Hunter of the Dead (21 page)

“Ah. Here’s a good one. Maurice Valais, are you now or have you ever been a member…”

“…of the Communist Party?” Maurice completed. “No, asshole. I told you I’m true blue. You’ll never pin a single un-American word coming out of my lips on me. Sure, I voted against Truman, but who wouldn’t? That’s not un-American, that’s just...by God, that’s more American…participating in the democratic…”

“Mr. Valais,” Topan interrupted, “that wasn’t the question I was going to ask you.”

Topan held the 3x5 card between his index and middle finger and held it out towards Maurice. Maurice leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, deliberately refusing to take it. Topan’s eyes narrowed and he simply placed the card down in full view. He sat back, waiting, knowing that Maurice’s curiosity would get the better of him sooner or later.

And damned if it wasn’t sooner. Maurice glanced down, just for a second, but then he read the index card, faster than he even meant to.

It read, “Maurice Valais, are you now or have you ever been a member of the secret Catholic organization known as the Inquisition?”

Maurice blanched.

“What are you…how are you…?”

“Well, what did you think you were here to answer questions about, Mr. Valais? Your communist affiliations? Joe McCarthy isn’t an idiot. You don’t even have a soft pink past. You don’t even have a pro-union voting record. You were called here because in the course of all these wonderful diggings and investigations, the truth about vampires – well, not vampires because we’re too careful – but the truth about you retarded vampire hunters finally came to light.”

An icy fist grabbed Maurice’s heart and refused to let go. He clutched at his chest, loosed his tie. Topan waited.

“Breathe, Mr. Valais, breathe. It’s what you’re good at after all.”

“You’re a…you’re…”

“One of your long hated, long hunted enemies, yes. I don’t know what it is that causes you people to keep bashing your collective head against the wall pursuing us, but now here we are. All the mysteries of a thousand-year-long secret war about to be laid bare because of one gloryhound politician and one vampire hunter who can’t think to keep his tattoo hidden.”

Topan opened his briefcase again, tossed a photograph from within onto the table next to the index card, and slammed it shut again. Maurice put his finger on the photograph. It showed him, sitting around a table with some of his Marine Corps buddies, easy, unforced smiles on all of their faces as they smoked cigars and tossed chips into a poker pot. And there, plain as day if you were looking for it, on Maurice’s barely uncuffed sleeve, was the double cross.

“I don’t…this isn’t enough to hang me with. This is barely…this is nothing.”

“Let’s try another question shall we?” Topan said, tapping the assembled top of his packet of index cards. Topan took one of the cards, set it at the top of the pile, cleared his throat (a deliberate, obviously unnecessary gesture for a vampire) and read it aloud. “Mr. Valais, is it true that you kept a record of your misadventures in this so-called ‘Inquisition?’”

Maurice ripped his tie off. Still, it felt like his throat was constricting, choking him. Topan waited a moment, before tossing the index card off into a corner of the interrogation room.

“No answer for that one? Let’s try another. ‘Isn’t it true you kept this diary in a green stenograph pad? This green stenograph pad?’”

Topan opened his briefcase, tossed a steno pad on the table, and slammed it shut. His hand quivering, Maurice reached for the pad. In a moment of pique, he snatched it off the table, jumped up from his chair, ran to a corner of the room with his back to Topan and eagerly attempted to rip the book to shreds. He clenched his eyes shut and braced himself for the vampiric strength of the body slam which he knew was coming.

When it didn’t come he slowly let his eyes open and turned back to look at Topan, who wasn’t even looking at him, he was simply shuffling papers idly on the table. Maurice looked down at the shredded pages he had left on the floor like a hamster’s nest. Blank. All of them blank.

Slowly, he retook his seat.

“Pleased with yourself?” Topan asked, still not looking at him.

“What was the point of that?” Maurice asked, his voice hollow in his throat.

With both hands, Topan tapped the stack of index cards together until they were all lined up perfectly.

“I got the book back,” Topan said. “Obviously. I’ve already burnt it. That was the first thing I did and it cost me a great deal of money and effort and political capital. There is an innocent evidence clerk who will be in jail for the rest of his life because of you.”

“Sacrifices have to be made,” Maurice said.

“I’m glad you agree.”

“In the struggle against your kind there will be sacrifices, yes. But if we don’t struggle, all the innocents will suffer.”

“You sound like maybe you’re trying too hard to justify yourself. That’s the sort of thing that will make McCarthy smell fear. And pounce.”

Maurice slammed his manacled hands, now balled-up fists, down on the table.

“Why’d you tell me that story? That some man’s going to jail because of me? You expect me to recant? You expect me to throw my hands up in the air and say, ‘Oh, Lordy, I was wrong!’”

“I already told you, Mr. Valais. I’m trying to shake you up. With a fake diary. With a story about the consequences of your actions. And you are very easy to shake.”

“Stop toying with me, bloodsucker. Just kill me. It’s the only way your secrets stay buried.”

Topan nodded. He leaned back, tipping his chair back, and crossed his legs up on the table.

“You know, that was my House patriarch’s conclusion as well. First thing he said to me. ‘Topan, silence that man. Do whatever you have to do, bribe whoever you have to bribe, get to him, and end him.’ Normally an edict like that? No one would gainsay it. But I thought to myself that there might be another way. A better way. One that leads to a better ending for both your kind and mine.”

Maurice snorted.

“You went to the mats against a patriarch for me?”

“No, not for you, Mr. Valais. Before I took on this task, I had no idea who you were. Not where you went to school, not where you were born, not your significance in the Inquisition hierarchy, not even your name. Of course I know all of that now. I know everything about you now. But the reason I went to the mats was for the opportunity you represent.”

Topan opened his briefcase. For the first time, he left it open, though still facing away from Maurice. He reached inside and drew out two tiny objects, tossed them on the table.

“Recognize those?”

Maurice picked one of the pieces of metal up, examined it. Turned it over. Checked the inscription.

“My mother’s wedding ring. And my father’s, I suppose. You’re threatening my parents if I talk?”

Topan remained eerily silent. Maurice tossed the two rings off into the corner where he had ripped up the steno pad. They clattered and clanged to a stop.

“You’re an idiot, then. You said you knew everything about me and you don’t even know I don’t speak to my parents? Hurt them, kill them, I don’t care. The old man never met a bottle that could keep him from tanning my ass. And the old lady touched me. They can both rot in Hell for all I care. Know everything about me. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

Topan reached into the briefcase and pulled out another ring, held it up to the dim neon light before placing it down on the table.

“That’s my high school class ring,” Maurice said, rubbing an identical piece of jewelry on his own hand.

He picked it up. There were initials inscribed on the inside. N.H.

“Nikki Howard. My old high school sweetheart. You really are batting .0000, Mr. Topan. I’m an Inquisitor. We don’t let family and relationships hold us back. And a girl I haven’t seen in twenty years? That’s supposed to sway me?”

“You had a breakdown on the way here, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, in Richmond.”

Topan reached into the briefcase and drew out a wrench. He let it drop heavily to the table.

“Light Brothers,” Valais read, “I think that was the name of the garage.”

Topan nodded.

“It was. You remember your second grade teacher, Mrs. Kopas? Did you know she lost her husband in the war?”

“Yeah. Maybe I knew that. I remember she always wore a…”

Topan placed a yellow ribbon on the table.

“What the hell else have you got in there?”

Topan made a welcoming gesture.

“Have a look.”

Maurice angrily grabbed the suitcase and turned it towards him. The case was brimming with bric-a-brac. Some of the souvenirs he instantly recognized. Others he didn’t know at all. Most tickled something in the back of his mind, but didn’t immediately remind him of anything.

“This pipe. That belonged to Tommy, my childhood friend. We used to smoke it behind the courthouse. And isn’t that Old Man Keene’s eyepatch? He was my neighbor when I lived in Cinci…”

Maurice rifled through the briefcase, taking great handfuls of all manner of bracelets, keys, wallets, and personal mementos.

“What are you trying to tell me? Are you threatening everyone I’ve ever known?”

“Please, Mr. Valais.”

Topan loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, and revealed his breast. A mark like a tattoo marked him, but it was actually a scar depicting a bifurcated red eye.

“You recognize that, don’t you?”

“House Cicatrice,” Maurice whispered.

“You were particularly fond of harrowing my House. Tell me, in all your time focusing your energies on my people, have you ever known any Cicatrice to resort to petty threats?”

Maurice sank back in his chair, letting two handfuls of personal effects scatter to the floor.

“You’ve killed everyone I’ve ever met?”

“Yes.”

“But there are…police. Family members. You can’t just…kill all those people.”

“It was time-consuming, yes. And costly. And Father Cicatrice was…ambivalent. But I convinced him to go through with my plan.”

Maurice ran his hands through his hair.

“But…why? Just so you could let me know you did something…unimaginably cruel before you kill me?”

Topan laughed heartily. It was the sort of laugh only a vampire or a truly deranged murderer was capable of. The sort of laugh that seemed to delight in human suffering, even revel in it.

“I’m not going to kill you, Mr. Valais. What would be the point of that now? No, you live. You live and you stand as a shining example of what happens to anyone who ever crosses House Cicatrice again.”

The door opened. The light that streamed in seemed to come less from the choirs of heavenly angels than from the screams of Memnoch’s tortured souls. A soulless, bespectacled G-Man stood there, his dark glasses and gray suit and hands folded in his lap betraying what he wanted. He stated it anyway.

“Time with your lawyer is up, Mr. Valais. It’s time to testify.”

Maurice stared pleadingly into Topan’s eyes.

“What do I tell them?”

“Frankly, Mr. Valais, I don’t give a shit. You’re a drifter with no past and no connections to any person living in this country. They might conclude you’re a spy. They might conclude you’re a madman. That doesn’t matter to me. All that matters to me is that you understand this: you, Mr. Valais, are
persona non grata
. As literally and liberally as that term can be used. You are an un-person, a non-person.

“And from now on this is what happens to any Inquisitor who so much as lays a finger on a Cicatrice houseling. Anyone you meet after today, dies. Anyone you call on the telephone dies. Anyone you think about in passing and fills up your mind’s eye dies. Your punishment is exile from the human race.”

***

Scav’s eyes fluttered open. Before he could even see what was going on around him, a brick of a fist smashed his stomach and intestines to jelly. He could feel his regenerative powers acting sluggish. He had still not yet fed today and he had already lost an arm and been beaten badly.

“I’m feeling stupid right now, Sven,” Scav heard his brother’s voice intone, “Did I miss something?”

“I couldn’t say, boss,” Sven replied.

His eyesight returned grudgingly to him. He was upright – not standing, but dangling from a drainage pipe which sprouted from his pelvis like an extended penis. No doubt Benito’s goons had enjoyed that malicious little joke immensely. He must have started to topple upside-down at some point because a dagger shoved through his shoulder held him in place.

Their encampment was a mess. Several of the coffins had been toppled, and some of the goons were running their hands through muddy messes of gravedirt which had dropped to the ground. Things would be unpleasant for all of them tonight, but Scav most of all.

“Let’s see,” Benito said, ticking off on his fingers, “I saved my brother from certain death. My own kin. You would think I could trust my own kin.”

“There’s just no one to trust in this world, boss. Just you and me, and you less than me.”

Hofstra, the omega, rose from the muddy mess of his sleeping area. Adding insult to injury, his funeral shroud had been torn. He practically charged at Scav’s impaled form, but two of the other goons grabbed him and easily held him back.