Hunter of the Dead (33 page)

“Oh. Father Cicatrice told me that in China white is the symbol of death, not black like here. He wore one just like it.”

She nodded.

“I know I’m just a farm girl, Hedrox, but I’m not stupid. I know what color is the color of mourning both in America and back home. What I mean is I think I’d prefer it in red.”

She swiped out at the cultist with a preternatural speed and sliced a gash on her nose. A splotch of red blood dropped onto the
cheongsam
, staining it terribly. Hedrox gasped, and tried to wipe the blood away.

“Let me ask you a question. How stupid do you really think I am?”

“I…I don’t, Matriarch. I’m sorry, I’ll have the dress taken back. Whatever color you like, I’ll have it for you within the hour.”

“That’s really the problem, isn’t it, Hedrox? You think Cicatrice’s gifts are in any way your domain. You’ve despised me since the minute I arrived here. Isn’t that right? Tell the truth, damn it.”

The cunicular look in Hedrox’s eyes disappeared as though it had never been there. She placed the dress and the garment bag down on the conference table. For the first time she had the look of a serious woman instead of a pawing sycophant.

“Yes, I despised you. He granted you the Long Gift. Who the hell are you? Some shit farmer from halfway around the world? I’ve served him for twenty years. As head of his circle for ten. If anyone’s earned the Long Gift, it’s me. I don’t give two goddamns for all your immortal politics and posturing. I just care about what I was promised.”

Idi Han felt a tickle at the back of her throat. She put her hand demurely to her lips to try to hide the giggle. It didn’t help. A moment later she was laughing, full-throated, wide-eyed, guffawing at the ridiculous woman before her. As though she had had a fit, it gradually passed.

“You buffoon. Idiot. Have you ever seen a disciple granted the Long Gift? It doesn’t happen. You’re useful idiots. If you were of any value as an immortal, you’d’ve been made one. Immortals don’t bring others across because of years of servitude. They bring them across because of inherent power. An inherent power I possess. I can smell it, we all can. Yours is so weak, I don’t even think you’d survive the turning process. You’d be reduced to one of those kitchen midden ghouls.”

Hedrox’s eyes narrowed.

“Then it is true.”

She nodded.

“But you already knew it was true. You knew it was true when you had the Signaris jump me. And you damn sure knew it was true when you tipped off the Inquisition that Father Cicatrice would be alone in Price’s apartment.”

She smiled.

“Still think I’d be such a weak immortal now? I have the killer instinct. And I don’t suffer slights lightly.”

Idi Han reached down and fingered a broken splinter from the chair. She ripped a chunk of wood out of it, a dangerous, jagged chunk. “Too bad you’ll never find out.”

“Now!” Hedrox shouted. “Now!”

Hedrox turned to look at the closet. Idi Han looked, too. They both waited patiently for a moment, but nothing happened. Idi Han walked over to the closet.

“When you said, ‘now,’ was this door supposed to open?”

She opened the door. The sickening vision of grue within made Hedrox immediately drop to her knees and vacate her stomach on the carpet.

“Ohhh…well, now I’m going to have to make you lick that up. But I suppose when you shouted this door was supposed to open and these two assassins of yours were supposed to jump out?”

Hedrox nodded, tears streaming down her face. Idi Han stepped into the closet and emerged with the industrial-strength paper shredder Cicatrice had kept in one corner of the room. The blades were still sticky with blood and chunks of intestine.

“You see, this first one here, I fed him piece by piece into the paper shredder.”

She shook the basket. It groaned wetly with a full bag. She popped the mechanism out of the top and kicked it over. A thick, bright red, porridgy sludge like ground beef that had been run through a food processor and pureed spilled out on the floor. Chunks of shattered bone sparkled throughout the mess of liquified assassin.

“But then the mechanism jammed. I mean, it was a strong motor, but there’s only so much bone and ligament it can chew, you know? So the second one, well, he had to go slower. I guess that was more fun, anyway. I always wondered what would happen if you just pulled a man’s bones out, one at a time.”

She reached into the closet and pulled out a floppy, almost shapeless semi-human form on a coat hanger. The boneless man had been heavily bound and gagged with packing tape. She laid him over her arm like a waiter with a serving napkin. She kicked a pile of what seemed to be a full human skeleton of bones out of the closet and scattered it amongst the flesh porridge.

“Old Floppy here survived almost until I pulled out his skull. I could hardly believe it when I plucked out each of his vertebrae one by one.”

She made a wet sucking noise as she replicated pulling out the man’s backbones on his sagging carcass.

“And I really couldn’t believe it when I got each of his ribs out. I mean his heart and lungs are probably…down here now.”

She gestured at the flaccid man’s boneless pelvis, which was fat with sagging organs.

“It was the skull, though, nothing to be done. I tried a couple of different ways but there was no way to get it out without getting the brain out, too. But don’t worry, I put it back.”

She raised the head and showed where she had jammed the brain back into the toothless mouth, filling it up, as though the assassin had been gagging on his own thought organ.

“I just always wanted to see what someone without any backbone looked like. I guess I could’ve just waited a few minutes until you came in.”

“Please, God,” Hedrox was muttering.

She knelt down behind her, wrapped her arm around her neck, and jabbed the splinter of wood into her ear.

“No, no, no,” she said, “None of your asinine, empty praying. Cicatrice has been your only god up until now. And now I am. And I am a vengeful goddess. You’re going to suffer far worse than either of these two clowns. I didn’t even care about them. They were just marionettes, dancing on strings. You were the puppeteer. And frankly, an attempt on my own life, that only makes me so mad. Not exactly not mad, but I expect that sort of thing. You, though, you killed a man more important than a father to me. So you’re going to suffer in ways you’ve never dreamt were possible. But first things, first. You’re still my loyal servant, for the next however long I let you live. You’re going to clean up this whole mess. Starting with that pile of sick you just vomited up. Then we’ll move on to the rest. You always wanted to know what it was like to be an immortal. And I told you you’d never be better than a ghoul. So time to find out.”

She shoved Hedrox’s face to the floor into the pile of putrid, still-warm throwup.

Eight

Nico stepped through the door and very nearly retched. Reaching into his pocket he grabbed a handkerchief and held it over his face. He looked around the room. Every surface was coated in gore. Body parts hung in places both expected and bizarre, like a child casting laundry on every surface. And in the center of the tempest of grue, Idi Han sat in a broken chair at the end of a long table, looking blank.

“Idi Han!”

He jumped forward, slipped on a puddle of blood, and skittered to regain his footing. With a little more care he hurried over to the other side of the table.

She was wearing a dress a little bit different from the one she normally wore. For one thing it was red, a dark red. He touched the fabric and realized with a sinking feeling that it was still wet. The dress wasn’t red; it was soaked in blood.

He grabbed her hand and pressed it.

“Idi Han! Idi Han!”

Slowly, as though it were a creaky old puppet in a midnight ‘50s horror movie, her head turned toward him. She blinked, but the blank look did not abate.

“Are you all right? Are you okay?”

A thin smile cracked her lips.

“Of course, Nico. Why wouldn’t I be?”

He gestured at the nightmarescape all around.

“This place looks like a war zone.”

“Does it? I thought it looked like a slaughterhouse.”

Nico pressed his hand to her cheek and her forehead. Both felt cold as ice and he suddenly felt foolish for checking. Something was wrong with her, though.

“Well, either, way,” he said, patting her hand, “What happened here?”

“There were some mortals who made some unwise decisions.”

Nico sank to his knees. He felt as though someone had just punched him in the gut.

“You did this?”

She nodded.

“It looks like you…tortured them.”

“I did.”

He took his hands off of hers. She didn’t respond. He rose to his feet and stumbled backwards. He nearly tripped over a chair, but grabbed it to steady himself.

“How could you? This is a horror scene. Don’t you have any remorse? Don’t you have any feelings left?”

Idi Han puckered her lips and dismissed his concerns with a wave.

“Oh, come on, Nico, they were only mortals.”

“I’m a mortal,” he whispered.

“You know what I meant.”

“What am I, special to you? Like a pet? A concentration camp commandant’s favorite Jew?”

“How perfectly banal. How beautifully bourgeois of you. You eat meat, Nico, I’ve seen it.”

“These aren’t animals. Animals don’t feel. Animals don’t think.”

“We’re all animals, Nico.”

She rose from her seat. He backed away from her, until his spine struck the door. In an eyeblink she was on top of him, her hand against his cheek.

“I want to be with you, Nico. Don’t you want to be with me? Don’t lie. What’s the point in lying?”

His throat was so parched he had trouble speaking.

“Of course I want to be with you. But you’d have to change. Swear off this kind of…evil.”

She turned her head, like a cat examining a mouse before delivering the
coup de grace
. She took his hand and pressed it to her heart.

“I think you’re wrong about who has to change. You feel that?”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Exactly. The pain and the suffering of the world slip away when you’re like me. All the weakness of guilt and fear, all those useless feelings, worrying about other people…they just get numb. And then they go away. I could grant you this gift. I’m already strong enough to do it.”

She began to drain just a drop of the energy away from his hands to prove her point. He snatched them away.

“I can’t,” he said.

“It’s glorious, Nico. You have no idea.”

“You talk about guilt and fear fading. What about love and passion? What makes you think those will stand the test of time? What you’re feeling for me right now, how do I know it’s not a vestigial piece of your real self. The real you. What was your name before?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not who I am anymore. That girl died and I don’t care if I never hear about her again. I’m Idi Han now. Queen of the Night. And you could be my king.”

“I’d rather die a person than live forever as a thing.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“A thing? You think I’m nothing but a thing?”

He had no words, but gestured at the depravity of the blood-speckled room.

“Get out now. For what we had together, I’ll allow you to leave.”

Nico scrabbled at the doorknob, not taking his eyes off of her. After a moment, he realized how silly he was being, and just turned his back to her to open it. If she meant to do him harm, it didn’t matter whether he could see her or not. Before leaving, he turned back one last time.

“You know; I would’ve been your mirror.”

Nine

“There was a time,” a syrupy, cruel voice intoned, “when our kind was not relegated to the shadows.”

“And there will be again,” she whispered under her breath.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Startled, she looked up, nearly jumping to her feet. Cicatrice stood before her, his hands folded customarily in front of him.

“I thought you were a memory.”

“If I am, then I’m here to remind you of something.”

He pointed at her chest. She clutched the golden key she wore there. She drew it out and stared at it.

“This is a dream.”

“Our kind do not dream.”

She waved the key towards him.

“You always have quite a lot to say about our kind, don’t you? What we should do, how we should we act, what we should feel, what we are.”

“It is the code.”

“The code you wrote, isn’t that right? The code you came up with. To protect us from The Hunter of the Dead. And now he’s here anyway.”

“You’re wasting time. You must feed The Damned, Idi Han. If you don’t…”

She cast the key away with such force that it smashed through the two-way mirror which looked out over the casino. The key sailed through the air and landed behind a bank of slot machines up against the wall. One day one of the janitors would have a very lucky pay day if he did his job well.

“You’re supposed to be a ghost, then? A shade? An echo?”

Cicatrice looked at the floor.

“No, don’t look away, look at me!” she shouted. “I have something to tell you. I’m glad you’re here. You and Topan and Signari and everyone always talk about how powerful I am, how strong I am. I never felt strong, even standing toe-to-toe with another immortal. But, now, for the first time, I understand what you all mean.

“It’s not that I’m strong. It’s that you were weak. For seven hundred years you lived in fear. You pretend to be a mighty man and others quaked in your shadow. But the truth is you’ve been a scared little boy, terrified ever since that day you first saw The Hunter of the Dead. And this, all of this, your code, your Houses, your patriarchs and your elders, and your endless apprenticeships, and your carefully chosen gets and all of it…it’s all a ruse. Whistling past the graveyard. Keeping our numbers low so that you never have to face the terrifying Hunter again. Isn’t that right?”