Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Her black leather jacket creaked as she knelt beside the pool and pinched off some more bread, tossing it to the hungry fish. She looked up at Morgan and smiled, her eyes once more hidden behind slivers of mirrored glass, except now the lenses grew out her brow ridge and merged with her cheekbones.

  “Are you going to kill me now?” she asked. “Is that why you picked such peaceful scenery? To lull me into trusting you?”

  “You are my queen—why should I kill you?” Morgan replied, the corners of his mouth jerking fitfully. Although his features were whole in this world, he had grown accustomed to smiling with only half his face.

  “How about because I trashed your plans for world domination and fucked up your face?” Sonja replied with a shrug as she continued to feed the goldfish. “Or because I killed your most trustworthy servant? Or, maybe, simply because I’m dangerous to you? Those are all pretty good reasons.”

  “Yes, they are,” he conceded. “Assuming I did want to kill you—what would you do to stop me?”

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “I do not believe you.”

  Sonja shrugged again. The piece of bread in her hands had yet to dwindle. “Believe what you like. But I will not stop you. I’ll even give back your chimera; assuming you still want it, that is.” She unzipped her jacket and reached inside its breast pocket, removing a small jade statue. As she placed it onto the ground, the figurine began to twitch and writhe, growing larger and larger. Within seconds, the three-headed tiger with the scorpion tail was standing beside her, lashing its barbed tail and growling. Then is began to melt and warp, like a chalk drawing caught in the rain until it disappeared entirely, only to manifest itself as a Yazuka tattoo on Morgan’s bare chest.

  “There. You can kill me now if you like,” she said, turning her back to him. “I will not stop you.”

  She wasn’t lying. She really was not going to stop him. The fight had gone out of her completely. In the past, when he dealt with Sonja he felt like a sport fisherman trying to reel in a marlin. Now there was no more ‘fight’ on the line—just slack. Morgan stepped back and drew his samurai sword from its scabbard. The blade gleamed like a tooth as he held it on high. Sonja turned to look at him one final time and smiled, then returned her attention to the koi pond.

  The sword cut through her neck as easily as the air, sending her severed head tumbling into the meditation pool. The body remained upright for a few seconds more, blood gouting from the stump like a fountain, before collapsing to one side.

  As Morgan wiped his blade clean, he shook his head in disappointment. After all, this had been the woman who had wrested a part of his very self during combat and made it her own; whose ferocity and deadliness had won his love. He had expected something…more from her.

  Suddenly there came a thick, bubbling sound from the direction of the pool. Morgan glanced in its direction and saw that it was a’ boil as if a geyser was about to erupt, turning the water first turned red as blood, then black as ink. As the koi bobbed to the surface, their gill slits straining as they gasped their last, a female figure emerged from the heart of the pool, arising like Aphrodite from the foam.

  The woman’s skin was black as polished night, her dark hair thick and wild, like the mane of a lion. Her eyes were a deep red, and her teeth white as pearls and curved into fearsome fangs, with a tongue as long and narrow as a cat’s. She had four arms, and in each hand she gripped an instrument of destruction: a shield, a sword, a noose, and a spear, the point of which was identical to Sonja’s switchblade. Around her neck was a garland of skulls and about her hips she wore a girdle of severed hands. When she turned her head, Morgan could see three other faces: one was that of Denise Thorne, the second that of a blue-skinned hag, and the third belonged to Sonja.

  The black-skinned woman nodded to Morgan as if acknowledging a debt. When she spoke, all four of her faces moved their lips as well. “I thank you, Sir Morgan, for unifying the forces within me. Before I was separate and unequal; now I am whole.”

  “Who are you?” Morgan asked warily. “What are you doing with Sonja’s face?”

  In answer, the ebony-skinned woman struck her shield with her sword, making it ring like a gong. Morgan cried out and clutched his ears at the awful sound.

  “I am the Dark One!” She laughed in a multitude of voices as her body began to grow until she was as tall as a tree. “The Queen of the Night! I am the monster that destroys monsters! The Slayer of the Dead!”

  Morgan cast aside his human form, his skin becoming mottled and scaly as his head widened and flattened itself and his arms and legs disappeared into his torso. His body doubled, and then quadrupled in size and length until it was the length and breadth of a city bus. Hissing his defiance, Morgan raised his upper body and flared his hood in challenge

  The Dark One laughed and began to dance, her four arms weaving in rhythmic patterns as she kept time to some unheard tune. Morgan reared back and spat at her glowing red eyes, but she blocked the venom with her shield.

  Morgan struck again, hoping to plunge his fangs into his opponent’s naked thigh, but she moved too fast, slipping her noose about his neck and yanking it tight. Morgan flailed about mightily, his body lashing back and forth like a bullwhip. The Dark One brought her left foot down upon the back of Morgan’s neck with such force it shook the entire world.

  The Dark One carefully set aside her weapons while still keeping a firm grip on the head of the giant cobra. Morgan shrieked and hissed and struggled, but there was no wriggling out from under her foot. The destroyer licked her fangs with her long red tongue, her eyes gleaming like polished skulls.

  “I have been a long time being born,” the Dark One said with her myriad voices. “And birthing is hungry work.”

  >Morgan opened his eyes to find himself back in his body, his arms still wrapped about Sonja. Anyone who might have stumbled across them at that exact moment might have mistaken them for lovers. Morgan grimaced and tried to break free of her embrace, but her grip was like iron.

  “You asked me why I fight against what I am,” Sonja said, her eyes burning like funeral pyres. “I did not answer you then because I really wasn’t sure myself. But now I know why I still fight. It is because I still have a soul. It may not be much of one, but it is still mine. And I refuse to surrender it for the likes of you. But you were right about one thing—it’s time I embraced my destiny.” And with that she plunged her fangs into his throat.

  Morgan shrieked like a cat boiled alive, clawing frantically at Sonja as she battened onto him as he had done to others so many times before, but it was no use. She did not flinch as his talons sliced her to the bone. Normally vampires could not feed on one another, but Sonja, Morgan now belatedly realized, was as far removed from him as he was from the prostitutes he had used for practice.

  As she drained him like a wine sack, the illusion of youth and vitality Morgan had maintained for so many centuries began to falter. His skin became the color and texture of parchment as the shock of white in his raven-dark hair spread outward. He began to dwindle, like a sugar cube in the rain, going from well-nourished to thin to gaunt to emaciated in the space of a few heartbeats. His hair, now the color of snow, began to fall away in drifts, until he was completely bald.

  “Enough,” he wheezed. “Stop.” But, of course, she did not. Morgan’s voice rose in a piteous wail as his eyes retreated into the back of his skull like slugs. His limbs withered and drew in on themselves, like the legs of a dying spider, and still she continued to feed. Only when she had finally had her fill, did Sonja retract her fangs and open her eyes. She grimaced at the sight of the withered thing in her arms and, with an exclamation of disgust, cast it roughly aside, just as he had tossed her into the London gutter, all those years ago.

  What was left of Morgan lay at her feet, surrounded by a mound of clothes, looking more like a mummified fetus than an adult male. He lifted his oversized head on its feeble stalk of a neck and looked around with blind eyes, his limb
s rattling like those of a marionette.

  “Mercy, my child,” the dying vampire begged, in a high, penny-whistle voice.

  “I’m not your daughter,” Sonja replied flatly as she brought her boot down on Morgan’s skull. “My father is Jacob Thorne. My mother is dead.” The vampire lord’s head crunched under her heel like a light-bulb.

  Her body vibrating like a tuning fork, she looked out at the city spread before her. The madness the Other had released through the Empire State Building’s broadcast tower seemed to hang over midtown Manhattan like a pall of smoke—then realized, with a start, that it was the real thing, created by the fires that dotted the horizon like candles on a birthday cake. As horrible as it was, this negative energy was what had given her the power to unite the disparate identities within her—the human, the vampire, and the vampire-killer—into a cohesive whole.

  After years of ignorance and fear, battling the voices inside her head, she finally understood what she truly was. Tonight had been a necessary, but bloody, step in her evolution, taking her from living vampire to Ultimate Predator. She was the monster who kills monsters; the saint of the pit; the holy demon.

  Behind her eyes, the Dark One sang her victory song as she danced on the body of her defeated foe, filling Sonja’s ears with the sound of drums and the clashing of swords. Flush with victory and the exhilaration of birth, the newborn Destroyer threw back her head and roared a challenge to the world.

  And the monsters, hidden in plain sight, trembled.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It had not taken long for the jungle long to reclaim the house. The front porch was alive with creepers and other blooming vines. A couple of empty Tecate bottles could be glimpsed amidst the overgrowth, and what was left of the hammock dangled like a rotting canvas spider web.

  The front door was unlocked, but the frame was so badly warped she accidentally yanked it off its hinges while trying to open it. Inside, the house smelled of mold, rising damp and rotting garbage.

  Small lizards skittered out from underfoot as she went from room to room. Although some of the windows were broken, it looked as if it had been months since anyone had last set foot in the house. Not surprising, really. The locals were exceptionally superstitious when it came to La Mujer Llama Azul.

  She stepped out into the courtyard. The fountain no longer burbled to itself and weeds now forced their rough heads between the tiles. The back of the house was even more overgrown as the rapidly encroaching jungle had swallowed Lethe’s swing set. A wild pig and her piglets burst from cover at Sonja’s approach, fleeing in the direction of the forest. She followed them, but not with the intention of hunting.

  The path was still there, of course. It had been there for several hundred years, and it will be there for several hundred more. She climbed to the top of the hill, where the ruins of the ancient Mayan observatory once stood. She dusted off one of the tumbled limestone blocks and sat on it, lotus-fashion and cast her mind into the jungle.

  Hours later, as the sun begins to sink, her summons was answered in the form of a man emerging from the jungle.

  He wore a jaguar skin draped over one shoulder and an unbleached linen loincloth. Jade earplugs stretched his lobes almost to his shoulders, and his lower lip boasted a similar ornament. Tattoos of Mayan sky serpents and jaguar gods swarmed his naked torso and arms. His hair, going gray at the temples, was pulled up into a warrior’s topknot adorned with the feathers of brightly colored parrots. In one hand, he carried a machete and across his back was slung an AK47.

  “Hello, Bill.”

  “I do not go by that name anymore,” he replied. “I’m called Chac Balam now. Lord of Jaguars. Why are you here, Sonja? Why did you come back?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not here to try and force your return to my service, if that is what you are thinking. I just wanted to see you one last time, that’s all. I wanted to tell you that everything’s okay. I... I’m not the woman I once was.”

  Palmer frowned and squinted at her, looking for things only he might see. He nodded, and some of the tension drained from his face. “You are different. You’re more - I don’t know - together. It’s as if the Other no longer exists.’

  “Oh, she’s here all right,” she laughed, thumping her chest. “Just as Denise is still in here. Hard as it might be to believe, the Other actually saved my ass. I guess you could say we have a truce. At least for now. What about you? Are you happy with your new life?”

  “I’ve founded a guerrilla group, composed largely of campesinos of Mayan descent. The government hunts us like animals, but they’ve yet to catch us. We keep our supplies and weapons hidden in the sacred cenotes. I guess you could say it’s a back-to- Quetzalcoatl movement.” As he laughed and shook his head, Sonja glimpsed some of the old Palmer she used to know. “I’m a pragmatic man. You know that. But I had a dream, not too long ago, where I saw the world change. It was fierce and frightening, but not hopeless, for the world was being reborn, not destroyed. But all births bring blood and pain, no matter how beautiful the child. All I want is for my people to prepare themselves for that day. Is that really that crazy?”

  “No,” she replied. “Just prescient’

  Suddenly there was movement in the tree-line behind Palmer. He glanced over his shoulder and nodded, then turned back to Sonja. “I must go. Farewell. Please do not misunderstand me when I say I hope we never meet again.”

  As Palmer slipped back between the trees, Sonja glimpsed a figure waiting for him in the shadows. It was the woman, Concha, her belly swollen with life.

  It was dark by the time she returned to the empty house. She paused for a second, then re-enter what had once been her home. One last walk through. Just for old times’ sake.

  The bedroom she had shared with Palmer reeked of old gym socks and the sheets covering the bed boasted blossoms of mold. In Lethe’s bedroom, mice had chewed their way through the collection of stuffed animals. The kitchen reeked of whatever had been left in the refrigerator months before. The pile of unopened invoices and bills of lading still sat atop the kitchen table, as did the black mask. Sonja picked it up and held it so its impassive features were level with her own. Even after all this time, the surface still shone like a piece of polished onyx.

  She decided to go look one last time, at Lethe’s menagerie of rotting plush toys. As she headed down the hall to the bedroom, she saw a pale golden light pouring out from around the door jamb.

  Suddenly someone spoke within her head: ‘ Auntie Blue.’

  She instantly recognized the voice as Lethe’s, but it was no longer that of a child. Still holding the mask in one hand, she stepped across the threshold, shielding her eyes with an upraised arm against the radiance that stood in the center of the room. Within the heart of the heatless light was a female figure. However, the woman before her was not the teenaged beauty Palmer has described to her, but a crone with a wrinkled face and withered breasts hanging flat against her ribcage, with long, white hair.

  “Lethe? Is that you?” Sonja gasped.

  Yes, I was Lethe.

  “What happened to you?”

  I embraced my destiny, just as you have done. We are agents of change, you and me. You are the sickle, I am the seed.

  “That still does not explain why you’re…you’re…”

  A crone? The old woman gave her a crooked smile. The world has but two constants: creation and destruction. It was such before the rise of Man, before the reign of the great lizards, and even the Unnamed Ones that came before them. Things are born, things prosper, and things die. There is a time for each. My time in this world was destined to be brief. Just as you are a living vampire, I am a living seraph. Neither of us was meant to exist, and yet here we are. We are being used, each in our own way, to reset scales that have long been out of balance.

  In the beginning, all humans possessed that which is called ‘sixth sense’. But over the millennia, thanks to the manipulation of the Pretending Ones who prey upon them, they have l
ost it. The Nobles and other creatures needed humans that were blind and deaf to the Real World, so they could exploit them to their own ends.

  But by closing Mankind’s third eye, the Pretending Ones threw the balance of things awry. Mankind metastasized, becoming far more dangerous than the Nobles dreamed. Humanity’s lack of awareness makes them oblivious to the damage they do as they waltz closer and closer to the brink of extinction.

  It is fitting that by tampering with a system already out of balance Morgan’s attempt to create a race of living monsters instead produced me. From the moment of my birth, as impossible as it was, I was destined to level the playing field between Pretenders and Mankind.

  The universe is both Positive and Negative. If there is too much of one, no matter which it is, then the center can no longer hold. You are the Destroyer, the one who prepares the way. I am the Creatrix—mother to the new flesh. I have mated with twenty-five men, all of whom possess a psychic ability of some sort, and from them I have delivered twenty-five sons who will live a healthy mortal span of years. Each son has either been left as a foundling or in exchange with a loving family for a dying child. Each son was born with psychic abilities, and all twenty-five, once grown to adulthood, will be highly attractive to those of the opposite sex. And, like the Greek gods, their seed will grow in even the rockiest soil.

  Should all twenty-five of my sons succeed in reproducing four times each, and their descendants do likewise, within ten generations there will be twenty-six million of them. By the thirteenth, there will be over one billion. By the fifteenth generation, homo sapiens—the thinking man— will be no more—and in his place there will be homo praescius—the aware man. No longer will the Pretending Kind be able to manipulate Mankind by hiding in plain sight. That is my gift to the world.’