorites. “Oh, sure,” he said, allowing a bit of rare sarcasm to color the two words.

  “It’s true.” Rat paused and cocked his head to the side. “Maybe you were too close to him to see it. But you’re still walking the earth, aren’t you?”

  Vall had never thought about it that way. People who crossed Cade did have a habit of disappearing, and that included vampires. But
it also made Vall wonder about something else. A very serious attempt had been made on his life when he’d been shot with the Claw. Had Cade himself been the driving force behind the hit? What kind of threat was Vall to Cade now, after all these years?

  “Yeah, I’m still upright. Where can I find Cade?”

  “He still runs Noctule. You can probably find him there.”

  Vall put a hand on Rat’s shoulder. “Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow night. I look forward with great pleasure to ‘interviewing’ a Brother or two. Later, my friend.”

  The plan for tomorrow was set, and Vall felt the excitement transform his body in the same way hunger did. He could feel his senses sharpen to an almost distracting level, and an ache akin to sexual arousal gripped his body. His mouth actually salivated in anticipation of bringing down the BOS.

  The Chicago detectives had selected twenty members of the BOS that, in their collective opinion, would be the easiest to arrest and interrogate. If they were lucky, they’d actually take a quarter of those into custody, and if they were very, very lucky, maybe one or two would sing. The arrests would be attempted tomorrow during day shift, with members from both Chicago’s Warrant Squad and Gang Squad forming three separate arrest teams. Kilpatrick would join one team, and Starling a second. Duvall and Ratkovich would participate tomorrow evening in the interrogation of anyone taken into custody.

  He waited with Kilpatrick outside the station for their car to be brought from the garage. It was a cold, crisp night, in the low twenties, and the air was pure and fresh. Vall supposed many would argue that there was nothing at all pure about Chicago, and maybe it was simply nostalgia on his part, but no one could deny the beauty of Chicago at night. Lights sparkled everywhere like so many jewels, and even the station house, with its new Greek revival façade, was bathed in the glorious light of the night. A huge portico supported by four columns sheltered the front entrance, and the pedimented gable above the portico pointed toward the stars.

  Vall drew a deep breath and tried to keep the memories of two hundred years from distracting him. He would see Cade tonight, and he needed a head as clear as the sky. It was with relief that an officer pulled up with their car.

  The Chi-No Police Department had sprung for the expense of two separate rooms at the nearby Chicago Balmour. Vall needed a vamp room with no windows, and even the tightwads in the Department realized the folly of trying to force a human to share such quarters with one of the undead. So they had adjoining suites, one with windows and one without, and everybody was happy except the budget director.

  “I’m going out,” Vall informed his partner before the latter retired for the night. “Don’t wait up.”

  “Now? It’s after midnight.”

  Vall smiled. “Prime time, meatball. I’m going to visit an old acquaintance.” He thought a moment. “Come to think of it, don’t bother looking for me tomorrow morning. I might not be here. But don’t worry, I’ll leave you the car. If you really need me for anything, call me on my cell.”

  “Have fun,” said Kilpatrick, but his tone wished the opposite. “Me, I’m going to call Candy and enjoy actually sleeping when the good Lord intended man to sleep.”

  Vall ignored him, shut the adjoining door, and locked it. He quickly unpacked and changed into a gray suit with white pinstripes and a white silk shirt. He left the shirt open at the neck, detesting ties of any kind, and donned his fur-lined gray coat. To say that Noctule was upscale would be an understatement, and while Vall had no desire to try to compete with Cade on a fashion level, or any other level for that matter, he did want to look his best.

  He called for a cab, leaving the squad car in the hotel’s garage as promised, and wasn’t surprised to find a vamp cabbie. Most of Chicago’s nighttime cab drivers were of the undead persuasion, sucklings trying to earn an honest living. “Noctule” was all Vall needed to say to the vamp behind the wheel. The cabbie took the Kennedy, exited at North Avenue, and less than ten minutes later Vall was back home in Lincoln Park.

  Nothing much looked to have changed in the past twenty years, just as Hell itself had done little to affect the area. There’d been no burnings here, no mass exodus of humans. Far too much wealth had been tied up in the gentrification of Lincoln Park for wealthy humans to abandon the neighborhood, and where the young, rich and beautiful went, the vamps followed—not sucklings—but those, like himself, who had age, money, and Cade’s stamp of approval. Like an artist, Cade had subtly coiled his fingers around the area and molded Lincoln Park into a masters’ paradise, untouched by the cold hand of war and the bloody talons of the Brothers of the Sun. True, the churches and schools in the area had protested the opening of Noctule as a vampire club, but Cade’s power as doyen reigned supreme, and while some young families with children had moved out of Lincoln Park, just as many humans, like flies to the spider, were drawn in. During the day, humans jogged, walked their dogs, and went about their business, and at night, humans and vampires alike ate and drank and clubbed their way to rapture.

  The taxi pulled up in front of Cade’s home-away-from-home and double parked. Like Lacustre, the club’s name was nowhere to be found on the outside of the building, a two-story, red brick façade former police station on Halsted. It was a simple little building, not as ornate as some of the Italianate three-flats in the area, but stately with its white gabled roof and huge wrought iron and glass pane lanterns. The words “Police Station” were engraved in stone beneath the pediment, as if the architects foresaw no other occupancy for the building through the ages. Unlike Lacustre, though, there was nothing secret about Noctule. Lincoln Park’s clubs were landmarks, known by resident and tourist alike, and Noctule was the most notorious of them all.

  Vall gave the suckling a generous tip, got out, and prepared to make his entrance. Exiting a traffic-scarred yellow beater wasn’t the most notable way to make a first impression, but those mortals on the sidewalk who flashed derisive smiles at his mode of transportation soon broadcast smiles of appreciation and invitation instead. He didn’t have Cade’s beauty, but he’d been with plenty of women, including Veronica, who had let him know in no uncertain terms that he was mighty fine as is.

  A red brick wall enclosed a tiny forecourt that held the steps leading up to the front entrance. There was a line of humans on the sidewalk, waiting to pass muster with the vamp who stood at the bottom of the steps, like Saint Peter at the pearly gates, and decided who ascended to heaven and who didn’t. The vampire was tall and slender, with shiny auburn hair and pale green eyes, his enticing looks an advertisement for the club even as he, in his role of doorman/bouncer, turned away those who didn’t make the cut.

  Noctule had always been chic and trendy, and Vall could see things had changed little in the almost two decades he’d been gone. It was a singles bar, with a basic recipe of single beautiful human seeks hot vampire. Humans outnumbered vamps as patrons, though it was no secret the club was run by a vampire and that vamps made frequent appearances. The employees, including the bouncers, bartenders, hostesses and club musicians, were all vampires.

  He stepped directly to the head of the line. Humans waited, his kind didn’t. The bouncer nodded him through, and Vall ignored the stares on the sidewalk and made his way up and into the club. He found himself immediately swept up by the wave of humanity at high tide that was Noctule on a Friday night. His senses, still heightened by the briefing, were flooded by warmth, the beating of two hundred ready hearts, and the scent of overheated flesh and blood. He opened his mouth just far enough to run the tip of his tongue over his upper lip and groaned deep in his throat. The perfume of desire was so raw and strong in the smokeless air that he could taste it, and to pay for the pleasure of sniffing the food on feast day he had to clamp down on the hunger that seized both his tongue and cock.

  You’re not here to indulge, old boy, he reminded himself.

  He threaded his way to the champagne ba
r, a throng of hopefuls in his wake. He reached the haven of the bar and signaled the bartender, ignoring the women who squeezed into the nonexistent space on both his right and left. They were both blond, tall, and leggy, like matching bookends pressing him from either side, but he gave them no encouragement.

  Vall leaned forward when the bartender, a blond vampire whose eyes looked a hundred and face looked nineteen, made his way down the bar to his station.

  “Tell Cade that Duvall is here to see him.”

  The vamp nodded, glided a few feet down, and picked up a phone.

  The blond bookends were busy. They both fought off those behind them who would take their coveted places beside him and tried with expert fingers to penetrate the armor of his leather coat.

  The bartender hung up the phone and returned to Vall. “The door at the far end of the bar. The bouncer’ll let you through.”

  Vall nodded his thanks and made his way down the bar, trailed by new admirers who had squeezed the blondes out in moves befitting professional football players. The bouncer at the door, a black-haired vamp wearing a vintage tux almost as old as he was, nodded, opened the door to let him through, and deftly prevented the would-be admirers from following.

  And there he was, the one being Vall’d known longer than any other on earth.

  Twenty-four

  Chicago, Illinois

  Twenty Years Earlier

  WULF GOT THE panicked call on his cell phone from the suckling just after the sun went down.

  “The house two doors down is burning!”

  Here we go again. It was the third fire this week. “What’s your address?”

  The suckling sounded like he was hyperventilating, but he managed to wheeze out the street and numbers. It wasn’t far away. “We’ll be there in five minutes. Are the Brothers of the Sun there?”

  “I think so, but I’m not going outside to make sure.”