On a Darkling Plain (43 page)

Durrell repressed a shiver. “I am, too,” he said.

THIRTY-ONEtTHE INVASION

It is well that war is so terrible; else we would grow
too
fond of it.

-— Robert E. Lee

Standing on the grass among his restless troops, waiting for the last few minutes to crawl by, Elliott looked at the night sky and thought of Mary.

When he’d confronted Gunter in front of the assembled Kindred in Roger’s house, and when he and Rosalita had traveled to Ohio to retrieve the Fouquet painting, he hadn’t known for a fact that he was going to wind up in mortal combat. This time he did. He could feel Death’s door standing open, inviting him to enter. Promising him surcease from loneliness, sorrow and guilt; and perhaps, if the universe was kinder than it seemed, even reunion with his love.

The prospect of perishing in battle tempted him, but not as much as he might have expected. He realized that, at bottom, he wanted to
win
this war, end the harassment of Sarasota and restore his sire to health. He wanted to stake Sebastian Durrell and his thugs through their treacherous hearts and leave them lying outdoors to burn in the sun. The recognition made him feel vaguely uncomfortable with himself. He supposed he’d grown accustomed to the old, wretched Elliott, sunk in misery and self-pity. He didn’t quite know what to make of the angry, iron-willed stranger who’d supplanted him.    -■

Dressed in loose-fitting black, his Herculean chest crisscrossed with bandoliers and his eyes glowing an eerie red, Angus looked at his watch. “The park closed fifteen minutes ago,” he said. “The last tourists should be pulling out of the parking lot by now.”

“Indeed they should,” Elliott said, shifting his grip on his Armalite AR-18 assault rifle. Evoking his charismatic abilities, he turned and regarded his followers. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time. The enemy we’re about to engage poisoned our prince, murdered our friends, destroyed our treasures and tried to drive us from our domain. Let’s make the bastards pay!” He pivoted and sprinted into the darkness. Silent and fast as swooping hawks, his companions dashed after him.

Elliott supposed that his companions really hadn’t needed his little speech to hearten them. They were, after all, vampires, not mortals. The abuse they’d endured, and the Beast lurking in every one of their souls, would ensure that they were avid for the fight. But he’d felt an urge to address them, so he had.

The vampires crossed one service road after another. Eventually raw Florida scrub land, coarse saw grass and palmetto bushes gave way to landscaping: smooth, verdant lawns; artificial lakes with gushing fountains; flower beds; topiary figures of dragons, damsels in conical hats, and knights on horseback. Then Camelot itself appeared, first as a smudge of glow against the eastern sky, then as a fantastic collection of illuminated turrets and battlements. Perhaps amused by the phony medieval architecture, Angus snorted. As the Kindred approachea the outer wall a few of Gunter’s Malkavians, who’d moved up earlier, relying on their powers of concealment to avoid detection, slipped out of the shadows to join them.

Elliott raised his hand to halt his onrushing troops, then took out his cellular phone and began making contact with the leaders of the other three advance teams. When he’d verified that everyone had moved up on schedule, that Camelot was surrounded on all four sides, he gave the order to go in.

The Toreador elder and his companions slunk up to the eight-foot wall. It was concrete, but textured and painted to look as if it had been constructed of blocks of rough-hewn granite. Scrambling over it without difficulty, the Kindred found themselves in a lane of obnoxiously quaint wooden structures with shops, including an ice- cream stand and a salon where tourists could be photographed in mock medieval clothing, occupying the ground floors. Evidently the scene was supposed to resemble an English town of King Arthur’s mythic age.    .

The cool air still smelled of sweat and sunscreen and all the greasy and sugary snacks the day’s visitors had consumed. Some of the street lights, fashioned to resemble flickering oil lanterns, were still burning, but the majority had been switched off. Elliott neither saw nor heard anything stirring in the shadows ahead.

“Let’s press on,” he said. “Remember, we’re looking for a way into the service tunnels. That’s where the Tremere base is.”

The vampires glided forward. The street of shops led them into an open square. A double Ferris wheel towered on their right and a row of oaks bordered by a low brick wall — the edge of the Enchanted Forest of Arden, according to a sign — rose before them. A few pieces of litter, Coca-Cola cups and shiny foil hot-dog wrappers, lay on the cobblestones.

Angus stiffened. Looking around, Elliott saw that the justicar was staring at the trash. “What’s wrong?” the Toreador asked.

“No clean-up crews,” Angus replied harshly. “After the tourists go home, workers should come out to get the park ready for the next day. We haven’t seen any.”

“That doesn’t necessarily prove anything.” Pausing, Elliott sharpened his hearing to the utmost. “But I don’t
hear
them, either. I think their bosses gave them all the night off. Which can only mean that somehow Durrell was expecting us.”

He turned, scanning the landscape anew for any sign of hostile activity. Even so, he almost missed it: it wasn’t his superhuman vision or hearing but sheer intuition that prompted him to look up at one of the gondolas hanging from the Ferris wheel. Just in time to see the man inside it aiming a rocket launcher in his direction.

Elliott jerked up his rifle and fired. The sniper lurched back against the side of the gondola. His long tube of a weapon flew from his hands and, tumbling end over end, plummeted toward the ground.

Long before it landed, Elliott was pivoting, looking for other attackers. He found them. Suddenly dark figures loomed in windows around the square. Fortunately, the actor’s comrades saw them too and were already starting to shoot at them.

Elliott ran. Leaping oyer the low wall encircling the stand of trees, he hunkered down behind the barrier and grabbed his phone. He had a second contingent of Kindred and ghouls waiting in reserve; those who, lacking both superhuman speed and powers of invisibility, might have had difficulty sneaking up on Camelot. Now that taking the enemy by surprise was no longer a consideration, it was time to call them in. As he dialed, stray bullets streaked over his head.

TH»RTY-TWO:THE REUNION

He travels fastest who travels alone.

— Proverb

For a long time, Dan couldn’t think. His head was too full of the terrible beauty floating before his eyes. Too full of pain. As the intolerable spectacle ripped at his mind, he thrashed, and his invisible bonds tightened repeatedly, so suddenly and powerfully that in other circumstances he might have worried about them cutting him or cracking his bones. Now, however, fascinated and tormented by the hyperspatial matrix, he was barely conscious of the coils.

Eventually, however, his anguished psyche groped its way back toward rational cognition. It wasn’t that the uncanny spectacle before him had become any easier to bear. Rather, he supposed, his brain was making a last-ditch effort to escape the torture through intellect and ingenuity before fleeing into howling dementia.

There
had
to be a way out of this. If he could just close his eyes, or turn his head! He tried for perhaps the thousandth time, once again to no avail. Obsessively, against his will, his perception fumbled at the lace-work of red and blue light, trying to comprehend its structure. A burst of agony blazed through his skull, and his self-awareness, his fragile hold on sanity, began to crumble.

“No!” he croaked. Exerting the last of his willpower, he fought to hang on. To stay focused on the prospect of escape. And somehow he succeeded, at least for the moment.

Maybe if he could get out of his bonds, he could walk or crawl backward from the matrix, loosening its hold on him with distance. Struggling to ignore his torment, to think beyond it, he considered the invisible coils. And after a while he realized something.

His bonds constricted whenever he shifted more than a fraction of an inch. But then they loosened up again. Their violent resistance prevented him from breaking them or squirming out of them rapidly, but it might not keep him from worming his way out of the end of the coil slowly, one tiny movement at a time.

He flexed his legs and dug his heels into the peculiar, only half-felt surface beneath him, straining to move with infinite care. Another flare of anguish transformed the maneuver into a spastic lurch. The bonds tightened.

No matter how many times he made the attempt, the result was always the same. The pain robbed him of the fine motor control his plan required. Unless he could somehow block out the crippling spectacle burning at the center of his vision, he was, in a real sense, going to die here, crumbling into the psychotic, cringing puppet that Tithonys required for his magical assault on Melpomene.

Alas, there seemed to be way no way to blot out the matrix. But what, he wondered abruptly, if he managed to understand it? To perceive it clearly? Tithonys obviously did, and with the enhanced vision Melpomene’s vitae had given him, maybe Dan could do the same. Then, perhaps, the construct would lose its hypnotic fascination, or at least stop hurting him.

Up until now, though he hadn’t been able to look away from it, he’d been straining to do so, flinching away from the torture. If he was to have any hope of seeing it whole, he’d have to do exactly the opposite. Steeling himself, he sharpened his vision to the utmost.

A blast of pain even more devastating than those he’d already experienced wracked him. He fought to ignore it, to keep peering, analyzing, trying to grasp the relationships of the luminous planes and angles hanging in the air. Another spasm wracked him, and then another. He felt as if someone were chopping him with an ax, one that cut his flesh and spirit both.

Despite himself, he felt his resolve beginning to fail. But then something changed inside his mind, like a lamp coming on in a darkened room. The glowing matrix altered without altering, reminding him of the optical illusions that had interested him as a kid, like the drawing that was a pretty young girl or a hook-nosed old woman, depending on how you looked at it.

As he grasped the true shape of the hyperspatial construct, his pain vanished. Now only the matrix’s loveliness remained, more compelling than ever because he recognized the five-dimensional symmetry that produced it. He gazed at it raptly, drinking it in, until it finally released him.

His mouth tasted of his own blood, and his lower lip stung. He realized that at some point during his ordeal he’d unconsciously extended his fangs and cut himself. Scowling at the discomfort, petty though it was compared to what he’d just undergone, he tried again to inch his way out of his restraints.

The process seemed to take a long time. Periodically he moved too aggressively, and the coils constricted. Telling himself repeatedly to take it easy, praying that Tithonys wouldn’t return for a while yet, he eventually managed to work his upper body free. He dug his fingers into the muddy floor for leverage and yanked his legs out with one

off^^ARKUNff'pTffN

convulsive pull. The coil made a metallic clashing sound as it snapped shut on itself.

Sprawled in the muck, Dan lifted his head and looked around. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The surface on which he’d been lying was invisible, too. Several feet away, and out of his visual range until this moment, his wallet, keys, .38 and the little antique gun he’d stolen from Wyatt’s haven were hanging above the floor as if resting on an unseen shelf. Apparently Tithonys’ magic was so potent that he casually hardened empty air to serve as furniture, or else cancelled the force of gravity.

Dan tried to stand, and a wave of dizziness swept over him. A pang of Hunger cramped his belly. His exertions had left him weak and famished again. He scrambled to the chubby woman, still sprawled where Tithonys had dumped her, and pressed his fingers against her carotid artery.

To his surprised delight, he found a pulse. He flung himself on top of her and buried his fangs in her neck.

He meant to spare her life, but
she
was weak, too, from having been bled once already. As he guzzled her vitae, desire and need overwhelmed him. He couldn’t stop drinking until she shuddered and an ugly, rattling sound came out of her throat.

Refreshed and slightly ashamed of his murderous gluttony, his torn tip tingling as it healed, he sprang to his feet, grabbed his possessions off the invisible ledge, and slunk toward one of the openings in the wall. There were two sets of footprints on the floor: Tithonys’ bare ones and others left by someone wearing shoes. With any luck, one of them would lead him out of the earthen tunnels. From that point, he hoped, he shouldn’t have too much trouble getting out of Camelot. He only prayed that the Methuselah’s magical H-bomb, or whatever the hell it was going to be, wouldn’t go off until he was clear.

And then, much to his surprise, a twinge of, if not guilt, at least uneasiness, lanced through his resolve. Did he
really
want to run away?

He scowled at his own idiocy. Of
course
he wanted to book. If he tried to interfere with Tithonys’ “sacrifice,” that would mean that he was still doing Melpomene’s dirty work, and the very thought of that enraged him. He didn’t care if Durrell’s Tremere and Sinclair’s Toreador got killed. Both sides had abused him in one way or another. He didn’t care about kine getting massacred, either; hell, he’d just drained one himself. Even if he
had
given a damn about stopping Tithonys, he was realistic enough to comprehend that he was nowhere near powerful enough to do it alone, and since every other Kindred and ghoul in the park regarded him as an enemy, who could he get to help him?

And yet—

The man, the human, Dan had once been
would
have cared about the impending slaughter. He suspected that the undead creature he’d become might have also, if Melpomene hadn’t tampered with his psyche. If he truly wanted to defy the Methuselah’s efforts to control and exploit him, to be his own person again, maybe he needed to try to rekindle the empathy and the principles she’d extinguished in him, by behaving as if he still possessed them. And besides, suicidally reckless though it might be, he yearned to get even with Tithonys for torturing him.