Hunter of the Dead (29 page)

“Go on, then,” Price grunted, “Kill me. I’m obviously outmatched. At least show me the respect of not toying with me any longer.”

“Respect? I have no respect for you. No respect for your profession. No respect for your person. You’re a joke. The Inquisition’s always been a joke. I tolerate it because it’s no more dangerous than tolerating a Bigfoot society or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Who cares if mortals want to waste their time believing they make a difference?

“But you, Carter Price, you in particular I have no respect for. I am an individual who understands his power and understands the power of organizing. But you have always been so certain that you alone could take on the world. Your friends who tried to organize? They were right. They might make a difference someday. Cowboys like you will always end up like this.”

“I should’ve clarified, Scar. Toy with me, torture me, whatever you want, but for the love of Christ, enough with the speechifying. Go ahead. Suck me dry.”

Price stuck his neck out as best he could towards the vampire.

“Death? That’d be a mercy. Don’t you know, Price, the Inquisitor always becomes the strongest immortal? I was once like you.”

Cicatrice rolled up his sleeve and held up his wrist, which was covered by a gauze wrap. He ripped away the gauze and bared his wrist, complete with the mark of the Inquisition. The tattoo bubbled and burned, as though it were constantly torturing him.

“It’s burning you. My God, you’ve got a little faith left in you, Scar.”

“It is the constant reminder of my human weakness. I will bear this pain eternally as a constant reminder of what I once was. Of what I despise now. Of you.”

“I find it hard to believe you were ever anything like me.”

“Believe it. I was the first of your kind. I founded the Inquisition. But then my matriarch taught me what it was to be immortal. Now I will grant you the same gift as punishment. You will learn what it means to be a scorpion.”

Cicatrice pressed his fingers to Price’s scalp.

Three

Mesoamerica…

Before the Europeans came to Tenochtitlan, the natives worshipped immortals, whom they revered as gods. They sacrificed the hearts of virgins in elaborate ceremonies designed to keep the sun rising each morning. In reality only the highest caste of priests knew that their sacrifices were really being made to immortals.

Then the conquistadors arrived.

Cortes and his men arrived on the shores of what is now called Mexico. Cortes ordered all of his ships burnt so there could be no retreat. The only hope for his men was to conquer an empire. And with the help of gunpowder, horses, and treacherous native politics, they succeeded.

The Aztec priests were shot, mid-way through their sacrifices to appease the gods. The pyramids where the immortals resided to receive their sacrifices were reconsecrated in the name of a carpenter from Judea, far across the sea.

Fourteen of the most powerful immortals from across the empire managed to escape the wholesale slaughter of Cortes and his men. They went north, far north to a place beyond the reach of the Aztecs, beyond the reach even of men, to a profane, unholy place.

The pyramid there was a reversal of the Aztec ones. It descended down into the ground, and terminated only at a vast abyss. Some believed this was the dark source of the power of the immortals. Others believed they had crawled up out of Hell and this was the spot where they had emerged. Whatever the truth of the tales they told, this was the place where the immortals had decided to sleep, and wait for Cortes’s reign of terror to recede. When the Spanish left, they were to be awakened. One among the immortals had the gift of sight, and predicted the Spanish would not leave until civilization was in the throes of a grand apocalypse.

The least of the immortals was tasked to be a caretaker. He would stay awake, watching over the others as they slept, communing in the dark with ancient evils and gathering their strength for a time when they intended to take back these shores. The thirteen slept, and the last waited, sealing up the others with a golden key. Each day the caretaker sacrificed a virgin, stolen from a far-off village (for at that time all villages were far off) to satiate the bloodlust and demand for sacrifice of the others. The key was passed down many times, but the Spanish never left, and in fact men began to encroach even on that dreadful place. The thirteen great ones were referred to collectively as The Damned, and the fourteenth as their steward or caretaker.

After the coming of the European immortals, with their tales of the Necropolis and The Hunter of the Dead, it was decided that The Damned represented too great a threat to the status quo. They were a danger to those who kept their heads down, followed the code, and kept The Hunter at bay. So it was agreed that they would remain sleeping for eternity, or until the age-old dream of an Empire of Immortals was at last realized.

***

She lay beneath him, nude except for two necklaces around her throat. One was a golden key which looked Mexican in design. The other was a delicate silver (or silver-colored) series of Chinese characters. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up into him as he thrust. She wasn’t reacting like any other girl he’d ever been with. She wasn’t a cold fish, but neither did she seem to be enjoying herself.

“Is it all right?”

She replied in Chinese, apparently forgetting herself, then pounded his chest with her fist. She left a throbbing bruise.

“Not right now,” she said, apparently repeating herself. “It’s about to be. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”

Her face remained impassive and he felt confused and even a bit worried, but a moment later she wrapped her legs around his waist and began practically kicking him into her. She began to moan loudly and her head went back, her back arching and the top of her head laying nearly perpendicular on the pillow, as though she were presenting her throat to him.

He felt the warm thrill of orgasm, as he had hundreds of times before, but there was something else there, a sense that she was drawing him into herself, needed him, was hungry for him, was draining him.

As he came he shuddered, and felt a ripple of pleasure run through him. Somewhere he had heard that the French called orgasm “
la petit mort
” or “the little death.” He’d never really understood that before, but in the instant that his mind seemed to void itself, filled with nothing but the absolute carnal pleasure of Idi Han’s body, he understood.

When he came back to himself she was smiling up at him, a devilish little grin. She wasn’t breathing hard (naturally – she didn’t breathe) but her skin had darkened, and was almost glowing. She put his hand in his hair.

“I’m sorry, Nico,” she said, “I think I took a little too much out of you.”

A sharp pain tugged at his scalp.

“Ow!” he said, slapping the spot where she had pulled out the single hair.

She held it under his nose. He stared and took it from her fingers, rolling it between his own.

“A gray hair? I didn’t think…Jesus, I’m only twenty.”

“That was my fault,” she said, rubbing his chin. “When you…uh, what’s the English word? We never really studied this sort of thing in school.”

“Urm,” he whispered furtively, “ejaculate?”

She nodded, not repeating it.

“Yes. When you did that, I felt your life essence and I…I may have taken a little too much.”

“I thought only really powerful va…uh, immortals could do that?”

She shrugged and smiled again, like a kitten this time. He rolled down off of her and lay on the bed beside her. He reached over, letting his hand slide across her breast, and fingered the golden key.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Chuckling, she took the key off her neck and dropped it into the drawer of the night stand.

“That is not for prying eyes.”

“Oh? Some sort of super secret squirrel vampire business?”

“Yes, precisely.”

He nodded. Then he fingered her other necklace.

“Okay. How about this, then?

“No, that’s not a secret squirrel.”

He chuckled.

“I’ve been staring at it all night.

“That’s what you were staring at?” she asked, raising her hand to cover her breasts demurely, as though she had been snubbed.

He grinned broadly. “Well…you know what I mean. What is it?”

“It was a gift. From my favorite uncle, before he passed away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. How did he die?”

“He was a worker in a metal shop. His arm got caught in one of the machines. He didn’t lose it, but gangrene set in. They amputated, but it was too late.”

“That’s a sad story.”

She shrugged.

“You work with dangerous things long enough and they’ll hurt you. But in the good old days, when he still had both arms, he made this for me with some scrap. I think I was his favorite niece the same way that he was my favorite uncle. He never said so, but he did make me this.”

“Is it your name?”

She looked down at the characters.

“My name? No. At least, not my proper name. It was one of his nicknames for me. I used to pick him poppies sometimes from down by the river. So he called me his little red flower…no…blood flower.”

Nico fingered the metal.

“This is Mandarin for blood flower?”

“Cantonese.”

“What’s the difference?”

She tapped her teeth, thinking.

“Well, you’re from Puerto Rico, right?”

“Right.”

“What’s the difference between that and Cuba?”

He furrowed his brow and sat up.

“Oh, tons of things. I mean, for one thing…oh, I get it.”

She smiled. He lay back down and she began to trace invisible pictures across his bare chest.

“Why did you ask to look in that woman’s mirror? Does your reflection go away eventually?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think so. I think that’s more of a metaphor than anything else.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you know, a lot of serial killers refuse to look in the mirror. The police go in to raid their lairs and they find all the mirrors smashed, all the pictures ruined. Like they can’t bear to look at themselves, or something.”

Four

The door to Price’s apartment exploded inward. Stunned, Price threw himself flat to the ground, but grunted in pain as a hundred splinters embedded themselves into his hip, thigh, and leg. Pushing with his right leg and scrabbling with his elbows he pulled himself out of the way.

Looking up, he saw that Cicatrice had been torn to ribbons, chunks of wood sprouting from his eyes, forehead, chest, crotch, and extremities. Cicatrice was stunned only for a moment, and his body began to forcibly eject the splinters and shards of wood as his wounds healed. To aid the regenerative process, he began pulling some of the larger pieces out by hand.

“
Cicatrice
!”

Price looked towards the missing door. A man he didn’t know stood there, eyes blazing. He was kitted out in what Price instantly recognized as one of Bonaparte’s uniforms. A layer of chainmail, covered over with a (theoretically) impregnable SWAT team uniform. The chain was made of rosary pieces, and the pads were covered with religious iconography, making all the armor theoretically hateful to a bloodsucker. Like all of Bonaparte’s men he wore iconic rings on every finger, and carried a sword on his hip and an automatic shotgun with heavy stopping power in his hands.

The man had his visor up so that Cicatrice could see his face.

“You look at me, Cicatrice! You look at the man who’s going to kill you. You recognize me?”

“Oh, Patrick,” Cicatrice said calmly, the last of the wood shards popping out of his body and tumbling to the floor, “Finally realized little Francis was missing, did you?”

Patrick bit his lower lip and raised his shotgun at Cicatrice, obviously wanting to taunt the vampire but clearly so roiling with fury that he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You tell me what you did with him! I’ve got the money. You can give him back if he’s still alive. I’ll let you walk away.”

“The money? What are you a child, Patrick? Who did you think you were dealing with? What did you think would happen when I said your firstborn was down payment?”

Tears were streaming down Patrick’s face.

“I…I…I…”

“Uh uh uh, what? You thought it was a metaphor? A joke? A reference to the
Merchant of Venice
? Yes, lots of shylocks deal in literary references. Your boy’s been dead for days. He died the day you defaulted to me. He made a meal for my daughter. She didn’t speak of it, but I suspect he was delicious. Well, not that it mattered. She was voracious at the time.”

Screaming, Patrick rushed at Cicatrice.

“No, you moron!” Price cried out, reaching out, but it was too late. Cicatrice had taunted him into forgetting all his weapons and fancy gear.

With expert aim, Cicatrice knocked the helmet off Patrick’s head, sending it flying until it embedded itself into the mortarboard of Price’s apartment wall. Cicatrice cupped Patrick’s head with his hand and began digging his fingernails into his skull.

“You ruined my life,” Patrick shrieked.

“Then allow me to relieve you of it,” Cicatrice whispered.

Cicatrice pressed until Patrick’s head exploded like a raw egg. Brains, chunks of skull, nose parts, and various effluvia rained down on Price and his floor.

“All right, we gave the father his chance!” a familiar voice shouted. “Move, move move!”

Cicatrice bared his teeth like a feral predator. The game was afoot. Bonaparte’s men began rappelling in through the windows, and a squad poured in through the door Patrick had blasted open. Metal began to fly through the air, as shotguns discharged from every side and Cicatrice was caught in a 360° crossfire. His body was reduced to a ragged pulp and splattered to the ground.