On a Darkling Plain (9 page)

Philo surged to his feet. His hand, tattooed with a picture of a hornet, shot inside his voluminous black leather coat, obviously reaching for a weapon. Baring her fangs, Alice leaped up from her seat and crouched to spring at him.

Moving at superhuman speed, Elliott lunged between the would-be combatants. “No!” he cried. “This is a conference, not a brawl. Save your aggression for our foes!”

Angry as she was, but accustomed to obeying her clan elders, Alice backed down at once. Shuddering on the brink of a true frenzy, Philo glared at Elliott, willing him to stand aside. Elliott could feel the other vampire’s coercive power pounding at his mind like a hammer.

Straining to resist the domination and to project his own subtler influence, Elliott gave the Brujah an amused, confident smile. After a few seconds, the younger Kindred began to feel what the Toreador elder wanted him to feel: namely, that Elliott was manifestly far more formidable than he was. Retracting his fangs, Philo averted his gaze.

The Brujah were a proud warrior clan. Elliott didn’t want any of them to go away from the meeting feeling that they’d been humiliated, particularly now that the domain needed their loyal support so desperately. He gripped the younger vampire’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said warmly. “Thank you for your forbearance.” He turned to Alice. “Please apologize at once.”

She stared at him, flabbergasted. “What? Why?” “Because you insulted him and all the rest of our friends who don’t share our lineage. Sarasota is not a Toreador domain. It belongs in equal measure to every Kindred whose fealty our prince has chosen to accept. If your sire never taught you as much, I’m certain Roger did.”

The redhead made a face. “All right,” she muttered, “I’m sorry.”

Philo shrugged contemptuously and dropped back into his chair.

Elliott felt himself relax. If he hadn’t defused the situation, in another moment the entire room might have been fighting. Vampires were like that; frenzy could leap from one to the next like wildfire, and the Brujah in particular were notorious for their hair-triggers.

The actor returned to the front of the room and surveyed his audience. “All right,” he said, “I understand that those of you belonging to other clans don’t see the urgency of protecting the art. I hope that you in turn comprehend that the matter is of compelling importance to us. Accordingly, I propose that we Toreador will retrieve the art ourselves, without anyone else’s help, while also assisting in the resolution of the domain’s common problems. Is that acceptable to everyone?”

Judy sighed. “We’d rather have you guys working on the other issues full-time,” she said, “but yeah, I guess that’s a

reasonable compromise.”

Eiliott turned to Gunter. “Do you agree?” he asked. Gunter shrugged. “I suppose. I doubt that your people would be much use on the front lines anyway. Especially it you were pining for your baubles.”

“Do you actually know where all the art is?” Judy said to Elliott.

“We know where a lot of it is,” the actor replied, “and we can find the rest. Sky wasn’t speaking figuratively: a portion of our collective soul
does
reside in it, and it calls to us. A couple of us can find it psychically. A more interesting question is, how are our enemies striking at the art so unerringly? How do
they
know what we created, and where it wound up?”

“Someone has been watching us and preparing this strike for a long time,” Sky said soberly, his silvery, vitae-stained handkerchief dangling from his hand.

“I think so, too,” Elliott replied with a grim smile. “Imagine how upset they’re going to be when we make the plan blow up in their faces.”

“Here’s a tactical question for you,” Judy said. “You can’t retrieve the art without visiting other domains. Are you going to ask the permission of their princes?”

“I suppose we must,” said Sky. “The Fifth Tradition requires it.” Some of the assembled Brujah hooted derisively. The Toreador poet blinked as if puzzled by their reaction, or as if he were in danger of weeping again.

“The problem is,” Elliott said, “that we don’t know who the enemy is. Any prince we contact could be an adversary who’ll use his knowledge of our movements against us.” “On the other hand,” said Judy, scratching absently at one of the long-healed welts on her shoulder, “if they catch you guys on their turf without permission, there could be hell to pay.”

“Unless someone objects” — Elliott glanced around the room, but none of his fellow Toreador called out or raised a hand — “I think we’ll risk it. It’s a big world, and Kindred are thin on the ground. We really should be able to sneak in and out of the average city without being noticed.”

Judy nodded approvingly. “That’s what a Brujah would do.” She turned toward the crowd. “Okay, kids, it all sounds like a plan to me. Let’s figure out who’s going to tackle what job. Why don’t the Toreador go off in a corner and decide how to get the art, and the rest of us will start working out everything else.”

“That sounds all right,” said Elliott. He and his clanmates gathered at one end of the chamber, beside a display case full of gray stone and gleaming gold artifacts plundered from a pharaoh’s tomb.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” said Karen nervously. “I hope I do all right.”

“Sure you will,” said Glenn, a sculptor with a salt-and-pepper beard and red clay under his fingernails. “If you can steal a mortal’s blood, you can certainly steal an object from his house. It’ll be fun!”

Rosalita, one of Roger’s brood, a short, bosomy, curly-haired Hispanic singer wearing a necklace of tiny jade skulls, gave Elliott a diffident tap on the shoulder. “If we’re going in teams,” she murmured, “I’d like to go with you.”

Elliott opened his mouth to explain that that wouldn’t be possible, then realized that he did indeed have to go.

When he’d entered the room, his fellow undead had been on the brink of panic. Through common sense, oratorical technique and a dash of his preternatural stage presence, he’d calmed them down and gotten them organized. So far, so good, but now they needed him to lead by example. If he withdrew into his accustomed seclusion instead of helping to further the strategy that he himself had advocated, everyone else was likely to lose faith in it.

One
mission,
he thought grimly.
I’ll run one errand, to get them started, hut then somebody else will have to run the show. God damn you, Lazio.

FIVE?
FIRST BLOOD

To
save your world you asked this man to die:

Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

— W. H. Auden, “Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier”

A cold winter wind moaned through the streets of downtown Columbus, Ohio, where, according to a Toreador sensitive, one of the clan treasures awaited. The chill didn’t bother Elliott but, remembering how uncomfortable it might have made him when he was mortal, he had to repress a reflexive shiver anyway. Striding along at his side with a rolled-up piece of canvas under her arm, shooting nervous glances in all directions, Rosalita clutched the collar of her lightweight topcoat shut.

The homeless were everywhere, wrapped in blankets of newspaper, huddled twitching, moaning and shivering in doorways, on grates, or inside cardboard boxes, but at three in the morning no one else was about. No one but the ranks of sooty gargoyles peering down from the upper stories of all the office buildings.

For a moment, Elliott felt a thrill of excitement. It had been a long time since he’d embarked on a clandestine, potentially dangerous errand. Once upon a time he would have relished the challenge.

Then he remembered that on his previous adventures it had been willowy, blond, blue-eyed Mary pacing at his side, and his instant of pleasure died in a spasm of grief.

Rosalita clutched his arm. “I think that man is staring at us,” she murmured.

Striving to shrug off his misery, Elliott looked where his companion was looking, at a hulking man with a long, tangled beard sitting with his back against a graffiti-scarred brick wall. Sharpening his senses, the Toreador elder heard the thump of the mortal’s heart and the rasp of his breathing, smelled his fetid body odor and saw the red, brown and silver aura flickering around him.

“He may be watching us,” Elliott conceded, “and if so, judging from the crimson in his aura, he doesn’t like us very much. But he’s human, and by all indications a genuine homeless person, so I doubt that he poses any threat.”

“Then maybe it
wasn't
him that I sensed,” Rosalita said, peering about again.

Elliott felt impatient with her, yet sympathetic as well. She was young and had never done this kind of thing before. Sheltered in Roger’s hitherto placid domain, she’d probably thought that being a vampire was
easy,
a never-ending round of feeding on unwitting or even acquiescent mortals, making music, and attending parties. She had no real concept of the perils that stalked her world of perpetual night, of the ordeals a Kindred must sometimes endure to preserve his endless life.

“Please,” he told her, smiling confidently, exerting his charismatic powers, “calm down. I’ve done this kind of thing many times before. I promise you that we’ll get through it.” Rosalita smiled ruefully. “I know we will, with you calling the shots. I’m sorry I’m so jumpy.”

“It’s all right,” Elliott said. “You should have seen how timid I was the first time I got caught up in a struggle among Kindred.” The two undead walked past a bookstore and what, before it went out of business, had been a boutique. Perhaps Elliott had caught a mild case of his companion’s jitters, because he imagined that one of the bald, naked mannequins in the window turned its head slightly when they went by. He repressed the impulse to look back and see if it really had.

“Here we are,” Rosalita said.

The door of the office building they intended to enter had an electronic lock requiring both a magnetized plastic key card and the proper combination to open. Earlier that night Elliott had intercepted a secretary who’d been working late as she exited the place. He’d charmed her, spirited her away to a nearby bar for a drink, teased the combination out of her without her quite realizing that he’d done so, and stolen the key from her handbag. Now he inserted the card in the proper slot and entered the numbers she’d given him on the keypad. One of the four heavy plate-glass doors clicked open, and he and Rosalita slipped into the lobby.

In the middle of the marble foyer was a semicircular desk with a rack of black-and-white video monitors linked to the building’s security cameras situated behind it. Elliott had expected a guard to be stationed here, watching the screens and signing after-hours visitors in and out. He’d been prepared to talk his way past the mortal or subdue him if necessary. But, though the monitors were live, no one was on duty.

“Nobody home,” Rosalita said, frowning. “That’s funny.”

“Perhaps the guard’s patrolling,” Elliott said, “or using the restroom, or catching a nap somewhere. In any case, it’s one fewer obstacle for us to worry about, provided we can make it in and out before he comes back.”

As they hurried to the elevators, their footsteps tapping on the slick, newly polished floor, Elliott studied the images on the monitors. All they showed him were vacant expanses of dimly lit corridor.

The bronze-colored elevator door opened as soon as Rosalita pushed the call button, and the two vampires stepped aboard. The Latin singer flinched when the panels rumbled shut again. Elliott suspected that, edgy as she was, being inside the car made her feel trapped.

The elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor. The doors opened. Emerging, Elliott smelled a hint of rot in the air. Frowning, he sniffed, but the odor was gone. Probably he’d caught the stink of someone’s unwanted lunch rotting in a wastebasket.

The two Kindred skulked down the shadowy hall to one of the doors. The gilt lettering on the frosted-glass window read NICOLL, HAWKE, SOMMERS & ANTCZAK, ATTORNE YS AT LAW. According to Elliott’s information, the firm was one of the most prosperous law partnerships in the Midwest, and Nicoll, the senior partner, had a painting by Thomas Fouquet, a brilliant nineteenth-century landscape artist and a Toreador protege, hanging on his office wall to prove it.

The door had a mechanical lock. “Now,” said Elliott, removing a black leather satchel of locksmith’s tools from the pocket of his long cashmere overcoat, “we’ll find out if I still remember what my burglar tutors taught me.” He selected a gleaming pick, inserted it in the keyhole, and set to work.

He found that he hadn’t lost the knack. His keen sense of touch still made opening the average lock a snap. He defeated this one so quickly that an observer watching from a distance might well have believed that he’d opened it with a key. He twisted the brass knob and swung the door open, revealing a receptionist’s desk and a waiting room. A vase of roses, ghostly white in the gloom, sat on a table, suffusing the air with their perfume.    -

“Come on,” he said, entering. Rosalita took a last wary look up and down the corridor, then followed him.

He led her on into the interior of the building, past an open area occupied by file cabinets, desks with computers on them, a photocopier, piled boxes of office supplies, and a kitchenette. “Do you know where you’re going?” Rosalita whispered.

“I think so,” Elliott replied. “I’d give twenty-to-one that Nicoll has the corner office, and, unless my sense of direction is on the fritz, that’s this one.” He twisted a doorknob; this time the door was unlocked. Beyond it was a large room with a row of windows running along the back and right-hand walls. A handful of the slumbering city’s lights glowed in the darkness beyond the glass. On the left-hand wall, behind Nicoll’s drawerless, glass-topped table of a desk and between floor-to-ceiling shelves of leather-bound law books, hung Fouquet’s painting. The canvas depicted a view of a weathered covered bridge spanning a peaceful river, with oaks and maples, their leaves ablaze with autumn, growing all around. Rosalita, who, like Elliott, could see the picture clearly despite the dimness, gasped at its beauty.