On a Darkling Plain (10 page)

Momentarily jealous of her rapture, Elliott moved to the painting and lifted it off the wall. “Don’t just stand there,” he said gruffly, “give me the cover.”

Blinking, Rosalita gave her head a shake and unrolled her piece of canvas. The two vampires wrapped it around Fouquet’s picture and tied it in place with a length of rope.

Elliott tucked the landscape under his arm and turned toward the door. Then he caught a whiff of the foul odor he had smelled before, and heard a faint, scuffing sound. “Hold it,” he whispered, raising his hand. “Did you hear that? Or smell it?”

“No,” she replied uncertainly. He grimaced. It would have been nice to have confirmation, but the fact that she hadn’t sensed what he had didn’t necessarily mean he’d been imagining things. Her perceptions, though more acute than any mortal’s, weren’t as sharp as his.

“I think somebody’s out there,” he said, nodding to the rest of the suite and other rooms and corridors beyond.

“Do you think they followed us?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I would have sworn that nobody was tailing us out on the street. I wonder if it could be the vandal, come to destroy the Fouquet. It would be a hell of a coincidence if we all went after the same picture at the same time, but stranger things have happened.” Almost despite himself, exhilaration like that he’d experienced on the street began to infuse his spirit. His errand had just become considerably more interesting. “If it is our culprit, we’re going to catch him. Wait here while I scout around.”

Elliott leaned the Fouquet against the wall, drew his Beretta 92F automatic from its shoulder holster and then, crouching, stalked silently out the door. His senses probed the gloom, seeking a flicker of motion or aura, noise, or the stink of decay.

After several seconds, darkness stirred at the periphery of his vision. Whirling, he aimed the gun, then saw that he had no target. Outside the window at the end of the corridor a cloud had swallowed the moon, dimming the wan light seeping through the glass.

Before long, he was convinced that no one but himself and Rosalita was lurking in the office. That left the hallway outside. He prowled to the exterior door, started to twist the knob, then froze.

Frequently his enhanced perception enabled him to detect sights, sounds and aromas that another person would have missed. More rarely, it kindled his intuition, as it did now. Though he didn’t actually see or hear anything to indicate he was in danger, he
felt
that it could be fatal to stick his head outside.

Hoping the bolt wouldn’t make an audible click, he locked the door, then braced one of the waiting-room chairs under the knob. Such a flimsy barrier wouldn’t hold back vampires for long, but it might buy him and Rosalita a vital second. Pointing the Beretta at the door, he backed out of the waiting room and on through the suite.

When he reached NicolPs office, Rosalita said, “Did you find anything?”

“There’s an ambush waiting for us in the hall,” he said. “As soon as we step outside, they’ll catch us in a crossfire.”

Her lustrous brown eyes focused on him in shock. “Are you sure?”

Actually, he wasn’t. The trouble with relying on his hunches was that even a Toreador elder’s intuition occasionally played him false. But it would be a mistake to betray any uncertainty to a nervous subordinate. “Yes,” he said.

Rosalita gave a jerky nod, reached inside her own coat, and brought out her Sig Sauer Pistole 75. “Then I guess we’ll have to shoot our way out,” she said.

Elliott felt proud of her. She might be jittery, but she was game. Roger had made a good choice when he’d Embraced her; better, perhaps, than when he’d transformed Elliott himself. “No,” the actor said.

She frowned. “But if it’s just one or two guys, or if they’re human, they shouldn’t pose all that much of a threat.”

“But I don’t think that’s how it is,” Elliott replied. “I think that up until now your instincts have been sharper than mine. The enemy has been lying in wait for us here. We were in trouble from the moment we climbed out of the car. Perhaps from the moment we arrived in town. And I think our best hope is to find another way out of the building.” He strode past her into Nicoll’s office. Crossing to the windows, he raised one and looked down.

Below him was an expanse of grimy, weathered stone wall riddled with cracks and pockmarks, decorated with gargoyles and other bits of decorative carving, and transected by the occasional narrow ledge. Along the bottom ran a narrow side street, where bits of windblown trash scudded along the broken pavement. More of the homeless were huddled in the shadows, but Elliott didn’t see anyone who looked like a sentry; not that that meant much, peering from such a distance. Even his vision had its limits.

He was willing to bet his life that he could climb down the outside of the building. He was, after all, more agile than any human, and his enhanced perception gave him an exquisite sense of balance. Rosalita possessed the same abilities, though to a lesser degree. He gave her a smile. “Not afraid of heights, are you?” he asked.

She stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s our best option.”

“Can we just go a little ways and then climb back through another window?”

“We
could,”
Elliott said, “but then we'd still be stuck inside the building, and I suspect that by now there are people watching the exits. I’d rather climb all the way to the ground if you think you can make it.”

“All right,” she said, returning her pistol to the holster on her belt, “I can do it if I have to.”

“Good girl.” He put away his own gun, discarded his topcoat, suit coat and vest, and tied the rope securing the Fouquet to the back of his belt. The painting bumped against his butt and legs whenever he moved. “Have you ever done any climbing?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Take your time,” he said, “and think before you move. Test your handholds before you trust your weight to them, Don’t hug the wall and don’t look down. I’m going to go out first and stay right underneath you, so I’ll be there to help if you get into trouble. You close the window when you get outside. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’m going to get,” she said.

He eased himself out into the darkness. The cold wind gusted, riffling his hair and clothing, batting at the painting dangling from his waist. Quickly but methodically testing the hand- and toeholds afforded by the cavities in the eroding stone, he descended ten feet to a gargoyle with the fangs of a sabertooth tiger and the curling horns of a ram. He peered up at Rosalita’s pretty, heart-shaped face. “Come on,” he said.

The younger Kindred lowered herself from the window and pulled it shut, hanging from the sill for a moment. Then she started down. Almost at once, stone cracked. She yelped and began to drop. Elliott stretched out his arm to catch her, but she grabbed a handhold and arrested her fall. Bits of rock clattered down the wall to smash on the sidewalk below.

“I thought I put my hands exactly where you did,” Rosalita said, a tremor in her voice.

“You have to test the stone for yourself,” Elliott said. “But that’s all right, no harm done. Climb on down.”

For a moment she didn’t move. He was afraid that she was too rattled to continue, but then she resumed her descent. Releasing the wall, balancing as confidently as a tightrope walker, he backed a step away from the side of the building on the gargoyle’s narrow granite spine, making room for his companion to alight.

When she did, he asked, “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” she said. “Let’s keep moving. I don’t want just to hang here in midair and think about what comes next.”

He studied her aura. It was tinged with the orange of fear, but not ablaze with it. He didn’t think that she was in any danger of panicking. Satisfied, he said, “All right,” and lowered himself from the stone monster. Hanging by one hand, he grabbed a jagged crack in the wall with the other, then continued his descent. Rosalita followed him.

To his relief she didn’t slip again, though occasionally she couldn’t find a place to put her groping feet and he had to climb back up and guide them for her. After a few minutes she said, “I wouldn’t have believed it, but this is starting to be fun.”

He decided that she was right. Long ago, he’d enjoyed climbing, swimming, riding, fencing and the martial arts, but in recent years he’d nearly forgotten the pleasure of pitting himself against a physical challenge. Or the joy of outwitting a band of enemies, leaving them bewildered and humiliated.

He began to smile, then heard a muffled crash overhead. The would-be ambushers had gotten tired of waiting for the Toreador to emerge from the office and had broken in to find them. Hoping that, with all the windows closed, the enemy wouldn’t realize where he and Rosalita had gone, Elliott said, “If you’re getting the hang of mountaineering, now would be a good time to pick up the pace.”

“I’ll try,” Rosalita said grimly. She began to move faster. Then one of Nicoll’s office windows opened. A creature stuck its head out.

The newcomer’s countenance was as hideous and asymmetrical as a visage encountered in a nightmare. Framed by oversized, pointed ears, the face had two eyes, positioned one above the other, on the right side, and one, milky as if sealed with a cataract, on the left. Half its scalp was bald, while the other half sprouted stiff gray spines resembling a porcupine’s quills. Its broad, flat nose had three nostrils, and crooked tusks jutted from its diagonal slash of a mouth. Trails of dark drool streaked its chin.

When Elliott saw it he realized why he hadn’t detected the enemy sooner. The thing was surely a Nosferatu, a member of the loathsome Camarilla clan whose members were monstrously deformed. Many of the bloodline possessed powers of invisibility so effective that even a Kindred with heightened senses had difficulty penetrating them.

For one more instant, Elliott dared to hope that the Nosferatu wouldn’t see him or Rosalita in the gloom. Then, its three eyes widening, the freakish Kindred screamed, “They’re down here!” in a high, female voice.

Several other windows shattered as the hideous vampire’s companions smashed them. Shards of glass showered on

Rosalita and Elliott, nearly knocking them from their perches, and crashed on the street below. Other Nosferatu, their features altogether different but just as misshapen as those of the first one, leaned out into the night and aimed their guns at the Toreador. The weapons flashed, barked and chattered, and bullets ricocheted whining off the wall.

Elliott looked down. He and Rosalita were still about forty feet above the street. A fall that far onto hard pavement would kill or at least cripple a mortal, but two preternaturally agile vampires might survive it intact. Certainly it seemed preferable to leap now, of their own volition, rather than wait a moment for the enemy to shoot them off the wall. Clambering out from under Rosalita to keep her from landing on top of him, he yelled, “Jump!” and thrust himself into space.

Though he knew the fall could only be taking a second, he seemed to plummet for a long time. Then, abruptly, his feet slammed down on the sidewalk midway between an overturned trash barrel and a graffiti-covered newspaper box. He tumbled into a roll to soak up the shock of impact, and emerged from it scraped and bleeding but essentially unharmed. Ragged, grubby mortals, already in the process of fleeing the barrage of gunfire hammering the street, gaped at him in amazement.

A split second later, Rosalita smashed down on the pavement. Elliott heard a sharp crack, and then she pitched forward on her face.

“Are you all right?” he asked, crouching over her.

“My leg’s broken,” she whimpered, breathless with pain. “Something’s hurting in my chest and back, too.”

Since she’d survived the moment of impact, her injuries couldn’t kill or permanently incapacitate her. She’d recuperate in a matter of minutes or hours. But for the moment she wouldn’t be able to run fast enough to get away. Stifling a curse, moving with superhuman speed, he tore the Fouquet off his belt. The canvas bundle w
^j
as now shapeless

so

rather than rectangular, since the fall had smashed the frame. For once thankful that art and beauty no longer captivated him as they once had, he chucked the package into the street.

“No!” Rosalita croaked. “The frame broke, but the
picture
may still be all right!”

“I can’t carry it and you both,” Elliott replied. He picked her up, draped her over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and ran. Bullets pounded the sidewalk like hail.

Zigzagging, he made it across the street and around the corner without getting shot. Now the gunmen in Nicoll’s office could no longer see him, but he didn’t dare slow down, He was certain that they had comrades stationed on the ground.

He sprinted on toward his rented LeSabre. He and Rosalita had left it three blocks away, in the nearest legal parking space; they hadn’t wanted to return to it only to find it that it had been towed away, or immobilized with a boot. It had seemed like an intelligent decision at the time, but now it could cost them their lives.

Elliott began to feel the strain of sprinting at superhuman speed while carrying a hundred-pound woman. He wasn’t growing tired or winded in the way a mortal would, but the exertion was burning the vitae in his system like flame consuming gasoline.

Something whispered through the air above his head.

He frantically peered upward. For a moment he couldn’t see anything, but then he glimpsed the three-eyed Kindred who’d spotted him and Rosalita when they were clinging to the wall. Naked, her white, chancrous breasts and crooked legs as ugly as the rest of her, the Nosferatu was riding the night wind on winglike flaps of skin extending from her wrists to her knees. Evidently, when the Toreador had run out of gunshot range, she’d swooped from NicolFs office in pursuit.

Unlike the shapeshifters of the Gangrel clan, who could assume the forms of huge bats, the Nosferatu was gliding precariously, not flying. She couldn’t have aimed a gun and remained aloft. But she could, and did, drop the small, round object in her right hand.