On a Darkling Plain (22 page)

“Let me,” said Dan. He shoved the Smith and Wesson back in his waistband, took Wyatt from her, and lifted the anarch leader in his arms. She gave him a grateful smile, the vitae smeared around her mouth making the expression look peculiar.

They ran on, through the intersection and down the right-hand fork of the Y. Wyatt kept grunting and going stiff as Dan’s stride jarred him. Then, behind them, bursts of automatic-weapons fire rattled. Felipe stumbled and nearly fell.

Awkwardly shifting Wyatt to one arm and grabbing the

Model 669 with the other, Dan spun around. Two vampires were running at them as fast as swooping hawks, fangs bared, blasting away with assault rifles

Dan and the anarchs returned fire. One of the pursuers dropped and the other dived for cover in a recessed doorway. Dan could hear the footsteps of more of the enemy pounding up the pavement, and car motors roaring to life.

“Get off... the street,” Wyatt wheezed, vitae seeping from his mouth. “Go between the... buildings. Easier to shake them off our tails.”

As his companions began to obey him, the Toreador who’d dropped lurched up and resumed shooting. Leaning out of his doorway, his partner did the same. Startled, Dan and the anarchs scrambled frantically to get out of the line of fire.

And, as Dan realized an instant later, by doing so, they’d inadvertently split up. Because they’d been spread out along the street, in their haste they’d lunged into at least two different gaps between thebuildings. He and Wyatt were in one and the remaining anarchs were somewhere else.

Dan decided it would be suicide to try to link back up with his friends by retracing his steps. He’d run right into the arms of their pursuers. It would be better to keep going forward, hoping that he and the remaining anarchs would spot one another along the way, or, failing that, meet up at the van. So, cradling Wyatt in both arms again, he dashed on, vaulting over the heaps of trash that choked the narrow passage. Wyatt’s shotgun slipped from, his hand to clank on the broken brick pavement. His eyelids drooped shut, and his head lolled.

Plunging into an alley, Dan peered up and down, looking unsuccessfully for some sign of the other anarchs. All he could detect was the pounding footfalls of Prince Roger’s, vassals, still racing along behind him.

He wondered fleeting.ly whether, if he crouched motionless; behind some piece of cover, his newfound powers of concealment would keep him safe from discovery. But he wasn’t at all confident that they’d shield him from the notoriously keen senses of the Toreador, and even more dubious that the force that masked his own presence would veil Wyatt’s as well. And so he hurtled on through a maze of unpredictably twisting passages, always fearful that his sense of direction was playing him false, or that the way would dead-end at some impassable barrier.

Plunging into a small, pentagonal space defined by the grimy back walls of five decaying tenements, where it looked and smelled as if garbage had been accumulating for years, he paused, trying to decide by which passage he should exit. And at that moment, a cold voice said, “Who are you?”

Startled, Dan jumped and then peered wildly about. Though the voice had seemed to come from nearby, he couldn’t see the person who had addressed him. But he could still hear the sounds of pursuit echoing through the labyrinth of passages; there was no way to know whether the Toreador had lost his trail or not. Hoping that the speaker lacked the means to detain him until the hunters caught up with him, he said, “We’re just passing through.” And strode on toward one of the alleyways on the other side of the courtyard.

“Stop!” cried the unseen presence. “Stop, or I’ll hurt you!”

“Screw you,” muttered Dan, breaking into a run, and then pain ripped through his knee. Losing his balance, he fell heavily, pinning the inert form of Wyatt beneath him. He frantically disentangled his arms from the other Kindred and sat up. Looking at his leg, he gaped in horror.

He’d only scraped his knee when he’d jumped out the window, a minor injury that wouldn’t have slowed him down even were he still mortal. But now reeking, suppurating flesh was sloughing away from the injury as if he had an advanced case of gangrene.

“I told you I’d hurt you,” said the invisible speaker, a gloating note in his voice. “Little Haiti belongs to the Samedi.
No one
hunts here without our permission.”

Dan had heard rumors of the Samedi. Supposedly they were a vampire clan who’d arisen in the Caribbean: rotting, corpselike creatures as hideous as the Nosferatu, though less diverse in their deformities, with the uncanny ability to inflict a similar decomposition on others by sheer force of will. “We don’t want to hunt,” said Dan, his senses probing the shadows, still to no avail. “We just want to get out of here.”

“Too late,” said the Samedi. “You trespassed and killed some of our kine. You showed disrespect, and now you have to pay the price.”

Dan imagined that it was a payment neither he nor Wyatt would survive. Then, finally, he heard cloth rustle on a cracked concrete stoop to his left.

Suddenly twisting, praying that his supersensitive hearing really had pinpointed the noise accurately, he fired his automatic. A stooped, leprous, noseless thing clad in filthy rags seemed to materialize out of empty air even as he recoiled against the door at his back.

Unfortunately, the Samedi wasn’t badly wounded, and it had an Uzi in its ulcerous hand. It shot back, and a spray of bullets riddled Dan’s chest. The world dissolved in a flash of pain.

Dan struggled to focus through the agony, to aim and fire again. His next shot hit the Samedi in the forehead and blew the back of its head out. The deformed vampire collapsed in a heap.

All right,
Dan told himself grimly,
so much for that.
He was messed up, but he thought he could still walk. Surely the van couldn’t be much farther. All he had to do was stand up, pick up Wyatt, and keeping mov—

Fresh torment blazed through his wounded torso. Skin and muscle softened and oozed off his broken ribs. He thrashed convulsively, and the gun tumbled out of his hand.

A second Samedi, this one wearing a necklace of human finger bones, a top hat and a clawhammer coat with a wilted white carnation boutonniere, shambled out of the shadows. It had a stake in its nearly skeletal hand, and its long, white fangs shone in the moonlight. They were the only part of the creature that didn’t look decayed.

Dan tried to grope for the Model 669, but the pain of his wounds and their putrefaction made him too spastic. In a moment perhaps the paralysis would pass, but by that time, he suspected, the Samedi would have the stake in his heart, immobilizing him permanently.

The Haitian undead knelt beside Dan and raised the wooden weapon over its head. Dan managed to lift his hands and fumble at his attacker, only to discover that he still lacked the strength to push him away. And then Wyatt reared up and clutched at the Samedi’s shoulder.

The Samedi jerked as if the vampire in white had thrust a blade into it. An instant later Dan felt a fierce heat glowing from inside his attacker’s ravaged body. Boiling blood gushed from the Caribbean Kindred’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth and sundry lesions, burning trails in its rotten flesh as if it were acid. Wailing, the Samedi lurched to its feet, blundered to one of the tenements, and dragged itself to the door.

“Little trick... my sire taught me,” Wyatt whispered. “Guess the bitch was good... for something.”

Dan realized that he and his companion
had
to get moving. There might be more Samedi lurking about, or the Toreador might appear at any moment. Trembling with exertion, he dragged himself to his feet. For a moment the world revolved, and a lance of torment stabbed through his injured leg, but somehow he kept himself from falling down again.

He stooped to pick up Wyatt, but the anarch captain shook his head and rose unsteadily. “Can walk now,” he wheezed, smiling. “Way you look, I think I’d... better.”

Swaying, clinging to one another, they gimped through two more cramped, lightless alleyways. As they emerged from the second, Dan saw the burned convertible, and beyond it their vampire comrades, Cassius and the van, exhaust fuming from its tailpipe, no more than thirty feet away.

jimmy Ray, Felipe and Laurie dashed forward. “Thank God!” the former hippie cried, her bellbottoms flapping around her legs. “We were afraid—” When she faltered, goggling at him in dismay, Dan realized that she’d seen, or smelled, the pockets of gangrene in his body.

“They’re just wounds,” he croaked. “They’ll heal.” At least he assumed they would. In his experience, you could destroy a vampire, but not permanently cripple or even scar one. Their powers of regeneration simply worked too well, even against the occult powers of their fellow undead. “Just get us on the van and get us out of here.”

Ten seconds later the panel truck was hurtling through the night. Dan felt weak as a kitten, and every bump jolted pain through his damaged body. Nevertheless, he forced himself to sit up and peer through the rear window until the vehicle reached the interstate, making sure that no one was following it. Afterward, he slumped down on the floor. Laurie took his hand in her cool, soft fingers, and then, though dawn was still hours away, he drifted into slumber.

FIFTEEN:TH E TRAITOR

Where we are,

There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood The nearer bloody.

— William Shakespeare,
Macbeth

As Elliott opened the front door of Roger Phillips’ mansion, he could feel a tingling warmth in his cheeks; when he paused to check his appearance in the mirror, a Venetian antique with an ornate gold wreath for a frame hanging on the right-hand wall of the foyer, he saw that his cheeks were still flushed with freshly stolen blood. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told his associates that he was leaving the estate because he needed to hunt. He simply hadn’t been telling the
whole
truth.

Lazio entered the hall while Elliott was twisting his head from side to side, inspecting his silvery hair. Being discovered at such a moment made the Toreador elder feel momentarily foolish, even though he knew the mortal was accustomed to actors and their primping. “It’s about time you got back,” Lazio grumbled.

“Why do you say that?” Elliott replied. “Did something happen?”

Lazio shrugged. “More reports came in.”

“I’m sure you were as capable of listening to them as I would have been.” Elliott smiled wryly. “We’re
all
worried about what’s happening, Lazio, but you have to allow me a
little
down time. Even the Duke of Wellington took a break occasionally. 1 know, I used to drink with him; or rather, he drank and 1 pretended to. Now, what’s the news?”

“Our people finally located Darrell Burroughs, Roger’s novelist friend, but they were too late. The man and his date were already dead. The enemy made it look as if Burroughs brought her back to his house, walked in on a burglary in progress, and the criminal killed them both.”

Elliott felt a pang of sadness leavened with a perverse thrill of satisfaction, because Burroughs’ murder proved that he’d guessed right. The Toreador’s adversaries
did
intend to murder their mortal proteges. Elliott had been correct to take steps to bring the humans to Sarasota for safekeeping.

“Pierre Devereaux, that Haitian painter, was murdered, too, along with his wife and children. Did you know him?” Elliott shook his head. “Someone must have decided to offer him patronage after I stopped taking an interest in such things.” For a second he felt vaguely embarrassed by his ignorance.

“Well, he was eccentric,” Lazio said sourly. “Once his work started selling he had plenty of money, but he insisted on staying in Little Haiti in Miami, living little better than he would have if he’d still been stuck in Port-au-Prince. He didn’t even have a phone, so we couldn’t just call him and tell him to get himself up here. We had to send people after him, and they caught Dan Murdock and his friends at the scene of the crime.”

Elliott’s muscles tensed with anticipation until he noticed the reddish brown, a color suggestive of frustration and disgust, flickering in the mortal’s aura. The Kindred sighed with his own disappointment. “1 take it that when you say ‘caught,’ you don’t mean ‘captured,’ do you?”

“No,” Lazio replied, “the bastards got away again. They shot their way clear, then lost our people in the streets and alleys. Apparently that part of the city is like a maze.”

Elliott clasped Lazio’s shoulder. “Don’t fret about it. They can’t stay lucky forever. We’ll catch them next time, or if not them,
somebody
from the other side.” The Toreador smiled crookedly. “Although it would be nice to hear some
good
news.”

“There is some,” Lazio admitted, sounding as if he resented having to relate it. Elliott gestured toward Roger’s study, and the two men walked in that direction. “A number of the clients are here already, and others are on their way. But there are some, people who don’t know their benefactors are Kindred, who said they were sorry but they couldn’t just drop everything and rush to Sarasota, not on the strength of one mysterious phone call.”

“Then someone persuasive will have to visit them in person,” Elliott said as they stepped into the den. A Toreador with the proper charismatic talents could influence a mortal to do all manner of things, a fact of which he’d frequently taken advantage.

“With some of them, that’s already arranged,” Lazio said, dropping heavily into one of the green leather chairs. As Elliott perched on the edge of the desk, he noticed that the dresser looked haggard and weary. Attending to Roger’s business both by day and through the night, Lazio had often made do with little sleep; but apparently, in the face of the current crisis, he was resting even less than usual. “I’ll make sure that the others are taken care of, too.” The mortal rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Have you thought about what to tell them? Charming as you Toreador are, you can’t be vague about the threat forever, or they’ll get fed up and go home.”