Hunter of the Dead (31 page)

“Perhaps you’re right. I’ll take what I want from you. She can just die.”

Cicatrice ran the razor sharp edge of his pinky nail across the little girl’s throat, slitting her from her ear to ear. He tossed the limp form towards the shrieking parents and with a roar and one last brutish effort rushed at Bonaparte to rip her head off. Bonaparte braced, getting off only one round with her automatic shotgun before dropping it to the floor and raising her fists, rosaries wrapped around them like brass knuckles.

The Inquisitors who had come in through the window hesitated to shoot with their boss in the line of fire. As if on cue, the door burst open. A ginger-haired Inquisitor with a massive unruly beard stood at the head of the squad, his boot raised as he had just kicked the door down. As he flew through the door he stepped right into the line of Cicatrice’s charge. Cicatrice reached forward, pushed his hand into the bearded man’s throat, wrapped his fingers around his trachea, and ripped it out wholesale.

“Sorry, Jimmy,” Bonaparte whispered as a hellstorm of weapons consumed and dropped Cicatrice for the third and final time.

The men with their crosses moved in and subdued him with far greater ease.

“Do it quickly!” Price cried out, from overhead. “Don’t waste any more time. Don’t lose any more men.”

Bonaparte looked up at him and he noticed that her glass eye had rolled backwards in her head in the scuffle, so that it looked like she was looking up at him with one normal eye and one pure white orb.

“They knew the risks when they signed up,” she replied.

This is why we’ll never get along. People are nothing to you but pawns in your chess game.

Whatever power animated Cicatrice seemed to have all but ebbed anyway. It was all over but the shouting. Bonaparte loomed over him.

“I haven’t seen a sunrise in eight hundred years,” he whispered. “I always thought I wouldn’t see one for another thousand. My life has been a dream. And I don’t want to wake up.”

Bonaparte’s voice was tender, even wistful as she reverently placed the stake over his heart.

“Did you really think you’d live forever?”

She kicked away what little remained of the metal armor, revealing the mark of Cicatrice over his heart. With an overhand arc she drove the special stake into the scar, where it embedded a few inches into his skin. Cicatrice grunted and coughed. Bonaparte stood, and with a finality of thought and action raised her boot over the stake and stomped down.

Five

The Dark Ages…

Cicatrice stood there, the steaming red ichor dripping from his sword. He stared down at his opponent, whose vestments were now glowering with a spreading stain. Lily walked up to him, her feet wobbling underneath her. She placed a hand on his cheek.

“Ever my defender. Ever my strong right arm.”

Cicatrice bowed deeply.

“It is my inexpressible pleasure to serve you, Matriarch.”

“When the time comes, my love, my crown…is yours.”

He nodded and watched as she retreated into the burgeoning dawn. The field was slick with carnage. At Lily’s order, the warriors who remained were turning the dead and the dying. Many of them would be reduced to the diminished state the Moors called
ghul
, but a few would make for mighty warriors. And more importantly the Crusader army was cracked, crushed, defeated.

No thanks to Signari. He was to have brought reinforcements and instead he has fled. I shall never forgive him for this.

A light groan emanated from the broken body at his feet. He knelt down, and at his touch the White Bishop cringed. For a man who had just been run through, Cicatrice was astonished to see him still breathing. A wicked thought entered Cicatrice’s mind, a thought he could not exorcise. Finally he gave in to it.

“Such a mighty opponent,” he whispered, “and now what? Reduced to nothing. You are nothing. You can do nothing to stop us. And now you will join us.”

Cicatrice reached out and pressed his fingers to the bishop’s head. He had yet to learn the fine art of siring, but he was certain that the feeling he felt was wrong. As he poured his essence into the dying man, he felt his own being polluted. A disgusting taste touched all the senses except his main five, as though drinking water tainted by brackish swamp muck.

Cicatrice removed his hand and shook his head, clearing it.

“No. No, your faith is a poison but you can not wield it against the likes of me. I am the scion of the Necropolis, heir to Lily the Only. You will be my first conquest.”

With a violent gesture, he reached out and grabbed the bishop’s head with both hands. The man tried to wrench away, but Cicatrice held him fast. Closing his eyes, he pressed his forehead against his foe’s.

What he had taken at first to be his own weakness, he now recognized as a battle of wills. The disgusting force flowing into his own essence was the dying man’s faith, but he was aware enough to wield it like a weapon. Cicatrice pressed through the muck and imagined himself plunging his sword into the man’s back again. He focused his energy like the point of a blade and drove it, like a light cutting through the darkness of his belief in God. Lily had done much the same to him, and having been through the process once on the receiving end, he felt more secure this time being the deliverer.

“Take it. Take it all.”

Suddenly the man began to quiver and quake, Cicatrice’s desired effect achieved at last. As the arcane energy that animated Cicatrice’s corpse took root in the bishop, what little blood had not spilled out of the through-and-through hole in his chest and back began to pour from his eyes, his nose, his ears, his asshole and the tip of his member. And then he flopped over, dead like a fish thrown onto dry land.

Cicatrice tumbled backwards onto his ass. The fight had taken everything from him. Cursing blackly, he saw that he had failed. His first attempt at siring had produced a stillborn get. Not even a
ghul
. And the sun was beginning to rise in the sky. He forced himself along, on three limbs at first, and gradually pulling himself to his feet, to return to the Necropolis. He joined the slow trickle of new warriors off the battlefield and into the sacred burial chambers and mausoleums that housed the immortals during the day in the Necropolis.

***

Agony blossomed in Idi Han’s chest. She gasped like a fish out of water. clutching at the blankets and surging up from the bed. Nico scrambled out of bed and stared at her writhing form, panic in his eyes.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Her nerves drowned out her ability to speak. Once she had fallen from a mule and had the wind knocked out of her. It had been horrifying, being simultaneously unable to breathe, unable to take a breath, and unable to fathom what was happening. It had been a few seconds of sheer madness, and now she felt that same way again, except…she didn’t have to breathe, didn’t have to do anything, and she had barely felt even pain in a muted, theoretical sense since she had been brought across.

“Idi Han? Idi Han? What is it?”

He was running his hands through her hair, but she still had no idea what was going on.

“I don’t know,” she replied in Cantonese, and though it took her a moment to realize he hadn’t understood, he didn’t ask her to repeat herself. His lips were a thin line.

“Look,” he said after a moment, pointing at her right breast.

The sheets were still over her, blossoming red. Delicately, he pulled the sheet down. She stared down, expecting the worst. Her scar, the mark of Cicatrice, was bleeding. She reached down and touched it, wincing from the white-hot pain that shot through her body where the finger touched. She stared at the blood, baffled. She sniffed it, tasted it.

“I thought vampires didn’t bleed,” Nico said.

She stared at him. The initial flush and surprise of pain had receded to a dull, aching throb.

“I thought so, too,” she agreed, “Is it real?”

He delicately placed the tip of his pinky against her wound. She winced and bared her teeth.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He sniffed at his finger and let his tongue dart over it briefly like a lizard’s. “I think it’s real.”

She jumped to her feet, and was astonished to find herself shaking. All the physical reactions which had seemed so
de rigeuer
in her old life had gradually faded until she had stopped missing them. And now that they were back, and in a shocking degree, it was far more terrifying than if they’d never left.

“I have to go,” she said, and rummaged in the nightstand for the golden key.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, reaching for his shirt and hat which were hanging over a chair.

“No,” she said, pressing his chest with what she thought was nominal pressure but was actually so forceful it forced him to sit, “it’s best you don’t come with me. Just wait. I’ll be back in a bit.”

He sighed. She stamped her foot, again forgetting her own strength and putting a small crack in the linoleum beneath her feet.

“Please don’t be a child, Nico.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Actually I’m feeling rather mature just this second. But that still doesn’t mean you’re coming back.”

She cast her eyes downward. It was probably true. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I…want to see you again.”

He shrugged.

“Me, too. But I guess it’s not in the cards. Dogs and cats, you know.”

She slipped the golden key around her neck. As she did so her hand brushed against her blood flower charm. She slipped it off.

“Take this,” she said.

He shook his head.

“I can’t.”

She grabbed him by the wrist and pressed the charm into his hand.

“A promise. I want it back. So we’ll have to see each other again.”

He looked down at the strap of leather dangling out of his closed fist.

“Maybe. But in what capacity, I wonder?”

***

After a stumbling, fumbling run through the city, certain there were Signari partisans around every corner, Idi Han reached the Aztec. She looked around, in every corner of the casino, but business proceeded as usual. Grandmothers pulled at the arms of slot machines. Wealthy young bucks and older angrier players worked on their tables.

Where’s the chaos? Where’s the tumult?

A security guard stared at her.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked.

“Where’s Mr. Cicatrice?”

“Uh, I couldn’t say, ma’am. I just work here. But are you all right?”

He pointed at her chest. A blossom of red was staining her dress over her scar.

“Yes, I just need…”

“Maybe I could call you an ambulance. Or at least set you up with some help.”

He reached under his booth and pulled out a first aid kit.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said, “I just need…”

She spotted a stand selling pizza nearby and snatched a handful of napkins from a dispenser. She packed the napkins under her shirt. The security guard stepped in front of her.

“Ma’am, are you twenty-one?”

Little pissant piece of shit do you have any idea who I am?

“Oh, of course,” she muttered, reaching into her bag and pulling out a business card which was decidedly not her passport or identification card. She reached out to hand it to him but just as it grazed his fingers she dropped it to the floor.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said, “I’m so clumsy.”

“It’s quite all right, ma’am,” he said with a smile, bending over to pick up the business card.

She placed her hand on the back of his head and bounced his skull against the floor like a basketball. He was immediately completely laid out.

“Walk it off,” she muttered and two-stepped toward the plastic pyramid in the center of the casino. She climbed over the velvet ropes and slipped into the door marked CASINO PERSONNEL ONLY.

When she entered the control room absolute silence dropped over the brethren. They all looked up and seemed aggrieved not to see Cicatrice. Hedrox approached her. She dropped to her knees and knuckled the ground before her.

“You have a telephone call, Matriarch.”

“Stand,” she said. “Show me.”

Hedrox led her into the conference room that served Cicatrice as an office. All eyes followed her as she moved.

“I’ll have that security guard let go.”

“No,” she said, “it’s fine. He was doing his job.”

“Nevertheless…”

“I think I made myself clear, Hedrox.”

“Of course. My apologies, Matriarch.”

She winced at hearing Hedrox use that term again. She had hoped the first time was a mistake. She didn’t want to ruminate too long on what using it twice meant. Hedrox opened the door for her and she stepped inside. Hedrox walked over to the telephone sitting on the far end of the conference table and lifted the receiver off the hook. She stopped, her hand quivering, and looked at Idi Han.

“What is it?”

“It’s not my place…”

“Spit it out, woman.”

She stared at her like a child who had broken her favorite toy.

“Do you know where the patriarch is?”

She shook her head. Hedrox nodded. She pressed a button and put the receiver to her head.

“Matriarch Idi Han is here. Yes, Elder. Just a moment.”

Hedrox walked past her toward the door.

“I’ll leave you in peace, Matriarch. And I’ll have a clean dress brought.”

“Oh.”

She glanced down at the ruined
cheongsam
.

“Anything in particular?”

“No. I trust your judgment.”

“There is something…yes, I’ll bring you something.”

Hedrox nodded and left. Slowly Idi Han walked around the table. She stared at Cicatrice’s chair for a moment, but couldn’t bear to sit in it. It seemed somehow too symbolic. Standing off to the side, she placed the phone to her ear.