Darkest Heart (21 page)

Sonja shook her head and placed a finger to her lips, signaling him to remain silent. Before he could say

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) anything further, she lifted the blanket and crawled under the covers. As she pressed her naked body next to him, he wasn't sure whether he should be pleased or shocked. He lay there, dumbstruck, uncertain as to what to do or say as she caressed his abdomen, gently brushing the back of her lower arm against his pubic bone. He took a sharp, short intake of breath between his teeth as she unzipped his pants, setting free his erection. He shuddered as her nimble fingers, cool and dry as snakeskin, wrapped about his penis, expertly pumping its length. The speed and force of the climax that overtook him made him roll his eyes back in his head as he arched his back, his hips thrusting upward with each spurt of semen. Shuddering like a winded stallion, he reached out to run his fingers through Sonja's short, spiky hair, only to find them buried, instead, in long, silken locks.

Estes locked the thing masquerading as Sonja in a stranglehold, pressing the tip of the Bowie knife against the soft underside of its jaw. The vampire's face shimmered like heat rising from a summer sidewalk, and Sonja's features were replaced by those even more familiar.

"Is this any way to treat your mother?" Gloria Estes asked, her voice as sweet and sharp as a honeyed blade.

Estes ground his teeth, fighting the urge to recoil from the thing he held in his arms. "You're not my mother," he whispered hoarsely. "My mother is dead."

Gloria grinned, displaying fangs better suited for the mouth of a wild animal. "Is that why you ran away when you recognized me? Because I'm not your mother? I knew who you were the moment I saw you. A mother can always tell her own." She gave him a knowing looks. "You've grown into such a strong, handsome man, Jack. If your father had been half as virile as you, I never would have been tempted to go elsewhere for companionship..."

"Shut up!" Estes tightened his grip on the hilt of his knife. The anger rising within him was so great it was in danger of sealing off his larynx. "Shut up, or I'll pit you like an olive! I swear it! My mother would never have done what you did to me - never!"

"I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it like you seemed to," the thing that wore his mother's skin mother purred.

"But I promise nobody will ever know. It will be our little secret. You're good at keeping secrets, aren't you, Jack? After all, you never told the police I was the one who killed your father..."

"I said shut up!"

Once Estes had believed he would never see his mother again, and now all he wanted was to kill her.

Every word out of her mouth burned him like acid. He wanted her to stop saying things he never wanted to hear. The anger and betrayal and shame buzzed in the back of his head like angry wasps, until the rage drained the color from the edges of his sight, turning the world from color into starkly defined black and white; a world where there was only light and shadow, and only one way to respond to the face of evil.

"Estes - no!"

Sonja, the real one, this time, was standing in the doorway of the hotel room, her arms held out as if trying to stop an oncoming locomotive.

"Don't do it, man! Let her go."

Estes shook his head in disbelief. "Let her go? Are you crazy? She's one of them!"

"Don't you think I know that? But this is not for you to do. You can't kill her - not like this. Not in anger.

That's what he wants."

The buzzing in Estes' head grew louder, as if someone had turned up the volume in order to drown out her voice. He swallowed and blinked rapidly, bringing the knife closer to Gloria's throat. The vampire made a low growling noise, like that of an angry cat, but did not offer to move. Somehow, Estes knew the screeching inside his skull would not stop until he buried the silvered blade of the Bowie knife into the she-demon's cold, unbeating heart... Sonja stepped forward, her voice echoing like the ocean within a conch. "Let go of him."

Estes frowned and nervously cast his gaze about the room. "Who the hell are you talking to? There's no one else here."

Sonja acted as if she had not heard him. She stood at the foot of the bed, her arms held straight to her sides, fists clenched tight, staring off into space with an intent look on her face.

Something pushed Estes' brain as if an invisible hand was inside his skull and pressing the flat of its palm against his frontal lobes. The screeching inside his head became so loud he forgot everything but the agony reverberating between his ears. He let go of both the vampiress and the knife, and he curled into a fetal ball, wrapping his arms around his head.

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) Sonja stood transfixed at the foot of the bed, her gaze focused on something only she could see. She did not move as Gloria, pale and naked as the moon, ran past her and out onto the balcony.

As suddenly as it arrived, the feedback coursing through Estes' brain was gone. Sonja's dropped heavily onto the corner of the bed, her shoulders slumping in obvious exhaustion.

"This is why I never use hotels," she wheezed.

Estes raised his head and stared at Sonja with angry, accusing eyes. "You let her get away."

"I couldn't let you kill her," she said, gasping as if she'd just dashed up several flights of stairs. "That would be playing into his hands. Besides, I was too busy kicking Noir out of your head to deal with her.

Noir wanted you to damn yourself. And in order to do that he had to make sure you killed your mother.

Not out of love and mercy, but out of hate and anger. He was even willing to use a little long-range telepathy to make sure you got the job done. I had to run some interference to break his grip."

"That bastard!" Estes spat in disgust. "Did she know that's why he sent her me?"

"Does it matter? Noir is her Maker. Gloria has as much free will as a piece of furniture; she is his to use or destroy as he sees fit." Sonja motioned to the slowly brightening sky. "It'll be dawn shortly, and I need a rest. It's clear they know where and who we are - or at last who you are. Tete-á-tetes burn up a lot of energy, and pushing Noir out of your head sapped what few energy reserves I have. I'm going to need everything I've got if we're going to survive the next twenty-four hours. The first thing we do is check out of here and find someplace safe... the sooner the better." She stood up, swaying slightly on her feet. She frowned and shook her head, as if trying to clear it. "Son of a bitch - "

"Sonja - what's wrong?"

"The fucking driver must have just dropped something just before I..."

"What are you talking about?"

Sonja didn't answer him, but instead dropped heavily onto the bed, her voice slurred. "Not ready for this...

Ssshit."

She pitched backward across the mattress and stopped breathing. Estes nudged her, but she remained motionless as a stone. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her as hard as he could, but it was no use.

Since it was obvious he was not going to be able to wake her up, he closed the sliding door that opened onto the balcony, locking it behind him. He then dragged a chair into the middle of the room, so he could maintain surveillance of every window and door while keeping an eye on Sonja. Come dusk she would awaken, as would Noir. Until then, it was up to him to keep watch.

Estes mulled over what Sonja had said. It was clear Noir knew who he was - otherwise why send his mother to him? But why not simply command Gloria to kill him, instead of toying with him in such a disgusting manner?

Whether she was intended as an assassin or sacrificial victim, Noir's motive had been to trick him into matricide. Sonja had said something about damnation, but it was not as if he didn't already bear the mark of Cain on his brow. In his own way, he was as foul a murderer as the creatures he was sworn to destroy.

Since the night Sonja plucked the faux-vampire skull from his collection, Estes had wracked his brains trying to remember which one it could have been. There were so many, they tended to blur together after time, which frightened him all the more. Had it been the malnourished Goth punk dressed in the black lace T-shirt and fingerless leather gloves, or the fashionably dressed young woman with the neon-purple hair and Nefertiti eye makeup? Perhaps it was the tall, elegantly attired older gentleman with the shaved head and ivoryhandled cane, or the six-foot-plus transsexual with the receding hairline and fullback shoulders in the black wedding dress? He could still hear their voices pleading with him, begging him to spare their lives. Their cries for mercy were mixed with the gunfire that had ultimately silenced them, echoing in his head like a distant cathedral bell, tolling for the dead.

For the first time since setting out on the life he had chosen, Estes felt adrift. He became a vampire hunter because it was the only way to prove that he was truly sane. He knew what he'd seen that terrible night had been real, and that the doctors' glib rationalizations were nothing but lies. So he had made himself into a living weapon, dedicated to the eradication of the horror that had so callously intruded upon his life.

But he had never meant to harm the innocent; his mission was to slay vampires, not murder humans.

He had started on this mad journey to prove his sanity, but now he doubted his reason more than ever. He had set out to hunt monsters, only to find that he, himself, had become one. What, if anything, could he possibly do to atone for such sins?

The knock on the door startled him from his reverie. Judging from the light seeping in from the window,

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) it was probably nine o'clock in the morning. There was a second, louder knock, accompanied by the rattling of keys. He moved to the door, gun at ready.

"Who is it?"

"Housekeeping," came the muffled reply.

Estes put one eye to the peephole and peered through the fish-eye lens into the hallway. A woman dressed in maid's whites, her back to the door, was busying herself with a service cart stacked with fresh linens, clean ashtrays, and rolls of toilet tissue.

"Come back later."

"Okay, mister. You need clean towels before I go?"

He glanced back at the bathroom and the vomit-encrusted bath linen hanging over the toilet tank.

"Okay. Just leave them by the door."

As the maid turned to face the door, her arms laden with clean towels, Estes could clearly see that she was in the final months of pregnancy. Suddenly something the size and shape of a refrigerator filled the peephole, driving the door into Estes' face, felling him like an axe.

Ygon sniffed the human male and lifted his lip in a growl, exposing the two-inch tusks jutting from his lower gums.

"Why this one?" The ogre asked petulantly, his voice reverberating like a kettledrum.

"It is not up to you to question his lordship's decisions," Lady Madonna snapped as she rolled the service cart into the room. "Now shut up and put the door back in place."

Ygon grunted and shrugged his wide shoulders as he realigned the hotel room door with its jamb as best as the broken hinges would allow. He had teamed not to argue with Noir's lieutenant over the years.

"His will be done," the ogre growled. "But I still do not understand why we should bring the man if it is the woman his lordship wants."

"We are to capture the male so that the female will follow."

Ygon scratched his skull, perplexed. "But the female is here," he said, jabbing a meaty finger at Sonja's motionless body "Why not take her now?"

"Because this is how Lord Noir said it was to be done!" Lady Madonna replied tartly as she removed a garment bag from the service cart and tossed it to the ogre. "Now stop trying to think and prepare him for travel! Every minute we dawdle, we run the risk of someone finding the housekeeper's body."

Lady Madonna casually shed the white housekeeper's dress, dropping it aside like a snake abandoning its skin, and stood naked in the middle of the hotel room. As she rubbed her hands over her distended belly like a fortuneteller trying to coax the future from a crystal ball, a bas-relief impression of the fetus appeared just below her skin, like a hungry man peering through the window of a bakery. She smiled, as if sharing a joke only she could hear, and removed her clothes from their hiding place underneath a pile of towels on the service cart.

Ygon maneuvered the unconscious human into the garment bag as easily as a father might tuck a slumbering child into bed. As he zippered the bag up, he was careful to make sure there was at least an inch of open space, since Lord Noir had insisted the human not suffocate in transit.

Dead. Alive. It was all pretty much the same to Ygon, at least as far as humans were concerned. However, the ogre had long since learned never to thwart the vampire lord's will.

"All is ready," Ygon growled.

Lady Madonna was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at the vampiress who lay atop the covers.

"Lord Noir is playing with fire with this one," she said, shaking her head in dismay.

"But you said it is not our place to question..." Ygon said petulantly.

"I know what I said, you bullet-headed ape!" she snapped, slapping him upside the head. The ogre didn't even so much as flinch. "Now let's get out of here!"

The concierge looked up upon hearing the ping of the elevator doors. Since it was his job to hail taxis, hold baggage and supply guests with information as to nearby restaurants and tourist attractions, the bell always drew his attention, no matter what time of day it might be. During his tenure he had seen every possible variation of man and wife stroll across the lobby of the Peachtree Park Hotel. But he had to admit that the couple that exited the elevator that morning was amongst the odder ones. The woman wasn't that unusual, really, except that her demeanor was extremely hard-bitten for someone so pregnant. Her companion, on the other hand, would have raised eyebrows even in a circus.