Circus of the Damned

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I stood in the front yard of a small, lime-green house with white trim. A chain-link fence peeked around one side encircling a roomy backyard. It was October, and the grass was still green. The top of a sugar maple loomed over the house. Its leaves were that brilliant orangey-yellow that is peculiar to sugar maples, as if their leaves were carved from flame. The mist helped the illusion, and the colors seemed to bleed on the wet air.

  All down the street were other small houses with autumn-bright trees and bright green lawns. It was still early enough that most people hadn't gone to work yet, or school, or wherever. There was quite a crowd being held back by the uniformed officers. They had hammered stakes into the ground to hold the yellow Do-Not-Cross tape. The crowd pressed as close to the tape as they dared. A boy of about twelve had managed to push his way to the front. He stared at the dead man with huge brown eyes, his mouth open in a little "wow" of excitement. God, where were his parents? Probably gawking at the corpse, too.

  The corpse was paper-white. Blood always pools to the lowest point of the body. In this case dark, purplish bruising should have set in at buttocks, arms, legs, the entire back of his body. There were no marks. He hadn't had enough blood in him to cause lividity marks. Whoever had murdered him had drained him completely. Good to the last drop? I fought the urge to smile and lost. If you spend a lot of time staring at corpses, you get a peculiar sense of humor. You have to, or you will go stark raving mad.

  "What's so funny?" a voice asked.

  I jumped and whirled. "God, Zerbrowski, don't sneak up on me like that."

  "Is the heap big vampire slayer jumping at shadows?" He grinned at me. His unruly black hair stuck up in three separate tufts like he'd forgotten to comb it. His tie was at half-mast over a pale blue shirt that looked suspiciously like a pajama top. The brown suit jacket and pants clashed with the top.

  "Nice pajamas."

  He shrugged. "I've got a pair with little choo-choos on them. Katie thinks they're sexy."

  "Your wife got a thing for trains?" I asked.

  His grin widened. "If I'm wearing 'em."

  I shook my head. "I knew you were perverted, Zerbrowski, but little kids' jammies, that's truly sick."

  "Thank you." He glanced down at the body, still smiling. The smile faded. "What do you think of this?" He nodded towards the dead man.

  "Where's Dolph?"

  "In the house with the lady who found the body." He plunged his hands into the pockets of his pants and rocked on his heels. "She's taking it pretty hard. Probably the first corpse she's seen outside of a funeral."

  "That's the way most normal folks see dead people, Zerbrowski."

  He rocked forward hard on the balls of his feet, coming to a standstill. "Wouldn't it be nice to be normal?"

  "Sometimes," I said.

  He grinned. "Yeah, I know what you mean." He got a notebook out of his jacket pocket that looked as if someone had crumbled it in their fist.

  "Geez, Zerbrowski."

  "Hey, it's still paper." He tried smoothing the notebook flat, but finally gave up. He posed, pen over the wrinkled paper. "Enlighten me, oh preternatural expert."

  "Am I going to have to repeat this to Dolph? I'd like to just do this once and go home to bed."

  "Hey, me too. Why do you think I'm wearing my jammies?"

  "I just thought it was a daring fashion statement."

  He looked at me. "Mm-huh."

  Dolph walked out of the house. The door looked too small to hold him. He's six-eight and built bulky like a wrestler. His black hair was buzzed close to his head, leaving his ears stranded on either side of his face. But Dolph didn't care much for fashion. His tie was tight against the collar of his white dress shirt. He had to have been pulled out of bed just like Zerbrowski, but he looked neat and tidy and businesslike. It never mattered what hour you called Dolph, he was always ready to do his job. A professional cop down to his socks.

  So why was Dolph heading up the most unpopular special task force in St. Louis? Punishment for something, that much I was sure of, but I'd never asked what. I probably never would. It was his business. If he wanted me to know, he'd tell me.

  The squad had originally been a pacifier for the liberals. See, we're doing something about supernatural crime. But Dolph had taken his job and his men seriously. They had solved more supernatural crime in the last two years than any other group of policemen in the country. He had been invited to give talks to other police forces. They had even been loaned out to neighboring states twice.

  "Well, Anita, let's have it."

  That's Dolph; no preliminaries. "Gee, Dolph, it's nice to see you too."

  He just looked at me.

  "Okay, okay." I knelt on the far side of the body so I could point as I talked. Nothing like a visual aid to get your point across. "Just measuring shows that at least three different vampires fed on the man."

  "But?" Dolph said.

  He's quick. "But I think that every wound is a different vampire."

  "Vampires don't hunt in packs."

  "Usually they are solitary hunters, but not always."

  "What causes them to hunt in packs?" he asked.

  "Only two reasons that I've ever come across: first, one is the new dead and an older vampire is teaching the ropes, but that's just two pairs of fangs, not five; second, a master vampire is controlling them, and he's gone rogue."

  "Explain."

  "A master vampire has nearly absolute control over his or her flock. Some masters use a group kill to solidify the pack, but they wouldn't dump the body here. They'd hide it where the police would never find it."

  "But the body's here," Zerbrowski said, "out in plain sight."

  "Exactly; only a master that's gone crazy would dump a body like this. Most masters even before vampires were legally alive wouldn't flaunt a kill like this. It attracts attention, usually attention with a stake in one hand and a cross in the other. Even now, if we could trace the kill to the vampires that did it, we could get a warrant and kill them." I shook my head. "Slaughter like this is bad for business, and whatever else vampires are, they're practical. You don't stay alive and hidden for centuries unless you're discreet and ruthless."

  "Why ruthless?" Dolph said.

  I stared up at him. "It's utterly practical. Someone discovers your secret, you kill them, or make them one of your . . . children. Good business practices, Dolph, nothing more."

  "Like the mob," Zerbrowski said.

  "Yeah."

  "What if they panicked?" Zerbrowski asked. "It was almost dawn."

  "When did the woman find the body?"

  Dolph checked his notebook. "Five-thirty."

  "It's still hours until dawn. They didn't panic."

  "If we've got a crazy master vampire, what exactly does that mean?"

  "It means they'll kill more people faster. They may need blood every night to support five vampires."

  "A fresh body every night?" Zerbrowski made it a question.

  I just nodded.

  "Jesus," he said.

  "Yeah."

  Dolph was silent, staring down at the dead man. "What can we do?"

  "I should be able to raise the corpse as a zombie."

  "I thought you couldn't raise a vampire victim as a zombie," Dolph said.

  "If the corpse is going to rise as a vampire, you can't." I shrugged. "The whatever that makes a vampire interferes with a raising. I can't raise a body that is already set to rise as a vamp."

  "But this one won't rise," Dolph said, "so you can raise it."

  I nodded.

  "Why won't this vampire victim rise?"

  "He was killed by more than one vampire, in a mass feeding. For a corpse to rise as a vampire, you have to have just one vampire feeding over a space of several days. Three bites ending with death, and you get a vampire. If every vampire victim could come back, we'd be up to our butts in blood-suckers."

  "But this victim can come back as a zombie?" Dolph said.

  I nodded.
r />   "When can you do the animating?"

  "Three nights from tonight, or really two. Tonight counts as one night."

  "What time?"

  "I'll have to check my schedule at work. I'll call you with a time."

  "Just raise the murder victim and ask who killed him. I like it," Zerbrowski said.

  "It's not that easy," I said. "You know how confused witnesses to violent crimes are. Have three people see the same crime and you get three different heights, different hair colors."

  "Yeah, yeah, witness testimony is a bitch," Zerbrowski said.

  "Go on, Anita," Dolph said. It was his way of saying, "Zerbrowski, shut up." Zerbrowski shut up.

  "A person who died as the victim of a violent crime is more confused. Scared shitless, so that sometimes they don't remember very clearly."

  "But they were there," Zerbrowski said. He looked outraged.

  "Zerbrowski, let her finish."

  Zerbrowski pantomimed locking his lips with a key and throwing the key away. Dolph frowned. I coughed into my hand to hide the smile. Mustn't encourage Zerbrowski.

  "What I'm saying is that I can raise the victim from the dead, but we may not get as much information as you'd expect. The memories we do get will be confused, painful, but it might narrow the field down as to which master vampire led the group."

  "Explain," Dolph said.

  "There are only supposed to be two master vampires in St. Louis right now. Malcolm, the undead Billy Graham, and the Master of the City. There's always the possibility we've got someone new in town, but the Master of the City should be able to police that."

  "We'll take the head of the Church of Eternal Life," Dolph said.

  "I'll take the Master," I said.

  "Take one of us with you for backup."

  I shook my head. "Can't; if he knew I let the cops know who he was, he'd kill us both."

  "How dangerous is it for you to do this?" Dolph asked.

  What was I supposed to say? Very? Or did I tell them the Master had the hots for me, so I'd probably be okay? Neither. "I'll be alright."

  He stared at me, eyes very serious.

  "Besides, what choice do we have?" I motioned at the corpse. "We'll get one of these a night until we find the vampires responsible. One of us has to talk to the Master. He won't talk to police, but he will talk to me."

  Dolph took a deep breath and let it out. He nodded. He knew I was right. "When can you do it?"

  "Tomorrow night, if I can talk Bert into giving my zombie appointments to someone else."

  "You're that sure the Master will talk to you?"

  "Yeah." The problem with Jean-Claude was not getting to see him, it was avoiding him. But Dolph didn't know that, and if he did, he might have insisted on going with me. And gotten us both killed.

  "Do it," he said. "Let me know what you find out."

  "Will do," I said. I stood up, facing him over the bloodless corpse.

  "Watch your back," he said.

  "Always."

  "If the Master eats you, can I have your nifty coveralls?" Zerbrowski asked.

  "Buy your own, you cheap bastard."

  "I'd rather have the ones that have enveloped your luscious body."

  "Give it a rest, Zerbrowski. I'm not into little choo-choos."

  "What the hell do trains have to do with anything?" Dolph asked.

  Zerbrowski and I looked at each other. We started giggling and couldn't stop. I could claim sleep deprivation. I'd been on my feet for fourteen straight hours, raising the dead and talking to right-wing fruitcakes. The vampire victim was a perfect end to a perfect night. I had a right to be hysterical with laughter. I don't know what Zerbrowski's excuse was.

  3

  THERE ARE A HANDFUL of days in October that are nearly perfect. The sky stretches overhead in a clear blue, so deep and perfect that it makes everything else prettier. The trees along the highway are crimson, gold, rust, burgundy, orange. Every color is neon-bright, pulsing in the heavy golden sunlight. The air is cool but not cold; by noon you can wear just a light jacket. It was weather for taking long walks in the woods with someone you wanted to hold hands with. Since I didn't have anyone like that, I was just hoping for a free weekend to go away by myself. The chances of that were slim to none.

  October is a big month for raising the dead. Everyone thinks that Halloween is the perfect season for raising zombies. It isn't. Darkness is the only requirement. But everyone wants an appointment for midnight on Halloween. They think spending All Hallows Eve in a cemetery killing chickens and watching zombies crawl out of the ground is great entertainment. I could probably sell tickets.

  I was averaging five zombies a night. It was one more zombie than anyone else was doing in one night. I should never have told Bert that four zombies didn't wipe me out. My own fault for being too damn truthful. Of course, truth was, five didn't wipe me out either, but I was damned if I'd tell Bert.

  Speaking of my boss, I had to call him when I got home. He was going to love me asking for the night off. It made me smile just thinking about it. Any day I could yank Bert's chain was a good day.

  I pulled into my apartment complex at nearly one in the afternoon. All I wanted was a quick shower and seven hours of sleep. I had given up on eight hours; it was too late in the day for that. I had to see Jean-Claude tonight. Joy. But he was the Master Vampire of the City. If there was another master vampire around, he'd know it. I think they can smell each other. Of course, if Jean-Claude had committed the murder, he wasn't likely to confess. But I didn't really believe he'd done it. He was much too good a business vampire to get messy. He was the only master vampire I'd ever met who wasn't crazy in some way: psychotic, or sociopathic, take your pick.

  Alright, alright, Malcolm wasn't crazy, but I didn't approve of his methods. He headed up the fastest-growing church in America today. The Church of Eternal Life offered exactly that. No leap of faith, no uncertainty, just a guarantee. You could become a vampire and live forever, unless someone like me killed you, or you got caught in a fire, or hit by a bus. I wasn't sure about the bus part, but I'd always wondered. Surely there must be something massive enough to damage even a vampire beyond healing. I hoped someday to test the theory.

  I climbed the stairs slowly. My body felt heavy. My eyes burned with the need to sleep. It was three days before Halloween, and the month couldn't end too soon for me. Business would start dropping off before Thanksgiving. The decline would continue until after New Year's, then it'd start picking up. I prayed for a freak snowstorm. Business drops off if the snow is bad. People seem to think we can't raise the dead in deep snow. We can, but don't tell anyone. I need the break.

  The hallway was full of the quiet noises of my day-living neighbors. I was fishing my keys out of my coat pocket when the door opposite mine opened. Mrs. Pringle stepped out. She was tall, slender, thinning with age, white hair done in a small bun at the back of her head. The hair was perfectly white. Mrs. Pringle didn't bother with dyes or makeup. She was over sixty-five and didn't care who knew it.

  Custard, her Pomeranian, pranced at the end of his leash. He was a round ball of golden fur with little fox ears. Most cats outweighed him, but he's one of those little dogs with a big-dog attitude. In a past life he was a Great Dane.

  "Hello, Anita." Mrs. Pringle smiled as she said it. "You're not just getting in from work, are you?" Her pale eyes were disapproving.

  I smiled. "Yeah, I had an . . . emergency come up."

  She raised an eyebrow, probably wondering what an animator would have for an emergency, but she was too polite to ask. "You don't take good enough care of yourself, Anita. If you keep burning the candle at both ends, you'll be worn out by the time you're my age."

  "Probably," I said.

  Custard yapped at me. I did not smile at him. I don't believe in encouraging small, pushy dogs. With that peculiar doggy sense, he knew I didn't like him, and he was determined to win me over.

  "I saw the painters were in your apartment last week
. Is it all repaired?"

  I nodded. "Yeah, all the bullet holes have been patched up and painted over."

  "I'm really sorry I wasn't home to offer you my apartment. Mr. Giovoni says you had to go to a hotel."

  "Yeah."

  "I don't understand why one of the other neighbors didn't offer you a couch for the night."

  I smiled. I understood. Two months ago I had slaughtered two killer zombies in my apartment and had a police shootout. The walls and one window had been damaged. Some of the bullets had gone through the walls into other apartments. No one else had been hurt, but none of the neighbors wanted anything to do with me now. I suspected strongly that when my two-year lease was up, I would be asked to leave. I guess I couldn't blame them.

  "I heard you were wounded."

  I nodded. "Just barely." I didn't bother telling her that the bullet wound hadn't been from the shootout. The mistress of a very bad man had shot me in the right arm. It was healed to a smooth, shiny scar, still a little pink.

  "How did your visit with your daughter go?" I asked.

  Mrs. Pringle's face went all shiny with a smile. "Oh, wonderful. My last and newest grandchild is perfect. I'll show you pictures later, after you've had some sleep." That disapproving look was back in her eyes. Her teacher face. The one that could make you squirm from ten paces, even if you were innocent. And I hadn't been innocent for years.

  I held up my hands. "I give up. I'll go to bed. I promise."

  "You see you do," she said. "Come along, Custard, we have to go out for our afternoon stroll." The tiny dog danced at the end of his leash, straining forward like a miniature sled dog.

  Mrs. Pringle let three pounds of fluffy fur drag her down the hall. I shook my head. Letting a fuzzball boss you around was not my idea of dog ownership. If I ever had another dog, I'd be boss, or one of us wouldn't survive. It was the principle of the thing.

  I opened the door and stepped inside the hush of my apartment. The heater whirred, hot air hissing out of the vents. The aquarium clicked on. The sounds of emptiness. It was wonderful.

  The new paint was the same off-white as the old. The carpet was grey; couch and matching chair, white. The kitchenette was pale wood with white and gold linoleum. The two-seater breakfast table in the kitchen was a little darker than the cabinets. A modern print was the only color on the white walls.