Bite Club

by Hal Bodner

  Take Lucenzio Caravella, for example. In fact, Sylvia thought, she heartily wished someone would take him—preferably for an extended vacation to a place far away from New York. Lucenzio had been handsome in his youth, still was in fact. However, during the past few centuries he’d taken up homosexuality with a vengeance and had become enamored of the most god-awful effeminate trappings. He could frequently be recognized out on the town by his outré combination of brilliantly colored early fifteenth-century brocades and silks and ornate eighteenth-century lace collars and cuffs. Sylvia had often voiced the opinion that Lucenzio would be considered a fashion risk in any century; the once attractive vampire had become a flamboyant caricature of his former self.

  Well, she supposed, he was old enough. With only a slight grimace of distaste and reminding herself to be polite, she dialed Lucenzio’s number. The answering machine came on after the fifth ring and she left a brief message. Several telephone calls later, she gathered that most of Manhattan’s vampires had already retired for the day. Knowing that she would undoubtedly be forced to sell whatever soul she still possessed to Sprint in order to pay off the long distance charges, she began to dial Europe, knowing that twilight would be falling and many of her kind would likely be already awake but not yet out for the evening. She reached several old friends and, after quickly explaining the situation, extracted promises that each would keep his or her eyes and ears open. In less time than she would have at first thought, she had managed to contact most of the vampires who had established informal salons and centers of social activity.

  She hung up the telephone and leaned back in her chair to think. Sylvia Gabrelli hadn’t managed to keep herself alive across the centuries by blindly marching ahead when her instincts told her to do otherwise. And right now her instincts told her that, if the rogue been active at any time in the recent past, the word would have spread and one of the people to whom she had just spoken would have had, at the very least, an unfounded rumor to report.

  She could wait until evening and try to call some of the other vampires who she knew, but she was fairly certain the results would be no more promising. While members of her race possessed a certain curiosity, their inquisitiveness was usually more directed toward finding out who was currently sleeping with—or no longer sleeping with—whom, and not of the type best suited for solving mysteries or tracking down murderers. Shuddering with distaste, she realized that, for a change, time was the one luxury she lacked and that she would undoubtedly have to turn to acquaintances who, although they were not vampires, possessed skills and attributes unknown to mortal men. And although the earth was home to many species of intelligent beings who were not altogether human, she was afraid that she knew exactly which community would be best suited to hunting down a killer.

  Hoping against hope that she’d come to the wrong conclusion, she mentally began to tally up the skills and attributes of the other groups, unwilling to make the telephone call to Queens that, if she were not mistaken, she would shortly have to make.

  She quickly rejected calling friends amongst the “little people.” Though terribly inquisitive most leprechauns and elves flatly refused to venture into any of the larger cities where humans clustered in abundance. She also dismissed the idea of enlisting the aid of the goblins. Although they had established settlements beneath almost every city of the world that had a large underground transportation system, their malicious practical jokes had frequently been known to indiscriminately injure mortals and immortals alike—sometimes with fatal results. No, contacting the goblins was definitely out of the question.

  As for the ghouls, they held only slightly greater promise. If Sylvia were willing to risk the utter ruin of whatever she happened to be wearing by tramping through the tunnels underneath Manhattan and if she managed to locate a nest, the poor creatures would undoubtedly flee from her in terror. Furthermore, they lived in such a perpetual state of fear of outsiders that they rarely communicated with anyone besides their own families, not even with others of their own kind. Well, perhaps if her other enquiries panned out…

  Sylvia sighed. This was getting her absolutely nowhere; she knew precisely what she had to do. Like it or not, there was only one person of her acquaintance who could provide her with access to the community which would be most likely to succeed in tracking down the killer. She spent an hour alternately steeling herself against the traditional narrow-minded lupine belligerence and trying to talk herself out of making the call and finally broke down and telephoned Hercule Legrande to arrange a meeting.

  One of the pups answered the phone and Sylvia was rudely and unceremoniously put on hold for a frustrating ten minutes while the youngster went off in search of his grandfather. Finally, Sylvia heard Hercule’s gruff voice come on the line, its lilting Cajun accent still familiar to her though she hadn’t heard it since their last disagreement almost five years ago.

  He masked his surprise at hearing from her remarkably well. She explained the situation in depth, stressing the danger that, if one so-called supernatural creature was discovered by the humans, others would be sure to follow. Hercule heard her out without comment. When she was finished, the line remained silent for a full thirty seconds.

  “So what?” he asked, unconcerned.

  Sylvia managed to control her brief flash of temper. “So, I’m asking for your help.”

  “Why?” was his only response.

  “You have packs located in every major city in the world. At least one near Los Angeles, if I remember correctly.”

  “The locations of our families have nothing to do with your problems.”

  The line fell silent as Hercule waited for her response. Sylvia cursed the well-known werewolf clannishness; she knew Hercule had no intention of making her entreaty for his help any less difficult than he could possibly make it. Her Italian accent grew slightly heavier from stress as she went on.

  “It’s easier for you to move around during the day. We’ll gather as much information as we can. But who knows? If you keep your eyes open, you may see something. As far as we know, Chris, Hanna, and Gustav are the only vampires in Los Angeles. You can spot a stranger as quickly as I can.”

  “This is true.”

  Sylvia felt her frustration building. “Hercule, do I have to beg?”

  “You could try.”

  Fighting the urge to damn him and all of his kind to whatever hell they believed in, she tried another tactic. “Could we at least meet somewhere and discuss this?”

  “Why?”

  She took a deep breath and then said through gritted teeth, “We could all be in terrible danger. Do you want peasants banging down your door, guns loaded with silver bullets? Threatening the safety of your family? Your children? Some things haven’t changed in the last few centuries.”

  This time the pause on the other end was thoughtful.

  “Why is it,” Hercule began, “that each time our community is threatened it is always the fault of one of your people?”

  Sylvia was silent, slightly ashamed, waiting for him to continue.

  “That painter who was killed in Paris in the ’30s, the woman in Georgia who went mad, each time it was we who found ourselves in danger. If you people can’t control yourselves, why should we bother to try – what? Excuse me a moment, Sylvia.”

  He’d evidently covered the receiver of the phone with his hand as his next words were muffled.

  “Jacques!” he said sternly, “Grandmere told you not to chew on the couch!” There was the sharp crack of a hand contacting flesh and a high-pitched yelp of pained surprise. “Go to your room if you can’t behave.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he spoke into the telephone again, “What was I saying? Oh, yes, we were speaking of your kind’s habit of running wild and endangering us all.”

  Sylvia allowed a hint of anger to creep into her voice. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never known a werewolf to run rogue?”

  “Not in my lifetime.”

  �
�Which hasn’t been nearly as long as mine,” she snapped. “If your kind lived for centuries, maybe you too would find aberrations cropping up.”

  “Aberrations? You speak as if this were an isolated incident. I find it occurs entirely too often for my taste.”

  “Three times since 1900?”

  “My point exactly.” He sighed heavily with disgust. “Well, I suppose I must at least hear you out, and the telephone is inappropriate. Where would you like to meet?”

  There followed a ten-minute discussion while the two haggled out a neutral meeting place. Each time Sylvia suggested a location, Hercule vetoed it unilaterally; this place was too openly public; that one was too secluded; the other was too difficult to get to; the next was too close to a home den. Each time, Hercule steadfastly refused to suggest a spot of his own.

  Finally, in a burst of thinly disguised sarcasm, Sylvia said, “I’ll tell you what. My building has a recreation room in the basement. No one uses it except for Wednesdays when the Hadassah ladies play bingo. I’ll reserve it for Friday night.”

  Surprisingly, Hercule agreed.

  Really! she thought as she bid him a terse goodbye and hung up. Those creatures are infuriating!

  The friction between the two species was long-standing and inevitable given their differing natures. Where vampires tended to be loquacious, chattering endlessly amongst themselves about their inevitable hobbies or reminiscing about the past, werewolves limited their verbiage to what was strictly necessary to get their point across. Vampires, due to their potentially infinite lifespans, had to be incredibly adaptable to changing societies and social conventions; their furry relatives, on the other hand, were extremely conservative, inflexible, and tended to be scornfully disapproving of change. Physically, a vampire could move much faster than a lycanthrope, even in wolfen form, and when walking on two legs the werewolves tended to be slow and ponderous in their movements. A vampire could, like Chris, look with wonder at the development of human society, or could, like Gustav, be amazed by modern technological advances, or could be like Sylvia, emotionally moved by the beauty of human art. A werewolf could only wonder with dour fatalism about what new dangers man’s development would pose for his pack or shake his head in sad disgust at the splash of brilliant colors in a Van Gogh painting, complaining that since his living room was brown the painting wouldn’t match. It was no wonder that individuals of the two species, when forced into each other’s company, could only be miserable with their mutual incompatibility.

  It was no comfort to Sylvia that it was physiologically impossible for a vampire to suffer from headache. At the thought of having to endure the upcoming meeting with Hercule Legrande, Sylvia could swear she felt a whopper of a migraine coming on.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Three stories beneath the ground, with the traffic on Fairfax Avenue muffled by the earth until it was a barely discernable hum, Rex Castillian slept. An observer, had one been able to witness Rex’s slumber and survive, would have seen no gentle rise and fall of the chest, no wisp of breath across the cheek, no soft throbbing of pulse at the temples or wrists, no stirring of the eyeballs as they twitched following the images of a dream.

  Even Becky O’Brien, had she happened across Rex’s inert form, would have immediately declared him dead—and she would not have been far from wrong. Had she the foresight to attach the electrodes of an EEG to the corpse’s temples, she would have been puzzled to note a tiny flicker of brain wave, high in the Alpha range, so small and so unusual that she would have probably dismissed it as a malfunction of her diagnostic equipment.

  Of course, had the hypothetical intruder possessed both the knowledge and the courage to place the sharp point of a wooden stake at a particular spot on the chest, above the heart, the quality of their observation would have been greatly enhanced as Rex Castillian, disturbed briefly from his sleep, instinctively tore out the intruder’s throat and sank back into slumber unaware of what he had done.

  Chris and Troy had been correct in their suppositions; Rex was old—incredibly old. Even he did not recall the exact time of his birth. His early memories had already begun to fade by the time a certain Jewish carpenter’s son was breathing his last upon a wooden cross. He was a creature without roots, without a past, railing out in anger against a universe in which his very identity was slowly being distorted and stolen by the passage of time. He knew his advanced age was to blame. While his body was immortal, his mind could only absorb new experiences by letting slip the old. His memories of the time prior to the glory days of the Roman Empire were but brief snapshots of moments, much as if a short clip of motion picture film had been ripped from a larger movie and presented to an audience with no introduction and no resolution. The images had only one element in common: blood—blood resulting from pain and death.

  During the daylight hours, fast asleep in his lair, Rex’s mind wandered, futilely attempting to dream and trying to bring his past alive once again. Visions of human suffering and misery swam through his subconscious. Sometimes the blood-stained images swarmed over him faster than his mind could cope; he was overwhelmed with moment after moment of sharp, crystal clarity, each vanishing as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a frustrated sense of hunger and sexual arousal.

  Today, in the early dawn hours, Rex was just beginning to dream. The dim remembrance an early incident in which he was amused by a young human’s death agonies began to take form. Rex was familiar with this particular dream. A favorite, it recurred on a fairly frequent basis. Its duration was longer than most, spanning almost two minutes. Rex clutched at it, hoping that with mental repetition he could recapture some of his lost past.

  The setting was a clearing in a dark wood, the moon gleaming ominously through the thick canopy of tall pine trees. A small group of robed figures surrounded a huge, flat block of stone, stained almost black with dried blood. A young man was led out of the wood toward the stone altar. Clad only in a pair of soiled homespun trousers, the victim was tall and muscular, with long dark blond hair in which bits of twigs and leaves had been caught. His shirt had been torn into pieces and now served as a gag; his arms had been bound tightly with cord to a stout tree branch that had been passed across his shoulders and behind his neck to function as a yoke.

  The robed men forced their prisoner to a halt next to the altar. Rex had a clear view of the young man’s back; he’d been flogged. The victim was perspiring with terror, his sweat mingled with the rivulets of blood, keeping it liquid as it slowly dripped from the raw flesh of his shoulders, down his back to stain the waist of the trousers. The remembered scent was maddening; Rex’s fangs ached in his upper jaw at the smell.

  The yoke was removed and the young man was forced backwards, stretched out, and bound face-up on the altar. Rex could feel himself beginning to salivate. He moved closer until he could meet the youth’s eyes with his own. Maliciously, Rex smiled and allowed the poor victim to get a good look at his fangs. The prisoner tried to scream through his gag but could manage only grunting noises.

  One of the robed figures approached, clutching a sharp stone knife, cowl thrown back to reveal a white bearded face. He raised the knife high into the air, poising it over the young man’s bare chest. Rex shivered with anticipation. Swiftly the bearded man brought the knife down, piercing the prisoner’s flesh, and a jet of blood shot into the air. Rex almost swooned as the torturer deftly twisted and hacked with the knife, ignoring the writing body beneath him. Rex had time only to delightedly recall the look of horror in the young man’s eyes as he realized he was dying. Then, despite his attempts to prolong it, the image vanished. This was one of the few dreams Rex remembered with any clarity.

  Part of him wanted a more total recall of his past; another part wanted desperately to be able to sleep in peace. But this was impossible. Of his breathing days he remembered nothing at all. His native earth was a mystery to him, and thus he was unable to include some in his coffin. His sleep was rarely refreshing; the dreams and memories co
ntinued to plague him. If he stayed in any one place for more than a century or so, he sometimes managed to achieve a modicum of comfort, but not much. He supposed his body finally began to adjust to the foreign soil; but he was never truly able to rest comfortably. This only increased his ire at a world that denied him a home.

  Even his birth name was lost to time. He’d taken to calling himself Rex, the “king”, roundabout when Tiberius had assumed the purple. During the Inquisition, he’d been dubbed The Castillian and, liking the sound of the name, he’d kept it. But he was no more of royal blood, and no more from Spain, than he was a florist from Hoboken.

  Rex was many things—vicious, hate-inspired, evil in many ways—but he was also an intelligent creature. He was a voracious reader, history naturally being his favorite subject. He’d eagerly devoured scholarly texts and had often been driven to a blinding rage when faces of people related to what he was reading swam clearly into his mind—faces he should have recognized, but couldn’t. Sometimes in the depths of a deserted library, the echoes of his laughter would ring from the high stone walls and ceilings of the building at the absurdity of some scholar’s conjecture about a particular incident or artifact. But to his great distress, although he knew the learned writer was incorrect, he could not, if his unlife depended on it, remember how he knew.

  Rex had always enjoyed the company of mortal men. They were so innocent, even the most evil of them, so unsuspecting of his true nature. He took pride in his cleverness at his ability to pass amongst them. It had been centuries since he was last able to retain consciousness without effort once the sun rose above the horizon, even longer since he had been able to tolerate the contact of its light on his skin without instantaneous painful blistering and burning. As the years passed and his limitations grew, he had been forced to discover more ingenious ways to explain his inability to be seen by mortals during daylight hours.