Hunter of the Dead (38 page)

Nico ran his hand across his head, presumably to wipe away sweat, but it came away bloody.

“Wow, that was easy.”

“Fuck,” Price said, angrily throwing his machete to the ground with a clang.

“Fuck, indeed,” Kasprzak agreed, nodding.

“What? What am I missing? We made it. Didn’t we?”

“You’re missing the big picture, kid,” Price said. “We made it, yes. But those things are loose in the city now. The Damned are dangerous but if they’re turning people then now the city’s going to start getting clogged with newly-turned vampires and ghouls. And they’ll all be afflicted by the hunger.”

“Usually a vampire chooses his get – his offspring – with great care and watches over them carefully,” Kasprzak explicated, “but these vampires haven’t learned the code. They’ll go wild and feast on every person in sight. With The Damned loose we could be looking at the vampire population to approach near-epidemic levels. And with the newborns left unchecked the slaughter will be historic.”

“Then the city is…” Nico started.

“Fucked.”

Five

A thump came at Damiana’s door.

“Go away,” Sephera said loudly, “we’re not to be disturbed.”

The second thump smashed the massive doors to splinters, like an icicle shattering. Damiana rose from her seat at the head of the table, her hand tucked reflexively into her chest like a chicken wing. Sephera dropped to her knees behind the table, one of the ridiculous ray guns the Teslans always seemed to be working on in her hands and leveled at the intruder.

“It’s best that you see me now.”

As the smoke and debris cleared, a diminutive figure resolved in the doorway. Damiana didn’t recognize her, but had a suspicion whom she was.

“Dramatics like this aren’t necessary, Matriarch,” Damiana said.

“Funny,” Idi Han said as she stepped over the threshold, “It wasn’t more than a few days ago that your patriarch and that woman there pointing a weapon at me did much the same to intrude on my manse. Unbidden. Unwanted.”

“Sephera,” Damiana said quietly, “would you kindly lower whatever that thing is?”

Sighing, the Teslan rose from her defensive stance and lowered the ray gun, but didn’t toss it away.

“Mother Idi Han,” Damiana said, “I think you’ll find that I am not my old patriarch.”

The tiny woman stepped more ambitiously into the dining room. She ran her finger along the back of a chair and examined the mechanism for moving meals around the table. Finally she settled on lowering her hands in a clump at the small of her back.

“No, I guess you’re not. I assume you’re the one everyone calls ‘the lepress.’ May I ask your real name?”

“Damiana.”

“Is that your birth name or one you acquired after being brought across?”

“It is a false name. We Signaris can choose whether to keep our old names or not.”

“I was never given such a choice. But I think I understand now why.”

“Yes. It’s a tradition in your House. There is much to recommend tradition. And the code.”

Idi Han smiled. It was a cold, mirthless smile.

“I suppose you’re referring to the old canard ‘immortals do not kill immortals?’” Idi Han put her hands on the back of a chair and squeezed, splintering the wood into forms shaped like her hands. “You have nothing to fear on that front from me, Damiana.”

“I wish you would have extended that same courtesy to my patriarch.”

Damiana limped over to a shelf on the wall and retrieved Father Otto’s sword. She tossed it forcefully onto the table.

“Kings don’t kill kings, isn’t that right?” Idi Han said. “And yet your patriarch arranged to kill mine.”

“We can hardly be held responsible for the actions of the mortal Inquisitors,” Sephera grunted.

“Nevertheless, I consider it a score settled, not a dangling thread.”

“And what about the five hundred immortals from every House that Cicatrice ordered killed?” Sephera grumbled, “Are those a settled score as well?”

“I can hardly be held responsible for the actions of the mortal Inquisitors.”

“Cute. Very cute.”

“Enough, Sephera,” Damiana said. “What does bring you to my manse this evening, Mother Idi Han?”

“Well, Mother Damiana…” Idi Han waited to see if she would protest the title. Damiana simply raised her hand, where she had managed to jam the obsidian ring of stewardship onto her deformed thumb. “…as you’ve probably guessed my business is not exactly settled this evening.”

“The city is in flames,” Sephera said, “and the Damned are on the wing. There’ll be no cover-up this time. Not even Cicatrice at the height of his power could’ve covered this up. An entire mortal city destroyed. And you’re worried about what exactly? Settling old scores?”

“Topan,” Damiana said.

“Yes,” Idi Han agreed.

Damiana struggled into a seat and folded her arms as best she could.

“If we were still doing business in the old way I’d make a bunch of protestations about why you came to me looking for your old sire and what he’s worth to you and so on and so forth and we would probably dance about for the rest of the night. But I was never as partial to humiliating repartee as Father Otto was. The truth is we all know Topan is here, hiding, a lost princeling who thinks the Signaris are going to crown him as a puppet patriarch. So let’s say we dispense with all of that.”

“Fine with me,” Idi Han agreed.

“The question is, how do you go forward? As Sephera pointed out, the old way of doing things is over. We can’t hide in the shadows any more. You’ve seen to that, haven’t you?”

“Has it occurred to you that perhaps that’s for the best?”

Damiana reached out and placed her hand on the pommel of Father Otto’s sword.

“Father Otto and Cicatrice hated each other as no two men in history ever have. And yet they saw eye-to-eye on this: the code, the vast web of misdirection, secrecy, hiding. Now our whole way of life is endangered. People will be looking for us. Not just the Inquisition. Everyone now.”

“Perhaps we should have revealed ourselves long ago.”

“Madness,” Sephera said.

“I agree the world is ours to inherit,” Damiana said, “but caution and prudence have served us for almost a thousand years.”

Idi Han took a seat.

“I feel like I’m being lectured. And I know that’s probably not what’s going on here. Because if we were trading lectures, I would probably say that the twelve Houses that turned against us upended seven hundred years of tradition and…what was it? Caution and prudence? All scrabbling for short-term gain. That you all tested the resolve of House Cicatrice and found it not wanting. That you all brought a plague down upon yourselves. So I know that we’re not going to lecture each other. I think we’re just going to come to a new way of moving forward.”

Damiana raised Father Otto’s sword so that the blade was before her nose.

“I swear by the Sword of Signari whatever hostilities, whatever mistrust once existed between our Houses…is at a conclusion.”

They both looked to Sephera. She nodded.

“The rest of the council will not pursue war without House Signari on our side.”

“Then it seems we have peace…if you wish it.”

“I do wish it. In exchange for one small indulgence.”

“Topan?”

“Yes.”

“You would’ve been better off asking for something else. I have no love for that piece of shit. He’s hiding in his guest chambers. Down the hall, past Father Otto’s. You’ll recognize Father Otto’s.”

Idi Han rose.

“Good evening.”

***

Idi Han twisted the door handle to the patriarch’s opulent visiting quarters, easily breaking the lock. She stepped inside and saw Topan was already crouching in the open windowframe.

“Idi Han,” he whispered.

“Were you planning to leave?”

He glanced out the window at Las Vegas below. Damiana’s manse was actually the top three floors of the Hotel Citroën, billed as luxury suites booked for years in advance to the public.

“I suppose if you’re here – unmolested, as it seems – my hostess has grown tired of me.”

“You could put it that way.”

He sighed.

“Not a lot of places left for me to run, then, are there?”

She held out her hand.

“Come inside, Topan.”

He glanced out the window again.

“If you run, I’ll find a way to make it worse.”

He looked at her.

“I’m not so sure there’s anything worse than what you’re going to do to me.”

“I’d find a way.”

He stepped back in and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Where will it be?”

“There’s a pit beneath the Aztec. I’ll probably drop you in there.”

“Ah, yes. El Dorado. The Aztec temple. You know, he never let me see it. He said one day when I was ready it would be mine.”

“But you were never ready.”

He smashed his fist into his other hand.

“Do you have any idea what that’s like? Pure mediocrity? To be held back by your own lack of potential? Nothing I could ever do would ever make me special like you. Not even finding you.”

“There comes a time when you either excel or you don’t.”

“I thought I had excelled once. I brokered the truce between us and the Inquisition. That led to half a century of House Cicatrice expanding without any meaningful opposition. You would think that would be enough for him to trust me. But then twenty years ago he called me back in said I was to go back to being his apprentice. Demoted. And then ten years ago he released me again and said he didn’t care what I did.”

He looked up at her, his eyes shining with the look of a broken dog or a child that had never been praised. She sat down and put her hand in his hair, and gently lowered his head to her lap.

“I know what you want, Topan. I know what you need. I understand the closure you’re looking for.”

“You do?” he whispered.

She nodded, though he couldn’t see that. She stroked his hair like a pet’s.

“You want me to say that I understand all that you did. That in the end, I forgive you, even if Cicatrice never could. That he never forgave you for being mediocre, that he saw in you all of his own worst impulses and that that wasn’t fair and that that wasn’t you and that you deserve to be judged on your own merits. And that you understand the punishment you’re about to receive, but that this is the closure you need first.”

He nodded. She patted his head one last time then wrapped her fingers around his throat. She crushed every vertebra in his neck with a single sharp snap and pressed his protesting face into her lap, like a deranged mother smothering her child.

“Well I’m not going to give any of that to you. I grant you nothing. Not peace of mind. Not absolution. Not even forgiveness. You were a failure. You were judged a failure by a man who never showed you anything but leniency. And worse than that, you were a traitor.”

Topan struggled, slapping at her as best he could with his arms, but she ignored the blows as though they were mosquito stings.

“I don’t forgive you for what you did to me. You were not special for discovering me. You were like a conquistador, claiming a land of plenty for his own as though he had conjured it out of thin air. I was always there. I was always me. You? You aren’t special because of me.

“And you are going to suffer the worst fate there is. I’m going to crucify you on a pair of I-beams and bronze you in liquid metal. And then I’m going to toss your still-living body into a bottomless pit to be forgotten and to suffer forever. And here above you’ll be erased from the history books. Your name will be scratched out of all records. All anyone will know is that Cicatrice was succeeded by Idi Han, and no one stood between them. All of that and you won’t even have the solace of being told I forgive you or that Cicatrice never stopped loving you. Because I don’t. And he did.”

Finally she let him up. He looked into her face, his mind racing and fevered.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Yes,” she agreed, “You are sorry.”

Six

Price pushed open the door to Cicatrice’s conference room.

“Idi Han,” he said in a sing-song voice, leading the way into the room with his shotgun instead of his face.

He peeked around the door. The room was a nightmarescape of inside-out people but the one he was looking for was missing.

“Damn,” he said, turning back, “We should decide whether we’re going to hunker down in here or…”

Price stopped dead in his tracks. Nico was on his knees. Behind him, Kasprzak held two pistols, one leveled at Price and one jammed in the back of Nico’s head.

“Your blade, Carter.”

Price looked down at his machete. Briefly, he considered whether tossing it would manage to connect with the professor, but that was all theatrics and he’d never been any good at that sort of thing. He let it slip out of his fingers and clatter to the ground.

“My blade but not my gun?”

Kasprzak grunted out something akin to a laugh.

“Use it if you want.”

There was not much chance of Nico not getting caught in the blast. And anyway, Price suddenly had a nagging suspicion that the weapon wouldn’t do much good against his old friend anyway. He dropped it into his leg holster.

“You’re one of them.”

Kasprzak nodded. She reached up and opened her blouse to reveal a plate of armor lying flat across her breast. She lifted it to show her mark of Cicatrice.

“Have been for a long time.”

“How long?”

“A long time. You know Cicatrice liked to know things. And that was always the impossibility about you damned Inquisitors. Can’t be bribed, can’t be bought. So damned idealistic. You’re easy to play, though. And now the whole house of cards is coming tumbling down.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She smiled wickedly.

“I’ve got files back in my office on just about every Inquisitor in the country. It’s taken nearly a century. But for what it’s worth, you were right, Carter. If you’d stuck to the cell system, you would’ve been nearly impossible to hunt down. Bonaparte’s aggression made for a string I can pull until the whole sweater unfurls. Now that The Damned are loose, the Inquisition is the last thing standing between us and total global dominance. Time for us to step out of the shadows.”