On a Darkling Plain (44 page)

Someone
among his fellow vampires would listen to him. He’d
make
them listen. Straining his hearing, trying to make sure he wouldn’t unwittingly walk up on his erstwhile captor, he followed the sets of tracks.

His caution was unnecessary. Except for small, strangely blurry creatures hissing and scuttling in the shadows, the cave appeared to be empty. Maybe Tithonys had needed to move closer to the battle to cast his spell.

The Methuselah’s footprints simply ended in the middle of a chamber. But the other set led Dan to a rickety-looking wooden staircase ascending to what appeared to be a blank rectangle of concrete blocks set in the dirt wall.

Dan bounded up the steps and examined the surface, looking for another shadow-symbol or some other catch that might open a secret door. For a moment the cold stone seemed to quiver beneath his hand, but nothing else happened.

He guessed he’d have to do it the hard way. Drawing on his superhuman strength, he pressed his palms against the wall, braced himself as best he could, and shoved.

His arms and shoulders quivered with effort. The platform beneath him groaned ominously and he was afraid that it would collapse before the mortar gave. But then several of the blocks broke loose and fell outward, crashing down on the other side of the barrier. Dan sprawled forward into the breach he’d created.

Peering about, he saw that he’d opened a hole into one of the service tunnels he’d visited before. After the dim green phosphorescence of I ithonys’ lair, the fluorescent lighting hurt his eyes and made him squint. Fearful that the noise he’d made would draw some potential attacker, he hastily scrambled through the breach and snatched out his .38.

After a moment he decided that, once again, he needn’t have worried. He didn’t hear anyone rushing toward him, nor did he hear any gunfire or other sounds of commotion echoing through the tunnels. Maybe Durrell and his men hadn’t wanted to fight down here, where they might conceivably be cornered. Perhaps they’d preferred to make their stand aboveground, where they’d have more room to maneuver and, if worst came to worst, might find it possible to flee.

It didn’t take long to find a stairwell to the surface. As Dan neared the door at the top he heard shooting. When he cracked it open and peeked out, the scents of gun smoke and vitae filled his nose. But no one was fighting on the section of sidewalk before him.

Wishing as he so often had that his powers of invisibility would shield him when he was in motion, he stalked out under the starry sky and toward what sounded as if it were the nearest battle. And then an assault weapon clattered, just to his left.

He reflexively leaped to one side. One of the bullets hit him anyway, shattering his knee. Somehow lurching on despite the burst of agony, he threw himself down behind the nearest available cover — a fish-and-chips stand in the shape of a miniature castle, topped by a sign that read
The Fisher King’s Feast.

“Why did you do it?” cried an anguished female voice. Laurie’s voice. “We
cared
about you! We wanted youto be part of our
family! ”

Dan felt a mixture of dismay and hope. He cringed at the prospect of fighting another friend, but with luck, it wouldn’t come to that. Surely he could convince Laurie of the peril that Tithonys represented far more easily than he could persuade a stranger. “I’m sorry about Wyatt!” he called. “But you have to listen to me. We’re all in terrible danger!” “Because you brought the enemy here!” she shouted back. “To the anarch
base!’’
Dan thought he could see her now, a vague black shape in the dark, but he wasn’t positive. At the moment the fierce pain of his wound was clouding even his superhuman senses.

“Durrell and his people aren’t anarchs,” he said. “They’re rogue Tremere. He and Wyatt lied to you about everything There are these two Methuselahs —”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “I’m not gullible enough for you to con me this time! You murdered my friend, I’ve caught you escaping, and now I’m going to
get
you!” She charged out of the darkness, her flapping bellbottoms, Yellow-Submarine T-shirt and leather peace-symbol pendant an ironic contrast to her fiery eyes, bared fangs and the AK-47 blazing in her hands.

Dan couldn’t run from her: his leg was still healing. Nor would his powers of concealment protect him when she’d already pinpointed his location. All he could do was fire back.

She lurched backward, and the gun flew from her grasp. She collapsed and lay motionless on the asphalt. Clutching the wall of the fast-food stand, Dan dragged himself to his feet and limped painfully forward. After a moment he flinched and averted his eyes.

He hadn’t meant to destroy her, just incapacitate ber, but his pain, or perhaps simple bad luck, had spoiled his aim. One of his bullets had penetrated the center of her forehead and splashed her brains out of the back of her skull. Some Kindred could recover even from a wound as ghastly as that, but he could see that she wasn’t one of them. She hadn’t had the necessary stamina.

His eyes stinging, shedding tears of blood, he waited for his knee to finish repairing itself. When the pain in his leg disappeared, he picked up her assault rifle and skulked on.

THIRTY-THREE:
FORSAKEN

And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.

— Matthew 26:23

Driven from their last redoubt, Durrell and his bodyguards — a Tremere, a Caitiff anarch and a ghoul — pounded down a cobblestone lane looking for a new refuge. As they passed beneath a flickering crimson lantern it dashed their shadows onto the ground.

Actually, the elder magus and his soldiers were racing by any number of shops and enclosed rides which might have sheltered them. But Durrell wanted to stay outdoors, where he could see more of what was going on. It gave him the feeling of being in control.

In his present straits, he
needed
that feeling, even though he recognized that it was an illusion. Because he hadn’t had time to position and instruct his forces properly, the battle had turned out to be every bit as chaotic as he’d feared, disintegrating into countless small but deadly confrontations scattered throughout the park. He and his officers had cellular phones for communication, but as the enemy struck savagely, repeatedly, unpredictably, and as more and more of his troops lapsed into frenzy, it had become impossible to

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maintain any semblance of overall direction. At this point, the only thing he was certain of was that his army was being gradually overwhelmed by superior numbers.

Where was Tithonys? Where was the awesome sorcery that was supposed to turn the tide? Durrell peered about for any sign that some great work of magic was rising to his aid, but could only see the mundane flashes of guns and explosions flickering in the murky distance.

He wondered if the Methuselah had abandoned him. If he, who’d worked so deviously to ruin Roger Phillips and his minions, had been himself deceived. The suspicion was so excruciating that he struggled to expel it from his mind.

The Caitiff, a coarse-featured, redheaded woman with a perpetually swollen belly — evidently possessed of a perverse sense of humor, her sire had embraced her when she was pregnant — lurched to a halt and pointed. “There!” Startled, Durrell spun around. “What?” he barked.

“That pen,” she replied. “Isn’t it what you wanted, a place where we’ll have cover and be able to see in all directions?” He saw she was referring to Elfland. The attraction, intended specifically for small children, featured miniature cottages and giant concrete mushrooms, lawn-jockey-sized statues of butterfly-winged fairies and pipe-smoking leprechauns, all surrounded by a four-foot version of Camelot’s usual phony castle wall. “Yes,” he said tersely, “it’ll do. Come on.”

He and his minions ran to the enclosure. The three Kindred vaulted the wall, and the ghoul, a shaven-headed youth with a pentagram tattooed on his cheek, ducked through the child-sized gate. “Spread out,” said Durrell. “I want one of you watching north, one east, and one south.” His warriors scurried away.

The master magus looked again for some indication that I ithonys was about to reach out and start killing the enemy, soon, while some of Camelot’s defenders were left alive. He still couldn’t detect any. Fighting to quash a fresh wave of doubt, he jerked his phone off his belt. Maybe this time more of his lieutenants would answer. Maybe he could gather some useful intelligence, something that would actually enable him to organize his forces. Maybe —

A winged shadow with glowing scarlet eyes swooped over his head.

Durrell pivoted, firing his Uzi wildly, but didn’t hit anything. The flying creature — the
bat,
he realized, the
shapeshifter
— had already disappeared. Startled by the racket, crying out, the magus’ trio of warriors jerked around.

“It’s Angus!” Durrell said. He was all but certain he was correct. As far as he knew, the Justicar was the only Gangrel involved in this fiasco, and one of the few members of the enemy army powerful enough to contemplate confronting the Tremere elder and his bodyguards by himself. “I think he landed in the center of the enclosure!”

“How right you are,” rumbled Angus’ voice, sounding grimly amused. Suddenly, moving as fast as any Toreador or Brujah, the bearded giant popped up from behind a pixiesized gingerbread mansion with candy-cane trim and fired his automatic rifle at the ghoul. The servant flew off his feet. By the time the remaining defenders brought their own guns to bear, the Justicar had ducked from sight again.

“Move in!” Durrell cried. His minions hesitated, and he repeated the command using the coercive power of his voice and glare. “Do it! Damn it, we’ve got him surrounded!” This time they edged forward. Sharpening his senses to the utmost, Durrell studied the whimsical shapes — lollipop trees, thatch-roofed cottages scarcely larger than ostentatious tombstones, dwarves playing baseball, and a hollow stump with spindly minarets rising from its center

— that sprouted from the ground before him. Surely a Kindred as huge as Angus couldn’t hide among such objects for long.

From the corner of his eye, the magus glimpsed something gray, something that
was
built low enough to the ground to conceal itself easily, streaking across the gap between two of the huts. Turning, he fired, but the shape was already gone.

The Caitiff screamed. Lurching around again, Durrell saw a huge wolf with shining crimson eyes spring at the woman and carry her down behind a row of vendors’ stalls in a goblin market. Her severed head tumbled over the barrier a second later.

Though Durrell couldn’t see Angus and didn’t have a shot at him, at this moment he knew his approximate location, and thus was able to cast a spell at him. Hastily he gestured and jabbered the three syllables that triggered the effect.

An instant later, despite his anxiety, he felt a rush of pleasure and vitality. The magic had stolen a portion of Angus’ blood and transferred it into his own system. He could tell that the spell hadn’t siphoned enough to incapacitate his opponent, but at least it had hurt him.

Fangs bared and assault rifle leveled, the other Tremere, a gray-haired, fortyish-looking vampire with a saber sheathed at his hip, charged the fairy marketplace. Reaching a position from which he could see Angus’ last known location, he shouted, “He’s moved on, Sebastian!”

“Not very far,” Angus’ bass voice replied. In human form again, or nearly so, he shot up behind the junior magus and grabbed his throat in his taloned hands.

The Tremere dropped his gun and frantically groped over his shoulder. Durrell understood what his clan brother was attempting. If he could grab his attacker, he could blast him with magic. Evidently understanding the same thing, Angus kept knocking away and otherwise avoiding his arm.

Durrell fired. The other Tremere was pretty much shielding Angus, but it would be worth hurting or even destroying the younger magus if he could cripple the attacker. Bullets hammered into the gray-haired vampire’s chest, and then the Uzi clicked, its magazine empty.

Angus’ claws ripped the younger Tremere’s head off. The corpse fell, pungent vitae flowing from the raw stump between its shoulders. Its slayer was bleeding, too, from the bullets that had driven through the magus’ body to strike his own, but he didn’t seem to feel the wounds. Pulling a stake out of his belt, leering at Durrell, he said, “You, Warlock, I’m taking alive. Sinclair and his people want to talk to you.”

For some reason, the smug self-assurance in Angus’ tone reminded Durrell of Tithonys. It roused the Beast and swept the fear out of his mind. By God, he was a
sorcerer,
a master of the unseen forces governing the universe. He’d
earned
his powers through centuries of study and perilous experimentation. In contrast, the Gangrel, however much brute strength he commanded, had received his abilities automatically, simply as a result of his transformation. Like most Kindred, he was little better than the undisciplined savage, the
animal,
he so resembled.

Durrell realized he didn’t have time to reload the Uzi. With his supernatural speed, Angus would be on top of him before he could ram a new clip into the gun. But that was all right. He wanted to humble the arrogant Gangrel with his wizardry. He should have relied on it from the start. “Come on then,” he said, tossing aside the firearm. “Take me if you can!”

Angus hurtled forward. Striving to exert every ounce of psychic might at his disposal, Durrell cast another spell. A statue of a pointy-eared gnome playing an accordion wrenched itself loose from its base, streaked through the air and slammed into the Gangrel’s shins, tripping him. Angus fell, but instantly leapt back to his feet.

Still straining, feeling the vitae in his system burn to fuel his magic, Durrell levitated an entire miniature cottage and slammed it down on Angus’ head. The Justicar sprawled back onto the path. With a murmured phrase and a flick of his fingers, the Tremere drained another portion of the other vampire’s vitae.