The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (67 page)

A Perfect Plan

We descended into the
pit of vampires, buzzing with tongues embroiled in gossip and intrigue. Huitzilli
and Zhi flanked Evelina as her guard, as the highest ranked of the ill-sorted
army, a troop sealed with spit and blood. The rest were surprisingly loyal,
unwilling to challenge their new commander. It could have been the head of their
former leader stuck on a spike at Evelina’s side, or perhaps it was the sight
of me behind her, but they raised their fists and pumped the air, no longer chanting
“Novitiate,” but giving her a new title. The small Venetian brood started to chant
“Dogaressa” from the gore stained decks, crowning her ruler of their
renaissance republic. Their praise rushed through the crowd with haste, as
others joined the chant.

Evelina silenced the crowd
with a swift cut of her talons, swiping the air and scolding the few wild ones
too amped up at the sight of the Empress’s split head. She gave Huitzilli the
order, his diving down into the pit and grabbing the neck of one, pulling the
other up by his hair. Both vampires welcomed the Hummingbird’s mercy after he
tossed them across the deck without removing either of their heads. He bellowed
out a laugh and returned to Evelina’s side where she stood as Athena among the
immortals.

As a progeny of mine,
she wielded her influence like one well aware of her greatness. She made me
recall Shenmé in the beginning, powerful and electric, and no doubt vulnerable
too.

“Fall in line or fall
out,” she shouted from the upper deck, looking down on her bloody band. Her
voice boomed over the crowd and they obeyed. “We are no longer in the business
of blood trade, but shall conquer land instead.”

The vampires cheered
their Dogaressa, as she raised the spike with Cixi’s head and shook the face
over the crowd. The fickle brood showed no sympathy for the dragoness, as none rose
in ire against their new leader.

But I had misjudged a
crew member, one I had not read well enough to know her loyalty to the Empress
ran deep. Youlan harbored revenge for Cixi’s death, keeping her secret hidden from
Peter. Even he did not suspect her capable of such an act, to abandon ship for
the shore once she found her Empress’s headless body on the deck of her cabin.

But she did not go
alone.

Muriel sent Veor to
pull me from Evelina’s inauguration, and I slipped out without notice, reading
the urgency on his face.

“Youlan has taken
Lucia,” Veor said, his mouth taut and eyes wild.

“When?”

“She was gone when
Muriel went in to feed her,” he said. “The one sitting with her is—headless.”

I did not waste time
inspecting the cabin for clues, but rose up on deck to catch the scent of the
child whose thread of being came from me. I could track her to the ends of the
world if that is where she had gone.

They had escaped the
ship after the sun reached its peak in the sky. Evelina could not know, for she
would brave the fire to chase after me. I turned to Veor and told him he must
keep her onboard.

“She will fight me,”
he said.

“You may count on
Peter to help.”

I was gone before he
could object, shunning Muriel’s offer of blood. Nothing could keep me from the
chase, and I rushed headlong into the daylight, soaring off the deck, through
the open air like an arrow slung from a bow. I hit the water without a splash,
torpedoing to the shore. Youlan had used a boat to sail to land, but they had long
since moored the vessel in the harbor. I pressed on despite their lead, using intuition
as my guide.

I have not said how
Lucia left an impression on me, as her mother had. One cannot see the seed of
one’s own being without acknowledging the deep attachment it forges. Feral and
brooding, my desire for Lucia was as innate as my hunger for her mother, but
blood was not the thing. Her humanity was the part of her for which I longed, and
the sealant Byron had forced on us.

For several days, when
first onboard Cixi’s ship, I would slip into the cabin where the sleeping child
lay. The menial girl who tended to her did nothing to appease my senses, for
she was as artificial as the others, but the child shook my core and I did not
know the cause. Once I discovered the truth of her parentage, I reminisced
about those times alone in the beginning when the connection was magnetic,
though still breakable. Now, she is my daughter and like me in every way. Then,
she was Evelina’s child and the only other source of healthy blood.

I swam straight and scaled
the rocky ledge to the flat land of the Nortrak. The shore along the coast was
snowbound, but I could not feel the cold. The entire eastern shore had become stony
and stalactitic beneath its blanket of ice, snow covering the land since the
last rupture. The corroded terrain tried to block my ascent, but I lifted my
corse up and over the ledge as easily as I had scaled any other rock face.

I recall the icy breeze
on my face, as the sun fought to warm my tips. Winter in full swing, the chill
on the air could freeze the hardest skin. But struggle pushed me forward, urging
me on to find the one. My child’s aura penetrated the coldness and drew me to
her despite our distance. I lapped up the cold as it drew a map to reach her.

Hunger and fatigue
did not flag me, as they had once upon a time. I had energy enough to turn the
sun around the earth, and I embraced the pounding of my heart, for it cried out
exhilarated by the hunt. Not finding her was impossible, and I pressed on. Youlan
would bring her to the facility, where she would go unharmed, at least in the
beginning. As a female human, she was valuable. Youlan could not have known she
was mine, and neither could Laszlo Arros. I convinced myself Youlan saw her as
a way to spite Evelina for having killed her Empress. I could not know she had
intended to steal the child all along, that Laszlo Arros had sent her to the
ship with that sole mission.

I rushed to the place
where she had docked the skiff, a spot as deserted as the harbor in Genoa. The vessel
from the cargo ship was easy to make, and the vehicle that picked them up left
tracks in the snow. Difficult terrain to cross, it was nothing like the one
from which I had come. The North had seen snow for months, even in summer. Nature
had conquered the seasons, surrendering the northern hemisphere to the cold,
and reserving the summer solstice for the lower half of the globe.

My boots crushed the
ice, as I chased the ghost vehicle, witnessing no signs of the plague, no
bloodless, nothing at all. Wind whipped past my ears, deafening me to the set
of electronic eyes tailing me. The remote-control drone watched me from above, leading
me to the only markers in sight, twin towers with necks stuck out of the snow
like javelins launched from giants above with unmeasured force, plunged into
the ground below. No other signs—martial, or otherwise—indicated
the sunken lair.

The device that
buzzed at my head was just one example of the sphere into which I would be
inducted. The facility maintained post-modernity in a newly antiquated world.
An electronic force field lay above the entire grounds like a blanket thrown
overtop, making escape impossible. The only reason the volt tongues had not
licked me as I approached was because they awaited me inside, allowing me to walk
freely past the safeguard. I went to the first tower, the only one with the
door.

“Step back.” A
computerized command broke up the sound of the wind. “Step forward,” it said.

I stepped within a
few inches of the door, and the metal seemed to melt down, liquid silver gathering
at my feet.

“Step in.” I stepped
back, but the quicksilver defied hardening in the snow, and crawled toward me. “Step
in.”

I made a large stride
forward and planted my foot in the liquid metal. My boot sunk down into the
pool like quicksand. My other leg followed, committed now to the plunge. I
would have held my breath had I felt myself sink down through the liquid, but
time skipped and I went from having my legs in quicksilver to standing in the
subterranean lair. It defied magic, for it was physics from another sphere, or
perhaps simply a mental trip between realities.

I found myself in a
room, alone, the wind and cold left outside.

“Are you brave
enough?” The voice that greeted me was the same one as above, but without its
computerized filter. I did not recognize the speaker, but believed it could
only be Laszlo Arros. Androgynous, innocuous and unfamiliar, his voice could
have been one I heard in my head.

The room in which I
stood was aseptic, like a laboratory illuminated with blinding fluorescent
lights, humming in the silence. Above me, hanging from the ceiling, was a black
screen carrying a single dot across it from one side to the next. The ball of
pixels pinged back and forth from left to right to a rhythm I had created. The
beat mimicked the sound I made when I drummed on the metal pole of the radio tower
on Cixi’s ship, as I sat with Veor at sunrise. The signal had been sent out and
received, calling me home without my knowing it.

 
Laszlo Arros spoke again, “I have been waiting
for this, but I am delaying the pleasure of showing you my face.”

“You do not need to
reveal yourself to me,” I said. “I am here for one thing.”

“Your spawn.”

“Give me the child.”

“No.”

I had no leverage and
was completely at his mercy, unsure if I was not in another dimension of time.
Laszlo Arros, like me, had a hold on physics.

“She has no place
here,” I said. “I will stay in exchange for her safe return to her mother.”

“You are trying to
negotiate with me?”

“You made a deal with
the Empress,” I said. “Why not me?”

“What you offer I already
possess.”

“The child cannot
come to harm.”

“I would never dream
of harming her,” Laszlo Arros said. “She is a miracle, wouldn’t you agree?”

“She belongs with me.”

“Perhaps you have a
fair claim,” he said, “but she is not safe with you.”

“Better than with
anyone else.”

“Right,” he said.
“You are so much more.”

“What do you want?”

“Simply put, what is
owed to me.”

“Which is what?”

“Everything that is
yours,” Laszlo Arros said.

“Who are you?”

“Didn’t Byron tell
you?”

“Show yourself.”

“I don’t believe you
are ready to see me yet.”

“Why?”

“I am too perfect.”

“Do I know you?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you?”

“I am you.”

I grew frustrated
talking to the air around me, competing with the sound of the beating monitor.
I stepped forward and smashed the screen with my fist. The room went silent, as
Laszlo Arros disappeared with the blip on the monitor.

“Come back,” I yelled.
“I am not done with you.”

The pressure of the chamber
in which I stood suddenly changed, as though my head were placed in a vise, my
brain squeezed with the swirling of a boa, wrapping its body about synapses.
The pain worsened and I dropped to the ground, shutting my eyes for lack of relief.
The agony thrust me back to the bier, back to where my human body withstood the
pain of death and my torturous rebirth.

“You have died.” Thetis’s
voice was unmistakable. “Foolish boy, you have died.”

Sightless and
disoriented, I fumbled in my blindness, unable to open my eyes to see the invocation
that had thrust me back in time. The smell of burnt flesh, crisping redwoods, and
charred skin was unmistakable.

“Rise,” my mother shouted,
her voice ripping through the ash. “Rise and rise and be risen.”

I submitted to her
orders and lugged my corpse up to a standing position, on two wobbly legs like a
cub learning to use his hinds.

“Come to me,” she
said.

I stumbled and
crawled to her voice in my blindness, relying on my mother’s will to guide me. “Come
to me,” she said over and over.

But I could not reach
her. Or she kept moving away. My struggle to catch her was long, endless and a
day. When light finally found my eyes, when I could use more than sound and
smell, I witnessed my rebirth, my regeneration, my surroundings. She had pulled
me from the wreckage of my pyre, scorched and fevered, and fed me the blood of
her ancestors, forcing new life on me.

“How?” I begged the darkness
to show me the way.

Thetis was only there
in mind, a memory so real it forced my body back in time to witness the thing I
had only ever undergone, not seen. She spoke her story into my ear, telling me
how she had rescued my shade from the field of asphodel.

“I came as the great
Odysseus,” she said, “taking his form and shape, leading his men to where they
could beach their ships on the shore of the outermost ocean, the Cimmerian land
of mist and fog. We came to the mouth of the dead, to the place where the Sybil
had directed me, and I dug a pit with my sword. I poured out libations of honey
and milk and sweet wine from Aeolian groves, and then we sacrificed the finest
heifer and the great black ram for the soothsayer. I cut the wether’s throat
over the pit, and the black blood pooled at a great speed. With my supplication
to the shifter gods, my ancestors, more blood was added to the pool, the blood
of the savior, the only blood that could bring you back, that of the greatest
shapeshifter. He spilled his blood as sacrifice for your genesis.”