“Morning, officer,” she said in a chipper voice.
“You fuckin’ crazy bitch!” the younger Transit Bureau cop snapped. “You threw him off the platform! You just killed that man in cold blood!”
“I beg to differ!” she retorted. “I didn’t kill him—and he is not a man. Well, not a human, anyway. Look for your self,” Sonja said, gesturing to the tracks below.
The younger cop risked a glance over the edge of the platform, only to go pale and cry out in terror.
“Jesus, Diaz!” his partner growled. “You’ve seen jumpers chewed up by trains before! Get a hold of yourself!”
However, instead of listening to his partner, Diaz fired his gun at something down on the tracks.
“Diaz! What the fuck are you doing?” the older cop shouted. He had his cuffs out and was in the process of snapping one of the bracelets onto Sonja’s left wrist. “I ain’t in the mood for bullshit!”
“Neither am I,’ Sonja agreed as she slipped free of his hold, smashing her elbow into his face, dropping him like a bag of suet.
Having exhausted his clip, Diaz backed away from the edge of the platform, his face rigid with fear. Sonja stepped forward and peered down at the vampire—or, rather, what was left of it—she had thrown onto the tracks. The train had cut him in two as neatly as a magician’s saw, chopping him off at the waist. The viscera dangling from his ruined torso looked like party streamers dipped in transmission fluid. Eyes glowing with inhuman hate, the vampire pulled his truncated torso back onto the platform.
Sonja shook her head in amazement. “Buddy, you just do not know when to quit, do you?” she said with a disparaging laugh as the vampire clawed his way toward her, dragging a length of intestine behind him like a gory bridal train.
“Any last words, butt-munch?” she asked, as she took the gun from the cop she had just cold-cocked.
The vampire bared his fangs at her and hissed in response. So she shot him, taking off the top of the dead boy’s head. She then turned to Diaz and smiled, flashing some fang. The younger cop’s eyes nearly leapt from their sockets as he made a mad dash for the stairs.
There were more sirens up top. Sonja could hear the thunder of city-issued shoe leather on pavement. Within seconds, the platform will be swarming with police. It was time for her to leave.
She tossed the older cop’s gun aside as if was a wad of chewing gum and shifted back into high gear. She sped along the platform, away from the arriving phalanx of police, towards the Second Avenue exit. She ghosted up the stairs at Chrystie Street and glided into the long, narrow green space of Sara Delano Roosevelt Park. Morning had broken, and in the earliest moments of dawn, she saw a solitary Chinese man practicing tai-chi in the park. He had the head of a tiger.
Just the start of another day in the Big Apple.
Chapter Twenty
The Great Victoria Desert, Australia:
He could not decide which was hotter, the sun under which he walked or the ground beneath his feet. His skin hung in peeling tatters from his bare shoulders, which were pinker than boiled shrimp. His back felt as if he had lain down on a white-hot Barbie and was covered with blisters the size of walnuts. How long had he been on walkabout? Three days? Four? How long could a man walk naked in Western Australia before dying of exposure or thirst? Two days? Three?
His name was Charlie Gower, and a month ago he worked as a commercial artist in Canberra, designing logos for tinned meat and flavored chips. Then the advertising firm he worked for landed a state-sponsored job. Charlie wasn’t too sure what the campaign was about, but his job was to draw something based on ancient Aboriginal designs. So he bought a few books on the subject for research, including one on Tjurunga, the sacred object art of the Arrente of Central Australia. Charlie had spent art school studying the Old Masters and English landscapes, but the minute he laid eyes on the sinuous, primitive designs, something changed inside him.
Fascinated, Charlie began to look into the history of the tribes— something rarely, if ever, mentioned in his schooling. This, in turn, piqued an interest in his own family history, as the Glowers had been in Australia since the 1850s. Upon investigating the genealogy records at the National Archives in Canberra, he was surprised to discover that he had Arrernte blood in him.
His great-great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah Gower of London, had been arrested for stealing a coat and, at the age of fifteen, was transported to New South Wales to serve his queen and country as convict labor. He finally won his Ticket-of-Leave six years later, but instead of returning to England he chose to stay in the land he had been exiled to and, according to the records, took an Aborigine to wife. All Charlie could find out about her was that she had been of the Wongaranda tribe and that her husband had renamed her Hannah. When he asked Grandfather Gower about it, the old man was scandalized by the suggestion that the family founders had been anything but upstanding and lily-white.
“Where do you get this rubbish about Jeremiah being a convict and married to an Abo?” The Gower patriarch shouted, nearly spitting his false teeth out in disgust. “My great grandfather came here as a guard! And Hannah was white as you and me!”
“I found it in the public records, Grandfather,” Charlie tried to explain. “It’s all digitized and searchable online.”
“Computers! Bunch of nonsense!”
Charlie really had not expected much more from grandfather. The old man’s generation had been raised in shame of its convict and Aborigine heritage, and his parents’ generation wasn’t much better. His mother, a devout Anglican, Christian, was exceptionally worried about his new interest in what she called “pagan art”, and feared it might somehow endanger his immortal soul.
As far as Charlie was concerned, they were all overreacting. He had simply discovered a new hobby, one that stimulated his mind in a way that churning out advertisement layouts could not.
In his study of the Tjurunga, Charlie read about the Dreamtime. It was a time that came before the birth of Man, when beings of great power shaped the land and filled it with all the plants and animals that would ever be. Once their work was done, these beings of power died, transforming their physical bodies into the stars, the rainbows, and the mountains. Their spirits withdrew into their own realm, where they dreamed of Man, whose role it was to serve as guardian of the natural world. Although they were dead, the Dreaming Things still retained power over the physical realm, which they continued to protect as long as Man followed the Great and Secret Plan and continued to commune with the spiritual realm through their dreams.
Charlie found the creation stories and tales of dreaming gods intriguing, in an anthropological sense, but did not really see much difference between the myths of Ancient Greece or the Norse sagas. In the end, they were just a bunch of stories trying to explain why it thundered, where the sun went at night, and where the mountains came from.
Then one night, he had a dream. He was walking naked through a strange and hostile land, both beautiful and frightening in its ruggedness. As he walked under a beating sun, he saw the Rainbow Serpent Wanambi rise from his watery hiding place and stretch himself until he filled the sky with his writhing, endless body. Mudungkala, mother to all Mankind, emerged from a hole in the ground, clutching the three babies that were the first human beings to her withered breasts, and scolded him for being so slow.
“You must hurry, Apari if you would be a father to the new race.”
“My name isn’t Apari,” he replied. “It’s Charlie.”
“Maybe that is the name you wear when you are awake,” Mudungkala told him. “But in the Dreaming you are Apari. And it is best not to keep your bride waiting, no matter what your name is,” the old woman said as she pointed to the horizon.
Charlie looked and saw a beautiful woman in place of the sun, shining as if she held a thousand stars in her belly. The Dream Woman opened her eyes and pinned Charlie to the spot with their golden stare. She smiled and spoke his name.
Apari.
Charlie
work up, the Dream Woman’s spectral voice echoing inside his head. Her voice continued to haunt him, making it hard for him to concentrate on the new ad campaign for Kookaburra Lager. The client wanted their mascot to be a kangaroo with a six pack of beer in its pouch, in place of a joey. He did as they asked and turned the finished artwork in, only to find himself called into a conference, where the client announced that they had decided the kangaroo should be wearing a bush hat because that would make it look masculine, and they did not want anyone to accuse them of encouraging pregnant mothers to drink. Of course, they seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that male kangaroos do not have pouches.
As the client droned on about the importance of kangaroos wearing hats, Charlie heard a woman call his name. His Dreaming name.
Apari.
Charlie’s eyes darted around the conference room, but the only woman was an elderly woman tending the tea trolley.
It is time to go walkabout, the Dream Woman’s voice murmured.
Without saying a word, Charlie stood up from his chair and took off his tie. Everyone in the conference room fell silent and stared at him as if he had just sawed off his right leg.
“Gower! What’s the meaning of this?” his boss blustered.
Charlie did not respond but instead marched out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. He left his jacket on the curb outside the office block where he had reported to work for the last six years. That was what? Three? Four days ago?
He got in his car and drove west for twenty-four hours until first he ran out of petrol. Then he walked along the highway until he came to a road. Then he walked along the road until he came to a track. And when the track disappeared, he left behind the bush and set off into the outback.
Of course, he’d had some help along the way, such as the elderly Pitjantjatjaran who let him ride in the back of his beat-up old Land Rover for a couple hundred miles, and the shape-shifting muramura who, upon seeing how close he was to dying from thirst, came dancing out of the shimmering heat of the desert with an emu egg full of water. Sometimes the muramura looked like kangaroo-headed humans, other times they appeared to have had dingo heads. In any case, they had proven fairly friendly to Charlie.
As he trudged deeper into the outback, all conscious thought, all identity besides that of Apari, flaked away with his peeling skin. All that mattered was the voice of the Dream Woman, drawing him ever westward, like a filing pulled by a magnet. But after struggling for the better part of a day he finally collapsed onto the baked earth, his face turned toward the sun.
As he stared up at the punishing sky with scorched eyes, he saw something bright and glowing fall from the heavens. At first he thought it was a meteorite, but as it came closer, he could see that it had arms and legs. He smiled then, for he recognized the Dream Woman and knew he was not dreaming.
She scooped him up in her golden arms and bore him into the sky, where she wrapped his burnt flesh in soft clouds while coaxing the honey of life from his loins with only the slightest movement of her own.
When Charlie Gower woke up, he was being tended to by a tribe of Ngatatjara living a hundred miles east of Warburton. His skin was darker than a betel nut, and there was what appeared to be tribal scarring on his face and belly. He was not sure if he had done that to himself somewhere along the line or if the Dream Woman was responsible for marking him.
The first day he was in the Ngatatjara camp he wondered how he was going to get home and if he still had a job, or if his boss had found someone else to draw hats on kangaroos. On the second day, he wondered if his family would miss him, or simply heave a sigh of relief. On the third day, he decided to hell with it and declared Charlie Gower dead. From now on there was only Apari, water-dowser and maker of Tjurunga.
And that’s who he was the rest of his life.
Rocinha, Rio de Janiero, Brazil:
João Iglesias and his wife, Mayara lived in a two room shanty in Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, located in the city’s Zona Sul, with views of Corcovado in one direction and the ocean to another. Built on a mountain slope, the sprawling hodge-podge of do-it-yourself housing was home to the majority of laborers who tended to the needs of those in the gleaming, ultramodern steel and glass towers below. João made his living as a moto-taxi driver, running his neighbors up and down Rocinha’s steep and narrow streets on his Honda motorbike while Mayara operated a small stand that sold sodas and snacks that her husband ferried up from Rio on his motorcycle.
Their house was essentially a concrete box with a corrugated tin roof, identical to the tens of thousands of other homes stacked along the narrow, twisting streets of the favela. The two rooms consisted of a combination kitchen and living area, and a much smaller sleeping room. The house built into a hillside, so there was little natural light and had few windows, and the ones they did have were fitted by metal bars that could not be removed, like those of a jailhouse. It was drafty in the winter and hot in the summer and the Iglesias family shared a communal toilet with the household next door. João and Mayara dreamed of someday moving to more spacious and pleasant surroundings, but for now this was the best they could afford. At least they had fairly reliable electricity and running water, which was more than Mayara’s sister-in-law did. Every other day she came to fill two five liter containers and take them back to where she lived, so they could flush the toilet in her apartment.
It was close to midnight, and Mayara was still awake, although she had spent all day tending her stall, selling soft drinks and cigarettes to the locals and the occasional Turista brave enough to venture into the favela in search of the “authentic” Rio. She was sitting next to the stove, the only source of heat in the house, and watching her baby sleep with a worried expression on her face.
“Mayara, are you coming to bed?” João was standing in the door to their bedroom, his hair tousled and eyes puffy. His day had been a long one as well.
“Something is wrong with Diego,” she replied. “He’s running a fever.”
“It’s just a cold,” her husband reassured her. “All the nieces and nephews have colds right now.”
Mayara frowned and leaned over her son’s cradle, fussing with the blanket around his feet. “I know. But he is only two weeks old. I should not have left him with your sister. He is still so little…”
“Mayara, we’ve already gone over this,” João said wearily. “We agreed that leaving Diego with Betina was the only thing we can do. Your mother lives too far away, and we cannot afford for you to stay home with the baby. Maybe in a few months, you can take him to work with you, but not right now.”
“You are right, João,” she sighed. “But I can not help but worry. He is our first child.”
João smiled despite his exhaustion and kissed the top of his wife’s head. “It is good that you worry about our son. It means you are a good mother. I worry, too. But I am even more worried that we will not make the rent.”
Mayara held her husband’s hand tightly for a long moment, her eyes never leaving the cradle that held their son. “Go and get some sleep, meu amado. I’ll join you in a little while. I will not be up much longer, I promise.”
João sighed and went back to bed alone, leaving his wife perched on a stool beside the stove as she rocked Diego’s cradle and quietly sang lullabies. A few minutes later Mayara could hear her husband snoring. The sound reminded her of just how tired she was. Her eyelids began to grow heavy, and her head started to nod.
Ten minutes after his mother dozed off, Diego Iglesias stopped breathing.
A few seconds later, a golden light filtered through the bars of the narrow window and the front door opened inward as if unlatched by a phantom hand. Standing on the threshold was a woman with long hair that fluttered about her naked shoulders as if buffeted by secret winds. In her arms was a baby boy with dark hair. The strange woman hovered beside Mayara for a moment, then lifted the lifeless body of little Diego from the cradle, replacing him with her living child. Then, as quickly and s
ilently as she arrived, the glowing woman left, the front door closing and locking itself behind her.
Mayara awoke with a start, blinking in confusion. She looked in the cradle to check on Diego and was both surprised and relieved to find that whatever was wrong with her son had seemingly passed. Diego gurgled happily, waving his little hands at his mother as if in greeting.
Chapter Twenty-One
Something was in the room.
The realization that she was no longer alone trickled into her sleeping brain like water from a leaky tap. At first she was uncertain whether it was the real thing or merely a dream of intrusion until the Other shrieked: Wake up, you stupid bitch! We’ve got company!
Sonja came off the loft in three seconds flat, her fangs extended and hair bristling like a wolf’s hackle. There was no time for her to wonder how they found her and got past the booby traps. She hit the ground ready for combat, her switchblade at ready. But instead of being greeted by an army of pale, undead faces, she found a solitary figure seated in the leather easy chair in front of the TV set.
“No need for alarm, milady,” Jen purred. “I intend you no harm.’
“Then what are you doing here?” She growled.
“My employers wanted to know where you nest,” he replied. “They told me to assign a shadow to you—which you expertly disposed, by the way. But you needn’t fear me. I won’t tell them where you spend your daylight hours.”
“What are you playing at, Renfield?”
“I am not a Renfield,” he said indignantly.
“You’re a human working for vampires,” Sonja retorted. “That makes you a Renfield in my book. Theirs, too, I’d say.”
I work for Luxor and Hedera because it suits my needs, not because they’ve got a slave collar snapped around my mind!” he said, bridling at her words.
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