Darkest Heart (18 page)

Not that Noir had to worry about being hunted down by vampire hunters. Once humans stopped looking for vampires in abandoned houses and deserted churchyards, the undead were free to move about unnoticed. However, the threat from members of the Ruling Class was still very real, and a good portion of Noir's time and energy was spent guarding against attacks from rival Nobles eager to boost their status.

There was any number of scheming enkidu, including that bastard Tenebrae, who were more than eager to eat his heart.

The office intercom buzzed. It was three o'clock in the morning; the bar was closed and it was time to review the night's receipts. Noir mimed opening a lock and the office door swung open of its own accord.

The sight of Lady Madonna's gravid belly caused a prickle of disgust to travel up Noir's spine, but he forced himself to smile at her nonetheless. As loathsome as her condition was to him, she had proven herself extremely useful to him time and again, and that, in the end, was all what truly mattered.

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"What do you have for me, my dear?"

Lady Madonna placed the cash box onto the table for his inspection. "The house made three thousand, counting door and bar receipts."

Noir gave the contents a cursory glance, then pushed it away. "How did the girls do?"

Lady Madonna responded by tossing three wallets, two sets of car keys, and one diamond-studded Rolex onto the desk. Noir quickly thumbed through the plastic, ferreting out the department store and gas cards.

"We'll unload the cars on DeMarco. He's always in the market for rolling steel," Noir said, tossing the gutted wallets into a nearby wastebasket.

Lady Madonna laced her hands across her swollen belly, which he had come to recognize as a sign of ill ease.

Noir turned to face his lieutenant, raising an eyebrow as he spoke. "Was there any trouble tonight?"

"I'm not sure. There was someone here earlier who looked like trouble. A woman. Black leather jacket, jeans, boots. Whatever she was up to, she didn't stay long. She couldn't have been in the club more than five, six minutes, tops."

Noir reached out and touched Ygon's mind with his own. The ogre's thoughts were as thick as compost, but nowhere near as fertile.

Ygon.

The ogre looked around, trying to locate the source of Noir's voice.

I'm in the office, moron!

"Yes, milord?" Ygon vocalized his response in order to form cogent enough thought patterns, otherwise all Noir picked up was pictures and scent patterns. Bring me the surveillance tapes from the main floor.

"As you command, milord."

A few minutes later Ygon entered the office carrying a set of VHS tapes in one hand like they were dominoes. He handed the cassettes to Lady Madonna, who inserted the first one into a video player built into the bookcase. The thirty-two inch video monitor set flush into the wall behind the desk suddenly blinked on. Lady Madonna hit the Play button on the remote control and the silver snow on the screen dissolved into the interior of Dolly Dagger's, as shot from a hidden camera just inside the front door.

The surveillance cameras had not been Noir's idea, but a holdover from the establishment's previous owner. Still, they proved to be a useful bit of technology; especially those cameras mounted behind the mirrors in the VIP rooms.

Lady Madonna pointed to the time code running in the far right side of the screen: twenty after midnight.

Noir leaned forward, steepling his fingers as he watched the playback. There is no way to read auras on videotape, so he had to use other physical cues to decide whether or not the woman was human. Judging from her build and her clothes, it was easy to dismiss her as an off-duty dancer checking out the club before an audition. But there was something in the way she handled herself.... She moved like a woman who knew she was being watched, but not for the usual reasons.

"She's trouble alright," Noir said, nodding thoughtfully.

He followed the trouble as she moved towards the bar, came to a sudden halt, and then turned toward the runway. The camera angle, however, did not allow him to see exactly who or what she was looking at. A couple of seconds later she exited the bar, clearly in pursuit of someone off-camera.

"One thing is for certain; she didn't come alone." Noir snapped his fingers impatiently. "Where's the other surveillance tape?"

Lady Madonna popped out the first tape and fed in a second, fast-forwarding until the timer read 12:20.

This time the camera angle was facing outward from the stage.

"There. There she is." Noir pointed to the trouble crossing into the camera's field of vision, headed towards the bar. She was in the far background, but still visible on the tape. He watched the trouble come to a sudden stop, then turn. The colored lights from the stage flared off her mirrored sunglasses. It was relatively simple to trace her line-of-sight to a man standing at the foot of the runway, staring up at one of the dancers.

Although the lust in the man's eyes was familiar enough, he was not the type of customer the Dagger tended to attract. Noir was tempted to label the stranger a renfield, until he saw a silver belt buckle shaped like skull winking in the lights from the runway. No. Whatever this man in black might be, he wasn't the human servant of a vampire. Still, Noir could not shake the feeling that he recognized the man's face.

That was one of the curses of having existed for nearly ten centuries: after a while, all faces were vaguely

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) familiar.

As the man in black stared at the dancer undulating on the stage, the lust abruptly winked out of his eyes, to be replaced by a look of horrified recognition. The man in black turned and ran out the door, the trouble following on his heels.

Most interesting.

"Who was working the stage during that shift?"

Lady Madonna checked her clipboard. "Gloria was on from midnight to a quarter after one."

It took Noir a minute or two to place the female. He had acquired so many brides over the centuries, their names and faces tended to blur together. He had a clearer memory of her previous owner than he did of her. Then again, that was almost always the case, since the vast majority of his brides once belonged to former business partners foolish enough to betray him. Some would say he was endlessly repeating that final, Oedipal act between his father and himself, but Noir saw it as going with what he knew.

"Have her brought to me. She was recognized tonight - I want to know by whom."

"As you command, milord."

Noir took the remote control from Lady Madonna, rewinding it back to where the trouble turned to face the stage. For some reason, he felt the same thrill of excitement he used to experience when he was on the run from the Inquisition.

Something told him things were about to get interesting again.

Despite the city being a sprawling metropolis, the smell of honeysuckle still somehow perfumed the warm night air. From her spot on the hotel balcony, Sonja saw fireflies clustered like fairy lights in the trees of a nearby park. Normally she didn't get to enjoy such views while she was working, since she usually hunkered down in abandoned warehouses in the less desirable parts of town.

She reached inside her jacket and removed the bottle VéVé had given her, holding it between thumb and forefinger. Although it glowed like a blacklight bulb, it remained cool to the touch. The sight of Judd's captive soul burning with such fierce purity triggered despair within her as deep and profound as first love.

She brought the bottle to her ear and heard an almost imperceptible buzzing, like that of bees sealed in a mason jar. She strained to decipher what, if anything, the sound might mean. Did he know she was there?

Did he know he was free of Malfeis? Did he know he was dead? Did he know anything at all? Or did he exist in a place beyond words; beyond even the thoughts that words represent?

She had loved Judd as she had loved no one else in her existence. Unlike Chaz and Palmer, Judd was neither a psychic nor one of the death groupies drawn to vampires. He was simply a handsome young man who found her attractive and enjoyed her company. Of course, it being around someone like Sonja was not a good thing for someone like Judd. She had tried to warn him off, but part of her enjoyed being mistaken for normal; she had not been able to bring herself to tell him the truth about the things she was capable of, and the Other had turned that weakness against her.

Judd had cared for her, and the Other had repaid his affection by breaking his mind and using his body to sate its base lusts. The Other raped both his body and his soul, and when it was through, his mind was like a broken toy hastily glued back together. For all their physical adaptability, humans have psyches as delicate as Christmas ornaments. It was impossible for them to glimpse the Real World without it warping them in some way. In Judd's case, his ordeal twisted him so that he craved the psychic domination of the Other. So she killed him, dismembered his body and fed it to alligators. It was the only humane thing to do.

For years she had carried the guilt of Judd's fall from grace locked within me. She had believed that the Other's ravaging of his psyche and his flesh was responsible for the damage to his soul. But now it was clear to her that that Judd had gone to Malfeis, seeking her whereabouts. And, in asking the demon where he could find her, he had, innocently and unknowingly, bartered away his soul. The thing she had killed was just a husk. Everything that truly made Judd who he was, his kindness, his empathy, his sense of humor, now lay in the palm of her hand.

She stared at the glow trapped within the tiny bottle and wondered what would happen if she removed the

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) stopper. Would Judd's soul shoot out like a bottle rocket, or ooze out like dry-ice fog? Maybe it wouldn't even realize there was a difference between inside and out, like a tiger raised in captivity that continues to sit in its cage after the door has been thrown wide. Her fingers closed on the stopper, then fell away. She lacked the courage to set him free - at least for now.

Sonja could hear Estes bumping around inside the room. She retired from the balcony to find the door to the honor bar sitting wide open. Miniature bourbon, tequila, whiskey and gin bottles littered the tabletop.

"How do they expect a man to get drunk with these damned things?" Estes snarled, shaking the last few drops of Johnny Walker into a tumbler filled with half-melted ice and Coca-Cola.

"You seem to be making a go of it," she replied. "Oh, and for your information, I don't intend to hold your head while you blow chunks."

Estes fixed her with a drunken glare. "I expect nothing from you - except what we agreed upon."

"That's cool. It's your death trip, man. I'm just along for the ride." She dropped onto the settee and picked up the remote control, pointing it at the color TV nested in the faux armoire. The screen blinked on like a giant's eye, revealing the black and white figure of a man dressed in a baggy suit with a little cloth heart pinned to its breast. The man's face was painted like a clown's, with twists of hair sticking up through a bald wig like a crown of thorns.

"What's this?" Estes asked, his voice slurred.

"He Who Gets Slapped."

Estes frowned at the screen, his brow knitting. "Why isn't there any sound?"

"This was made before films had soundtracks. You know about the old silent movies, don't you?"

"No," he replied flatly, dropping onto the settee beside Sonja. "I've never even been to a real movie theater. I've only watched them on TV and video players."

"That's right - I keep forgetting you were - "

"Raised in an insane asylum?"

"I was going to say `catatonic for ten years,' but, yeah, that's what I meant."

"My knowledge is full of gaps. Blind spots, I guess you could call them. I was taught how to read and write, I was tutored in American history, basic math, biology... but I never went to school. And once I was released from the Institute, well, I was only interested in learning those things that would help me track down vampires. I never experienced growing up, not the way I saw it on television. I didn't go to the movies, didn't hang out after school, didn't read comic books or play video games. I know I should have been doing all those things, because I saw kids my age doing them on TV, but I never got the chance.

How about you? Did you ever get to be a kid?"

"Yeah, I guess so. But I wasn't me back then, I was someone else."

"But you can remember being her, can't you?"

"Enough to hurt."

"Did you play video games?"

"They weren't invented yet." She turned to search his face. "You honestly don't remember anything from before that night?"

Estes shook his head sadly. "Just blurs. They're more like dreams than genuine memories. Every time I try to examine one, it dissolves. It's like trying to catch soap bubbles with your bare hands."

"You resent your childhood being taken away from you."

He took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. "Yeah, I do. Funny, I couldn't bring myself to admit that to myself before now. It always sounded kind of selfish. Avenging my parents seemed so much more noble."

"I understand where you're coming from - I was angry for a very long time. For years I thought I wanted to kill the bastard who made me a vampire because he raped me. But it was more than that. I was angry because my life had been stolen. I'll never get to grow old, have children, or even truly die. All of that was taken away from me. I know there are people out there who would gladly sacrifice everything they own and are to be like me. And all I want is to be able to age, die, and stay dead. And it makes me angry that such simple things have been denied me. I've tried to get a handle on that anger, tried to make myself its master, not the other way around."