Authors: Christine Cody
Bloodlands (27 page)
“Excellent,” the kid said, as if there were no hard feelings between any of them and he was happy to have them at his soiree. “I was hoping I’d get to apologize face-to-face for my misconceptions about your killing my men. I’m grateful for this opportunity to smooth the ground between us.”
As four of Stamp’s crew gathered around, the gasping sound of their FlyShoes stilled. Thanks to the accoutrements, the guys—and even a couple of women—towered over Gabriel and the group as the white hankies went limp in the crew’s grips. The three others who’d arrived in the first rumbler ambled on over, too, minus the FlyShoes.
Zel was tense, her fingers spread low on her hips, just under where Gabriel kngathhe’d stowed her weapons.
“I can speak for us all when I say we, in turn, appreciate the apology, Mr. Stamp,” she said. “Now we can be good neighbors, just as you wanted.”
“Yes, we can.” As Stamp smiled, his fathomless eyes crinkled at the corners. But that smile did more to freeze than a glare would’ve. “And, as neighbors do, we wanted to share what we found sniffing around our place shortly after we discovered Cedric Orville dead a few hours before dawn. We figured you would want to know that this menace was taken care of. You’d warned us about the wildlife, and you were right, so we owe you at least this.”
The whirring sound of the second rumbler got even louder as it chopped over a hill, mangling everything under its speedy path. Sparks shot from the wide wheels as it consumed rocks and bushes.
While it pulled up a few yards from the group, the driver halted the vehicle, and two men alighted from it, their hands full with what, at first, seemed to be a shapeless form.
Zel, Sammy, and the oldster drifted closer to Gabriel.
The crew’s baggage became far more recognizable—a man wearing a black hood. After the crew set his feet on the ground, he stumbled while pulled along, his wrists, covered by the cuffs of his shirt, bound behind his back by some manner of gleaming substance, brassy in the reflection of the solar torches. He was wearing tattered clothing, as if it’d lasted him through a long, hard journey.
A man? Gabriel thought.
He’d
been the scourge of the Badlands?
He’d
been the scourge of the Badlands?
Gabriel’s shoulders hunched as he felt the terrified energy from the others, their adrenaline racing through them and fluttering their heartbeats, the scent of fear and bewilderment in the air.
The crewmen were heading for Stamp with the hooded captive, but the kid held up a hand to stop them about ten yards away. Disdain slashed over his otherwise smooth, young face.
Gabriel couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “That’s a man, not a . . . thing.”
Stamp turned his gaze on Gabriel, but when he talked, it was to his employees.
“Truss him up,” he said, his voice without inflection.
And his heartbeat was the same, Gabriel realized. As flat as a projectile’s course.
The crew seemed tickled to be taking part in such a job. One man wrapped more brasslike cable around the hooded one’s pants-shrouded ankles, and the captive tried to fight as other crew members jumped over to spike three long stakes into the ground, which they crossed at the top. Another guy wearing elevated FlyShoes was up high enough to lash the poles together.
Then they turned the hooded man upside down and handed him up, ankles first, so that the employee with the FlyShoes could tie the captive’s cords to the apex of the poles.
An execution. Wasn’t that what Sammy had said?
Gabriel leaned a little closer to Stamp. Not near enough to let the kid sense a lack of scent about him or to feel the absence of warmth from his skin. Just enough to whisper in a rough voice.
“Is this necessary?”
At Gabriel’s proximity, there was a bump in Stamp’s heartbeat. Otherwise, he remained unruffled, only offering another smile.
Cool customer, Gabriel thought
Then the kid made a small gesture, and one of the crew stripped the hood off the captive, revealing long, stringy black hair that hung to the ground, swarthy skin, and a muzzle clamped over the lower part of his face.
“Jesus,” Zel whispered.
Gabriel flinched at the curse—or maybe it was a plea—but he couldn’t look away.
As the oldster had said, Stamp did have a point to make, but Gabriel wasn’t sure how much it had to do with keeping the Badlands safe. Maybe it had more to do with how Stamp treated those who needed taming . . . like his neighbors.
The kid nodded, and one of the crew, a guy with an old-fashioned miner’s hat and a blond braid winding down his back, took out what looked to be a brass dagger.
“This
thing
,” Stamp said, “is what’s been sneaking around these parts.”
thing
,” Stamp said, “is what’s been sneaking around these parts.”
With a grin, the braided man pressed the brass blade to the captive’s forehead, and as flesh steamed, the victim convulsed, shutting his eyes tight, flopping around as the muzzle cut off his cry.
The crew member yanked the dagger away, but not before the oldster came to step in front of Zel, who’d groaned while lurching forward, as if she intended to stop this torture session. Sammy helped hold her back.
“Now open that monster’s eyes,” Stamp said to his crewmen.
The employees enthusiastically forced the captive’s lids open so that his eyes were big and glaring.
Eyes that were a spangled black—as startling and bright and endless as the old star-ridden sky.
Gabriel’s mind raced. What was this man? Better yet . . . what was this monster Stamp had caught?
And why hadn’t Gabriel been able to identify it right away?
At Stamp’s next gesture, the blade-wielding crew member pressed the dagger to the captive’s neck, creating another sickening hiss. The other thugs laughed, as if this were a prelude to some live carnerotica.
Stamp’s low voice scraped over Gabriel. “Do you know what this piece of work is, Mr. Gabriel?”
“I’m not . . . sure.”
The kid paused, as if deciding whether Gabriel was lying. Then he said, “A demon.”
Gabriel tried not to respond. He’d never knowingly met a demon before. Shouldn’t he have some kind of violent instinctual reaction to or sympathy for a fellow monster . . . or was it all too true that the other kinds were too hard to identify?
Worse yet, should he be glad it’d been caught because it was Gabriel’s rival in the race to survive off the remaining humans in this area of the fractured earth? Should he
want
his competitor’s death?
want
his competitor’s death?
He wasn’t sure if vampires were supposed to be allies or enemies with other preters. According to the vague pamphlet his creator had given him, vampires had long ago nursed a preferred avoidance for anything else supernatural. But the rules had changed during the scramble for survival. Every creature did its best to keep to itself out of necessity, never exposing what it was so that it might test any theories of who were friends and who were foes.
As the torture continued, Stamp put his hands on his hips again, as if taking in a sporting event like mash baseball or killfight. “When one of my me glad itt sight of this loser prowling around Cedric Orville’s gutted body last night, he thought he saw it changing shape, from man to red cloud and then back again.”
As the demon flailed under the brass knife once more, Gabriel strived to appear untouched by the creature’s pain. It’d been out there, somewhere, last night, maybe even yards away from Gabriel and Chaplin, and he’d never even known it.
Wild things, he thought. What else did the New Badlands host? No wonder the community stayed close to home.
He managed to respond to Stamp. “A shapeshifting demon.”
“Yes, but it’s not shifting now; brass can bind and harm this one. And also?” Stamp’s words got graveled in obvious bitterness. “It’s clearly a man-eater.”
And it’d been feasting on Stamp’s crew.
The kid added, “The employee who spied it thought fast enough to take a jetpack closer to the hubs, where she was able to secure Nets reception. She did some quick research about ways to handle situations like this, then persuaded a bunch of fellow employees to catch it, with each of them trying different methods. Fortunately, one of the boys was slinging brass, and it worked to bind and disable this scourge. I didn’t even know about the hunt until they were done.” Stamp smiled. “Now, that’s a crew a boss can hold some pride in.”
Zel was breathing hard, a hand clamped over her mouth. The oldster and Sammy just seemed frozen.
Questions rained down on Gabriel. The community had existed out here for years and had to have known a creature of this order was near. Had they been doing something to appease this demon, to keep it from coming to their home?
Gabriel searched his mind for any evidence of that, but he came up with nothing.
As the crew kept at the creature with the brass blade, one of the men pulled down his arm glove and accessed his personal computer screen, reading out loud from it. He must’ve uploaded the information into his own database.
The words weren’t familiar to Gabriel, but his best guess was that they were Hindi, and they made the captive squirm even more.
Expelling the demon from its shell, Gabriel thought.
He shut his mind to the sight, thinking that this torture could’ve been his own if he hadn’t been so determined not to flaunt his vampire powers, even on the night he’d arrived here and Stamp’s men had roughed him up.
As the crew member’s words got louder, faster, the demon stiffened, then . . .
Much to Gabriel’s horror, the captive’s body burst open, letting loose with a group of ten screeching black heads, all with long necks and mouths that snapped at the air, then began tearing into each other. While the crewman raised his voice at the peak of his incantation, the heads whirled into one screaming mass of red, then ripped away from the prone host body, hovering in the air, then seeming to melt into a flood of gore as it fell to the ground, seeping into the dirt until there was nothing.
In the aftermath, all went still. No one spoke. Not until the crew started whooping and high-fiving each other, taking kicks and swipes at the decimated mass of flesh and bone dripping upside down from the poles.
Gabriel turned away, expecting the blood from this body that the demon had possessed to tweak his appetite, though it was from a dead man whose blood wold be no good for him.
But. . .
He smelled it—the polluted blood of an urban hubite. And the sustenance didn’t pull at him as it usually did.
The peace he’d shared with Mariah. Her imprint was still alive in him, wasn’t it? And it’d strengthened Gabriel against himself, even temporarily. That had to be it.
He straightened, looking Stamp in the eye, confident that his monster was pushed so far down that the kid wouldn’t detect it. And when Stamp just smiled, then looked away to watch his men kick around like giddy idiots, Gabriel knew he was on firm ground.
Then Zel burst out from behind the oldster and Sammy, and Gabriel caught her before she got to Stamp.
“You fiend,” she yelled. “That was—”
“Justice,” the kid said, sending her a collected, and even somewhat puzzled, look. “And isn’t justice beautifully simple in a place like this?”
Maybe, as a cop, she’d seen too many bad guys like Stamp, and she knew when to back away. Whatever the reason, she put distance between her and the kid as she headed for Mariah’s entrance.
“There’s a place for people like you,” Zel said, sounding different, as if some vital portion of her had flipped.
“Believe me,” Stamp answered as she opened the domain door, “I’ve already been there.”
Sammy followed her, but the oldster went only halfway in.
“Our squabble has been settled, I take it,” he said.
The glimmer in the kid’s black-hole eyes sent chills over Gabriel.
“Just being a good neighbor,” Stamp said, “keeping us all informed and safe. You can count on cordiality from now on.”
And then, as Gabriel settled himself at the entrance, too, the kid walked away, toward a rumbler, signaling to his men, making it unnecessary for the Text-fluent crowd to read his silent intentions of leaving.
They followed their boss, deserting the carcass of the former demon in what Gabriel took to be a dire warning for anything else that might decide to go hunting in the night.
20
Mariah
A
ll I could do was watch the visz to see that the vehicles and men wearing FlyShoes left the area before Gabriel shut the ladder door behind him, then descended. Everyone surrounded him, just as numb as I was, even before he got to the ground.
ll I could do was watch the visz to see that the vehicles and men wearing FlyShoes left the area before Gabriel shut the ladder door behind him, then descended. Everyone surrounded him, just as numb as I was, even before he got to the ground.
“That wasn’t just about Stamp clearing out a killer,” Sammy said. “That was about showing
us
what he’s made of. He’s declared himself at the top of the chain.”
us
what he’s made of. He’s declared himself at the top of the chain.”
“Not only that,” the oldster said. “I get the feeling that above all, Stamp would love to see us run. He plans ahead, that boy, and I’m sure he’s got his sights set on what we’ve claimed here, namely water.”
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