Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  “You got my note,” he said. “Good of you to come.”

  Sonja felt the chimera shift inside her head as it sensed its old master. As for herself, being so close to him made her muscles vibrate like the cables on a suspension bridge. The closer she got to him, the more she had to fight to keep from twitching like a junkie in need of a fix.

  Destroy him, whispered the Other as its wrapped her brain in a crown of thorns.

  “You know I’m going to kill you, Morgan,” Sonja said as she wiped at the cold sweat beading her upper lip.

  “You’ll try,” he conceded, with a bow of his head. “But not here, and not now.”

  Screw being discreet, nail him before he tries to call the chimera back, the Other growled, pushing the thorns even deeper into Sonja’s brain.

  “Why do you insist on fighting me, child?” Morgan asked, his voice as soothing as a cool hand on a fevered brow. “Do you still view your condition a curse? I gave you immortality, freedom from the ravages of old age and disease!”

  “I did not ask to be made into one of you. I did not ask for any of this,” she snarled.

  “Are you so certain of that?” Morgan countered. “You know as well as I that there are humans who seek us out. Luxor’s brothel swarms with them. You responded eagerly to your seduction; I used no beguilement, no mind control to lure you away from your friends.”

  “How dare you blame me for that?” She snapped.

  Morgan’s smile tried to be charming, but the scars twisted it into something else. “I’m not blaming you, of course. After all, you are not the girl who so willingly followed me from the club that night, are you? You are not Denise Thorne, but a creature of my seed, shaped in my image, hosted within her dead flesh.”

  “But Denise did not die,” Sonja replied.

  “If that is true, then where is she now?” Morgan countered.

  Sonja blinked, uncertain of how to answer. That was a question she had been unable to understand.

  What are you doing? The Other demanded, its voice close to hysterical. Can’t you see he is trying to hypnotize you? You have been waiting for this moment for decades! Kill him, and be done with it! Every moment you waste, you put us both in danger!

  Morgan reached into his breast pocket and produced a clamshell jewelry case. “I realize now I was a fool to throw such an exquisite thing as you away. What I did in London was a cruel and thoughtless thing. I was your sire, and I turned my back on you and left you to find your own way in a cold and trackless waste, without guidance or protection. You have every right to hate me for bringing you into such a pitiless world. But you have avenged your outrage by marking me. Our scores are now settled, wouldn’t you agree? In order to prove I harbor no ill-will towards you, I make you this peace offering.”He held the case out to her, flicking it open with his thumb. “I hope you like it. I thought you would, at least, appreciate the symbology behind it.”

  Lying on the red velvet interior was a black enamel eight-ball pendant shaped like a heart, affixed to a golden chain. As Sonja stared at the pendant, Morgan continued to speak, his voice thick and sweet in her ears, like honey dripping from the comb.

  “What happened to Denise Thorne does not concern us. Let us set aside our vendettas and begin our relationship anew.”

  Sonja reached out as if in a trance, her fingertips brushing the outside of the case.

  Don’t touch it!

  The Other’s voice was so loud it made Sonja flinch. She shuddered as if coming out of a trance, and drew back her hand. “What are you trying to pull?” she growled.

  “You misunderstand my motives.” Morgan’s tone was still genial, but there was a glimmer of apprehension in his good eye. He abruptly squared his shoulders and straightened himself to his full height. “But we can discuss that later—after we deal with our unexpected company.”

  Sonja followed his gaze and saw a half-dozen undead making their way across the dance floor towards them. To the eyes of the humans nightclubbing it up, the six new-comers looked perfectly normal. However, Sonja had no trouble seeing them for what they truly were—walking corpses.

  Without realizing it, Sonja suddenly found herself standing shoulder to shoulder with Morgan against the advancing vampires. Although she still had every intention of slaying Morgan, the sudden arrival of six unfriendly vampires necessitated a change in priorities and allegiance.

  “They’re Luxor’s brats,” Morgan sniffed in disgust. “That accursed half-bastard of Pangloss’ must have told him I’d be here! Still, I never imagined the hermaphrodite would be so bold!”

  “He probably thinks we’ve formed a truce and are teaming up against,” she pointed out.

  Morgan nodded in agreement with her assessment. “Luxor is nothing if not paranoid. And Hedera is even worse.”

  The air surrounding the assembled vampires abruptly shuddered as they shifted into overdrive en masse. Sonja and Morgan followed suit. The dancers on the floor instantly froze in mid-step, like the images on a paused DVD, and the strobes ceased their stutter, becoming spotlights. The rhythmic thumping bass of the dance music slowed until it sounded like whale song.

  Now safely invisible to the human eye, Luxor’s brood cast aside their masks of normalcy, revealing blood-red eyes and gleaming fangs as they surged forward to meet their enemy, yowling like banshees.

  Sonja met the first one head on, driving her switchblade into its chest. There was a fleeting moment of confusion on the vampire’s face before it folded around her fist like a punctured pool-toy. Before she could pull the blade free, a female vampire in retro bell-bottoms and a macramé tube-top slammed into her, knocking Sonja to the floor. Sonja quickly rammed her palm into the underside of her attacker’s chin, snapping the lower jaw like a piece of celery. The female vampire shrieked and tried to plunge a hooked thumbnail into her right eye, only to have Sonja bite it off and spit it back into her face.

  There was an explosion of pain that filled her eyes with spiraling stars as a vampire wearing steel-toed Doc Martens kicked the side of her head. As he drew back his foot to deliver a second one, she grabbed at his bootlaces and yanked, sending him flying.

  As Sonja scrambled back onto her feet, the vampire in the tube-top—now missing a thumb—leapt onto her back, clawing at her face with three-inch-long fingernails. Sonja reclaimed her knife, which was still wedged in the first vampire’s rapidly decomposing chest, and, reversing her grip, rammed it into the female’s left eye. The vampires yowled like a cat in heat and dropped onto the floor, where she flopped about like a landed fish.

  Sonja turned to see how Morgan was faring just in time to witness him grab one of his attackers and twist the vampire’s head completely around as if winding a watch stem. The vampire’s eyes blinked, more surprised than pained, then went gray.

  Suddenly the vampire who kicked her was back on his feet, driving his head into her gut like a Billy goat, slamming her into a nearby wall with such forced it cracked the plaster. Sonja rammed her switchblade into the back of her attacker’s neck, between the third and fourth vertebrae. The vampire instantly dropped to the floor, his body twitching and jerking as the silver invaded his central nervous system.

  As she looked back up, she saw Morgan decapitate the final member of Luxor’s suicide party and hurl the head into the packed dance floor. Despite everything she knew about the bastard, she had to admire his style...

  Kill him, the Other growled. Do it now.

  “I’m in no shape to take on a Noble of his power, right now,” Sonja muttered under her breath as she nursed her splintered ribs. “Fighting in overdrive is debilitating, and I’ve got a skull fracture and four broken ribs, and what feels like a damaged spleen. If I try to go up against him now, he will tear my head off, just like he did Luxor’s assassins.”

  Kill him or you will doom us all.

  “Shut up,” she whispered as she turned back to face her. “I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.” But, to her surprise, Morgan was nowhere to be seen. Ho
wever, the clamshell case was lying on the floor at her feet. She bent down and picked up the pendant, dangling it from its golden chain for a long moment.

  As she slipped the hear-shaped eight-ball about her neck, she felt a stab of excruciating pain in her upper left abdomen. From experience, she knew that her spleen had ruptured, and she was bleeding internally. She needed to return to her nest and power down so she could heal. But first she had to kick out of overdrive as it was rapidly depleting her already taxed energy reserves, if she wanted to steer clear of the morgue. She hated waking up to find some coroner splitting her open like a Christmas goose.

  As she slipped out of overdrive she was greeted by a chorus of shrill screams as the Cherub Room’s clientele suddenly discovered themselves not only splattered with blood, but the dance floor strewn with mutilated bodies as well.

  No doubt the club’s owners would have a hard time explaining the whole thing to the cops. But that is what they get for letting just anyone in the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  As Sonja returned to her nest downtown, one thought kept buzzing in her bruised and bloodied skull: Why didn’t she kill him?

  He was standing right there. It would not have been easy, or clean, but she could have at least tried. But she didn’t. It wasn’t like the first time she saw him, back in San Francisco. Back then she wanted to kill his ass, but good. But there is a dominant-submissive switch that is thrown whenever a vampire's spawn desires to destroy its sire, and it shuts that shit down but good. That’s what prevented her from taking down Morgan when she finally saw him again after all those years. It was a fail-safe, but it was far from infallible. If a vampire had enough willpower, he or she could overthrow their conditioning. But that’s not what happened to her at the Cupid Room. She did not struggle against anything. Instead, it was more like the fire in her belly had simply been extinguished. But why?

  Was it because he no longer resembled the Morgan she remembered? Or perhaps it was the sense she had that he had somehow changed in far more subtle ways than the scarring to his face? She had believed such a thing could be possible for a Noble, but after seeing Pangloss in his final hours and his subsequent metamorphosis, she was unsure as to exactly what she did and did not know about Pretenders and the Real World.

  The only part of her that still seemed to view Morgan with the same disgust was the Other, who made it clear that it would not be satisfied until he was destroyed and scattered to the winds. But Sonja could not figure out why it had such a hard-on for Morgan. The Other usually preferred wreaking havoc on those weaker than itself. So why was it so hot to slay a predator as dangerous as Morgan? Or had she simply spent so many years fighting the Other, trying to ignore its needs and desires, that she was automatically suspicious of its motives, even when they made perfect sense?

  With everything that had happened lately—Judd, Palmer, Lethe, and Pangloss—maybe she needed to call a Time Out and reassess her agenda. Maybe Morgan had a point. Perhaps it’s time for her to put aside her vendetta before she turned into a pathetic, vengeful moron like Luxor, constantly warring with others over perceived slights.

  I can not believe what I’m hearing, the Other growled. For decades, you have searched the globe for this fucker. And now you are turning chickenshit just because he said he was sorry and gave you some junk jewelry from Hot Topic?

  “Shut up,” she snarled in response to the voice only she could hear. “I’m not going soft if that’s what you are suggesting. I’m just tired, that’s all. I need to heal and sort things out.”

  Bullshit! You are looking for excuses not to act because you’re falling in love with him!

  “I’m not falling in love with Morgan!” Sonja exclaimed, grimacing at the empty air. “It’s sick to suggest that—even for you!”

  I was not talking to you.

  “Who else could you be talking to?” Sonja snorted derisively. “Denise? She’s dead…isn’t she?”

  ‘All in all, it went quite well. Luxor’s little kamikaze squad putting in an appearance worked to my advantage as it weakened her resolve. Good. It will make it easier for me to lull her into a false sense of security.

  ‘I have seduced thousands upon thousands of women over the centuries. Casanova was a bumbling school boy, in comparison. After all, coercing a woman to surrender her virtue is nothing—I rob them of far more than their maidenheads. I have lured legions of fair women to their doom, but none as deadly and as dangerous as my dearest Sonja. And until those who have come before her, I genuinely do love her. How could I not? The way she handled Luxor’s brats was poetry in motion! She is indeed a prodigy. Most vampires do not attain such poise and self-confidence until they are well into their second century! She is like a samurai blade tempered in the forge of a master smith. No wonder Luxor feared that she and I might team up. Together, no Noble would dare stand against us.

  ‘If only there was another way. She is a truly magnificent creature. A more regal Noble has never walked the earth. One glance at her, and you can tell she has never scuttled under rocks or into dumpsters to hide from the sun. But, then again, neither has she submitted to the will of another. And that is why she must die. The thought of destroying her pains me, but not as much as the act of loving her does. I can only hope my dress rehearsals have been successful in preparing me for my part.

  ‘This will be the hardest thing I’ve done since I broke my fealty to Pangloss, five centuries ago. I take no pleasure in what I must do. Even though she ruined my face, turning me into a sneering, one-eyed freak for the rest of eternity, I take no pleasure in plotting her demise. She is the only thing I have ever loved, and I have to kill her. I must kill her. There can be no other end to this.

  ‘I am Morgan, Lord of the Morning Star. I will be slave to nothing, living or dead. Not even love.’

  —from the journals of Sir Morgan

  The insistent sound of the cell-phone ringing dragged Sonja from her death-like sleep back to the land of the living. She was always groggy after her body had repaired itself from extensive physical damage, and this time was no different. She groped about in the pitch-black darkness until her hand closed about the phone and brought it to her ear. The caller-ID flashed ‘Jen’.

  “How did you get this number?” she growled.

  “Is that any way to say hello to a member of the family?” Jen replied puckishly. “And, to answer your question as to how I got this number, let’s just say I have my ways, and leave it at that, shall we?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Sir Morgan asked me to deliver a message: He would like you to meet him at the Empire State Building’s open-air observation deck—after it closes, of course. Ta-ta.”

  Sonja stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. She knew Morgan invitation to meet him atop the Empire State Building was a trap of some sort, but she could not bring herself to decline the opportunity. If he decided to flee again, it might be years, if not decades before she tracked him down again. Yes, she would do as he wanted, and meet him on the observation deck, trick or not.

  But, first, she had to tie up a couple of loose ends...

  The ogre guarding the door of the Black Grotto moved to block Sonja’s path as she approached. She had gone up against more than one of his kinsmen over the years, and knew they were damn near impossible to take down in hand-to-hand combat. However, all things, Natural and Supernatural, have their weakness. And the ogres’ was their complete lack of psychic powers. For all their fearsome strength, they were even weaker than humans between the ears.

  The whites of the ogre’s eyes filled with blood as she squeezed his mind. He made a snuffling noise, like a hog at its troth as cerebral fluid spurted from his nostrils and ears, before finally collapsing in a boneless heap. Sonja stepped over his splayed body without a second glance.

  The human chandeliers moaned as she entered the main room; whether in greeting or alarm was impossible to tell. The eyeless chamber musicians halted in mid-performance of Bartók�
�s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, sniffing the air nervously, like hunting dogs that have caught scent of a predator circling their camp. Lady Hedera was seated in a throne-like chair, dressed in knee-high stiletto boots and a black Merry Widow corselet as she oversaw the flaying of what had once been a stock analyst from Connecticut in

  “Who let you in?” the Black Grotto’s owner snarled, her voice slightly dipping lower as Luxor’s features threatened to emerge from their hiding place. “And thanks for upsetting the décor, by the way; we’ve only just got them to quiet down!”

  “I realize I promised I wouldn’t come back until I’d settled with Morgan,” Sonja replied, “but I changed my mind after you sent your spawn to the Cherub Room last night.”

  Lady Hedera barked a humorless laugh and cast a knowing look to her surrounding brood. With a single nod of her head, all twelve rose as one. “You must really have a death wish.”

  “That may very well be true,” Sonja agreed as she flicked open her switchblade.

  “Is that supposed to intimidate me?” Hedera sneered. “Do you think you can stab us all with your little silver knife before we bring you down?”

  “No,” Sonja admitted. “I’m only planning on killing you with it.”

  “We would say you are droll, Ms. Blue; but we are not amused. Kill the bitch,” Lady Hedera commanded, with a languid wave of her manicured hand.

  Luxor and Hedera’s spawn moved forward, their eyes glowing in the darkness of the speakeasy like those of a pack of hyena on the hunt. As they drew closer, Sonja reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a large aerosol can with a ring attached to its top. Grabbing the ring with her teeth, she gave the canister a hard yank and then tossed it onto the floor between her and the advancing brood. The vampires came to an abrupt halt. Even though a hand grenade would not be enough to kill them, none of Luxor’s gets were particularly eager to have their legs blown off.