UNSEEN: THE BURNING

by Nancy Holder

  They all kind of clumped closer together at that. Pat and the Patlings. Cordelia felt a wistful longing for the other days when she had her own clique of groupies who wanted nothing more than to be seen agreeing with the lovely and popular Cordelia Chase.

  “Look,” she said, “I can’t divulge sources, but I’ve been having . . . dealings—not dealing, not like drugs, just say no to drugs!—but I’ve been around vampires for a lot of years. There’s nothing good about it. Really.”

  “She’s lying,” Pat said emphatically, keeping a real good grip on her kitchen knife, if not reality. “She doesn’t know anything about vampires. He doesn’t have bad breath and he looks great.”

  He. Great. This chick’s probably all crushy on some dork who got changed last Tuesday.

  Cordelia gazed levelly at her nemesis of today. “Okay, so who is this vampire that you know, Pat?”

  Pat’s eyes gleamed. Crushy for sure. “His name’s Kostov,” Pat said. “He’s Transylvanian, just like Dracula was in the stories.”

  Cordelia nodded, trying to formulate a plan of attack. But if there was one thing she’d learned in high school, it was never to diss another girl’s boyfriend, even if he was the most loathsome slime ever to walk the planet—by day or night. Of course, there’s preaching, and then there’s practicing.

  “You’ve read that book?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.

  Pat yawned. She was not so great on the breath angle herself. “Tried to. Boring. I like Anne Rice better.”

  Why doesn’t that surprise me? Cordelia thought. She’s so enchanted with the romance of vampirism that she doesn’t understand what it’s really like.

  The other girls nodded eagerly. One murmured, “Lestat,” and another said, “Louis. He rocked.”

  Yikes, they’ve all got it bad.

  “And how do you know this guy?” Cordelia pressed.

  Pat waited a beat, waiting for everyone to give her their attention. They did; all eyes were focused on her, like little kids about to hear their favorite bedtime story. Or for the lead in the musical to burst into song.

  Cordelia wondered if she bolted, she could outdistance Little Miss Kitchen Knife, but she discovered that her feet were rooted to the floor; she was too scared to run. Besides, she wanted one more chance to disabuse these girls of their vampires-in-velvet misconceptions. Cordelia Chase always rises to a challenge.

  And boy, does that sound like something Wesley would say.

  “I met him on the streets one night,” Pat said in a low, hushed voice. One of the other girls sighed. “He had just taken a victim, so he wasn’t hungry. Still had her blood dripping at the corners of his mouth.”

  And that was attractive? Cordelia thought, but held her tongue.

  Pat lifted her chin, going somewhere no not-insane girl had gone before. “I convinced him that I didn’t mean him any harm. I told him I was curious about him. We talked for hours.”

  The girl’s face was rosy, almost shy. Vampires are such users, Cordelia thought with disgust. Oh, sure, he’ll promise to respect her in the morning after he sucks her dry, but he’ll just roll over in his coffin and he won’t ever even call.

  “We talked for hours,” Pat repeated, maybe for dramatic effect, maybe because she was losing her mind along with her memory, “and then we made arrangements to meet after that. When I told these guys, everybody was excited about being turned, so we made a deal.” She gestured as if to say, And the rest is written in the stars, for me and my vamp.

  “Turning you all.”

  Pat nodded. The others followed suit. They looked like a bunch of wobbly-headed dolls, the kind people used to stick on their car dashboards.

  “He offered to turn me right then, right there, but I asked him to turn all of us. That’s how close we are.” She smiled at her posse, who seemed so enthralled by her generosity that none of them felt like objecting to the fact that she was, in essence, delivering them to the slaughter-house like a cowboy on a cattle drive.

  Cordelia was not pleased. So very not. “When is he supposed to do this?”

  “I’m not telling you that,” Pat retorted, showing her teeth. “You’d probably try to stop it or something.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that he’s a killer?” Cordelia leaned forward, trying to make her point. “That you’ll all become killers if you let this happen to you?”

  “Those people out there?” Pat indicated the land past their plywood barrier—customers in the restaurant, families with kids, eating their dinners in peace. Teenagers checking out magazines and hanging with their friends. “They don’t care about us. They’d just as soon we were dead. They’re meat to me, nothing more.” Her voice was incredibly bitter, and Cordelia could only fathom the depth of her emotional wounds.

  “That includes me?” she asked, putting down her best card—that she wasn’t just meat, she was someone real, someone who had tried to extend a hand.

  Pat looked at her with supreme contempt, as if sizing her up for a meal. “Meat,” she said. “Don’t think just because you bought us some greasy food that makes you our friend or anything.”

  “I don’t want to be your friend,” Cordelia replied, keeping her voice calm even if very little else of her was serene in the least. Being threatened with death tended to have that effect on her, no matter how often it happened.

  “But I’ve done you a bigger favor than someone who wants to kill you is going to do you.”

  “Maybe the Red Cross will give you a medal,” Jean said. Some of the others chuckled at her fine wit.

  “I haven’t asked you for anything in return,” Cordelia said, looking around at the circle of faces. “A little gratitude would be nice, but obviously that’s not coming my way. So forget about it. I tried to do something nice for you. I did it. It’s over.”

  She gave Pat an equally contemptuous smile and clapped her hands. “Have a nice life. Death, I mean.”

  She stood up and started for the door. By the time she reached it, little Kayley was at her side.

  “Cordelia,” Kayley began, “I just want to thank you. For wanting to help me. No one’s ever done anything like that before, I mean outside of Pat and the girls, you know?”

  “It’s nothing,” Cordelia said. “It’s just what people do for each other. You know, living people, not the undead ones.”

  Kayley’s cheeks reddened. “Pat, she’s real excited about this Kostov guy turning us. I guess we all are. But it’s more Pat’s deal than anything, you know?”

  Cordelia tried to press her advantage. “You don’t have to go along with it.”

  “It’s what I want, too, don’t get me wrong,” Kayley said quickly. “I’m just saying Pat is sort of the one pushing it hardest. She’s all gung ho on the whole fang scene.”

  “I think she’s an idiot then,” Cordelia told her honestly. She grew as serious as she possibly could. This might be my last chance with this girl.

  “Listen to me. It’s not like those books. It’s a hard existence. It’s all about staying in the dark and looking for the next kill, hunting and being hunted. It’s not pretty and it’s not fun.”

  “You sound like you really know something about it,” Kayley said, intrigued.

  Cordelia lifted a hand to touch her shoulder, decided against it, and dropped her hand to her side. “Believe me, I do.”

  Kayley nodded slowly, not asking the questions on her face. “I do believe you. But you’ll never convince Pat. And she’s got the others wrapped around her little finger.”

  “There’s still hope for you, Kayley. You can come with me right now. Just walk away from it.”

  Kayley looked back at her friends. They were watching, mostly with curiosity, though Pat’s eyes burned with contempt.

  “No. I can’t. I’m with them.”

  Cordelia dug one of Angel’s cards from a pocket and slipped it to Kayley. She had crossed Angel’s address and phone number out and written her own in, after his office had been blown up. “If you
change your mind, get in touch with me there.”

  “I won’t,” Kayley said. She pocketed the card anyway. “But, okay. And thanks.”

  Cordelia stepped out through the double glass doors into the night. Kayley stayed inside, with her friends.

  Where the night would never end.

  Chapter 6

  Sunnydale

  TO MOST OF SOCIETY, THE PHRASE “NIGHT OF THE LONG Knives” has two specific meanings. Historically, it’s a reference to June 30, 1934, when Adolf Hitler cemented his power over the Nazi Party and Germany by ruthlessly and systematically assassinating a thousand people who might have opposed him.

  As a result of that night, the phrase entered the popular vocabulary to refer to any kind of merciless consolidation of power, whether in politics or business or any other kind of human activity.

  But in the context of magick, Nicolas de la Natividad knew it meant something else entirely.

  It was the night that a warrior could not be hurt.

  Tomorrow night would be Nicky’s night.

  Nicky knew that where he wanted to be was in the bosom of his family—his real family. Not the people to whom he was born, not the oversized, Anglicized house in which he had grown up. He didn’t hate his family, but he felt that they had given up too much to be where they were. They had given up their heritage, turned their backs on their people. When his father and grandfather had associates over for dinner or a party, they were almost all wealthy and white. If any of them came from poverty, they had forgotten all about it.

  Nicky had never known poverty in his life, but he knew that was where his roots were—with the peons, the poor farmers and laborers, not the rich owners. He felt that knowledge burning in him every day he spent within the confining walls of that big estate in Los Angeles.

  The Latin Cobras. These were the people who cared for him. They looked out for him. There were machos and mamas in the crew who would give their lives for him without a moment’s hesitation. He would do the same for them.

  Give lives, or take lives. Whatever it took. They backed each other’s plays.

  Even though Nicky was the new guy, he felt secure with the Cobras. No one would give a Cobra any grief, not if they wanted to live through the night.

  But there was one thing left for him to prove himself worthy of their trust. To become a full member of the gang, he had to volunteer for a dangerous assignment. Everyone did.

  For most, it was doing a hit, pulling a drive-by, maybe knocking over a gun store to arm the membership.

  But compared to what Nicky had run up against, that was child’s play. Piece of cake.

  Because Nicky had come into the family at the same time the family had gone up against Del DeSola.

  DeSola was an oil magnate—one of the few Mexican-Americans Nicky could think of who was richer than his own grandfather. He had started with a small oil operation in the Mexican interior, then parlayed that into some fields in the States as well. These days, he pumped oil wherever he could find it in the world, and shipped most of it into the States, to quench the insatiable thirst the Americans had for the black stuff.

  Which meant he had a constant supply of ships moving in and out of American waters.

  The Cobras wanted access to those ships. They had product of their own they moved into the U.S. Product for which there was an equally insatiable demand, but which the government did not want to allow across the border.

  Heroin.

  Poppies harvested in Mexico and farther south were distilled into pure heroin. The Cobras had the connections down there—this was not some nobody-street gang, but part of an association of people with roots as deep and extensive as any gang in America and most legitimate businesses, with arms reaching to the East Coast and all across the Midwest—and they had the distribution network in the States. It was only a matter of getting sufficient product into the country to meet the enormous demand, and they’d all be wealthy.

  So they wanted DeSola’s ships to carry a little of their product in addition to his.

  They asked, and he refused.

  They insisted. He continued to refuse.

  So they were going to make their case in a more forceful way.

  Nicky was alone.

  The Latin Cobras kept a headquarters in a little house on the edge of town, a quiet suburban neighborhood where no one really bothered them. They had another spot where they gathered for meetings and parties and general hanging out, behind a pool hall on the highway. There would be, on any given night, a few of them crashing at the house, maybe two or three more sleeping on or under the pool tables. But each member had his or her own place, or shared a crib with other Cobras.

  Now that he was one of them, semiofficially, Nicky had moved out of his sister’s place. She would not have approved of the Cobras, and she would definitely not have approved of Nicky’s immediate plan—a plan which had been in motion for a week.

  One of the Cobras, Rosalie, had a studio apartment, a tiny stucco bungalow on a little gravel courtyard in a place that had once been a motel, back when Sunnydale had had a tourist trade to speak of. This is where he’d been staying.

  Tourists seldom came to town these days. The place didn’t have a welcoming reputation anymore; that had dwindled with the decades, until daytrippers didn’t even think of going there for fun. Sunbathers who wanted to enjoy southern California’s beaches went elsewhere. The scenery was unspectacular and the weather no different than anywhere else in southern California.

  As for “attractions,” there really weren’t any. The zoo was mediocre and the museum, though occasionally offering an outstanding collection, was not enough of a draw in itself to entice many out-of-town visitors.

  But what it came down to, ultimately, was the wrongness of the town. There was nothing about Sunnydale that looked out of kilter, but it certainly felt wrong—at a subliminal level. Tourists just didn’t feel like going there, or so they told themselves. If asked, they would realize that something kept them on the highway, heading for the next exit after Sunnydale.

  But they were rarely asked; Sunnydale was simply below the radar of most people’s conversations.

  Tonight—as for the past five nights—Rosalie had gone off with the Cobras somewhere. Nicky had barely seen her in days, and he had not left the apartment in as long. He needed the solitude to prepare for his Night of the Long Knives. It was a complicated spell—he had been working on it, learning the procedures and rituals inside out, gathering the ingredients, preparing himself mentally and physically—for more than a month. He worked out every day, lifted four times a week, meditated for at least an hour every morning to clear his mind and cleanse his spirit.

  Now, he watched the fire.

  He had a pot cooking on her little two-burner gas stove. A selection of herbs, some obtained from the magick shop in town, some lifted from his grandmother’s kitchen, some stolen from appropriate spots in town, simmered in an inch of water. The mixture stank, but then the apartment wasn’t exactly daisy-fresh to begin with. Four cats shared it with Rosalie, and when Nicky first walked in the ammonia stench had almost knocked him over. She had no air conditioning, and he couldn’t risk leaving any windows open, so the place felt like the inside of an oven set to “high.”

  But this was the last night of preparations. The next night would be the real thing. He could take it for that long. He shook his head, sucked it up, ignored the smell and the feverish heat.

  He dumped the contents of his paper bag onto the tiny tiled countertop. Herbs. Paint he had made himself, following an ancient recipe he had found, from graveyard clay and stolen holy water and some crushed berries. A talisman he had boosted from his grandmother, a round amulet about two inches in diameter with a sun engraved on it. This he had strung on a strip of leather that had been tanned from the skin of a murder victim, though the guy at the shop hadn’t been able to guarantee that the victim was human.

  Nicky was positive it didn’t matter. As with a gift, he knew, it was
the thought that counted.

  Magick was all about representation. The microcosm, that which one could control, represented the macrocosm, the greater world outside. The actual type of being the leather strip came from only mattered in that it represented the flesh of humanity.

  It could as easily have come from one of Rosalie’s cats.

  Nicky checked the faded floral curtains once more, drawing them fully over the windows, rattled the doorknob to make sure it was locked, and took off his clothes. He was tall and muscular, with shoulders as wide as an ax handle and a deep chest. He had chopped off his thick black hair close to the scalp. He breathed through his open mouth as he worked in the torrid kitchen, and a sheen of sweat glossed his form.

  He opened the plastic container of paint he had made, and, breathing in the rank odor of the bubbling stew, he began to paint himself. A line from his hairline to the top of his nose, across his third eye. Another line from his lower lip to his chin. A third line from the hollow of his throat to his navel. Then he smeared the paint over his hands and made five semiparallel lines across his chest, around his ribs, at the small of his back. Tomorrow night he would have to repeat this entire ritual, but he had been doing it for days and it was becoming second nature. As he dabbed himself he spoke the required words under his breath.

  He capped the paint and turned to the talisman. Lifted it by the strap and held it over the simmering broth. He kissed it once, then dipped it into the pot. He held it there for five minutes, inside the gently boiling mixture.

  Then he drew it out, held it over his head, slipped it around his neck and let the amulet fall against his chest.

  His skin sizzled.

  He leaned forward so that the amulet fell away from his chest. There was a red mark on his flesh, where the thing had burned him. The previous nights’ efforts had done the same thing. The scar, he knew, would remain with him—a reminder of his night of power and a badge of honor.