“See you in the morning,” he said, and left the room.
Chapter 26
Gasper Gerhard’s Journal
What would have happened if mankind had never imprisoned the Three Goddesses? What if we had continued to worship them instead? What if we had accepted their blessing as they were offered?
Bad enough that we toppled them from their place of divinity, but to force the Daughters of Lilith to serve us, to give us their very Blood, turned them against us forever. It was men, and the women who abetted them, who turned the sisters into demons.
We will never have the chance to find out what it would have been like to live in harmony with them. There will be no second chances. The Succubae quite rightly hate us.
The Guardians failed in their duties. But the failure was foreordained from the day we first imprisoned the sisters.
The Succubae are fallen angels who wander the Earth seeking their vengeance, using our own weakness to punish us. It is we who have failed. The Succubae only test us.
***
Rick drove for two straight days, until he reached the outskirts of Portland. He was so tired he was dizzy. He thought about taking a dab of Blood but decided that this close to his goal, it would be foolish to risk giving the Succubae any warning that he was coming.
He could never get used to how big America was. He’d lived here long enough to almost pass as a native, though he couldn’t quite kick a whisper of a German accent.
The van ran amazing well for having sat for several decades in a garage with only occasional starts. No one seemed to think the hippie mural was unusual.
By the time he reached Boise, he could already feel the effect of the Succubae. He was Cut, but he could still sense their power. There was no doubt the Daughters of Lilith were converging, even if they weren’t together in one place yet. He wasn’t sure if he sensed them because he’d consumed so much of their Blood over the decades or if everyone was feeling the same eroticism but weren’t aware of the cause. It wasn’t the kind of thing people talked about aloud, which was one of the reasons the Succubae so often slipped under the radar.
He pulled off Interstate 5 into a town called Wilsonville. It appeared to be mostly offices and apartments, but he found a nice motel and checked in. He dragged his backpack into the room, left it on the floor at the foot of the bed, and fell on top of the covers, fully clothed. He was just going to rest his eyes for a moment.
Serena was waiting for him, depending on him. He didn’t want her doing anything rash. He could only hope that she’d taken his advice and was hunkering down.
He awoke to lights flashing in his eyes. It was more than one beam crisscrossing his face, confusing him. He reached for his gun and realized that he’d left it in the pack instead of putting it on the nightstand as he usually did.
“We aren’t going to hurt you, Mr. Gerhard,” a man’s voice said. “Calm down. There are more of us than you can fight.”
“Guardians,” Rick said. “Is that what you call yourselves?” He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Do you mind taking those lights out of my face?”
The overhead lights came on, and their softer glow filled the room. There were six men surrounding the bed, all of them bigger than Rick, all armed. He had no doubt they were trained for combat, which he was not. There were also soft voices in the hallway.
There was no getting away.
“Yes, we are the Guardians.” The voice came from a seventh man, who still wielded a flashlight and still shone it in Rick’s face, to keep him off-balance. Rick couldn’t quite get a good look at the man. “And for most of our history, we thought we were the only ones. We had no idea, until we found you, that any of the original families had survived. No one could find the caves. We thought they were lost to us forever.
“Really, Mr. Gerhard, it would have made things so much easier if you’d joined us when we asked, but when you refused, we let you go. We weren’t going to force anyone to serve us.”
“And yet here you are, holding guns on me,” Rick pointed out.
“A temporary situation, I assure you.” The man speaking was the only one not outfitted in black combat gear and fatigues. He wore a well-tailored suit and had exquisitely cut blond hair.
“Mr. Carmichael, I assume?” Rick asked.
“Mr. Carmichael?” The man seemed amused. “Ah, I see you have been talking to Serena Carlton. Yes, that’s as good a name as any.”
“What do you want?” Rick asked tiredly. He closed his eyes tight and tried to concentrate on what he was hearing. When he opened them up again, the fog was finally lifting.
“We’d still like you to join us,” Carmichael said. “But as you can see, we don’t need you. We have found the Succubae without you.”
“Hard to miss when they are together,” Rick said. “If you can read the signs.”
“Indeed. So to answer your question, we don’t want anything from you, except for you to do nothing at all.”
“Nothing?”
“Just rest up in this nice motel, get all the room service you want. You’ll have the company of Gary and Pete here, but they’re easygoing guys. They’ll watch anything on TV you want to watch.”
The man whom he’d indicated was Pete nodded. “Except reality shows. If you start watching those, I’ll have to kill you.”
“And sitcoms,” another man, presumably Gary, added. “I hate sitcoms.”
“So there you have it,” Carmichael said. “So you can watch anything you want with these guys, as long as it’s football.”
Rick didn’t respond.
Carmichael pointed at the backpack at the foot of the bed, and Pete unzipped it and poured the contents out onto the bedspread. Rick winced as the bottles of Blood clanked against each other, but they didn’t break.
“For God’s sake, be careful, Pete!” Carmichael said, and for the first time, there was some emotion in his voice. He reached over and picked up a bottle, then lifted it up to the light. It seemed to glow. “This is the real thing, isn’t it?”
“If you mean raspberry soda, then yeah,” Rick said. “Horrible stuff, but it keeps me awake when I’m driving.”
Carmichael unscrewed the cap and took a sniff, and a beatific look came over his face. Rick had to given him credit for self-restraint. He didn’t take a nip.
“They found a few drops of a Succubus’s blood at one of her Cullings,” Carmichael said. “The head of our Order was given the privilege of licking it. Actually, he wasn’t the head of the Order when he partook of the Blood. It was the insights he gleaned from that small amount that made him our leader. Like you, until then our goal was to track down the Daughters of Lilith and destroy them. Since that day, we have bent all our efforts toward capturing them.”
“You won’t be able to,” Rick said. “They can’t be taken.”
“They were captured once. Why not again?”
“They were Goddesses then, worshipped by men and women. They had no reason to distrust us. Now? They are creatures bent on vengeance who trust no one. They’ll kill anyone they think even has knowledge of them.”
“Then why are you alive, Mr. Gerhard?” Carmichael asked. “Many of us have wondered. Perhaps they aren’t afraid of you. Perhaps you are a pet? Perhaps a Judas goat? We’ve kept our distance from you, because there is something odd about the whole thing.”
Rick didn’t answer. He’d often wondered the same thing. He was pretty sure the Succubae had had more than one chance to kill him. Instead, they had chosen to make his life miserable, to never allow him a moment of happiness. Whether it was because they disdained him or hated him or for some reason he couldn’t fathom, he had decided it wouldn’t stop him from trying to kill them.
Carmichael gently lowered the bottle next to the other three on the bed. “Is this all of it?”
Rick didn’t answer.
“Not going to tell us? Well, we’ll talk about it when we come back. Either we will be successful and won’t need your hidden supplies, or we won
’t be, and we’ll be dead. Or perhaps a few of us will survive, in which case, Heinrich Gerhard, we will demand your cooperation.” He turned to a man standing near the door whom Rick hadn’t noticed before. He, too, was dressed in civilian clothing, and was older than the other men by a couple of decades, but he had a look that Rick recognized.
This was the leader of the Order of Guardians—the one who had partaken of the Blood.
“Will this be enough, Mr. Harrison?” Carmichael asked him.
The man walked over to the bed, not even looking at Rick, as if he was unimportant. He stared down at the Blood with shining eyes.
“It is enough for an army,” Harrison breathed. “A few gulps of this and our men will be invincible.”
Harrison finally turned to Rick. There was an Old World manner about him, and his eyes contained years that his body didn’t show. This man had had more than a few drops of the Blood, if Rick had to guess. How he had gotten it was impossible to know.
“Harrison?” he said. “I met your father.”
“And you should have accepted his offer, Mr. Gerhard,” Harrison said. “It’s a pity you can’t see the rightness of our mission. This Blood, properly analyzed, could be a miracle drug.”
“Fair enough,” Rick said. “Take it with my blessing. Analyze it, try to replicate it…but kill the Succubae.”
Harrison was shaking his head before Rick even finished speaking. “This Blood has been around before science existed. I suspect, though I hope I’m wrong, that it can’t be reproduced, which means we need the Succubae—or at least one of them.”
“They won’t be taken alive,” Rick said. “I don’t think you have a chance of taking them at all. They can withstand your bullets, anything you might use. If you destroy their bodies, they’ll turn into pure spirits, feeding off of your wet dreams. But they’ll return.”
“See, Mr. Gerhard?” Harrison exclaimed. “That is why we need you to join us. You know more than we do, I admit. But I believe you are wrong in trying to kill these creatures. Their Blood can be used to help all mankind. We have to at least try to get more of it.”
“It is a relic of the past,” Rick said. “We should be rid of it.”
“Yet I’ve noticed that you haven’t poured it down the drain,” Harrison mused. “But we could argue this all day, and we need to get over the mountains to Bend.” He came over to Rick’s side, and for a moment it looked like he was going to extend his hand. “My father told me when he visited you in France that you were concerned for the welfare of the Succubae. I assure you, we will be humane.”
Rick laughed bitterly. “I no longer care. If I thought you could capture them, I wouldn’t care if you if you threw them into the deepest, darkest pit.”
“Yes, they have been particularly cruel to you, Heinrich,” Harrison said softly. “I’m sorry for your family. We have—and I’m sure you don’t know this—tried to keep watch over your son.”
“Stay away from Richard,” Rick warned. “Don’t you realize that it was your man who led them to my family before, whether he meant to or not? Just leave my son alone!”
Harrison didn’t try to deny it. He shook his head and turned away.
“Please,” Rick said, knowing it was useless. “Don’t try to capture them. You aren’t prepared.”
“We’ve been preparing for this for years, Mr. Gerhard,” Harrison said, motioning for the other men to leave.
“Mr. Harrison!” Rick cried out one last time.
Harrison looked as if he was going to just keep walking, but at the last second, he hesitated.
“You should remember this, Mr. Harrison,” Rick said. “The gulps of Blood you intend to feed your men? It is nothing. It is the same Blood that courses through the veins of the Succubae. What chance do you have against that?”
Harrison looked ready to answer, then seemed to think better of it. He closed the door, and Rick was left with his new friends, Pete and Gary.
Chapter 27
It was early in the morning when Eisheth left the bar. The streets were empty, and it was still dark enough to hide. Streetlights flickered on deserted corners. She ducked into an alley, and a bum rose up, shouting at the sight of her. She lashed out at him, though it gained her nothing. He fell like a sack of wet rags.
Soon the authorities would find the dead humans in the bar and at the homeless camp, and everyone would be wary, though they wouldn’t know what to be wary of. A spree killer? A serial killer? It would make it that much harder for her to seduce them.
Eisheth couldn’t believe it. She’d chosen the right victims three times, and three times had been frustrated for reasons beyond her control. An eternity meant that everything that could happen would happen, eventually, both good and bad. She’d been the Queen of Sheba, and she’d been a boy’s first erotic thought. Being queen was better.
She should have killed Serena the moment the woman vowed in that courtroom to seek justice. At the time, Eisheth had laughed at her. She hadn’t taken the threat seriously—she’d heard such vows before, by men and women much more powerful than Serena Carlton. But the age of the Internet had changed information gathering forever, making the Daughters of Lilith vulnerable again, more vulnerable than at any time since the beginning, when they first emerged to prey on men.
As soon as it was dark, Eisheth crept toward town, staying in the alleys and on the back roads, scuttling from shadow to shadow.
Crouching beside a small shack of a house, she got lucky. A young boy was masturbating for the first time, his entire body reaching toward the ceiling as the first massive orgasm overcame him, amazed by the wonder of it, that this thing existed, that it was free, that it required only fantasy and his own hands. The boy tried again, right away, and failed. But Eisheth knew it wouldn’t take long, and she waited. Later, as he languished in bed, his hands so busy, she soaked up the boy’s desires.
Then Eisheth moved on, reluctantly. She retreated back to the edge of town, catching a middle-aged couple having perfunctory sex, getting barely enough energy to keep her in place.
Something of her thoughts must have been picked up, for the door of a nearby house opened with a creak and a timid voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Eisheth flew at the man, smashing through the screen door and laying him out in the hallway. He was alone, she sensed. She raised her talons to rip out his throat, then hesitated. He was so scared that his penis was shrinking back into his scrotum, but she could make him have an erection. She slapped him hard enough to give him a concussion, then got a pencil from a drawer.
She jammed the pencil into his cock and mounted him.
He was screaming loud enough to attract the neighbors, so she punctured his voice box with one finger.
It wasn’t sex. But it was satisfying nevertheless to grind into the man as he bled to death. Eisheth was so gripped by his pain that she didn’t hear the car pull up.
The bullet ripped into her shoulder before she heard the gunshot. She rose up, swinging wildly. She caught the shooter in the stomach and ripped her open. The woman just stood there, holding her guts in. The gun fell from her hands, and without thinking, Eisheth picked it up. It was awkward in her hands, but she found the trigger and pointed it at the man and blew his head off; then she turned to the screaming woman and shoved the barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. The woman dropped on top of her husband.
Eisheth waited for lights to come on on the neighbor’s porches, but there was nothing but the distant barking of a dog. She dragged the woman’s body inside and tossed it on top of her husband’s.
She took a long, hot shower, then looked through the closet for something to wear. The dead woman was heavier and taller than Eisheth’s new form, but the clothes draped over her scrawny bones were not unpleasing. She looked kind of hippie-retro.
Eisheth left the bodies just inside the door, energized by the experience, though in truth she had used almost as much of her energy on these two as she had gained. Yet there was something t
o be said for the joy of pure revenge, without gain. It was what she really wanted to do—kill humans. She really didn’t care who or how anymore.
It was still early in the evening. Eisheth walked to the nearest neighborhood tavern, easily picked up a young man, and took him into the alley behind the bar. She drained him until he could barely move except to flop about atop her, twitching in pain and pleasure, begging for her to stop.
She waited for him to come one last time and felt the energy flow into her body. Then she squeezed his throat until she caught his last rattling breath in her hands.
When she arose and went back inside the tavern and looked in the mirror over the bar, she saw a cute young woman with long, straight, blonde hair and a kind of hippie look, wearing bright colors. She also noticed in the reflection that most of the men in the tavern were staring at her hungrily.
Eisheth turned with a smile.
Who do I Cull next?
She let herself relax. She closed her eyes and felt the sexual energy in the air. The tavern was full of it, of course, but she was ready to move on. Where next?
There was a fleabag motel down the street that she had checked out when first arriving in town. There was always some low-energy sex going on there, but not enough to draw her. Wait. Just outside—something was happening there. It was coming from the street, probably a car; she recognized the sexual emanations.
Adam and his bitch girlfriend.
She smiled and walked out of the bar, ignoring the men who stood lined up to offer themselves to her.
Chapter 28
Bobbie Jo and Adam drove his old clunker to the Plaza. The blue Pinto had been hidden in an abandoned cul-de-sac not far from their camp, one of the many unfinished housing projects in the onetime boom town of Bend. Every time Adam returned to his car, he feared it would be gone, towed away.
The Pinto didn’t want to start, having been neglected for so long, and one of the tires was half flat, but Adam managed to get it going in a cloud of belching black smoke and stuttered down the street. Bobbie Jo didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look askance at him.
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