American Gothic (17 page)

“She saw through your strategy,” Madame Allard jeered. “She was a better chess player than either of you two men.”

The fire broke through the ceiling over the fireplace. Pieces of flaming joists crashed down in a shower of sparks, the heat so fierce that Peregrine had to move away.

“The science…” The sound of Lavalle’s own voice startled him. He could speak again! He tried to stand up, but that was still impossible. “The science,” he began again, “isn’t there yet. But perhaps in twenty years. Maybe fifty. If I were immortal, I could work on the problem until the solution is found for us all.”

Madame Allard came closer and began to stroke the back of her fingers against the stubble of Lavalle’s unshaven face.

“What do you think, Nathaniel? Should we make him a changeling so that he can continue your insipid quest to regain your exalted status being human worm food?”

Peregrine shook his head. “Lavalle is precisely the wrong sort of person to be given a vampire’s power.”

“Why? Because he is so much like me—vicious, cowardly, and caring only for his own pleasure?”

The American said nothing.

“Did you know that he told Lady Fairweather the reason he had to leave France was because he’d killed a man in a duel over a woman?” She put her face directly in front of Lavalle’s, so close he could feel her breath as she spoke. “Why didn’t you tell her the truth? Why didn’t you tell her you went on a monthlong cocaine binge and murdered your pregnant wife and your best friend after becoming so delusional you were convinced they were having an affair and planning to murder you if you didn’t kill them first?”

“Please don’t speak of that,” Lavalle begged. The tears only added to his humiliation, but he could not bear to think about the horrible thing he’d done in Paris.

“I think Dr. Lavalle would make a
perfect
vampire, Nathaniel. Have you told him what it feels like to become drunk on the blood of human cattle?” Her eyes burned with the fire of a madness as intense as the one that was about to consume them along with the great house. “The feeling you get when you inject cocaine into your veins is
nothing
compared to the delirious bliss a vampire knows drinking blood. Shall I show you? My victims share my pleasure, at least they do until their hearts stop beating.”

“Let him go, Delphine, and I will go with you to Paris or wherever you wish to go. Enough killing.”

“You will?” Madame Allard sounded as excited as a child promised a treat.

Lavalle hardly noticed when his hands began to slip back from their awkward grip on the chair’s arms. An almost electric shock shot through him when he realized he could move again.

The doctor was on his feet, running, even before his mind could form the intention to flee the fire and the pair of supernatural killers. The archway to the front hall was in flames. He threw his arms over his head to keep his hair from catching on fire, and soon was flinging himself down the front steps.

Napoleon! He looked frantically around, but there was no sign of his horse. Either someone had stolen him, or the beast had become frightened enough of the conflagration engulfing the house to slip his reins and run away.

Lavalle began to run down the lane.

The drumming—why did the drumming continue while Maison de la Falaise went up in flames? Did the people at the voodoo ceremony know Peregrine planned to destroy the great house and leave? Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they were
glad
the mansion was burning. If not for the infernal drumming, Lavalle would have thought them all dead.

Unless they
were
dead. Unless they were zombies.

Something gave way in Dr. Lavalle’s mind and he began to shriek in animal terror as he ran through the darkness. It was not that he believed in zombies—he could barely believe in vampires, and he knew they were real—but that the science, mathematics, and physics he had used to shore up his life were falling in on themselves, the foundation of his sanity eaten away by the chaos, by the unexplained, and the unexplainable…

Lavalle ran screaming through the night, knowing that if vampires existed, then perhaps zombies did, too. And even if there were no zombies, he had been proven insufferably narrow-minded and myopic to have circumscribed the world into small, orderly circles whose boundaries were defined by scientific inquiry. There was more to the world than Lavalle had dreamed of in his mind, which lacked only for imagination.

But worst of all for Dr. Lavalle was knowing that, taking the argument to its logical conclusion (as he felt compelled, as always, to do), the existence of categories of beings beyond the understanding of mortals meant that in all likelihood there really was a God, somewhere out there far, far away, at the end of all things, at the beginning of all things. And since God existed, then it was entirely reasonable to postulate that Dr. Michael Lavalle—murderer, drug addict, lecher, liar, fugitive, racist—was going to die and go straight to hell.

Lavalle nearly ran into Madame Allard on the road. She had evidently run ahead of him through the jungle with impossible vampire speed, as Peregrine had once done, and was now waiting, not even panting, for him.

“You didn’t really think I was going to let you get away,” she said. “Nathaniel is such a weakling. He would let you go, but I, however, am quite strict about not leaving loose ends when I finish enjoying myself and move on to new diversions.”

Lavalle pulled away when she reached for him and ran back toward the house, his legs moving so fast that he kept stumbling and falling forward, though he somehow managed to stay on his feet and keep moving from the horror behind. He could hear her back there, laughing. She could catch him whenever she wanted, but it amused her to toy with him, like a cat playing with a mouse, prolonging the act of killing for sheer perverse enjoyment.

The flaming great house appeared out of the trees, first as a brilliant light above the leafy canopy, then in its entire horrible blazing glory. The structure was fully wrapped in flames that danced and jumped into the overarching darkness. There was no escape for Lavalle there.

Peregrine sat on the bottom step of the porch, oblivious to the inferno behind him, head in hands, eyes downcast, ignoring the smoke coming off the back of his smoldering jacket.

“Help me!” Lavalle shouted, but the American did not even look up.

She was close behind him now, so the doctor had no choice but to keep running. The fire illuminated the rim of the cliff ahead, beyond it a yawning abyss that concealed the long drop to the rocks and water below. Lavalle had a fleeting, desperate idea to stop at the last possible moment and see the monster hurtle past him, but he was running too fast. Madame Allard’s fevered fingers reached out to lightly brush his neck over his jugular as Lavalle felt himself hurtle over the edge.

There was the sickening sensation of falling, and the vomit rising, when something smashed into Lavalle from behind.

He instinctively knew, in that split second, that Delphine had thrown herself after him, unafraid of the fall, knowing that not even the screaming drop to the rocks below could end her demonic existence.

In his last moment of life, as the rocks loomed boldly into his vision, blotting out everything else—dark, jagged, unforgiving—Dr. Lavalle felt the vampire’s teeth tear savagely into his neck. There was a short, sharp eruption of bliss seemingly as powerful as a star exploding into nova, and after that…

Nothing.

PART THREE

SAN FRANCISCO

The Present

27

The Cage Club

I
T WAS A rainy night on a dirty, litter-strewn street of San Francisco. The closed factories and shuttered warehouses had been slated for gentrification a few years earlier, before the Internet bubble burst. The pricey apartment lofts and hip advertising agencies decorated in industrial chic were still only blueprints tucked away in a filing cabinet in the office of a real-estate developer one step ahead of bankruptcy. The buildings on McKennit Street remained empty, the broken windows boarded up, steel accordion gates padlocked across entries to keep out transients. But the homeless and lawless looking for something to steal or smash had learned to stay away from McKennit Street. The neighborhood belonged to the Ravening Brood, and they had a reputation for dealing harshly with trespassers.

A young woman walked boldly down the deserted street, oblivious to the grim atmosphere. She was tall, nearly six feet in her bare feet, with the lithe, willowy body of a ballerina. She wore her long hair down; the color appeared to be black, but when she passed beneath the streetlamp, the light reflecting up off the wet pavement revealed the deep purple highlights. Her face was narrow and intelligent, with classic high cheekbones and a noble forehead above her large, luminous eyes. Her skin was pale, as if the only natural light that ever touched it came from the moon and stars.

The girl’s manner of dress was eccentric, as if part of her wardrobe was from the closet of a Victorian lady, the rest from a gypsy’s caravan. Her black ankle-length skirt nearly concealed the high-heeled boots, which served only to accentuate her height and angularity. The long-sleeved blouse, also black, was held closed at the throat by an antique cameo. Her fringed silk shawl was decorated in reds, purples, and blues, an elaborate Oriental pattern. As cold rain began to fall again from the night sky, she clasped the wrap more tightly around her, the finger tendons standing out more sharply against the soft flesh on the back of her hand. She wore silver rings on all her fingers and both thumbs, and her nails were painted with black lacquer. The ankh pendant around her neck was silver, as were the half-dozen smaller Celtic and traditional crosses. The dozens of bangles and bracelets on her wrists were silver, too. She wore only silver jewelry. Black, silver, and bloodred—those were Ophelia’s colors.

The girl stopped to open her umbrella as the rain began to pelt harder. A rat stuck its head out of a hole gnawed in a corner of disintegrating plywood over a doorway. The rodent squeaked at her. That made her smile, because it reminded her of the line of poetry about dead men who lost their bones in the rats’ alley.

The black rain came down hard enough to wash some of the trash from the street and sidewalks, the runoff flowing filthy in the gutters. Ophelia stepped over a foul rivulet and entered a narrow alley that dead-ended in a brick wall. Halfway to the end, just past a reeking Dumpster overflowing with beer cans, wine bottles, and fast-food garbage, was a steel door that slid open sideways along an overhead track. The handwritten sign on the door decorated with a skull and crossbones warned trespassers that survivors would be prosecuted.

The door opened with a shriek of rusty metal.

Ophelia stepped inside.

The door slammed closed behind her.

The only light inside came from a ten-watt bulb on the other side of a grate, making the light splay out in bars across the floor. A deep pulse came up through the concrete floor, like a leviathan’s heartbeat or the sound of a sinister machine at work deep in the bowels of the earth. Ophelia felt it through the soles of her boots as she went to the freight elevator and bent for the greasy rope to raise the gate of vertical wooden slats.

She was going down. She stabbed the button marked
basement.
The elevator, its ancient electric motor long in need of service, shuddered to life with a loud hum and the smell of ozone, and began its descent.

The cavernous cellar stretched out into a vast darkness interrupted by bits of red glow shining through the holes in the brick walls near the ceiling where the water pipes and heating and electrical conduits ran. The building had once been the warehouse for a downtown department store that had gone out of business when Eisenhower was president. Beyond the first few rooms, which were filled with boxes and bales of crumbling business documents, the cellar expanded into a large room that had been divided into a series of cages where merchandise was once organized. Some were filled with old store display cases or broken office furniture, others with battered mannequins posed in ways that were intended to represent various sex acts.

The music became progressively louder as the elevator carried Ophelia to the lower level. It was the metallic sound of synthesizers programmed to suggest music made by machines untouched by human emotion, except perhaps for angst and rage—industrial Goth music.

Ophelia exited the elevator and strode through the dark passageways, knowing the way as well as any. Some of the cages she passed were strewn with garbage, others outfitted for ritual purposes. There was the Initiation Cage, the Transformation Cage, the Judgment Cage. Some of the cages were purely for fun and games and equipped with chains, shackles, cables, transformers, and wires for electrical sex play, restraints, whips, clips, ropes, and nooses. Some of the cages had mattresses on the floor where the fledglings—but usually only the females—had to submit to the pleasure of master vampires. Ophelia had put an end to that, once she took over the Brood. The mattresses still got their share of use, especially on weekend nights when there was X in the Cage Club and dancing sometimes degenerated into spontaneous orgies. Ophelia remained aloof from such activities. She didn’t care for drugs and was mostly indifferent to sex. But mainly, being Brood Mistress required her to maintain a certain distance from the other vampires.

The Brood was gathered in the Great Hall, an open area at the back of the basement from which the cages had been ripped out. The room was bathed in red and green light. A powerful strobe light was trained on the platform along the rear wall that held the speakers and music gear. Zeke was running sound, a spectral form in a floor-length black trench coat looking even more sinister than usual in the flickering light. Next to the sound platform, pressed into the corner was the boiler, a hulking contraption sprouting ductwork that made it look like a giant spider lurking in the shadows.

The way the other vampires whispered to one another when Ophelia strode into the middle of the room made her immediately suspicious. She was always on the lookout for treachery. If there was one thing you could always count on in a Ravening Brood, it was that somebody ambitious and evil was always ready to overthrow the Brood Master or Mistress and seize power. Broods were governed according to a strict hierarchy, like the Jesuit brotherhood on which they were patterned with a consciously perverse irony. Though others held authority commensurate with their rank, with the fledgling vampires at the very bottom of the pecking order, ultimately the individual Brood members were scarcely more than slaves relegated to serving the Master’s or Mistress’s desires.

Ophelia looked at Zeke through narrowing eyes, which was the only thing she needed to do to get him to turn down the music so that she could hear herself think. Her own taste in music ran toward classical, but she would never have expected the Ravening crowd, by and large a rough, crude group, to appreciate true beauty.

Her eyes went from one vampire to the next as she joined them in the middle of the room. Conspiracy was definitely afoot. She could smell it on them. In mortal life, she had been born with Chiron conjunct with Pluto, which made her unusually psychic. Ophelia slipped her hand into her antique beaded purse, reaching for the death talisman. Whoever was planning to depose her would pay dearly for the mistake.

“Surprise!”

Ophelia had to stare at the grinning idiots for a few moments before seeing the cake on the table. It was shaped like the ankh Ophelia always wore around her neck, the black icing decorated with bloodred candles.

“Happy birthday, Mistress!”

A fledgling named Letitia, who imagined herself a favorite of the Mistress, put her arms around Ophelia. Ophelia stood there stiff, barely tolerating the expression of affection.

“I told you she wouldn’t like it.”

Blade was grinning at her, enjoying her discomfiture. He knew her better than the others. They had once been lovers, when he was Brood Master, before Ophelia deposed him. He was lucky she hadn’t made the Brood shun him—or worse—she thought, not for the first time regretting the mercy she’d shown him.

“There is nothing happy about me,” Ophelia said. “Not today. Not ever.”

“I told them vampires don’t celebrate birthdays,” said Damien, a fledgling who obviously regretted that he had been pulled into this embarrassing charade by Letitia and her lover, Pendragon.

“The undead have no need for sentimental gestures,” Ophelia said.

Letitia and Pendragon edged back away from her, unable to look at the others after their blunder. But Damien was the one Ophelia wanted to eviscerate most. He had been part of their silly plot to ingratiate themselves with the Mistress, but now he thought he could turn on his fellow conspirators and escape her wrath. Ophelia would make the others pay in time, but Damien would pay the dearest price. He would never gain admission into the Brood when his apprenticeship in vampirey was over.

“Come on, Ophelia, lighten up,” Blade said in a condescending voice. “It’s your eighteenth birthday. You’re
legal
now.”

Ophelia’s hand clenched around the death talisman, but something told her to let the insult go. She would deal with Blade, too, but in her own time. She didn’t like to use her power in showy, indiscriminate ways. That led to resentment, and resentment led to cabals and combinations and plots. Ophelia could never forget that Blade’s high-handedness with the Brood had led to his own downfall—as well as to her own elevation to Mistress of the Ravening Brood.

“I appreciate the gesture.” She smiled at Letitia. “The black icing is lovely.”

“It’s chocolate heavily dosed with food coloring,” Pendragon said.

“But nothing else,” Letitia said.

“Thank you, Letitia and Pendragon,” Ophelia said, pointedly ignoring Damien. She could feel the third fledgling’s psychic withdrawal from her presence. He
knew
he was dead meat to her. If there was anything Ophelia despised more than treachery aimed against her rule over the Brood, it was someone who thought he could get away with manipulating her.

“It would be a shame to let the cake go to waste,” Ophelia said with carefully contrived good humor. “It will go well with a nice glass of blood.”