Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  >You might be surprised.<

  Whatever. Look, why don’t you make yourself useful for a change. I need a memory.

  >A what?<

  A memory. Of your last time together.

  >Speculation and gossip! Prince Vlad Dracul Bassarab and the Blood Countess never met.<

  I saw you together.

  >What?<

  In her tower. You called her Betya.

  >!<

  I just want to see her as she was back then.

  I had to wait but, eventually, images flitted through my head. Four-hundred-year-old memories. A fall of black raven’s-wing hair. Amber, catlike eyes. Skin like fresh milk, white and startling in its contrast to the darkness around her. An exotic, twenty-something, Slavic woman approaching the peak of youthful beauty. She outshone all of the young maidens who had been gathered into her castle, her holding pens. For now, at least. Even her lovely and mysterious young domestic, Katarina Beneczky, whose beauty was said to approach that of her royal mistress. Some would later claim it was Katarina’s striking good looks that contributed to the favor she found with the tribunals even as they walled the countess into her chambers and put the rest of Erzsébet’s staff to torture and grisly death.

  It was hard to tell from Vlad Drakul’s remembrances: he had taken no notice of a serving maid. His attention had been focused on the mistress of Castle Cséjthe; Beneczky’s image was only a shadow in his memory. And even now those projected memories were peeling away as I awoke to the lurching momentum of a wheelchair.

  My wheelchair.

  Entering one of the BioWeb elevators.

  Five minutes to curtain, Mr. Cséjthe.

  Break a leg.

  Knock ‘em dead.

  It’s show time!

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Even though the floor was no longer flashing beneath the footrests of my wheelchair, I had trouble focusing on the carpeting as we rode the elevator down. So far my ears were sharper than my eyes: I recognized Kurt’s voice immediately.

  “We are allied with fools and incompetents,” he complained behind me. “The countess wanted him awake by sunset and yet they drugged him a second time. She is furious!”

  “She would certainly be more furious if he had escaped after awakening this afternoon,” said a second voice—Graf, maybe—it certainly wasn’t Jahn. “I understand their caution.”

  “Bah! If he was going to escape, he would have left with the bloodhair at daybreak.”

  “Maybe he feared the sun . . .” Since I had never heard Graf speak, I would only be guessing so, for now, I dubbed him “Skippy.”

  “If so, then he would hardly attempt an escape in the middle of the afternoon. He stays out of obligation to the hostages. He is honorable, this one.” Kurt sighed. “Perhaps he is older than they say he is. Honor is such a rare commodity in this generation.”

  “Perhaps,” Skippy allowed, “but I still understand their caution. He killed at least five of us now and he is only half as strong and half as fast as the rest of us. He is dangerous, this one!”

  “Yes,” Kurt agreed, “yes he is. He has the powers of a Doman, and some say that he is more Sire to Dracula than the Prince of Wallachia was Sire to him. Last year he destroyed the Egyptian necromancer, Kadeth Bey—something entire armies had failed to do for over four thousand years. His blood gives his chosen immunity from the sun and he has secrets that Our Lady both fears and desires.”

  “I would have second thoughts about facing him in single combat.”

  “You fear for your physical existence,” Kurt said. “I fear more for his power to break my oath.”

  “You call him Warlock?” The awe and fear in his voice almost made me grin. Of course Skippy’s use of the term was the ancient alias for “Oath-breaker,” not the pop-cultural designation for a male witch, popularized by femophobic sexists and instructional television like Bewitched.

  “She calls him Cséjthe,” Kurt countered. “We swore an oath to the bloodline.”

  “We swore an oath to serve the House of Cachtice!”

  “Cachtice, Cséjthe, linguistic hair-splitting. They are one and the same.”

  Skippy wasn’t mollified. “But Erzsébet Báthory is eldest survivor and head of the bloodline. She is royalty. If he is of the blood, he still must swear fealty to her or be destroyed. If he does swear and she embraces him, he has no authority but that which she grants him. There can be no conflict. Our oath binds us to the eldest head of the line.”

  “Perhaps.”

  A frantic note crept into his voice. “There is no perhaps! Unless you choose to break your own oath and turn rogue.”

  “Not rogue,” Kurt mused, “not if I am allied with another Doman.”

  “No,” Skippy admitted. “Not rogue. But just as dead. You would ally yourself with a Halfling who has no demesnes. His werewolf lover has abandoned him, his two Thralls are less wamphyri than he, one of whom would betray him for the Embrace of any vampire lover, and you would have the combined might of the East Coast demesnes arrayed against you. To what purpose?”

  “I would have my honor,” Kurt replied quietly.

  “Honor? Ptah,” spat the other. “Your discontent is well-known, my friend. The countess has her eye on you. See what your honor gets you when push comes to shove!”

  The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. I kept my head down but rolled my eyes up as we moved into the corridor and around the corner: Gen/GEN was just down the hall. Feeling was starting to flow back into my fingers and toes but it was too little and too late. I couldn’t run and I wouldn’t hide.

  I could only play the meager hand that was dealt me.

  Any variant of poker and I was screwed; my only chance was a hand of Fifty-two Pick-up . . .

  * * *

  They wheeled me into an office just two doors down from the Gen/GEN lab.

  The woman who had once introduced herself as Elizabeth Cachtice was waiting for us. “Mr. Cséjthe, can you stand on your own?” she asked curtly.

  A very dazed-looking Chalice Delacroix was by her side, still wearing the little black cocktail dress she’d had on the night of the BioWeb fundraiser. One strap was broken, possibly during the scuffle at Montrose’s place, and a dark breast nudged the loose fabric aside like a Hershey’s kiss attempting a curtain call. She swayed like a young tree in a high wind.

  “Countess,” I replied, trying to match her tone and mask my concern, “can you sit on it?”

  Báthory’s response was immediate and swift. She swung her arm, sweeping the top of the desk clean; the lamp and the phone went flying to crash against the far wall. “I don’t have time for this,” she hissed. “I have a video-conference set up in the genetics lab and two dozen envoys from the various enclaves waiting for us! I need you up! I need you healthy-looking! And I need your unquestionable obedience! All in the next ten minutes!”

  “Well then,” I drawled, still having a little trouble with making my mouth work properly, “it seems you’ve got a little problem.”

  “Have I?” Her eyes glittered in the backwash of the crumpled lamp on the floor. “Let’s see if I can kill a bird and a bat with one stone!” She threw Chalice down on the desk and pinned her wrists above her head with one hand. More stunned than dazed now, Chalice gave no evidence of resistance but Báthory tightened her grip so that the muscles in her forearms bunched. “Bring him here,” the countess ordered.

  I was rolled up to the edge of the desk. Báthory handed me my teeth. I just stared at them in my hand. Was I ever going to spend a day in this place without someone handing me my fangs? Kurt took them from my hand, opened my mouth, and slid them into place. I didn’t know which was more surprising: that he did that or that I let him.

  The command was given to hold Chalice’s legs, and Skippy moved to grasp her ankles. She groaned as the two vampires pulled, stretching her on her back across the desk. Báthory reached down with her free hand and ripped the front of the little black dress from neckline to hem.
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  “I caught this little bitch down in the containment labs last night! She was destroying the viral loads for Operation Blackout! I have already executed the security personnel who should have prevented such a thing from happening. The only reason that she is still alive is that she contributes to my hold over you. If you do as I say, she may live a little longer. If you disobey me, I will flay her alive and render her body fat into bath soap!”

  “What do you want?” I asked carefully.

  “First of all, I want you to drink.”

  “Drink?”

  “Her blood. I need you to be able to walk and function with the appearance of health and the assumption that you are acting of your own volition.”

  “And then what?”

  “We will go into the Gen lab and you will swear fealty to me before a roomful of witnesses with a camera recording the event for the other enclaves as well as my people back home. There will be an exchange of blood: mine for yours. Normally we both would drink, but I’m not sure that it is wise for me, given the unusual effects your blood seems to have on both the living and the undead. So, I will hold your blood in trust. You will drink mine as part of your blood oath to me. Then the oath will be administered and sealed. I expect you to speak and act as though you do these things of your own volition and that you do it willingly, if not eagerly.

  “Make no mistake, however: I will maintain a psychic hold on your mind. You may not do anything without my permission. At the first hint of rebellion I will shut down your higher brain functions and you will become my puppet. And after this evening is over and we are back in my stronghold, back east, I will kill her as slowly and painfully as I can devise while you watch and listen. And when I am done, you will be forced to eat her remains. Some of which will be pre-chewed. Do I make myself clear?”

  I swallowed bile and nodded.

  “Do we have an understanding?”

  “S-sure,” I said. “N-no problem. I was just afraid you were still going to force me to sleep with you.”

  I knew it was mistake even before I said it but the words just came tumbling out of my mouth like eager puppies looking for mischief. Báthory’s hand curled, her fingers becoming curved talons, and she raked Chalice’s belly, trenching red furrows in her dark skin with inhumanly sharp fingernails.

  “There, Mr. Cséjthe,” Báthory crooned with stomach-churning sweetness, while Chalice moaned and twisted in the vampires’ grasp, “I’ve prepared your trough. Drink up.”

  I opened my mouth to—to—what? Defy her? Threaten her? I had no leverage. Anything but unquestioning obedience on my part was only going to make things worse. After a moment’s hard thought I spoke anyway: “I’ll drink if you leave the room.”

  “And why should I do that?” Báthory wanted to know.

  “I’m shy.”

  Báthory’s verbal evaluation was somewhat different and a lot more vulgar.

  “I’ll drink,” I tried again, “but I don’t want an audience. This is a difficult thing for me. Feeding is . . . is . . . very private for me.”

  “Private?” Báthory’s lips curled in an unpleasant smile. “I don’t care where you bite her, Cséjthe. I am not leaving you alone until our business is done in the next room. Now we’re running out of time.” She reached across the desk, grabbed a handful of my hair, and pulled my face against Chalice’s wounded stomach. “Feed!”

  I rolled my face away from Báthory, smearing Chalice’s blood across my nose and cheeks. As I did, I bit down hard on my lower lip, making twin punctures in my flesh with my artificial fangs. My own blood began to dribble down my chin and I turned my face back, backwashing my own blood into the torn flesh of Chalice’s abdomen. As I turned, she sucked in her stomach, forming a shallow basin for the blood to pool in. I caught a little reverse tide, as well—more than I had counted on and it flooded my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I swallowed convulsively and nearly choked.

  It was like tasting whiskey-laced honey and crank.

  During my gradual transformation over the past year or so I had supplemented my diet with blood that had been clinically donated, packaged, frozen, stored, thawed, reheated, and eventually served in cradles of plastic or porcelain. Those rare occasions that I had tasted of a living host was when the blood was freely offered—a gift given, not forcibly or painfully taken.

  This was utterly different.

  As strong as the burning brightness of Chalice’s blood had seemed when I sipped from her arm a few nights before, it paled in the supernova of now. It was as if her body had transformed into some kind of bipolar brewery and crystal meth lab, distilling the neural cracklings of her synapses and pain receptors into arterial white lightning. It was a heady blend, containing neurotransmitter lattice-works of codified adrenaline and compressed dopamine poppers that exploded at the back of your eyeballs, sizzled across the channels of your cerebral cortex, crawled through your chest like a prickling army of electrified lemmings, and detonated like depth charges in the murky depths of the hindbrain. It was like tasting colors and sounds, a symphony of dark energies that surged and thrust and hummed and spun, sucking me down and down into warm, pulsating wetness.

  Dimly, I realized I was pushing my face against her tortured abs, trying to burrow like a mole into darkness. I pushed away but it took great effort.

  I wiped at my bleary eyes: Báthory’s amused face swam into view. “You’ve never really slaked your thirst with the wine of violence, have you Cséjthe?” she mocked. “Pain is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

  I wanted to say something rude and vulgar. I wanted to deny the dark power that had suddenly enveloped my senses and stripped away the veneer of humanity, but I was suddenly bereft of reason, of rational thought.

  Of humanity.

  I looked down but my eyes wouldn’t focus. I wondered if Chalice had escaped and then wondered who or what I was even thinking about. The desk was a smorgasbord of chocolate sweetmeats, a buffet of fudge brownies and devil’s-food delicacies, a cacophony of caviar and cocoa. And the stripes of cherry topping were like an irresistible dessert, a homing beacon to the tongue, the gravity well of a dark and mysterious star. I felt my face drawn downward, pulled by irresistible forces, and then, for a moment, could see flesh and blood in human form once more.

  Chalice . . .

  I had to save her.

  I had to have her!

  The difference of one little letter: “s” or “h.” Save her, have her, save her . . . have her . . .

  So thirsty . . .

  No.

  Hungry!

  I bit down on my lower lip again and the pain was like a sleepy sensation buried under an avalanche of thrumming desire and appetite. Blood dripped from my mouth as I lowered it toward her chocolate sweetness. Crimson drops pattered across the scarlet slashes and her belly fluttered like the dance undulations of an Egyptian houri. She whimpered and I felt the tattered remnants of self-control snap taut like a threadbare flag in a sudden gale, a furnace wind from the soul.

  I lowered my head (God help me, I couldn’t stop myself) and I pressed my lips to her wounds. But I held that line against her velvet skin. More viral-loaded blood drooled from my mouth and I used my tongue to lave it into the open furrows, fighting the gripping, tightening, squeezing impulse to delicately slip its tip down and in, to gently probe, to slide—

  I snapped my head back and Chalice moaned again. There was a different quality to the sound escaping her throat, this time. An undercurrent of a sigh. A sub-harmonic of surrender. I blinked and it seemed as if the cuts across her stomach were smaller, now. More shallow. I turned my face toward hers and saw that she had raised her head; her eyes were clear and locked on mine.

  “The Blackout virus,” she whispered. “It’s a genetic tar baby—”

  Báthory released her wrists and slammed Chalice’s head back against the desk. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she was gone. My eyes searched her face, her throat, her upper body for any indication of breath. I reached to feel f
or a pulse and Báthory was around the desk before I could touch the side of her neck.

  “No time for that,” she said harshly, taking my arm and hauling me up and out of the wheelchair. “You can play with your new toy as soon as we’re finished with the night’s festivities.”

  I was able to walk now but Kurt took my left arm and Skippy my right and thery proceeded to support me between them like a vampire sandwich. Báthory stepped into a small washroom to the side of the entrance and produced a couple of wet towels. “Here,” she said, tossing them so that one actually settled over my head. “Clean him up and then bring him in as soon as he’s presentable.”

  She exited the office without a backward glance.

  * * *

  It took more than a couple of damp towels. I ended up with my head in the sink before it was over and about three-dozen paper towels and a whole roll of toilet paper before I was ghoulishly presentable.

  During the process, I looked up at the face in the mirror.

  It wasn’t mine.

  It was Chalice’s.

  And she looked even less substantial than I usually did.

  Chalice?

  /Chris . . . I have to tell you . . ./

  My God, you look like a ghost!

  /I’m not sure but I think I am . . ./

  Oh my God! I’ve killed you!

  /Don’t be an ass . . . that bitch killed me after you did everything you could to save me. . . ./

  Oh dear Lord, I am so, so sorry!

  /We don’t have time for this . . . listen . . . I have to tell you something . . . something important . . ./

  Uh, okay.

  /They came looking for us at your friend’s house . . . there were too many of them . . . I think they staked the boy. . . ./

  I felt a pang in spite of the fact that he was an annoying little twerp: I hadn’t really disliked him all that much.

  /After they brought me back to BioWeb, they put me to work under the supervision of one of the security guards . . . with Krakovski gone and the big move scheduled for tonight . . . oh, this is taking too long to explain . . ./