On a Darkling Plain (4 page)

Her sense of urgency notwithstanding, the loveliness of the grounds tugged at her, tempting her to linger. She no longer thought of herself as a Toreador. She’d long ago grown beyond such categorizations to become a singular entity. But she’d been reborn into undeath a Toreador, and her identity was still defined by the bloodline’s fascination with art and beauty.

Shaking off the bewitching spell of the verdure, she walked toward the darkened mansion standing at the center of the grounds. A horned owl, a fellow night hunter, swooped over her head. Then three snarling hounds slunk out of the shadows.

She smiled at them and spread her arms.
I love you,
she thought,
and I want you to love me too.

The animals stopped growling. One of them whined, as if ashamed of its truculent behavior. Their tails began to wag. She knelt and they ran to her, nuzzling, licking, lolling on their backs so she could tickle their stomachs. Their wet tongues laved her skin. She gave them all a good petting, crooning “Good boy,” “What a pretty dog,” and similar comments. For a moment, she felt a pang of nostalgia for her mortal childhood in Athens, when she’d romped with her father’s hunting hounds.

After a minute she clambered to her feet. “Go away,” she said, making shooing motions with her hands. “You’re good dogs, but I can’t take you in the house with me.” The adoring canines permitted her to depart alone, but watched her mournfully as she walked away.

Nearing the house, she saw that it was a hideously botched attempt at a grand home in the neoclassical style, with an incongruous string of leering gargoyles running along the roof line. Obviously her unwitting host had been more fortunate in his landscaper than in his architect.

She climbed the circular steps to the twin-paneled front door. Instead of a keyhole, it had a keypad mounted on the jamb. She laid her hand lightly on the buttons. After a moment, the numbers eight, four and three came into her mind. She punched in the combination and the door clicked softly open.

She stepped into the vestibule. The smells of furniture polish, pipe tobacco and dry white wine hung in the air. Above her, on the second floor, the hearts of four humans slowly thumped while their breath sighed in and out. By the sound of it the mortals were all fast asleep. Easy prey, but not for her. Vampires as ancient as she could only be nourished by the blood of their fellow undead.

Her intuition urged her toward the arch directly opposite the front door. She stepped through it into the house’s central hall, then gasped with delight.

A treasure trove of paintings hung along the walls. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the owner of the house had assembled his collection, or to the manner in which he’d chosen to display it. An early self-portrait by Picasso hung beside a gorgeously illuminated page from a medieval Bible, which in turn bordered a voluptuous nude by Rubens. But the disorder, the jarring clash of cultures and periods, didn’t matter in the least, because every piece was magnificent. The vampire could have lost herself in any one of them for hours.

And they were
safe.
Intact. Perhaps the dream that had roused her from her year-long trance had been only a nightmare. Perhaps the masterpiece for which she feared was safe as well. Except for the warning embodied in her vision, she could think of no reason why it shouldn’t be.

Encouraged, she paced on into what in the eighteenth century would have been the withdrawing room. Here it was an extension of the householder’s art gallery; he’d eliminated the windows in the bowed back wall to provide more hanging space. The pictures here, a Wyeth and a Mondrian among them, were as exquisite as the ones in the central room. All except one: a portrait of an Elizabethan lady. The lady’s shoulders, eggshell-colored ruff, long white neck and dark brown hair w’ere as the vampire remembered them, but her face was only a muddy blur.

Aghast, moving as fast as a cheetah, the vampire rushed to the painting. A sharp, astringent smell stung her nostrils. Someone had employed a solvent to scour away the pigment of the Elizabethan lady’s features, destroying the portrait beyond any hope of restoration.

The vampire lifted the picture gently off the wall. Holding it to her bosom as if it were her dead child, she dropped to her knees on the polished oak floor and rocked slowly back and forth.

John Kincaid had painted this portrait: grinning, mercurial John. She’d never even spoken to him — by Elizabeth’s time, she’d already withdrawn from both mortal and undead society — but she’d been fond of him nonetheless, ensuring that he found generous patrons, savoring his triumphs and endearing quirks as one might the antics of a character in a play. And, of course, marvelling at the passion and technical proficiency of his art on those rare occasions when he could be lured away from his amusements and his myriad lovers long enough to paint. She’d intended to arrange for his induction into the ranks of the Toreador, but he’d perished, knifed in a senseless tavern brawl, before she’d gotten around to it.

He’d left only a handful of canvases behind, and now one of the finest was lost forever. Anguished and outraged, keening softly, the vampire wept tears of blood.

ONEtTHE PARIAH

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

— Mother Teresa

Dan Murdock was trolling one of the beach bars, a crowded, raucous place decorated with circus photos and memorabilia, when he spotted the other vampire.

One moment, everything was fine. Pretending to sip a Heineken, he was jammed in with the youthful, sun-bronzed mortals watching the limbo contest. The blood thirst beginning to burn in his throat, he was peering about, looking for a drunken girl to seduce. Drunks were easier. He didn’t have to be particularly charming to convince them. His tall, athletic build, arresting gray eyes, shock of blond hair and what one would-be lover had called his “cruel, chiseled good looks” generally did the trick all by themselves. Even more importantly, the drunks rarely understood or remembered what he’d done to them. And he liked the buzz their alcohol-laced vitae gave him.

Then the hairs on the back of his neck had stood on end. Turning, he had spied the other undead standing across the room, between the door and a calliope, glaring at him. He’d seen her around town before, though he didn’t know her name. She was a big-boned, butch-looking woman as tall as he was, with short, dark hair cut in bangs, and a pug nose. She had a sloppily hand-rolled cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth and was dressed in a stained Tampa Bay Lightning sweatshirt, denim walking shorts and flip-flops. Judging from her homeliness and lack of any vestige of sartorial elegance or style, Dan surmised that she wasn’t one of the Toreador who comprised the majority of Sarasota’s vampire population, but rather a Kindred of some other bloodline.

She arrogantly jerked her head, summoning him outside. He supposed that she wanted to tell him to keep away from prime hunting ranges like the strip of bars opposite the public beach, which “Prince” Roger’s subjects wished to reserve for their own use. Some of her peers had tried to deliver the same message on previous occasions.

He mouthed the words, “Fuck you,” and began to turn away.

The female vampire stared at him even more intently. Without meaning to, he took a shuffling step toward her, jostling a young man’s elbow, sloshing beer over the rim of his stein. On the dance floor, the MC lowered the limbo bar another notch. Reggae music tinkled from the speakers set around the concrete-block walls.

Despite his thirty years of vampiric existence, Dan still considered himself woefully ignorant of the world of the undead. Clanless, transformed and summarily abandoned by his anonymous sire, he hadn’t had anyone to teach him about it; what little he had learned he’d discovered through observation and experiment. But he knew enough to recognize that the woman by the door was mesmerizing him. Exerting every iota of his willpower, he managed to wrench his head to the side, breaking eye contact. His rebellious feet stopped trudging forward.

Hoping that he’d shaken her confidence sufficiently to convince her to leave him alone, he turned away and moved toward the chiming, chirping pinball machines and the pool tables at the rear of the bar. After a moment, he glanced stealthily back and then scowled in annoyance. The woman was pushing through the crowd. Coming after him.

He turned and waited for her, trying to look tough and forbidding without quite reestablishing eye contact. Perhaps because of the crowding in the bar, she wound up standing just inches away from him. They could have put their arms around one another and waltzed.

“I gave you an order, Caitiff,” she told him.

“I don’t take orders,” he replied. “If you’re smart, you’ll go hassle somebody else,”

“I guess I’m not smart,” she said, sneering. Something hard pressed against his navel.

He looked down. She was holding a snub-nosed revolver against his belly. All around them mortals drank and chattered, joked and flirted, oblivious to the battle of wills being waged in their midst.

Dan was puzzled. Though he’d had his share of altercations with Prince Roger’s flunkies, they didn’t defend their “domain” from outsiders nearly as zealously as other vampires he’d encountered; that, together with the fact that he’d been born in the area, was why he’d settled here. In fact, none of them had ever pulled a gun on him before, even when he’d provided considerably greater provocation. “Would you really shoot me in the middle of this mob?” he asked calmly.

“Believe it,” she replied. “I could be gone before any of the kine realized what happened. And even if they did notice, they couldn’t stop me. Now, are you coming, or what?”

“I’m thinking it over,” he said. It was almost inconceivable that a bullet in the guts would kill him. He was even more resistant to harm than the average vampire; that, and prodigious strength, were the powers his unknown creator had passed on to him. But the wound would be painful and inconvenient — too high a price to pay for the pleasure he’d derive from frustrating his would-be abductor’s desires. Besides, he was curious to discover what she wanted. “Oh, hell, why not?”

She edged around him and jabbed the revolver into the small of his back. Setting his green beer bottle on a table, he led her toward the door, past a tiny yellow clown car and a plastic statue of a rearing elephant, twisting and sidestepping as he worked his way through the crowd. He realized that it would be child’s play to interpose one of the mortals suddenly between himself and the gun, thus frustrating her rather pitiful attempt to coerce him. But then he wouldn’t find out what was going on.

They emerged from the stuffy, smoky atmosphere of the bar into the cool, sea-scented air. To the south, over the black waters of the Gulf, lightning flickered. “Let’s take a walk on the beach,” the female vampire said.

They crossed the street and the largely empty parking lot on the other side, then walked onto the soft white sand. The waves murmured. A few other people, mere shadows in the dark, were strolling on the shore, while a handful of anglers fished off the concrete pier.

In a minute Dan and the woman were well away from the lights shining in the parking area. He stopped walking and turned to face her. “I assume this is isolated enough for you,” he said.

“It’ll do,” she replied grimly.

“Then tell me what you want. If it’s a sex thing, 1 have to warn you, beefy, ugly women aren’t my type.” The remark was a joke, if not a very witty one. Vampires had no more sex drive than any other dead thing. When they were transformed, the desire to make love warped into the insatiable craving for blood. It was one of the many aspects of his condition that he didn’t like.

“I want to know what you were doing last night, and three nights before that.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What a weird question. I wasn’t thirsty” — his stomach churned, reminding him that he was now — “and didn’t need to go out, so I stayed in, playing a computer game and slogging my way through
The Complete Works of Dickens.
Why?”

She ignored his question. “Was anyone with you?” “Yes,” he said sarcastically, “my hundreds of Kindred buddies. No, no one was there. And now, if you want any more answers, you’re going to have to tell me what this is all about.”

She lifted the little revolver, reminding him of its existence. Moonlight rippled down the barrel. “You aren’t in any position to make demands.”

“Because of that popgun?” He snorted in derision.

She stared at him. After a moment, he sensed that she was trying to take control of him again, but this time the magic didn’t work at all.

Abruptly feeling bored with the situation, perhaps even a little sorry for this woman who wanted so badly to be tough and wasn’t especially good at it, he said, “Can’t we just talk like a couple of reasonable people? What will it hurt? If you’ll fill me in on what’s bothering you, maybe I can even help you.” He smiled sardonically. Right, help the prince’s people, who shunned him. They’d certainly given him a lot of incentive to do that!

The woman grimaced. “All right. We — the clans — need to get to the bottom of these murders. I saw you in the bar and decided to see if you knew anything about them.”

He held up his hand. “Whoa. You lost me. What murders?”

She blinked in surprise. “The triple murder at the aquarium, and then the double one on Siesta Key. You
must
have heard about them on the news.”

He shrugged. “Afraid not. I don’t pay much attention to the news.” Why should he? The stories were about the living, not creatures like himself; although, come to think of it, tidings about the doings of other undead wouldn’t have been all that relevant to his solitary existence either.

“Well, the killings were... strange/’ she said, “for all kinds or reasons. The police obviously don’t understand how the murderer could have done the things he did and gotten away clean. And each of the victims had twin puncture wounds in the jugular vein or the carotid artery.”

Dan frowned. “Like the bite of a vampire.” A
careless
vampire, or one unconcerned with secrecy, to be precise. Ordinarily Kindred licked the wounds they had inflicted when they finished drinking, which caused the fang marks to close instantly. “And you’re worried that whoever it is will give away the Masquerade.”