Hunter of the Dead (34 page)

He looked at her, but said nothing.

“You were weak. Too weak to let The Damned roam free. Too terrified of the consequences. Terrified The Hunter would return, terrified the mortals would learn of our existence. And now I know why you all call me strong. Because I’m not scared of any of those things. And I’m happy to watch everything burn.”

She turned to look out at the casino. It was far from peaceful, buzzing as it was with humanity, blinking lights, smoke, the whirring of machines, the cadence calls of dealers, and all manner of hustle and bustle. But it was ordinary. It was normal. Pedestrian. After tomorrow she would never be able to see this scene again.

“Aren’t you proud of me, Father…?”

She turned to look at him, but there was no one there. Grimly, she pressed a button on her telephone.

“Yes, Matriarch?”

“Bring me two pots of makeup. One white, one black. Contact Otto Signari by whatever means we have at our disposal. Tell him I want to talk. That I’m ready to negotiate the surrender of House Cicatrice.”

Ten

With a burlap sack over one shoulder and a shovel over the other, Price strode into the cemetery. A ghoul clambered up on top of one of the headstones, silhouetted in eerie light against the moon. Eyes gleaming yellow, it stared at Price. Price threw the sack to the ground.

“Guess I haven’t been keeping up with my regular extermination work with all that’s been going on the past few days.”

The ghoul hissed, its eyes darting back and forth. It went both ways with feral ghouls sometimes. Sometimes they ran, sometimes they attacked. This one attacked. Price waited until the ghoul was in perfect range and swung the shovel in a perfect arc through the air. It connected with the ghoul’s chin and severed the top of his head from the rest of him. The cap of his head tumbled to the ground. Its yellow eyes blinked, roved, and fell still.

Price raised both arms to the air and made the imitation of a hissing audience.

“And the crowd goes
wild
! Yeah! Carter! Carter! Carter!”

Price paused and scrunched his face. His little baseball charade had reminded him of Nico. He sighed and tossed the burlap sack over his shoulder then struggled to grab the ghoul and drag it by its heel while simultaneously kicking the top of its head like a puck across the blacktop. He came to a rest with his burdens at a grave marked AOIFE PRICE.

“Hey, ma,” he whispered, running his finger along the engraved name.

He sloughed the sack atop the grave, and kicked the ghoul’s body and head top until it was in the same spot. He jammed the head of the spade rigidly into the earth and slouched down against the burlap sack. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out his flask, unscrewed the top, and took a sip.

“
Slainté
,” he muttered

He tippled a few drops onto his fingers and ran it across his mother’s name. As he tipped his head back to take another sip, out of the corner of his eye he spotted a white-clad figure busying itself at a nearby grave. Price leapt to his feet; hand on the shotgun on his side.

“Relax,” a dark, heavy voice intoned.

Cicatrice rose from the grave, a handful of white orchids in his hand. He walked up and proffered them forth. Price reached out and slowly grasped the handle of stems.

“For your mother.”

“Did you just steal these?”

“Well, Price, I would’ve called and had my florist send some around but considering I’m dead and in that sack right there, my options are limited.”

Price thought about it, shrugged, and placed the flowers at the base of his mother’s stone. He lay back down against Cicatrice’s body. Cicatrice walked around to the other side of the grave and lay down opposite him.

“Are you real?”

“What is reality? What is a dream?”

Price grunted.

“That’s very poetic but it’s hardly an answer.”

“I wonder what kind of an answer someone like me could give. ‘Yes, I am real’ or ‘No, I’m not.’ Either way seems somehow disingenuous.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“A hallucination, then?”

“Probably. I suppose that’s what science would say. But then science would also say there’s no such thing as vampires.”

“And the real Cicatrice wouldn’t call himself a vampire.”

“And a hallucination couldn’t pick up a bouquet. So. Here we are.”

Price took another drink. He looked upward. The stars were bright and he felt like he could see them all. The moon practically eclipsed the rest of the sky. It had been so damn long since he had just sat and looked at them. It made him wistful for another time. Back when he had been Nico’s age, maybe. Although who knew if a kid like Nico even looked at the stars anymore. Kids never seemed to look up from their smart phones. Nico was a good kid, though. A good boss, come to think of it.

“How’s your leg?”

Price nodded.

“Interesting that you ask. I’m…on quite a lot of morphine. But once they got all of the wood out and made a little, you know, Tinker Toy log cabin out of it, basically the damage was all nominal. Not like I was going to walk around with a cord of lumber in my leg, but basically I’m all patched up.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Do you really give a shit?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Oh, I’d say the most likely explanation is that I’m here to convince you to give my body back to Idi Han for proper burial.”

Price laughed and shook his head.

“I knew it. I fucking knew it.”

“Knew what? That there’s still a dignity and an honor in death that even the voices in your head would like you to acknowledge?”

“No,” Price said, elongating the short word, “not that. I knew even in death you’d try to get out of this. You’re like a weed that can’t be pulled out, even by the root. I’m not stupid, you know. I know that staking or beheading isn’t the end. It just incapacitates you. A night in your native soil and you’d be back on your feet.”

“Ah,” Cicatrice said, “then you think I’m trying to trick you. So be it. Bury my body in some fake grave you’ve bought just for the chance. While you’re at it, why not jumble up my parts with some dead feral ghoul’s? That’s the dignity befitting the end of the greatest immortal of his age.”

“It’s not fake.”

Price ran his hands through the soil of his mother’s plot, which had overgrown with grass. He pulled out a chunk and let it sift through his hands, disposing of the clod of grass.

“Well, I know your mother’s not buried here. Not really. She was one of our kind at the end.”

“I know.”

He rose. Feeling the shift in the sack that contained his mortal remains, the shade (or whatever) of Cicatrice rose as well. With the spade, Price scratched a small trench around the gravesite.

“She’s ash now. I burned her right here on this very spot. I know this is just a monument to her memory. I know she wasn’t herself at the end. I don’t know what it is about your kind. Idi Han’s not the Idi Han she was before she died. I doubt you’re the same as you were either.”

“I’m not. That’s why Cicatrices choose an immortal name.”

“What was your mortal name?”

“If I am a hallucination, then that’s something I couldn’t possibly know.”

“And if you’re not?”

“If I’m not then it’s something I would never tell.”

Price tapped the spade over and over again into the groove he had just dug. It was an affectation more than anything else.

“My mother – my real mother, I mean, not the thing your kind turned her into – would be proud that I ended your legacy in her name.”

Price flicked his Zippo open and on with a single move.

“Don’t,” Cicatrice said.

Price tossed the lighter onto the burlap sack and watched as the remains of the greatest vampire of his age and some anonymous degenerate ghoul burned up together. He turned to say something witty, but the shade of Cicatrice was gone.

Night Four

One

Deep in the bowels of the Earth, The Executioner’s eyes fluttered.

Food.

She waited. Her gut twisted; an unfamiliar feeling.

Caretaker. I hunger.

She wrapped her head back in her hands and waited. A bony hand, chilly as a frozen lake, wrapped around her shoulder.

Executioner.

She opened her eyes. A deranged creature stood before her, his jaw missing, his skin sallow and nearly sloughing off the bone. He looked like a horror out of time, but there was something familiar about his features, the low cut of his brow, the way his nose turned to the left. Her mind raced across five centuries of slumber, trying to recall the creature’s name. He had once been a bloody jaguar warrior of Tenochtitlan, but his name had fled her entirely.

The Seer is gone.

The Warrior pointed across the way to the Seer’s spot. She was indeed missing. How irritating. How noisome. She was tired. All she wanted to do was slumber, slumber for a thousand years. But now she was hungry, her guts ached, and The Seer was missing.

She shook her head trying to form a picture of The Seer in her mind. She had been a beautiful maiden…hadn’t she? A sorceress who had looked to the entrails and chicken bones to tell what would come. A panic settled in The Executioner’s heart.

She couldn’t recall her own name. She had meted out justice for the Emperor. “His own hand,” he had called her. A tall man, a fat man. What had his name been? Frustrated she moved to bury her head in her hands and was shocked to see that they had turned to bony claws. In horror she reached up to feel her face and found that she, too, had the aspect of a jawless lamprey.

She turned, seething, and spun, as the other eleven approached her from their stations. She recognized each in turn, The Hermit, The Scholar, The Priest, without being able to recall a single name. They all had a single thought on their minds.

Where is The Caretaker?

Has he taken ill?

Perhaps he’s been detained.

We should give him twenty-four hours.

Yes, it is early to panic.

Perhaps we should seek him out.

What if he’s been killed?

What is the world like? Are we free to roam?

I fear the worst.

If the worst has come to pass, we must be prepared to take action.

Their thoughts filled her head, jumbling, jangling, and straining against one another. She felt pulled in eleven different directions, as every strain of thought fought for prominence. Some were more panicked than others, but as they bickered and debated all began to grow agitated.

Silence!

The thousand competing thoughts receded away, and the others sat quietly, waiting for her words.

If The Seer were here, she might tell us what has come to pass. But she is not. If The Caretaker were here, he might tell us what has kept him. But he is not. So we must act as though we have been left to our own devices. Which we have. So I wonder if the apocalypse The Seer foresaw has at last come to pass.

And if it hasn’t?

Then we shall bring it. Besides, I hunger. Let us feast.

Two

The night air was chilly and full of mysteries. The wind battered her hair, turning it into a manta ray fluttering on the jetstream. She had never been higher than the top floor of the Aztec before. Now, standing atop the very peak of the Stratosphere Tower, she felt like a god.

The ball of her right foot was balanced precariously on the spike that terminated the dizzying height of the tower. Her left foot was in free fall. At first she had held her arms out for balance, but that had been a weakness, a mortal conceit. The muscles in the center of her foot were easily strong enough to maintain her balance, even if she were struck by something heavy. And the wind was making its best effort to topple her. It was exhilarating.

“Ahoy, there!”

She looked down. A few rungs below, on a tiny catwalk that seemed more designed for a suicide than a maintenance man, Otto Signari in his resplendent armor stood next to Topan.

“Might I have word with the new matriarch of House Cicatrice?”

She nodded. She raised her arms above her head in imitation of all the times she used to dive into the river back home. With only her foot to push off of a tiny spike, she flung herself up into the air, did three somersaults, and came down with a clang next to Signari.

Upon seeing her countenance, Signari took a step back, nearly knocking into Topan, who stood on his other side. The catwalk was so narrow they couldn’t stand abreast.

“Lily,” he gasped.

“You like it?” she asked, having to remind herself not to finger the facepaint for fear of smudging it. With black paint she had cut out the lower right quadrant of her face, and then replaced the teeth and skullbones with white.

“It’s…quite striking.”

“She’s trying to psych you out. Typical Cicatrice bullshit,” Topan muttered.

He wore a black armband embroidered with the red mark of Cicatrice, identical to her own. She wanted nothing more than to reach out and rip it off, along with the rest of his arm.

“Psych me out? Come now, Topan, there are no opponents here to psych out. We’re just adults having a conversation about the future. Idi Han, I’d be lying if I said I truly mourned the loss of Cicatrice, the way you obviously do. We were often at odds. But I never failed to respect the man, and he was the greatest of us.”

“I suppose that makes you the greatest of us left.”

He nodded.

“Your words, not mine. Nevertheless, you have my sincere condolences. Certainly he could have gone better than to a pack of Inquisition dogs. Better at my sword, at least.” He patted the pommel of his weapon. “There would have been honor in that. And you have my word House Signari will hunt down every one of those Inquisitors. It’s just a small matter, a gesture of goodwill, if you will.”