Hunter of the Dead (15 page)

As the crowd flooded in to have a bite of Signari’s “birthday cake” the patriarch himself walked Damiana back to the docket. He kept his arm around the lepress.

“You’ve always been my best elder, Dami. You know that, don’t you?”

“It’s never unpleasant to hear, Father Otto.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I know it’s not exactly a pleasant duty, but the rewards are…well, you can probably guess what the reward is. Will you represent my interests in Las Vegas with that reptile Cicatrice?”

“Of course, Patriarch. I shall miss Rome.”

“Don’t miss it too much. You’ll be back here soon, if you know what I mean.”

Signari patted Damiana hard on the cheek. Suddenly he noticed the Scavatelli brothers.

“Benito Scavatelli. And you I don’t know.”

“Italo Scavatelli, Patriarch,” Damiana said.

“I see. How far back on the docket are they?”

“Fourth or fifth.”

“Let’s just deal with them now so you can get the first flight out of here. All right, everybody get a slice of cake? Okay, take your seats, take your seats.”

The crowd receded as one of Signari’s mortal disciples dragged the gurney out of the room. Now, in addition to being drilled full of holes, she was criss-crossed with the scars of the blood-drinkers’ razor blades. Signari didn’t sit, but stood behind a podium. He didn’t seem the type to get too comfortable with sitting.

Damiana grabbed Scav and his brother bodily and tossed them both to their knees at Signari’s feet.

“Benny, Benny, Benny. You are just barely out of diapers. How long have you been draining force without drinking blood?”

Benito grimaced.

“A few days.”

“What was that?”

“A few days, Father Otto.”

“And when did your sire release you from your apprenticeship?”

Benito scowled. The lepress struck him, hard enough to shatter his jaw.

“The same, Father Otto.”

Signari nodded knowingly.

“So Quentin, a longtime, well-trusted, well-known to me member of this House in excellent standing, did right by you. He trained you even to the point where you don’t even drink blood anymore. That’s dedication. That’s righteousness. That’s doing right by one’s get. And you immediately turn around and do what?”

“I broke the code.”

“Broke the code? You spat in Quentin’s face. I ought to call him up here and let him decided what to do with you. What do you think about that?”

“Father Otto, if you understood the love I feel for my only brother, you would understand…”

Signari rolled his eyes.

“Shut him up.”

Damiana smashed Benito’s face again, shattering his jaw in multiple places and causing him to sever his own tongue. Suddenly, Signari’s eyes alighted on Scav.

“You don’t look like he loved you very much.”

You’re god-damned right he didn’t.

“And you smell like…” Signari wrinkled his nose, “A churchyard. You still have faith, don’t you?”

Scav opened his mouth, but no words would come.

“Oh, don’t be shy. Nothing you say or do is going to affect my verdict one way or the other. I’ve already decided what to do with the both of you. You may as well just get in the habit of answering your patriarch truthfully.”

“I have faith.”

“I knew it. You stink of it. I can’t imagine how your brother could bear to drain you, let alone sire you. It’s like getting a mouthful of poison. Well, your dumb ass is responsible for this, Benny, what do you think I should do with you?”

“Uh…let us go? Make my punishment to teach my little brother the code better than I learned it. Responsibility can go a long way toward stabilizing a person.”

“Yeah, no. You two don’t see each other anymore. Let’s talk about all the ways you broke the code. First, you sired a get without your patriarch’s permission. You think I let just any rabble into my House?”

“Well, I thought it was just a formality, Father Otto. A rubber stamp.”

“A rubber stamp? Because I usually say yes? I usually say yes because my houselings usually don’t come to me with half-cocked proposals. And I trust the people I sired to sire good people and so on, so that everybody in the House is more or less worthy of my trust. Now you go and you bring an immediate family member across? Oh, that’s strike two, by the way. You know, if you were House Temuchin, they’d’ve made you slaughter your entire family the moment you were brought across. The code’s strict about that, too. You leave your mortal kin behind along with all your mortal weaknesses. Clearly you haven’t.”

“I’m sorry, Father Otto.”

“You are sorry. You’re a sorry sack. And the worst thing you’ve done is to make your sire look like a fool. I had faith in him. Quentin was going to be an elder. Now?”

Signari gestured at someone behind Scav’s back. He turned to look, but it was too late. A head came tumbling down at the floor before them. Scav didn’t recognize the man, but gathered it was Quentin, Benito’s sire. Benito seemed stunned.

“You can’t…you can’t punish him because of what I did!”

Signari chuckled.

“It’s not wise to tell a House patriarch what he can and can’t do. Especially in his own manse. No, Quentin suffered for your stupidity. Now as for you, you can pay me back with twenty-five years of service as a fixer. Make it fifty. Damiana?”

The lepress reached down and strained the metal, as Benito did the same. Suddenly the yoke shattered. It would be some time before Benito would be able to weasel his way out of the rest of his bonds, but he was free to do so at his leisure now.

“Now, as for you, my boy. First of all, I like the hair. I’d like it better dyed white.”

“Of course. Any…anything you say, F…F…”

“All right, all right. Now, officially you’re an immortal without a House. That means you’re nothing. You have no standing. Within a House, only a patriarch can order a death sentence, and then only as a last resort. Yeah, I see you looking down at Quentin’s head. He hasn’t had a decent get since I turned him five hundred years ago. He’s been a complete and utter failure to me. If it wasn’t your idiot brother, it would’ve been some other screw-up.

“But you? No House? Anybody can kill you. Cicatrice. Temuchin. Teslan. Druid. I don’t care. Nobody cares. Now I do have the authority to grant you an adoption. Normally I wouldn’t but men of faith are hard to turn. And therefore valuable. But you’re also a goddamned abomination. An immediate blood relation of a houseling in poor standing.”

Signari seemed to ruminate for a minute.

“Tell you what: we’ll let fate decide. If there’s someone in this room that’s willing to adopt you, we’ll go that way. If not, we’ll go the other way.”

Signari gestured at Quentin’s head on the ground. Then he looked up at the audience.

“How about it? Any takers for a new get?”

The silence blared in Scav’s ears for a moment. He nodded, accepting the judgment of the fates, and waited for the hammer to fall. Then, to his surprise, a Scottish brogue cut through the quiet.

“I’ll take the boy. Just because I know it’ll piss off Benito Scavatelli.”

***

Father Otto tugged the heavy metal gauntlet off his hand and flexed his fingers. He leaned back in the chair at the head of Damiana’s table. The chair was “his.” Even as senior elder (and, it was assumed, Father Otto’s expected heir) Damiana could not sit at the head of her own table without explicit instructions from Father Otto to do so and to make a proclamation in his stead.

Father Otto reached out and put his thumb to the forehead of the ginger young woman before him. She was snuffling (as they all did at this point) though her tears had long since gone dry and she was unable to make herself understood through the heavily-articulated harness gag she wore. Some Signaris preferred their meals screaming, or even kicking, but Damiana was a bit toned down and preferred to eat in relative silence, or at least in conversation with other immortals, not over the incoherent shrieks of their meals.

“How is she, Father Otto?”

Father Otto removed his thumb from the ginger’s forehead and sucked it, making a sour face and shaking his head.

“Too bitter.”

“Do you prefer a virgin meal, Father?”

Father Otto shrugged.

“Not necessarily. That one though…I think she had a rough life. I need a little less stress.”

Damiana nodded and pressed the button down at the foot of the table where she was sitting. The table was actually rather ingeniously designed. The center held still but the outside was a conveyor belt of sorts. At each “setting” of the table was a small, seamless, locked box, which contained a kneeling mortal, restrained and gagged as Damiana preferred them. By pressing the button the conveyor belt activated and the settings moved down a place. Damiana activated the device three more times until a towheaded, ten-or-possibly-twelve (who really cared when it came to mortals?) year old boy hung before Father Otto, petrified and no longer even trying to scream in fear.

“Not much stress in a schoolchild’s life. And a virgin, though you said that’s not a necessity.”

Father Otto shrugged and reached out to put his thumb against the child’s cheek. He seemed to consider for a moment, then, like a connoisseur selecting a bottle of wine, nodded. Damiana leaned forward and prepared to devour the meal before her, a rather crusty old man who was giving her the stinkeye. Normally Damiana got the choice of meals, but, of course, when hosting her patriarch, the choice was his.

“Excuse me.”

Father Otto and Damiana both looked up. Topan was glaring at them. It was hard for Damiana to get used to the idea of dining with a Cicatrice. Both she and Father Otto had long made it a policy not to do so, and the Cicatrice sitting there, red noose around his neck proclaiming his loyalty, was like having a splinter in her eye.

“Yes, Topan?” Father Otto asked, affecting an innocence in his voice that many recognized as false, though only a lieutenant as long-standing as Damiana recognized as hiding, deep, deep fury.

“If this is not good enough for Otto Signari, why is it good enough for me?”

He gestured at the ginger mortal, which in the process of Father Otto selecting his meal, had looped around to Topan’s seat. Damiana rose before Father Otto could respond. In all things she deferred to her patriarch, but as host, this matter was hers to rectify. She walked to Topan’s seat. The other immortals seated around the table were buzzing, whispering in one another’s ears. Some were Signari, a few were from the other Houses, but none, as was customary, were of House Cicatrice save his heir alone.

“This mortal is not to your liking, Elder Topan?”

Topan folded his arms.

“That’s not the point.”

Damiana looked to Father Otto for some sign of what to do, but her patriarch was inscrutable, watching with a twisted smile on his face.

“Forgive me, elder, I miss the point entirely then.”

Topan fixed her with a glare as though he were chastising a schoolchild or a mortal, not an elder of House Signari.

“The point, lepress, is the insult.”

Damiana’s face turned stony. She knew other immortals called her that. She wasn’t so ignorant to think that others didn’t make fun of her condition behind her back. But it had been a long time, long before she had become an elder of her House, even, since someone had called her a lepress to her face.

Topan continued.

“If it’s not good enough for the patriarch of House Signari, what makes you think it should be good enough for the patriarch of House Cicatrice?”

Father Otto howled in laughter, pounding his thankfully ungauntleted fist on the table, but otherwise offered no hope and in fact waved off her pleading look as though to say, “No, no, don’t let me interrupt you.” Damiana was very old, and had long since learned the values of patience and abstinence. She didn’t let any emotion cross her face.

“It is customary that the elder of this manse has her selection of the meat. Or, when he’s present, the House Patriarch. Everyone else is fed randomly.”

“Randomly?” Topan repeated, attempting to copy Damiana’s inflections, “This is how seriously you take your hosting duties, Damiana? Just tossing random pieces of meat at people and hoping they’re not offended, is that your methodology?”

“These are all top-tier specimens, carefully culled from my farm and the wild…”

“Push the button, you deformed freak, and let me have a finer cut.”

In the silence that followed, a pair of flies fucking would’ve been a cacophony. After a moment, Damiana nodded.

“You don’t care for this meal?”

“I do not care for anyone’s sloppy seconds. If I am to be patriarch of the most powerful of the Great Houses, I demand the best.”

Damiana reached out and grabbed the shrieking ginger around her throat. With a pinch she severed her spinal column and the girl fell dead.

“You don’t want my hospitality, Cicatrice? Then starve.”

Topan’s chair flew out from behind him as he leapt to his feet. His hands were not clenched in fists, but curved into claws, his preferred fighting style. Damiana struggled to open her mouth and bare her teeth. Suddenly Damiana felt a great gauntleted hand drop down on her shoulder, rubbing bone against bone. Father Otto’s other, ungloved hand, came down on Topan’s shoulder.

“Come now, children, none of this,” Father Otto said, “Are we all satisfied with our posturing? Everybody feel they’ve proven who’s toughest?” Father Otto glanced from one face to the other. “‘If that big meanie Otto Signari hadn’t intervened, I would’ve taken him lickety split,’ right?”