On a Darkling Plain (2 page)

Lazio was cowering in the corner, where the force of Roger’s rage had driven him. Panting, his face beaded with sweat, he said, “You see what he’s like? Completely irrational! How can we help him?”

“I don’t know,” Elliott said, frowning. “One thing’s obvious. He’ll go on unless we physically restrain him. And I doubt anyone’s willing to go that far. He might
really
decide that we were traitors. Indeed, he might destroy us on the spot.” Older vampires were almost invariably more powerful than younger ones, and thus Roger, even in a debilitated condition, might well prove more formidable than any of his brood.

“But he’ll disgrace himself!” said Lazio, his wrinkled face a mask of anguish.

The mortal was in so much distress that Elliott felt an urge to reassure him. “Perhaps not,” he said, exerting his own unnatural powers of persuasion. “Perhaps his problem is that he drank from someone intoxicated. If so, he may be himself again by the time the curtain goes up.”

Lazio peered at Elliott dubiously. “Do you really think that’s what’s wrong? He’s usually so careful about his vitae.” Elliott shrugged. “That’s a matter of opinion. He usually drinks from actors or other artists. You know what we’re like. Always putting something down our throats, in our arms, or up our noses. I’ll tell you what. Speak to the stage manager. Ask him to find an excuse to hold the curtain for a few minutes, to give Roger that much more time to recover.” He gave the dresser an encouraging smile.

“Good idea!” cried Lazio, abruptly succumbing to the vaimpire’s influence. The mortal scurried out of the room.

Wishing that he had some method of easing his own fretful mind, Elliott made his way back upstairs and took a seat in one of the shadowy boxes overlooking the stage. The rest of the audience would no doubt choose to sit in the orchestra, where the view was better, and now that he was worried about Roger he was even less inclined to socialize with them than he’d been before.

He wondered if Roger really
had
drunk blood laced with alcohol or drugs. Lazio was right; given the prince’s habits, it seemed unlikely. But Elliott
hoped
it was true, because all the other possibilities were worse.

He prayed that, whatever was wrong, Roger would give a creditable performance. It w’asn’t impossible. During his centuries as an actor, Elliott had seen his fellow artists work drunk, starving, and afflicted with influenza and pneumonia. The attention of an audience enabled them to tap into some mysterious reserve of inner strength.

Except, of course, when it didn’t, and the poor wretches wound up collapsing or babbling lines from the wrong play.

Elliott wished he could just get up and leave. Whatever was wrong, let someone else put it right. His labors, his days of troubleshooting problems, were supposed to be over. But he couldn’t go. However joyless his current existence was, he’d been happy once, and he owed that happiness to Roger. If the Toreador prince hadn’t made him a vampire, extending his life beyond any mortal’s natural span, Elliott would never have met Mary. Roger had even introduced him to her at the riotous party following the opening of
The Old Bachelor
at Drury Lane.

After a few minutes, the house lights dimmed and brightened. Elliott knew they were doing so throughout the building, signalling the imminent beginning of the play. Shortly thereafter, the guests filed into the cavernous auditorium and selected seats in the first few rows. Gazing down at them, Elliott noticed that Otis and Catherine had chosen to sit together. He wondered absently if they’d decided to make peace. That too seemed unlikely. It was a rare vampire indeed who ever forgot a grudge.

The hall darkened, and the crowd fell silent. With a whisper of ropes and pulleys, the golden curtain rose toward the masks of comedy and tragedy carved on the proscenium arch. The spotlight picked out two Toreador standing center stage. Both were costumed and made up as Vietnamese peasants.

As the scene unfolded, they did their best to give a good performance. Still, Elliott could see that they were carrying themselves a little stiffly, and hear a subtle undercurrent of tension in their voices. Obviously they were anticipating Roger’s entrance as nervously as he was.

Eventually one of the peasants said, “The village has to eat. We can always make more children.” Then the two actors fell silent, as if awaiting some event, but nothing happened.

“We can always make more children,” the actor repeated after a moment. Elliott surmised that someone, probably Roger, had missed his cue.

Sure enough, wiping his face with a red bandanna, a camera hanging around his neck, the Toreador prince strode in from stage right. He was moving with his customary grace, and Elliott felt a pang of hope. Whatever his mysterious malady had been, maybe Roger had recovered.

“How can you people live in this heat?” Roger said peevishly. “Where am I, anyway?”

“Ten miles outside An Tuc,” said one of the other actors. Roger frowned as though perplexed and then, suddenly, sneered. His fangs began to lengthen.

With his hypersensitive hearing, Elliott heard the prompter stationed in the prompt box at the front of the stage whisper Roger’s next line: “Shit. No way am I walking that far. Where can I hire a car?”

With one violent motion, Roger tore the camera from around his neck, breaking the sturdy leather strap in the process, and hurled it into the concealed opening of the prompt box. Elliott heard the device shatter and the prompter’s body thump to the floor.

Roger’s fellow actors goggled at him in horror. The audience sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then they murmured and leaned forward, peering with heightened interest, as if they’d decided that Roger’s behavior, however aberrant it seemed, must be a part of the show.

“Bastards,” the prince snarled to the peasants. “Trying to upstage me. Trying to ruin my reputation.”

One of the actors pivoted toward stage left and gestured frantically. Elliott assumed that the performer was signalling to someone to lower the curtain. It didn’t come down. Perhaps the stagehands w'ere frozen in dismay.

“And you,” slurred Roger as, swaying, he rounded on the audience. “You think you’re bloodsucking little gods, don’t you? The lords of creation. Well, I say you’re corpses. Vermin. A pack of mosquitoes and fleas.”

Shocked, the thin, white faces of the spectators gaped up at him. Such insults were egregiously offensive and a gross breach of the etiquette proper to any Elysium whether a part of the script or not, although, somewhere in the darkened hall, a single thick-skinned Kindred was chuckling appreciatively.

“Want some vitae, little fleas?” Roger mumbled, his long ivory fangs extending fully. “Of course you do.” Lifting his bare right forearm to his mouth, he scored his flesh from elbow to knuckles. The coppery aroma of Kindred vitae, even sweeter and more enticing than that of mortals, suffused the air. Red drops, shining like rubies in the spotlight, pattered onto the stage. The prince started to tear open his left arm.

“No, sire, please!” cried one of the actors. The two faux Vietnamese grabbed their leader, trying to wrestle his muscular arm away from his bloodstained lips.

Roger knocked one peasant on his butt with an elbow to the belly, then hurled the other crashing into the orchestra pit. As the first actor tried to scramble to his feet, the prince whirled and kicked him in the jaw. Bone snapped, and the performer slumped back down.

Intending to help restrain Roger, Elliott surged to his feet. Some of the audience did the same. Voices babbled backstage.

Turning, suddenly looking as formidable as a crazed, maimed god, Roger stared at his would-be rescuers. A spasm of unreasoning dread locked Elliott in place. Below him, vampires recoiled back down into their plushly upholstered seats.

The Toreador prince tore open his other arm, thrust his fingers into the gaping gashes, and flicked spatters of vitae into the orchestra pit. “Go on!” he cried. “Soup’s on! Get down on your knees and lick it up!”

No one moved.

After a moment, Roger said, “Well, perhaps I’ve misjudged you. Maybe you’re not fleas, but maggots. In that case, have some carrion!” He put his index finger between his teeth and bit down hard, evidently intending to sever it and throw it to the crowd as well.

Elliott wondered sickly if Roger meant to dismember or even destroy himself completely. His horror at the prospect drove the paralyzing awe out of his mind. Moving faster and more nimbly than any human acrobat, he scrambled onto the gilded, rococo balustrade of his box and leaped down toward the stage.

He slammed down on the edge of the platform. The impact jolted pain through his joints and threw him to one knee, but he was all right; the fall hadn’t torn any ligaments or broken any bones. Roger spun around, snatching his bloody hand away from his mouth.

Elliott tried to project his own unnatural charisma. “Please, take it easy,” he crooned soothingly. “I’m your friend. Your faithful childe. I want to help you.”

Roger snarled and lunged at him.

Elliott twisted aside, slamming his fist into Roger’s kidney as the prince blundered past. But, unlike certain other Kindred, the younger vampire only possessed the strength of an ordinary human. In his delirium, Roger didn’t even seem to feel the blow.

Spinning, Roger kicked at Elliott’s head. Elliott ducked, then sprang forward, right into a second kick to the solar plexus. The impact threw him halfway across the stage and down onto his back. Black spots swam before his eyes.

Christ,
he thought, dazed, trying desperately to clamber to his feet,
how can he move like a drunk one second and Bruce Lee the next1

Addled with pain, Elliott never even sensed Roger approaching. But without warning, another kick smashed against the younger vampire’s temple, hurling him back down onto the stage. Roger dove on top of him and pinned him.

Elliott struggled, but couldn’t break free. The punishment he’d taken had stolen his strength. Roger opened his jaws and lowered his head toward his opponent’s throat. Elliott realized that, despite the presence of nearly one hundred

err'

witnesses, despite the fact that diablerie, the practice of preying on one’s fellow vampires, was perhaps the most heinous crime an undead could commit, Roger meant to drink his blood.

“No,” Elliott gasped, gazing imploringly into Roger’s maddened eyes. “Please. If the other elders see you do this, they won’t rest until they’ve destroyed you.”

“To hell with them and to hell with you,” Roger replied. Overcoming Elliott’s last feeble attempt to fend him off, he plunged his canines into his childe’s neck.

Elliott felt a stab of pain, then a wave of numbness. One part of his mind gibbered in terror, even while another part opened itself willingly to the final death, to an end to futility and sorrow. He prayed that he was about to see Mary again.

Then several of his fellow Toreador charged onto the stage. Apparently they too had finally managed to break through the artificial cowardice Roger had implanted in their minds. They grabbed the prince and pulled him off his victim. As Roger’s fangs tore free, they ripped ragged gashes in Elliott’s throat.

Roger struggled in the grasp of his childer for another moment, then went limp. His eyes rolled back in his head as the younger Kindred began to haul him offstage.

Amanda, the same slender, fresh-faced cheerleader of a neonate who had assured Roger earlier that his offspring loved him, knelt beside Elliott. “Are you all right?” she asked, her eyes wide with concern.

Feeling addled and slow, Elliott gingerly touched his wounded neck. The gashes were closing, though more slowly than if they’d been inflicted by a blade or the teeth of a natural creature. “I’ll be all right,” he managed. “Just help me up. Get me offstage.” It wasn’t prudent for
him
to look weak and helpless in front of his peers, either. In any case, a pride he’d half-forgotten he possessed rebelled at the prospect of further humiliation.

The neonate lifted him to his feet and draped his arm around her shoulders, helping him toward the wings. His head swam; the theater seemed to spin around him. The audience, now convinced that what they’d witnessed had been real, maliciously rejoicing in the disaster that had overtaken the Kindred of Sarasota, began to applaud.

♦

The aquarium was a four-story box of a building standing beside the Gulf of Mexico. A huge, wraparound mural of whales and porpoises, only vaguely visible in the darkness, decorated the exterior. By the time Forbes and his partner Ryan pulled up in front of the staff entrance, one of the facility employees was waiting under the light on the stoop to let them in. She was a dumpy, middle-aged woman dressed in a baggy gray sweat suit. With her short, gray-brown hair disheveled, she looked as if she’d been dragged out of bed. Given the lateness of the hour, that was no doubt precisely the case.

The two policemen, clad in green uniforms with orange trim, climbed out of the prowl car. Forbes, a lanky man with a straw-colored crewcut, paused for just a second to savor the cool sea breeze and the murmur of the ghost-white breakers. Ryan, a burly African-American with a neatly trimmed mustache and a broken nose, hitched up his gun belt, trying to position it comfortably over the beer gut he’d been growing for the past two years.

“Let’s take care of this nonsense as fast as possible,” Ryan said. “We’ve had to stay past end-of-shift the last two nights. I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it again this morning.”

“I’m with you,” Forbes said. “I’d like to get home in time to see the wife before she goes off to work. Maybe even catch her still in bed, if you get my drift.” God knew, he and Julie didn’t get nearly enough quality time together. He loved being a cop, but working his current hours was playing hell with his home life.

The two men hurried up the sidewalk that led to the entrance. “Thank goodness you’re here,” the dumpy woman said. “I’m sure there’s nothing to this, but I was getting nervous, waiting here by myself.”

“It would have been safer to wait in your car with the windows up and the doors locked,” Forbes said reflexively. Then, realizing that this little safety tip might spook the woman even more, he gave her a reassuring smile. “But you’re okay, so what the heck. I’m Sergeant Forbes and this is Officer Ryan.”