Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  “Do you still have it?” she asked.

  He nodded wearily. “Yes, although God only knows why I kept the horrible thing. It should be smashed to pieces and sown with salt.”

  “Can I see it?”

  The DVD started without any preface, revealing a medium long shot of the Blue woman, minus her sunglasses, trussed up in a straitjacket and a length of chain, shot in night vision so that everything looked grainy and pale green. As the camera pulled back, the setting was revealed to be a racquetball court. There was no sound to go along with the picture, so the Blue woman shrieked and howled soundlessly as she slammed herself against the hard white walls. Blood dribbled from her nostrils and the corners of her mouth, and she looked drunk.

  Something fluttered at the corner of the camera’s field of vision. Someone had thrown a live chicken from the observation deck above the racquet ball court. It hit the polished wood floor like a bag of suet. The Blue woman was on it in half a heart-beat. The injured fowl flapped about in a feeble attempt to escape her. After she drained the chicken, she seemed to calm down.

  There was a jerky cut, as if the camera had been shut off. The digital readout in the left-hand corner of the screen indicated a half-hour had elapsed since the last shot. This time an alley-wise tomcat was thrown into the makeshift geek pit. Although she ended up with some nasty facial scratches, it didn’t seem to slow her down much. An hour later a large dog went sailing off the observation deck. The poor mutt’s legs shattered on impact, making her ministrations seem almost merciful. Two hours after that, they threw the wino in.

  The homeless man lay sprawled on the floor of the racquetball court, his legs hopelessly smashed, just like the dog before him. He looked like every other street person over the age of thirty, with a tangled beard, crooked teeth, and an unwashed face rendered featureless by hardship. As he struggled to raise himself onto one elbow, she jumped him like a hungry spider would a fly. It was a fierce, bloody transaction. After feeding, the Blue woman rocked back on her heels and looked straight into the camera and grinned, displaying her fangs. Then the video went to black. There was a long silence before Thorne finally spoke.

  “I don’t know what you are, but you aren’t my daughter.” His voice was that of a man suffering a deep wound without anesthetic. “You’re some kind of freak, an aberration of God and nature. You might have her memories, but you aren’t her. You can’t be her. I won’t let you be her.”

  Sonja said nothing but continued to stare at the blank television screen.

  “What do you want from me?” he growled angrily. “Is it hush money? That’s what that degenerate Englishman asked for when he came around. He threatened to go to the tabloids if I didn’t make it worth his while.”

  “I did come here to ask for money, Mr. Thorne, but not for myself. I’m asking on Mr. Hagerty’s behalf,” she explained, gesturing to Claude. “He was my keeper while I was incarcerated. Wheele wants him dead because she thinks he was working for you and allowed me to escape in order to break her hold over you. As you can see, they came very close to killing him before I stepped in. Mr. Hagerty is an innocent bystander in all this, and I do not wish to see him harmed.”

  Thorne glanced at Claude as if truly seeing him for the first time. “What do you expect me to do about the situation?”

  “You’re very good at intimidating others, Mr. Thorne. Just pretend she’s attempting a takeover. Even if you don’t pull it off, it will at least give me time to make sure Claude gets out of town safely.”

  “What are you planning on doing?” Thorne asked uneasily.

  She hesitated, uncertain as to whether she could trust him with such information. “Whatever I do—believe me—I’ll keep Mrs. Thorne’s name out of it.”

  Thorne grunted and got to his feet, moving across the room to the flat screen TV mounted on the wall. He punched a button and the LED screen rolled upward, revealing a safe. He punched in a code into the digital keypad, and the door swung open. He reached inside and removed a plain brown paper sack.

  “Here’s this month’s ‘love offering’ to the Wheeles of God Ministry,” he said, handing the bag to Claude. “It’s one hundred thousand in cash, mostly hundreds and fifties.”

  “Jacob? What’s going on in here? What are you doing with Sister Catherine’s money?”

  Shirley Thorne stood in the doorway of her husband’s office, using the door frame to keep her balance. She blinked in confusion at the strangers standing in her home in the middle of the night.

  “Honey, go back to bed. It’s nothing.” Thorne was trying to sound casual, but the look on his face was that of a man trapped in his worst recurring nightmare.

  “Who are these people, Jake? Do they work for the ministry? “

  “Please, Shirley, please, just go back to bed!” He was all but sobbing now. “It’s nothing that concerns you!”

  Sonja stepped back, as if trying to wrap herself in shadow. The movement attracted Mrs. Thorne’s attention. She peered at the young woman dressed in denim and black leather with eyes hazed by tranquilizers. Suddenly she gave voice to a cry of recognition and rushed to embrace her long lost daughter, burying her face in Sonja’s leather jacket. Sonja’s arms moved instinctively moved to encircle the old woman, but halted before actually touching her. Her entire body trembled as she fought to keep from returning her mother’s hug.

  “You’ve come back! Praise the Lord! You’ve come back to me! Just like Sister Catherine told me you would!” she sobbed. “Everyone said you had to be dead by now, but I never believed them! Never-never-never. I knew you were still alive! I would have felt it if you were dead. But you were always in my heart.”

  It was hard, so very hard to deny her. Sonja ached to fall into her mother’s arms and weep for the years lost to them, but that was impossible. It felt as if something was breaking inside, filling her heart with shards. She was afraid to speak for fear that her voice would sound like breaking glass. There was no way back into the bosom of her family. She’d understood that hard, cruel fact when she killed Joe Lent. But there had always been the faint hope that she would be forgiven her trespasses and allowed to return, but now was the time to pull that fantasy out by its roots. She knew what she had to do, even though it pained her more than Thorne’s betrayal.

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mrs. Thorne,” she said as firmly as she could as she unwrapped her mother’s arms from about her neck.

  Shirley Thorne looked into her Sonja’s, perplexed by the twin pieces of polarized glass that covered her eyes. It was easy to slip into the old woman’s mind, even though Sonja was repulsed by this most intimate of intrusions.

  She dropped through the layers of Shirley Thorne’s consciousness, shocked by how close she was to true insanity. Her mind was an unlanced boil, filled with years of accumulated grief and anguish. And the nucleus of Shirley Thorne’s malaise was her daughter.

  Denise Thorne lay curled within her mother’s mind like a giant seventeen-year-old fetus, her face wiped clean of human imperfection and glowing like an Orthodox saint,. An umbilical cord, as thick and black as a snake tethered the approximation to Mrs. Thorne’s unconscious.

  Saint Denise stared at the intruder in her realm with the passive eyes of a caged doe. Sonja realized what she was looking at was a cherished memory turned malignant. Left unattended, Shirley Thorne would simply retreat deeper and deeper into her self-inflicted wound, content to spend the rest of her days in the company of her canonized ghost-daughter.

  The poor woman had spent decades denying herself the catharsis of mourning her only child. She had refused to surrender hope, as her husband had done in the name of ‘moving on’. But unrewarded faith can curdle, and in time her optimism had given way to desperation, then delusion. But Sonja knew that wherever Denise Thorne may have gone, she certainly wasn’t gestating in her mother’s head. She realized what had to be done to end her suffering, but was uncertain whether it heal Denise’s mother or finally drive her over the edge for goo
d.

  Suddenly she was dressed in black leather surgeon’s mask and gown, a gleaming switchblade scalpel in her hand. She reached out for the pulsing, diseased umbilical cord as the Denise tumor bobbed lazily up-and-down, like a balloon on the end of its string. Was this murder? Suicide? Or was it something like abortion? If so, the mother’s life was at stake. As the scalpel sliced through the fake Denise’s lifeline, a flicker of awareness seemed to cross the tumor’s blankly perfect face.

  Sonja disengaged from Mrs. Thorne’s mind to find that a second, perhaps two, of real time had elapsed. “I’m not who think I am, ma’am. I hate to say it, but your daughter is dead. I was there when she died.” Her words were quiet but firm, just like the push she gave Mrs. Thorne’s mind.

  Shirley Thorne stared at the strange woman with mirrors for eyes. She opened her mouth, once more prepared to deny the possibility of her daughter’s death, only to have an invisible white-hot needle stab her between the eyes. Something convulsed deep inside her mind and for half a heartbeat she could hear Denise’s voice crying out Mommmmmeeeee. It was then that she knew her child was dead. With that horrible realization there was an overpowering sense of loss, followed by a rush of relief that it was finally over. Her sobs racked her frail body, threatening to knock her to the floor. The girl with the mirror eyes reached out to steady her, but she shrank away from her touch.

  “Get away from her!” Thorne snapped as he hurried to his wife’s side, putting himself between them. “Can’t you see you’ve done enough damage already?”

  Mrs. Thorne turned and clutched her husband’s arm like a life raft, her tears splashing on his seamed and wrinkled hands. “Our baby’s gone. She’s dead, Jake. Denise is dead.”

  Jacob Thorne’s sinus ached from unshed tears, but he refused to weep in front of the thing that wore his daughter’s skin. “Get out,” he hissed. “Now!”

  Sonja left without looking back, her bruised companion in tow. If she had permitted herself one last glance at Denise’s parents, she would have seen Thorne reach for the phone.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Claude stared at the bag full of money he held in his hand, then back at Sonja as she strode purposefully down the street, her hands buried deep in her pockets and her mouth set into a scowl. She had not said anything since they left the Thorne penthouse, but it was obvious she was upset by what had gone down with Denise’s parents. Not that he could blame her. But it would really help if he knew what their next step might be.

  “Uh—Sonja?”

  She did not look at him as she grunted her acknowledgement.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the bus station,” she replied, still not bothering to look in his direction. “It’s the easiest way to get you out of town. There are no security checkpoints, you won’t need a passport, and nobody cares if you’re travelling light.”

  With a start, Claude realized that after years of waiting, something was finally happening to him, not some character in a book, TV show or movie. Just a few days before, he was just another half-broke slob, trapped in a dead-end job with nothing to his credit except a high-school diploma and a library card. Now he was privy to secrets theologians would kill for, conspiring and conspired against, and permitted the frankest of looks into the private lives of the rich and famous. It was enough to make his head spin. Or was that the cognac he’d helped himself to from Thorne’s wet bar? As he looked at Sonja, he was suddenly overwhelmed by an immense feeling of gratitude, mixed with shame. Without hesitating, he reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Sonja—please—can you stand still for a minute or two? I need to say something.”

  She grudgingly stopped and turned to look at him, her eyes unreadable behind their reflective shields. “Yeah? What is it?”

  “I know you’re feeling low right now—but I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done. I mean, you’ve done more to help me than anyone has since I left home. I don’t know anyone else who would have put themselves on the line for me the way you did. Ever since I graduated high school, I’ve done nothing but work nights and sleep all day, so I don’t have a whole lot of friends in my life. Hell! The only thing that kept me tied to this city was my job—and now I don’t even have that. I guess what I’m trying to say is ‘thank you’ for giving me the chance to start my life over again. It’s an opportunity I never dreamt I’d have. You know,” he said with a smile, “you’re not a half-bad person for a vampire.”

  She laughed then, and for the briefest moment it seemed as if Denise Thorne was smiling back at him.

  Then the dark sedan jumped the curb and plowed right into them.

  Sonja cursed herself for becoming so distracted. She planted her right hand on the hood of the moving car and vaulted onto its roof. Her landing was not the smoothest, and she ended up bouncing down onto the truck, bashing her shoulder as she went. She quickly got to her feet, scanning her surroundings for signs of Claude, fearful his benign bulk had ended up under the front wheels of the sedan.

  She heaved a sigh of relief upon seeing the orderly had leapt clear of the vehicle, and was sitting in the gutter. The paper bag full of money he had been carrying had split open, surrounding him with fistfuls of hundred dollar bills.

  The doors on the sedan opened, disgorging lookalike young men outfitted in suits, ties, and sunglasses. Claude looked down at his newly won fortune dumped into the street like so much trash and began to laugh. He didn’t offer any resistance as two of the Wheelers thrust their guns in his face and pulled him toward the car.

  “Stay away from him!”

  The Wheelers froze in mid-abduction, their faces rigid with fear. Sonja felt a touch of pride upon catching scent of their terror, followed by the familiar surge of adrenaline that signaled The Other’s arrival. It was good to know they feared her, as well they should. As she stepped toward the knot of faceless men, she could already taste their blood on her lips. Then a couple of them pulled out pocket-sized burp guns and opened fire.

  The bullets punched holes in her abdomen, the hollow points expanding on impact and sending shrapnel through her guts. She’d been hurt hundreds of times before, but not like this. Never like this. In all the previous woundings she’d experienced, the pain had been intense but brief. After all, what was pain but the animal flesh reacting out of instinct? But the agony she now felt was unrelenting and quadrupled with every breath, like sunlight reflected in a house of mirrors. She collapsed face-first onto the street, her torso a mass of blood and exposed intestine, as the sedan sped off with Claude stuffed in the trunk. No one seemed to notice the small fortune in hundred dollar bills lying forgotten in the gutter.

  She caught the scent of ruptured bowel and it took her a second to recognize the stink as being her own. It was then she realized her spine was damaged. The spinal cord—that flexible cable of nerves and tissues—was the vampire’s Achilles’ heel. Once damaged it could never be regenerated, as was true for the brain perched atop it in its box of bone. Sever or crush a vampire’s spinal cord and it became paralyzed and soon died of starvation. It was one of the few physical frailties they shared with their prey.

  She found some irony in the fact that she was exiting the world as she had first entered it, lying in the gutter, as if the decades that had passed were nothing but a dream before dying. She tried to laugh, but all that came out of her mouth was a lungful of dark blood frothed with oxygen.

  As she slid closer to death, she began to hallucinate. Ghilardi was bent over her, his face pinched with concern. She recognized him more by his aura than his physical appearance, as he had been dead for some time. He shimmered like the sky on a bright summer’s day, and his blurred features were younger than those when she had known him. But then, no one ever pictures themselves as being old.

  “Sonja?”

  She’d expected his voice to be as ephemeral as his form, but it was the same as it ever was. There was no static on the line. He wasn’t talking long-distance. Th
at meant she was close. Closer than she’d ever been before, even the first time.

  “I’ve so much to tell you, Sonja!” he said excitedly. “I was such a fool about so many things! The flesh deluded me. But everyone finds that out, once they’re rid of it. Most do, that is. Some never surrender the illusions of the flesh and its limitations. The Aegrisomnia isn’t a key to the doors of human perception. It was written by a Pretender for Pretenders, and was intended to awaken changelings ignorant of their birthright and thought themselves humans—the ultimate pretense! It turns out I had some Pretender blood in me. Not much, but enough to be sensitive to the Real World. It was easier for me to claim my powers were inherent in all humans rather than to contemplate an ogre or an incubus in the family tree.”

  This was all very interesting, but Sonja could not see why her mentor had intruded on her final moments with such late news.

  “There’s so much to learn and forget once you’re free of the business of living,” Ghilardi assured her. “But I’m afraid you can’t die, Sonja. Not yet, anyway. Much depends on you.”

  Sonja frowned. Was Wheele that dangerous?

  Ghilardi caught her thought and dismissed it with a chuckle. “Wheele is nothing more than the bastard product of a backwoods incubus. She is a Pretender unaware she is pretending and armed with more power than she knows what to do with. No, grander and far more horrible fate awaits you.”

  “Death has made you oblique, old man,” she whispered, but Ghilardi was gone. In his place was another familiar face.

  Unlike Ghilardi, who had problems regaining human form, Chaz’s apparition was a perfect replica of his physical self, right down to the nicotine stains. The only flaw in the illusion was that he was composed of violet fog instead of flesh.

  The dead psychic leaned forward, studying her with the same detached interest he’d give an ant farm. A ghostly cigarette dangled from his lips, phantom smoke curling about and through his head, as they shared the same consistency.