Of Masques and Martyrs (4 page)

The smell of devastatingly spicy jambalaya wafted through the open saloon doors of a restaurant whose name was barely legible on a faded sign. But it didn’t need a name, not with food that smelled that good. She’d eaten inside the little establishment three times since she’d been here, and each night, it seemed, the meals improved. How anyone could make something that tasted as good as the gumbo they served was beyond her ability to imagine.

Half a block from Old Antoine’s she could clearly hear Swamp Thing, the New Orleans funk-infused jazz trio that served as the bar’s house band, ripping through a completely insane version of Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved.” It was beautiful, entrancing.

Nikki had never been so happy.

 

Southern Comfort burned sweetly in her throat and belly. Nikki swayed, her hands caressing the strings of her guitar as she growled her way through Robert Johnson’s immortal “Come On in My Kitchen.” It was the fourth song in her set, after she’d run through Clarence Carter’s “Sweet Feelin’,” Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man,” and Bonnie Raitt’s mournfully sexy “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Shafts of smoky blue light punched through the darkness and she turned her face to their brilliance as if to the sun.

She lived for those lights. For the cloud of smoke that clogged her lungs. For the silence of the audience while she poured her heart out to them, and the roar of approval when she was through. Her sets moved from bluesy pop standards like Bob Seger’s “Main Street” to the absolute core of the blues. It was stripped-down, soul-baring music she’d come to love as a child, trying desperately to fall asleep as her mother sat and drank herself into a stupor listening to Blind Willie McTell and Elmore James and Big Mama Thornton and T-Bone Walker. So many songs. So much pain.

Until the day she died, Nikki’s mother, Etta, had still listened to music on vinyl. With a record player. The memory was bittersweet, like nearly all her thoughts of her mother were.

She put the sadness into her voice, into the song, and gave it to the audience as a kind of offering. Maybe they’d all feel a little better when she was done. At least that’s how she’d always thought of it.

When she was through, she barely allowed the audience a moment to applaud before launching into Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Love Me Like a Man.” It always made her feel sexy to sing such a raw, inviting song. She let her eyes drift over the shadowed faces of the audience, where they sat around tables and tipped back Lone Stars and Dixies and glasses of whiskey. Suddenly the men stopped drinking.

They always stopped drinking during this song. Their eyes riveted on Nikki, on the way her body moved against her guitar. She invited it, moved with it. That’s what the song was all about. She slapped the front of the guitar in time with her picking and strumming, and she smiled with mischief toward the faces in the dark.

“I need someone to love me, I know you can,” she sang throatily. “Believe me when I tell you, you can love me like a man.”

Her eyes continued to trawl across the audience. Then stopped, frozen on one face. A handsome, chiseled, intense face, belonging to a man who’d come to see her four nights running. He had short, raggedly cut hair and a goatee, and when her gaze stopped on him, he held it with his own. His mouth blossomed into a lopsided grin, and Nikki felt the whiskey-warmth in her belly spread further through her.

The words to the song almost eluded her, but she caught herself and went on, unable to look away from the dark-haired man leaning against the bar. There was an intimacy to their exchange now, and she began to blush with the sexuality of the song.

What’s wrong with you?
she chided herself, and shook it off. She looked away, continued the song. Remembered the man. His easy smile, the confidence in his bearing. Not a freak, certainly. Charming as a stalker. But that didn’t mean he was one. Just a fan, then. A really, truly, good-looking fan.

When her gaze swept past him again, it was Nikki’s turn to smile. She ran through the rest of her first set feeling a kind of tingly excitement she wasn’t at all used to. Unexpected as this feeling was, she knew it was also unwarranted. There was no reason for her to expect the guy at the bar to be anyone she’d want to get to know.

But when she laid her guitar down and stepped offstage, Nikki waded through the smoke and the applause, brushing past chairs on a direct path for the man at the bar whose darling grin and smiling eyes drew her on.

She was perhaps twenty feet away from him when a broad stone wall of a man blocked her way, a leer stretching his lips and a Dixie in either hand. He held one of the beers out to her, stepped in closer, and she felt suddenly, oddly, cold.

“I like the way you sing,” he said suggestively, his southern drawl more pronounced than that of the locals. “Like you’re lonely and wet and can’t help yourself.”

Nikki felt her stomach churn. Her upper lip curled back in an involuntary sneer.

“You’re a fucking poet,” she shot at him, and stepped to one side, intending to go around.

She heard the dropped beer bottle shatter on the floor in the same instant that the big, cruel-eyed man wrapped her right bicep in a crushing grip. Nikki cried out, less in pain than in fear that he would break her arm just by holding on to her.

“Hey, asshole!” somebody shouted from a nearby table. “Why don’t you leave the lady alone?”

A tall black man appeared next to her and reached out for the steel fingers that had trapped her there in the middle of the club. The big man who held her wasn’t about to let go. His other hand shot out in a flash. He grabbed the tall man by the throat, gave a jerk, and her would-be savior’s neck snapped with a gunshot crack.

“Oh my God!” Nikki screamed.

The killer leaned in close to her, pulling her to him in an almost intimate embrace. He spoke softly, snarling, but she felt no breath on her face.

“That’s your fault, bitch,” he whispered. “You killed that fella, sure as I’m standin’ here. And I was only tryin’ to be nice. Now,
you
gonna be nice or do I have to start gettin’ mean?”

He smiled, waiting for an answer, and she could see his fangs. Nikki whimpered, unable to scream, barely able to breathe. Even as she cringed away from him, she was ashamed of her fear. This was a tyrant, like so many other men she’d known, an animal whose basic instinct was to inflict pain on others to feed its own delusions of power.

She was terrified. There was no getting around that. Perhaps she was about to die. In the few seconds that he waited for her response, her emotions were in turmoil. But she knew this: he might take her life, but she would never surrender her dignity again. She wouldn’t give him that.

“Last chance, darlin’,” he drawled.

Nikki Wydra balled her left hand into a fist and swung it as hard as she could into the big vampire’s face. Felt it give way beneath her knuckles. Smiled as she saw the blood squirt from his now broken nose.

“Fuck you,” she growled.

With a roar, the vampire yanked her hair, pulling some of it free of her scalp. He drew her head back, bared his fangs with a hiss, and shot his mouth toward her throat. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes, but she knew she would be dead before they fell.

“You want to see mean?” a soft, commanding voice asked.

She heard the vampire grunt in surprise and pain, and forced her eyes open. A hand was twined in the huge monster’s hair, his own head yanked back, throat exposed.

It was him. The man from the bar, the man with the lopsided grin who’d come to see her night after night. The vampire towered over him, was double his size, but the handsome, goateed man easily held him down, biceps bulging but not straining with the effort. How? she thought. How could he . . .

Then she knew.

“This isn’t the way things are done in New Orleans,” the man from the bar said quietly, sternly, as if he were reasoning with a small child. “If you’d wanted to live like this, to behave like an animal, you should have stayed with Hannibal’s clan.”

The huge vampire slapped the man’s hand away and rounded on him. Nikki backpedaled, unable to look away but frantic to escape further attack.

“What makes you think I’m not still part of that clan?” the huge vampire sneered. “You think I’m gonna take orders from a pussy like you, man won’t even take what’s his by right?”

The man’s eyes widened at the vampire’s words.

“Oh,” he said amiably. “A spy, eh? Did it ever occur to you to wonder why I’ve been hanging around Old Antoine’s for the past few nights?”

Now it was the vampire’s turn to register surprise. Nikki didn’t understand what kept him from attacking the man. They were so close, he could have reached out and killed him just as he’d done to the other man who’d tried to help her. And the way he moved, nervously, from side to side. It was almost as if he were afraid.

But that was ridiculous.

“No? I didn’t think so. I begin to doubt Hannibal’s vaunted wisdom. Only a fool would send an idiot like you to do a job that requires some brains,” the man snarled.

The huge vampire began to change then. Fur sprouted all over his body, and his face elongated into a snout full of gnashing, flashing death. Hands lengthened into claws and Nikki got her first good glimpse of what a werewolf looked like.

“You’re dead,” the wolf growled, in words barely decipherable.

The man actually chuckled. “Ah, little cub,” he said. “If you had any idea how many times I’ve heard those words, even you would have to laugh at how stupid they make you sound.”

That did it. Despite his obvious trepidation, the wolf could take no more. The huge, howling vampire launched himself at Nikki’s savior and admirer, claws extended, reaching, ready to rend and tear.

Green light spilled from the man’s eyes and sprouted from his right hand. He moved so fast that if Nikki had even blinked, she might have missed it. The green glow blazed around his fingers and the man stepped forward, into the wolf’s charge. His hand slammed into the huge monster’s chest, shattering bones and ripping flesh.

“This is how we deal with spies,” the man said.

As he withdrew his hand, the dark-haired man stepped aside. The vampire, already changing back to his human appearance, crashed into an abandoned table and tumbled to the floor on his back. There was a steaming hole in his chest where his heart had once beat.

Now it burned. In the hand of the man who had saved her, who had looked at her so enchantingly from across the room, was the black heart of the vampire. It burned green and bright for a moment, and then its ashes scattered to the ground. Nikki stared at them as they fell like snowflakes to the sticky floorboards.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice filled with warmth and concern.

Nikki jumped, startled to find him there, next to her. Then she relaxed. She should have been terrified. He wasn’t human either, that much was clear. Vampire. Sorceror. Whatever he was, whatever insane things existed in this new world since the Venice Jihad six years ago, she ought to have run screaming from them. From him. But she didn’t feel afraid. She felt . . . safe. That was the only way to describe it. He had saved her life. And there was a kindness and wisdom that came through his every glance, his every word.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking.

“You sing beautifully, Nikki,” he observed by way of response, and smiled again, white teeth splitting his tightly trimmed goatee. “My name is Peter.”

“Peter,” she repeated, tasting the flavor of his name on her lips.

He reached out to her, his fingers lightly brushing against her hand. She ought to have pulled away. But she simply didn’t want to. Then, at the back of the club, metal stage doors clanged shut, the scraping clamor echoing through the room.

“Octavian!” a woman roared from the dimly lit front entrance.

There were five of them, all together. At least, five that she could see. A pair of lanky, slinking males approached from the stage door. At the front door, a long-haired Latino man and two women moved further into the club. The one who had spoken walked in front, apparently leading them. She was young and petite, a slight Asian girl who radiated a power that belied her size.

“Nobody move, and maybe you’ll survive to be dinner another night,” she sneered, her beautifully sculpted face split by a sickening grin.

“Hello, Tsumi,” Peter said coldly. “I haven’t seen you since Hong Kong. What was it, 1854? Or was it ’55?”

The girl named Tsumi smiled. “I’m glad you remember,” she said.

The five vampires continued to move in, obviously intending to encircle the other, to trap Peter between them. As they passed the bar, Sidney, the bartender, took a step or two away from them. The long-haired Latino grunted as his right hand extended into a horrible wooden pitchfork of a claw. As he passed the bar, he whipped his arm out and sliced cleanly through the bartender’s throat. The vampire didn’t even look at the man as blood sprayed across the bar. Nikki felt sick as Sidney crashed into a rack of liquor bottles, hands flapping wildly, trying to staunch the flow of blood from his throat.

Nobody else in the club moved. Not at all. Some whimpered. Some actually cried. Ash grew long on the ends of burning cigarettes. But nobody moved.

“When they come for me, run for the door,” Peter whispered in Nikki’s ear.

“Ah, is she with you, then?” Tsumi asked.

“Not at all,” Peter replied. “She’s just a wonderful singer. Though I see you’re still the jealous type. Does Hannibal know you have a personal vendetta against me, or does he think you actually believe in his politics?”

“Politics?” Tsumi snapped. “You are a fool, Peter. This is about survival. Survival of the fittest.”

Then she softened. “Once upon a time, when I loved you, you would have known that. You were the greatest warrior I have ever known. But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? What’s become of you?”