On a Darkling Plain (11 page)

Elliott dove to one side. He lost his grip on Rosalita and she tumbled off his shoulders. The grenade exploded as soon as it hit the street, peppering the Toreador elder with shrapnel. The boom spiked pain through his hypersensitive ears.

Staggering to his feet, grateful that the blast hadn’t crippled him, Elliott snatched out his Beretta and aimed it at his attacker. The Nosferatu snarled and hurtled down at him.

Elliott squeezed off three shots. Two hit the Nosferatu in the chest and one in the cheek, but the hideous undead kept coming. He spun out of her way.

Or at least he tried. Perhaps his wounds were slowing him down, or perhaps she possessed a touch of the supernatural quickness that only those of Toreador or Brujah blood ordinarily possessed. In any case, her gnarled, taloned hand shot out and grabbed his forearm, and her momentum jerked him off balance.

The two combatants tumbled to the ground and rolled over and over, grappling. The Nosferatu’s fetid body odor, the same stink Elliott had smelled in the office building, filled his nostrils as she clawed and bit at him. He could feel that she was far stronger than he was, strong enough to tear him apart. Butting and gouging, using every infighting trick he knew, he barely managed to fend her off until he could point the Beretta at her midsection and fire two more shots.

The Nosferatu convulsed. Blood, black in the moonlight, gushed from her misshapen mouth. Elliott scrambled out from underneath her and pointed the automatic at her head.

“Who’s attacking my people?” he demanded. “What’s it all about? Talk, or I’ll kill you.”

The Nosferatu’s arm flopped like a fish lying in the bottom of a boat. Elliott suspected that she’d tried to claw him, but presently lacked the strength. “Go fuck yourself,” she moaned.

Elliott opened his mouth to press the issue, and then automatic-weapons fire crackled through the night.

The actor spun around. Three more Nosferatu stood a few yards down the street. He suspected they’d been stationed on the ground floor of the office building and had chased him when he ran away. With his supernatural speed, he’d outdistanced them, but their winged comrade’s attack had delayed him long enough for them to catch up. Now, seemingly indifferent to the fact that she was in the field of fire, they were blasting at their quarry with Uzis.

Elliott flung himself to the ground as bullets hurtled through the space he’d vacated. Moving with blinding speed, he rolled and fired, rolled and fired, snap-shooting, relying on his inhuman coordination and eyesight to place the bullets.

One of the Nosferatu’s shots slammed into his left shoulder, shattering bone. Ignoring the resultant burst of agony, he kept his own gun blazing. One of the hideous Kindred, then another, and finally the last crumpled to the ground, felled by repeated shots to the head.

Elliott watched them for a moment, making sure they weren’t going to jump back up any time soon. Finally satisfied, the elation of victory counterbalancing his Hunger and the pain of his wounds, he remembered Rosalita. Smiling, he turned to check on her.

His companion lay motionless in a pool of her own fragrant vitae. When she’d fallen from his shoulders, she must have wound up closer to the grenade than he’d realized. The explosion had obliterated her features and virtually severed her head.

Elliott wailed. Suddenly he felt that he was living not merely in the present but simultaneously fifteen years in the past. That the Toreador woman lying on the broken asphalt, her gory, outflung hand dangling in a pothole, was not only Rosalita but Mary, butchered by the mortal vampire hunters who’d attacked her so mysteriously.

Squinching his eyes shut, he tried to push the grisly memory aside. He mustn’t cave in to his grief over Mary’s death, not now, or he wouldn’t escape this killing ground. God knew, the horror of what had happened to Rosalita was nearly overwhelming by itself.

When he felt that he had control of himself, he opened his eyes, ran to Rosalita and knelt beside her. Perhaps she was still alive. In the course of his centuries of existence, he’d seen one or two members of his resilient species recover from injuries nearly as severe. But no matter how closely he scrutinized her, he couldn’t see any signs of incipient tissue regeneration, nor the slightest flicker of aura. After a few seconds, her flesh began to rot.

The three-eyed Nosferatu chuckled, a broken hiccup of a sound, as if she were choking on the blood still flowing from her mouth. “We got one of you,” she croaked. “The night wasn’t a total loss.”

Furious, Elliott thought,
You won’t think it’s so funny when I torture your secrets out of you.
Then, somewhere in the night, out of sight but not far away and drawing nearer, he heard tense voices muttering and hurrying feet pattering along the pavement.

More of his enemies were approaching. But if he couldn’t take the time to interrogate the Nosferatu, he could at least avenge Rosalita’s murder. He dashed to one of the threeeyed Kindred’s downed companions, grabbed the deformed vampire’s Uzi, and ran back to the object of his wrath.

Cowering, the Nosferatu tried to lift her arms, probably hoping to wrap them around her head for protection, but she was still effectively paralyzed. Elliott pointed the machine gun at her neck and fired every bullet in the clip, decapitating her.

Hearing the reports, his oncoming enemies quickened their pace. Elliott wheeled and sprinted for the car, past dozens more homeless mortals. He half-expected that one of them would prove to be another of his foes and leap into his path brandishing a weapon, but everyone cringed from the racing man with the raw face and shredded, bloody clothes.

He rounded another corner and the LeSabre swam out of the murk ahead. His first impulse was to return to the hotel room he’d rented, but then he realized that the enemy might have a lookout posted there. It would be safer to drive out of town.

He unlocked the car door, scrambled inside and twisted the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life. As he threw the LeSabre into gear, scarlet tears of rage and regret began to seep from his eyes.

SIX:
THE WARNING

Every good gift, and every perfect gift, is from above.

— James 1:17

As Judy rode her Harley through the gate in the coquina wall encircling Roger’s estate, a spectacular fork of lightning flamed over the expanse of ocean behind the imposing house. A stray drop of water, harbinger of the downpour to come, smacked against the motorcycle’s bug-splattered windshield.

Ordinarily the Brujah elder relished storms, just as she delighted in riding her hog as fast as it would go, slam-dancing to death metal, or any other spectacle or pastime that somehow mirrored the savage spirit of her bloodline. But tonight she scowled at the prospect of violent weather. A storm would further hamper the search for the rogue vampire who threatened the Masquerade, a search which seemed to be getting nowhere as it was. They hadn’t even found any trace of that diabolist bastard Murdock.

She hurtled up a brick drive lined with towering royal palms, parked her Harley under the porte-cochere, and marched up the front steps and through the front door into the foyer. The handcuffs suspended from her studded belt clinked.

m?
Wain

Visible through arched doorways, the spacious interior of the house looked as lovely and well-tended as ever. Every object was a work of art, and the contents of every room had been meticulously arranged into a pleasing gestalt. But nevertheless, a lonely, desolate feeling hung in the air, an atmosphere she’d never encountered here before. She remembered how, on her first meeting with Roger Phillips in the 1880s, she’d scorned his haven as evidence of his fundamental Toreador effeteness, just as she’d chafed at the notion of conceding him any measure of authority over herself and her brood.

The two of them had come a long way since then, facing a number of crises shoulder to shoulder, and gradually, against all expectation and contrary to the prejudices common to those of her lineage, Roger and his Toreador lieutenants had won her respect. Today even the most fractious of her independent childer were willing to abide the prince’s governance, at least while he ruled as lightly as he had hitherto. Judy would be saddened if he never recovered his sanity and his progeny were exterminated or driven from their domain.

The Brujah scowled at herself. Such defeatist thoughts were unworthy of the warrior who’d engineered Stonewall Jackson’s demise. Striving to shove her forebodings aside, she bellowed, “Lazio!” The shout echoed through the house.

After a moment, a door on the second floor clicked open and shut. Floorboards creaked and Roger’s mortal confidant, looking haggard and careworn, started down the majestic oak staircase. He was wearing a ratty, stretched-out sweater, incongruous in such elegant surroundings, with a bone-white cellular phone protruding from one of the pockets. “Good evening, Judy,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t yell. You might have gotten Roger agitated again.”

The former slave shrugged. She liked Lazio, and knew he was right to scold her, but she had her limits: it wasn’t in her nature to admit error to a human, particularly a white male human. “I don’t hear him hollering,” she replied, “so obviously, I didn’t. How is he?”

Shaking his head, Lazio alit from the bottom stair. “Unresponsive,” he said. “He’s started having what Dr. Potter calls ‘episodes of catatonia.’ I don’t think he knows why.”

“What a surprise,” Judy said dryly. As far as she’d been able to determine, the celebrated Dr. Potter hadn’t managed to learn
anything
about Roger’s condition. “I didn’t see any guards when I came in.”

“They’re some of Gunter’s Malkavians,” Lazio said. Some members of the lunatic clan, like many Kindred of the deformed Nosferatu bloodline, possessed uncanny powers of concealment. “You’re not
supposed
to see them.” He gestured toward one of the doorways, inviting her to step into a darkened room which, she knew from past experience, was a cozy parlor. “Would you like to sit down? And is there something I can help you with?”

She walked into the parlor and dropped heavily into a red, velvet-covered armchair. She assumed that it was some priceless antique and that Lazio, who was almost as much of an aesthete as his master, could bore her with its provenance if she were fool enough to ask about it. “I just came by to find out how Roger was,” she said, “and to see which of the art thieves has checked in.” And to give herself a break from the frustrating manhunt her people were conducting on the streets.

Lazio switched on a green and gold Tiffany floor lamp, driving the shadows into the corners of the room, then slumped down on an ornately hand-tooled leather sofa. “I’ve heard from three of the teams,” he said. “Two achieved their objective, one didn’t.”

Judy glanced at the ormolu pendulum clock softly ticking on the mantelpiece. It was almost four-thirty. “Shouldn’t you have heard from more of them by now?” she asked, frowning. “They were
supposed
to check in,” Lazio said, “but

perhaps they simply aren’t bothering.” He gave her a smile that tried and failed to mask his worry. “Toreador are sometimes as bad at following instructions as you Brujah, especially when they have some coup to celebrate.”

“Maybe so,” she said. One of her scars throbbed, and she twisted her arm around behind her back to rub it. She often wondered how the old welts could still ache one hundred and sixty years after she’d passed from life into undeath. People had told her that the pain was psychosomatic, but she refused to believe that her mind was masochistic or weak enough to cause her needless discomfort. “I hope so.. But if they’re screwing around partying when they know we’re at war, I’m going to have a little talk—”

Lazio’s cellular phone buzzed.

The mortal fumbled the instrument out of his pocket. Judy watched impatiently, fighting the urge to tear it from his hand. Surely no vampire ever moved so clumsily, even when filled with anxiety.

Finally the mortal managed to bring the cordless phone to his mouth. “Phillips residence,” he said.

The person on the other end of the line began to reply, but Judy, whose senses were no keener than a mortal’s, couldn’t make out the words. Moving as quickly and nimbly as a cat, she surged out of her chair, crouched over Lazio and poised her ear beside his head and the phone. The aging mortal cringed slightly, probably w'ithout even realizing it

— the prey instinctively shrinking from the predator.

“I’m at a gas station a few miles south of Columbus,” the voice on the line continued. It was Elliott’s voice, but his normally rich tones were weak and shaky. Had he been human, she would have inferred that he was out of breath.

“Is something wrong?” Lazio asked. “You sound upset.”

“I had to feed,” Elliott said. “It was an emergency, and I was rough. I clubbed someone unconscious, and I drank a lot.’’ "

Judy scowled. Ordinarily, she knew, Elliott was a sandman, one of those squeamish Kindred who fed only from sleeping vessels and, except for a touch of anemia, left them none the worse physically or psychologically for his visit. But in the past, when necessary, he’d taken down wakeful, frantically struggling kine, so she doubted that the scuffle he’d just experienced was truly what had unnerved him. Once again she fought against an impulse to snatch the phone and demand an explanation.

“Did you leave any evidence that could compromise the Masquerade?” Lazio asked.

“No,” Elliott said.

“Is the man alive?” said Lazio.

“Yes,” the Toreador elder replied.

“Then this part of the situation is under control,” Lazio said soothingly. Obviously, like Judy, he’d figured out that Elliott hadn’t told him the really bad news yet. “If you want, you can call the man an ambulance just before you leave. Now, what else is wrong?”

“Rosalita and I walked into a trap,” Elliott said. “A gang of Nosferatu were lying in wait for us, and they killed her. Has everyone else checked in?”

“No,” Lazio said, frowning.

“Damn!” Elliott exclaimed. “The ones who haven’t must have been ambushed too!”