Manitou Blood (28 page)

“I'm still not sure,” said Jenica. “But anyway, the casket was taken to Borsa, and bricked up in the vaults of the Chapel of St. Basil, and that must have been where Gheorghe Vlad found it.”

“So this is the Vampire Gatherer we have to go looking for?”

“That's right. Although I do not know how we are going to find him. The
svarcolaci
are notorious for concealing themselves so that not even the most skillful purifiers can discover their hiding places.”

“Maybe I should try saying The Wolf's real name. That way, he'd come looking for
me
.”

“No! You do not know what are you suggesting, Mr. Harry. If the
svarcolaci
becomes aware that you are hunting for him, he will always make sure that you are dead before the next sun rises. And yes, your spirit guide is right. You will be ripped to pieces so that there is nothing left to bury of you but human rags.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “So what's Plan B?”

“I will look through my father's books, and see if I can discover how it was that the Black Purifiers discovered where The Wolf was hiding.”

“Very good idea. You're not just an extraordinary looking woman, are you?”

She stared at me, as if she were waiting for me to say something else.

“What do you want me to tell you?” I said. “I think you're beautiful, and if you don't know that you're beautiful, then you've been looking in the wrong mirrors.”

“Mr. Harry, we are looking for a Vampire Gatherer.”

“Yes. I'm sorry. But I just thought I'd let you know that I'm not completely impervious. You know, to the way you look. And that tickly thing you did, on the palm of my hand. And you walked into the bathroom, didn't you, when I was taking a shower?”

Jenica looked totally baffled. You can't even imagine how relieved I was when the doorbell rang.

We drew the velvet drapes together as tightly as we could. Apart from a few triangular chinks of sunlight, it was so gloomy that we could hardly see each other, but Dr. Winter still couldn't stop shivering. Gil had given him a gilded, straight-backed dining chair to sit in, but the poor guy kept doubling forward in pain. His face was thick with yellowish-white sunblock, and there was dried blood on his chin, like a beard. His black pants were filthy and one of his sleeves was torn.

“Maybe I shouldn't have brung him up here,” said Gil.

“No,” I said. “I think you did right.”

Jenica was pacing up and down. “What if The Wolf sent him here to tear us to pieces? How can we know for sure that he will not turn on us, and cut our throats, and drink all our blood?”

The answer was, um, we couldn't. But for some reason I felt that we could trust him, at least some of the way. He didn't have the same unhinged stare as those people who had attacked Gil and me in the street. He was very sick, no
doubt about it, but it was obvious that he was struggling hard to keep his sickness from overwhelming him. And he was a doctor. Once upon a time he had taken an oath to save people's lives, for what that was worth.

I sat on the couch next to him. “It's Frank, isn't it, doc?”

Frank lifted his head, and attempted a smile. “I want to thank you, for taking me off the street. I think I'd be dead by now, if you hadn't.”

“Gil says you've been infected.”

“That's right. It was a girl called Susan Fireman, a patient of mine. She died, or at least I thought she was dead. She climbed into my bedroom the night after she was taken to the morgue. We had sex.”

“A dead girl climbed into your bedroom and you actually managed to have sex? Jesus. I'd have been halfway to the Canadian border, leaving a brown trail behind me.”

Frank coughed, and nodded. “It was like a dream. Well, more like a nightmare. I can't really explain how it happened. But I'm pretty sure that's how the vampires pass their infection on, from one person to another, through the exchange of bodily fluids. It's perfect . . . the quickest way to spread an epidemic, bar none. You should see how the HIV virus was spread in India . . . by long-distance truck drivers, using roadside prostitutes. Millions got infected. Five million, in a few months, all across the continent. The same thing's going to happen here, with this.”

“So you think it's a virus?”

“It's some kind of viral-type infection. Our pathologists at the Sisters of Jerusalem were trying to isolate it, but from what your friend tells me—”

“The Sisters of Jerusalem was burning, the last I heard,” Gil put in. “St. Vincent's too, and Bellevue.”

I turned back to Frank. “So how do you feel? Do you think you're going to be able to beat this thing, or what?”

“I don't know. My skin's burning. I feel like a pig, to tell you the truth, roasting on a spit. I'm so thirsty I can hardly
swallow, but even
thinking
about water makes me sick to my stomach. All I can think about is human blood. It's worse than being an alcoholic and needing a drink.”

“Are you hungry? When was the last time you ate?”

“I can't remember. Yesterday morning, I think.”

“Do you think you could manage to eat something?”

“I don't know. Some raw meat, maybe.”

“Jenica?” I asked her.

“I have some chopped liver in the fridge,” she said, although she didn't make any effort to hide her disgust.

“Well, I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll blend some chopped liver with some Romanian wine, and we'll see if you can keep going on that. If you don't drink any human blood, Frank, maybe you can beat this infection, you know?”

“I'll try,” said Frank.

I scraped the chicken livers out of their bloodstained paper into Jenica's Waring blender. Then I poured in half a bottle of Feteasca Neagra, and blitzed the livers into a smooth, dark-brown glop. It smelled appalling, like a rabbit that had died after a weekend on the booze, but Frank needed feeding and I couldn't think of anything else that he might be able to stomach.

Gil came into the kitchen while I was making it, and between blitzes I told him everything that Jenica and I had found out about
strigoi
and
svarcolaci
.

“Most important of all—we think we've found out the name of the actual Vampire Gatherer who's here in New York. Back in Romania they used to call him The Wolf.”

“So what's his real name?”

I scraped the brown glop into a cereal bowl and rooted around in the cutlery drawer, looking for a spoon. “We daren't say his name out loud, in case he picks up on it, and comes looking for us. And from what Jenica tells me, he doesn't take prisoners.”

Gil said, “Shit, man, we really have to take some action. And I mean, like,
now
. Outside in the streets—it's like a goddamned war zone out there. Bodies lying everywhere. Men, women, kids. It's worse than Kosovo.”

Gil had managed to shower and shave when he was home, and he was wearing a clean khaki T-shirt and clean Desert Storm-style pants. But he had haunted, dark circles under his eyes and I could tell from his disconnected speech how exhausted he was.

“Is your family okay?” I asked him.

He nodded. “I've barricaded them into our apartment, and they're pretty well supplied with food and bottled water. I've left Marie my gun, too, and she knows how to use it.”

“That's good.”

“Yes—but we still need to
do
something. We can't just sit on our duffs talking about it, for Christ's sake.”

“We're not going to,” I reassured him. “For starters, we're going to go looking for the nest.”

“Then we can frag it, right?”

“I don't think you can beat these suckers by fragging them. They're undead, remember, which means they're dead already. What we have to do is, identify which casket belongs to the Vampire Gatherer. He's in charge of all of the rest of the vampires. Jenica has a book, and it has the ritual in it for sealing him up again. So if we can catch the Vampire Gatherer during the day, while he's hiding in there, we can stop him from ever getting out again.”

“So where do we start looking?”

“Well, I'm not sure, exactly. I was hoping that the doc might have some ideas. I mean, he's halfway to being one of
strigoi,
isn't he?”

“And what if he doesn't? If Jenica's old man hasn't been able to find it, after all these years, what hope do we have?”

“I don't know, Gil. Maybe we'll have to put our faith in the Lord.”

I carried the brown glop back into the living room. Frank
took it, and sniffed it, and prodded it with his spoon. But then he tried a little, and managed to swallow it.

“How is it?” I asked him.

“Don't ever try to open a restaurant, but I think I can keep it down.”

I sat beside him as he tried to eat. I had to admire the guy. He was obviously going through seven kinds of hell, but he was trying very hard to hold on to his humanity—even to his sense of humor. All the same, there was something in his eyes that told me that he was fighting a losing battle. A kind of
looking inwards
. I had seen that expression before on people who knew they were soon going to die. Like, how can the world be so heartless as to leave me behind?

“We need to find the place where the vampires' coffins are hidden,” I told him. “I was wondering if you had any ideas.”

“My father always believed that they were still downtown someplace,” put in Jenica. “But we have no records of where they might be. Maybe you have some special intuition.”

Frank attempted a smile. “I'm not one of the undead yet,” he remarked. “But I'll tell you something—from what I've seen, the
strigoi
don't need coffins to hide during the day. This was what I wanted to tell the pathology people at the Sisters of Jerusalem. It sounds crazy, I know, but they can hide inside mirrors.”

“What?”

“They can walk into a mirror just like it's a door, and they can stay there until it gets dark.”

“How the hell do they do that?”

“I'm not sure. But the early tests we did at the hospital showed that they had an enzyme in their bloodstream with a silver element attached. In some way, they seem to have a metabolic association with silver, and maybe this allows them to penetrate the reflective surface of a mirror and pass through to the other side.” He coughed. “Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's black magic, who knows?

He managed another spoonful of liver and wine. “This is truly disgusting,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I apologized. “But it should help you to keep your strength up.”

Little by little, as he ate, Frank told us what had happened in his apartment. He explained how Susan Fireman had climbed in through the window, even though she was clinically dead, and how she had reached out of the mirror in the hallway and cut the detective's throat. “There was blood just about everywhere.”

“Weren't you at all . . .
tempted?
” asked Jenica. She was a sharp one, no question about that.

“Tempted?” Frank shook his head, but as he did so he gave me quick, shifty glance, and I strongly suspected that he was lying. But who was I to judge? He was infected with a virus that had already turned hundreds of people into murdering blood-drinkers, and nobody knew how to cure it. He was a victim, too.

“I had a dream that Susan Fireman stepped into this tilting mirror that I have in my bedroom,” said Frank. “Well—it may have been a dream, or maybe I was hallucinating. In any case, I refused to follow her. I smashed the mirror to stop Susan Fireman from coming back through, or the Vampire Gatherer from coming after me, and when I woke up, I found that I had broken my mirror for real. I think that's the only thing that saved me.

He had another fit of coughing, but then he said, “The reason I was trying to get back to the Sisters of Jerusalem—I needed to talk to our chemists. If they can find some agent that can break down this silver enzyme—maybe we could inject people with it when they first show signs of infection.”

“But would that stop them from turning into
strigoi?
” asked Jenica.

“I doubt it. But it would probably stop them from escaping
into mirrors. When the sun came up, they wouldn't have anyplace to hide, and they would burn up, and die for good. Eventually the
strigoi
would stop spreading so fast, and we could hunt them down and get them under control.”

“That's kind of extreme,” I told him. “That's like stopping a forest fire by cutting down the forest.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Well, like I said, I think we need to find out where these freaks are hiding and hit them where they live. Or where they're
undead
, rather. That would be a start. But we also have to find out who revived the
strigoi
, and why, and we have to get rid of
him
, whoever he is.”

“Of course, Harry, this is the best plan,” Jenica put in. “But this is not going to be such a simple proposition. For all of his adult life my father has been searching for the Vampire Gatherer and his nest of
strigoi
, and he could never find them. Besides, we must be rational. The
strigoi
are surrounded by myths and legends, remember, not established facts.”

“You think so?” said Gil. “The way I see it, all those dead people in the streets, they weren't killed by myths and legends—but if they
were
, then the myths and legends must be pretty much true. Like the doc says, this is either some complicated kind of bio-chemistry, or else it's black magic. Dead people can't climb up buildings, and nobody can hide inside mirrors, whether they're dead or alive. But, hell—here they are,
doing
it. So if all the intelligence we've got to go on is myths and legends, that's still better than no intelligence at all, believe me. In Bosnia once I had this superstitious feeling that the Serbs had set up a booby trap inside a children's hostel, and that superstitious feeling saved me from getting my ass blown inside out.