Immortal

by Christopher Golden

  “Good,” he agreed.

  Together, they stepped over the fresher corpses and went to the ruined body Catherine had chosen. As Catherine bent to grab its hands, Konstantin studied her. Certainly, she was beautiful. And she seemed amiable enough. But as Veronique had begun to trust Konstantin less, it was clear that she had begun to favor Catherine more. To take Catherine into her most intimate confidence.

  It did not bother Konstantin, really, that Veronique did not trust him. Though he certainly did not plan any kind of rebellion, even philosophically, he could not say for certain that he had faith in their actions.

  In his heart, Konstantin was troubled by that lack of faith.

  “They’re always hungry now, aren’t they?” Catherine said, as Konstantin lifted the corpse by its legs and they started for the stairs. “It makes me nervous to be near them, when what we feed them isn’t enough.”

  Konstantin nodded thoughtfully.

  “The Harbinger gave us explicit instructions, however,” he reminded her. “We must be careful how much we feed the hatchlings. If they grow too much, too fast, it might be impossible to reunite the Three-Who-Are-One.”

  They started up the stairs. Konstantin had thought the conversation at an end, until Catherine paused on a step and looked at him meaningfully.

  “Would that be a terrible thing?” she asked.

  Konstantin stared at her. “Veronique would go mad. She has spent hundreds of lifetimes working for this.”

  Catherine glanced away. “Please say nothing to her,” she asked. “It’s only that I wonder . . . I fear what might be in store for us when the Triumvirate walks the Earth, whole once again. What need will it have of us?”

  With one eyebrow raised, Konstantin urged her to continue up the stairs. They carried the corpse between them.

  “You must have faith,” he said, aware of his hypocrisy. “I will say nothing of our conversation, however.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine said earnestly.

  But he suspected she was not in earnest at all. It did not make sense to him. And it did, in a disturbing way. Close as Catherine was to Veronique, who clearly did not trust Konstantin himself, the girl might well have been commanded by the Harbinger to tempt him, to draw him out.

  Wisely, he had kept his own counsel. He was not a heretic, a betrayer. But he could not be certain that would always be the case.

  In silence, they made their way up to the first floor. Konstantin left the door to hang wide behind him as they emerged. Some light from the early-morning sun spilled in through cracks in the boarded-up windows and sent spikes of invisible fire across the floor. Even with their horrible burden, they were very careful to step around the shafts of sun as they made their way along the corridor toward the front of the building, where the hatchlings nested in an office that had become almost too small for them.

  In another room, not far off, the newly made vampires lay, still dead, awaiting their resurrection. One of them would be Veronique, of course. A very special target, chosen by the mistress herself, for a very special purpose.

  Konstantin smiled to think of it. Cruelty, cleverness, war, those were the things that aroused his interest. In certain ways, serving a demon like the Triumvirate, which would lay waste to everything in its path in what he thought might be a failed attempt to destroy human society, was a huge waste of time.

  But for the moment, he could not think of any alternative.

  As they approached the nest, he could hear the clacking of human bones, stripped clean, as the hatchlings lumbered about like voracious manatees in the remains of their many meals of these past days. Unlike manatees, however, the hatchling demons had arms and legs and tails. They were sheathed in golden scales and had molted their outer skin several times while growing. It had occurred to Konstantin to collect those skins, and he had secreted them away in his own space within the old building. One day, if he lived long enough, he might fashion some kind of armor from the scales of the demons. He imagined it would be quite effective.

  “I don’t like to be near them,” Catherine whispered.

  “They are your masters,” Konstantin reminded her, still playing the dutiful worshiper. And, in a sense, he was not playing at it. The Triumvirate had the most raw power he had ever been in the presence of, and it was exhilarating.

  But Catherine was correct. It was also frightening.

  The Three-Who-Are-One, or would be again, heard them coming, or scented the corpse they carried, for the clacking of bone against bone grew louder and more frantic, and as they approached the office, Konstantin could see their tails flashing in the air above the nest. A pair of arms came over the edge of the nest, and one of them hauled itself up to look over the edge.

  Its eyes nearly froze him there. He was a demon himself, really. But the evil and the power of this thing, its golden eyes, overwhelmed him. Konstantin smiled at it and moved forward.

  “Not too close,” Catherine told him in a hushed voice.

  Together, they went to the outer door of the office and, with a mighty heave, tossed the corpse inside, where it flopped with a wet thud next to the nest. A pair of golden-scaled tails whipped over the edge of the nest, wrapped around the dead, rotting human form, and hauled it up and into their filthy lair.

  The sounds of the hatchlings eating were enough to chill even the vampires. Konstantin moved a little closer to Catherine as they heard the gnawing and sucking and tearing and snapping of bones from within. They saw heads bob into the air, lightning quick, and tails waving with ecstatic pleasure.

  A tiny sound escaped Catherine’s throat.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Konstantin told her in a whisper.

  “I’m not,” she said. “The evil, the savage purity of it . . . it’s beautiful.”

  “Do they still remind you of dragons?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she replied thoughtfully. “Though I wonder if it wasn’t the father of dragons.”

  Konstantin considered that. “Or,” he added softly, “the dark dreams that inspired the legends.”

  A kind of numb quiet had fallen over the library. Willow sat at the computer terminal, clack-clacking away at the keyboard. Oz and Cordelia sat at the long study table leafing through volume after volume of Giles’s books — the ones in English, at least (though Willow could decipher some of the Latin and Greek now). Xander had gone out to get pizza.

  They had spent the day popping into the library as often as they could and convened there after the last bell. Now the tension level had risen to terrible proportions, as another evening approached and they were no closer to solving the mystery behind Veronique’s machinations.

  Buffy sat in a far corner thoughtfully whittling the ends of crossbow bolts to a fine point.

  Giles moved silently, sternly, from the stacks to his office and back, trying to figure out the best place to begin looking for more information about Veronique or this Triumvirate she served. He had called the council, hoping for some information he did not have, but to no avail.

  He paused at the center of the room and cleared his throat. They all looked up immediately, save for Buffy. It took a moment, it seemed to Giles, for things to sift through the fog of emotion that surrounded her now.

  “We are at an impasse, it seems,” he began.“I’m not certain how to stop Veronique without knowing what her plans are. Clearly, there are two facets to her scheme. First, the breeding, which we seemed to have an impact on last night, though according to this morning’s papers, not quite enough. Secondly, there are the grave robbings. Until we discover what use she is putting these stolen corpses to, I fear we won’t know what she’s up to.”

  The Watcher looked thoughtful. “While I’m fascinated by these meetings with the Hanover ghost and her apparent willingness to aid us in our search for information, we certainly cannot expect any news from that quarter. We have no way of knowing what, if anything, she will find or even if she will remember us. Ghosts are not generally very reliable.”


  “She won’t forget,” Willow told him confidently.

  “Yes, well.” Giles nodded in acceptance. “Be that as it may, we’ve got to rely on ourselves for the moment. If we knew exactly what the Triumvirate was, we could perhaps infer what Veronique’s plans are.”

  “Well, I’ve got a big, fat zero,” Willow admitted. She took her hands off the computer keyboard like a concert pianist wrapping up a great session of Liszt’s greatest hits. “I mean, graves, vampires. Vampires usually come out of graves. But vampires digging up graves? I don’t think so.”

  “The vampires are digging up the graves because the corpses are people they wanted to vampirize, and it was a nice thing, like giving a really ugly girl a makeover,” Cordelia ventured. Then, at the looks from the others, she said, “Or not.”

  “We could follow them,” Oz suggested.

  “My thought precisely,” Giles replied. “If we can track them to their lair, perhaps we’ll be able to determine precisely what Veronique is up to. Unfortunately, it means effectively losing another night or two of ground with these disappearances and corpse thefts, but once we’ve found their headquarters, we can bring the fight to them, and —”

  “No.”

  Giles blinked and looked over at Buffy. She stood up and walked toward him, then turned to face the others.

  “All we’ve been doing is reacting. We’re flailing around blindly, waiting for more people to die,” she said, and paused, glancing away before turning to face Giles again. “We need to take the fight to them now. It might not get any better results, but at least we’ll be making some kind of progress.”

  For a moment, Giles thought about arguing with her. But then he realized that she was right. Beyond that, he knew that it was far better for her mental health right now to feel as though she were accomplishing something.

  It occurred to him, for the very first time, that Veronique must seem to Buffy very like her mother’s cancer. She was a phantom enemy, something truly evil, and yet something the Slayer was incapable of destroying.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “Willow, make up a list of likely places to search. Empty warehouses, closed-down businesses, abandoned houses, that sort of thing; places in town that are big enough to hold a bunch of vampires during the day, not to mention their little private stock of dead guys, and remote enough that they might not be noticed. Then you and Oz, Cordelia, and I will start looking,” Buffy said.

  Xander pushed in through the library’s double doors with a smile on his face. “Hey, pizza! Don’t forget the tip!” Then he looked around the room, and his smile faltered. “I see we’re still living in Fun City.”

  “Go ahead and eat,” Buffy told him. “Then I want you to get over to Angel’s.”

  Xander rolled his eyes. “Why again?”

  “You like playing the tough guy at Willy’s, right?” she asked. “I want you and Angel to hit the Alibi Room, maybe some of Angel’s contacts, see if we can’t figure out where Veronique and her crew are crashing during the day.”

  “You said that’s after pepperoni, though, right?” he asked hopefully.

  “You’re still a growing boy,” Buffy agreed.

  “Agreed, then,” Giles said. “Once we’ve eaten, we’ll all set out on our appointed rounds.”

  Though it was many, many centuries earlier, Veronique could still remember when she had first awakened to the life of the vampire. It had been a bit frightening at first. That was part of the mystery of vampirism to begin with. The demon soul rooted in the human mind took on all the memories and knowledge of the dead host body. Veronique had always been her name, and the human taint in her had felt the fear as well.

  For waking to the world as a creature of the night, a blood predator stalking humanity, was new for both of them.

  From body to body, the original human mind of Veronique traveled along with the demon soul. With each new host, she gained knowledge and memories, but her persona remained that of the girl from the foothills of the Pyrenees who had first given her life’s blood up to a handsome man on the roadside, shrieking all the while.

  Each resurrection was different. Sometimes they were incredibly swift, and other times they might take a night or two after a new vampire had been made for her to rise in that form. But in the many times she had inhabited a new host, Veronique had never awakened with such a vital sense of immediate purpose.

  With the failing light of dusk just beyond the walls that kept her safe from it, Veronique’s eyes snapped open.

  “The Slayer,” she snarled, and rose quickly to her feet.

  Veronique strode impatiently into the corridor. Catherine was coming down the hall toward her. The Harbinger was about to speak when Catherine brushed past her.

  “Stand aside, newborn,” Catherine growled. “Or I’ll teach you to respect your elders.”

  With a snarl, Veronique’s face changed, yellow eyes blazing, and she grabbed Catherine by the hair and drove her hard into the wall. Catherine spun, face also contorted into the countenance of a vampire, and prepared to attack.

  “You forget yourself, girl,” Veronique snapped. “Don’t make me kill you.”

  For a moment, Catherine only looked confused. She stared at the new body that her mistress wore, and then their eyes met. And Catherine knew. She fell to her knees and prostrated herself before Veronique in abject terror.

  “Mistress, I did not know,” she pleaded. “I did not know which of those taken last night would . . . would be you. How could I have recognized —”

  Veronique crouched by her and reached out. Catherine’s words stopped abruptly, and she winced, expecting an attack. Instead, Veronique caressed her hair.

  “You know, I think I like you like this,” Veronique told her, fingers trailing down to Catherine’s face and lifting her chin. She stared into the other vampire’s eyes.

  “Yes, Veronique. Thank you,” Catherine replied.

  “You would be wise not to dismiss the newborns so,”Veronique said. “Sometimes the youngest of vampires are very strong, and certainly they are impetuous. If you insult me again, you will die.”

  “Yes, mistress,” Catherine whispered. “Your new body is very beautiful,” she added.

  Veronique agreed. It was beautiful, and it would serve her very well indeed. She knew that she had probably overreacted to Catherine’s slight. But she was still enraged over the actions of the Slayer the night before. It was becoming tiresome for her to have to lose time again and again because the Slayer destroyed her hosts.

  This time, however, they had planned ahead.

  Veronique reached out to stroke Catherine’s cheek, to run her fingers through the girl’s hair. She pulled Catherine toward her and kissed her lightly. “Come to me later, Catherine,” she whispered. “For now, though, gather the others. I want to know exactly where we stand.”

  “Yes, Harbinger,” Catherine replied hoarsely.

  Shortly thereafter, they were all arrayed before Veronique. All.

  “Six,” she growled. “We began the night last night with six. How is it that we begin this night also with six?”

  Konstantin looked away, then glanced back up at her. “The Slayer and her comrades are —”

  “I am not pleased,” Veronique snapped, cutting him off. Then she smiled cruelly. “Fortunately, I have a plan.”

  Willy’s Alibi Room was nowhere near as much of a dive as the Fish Tank. It wasn’t that kind of place. It was filthy and dark and stank of stale beer and cheap whiskey and cigarettes, but Willy catered to a much different kind of clientele from the Fish Tank. Unlike the bikers and dock workers and the criminal element that frequented the Fish Tank, the regulars at Willy’s were a relatively peaceful group. Of course, from time to time there’d be a random bar fight, which usually only happened when there was someone new in town.

  A lot of Willy’s customers were from out of town.

  A lot of Willy’s customers weren’t human.

  It was the kind
of place where one could hide from an angry spouse or lover or the cops or a process server. If Willy answered the phone, and one of the regulars had a call, he’d always raise an eyebrow in that customer’s general direction to see if they were officially there or not.

  On the other hand, that generally only referred to the human customers. The others — the vampires and minor demons and other creatures that didn’t quite fit the definition — for the most part were just there because they had nowhere else to go at the moment. Or they were meeting someone, gathering information, or planning something horrible.

  Willy honestly didn’t mind. This was the only place in town they could come and let their hair down, so to speak. They weren’t about to kill him. And the money that came from the pockets of the undead or evil Hellspawn spent just as well as anybody else’s.

  There was also the fringe benefit that Willy was a born listener. If you ran a bar, you sort of had to be. Willy listened. And he heard. And some of the stuff that he heard, he might share with someone who was asking. For a price. There had been a few times when that cute little girl who was the Slayer had roughed him up a little for some info he didn’t feel comfortable sharing. He could have gotten in trouble for that stuff.

  So far, he was okay.

  In fact, he was so okay that he’d wised up. Instead of waiting for her to rough him up, he held out his hand and waited for his palm to be crossed with silver. Then he gave with the goods. It was a nice arrangement.

  As long as Buffy, or that Angel guy, or the punk Xander who always had a little swagger in him that Willy knew covered up for his fear (something Willy knew because he’d once had a swagger like that — before he’d given up bothering with trying to hide his fear) came in relatively early, when the place wasn’t busy, he was pretty safe.

  It was going on eight o’clock, and business was already pretty good. Three vampires and a chaos demon, all of whom were regulars — guys who never got in trouble with the Slayer because they kept their heads down and did their business out of town or not at all — were in the midst of their weekly poker game at a round table in the back.