Decima shot to her feet, frantically grabbing at the deadly silver knife lodged in her head as her eyes began to swell, until they sprang from their sockets like water balloons. Her screams were so shrill they climbed into the ultrasonic register, like those of a bat. She trembled like a tuning fork as her brain liquefied and poured out her nose and ears. Her central nervous system destroyed, she crashed to the floor, landing with enough force to drive the knifepoint of the switchblade all the way through her head and out her left ear.
The Other looked down at Decima’s rapidly putrefying carcass and, grinning in triumph, kicked it in the fangs with her steel-toed boots. As she pulled the gore-covered switchblade from the dead vampire’s skull, like Arthur drawing Excalibur from the stone, The Other was racked by a cough that sent a lungful of blood geysering forth from her mouth.
As the spasm passed, so did The Other’s control, allowing Sonja to resume possession of their shared physical self. As she snapped off the last few inches of crossbow protruding from her chest, the pain made her vision go monochromatic and seemed to fill her ears with water. She staggered backward, fighting the instinct to curl up in a dark corner and regenerate. If she wanted to survive the night, she had to get out of Esher’s stronghold, and it was going to take everything she had to do so.
Sonja had no idea what madness The Other had tapped into in order to siphon the energy necessary to break free, but it had to be big. She tried the door to the cell and, to her surprise, discovered it unlocked and the hallway deserted. No doubt no one ever left the room in anything but a body bag. She glanced back at Decima, whose body lay twisted on the floor like an animal with its foot in a trap. It was like staring into a funhouse mirror and seeing what she might have become had her own sire, Lord Morgan, bothered to take her under his wing and tutor her in the ways of monstrosity. She shuddered at the thought of what she could have become.
I didn’t haul our collective ass out of the frying pan so you could stand around in the fire! growled an all-too-familiar inner voice. Get us out of here!
“Shut up!” Sonja snarled, shaking her head in a futile attempt to clear it of the intruder. Still, The Other was right. She was suffering from severe internal damage, even by vampire standards, and she was rapidly losing strength. She had to find a way out before Esher’s minions came after her. And in such a weakened state, there would be no second chance for escape.
She headed down the darkened corridor to the central vault, which served as the barracks for Esher’s brood. Once there, she would be able to escape by using one of the myriad tunnels that branched off from the main catacomb. Of course, that assumed she could stay a step ahead of her enemies. Hell, right now she’d be thrilled with just a half-step.
Chapter Twenty
Esher stood, arms folded, staring out at the sea of pallid, ruby-eyed faces turned toward him. The time had come. His troops were assembled before him, awaiting his commands. When at last he spoke, his words rang like a death knell. “Tonight it begins, my friends! Tonight is the last night for Sinjon and his brood! The gauntlet has been thrown down! This is war!”
“War!” came the response from a half-hundred throats. “War for Lord Esher!”
He smiled as the assembled members of his brood thrust their fists into the air, pumping their arms vigorously. Most of them would be truly dead come the dawn. But that did not matter. There was more cannon fodder where they came from. Come sunrise he would be the undisputed master of Deadtown.
Suddenly the doors to the audience chamber flew open and a badly frightened Pointer ran inside. The brood turned to stare in amazement at the intruder, as it was forbidden for humans to enter Esher’s presence unannounced. The youth’s clothes were torn and his face bloodied and bruised from tumbling up stairs and colliding with flying doors. A pair of vampires grabbed him, pinning his arms behind his back, and dragged him to the dais.
“What is the meaning for such an interruption?” Esher demanded.
“Milord!” the boy cried. “The streets are on fire!”
“What do you mean—?”
“Deadtown’s gone crazy! They’re throwing bottles, rocks, and burning down buildings! Some of them even have guns and knives!”
Esher’s frown deepened into a scowl. “You mean Sinjon’s forces are on the attack?”
“I seen a bunch of old ladies tear apart a Black Spoon with their bare hands, so it ain’t him! It’s bad out there! End-of-the-world bad! I ain’t lying, milord—check it out for yourself!”
Esher tilted his head to one side, like a bird listening for the telltale rustle of a hidden earthworm’s passage. He could make out the distant din of screams and smashing glass and gunfire from beyond the thick walls of the House. At first the noise was faint, but growing perceptibly louder—and closer—with each passing second.
“A riot? Now, of all times? This must be Sinjon’s doing!”
“How can it be him?” the frightened gang member said. “The freaks are goin’ after everyone out there, it don’t make no difference! Some of ’em are even goin’ after each other! What do we do?”
“What does any army do in wartime?” Esher snarled. “Break out the heavy munitions! Arm your men to the teeth and tell them to kill everything and everyone in their path! Is that clear?”
“Yes, milord!”
“Go do it, then!” Esher snapped. He turned his back on his audience, massaging his lower jaw as he thought. Without warning, there was a sharp pain in his chest, as if an unseen hand had driven a knife into his heart. He staggered backward, then dropped heavily into his chair, his limbs as wooden and lifeless as a puppet’s. He’d only experienced such numbing emptiness once before—when he had been forced to destroy Darcy.
One of the recruits gathered at the foot of the dais edged forward. “M-milord? Is something wrong?”
Esher’s lips pulled into a grimace so frightful the other vampire instinctively cringed. “The Lady Decima is dead! Avenge her, my children! Bring me the head of the one called Sonja!”
Without hesitation, Esher’s brood hurried from the audience chamber, their voices raised in an ululating cry, like a pack of baying hounds in pursuit of a fox.
Sonja counted herself in luck. The barracks were empty; the collection of mildewed mattresses and rotting futons stretched before her like a subterranean homeless shelter. All she had to do was disappear down one of the tunnels that led to the cellars that served as auxiliary entrances to the House of Esher. Suddenly a voice from behind her cried out: “There she is!”
She turned to see a pasty-faced vampire, his eyes gleaming like those of a rabid rat, standing at the foot of the sub-basement stairs, pointing in her direction. Behind him crowded dozens of equally pallid, hungry faces.
“Get her!”
Sonja wheeled back around and ran toward the nearest exit. She tried to boost herself into overdrive, even though it felt as if her insides were being taken apart. At least she would be able to see the ghostwalkers as they attacked her—like the asshole who just zipped past her and had positioned himself at the mouth of the tunnel. The vampire was tall and pale, with lank hair that hung in his gaunt face, a tight-fitting pair of leather pants, and a black net T-shirt. He grinned at her, exposing his dripping fangs.
“Outta my way, deadboy!” she snarled, driving her switchblade into the vampire’s throat and pushing him aside without a second glance. She continued to run as her pursuers crowded the narrow, unlit tunnel, snapping and slashing at one another in their eagerness to snare their quarry.
She had to escape. She had to get away, even though felt as if her gut was full of broken glass, and every step drove a barbed spike deeper and deeper into her back. Her arms felt like pieces of cold meat hanging from her shoulders and the numbness was spreading to her legs. Her right lung was full of blood and the left was swimming with bone splinters. She was lucky that most of the recruits to Esher’s brood we
re so raw they didn’t know how to ghostwalk, but luck always runs out sometime.
Sonja stumbled out of the tunnel into an exposed cellar strewn with garbage. She looked about frantically for sign of a staircase, only to discover it had long since rotted away. She flung herself at the wall, scrabbling at the brickface with the frenetic tenacity of a cornered rat as her pursuers boiled out of the tunnel like blowflies from a corpse, shrieking for her blood. As she was about to pull herself over the lip of the pit, a shadow suddenly loomed over her.
“Fuck you!” Janice screamed down at the pit of vampires. “Fuck all of you!” She opened fire, laughing as the white-faced monsters collided with one another, trying to dodge the lethal incendiary bullets in the gang-member’s gun.
“Help me,” Sonja rasped. “They’re trying to kill me.” The girl standing over her was painfully thin, with hair that hadn’t been washed in weeks, and dressed in threadbare jeans, a tank top emblazoned with a faded decal, and a pair of busted-out high-tops. Her inner arms were pockmarked with needle tracks, some of them badly infected, but she at least seemed to be human. “Please—give me your hand.”
Janice pointed the Luger at Sonja’s head. “Fuck you too, bitch,” she said, her voice sounding almost dreamy. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.
Sonja grabbed the junkie by the ankle and yanked, sending her tumbling headfirst into the open cellar. The vampires yowled in delight as they pounced on the human that had landed in their midst. Sonja dragged herself out of the pit and staggered to her feet. The morsel tossed to her pursuers would distract them for a minute or two—but no longer.
As she loped through the blighted no-man’s-land of razed buildings that ringed Esher’s stronghold, she could finally see for herself the madness the Other had unleashed on Deadtown. Several nearby tenements were on fire, and although she could hear screams and gunfire, the wailing of ambulance and fire truck sirens was eerily absent. The buildings would burn until they collapsed into their basements, with the blaze spreading to the surrounding structures, without a single hand lifted to halt it. Those who were injured had the choice of either dying on the streets or dragging themselves off to some safe place to lick their wounds.
As she leaned against an alley wall, struggling to catch her breath, she glimpsed a couple of Pointers stumbling down the sidewalk. They had the look of young wildebeests that had somehow managed to elude a pride of lions, their eyes bugging from their heads as they moved as fast as their damaged limbs could carry them.
She was starting to piece things together, and it appeared that The Other had triggered the fight-or-flight instinct in Deadtown’s citizens, finally awakening the predator inside the prey. For the first time in decades she didn’t feel guilty about setting the darkness within her free.
As she rounded the corner she stumbled over a body, landing hard on her wounded side. The pain was so overwhelming there was nothing for her to do but to lie there and ride it out as it washed over her body like a wave. The corpse that had tripped her had recently been a man in his late fifties, with the haggard features of a street crazy, dressed in a Marine Corps dress uniform, complete with decorations. Someone or something had dropped a cinderblock on his head from one of the nearby buildings, crushing his skull. While he still clutched an M16 rifle in one hand, the action had been jammed, rendering it useless. However, the bandolier of live grenades he was wearing had not been touched. Sonja hurriedly removed the weapon harness and looped it over her shoulders. Weighing a pound apiece, the grenades pressed against her leather jacket like deadly fruit, rattling ominously as she staggered to her feet.
She could hear the wordless howling of Esher’s bloodhounds closing in on her. She resumed her jog, although her right knee no longer seemed to want to bend the way it was supposed to. She ducked into a nearby doorway and yanked one of the spherical grenades free, holding the safety lever tightly with her left hand. She peeped around the doorway in time to see Esher’s recruits emerge from the alley onto the street. The vampire at the head of the pack’s head was tossed back, scenting the air, while the rest pushed and shoved and snapped at one another like nightmarish Keystone Kops. If it wasn’t her own head they were after, she would have been tempted to chuckle.
The lead tracker suddenly pointed in the direction she’d taken and the group surged forward eagerly. Sonja darted from her hiding place and lobbed the grenade, praying she wasn’t carrying a bandoleer full of duds. It sailed through the air and landed in the midst of the mob, exploding on contact. Two vampires were thrown into the gutter, their legs reduced to jelly, while a third found his intestines and stomach dangling about his calves. The others in the pack quickly dropped back; even though vampires could not die from such wounds, none of them particularly relished being blown apart.
The stranger grimaced as something soft inside her ruptured, sending blood frothing from her lips. Despite the pain, she had no choice but to continue to run. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw that the tracker was in the lead again, waving his more timid brethren onward. Sonja lobbed a second grenade, this time aiming directly at the leader of the pack.
“Heads up, asshole!”
The tracker instinctively raised a hand and caught the grenade just as it exploded, leaving only the lower half of his body. Sonja staggered out into the middle of the street, holding aloft another grenade.
“You want me so bad, you bloodless motherfuckers? Okay, come and get me! I’ll take you all to Hell!” As she drew back to throw the third grenade, the remaining vampires turned and ran. “Buncha wussies,” Sonja muttered under her breath as she watched them flee.
She took an unsteady step backward, nearly collapsing as her right knee disintegrated. The vision in her left eye was fuzzy and her right one flickered like an aging cathode tube. Every breath she took resulted in bloody froth from her nostrils and mouth. She winced and looked down to see a rib poking through her leather jacket. Damn it, she’d just had that lining replaced. She only hoped she could hold out until she reached her final destination.
She managed to get halfway up the steps before she collapsed. She lay there on her back as gray shadows crowded what was left of her vision. She had to keep moving and hide before Esher’s minions regathered their courage and came back for her. But her body simply refused to respond. She couldn’t feel her legs anymore, and she could no longer move her arms. She couldn’t feel anything except the pain, which started at hair and extended to her toenails.
Suddenly one of the gray shadows came forward, moving close enough for her to see it was a man. His face was wrinkled and careworn, his jaw unshaven, and he wore a priest’s collar that was the same color as his graying hair. He stared down at her with a mixture of fear, fascination and repugnance, as if she were a rare but exceptionally repellent insect.
Focusing what little strength she still had left, Sonja managed to lift a hand in supplication. The priest flinched, but did not move away, as her fingers brushed against the silver rosary draped about his neck. She tried to speak, but all that came out was a rattling gasp. As the priest leaned forward, she clutched the front of his cassock, pulling him closer so he might hear her plea.
“Sanctuary.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The odor of damp earth surrounded her, and for the briefest moment Sonja thought she was still trapped in the catacombs below Esher’s stronghold. But upon opening her eyes again she was still blurred, but she saw the figure of a priest kneeling over her, surrounding her. He looked to be in his early sixties, with gray hair that hung below his clerical collar. He had a strong nose and chin, and the gin blossoms on his cheeks imparted a mottled rosiness underneath the grime, with eyes as blue as a clear autumn sky.
“Don’t try to move,” he whispered. “You’re safe here.”
“Where am I?” she groaned. “And who are you?”
“I’m Father Eamon. And you’re in the vault beneath St. Everild.�
�� “You mean the church across the street from the Black Lodge?”
The priest nodded and placed a cool hand to against her forehead, checking for fever. “I made a bed out of old choir robes for you, but I’m afraid they’re somewhat mildewed.”
“I’ll get over it,” she grunted.
Suddenly there came the sound of a not-so-distant explosion, and the entire church shook. Father Eamon stood up and peered out a heavily barred window that was set level with the sidewalk. His hand dropped automatically to the rosary about his neck. When he spoke, his voice was strangely calm, almost dreamy.
“Tonight I saw the Hand of God stretch out across Deadtown. It is a sign that the time has come for the just to rise up and put pay to the wicked for their sins. Tonight I cast aside my fear of the dark and unlocked the doors of my church for the first time in twelve years.” He glanced down at Sonja on her makeshift pallet. “At first when I saw you sprawled across the stairs, I thought you were Esher’s harlot—the one with the piercings.”
“Seems to be a common mistake around here: confusing the two of us,” Sonja said wryly. “It won’t be happening any more, though, now that I’ve killed her.”
Father Eamon lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a confession?”
“Hell, no,” she replied. “Just a statement of fact.”
“I see a lot from the belfry. And one of the things I’ve seen is you. At first I thought you were one of them, because you slept during the day, and I saw you going in and out of the Black Lodge. But this morning, you were on the street with the boy and his mother. It was then I realized I had sorely misjudged you. I see now that you are a child of God, not Satan.”
“I wouldn’t go so that far, padre. You were a lot closer the first time. See what I mean?” she said, opening her mouth so he could see her fangs.
Father Eamon gasped and took a step backward, his hand closing on the rosary. “Impossible—! You touched my rosary! You asked for sanctuary—I have bathed your wounds in water from the baptismal font! I saw you walking in the full light of day!”
Books 1–4 Page 85
