Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I had to give them credit for tenacity, but I really wasn’t in the mood to fight serious evil, so I decided to make one more attempt at canceling their summons before I just beat them all senseless. I called in even more power, and still keeping my voice as near to silent as I could, whispered very firmly, “VENTUS.” All five candles winked out, and the two nearest where I stood actually toppled over and began to roll around on the floor of the gazebo, dribbling hot wax all over the boundary of their circle.

  “Come on!” Zippo Guy exclaimed, kneeling on the floor and trying to right the candles. “Ow!” he yelled as his hands became coated in melted wax.

  “Just leave it, Jerry,” one of the other robed figures said. “The Great One is sending us a sign that he shouldn’t be disturbed right now. We’ll try again tomorrow night at midnight.” This junior magician was another man, this one with the strident accent of the Bronx thick in his mouth.

  They all knelt down then, some gathering up supplies, and others carrying over a bucket with water and rags in it to start scrubbing the signs of their ritual away. I had to give them a little credit for being considerate. So often demon-summoning wizards just leave their goat entrails everywhere for someone else to clean up. It was nice to see a group of evil magicians with a little courtesy. Or with enough sense not to want everyone in Jersey City to know some seriously evil shit had been going on in their park.

  I ducked behind a tree as the first of them filed past, whispering an incantation to bend light around me and make me functionally invisible. As I watched, the shortest of the summoners turned to look back over the area once more, presumably to make sure they hadn’t left any evidence of their passing. As they did, I could tell by the way the fabric hung that she was a woman, and I took advantage of the pseudo-invisibility spell to try to get a look at her. The black cloth was pulled down to uncover her nose, but most of her face was still obscured.

  That didn’t keep me from barely stifling a gasp when I got a good look at her eyes. I knew those eyes. I’d seen those eyes in my dreams every night for six years. Somehow, in New Jersey, six years after I watched her die, I was looking into the eyes of Anna Treves, the woman I’d watched get killed by Nazis in France in 1943. Anna Treves, my first true love.

  * * *

  —

  I followed her. Of course I followed her. She veered off the path where the rest of her would-be cabal walked, and knelt down beside a large maple, pulling a small cloth bag out from under a shrub growing up next to the tree. I watched as she threw her hood back, unwound the cloth from around her face, and pulled the robe up over her head. Underneath was a modest dress of dark blue with white piping, and a matching headband held back auburn curls. When she stood and turned to go, her cult robes tucked safely into the bag at her side, I got a good look at her face for the first time.

  It wasn’t Anna. Of course it wasn’t Anna. Anna was dead, ripped from me by a murdering Nazi bastard with a grin on his face. But there was something of Anna to her features, a similar shape to the nose, a line of the jaw that recalled my lost love’s face. This wasn’t Anna, but it was someone close to her. She was some relation, and if she was dabbling in dark magic, I owed it to Anna’s memory to keep this girl safe.

  She walked out of the park and turned left on York Street, walking without fear along the shadowy sidewalks. It was a good part of town, but still nowhere a nice young woman would ordinarily be seen alone. Of course, she wasn’t alone, but she didn’t know that she had an invisible magician trailing twenty feet along behind her. She took a left onto Jersey Avenue, and I ducked behind a tree, wary despite my spell. I watched from the shadows as she crossed the street in front of the public library and entered a house. Moments later, a light came on in a second-floor window, and I turned to go home.

  Only to come face-to-face with another of the wannabe coven, standing right behind me and holding a Schrade Presto switchblade low and out to the side. He pressed a button, and the four-inch blade leapt out, catching the gleam of a streetlight and winking back at me, thirsty.

  “What do you want with Rosalyn, you creep?” the man asked, staring right at me.

  I shook off my surprise at him seeing right through my illusion and said, “She looked like somebody I used to know. I wanted to make sure it was my friend before I said anything. I didn’t want to scare her jumping out at her in the middle of the night. But it’s not her, so I decided to head home.” I took a step forward, hoping to end the confrontation without violence.

  He didn’t budge, and from the look on his face, he didn’t buy my story, either. “So you just decided to follow her all the way from the park and peep in her windows, huh? Is that what you are, some kinda Peeping Tom? Maybe I cut out your eyes and you don’t do no more peeping, Tommy.”

  I sighed. This was not going to end well for this guy, and if I didn’t keep it quiet, it wouldn’t be good for me, either. “My name isn’t Tommy, I’m not a peeper, and you really don’t want to mess with me, pal. Now step aside and I’ll just go home and nobody has to get hurt.”

  He grinned a savage grin, and I could see just the slightest hint of amber glowing in his eyes. Shit. He was demon-touched. Not possessed, not yet. But he’d dabbled in enough dark magic that someone from Down Below took an interest in him, and now their claws were deep in this guy’s soul. I’d first seen it in Europe. It explained some of the Nazis. Not all of them, though. Sometimes terrible human beings are just terrible human beings, without any supernatural explanation.

  If left alone, this guy was going to dig deeper and deeper until he got so far into black magic that he either called up a demon or went nuts and murdered a bunch of people. That happened with greater frequency after the war, with cases like the Lipstick Killer and the Lonely Hearts Killers grabbing national attention. The headlines didn’t mention anything arcane, but Luke and some of his people had found definite links between demonic influence and some of this new breed of murderer. Now it seemed like Jersey had a new devil, and he was standing right in front of me.

  “Last chance, friend. Fold up your little pigsticker and go home. Sleep off whatever you’re on and stop playing around with things you don’t understand. Otherwise, you’re going to end up in way over your head.”

  “I might be in over my head, but you’ll be dead,” the man said, a vicious grin stretching across his face. He swung the knife up toward my throat, holding it like someone who’s never cut anything more dangerous than a sirloin. I leaned back, letting the blade whiz by my face harmlessly, then punched the would-be murderer in the stomach. He staggered back, one hand holding his gut and the other bringing the knife back around to defend.

  “You still want to play around, pal?” I asked. “There’s no shame in running from a stronger opponent.” I really didn’t want to kill this guy. Maybe if he got help, he could shake loose of the demon’s hold on him. But if I snapped his neck on the sidewalk, there would be no coming back from that.

  He didn’t answer, just growled and charged at me. He lowered his head, apparently intending to wrap me up, slam me into the light pole behind me, and bury his blade in my middle. I didn’t like that plan, so I stopped him.

  Actually, that’s exactly what I did—I just stopped him. I planted my feet, leaned forward at the waist, and met his shoulder with my own. When our bodies slammed together, I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand and jerked it out away from our bodies. Then I slipped my right shoulder around and under his jaw, pulling on his right arm the whole time. I ducked further and his body slid onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I grapevined my right arm around one of his legs, then flung myself backward to the ground, slamming the knife-wielding idiot into the ground, and my shoulders into the idiot.

  I spun around and up to my feet, never letting go of his wrist. He lay on the sidewalk, his eyes open wide and mouth flapping open and closed like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I stepped over his elbow, wed
ged his forearm between my legs, and twisted, using my shin as a fulcrum. The bones of his arm snapped like twigs, and his face went whiter than the full moon. He drew in a huge gulp of air to scream, but I dropped to one knee, burying my elbow in the side of his skull. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his jaw went slack as he passed out cold.

  A quick scan of both sides of the street confirmed we were still alone, and no new lights were on in the apartments surrounding us, so I felt safe that we hadn’t been observed. I folded up the switchblade and slipped it into the pocket of my pants, then rifled through his pockets, emptying his wallet and leaving it on the sidewalk beside his head. To an observer, it would just look like a random mugging, but if this guy was smart, he would realize that I now knew his name and where he lived, and hopefully that would be enough to scare him off his nocturnal activities for a while.

  Of course, being smart and summoning demons don’t exactly go hand in hand, so I held out only the barest hope for that. My blood rushing from the sight and my head swirling with everything I’d seen, I stood and went in search of the one person most likely to have some answers for me.

  It was time to go see my uncle, Count Dracula.

  * * *

  —

  “I know how it sounds, Luke, but I saw her.” The bourbon left in my glass was barely enough to moisten an ice cube, so I passed the tumbler over to Renfield, who poured another drink from the decanter on the side table. This Renfield, the latest in a string of manservants my uncle had that answered to the name, was efficient, if not as warm as some I’d known. But he was efficient, and he took good care of Luke, so I didn’t mind him being a bit of a cold fish. Besides, he wasn’t a psychopath, which was a marked improvement over some of the previous Renfields.

  “I don’t mean to be cruel, Quincy, but you have seen a great many things since Anna’s death, and not all of them have actually been present.” Luke’s voice was mild, but laced with steel. He looked at me over the rim of his wineglass to gauge my reaction. If I wanted to get violent, he was prepared to deal with me. And he could, without even trying hard. Without magic, I was nowhere near a worthy opponent for the vampire using the name Lucas Card, and he was too close for me to get off even the quickest spell.

  We sat in the living room of his flat in Brooklyn, the third floor of a modest brownstone in the middle of a nice working-class neighborhood. I once asked him why he chose Brooklyn over some of the flashier neighborhoods of New York, and he told me that a hunting ground was always best if it was heavily stocked with game no one would miss, and Brooklyn had plenty of people moving in and out all the time, so if one or two vanished, no one would notice. I didn’t ask again.

  “That’s fair,” I replied. “It’s not been my best few years, even counting only the ones I remember. But I’m much clearer now, and I know what I saw.” I was only lying a little bit. There weren’t too many nights that I lay awake until dawn trying to escape the bad dreams, and I was almost to the point where I could hear a piano without thinking of the people I cared about who died by my inattention, my insufficiencies.

  I took a deep breath. “It’s not Anna. I know that. Anna is dead. I didn’t just watch her die, I felt her die.” When the Nazi colonel murdered my love, the psychic connection between us was severed, but not before I felt every second of her agony. The combination of the psychic backlash and feeling her die inside my head had driven me insensate for at least three years. There were times I thought I still felt her mind touching mine, like the pain of a phantom limb, but I knew she was gone.

  “But this woman is connected to her somehow. I saw her eyes, Luke. They were Anna’s eyes.” I looked from Luke to his current Renfield and back. They both wore looks of pity, but they weren’t convinced.

  “Even if she is somehow connected to Anna,” Luke said, “what business is it of yours if she dabbles in dark magic? You aren’t the magic police, Quincy.”

  “Aren’t we?” I shot back. “Isn’t that exactly what you created the Shadow Council to be? Protectors of the innocent from the supernatural monsters and mystical evils of the world? This guy I fought tonight was definitely demon-touched. If this woman and her group are playing around with the dark arts, there’s no telling what kind of trouble they could unleash upon the area. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that a demon running loose around New York would be bad for anyone of a supernatural disposition trying to keep a low profile.”

  That registered. Ever since Stoker’s book, Luke worked very hard to remain invisible. He even rotated through names every few years when he changed cities. But he liked New York, and he liked being Lucas Card. I knew he would want to protect this identity.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll have Renfield look into Anna’s family history, what we can find of it. Many of the records from Europe simply disappeared under the Nazis, particularly those of Jewish citizens.”

  “If there is anything to be found, Master Quincy, I will unearth it,” Renfield pledged.

  “Thanks,” I said, stifling a yawn. Pink sunlight crept in around the edges of the drawn curtains, and I realized that I’d let another night go by without sleep. If I kept up this nocturnal schedule much longer, I’d forget who was the vampire, me or Luke. “I’m going to get some sleep and then look around the park this evening. Since I spoiled their ritual, they have to try again tonight. We’re right on top of the solstice, so the spell probably has a calendar component.”

  “The guest room is made up,” Renfield said, pointing down the hall. “Just ring the bell if I can bring you anything. I will make some calls to friends in Europe and find what I can, but I doubt I’ll have anything before you wake.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” I said. “These things take time. Unfortunately, I may have to go in without much in the way of information.”

  Luke chuckled, then covered his mouth and turned it into perhaps the worst fake cough I’ve ever seen. When I looked at him, he gave me a smile. “That is something of your forte, Quincy. Of anyone I know, you have raised blindly rushing into a situation to an art form.”

  I let out a little laugh of my own as I stood and stretched. He was right, after all. Planning and forethought were great ideas. Unfortunately for me, they had always remained just that—ideas. “Good night, Uncle. Renfield, thank you for the drink. I’ll see you in a few hours.” With that, I went down the hall, listening as the siren song of the pillow called my name.

  * * *

  —

  I slept until dusk, and let myself out of the apartment without disturbing Renfield. I knew he was awake—there was nothing that happened in any of Luke’s resting places that he wasn’t completely aware of—but if we spoke to each other, he’d feel obligated to offer me breakfast. Or dinner, whichever he felt was appropriate. Then my stomach would rumble, and I’d feel like I was imposing on him even more than just leaving him dirty linens to wash. So I caught a bus back to Jersey City and stopped into a diner for a quick bite to eat before returning to my apartment to plan the night’s activities.

  After a quick shower I dressed in a pair of black pants and black military-style boots I’d grown to appreciate while running around parts of Europe in deep wilderness. I put on a dark blue short-sleeved shirt and opened a drawer by my bed. I pulled a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver from under a stack of handkerchiefs, slipped it into a shoulder holster. I strapped the gun around myself, tugging the straps tight, and drew a lightweight jacket over the whole assembly. It was a little warm for the jacket, but at least it kept the gun hidden. I picked out a dozen extra bullets for the .38 and put six in each pants pocket. Hopefully I wouldn’t need that many. Hopefully I wouldn’t need any, but I wasn’t much of an optimist where demons were concerned.

  Dressed for the night, I had nothing to do but think, so I slipped out of my apartment and walked across the street to the park, where at least I could think and keep watch at the same time. My mind wandered down f
amiliar dark alleys as I sat on a bench staring up at the clouds. Images of Anna, of her younger brother Gerald, of the blond Nazi that murdered her, these were the moving pictures of my memory as I sat and waited for my chance at redemption, my chance to right some of the wrongs of my past. Nothing I did would bring Anna back, but maybe if this girl was some relation, and I could keep her safe, it would erase some of the failure on my soul.

  I was startled from my reverie by the bench creaking as someone sat down next to me. I started, turning to the side, and barely refrained from a cry of surprise when I saw the woman from last night looking at me.

  “Penny for your thoughts, stranger,” she said with a smile tweaking the corner of her lips upward.

  “I’m afraid you’d be overpaying, ma’am,” I said, doffing an imaginary cap. The tendency for men to wear hats everywhere was something I never understood. I didn’t want anything limiting my vision, and more than once I’d needed to see things coming at me from above.

  “I doubt that, sir. You looked like a man deep in contemplation.”

  “Or wallowing in memories,” I said, letting a little too much truth leak out. She’d really shaken me by just appearing on the bench like that. I must have been deeper in thought than I realized. Couldn’t let that happen often, it could be bad for my health.

  “What brings you out on this fine evening?” I asked, glancing down at the bag by her side. I couldn’t see anything in it, but I assumed it held her robe and whatever else she needed for her ritual later that night. I was a little surprised she stopped to talk to me, a strange man on a park bench, after dark. She was truly a fearless young lady.

  “I’m meeting some friends over at the bandstand,” she said with a wave of her hand. “What had you so lost in thought? You were really in another world. I was a little afraid you were drunk, or maybe sick.”