Hunter of the Dead (19 page)

The last man who had promised to look after her had turned out to be a rapist, a lunatic, and a monster. Not just a human monster, but a monster of myth and legend, of seafoam and cloud. How was Cicatrice any different from Topan? Who knew if he was even worse?

Perhaps I should learn to look after myself.

“Father Cicatrice ordered you to take me to this encampment of yours.”

Scav jammed his hands into his vest pockets and turned around.

“You don’t want that. Just trust me. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. We could go on the open road, the way me and my sire did. Old Connor, he used to tell me he hopped train cars during the Depression. Made meals out of stewbums like they were candy. Now I wasn’t sired until the ‘80s, but that was a hell of a time, too. We’ll have to get you new clothes of course.”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“What’s right with them?”

If I mean to look after myself…this is my chance.

A smile split Scav’s face in two. He was ready to run. Idi Han sighed and his smile melted away.

“Whatever he is to me…whatever he is to you…Cicatrice entrusted us with this task. He can’t go among the fixers. He’s too well known. And he’s probably their target. Once you’ve shown me this place, I don’t care what you do. But you will fulfill your promise at least.”

Scavatelli reached up and gouged eight great furrows into his own face with his fingernails, laying bare muscle, sinew, and meat. Idi Han stepped back, tensing herself for battle, but when he began knocking at his own forehead she realized it was just a nervous tick. His horrible wounds were already healing over. The Long Gift of immortality in full effect.

“I warned you. I tried to warn you. Whenever you think of me, remember: I tried to warn you.”

“I won’t think of you.”

Scav turned and headed back toward the city. He led her to an overpass. As the cars and trucks rolled by overhead, two concrete tunnels led down ominously into the depths below the neon city.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked.

She nodded. She had been paying attention to the street signs.

“Thank you. Good luck.”

She grasped at the garland of garlic bulbs around her neck to make sure it was still there. Cicatrice had warned her not to remove it and not to show off her skills if it could be avoided. She had nearly laughed in his face then. Her skills mostly amounted to cooking rice and yoking oxen without getting kicked.

A hiss like a tea kettle sounded.

“Ah, hell,” Scav said, “I can’t let you go down there. But you owe me.”

She cast him a sidelong glance as he re-appeared at her side.

“For remaining true to your word?”

“For hanging around The Hunter of the Dead’s hunting grounds, how about that?”

They passed into the labyrinth. At first she wanted to look for light, but in a moment she remembered she didn’t need any. Her eyes could pick out everything in the dark as well as in the light – even the colors of the graffiti.

A few mortals rose to stop them, but upon seeing Scav they returned to their business. Sections of the sewers and tunnels had been laid out like apartments. Each had a coffin, sometimes two, or else a platform of some type covered with dirt and a burial shroud. Mortals busied themselves cooking, cleaning, and looking after the effects of their immortal masters, but Idi Han could spot none of them.

“Where is everybody?”

“Out fixing. Or seeing the town. Or…just about anything but hanging out in a dank sewer. Come on, I’ll take you to my encampment.”

Probably looking for Cicatrice, in other words.

As they continued through the maze, Idi Han took care to note the twists and turns they took. She was supposed to be doing reconnaissance, after all. It quickly became apparent from the habitations that people had been living here for many, many years.

“How long ago did you say that you all descended on this place?”

“A few weeks. Maybe a month. The lepress – I mean, Damiana, she’s the Signari elder here in Las Vegas – put out a call for fixers. As many fixers as could be found. She said there was work in Las Vegas for the next hundred years.”

A few weeks? People have been living here for years.

She wondered briefly how many of the mortals living here had pledged their allegiance to the fixers when they arrived…and how many had been brought.

They soon reached Scav’s encampment. It was separated from the rest of the habitations by a few shower curtains. Wooden pallets lined the ground, and Idi Han could tell by the water stains that they were necessary to avoid flooding.

She counted six sleeping areas. A mortal, her eyes sunken and her face pale and drawn – Hedrox’s features, writ small – rose with some difficulty from a small cookpot over a camp stove.

“Welcome back, Master Italo,” she practically whispered.

“Thanks,” Scav replied, his eyes darting all over the place.

“Are you hungry, master?”

“Famished,” Scav replied.

The disciple seemed to notice Idi Han for the first time. Her wits were slow, her senses dulled. The labyrinth of scars up and down her arms and neck suggested she had given a great deal of blood to her immortal masters.

“Oh, but you have a guest,” the mortal said, “Guests should eat first. Mistress?”

The woman bowed deeply before Idi Han, and the razor blade that dangled on a piece of cord around her neck hung in the air, an offering. She glanced at Scav, who seemed visibly disappointed that the cultist had approached her first. She glanced at the woman.

She had rushed out of Cicatrice’s manse without feeding. He had placed a great emphasis on not wasting another moment now that the plot against him was fully revealed. She could feel the hunger in the pit of her stomach, not as strong as the first night when she had mindlessly feasted on her father, but aching, nonetheless.

Now, though, there was something different about the mortal presenting itself to her like a trussed fowl. She could sense, like candles flickering in the night, points of great power in the woman – arteries, she realized, and the heart strongest of all. The power flowed through her like sap through a tree. It was so close when she closed her eyes she could practically see it.

“I’m sorry,” Scav said, ripping her out of her reverie, “You’re not still a newborn are you? Do you need me to show you how to…”

“No,” Idi Han said, raising her hand, “I can handle it.”

She realized with surprise that her hand was trembling as she took the razor. She cut her palm severely, and if blood had still flowed through her veins, she would have spilled a gallon on the palletized sewer floor.

She took more care as she nicked the neck of the woman prostrating herself before her. With her supernatural senses, she had struck true, and the blood that bubbled up from the cut was rich with the essence that the immortals sustained themselves with.

Idi Han pressed her lips to the woman’s neck, as though kissing a lover, and almost instantly stopped. She didn’t taste the energy the way she had tasted the flavors of food, but something about it seemed off. It “smelled” strange. Her eyes rolled open and she looked at Scav.

He was watching her.

She pretended to suckle at the woman’s neck, corking the actual flow of liquid with the flat part of her tongue. As she pretended to drink and drink, Scav’s smile gave the game away. Somehow the woman’s essence had been poisoned or drugged, whether through conventional means or supernatural, Idi Han hadn’t the breadth of knowledge to guess. Perhaps a human riddled by disease or addiction was not safe to drink from. Or perhaps, as garlic hampered the immortal “nose” other ordinary spices and tinctures had drugging effects.

She smacked her lips audibly, and wondered briefly if it was customary to thank the bloodbag for her contribution. Knowing how Cicatrice had treated Hedrox, she guessed not.

“Thank you, Scav,” she said, “I was famished.”

He nodded, and she watched carefully as he took his own pretend drink.

“You may leave us,” Scav said, and the cultist nodded and disappeared.

“Well,” Idi Han said, “I’ve got to get back and report what I know. And you’ve got to…anyway, thanks for the snack.”

She started to walk past him, but he put an unwelcome hand on her chest.

“Hold on.” Scav glanced off into the distance as though he saw something she could not. But nothing was there. Just expectation. “Let me show you something.”

He reached into his pocket and drew out a beaded necklace with a Christian crucifix at the end. He didn’t look at it, but pointed it towards her. Idi Han hissed in an unrecognized pain.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“Faith,” he said, “That woman you drank from was clergy once. Her life energy will make you slow and weak for a time.”

“You drugged me.”

“In effect, yes. I’m still a believer myself. It’s rare, almost unheard of amongst our kind. But I was raised Catholic and I can’t shed myself of it. That’s why I can make this work on you.”

His own hand was sizzling where he grasped the beads of the necklace. As he moved towards her, Idi Han felt the pain rise in her gorge. So this was what Topan and Cicatrice had alluded to. The pain of encountering faith. Faith in a divine or greater power. Faith, the ultimate antidote to the desire to live forever as an immortal, channeled through a relic or totem. She backed away from him as the invisible black flames licked her body.

“I’m sorry, Idi Han. I tried to convince you to leave, remember?”

“Why are you doing this?”

He closed his eyes and bit his lip.

“My brother...he put me up to it. But now I’m starting to think there might be another way. A way out for me. Cicatrice’s young, untempered heir is too great a prize to pass up. I’ve killed Cashley. Now I’ve captured you. Father Otto will have to take me seriously. Have to reward me. I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to turn out this way. But now we’ve been seen here. My brother and his goons will be on their way.”

Idi Han plunged her arm forward, as though dousing it in a bucket of ice. She grabbed his hand, snapped his wrist, and turned the idol back on him. He hissed in pain as her own fog of doubt lifted, and she clenched his hand tighter and tighter even as he tried to drop the holy symbol.

“I’m sorry you took me for a fool,” she said, staring into his eyes as he bit back at his own supernatural bile, “But I’ve known you meant to betray me ever since we reached this place.”

“You never drank…”

She shook her head mournfully from side to side.

Idi Han clenched her fist, and felt Scav’s bones crunch to shards beneath her grip. He gasped, a gesture unusual at best for an immortal. She reached out with her other hand and gripped his shoulder blade, feeling the sting of the holy symbol as her arm passed the invisible wave of its path. She yanked, and with a single pull his arm came fully out of its socket, and she grasped his severed limb in her hand.

The holy icon was pulverized to plastic fiber. Its power to harm vanished with the separation from the faith of its wielder. The meat of his severed limb was perversely, bleakly white, devoid of the blood which normally gave muscle its healthy red color.

Idi Han cracked Scavatelli across the face with his own severed bicep. He stumbled forward into the pallets, scattering coffins and spilling grave dirt, unable to brace himself without his missing limb. He rolled away from, her, half covered in dirt now.

“Wait! Let me explain!”

She brought the arm down with such force over his crown that the forearm and the bicep split asunder. The shoulder haunch, or what was left of it, flew off into the sewers. The shattered ulna was now showing through what was left of his forearm. She drove the splintered bone down into his eye, lifted it out, checked to see if his lips were still moving, and then drove it in again and again until his mouth fell dumb. It was odd to cut so deep and draw no blood.

She rose to her feet, dropped the shattered chunk of Scav’s arm by the rest of his body, and hurried back out into the bright blinking lights of Vegas.

Four

“The Crusades began. History as we record it looks at the Crusades as an attempt to recapture the Holy Land. But at least some texts – which you’ll find roundly mocked if acknowledged at all in conventional academia – speak of the attempt to bring low the Necropolis. The European kingdoms united, in a fashion, and sent an army of knights to march on the grand city of the vampires.”

Kasprzak flipped a page. The picture was a familiar one, the medieval attempt to explain an army when the idea of numbers and units was a bit sketchy even in the mind of a fairly well-educated monk. Many banners, no doubt of great significance to a medieval audience, waved amongst the assembled forces, but all bore a red cross on their shields. At the head of the army was a clergyman in either transparent or white vestments holding aloft a silver cross. She tapped him.

“This happy customer here is, ah, unnamed in the texts, but we refer to him as the White Bishop. The Crusaders didn’t know it, but the crosses painted on their shields, and silver crucifix the bishop carried were some of their most potent weapons. It’s said that the horses refused to enter the shadow of the Necropolis, and the Crusade was almost turned back before it began. But the White Bishop plunged in, unafraid, and the assembled knights were so shamed by a simple clergyman’s bravery, that they dismounted and followed.”

The professor turned the page, which portrayed an army of vampires emerging from the Necropolis, headed by Lily the Half-Faced.

“The armies clashed. Neither side could seem to gain the advantage until Lily the Half-Faced met the White Bishop in single combat. Lily was a vampire far beyond anything the Bishop had ever encountered before. But Lily had also never encountered a man of such singular faith before. The two clashed for hours but neither could gain the advantage.”

“An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object,” Nico said.

Kasprzak looked up and smiled.

“Exactly. And then, as so often is the case, a quirk of fate turned the tide of history. A knight’s sword was knocked out of his hands, flew through the air, and knocked the crucifix out of the White Bishop’s hands. Lily was able to push through and drop the Bishop to his back. But the Bishop wore a scapular. Lily recoiled in horror from the holy object and the Bishop rose to deliver the
coup de grace
. But a sword suddenly plunged through the Bishop’s back and out his front.”