Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Suddenly she found herself at the head of the line, with Esher smiling down at her as he handed her the chalice. “Drink this, my friend, so that we may be of one blood.”

  Steeling herself, Sonja lifted the chalice to her lips. It tasted like the finest vintage wine and was as thick and nourishing as mother’s milk. She felt it creep through her veins, spreading a warm glow as it went. Nothing could compare to it: not sex, not food, not drink. She closed her eyes and savored the moment, tempted to lose herself in the ecstasy of it all, only to start from her reverie as Esher took the chalice from her hands and handed it to the tourist-vampire, who eagerly took her place in line. As she moved away from the stage, she could feel Esher’s blood inside her, humming to itself like a tiny dynamo.

  As she joined the others on the dance floor, the door to the club flew open and a tall figure dressed in a scarlet cloak entered. The Pointers did not challenge this new arrival, assuming it to be a member of Esher’s brood. But Sonja could tell by the way he carried himself, this was no garden-variety vampire.

  “Esher!” thundered the newcomer.

  The vampire lord halted and peered into the crowd. “I know that voice.”

  The newcomer pushed back his cowl, revealing shoulder-length honey-blond hair pulled into a loose ponytail and features so classically perfect they could have been the model for a Greek statue. “Has it been so long that you have forgotten your own sire?”

  Esher frowned. “Gabor? They sent you?”

  “Who else would they send? I was the one responsible for Making you, thereby the onus falls on me to reign you in.”

  “Surely you jest, old friend! All I do here is for the greater glory of the Ruling Class!”

  “Lie to yourself all you like, Esher! But don’t lie to me! What you’re doing is born out of lust for power. You are on the verge of open brood-war with one of the most entrenched and powerful Nobles in America. Even in Deadtown, open warfare between rival broods is bound to bring attention from humans. It was one thing to blatantly battle amongst ourselves in the old days, but with every warm-blood carrying a camera in their cell-phone and the Internet, it’s an invitation to genocide! There have also been complaints that your bloodlust for the mortal woman—the dancer called Nikola—has affected your reasoning and made you reckless.”

  Esher’s eyes narrowed and his frown became an angry scowl. “I weary of your questions, Gabor! We were more than friends, once—but those nights are gone! There was a time when you were the master, and I the student, but I have gone on to claim the power you never dared to. Do not threaten me, for I will not stay my hand!”

  “Is your hubris such that you would risk exposing us all for the sake of making Deadtown your own?” Gabor retorted. “The altercation at the restaurant earlier this evening did not go unnoticed, I assure you! There are those in power at the Holy See waiting for evidence of large-scale vampire activity. You may very well have given the Malleus Maleficarum its new lease on life!”

  “Let the Witch Hammer strike me, if they dare!” Esher sneered.

  Gabor shook his head in dismay. “I had hoped that I would be able to talk reason into you, Esher. But I see you will have none of it! Very well—I have no recourse but to take you back with me.”

  “I will not be judged, Gabor! Not by you and not by the Synodus Horrenda!”

  “Very well,” the blond vampire sighed as he leapt onto the runway, his movements as fast and smooth as those of a tiger, his hands glowing as if they held live coals. “Then you leave me no choice.”

  The Pointers and vampires both began pushing for the exits as Esher moved toward his Maker, his fangs bared and red energy crackling from his fingertips. The warlocks lunged at one another, their hands locking onto one another’s shoulders. To the uninitiated, it looked as if they were engaged in nothing more than a vigorous bout of Indian wrestling, but the look of pain on the combatants’ faces told a different story.

  The air inside Dance Macabre grew heavy and Sonja felt her skin prickle, like before a lightning strike. There was a sound like that made by an arc welder going full blast, and then a shroud of crimson energy enveloped the battling wizards. She swore and instinctively covered her eyes, even though she was still wearing her sunglasses. The smell of burning blood filled her nostrils, making her grimace in disgust. She had heard stories of the Strega—humans versed in the occult who had carried their dark power over into their undead existence—but she had never seen anything like what was transpiring on the main stage of the Dance Macabre.

  As Esher and Gabor strained against one another, tears of blood leaked from the corners of their eyes and ran down their cheeks, soon followed by blood from their noses and ears.

  “Stand down, Gabor!” Esher growled. “Let go, or I’ll boil your blood like a pudding in the pot!”

  “Only if you agree to leave Deadtown with me!”

  Esher’s response was to close his blood-filled eyes and push even harder than before. Gabor cried out as he was sent sliding the length of the runway on his back. His eyes were gone, the sockets reduced to puddles of blood that bubbled like boiling sugar. Gore poured from every hole in his head, turning his face to a crimson mask.

  Esher knelt down beside his dying sire, a look of genuine regret on his face. “Why did you have come here, old friend? You should have known it would end like this. I will not be stopped by a handful of museum pieces, shivering in fear of what the cattle might do should they see us for what we are!”

  Gabor made a wet gurgling sound deep in his chest that was the best he could do for a chuckle. “You blind fool. They don’t have to raise a hand to swat you down. Your doom is upon you, but you cannot see it for what it is. You nurse a serpent at your bosom, beloved.”

  “What do you mean?” Esher glowered. “Are you saying there’s a traitor in my brood? Answer me, damn you!”

  But Gabor was beyond all questions. As Esher watched in disgust, the dead Noble’s skin melted away, quickly followed by its exposed pink muscle and bone. Within seconds there was nothing left to mark the passing of the six-hundred-year-old Transylvanian but a pool of fetid ichor.

  THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ESHER

  Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid.

  —Jeremiah 2:12

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Eddie! Open up!” Sonja announced as she pounded on the basement door. “It’s me!”

  The door opened slightly and the old hippie peered past the security chain. “Man, this is getting fuckin’ weird, even for Deadtown!” he whispered nervously as she slipped across the threshold.

  “Did you do what I asked?”

  “Yeah—they’re over there,” he said, pointing to a florist’s delivery box perched atop a steeple of books. “I gotta say, you’ve got some strange friends, lady. The woman who ran that freaky all-night flower shop you sent me to—if I didn’t know better, I’d swear she was green under all that makeup she was wearing!”

  “Yeah, Gaea’s what you might call an Earth Mother,” Sonja replied with a chuckle. “Have you seen anyone unusual go in or out of the building?”

  “Yeah. That’s another piece of high weirdness!” Eddie replied, looking like he just swallowed a lemon. “This dude was heading out the front door just as me and Ryan were coming back from your errand. Big guy. Had to be seven feet tall, easy. He was wearing a bulky trench coat and porkpie hat. He looked like he was missing an arm. And he had tusks.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “No, but he gave Ryan the fish-eye. Kind of like the way a dog does a piece of steak. Fucker gave me the creeps.”

  “Yeah, well, you should see his old lady. Excuse me a minute, Eddie. I need to go upstairs and check on something.”

  She returned a few minutes later, carrying her gym bag. She knelt amid the jumble of books and removed several sheaves of neatly bound hundred-dollar bill
s, stacking them on the floor next to her. Eddie whistled in astonishment and bent to pick up one of the stacks. “I need you to stash this for me until I get back,” she said.

  “No prob!” he laughed.

  Sonja walked over to the florist’s box and removed the bouquet of black roses from their container. She studied the long stems for a moment, and then used her switchblade to trim them back to a more manageable length before stuffing them inside the now-empty gym bag.

  “Where’s Ryan?” she asked as she entered the kitchen.

  “Here I am!” the boy chirped, sticking his head out from under the sink. “You’re supposed to be asleep, buster!” Eddie chided.

  “But I might miss something!” Ryan protested.

  “That’s the point,” Sonja said.

  Eddie frowned and tugged on his beard. “You said things were gonna be comin’ down fast.”

  “The wheels are in motion, Eddie, and I’m doing my best to see that none of us are caught in the machinery, that’s all I can tell you. There’s less than an hour before the sun comes up,” she said, as she picked up the gym bag. “Look for me come the dawn.”

  “And what if you don’t show up?”

  “Take the money and the boy and get the hell out of Deadtown and never come back.”

  Obeah sat and stared sourly at the TV set. One of the perks of being Nikola’s bodyguard was satellite TV. He particularly liked Spike and the SyFy Channel, but tonight he found it hard to focus his attention on anything but his leg. Normally he played cards with Webb when he couldn’t stand being inside his own head, but Webb was no more—his brains now decorating the street he’d spent his short life prowling. He grimaced as pain shot from his shattered kneecap. Muttering under his breath, he pulled a bottle out of his shirt pocket and popped a couple of Vicodins, hoping he could get a handle on the pain before his supply ran out. The Pointers had knocked over a pharmaceutical warehouse a week or two back, in order to replenish the supplies in the gang’s makeshift “infirmary.” Unfortunately, most of those involved in the heist were functionally illiterate, so the majority of the haul ended up being morphine sulfate suppositories. As bad as his leg felt, it wasn’t worth sticking a finger up his ass. At least not yet. Another surge of pain made him curse Esher, but not loud enough for anyone—or anything—that might be lurking in the shadow to hear.

  Still, despite what Esher had done to him, he was the only man Obeah respected and feared more than Papa Doc. After all, Papa only played at being a servant of Baron Samedi, the Lord of Cemeteries. Esher was the real thing.

  Although he had been in the Tonton Macoute, Obeah was not a native-born Haitian. He had been born and raised in New Orleans, the son of an illiterate dockworker and a Haitian émigré. His mother had come from Port Au Prince as a young girl, searching for the American Dream. What she found was a job as a laundress. Obeah learned of voodoo at her knee, which she practiced on the side, casting spells and making love charms for the neighbors to make ends meet. When, in 1968, Obeah received a draft notice on his eighteenth birthday, inviting him to Viet Nam, he fled to his mother’s homeland—and soon found himself embroiled in the island’s voodoo societies, which in turn led to gainful employment with Papa Doc’s secret police force.

  By the time Baby Doc fled his homeland for the safety of exile in France in 1986, Obeah had long lost count of the murders, mutilations, and rapes he had participated in. On one foray he and his fellow Tonton Macoutes had stormed an opposition party meeting and hacked the arms off everyone in the house—men, women and children alike—and then piled them in the street for the neighbors to see. He remembered how he’d laughed at the sight of the fingers on some of the freshly severed limbs twitching spasmodically, as if trying to wave bye-bye. Those had been good days for him.

  Now he was back in the country he’d turned his back on over forty years ago. The last twenty-five years had been rough—with Baby Doc gone, the people of Haiti he had helped to terrorize for so long were free to exact revenge, and in short order he found himself out of a job and his home burned to the ground. Fearing for his safety, Obeah returned to his native land, hidden amongst the thousands of boat people who had struggled to make it to Florida in leaky tubs cobbled together out of little more than desperation and sealing wax. He discovered that during his absence his father had been killed on the job by a dropped freight container, while his mother died of a stroke while washing other people’s clothes. Since there wasn’t much call for a death squad leader in the States, he became a professional killer, while working as a conjure man on the side to make ends meet. It wasn’t honest work, but it paid the bills.

  Then, a five years ago, he met Esher. The minute the vampire walked into the botanica that served as the front for his death-for-hire business, Obeah recognized him for what he was. You don’t traffic in voodoo all your life without developing a sense for such things. Esher lost no time in telling him he was in the market for a human enforcer with occult knowledge, and Obeah came highly recommended. He signed up the vampire then and there and hadn’t looked back. Two years later he teamed up with Webb, and they ended up handling most of the dirty deeds that Esher needed done right. Then, six months ago, Esher re-assigned them as bodyguards to his new favorite.

  It was a cushy job, for the most part. He and Webb spent most of their time in the safe house watching TV or playing cards or shooting the shit. It wasn’t like the bitch did anything—at least not anymore. The first few weeks she kept trying to escape, and when it became obvious she wasn’t going to be able to do that, she’d tried killing herself. That’s when Esher ordered him to start dosing her with the zombie-dust. After that, their job became even easier than before., which suited Obeah just fine. Webb, being a young man, tended to get restless and often resented the monotony. Obeah, on the other hand, was of an age where constant danger and action had lost its appeal, and was, at first, grateful for the reassignment. Esher did still send them out, now and again, on those errands he could trust no one else with, such as the business with Dario Borges.

  He hoped Esher would find someone competent to replace Webb, but he doubted it. The Five Points Gang was the biggest bunch of scramble-headed fuckups he’d ever dealt with. Compared to the Tonton Macoutes, they were a bunch of snot-nosed kids in baggy pants and expensive sneakers playing at being bad.

  Every now and again one of the punks would try and make his bones by messing with the Witch Doctor, as they called Obeah behind his back, to show everyone what a bad mother they really was. It always ended with the punks getting a taste of machete. If they were lucky, they would just lose a nose or an ear. The little fuckers were like a cottonmouth snake: you had to stand on their collective neck every second so they wouldn’t whip around and bite you. Most of them were too whack to be of any use except as cannon fodder. He didn’t trust any of them to wipe their own ass, much less watch his back. Webb had been more than a little nuts, but at least he had the badass to back it up.

  Obeah grimaced and took a swallow from the bottle of Olde English tucked between him and the side of the chair. Things were going to shit and fast. Esher was losin’ it, big time, even though he was even more powerful now than he’d ever been before. No, juice wasn’t the problem. The problem was pussy.

  Esher wasn’t thinking straight on account of that bitch Nikola. And for what? Granted, she was fine in the looks department, but it was clear now there was no way Esher was going to be able to scrub that kid out of her mind. If she responded that strongly to the boy’s presence after a steady diet of zombie dust, then she was never going to give that part of herself up.

  If it was his call to make, he’d walk into that bedroom right now and pop a cap in her fuckin’ skull and get it over with. But that would be a foolish thing to do. After all, he’d signed a contract with Esher in his own blood. And he knew what happened to those who reneged on their contracts. Still, fear for his life aside, Obeah prided himself on his loy
alty, and despite everything, he still held the man in awe. He had come too far to abandon his master now. Plus, truth to be told, he was too old to be anything except what he’d always been—a killer. A taste for brutality and an inborn obedience to the biggest dog with the strongest teeth had been part of him all his life. His soul was the Devil’s, part and parcel, just as his Mama said, and it was too late to try and backpedal on the deal he’d made. He was in until the end—be it his or Esher’s.

  Obeah glanced over to where Webb normally sat on the sofa. There was something bothering him about the kidnapping that lead to his friend’s death, something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Still, it nagged at his brain like a popcorn shell wedged between his teeth. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something. The last he saw of Webb was the soles of his boots as he was yanked from the moving car’s window. But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something he witnessed but did not see.

  He’d always been unsettled by the vampires and their ability to ghostwalk, as they called it. That was why Decima usually rode with them to and from the safe house. Although humans couldn’t see a vampire while it was ghostwalking, another vampire could sense them. That was why the only time he and Webb felt they were actual bodyguards was during the drive in the Batmobile.

  But Obeah had personally spoken with the guede, the spirits of the dead, and been ridden by the loa, the god-forces of ancient Africa. A man does not undergo such experiences and remain the same as other men. The spirits leave something of themselves behind—a heightened awareness, a touch of second sight, that the bokor could call upon in times of need. He knew now that he had seen something in the moments just before and after the crash, but what?