The Eye of the Moon (26 page)

The sight of him storming towards Silence, who was standing by the pool table, only served to set off everyone else. Like a pride of lions homing in on a wounded antelope, Clowns and Shades swarmed in from all directions, ready for a fight. Dante was glad to see that the Shades outnumbered the Clowns by six to four, or even eight to four if you included Cleavage and Moose, who for the time being remained seated at the bar. Unfortunately, his relief was short-lived, for it soon became apparent that the Clowns were carrying weapons.

Reuben whipped a heavy knife with an eighteen-inch blade out from the sleeve of his clown suit, and his two yellow-haired minders did likewise, revealing equally large bone-handled knives that verged on being long enough to be classified as swords.

Jordan had squared up to Silence, unveiling a blade of his own that he had drawn from under a flap on one leg of his sodden white romper suit. He stood, tensed and ready for trouble, no more than two yards away from his enemy, waiting for the go-ahead from Reuben.

Vampires generally wait for the nod from their leader when there’s a rumble, and the Shades were looking to Vanity, who was standing at the pool table with Dante. Fritz, Obedience and Déjà-Vu had all made their way around the table to square up to their knife-wielding opponents.

Vanity spoke calmly in the direction of Reuben. ‘There’s no need for any joking around here, Reuben. This can be sorted out without any bloodshed.’

Reuben sneered at Vanity, his bright red grin broad across his face. ‘Do I look like I’m jokin’ around?’ he asked.

‘Well, yeah, you kinda do,’ Vanity replied, gripping his pool cue, ready to use it in his defence.

This only served to rile the clown further. ‘Your buddy Silence has played one too many stupid tricks. This time he’s gone too far. You hand him over to us and the rest of you can walk away. That’s the deal.’

‘NO FUCKING DEAL!’ bellowed Fritz from the place he had taken up just behind Silence. ‘VE SHADES, VE SCHTICK TOGEZZER!’

‘Then you’ll die together.’

That was the signal for it all to kick off. The Clowns waded in, swinging and jabbing their blades at anything that didn’t look funny. The Shades all grabbed whatever weapons they could, which was mostly pool cues, and set about fighting them off.

Except for Dante.

Unusually for him, he froze at seeing a fight develop.
He’d never been attacked by bloodthirsty clown vampires before, and wasn’t quite sure how to react. More importantly, however, he had an image of Kacy flashing through his head. In his mind, he saw her crying, begging him to run away at the first sign of trouble. He hated to see Kacy cry, even if he was only imagining it, but he knew that if he stayed and fought, there was a damn good chance she’d be crying soon enough, because he was liable to get killed or at the very least lose a limb. He heard her tearful voice in his head screaming
‘Run you idiot! Run!
’

So as the fight got under way, with everyone watching out for whatever weapon was being swung or stabbed in his direction, Dante rolled beneath the pool table out of harm’s way. He soon spotted a gap at one end where there seemed to be no one wielding a weapon, so he crawled over to it and then rolled out and ran towards the bar. Reaching it, he wasted no time in diving over the counter. Ducked down on the other side were Hank the bartender and Moose and Cleavage. Dante came crashing down alongside them.

‘Hi,’ he said, smiling a nervous smile.

All three of them looked at him in a manner that suggested that they thought his action in joining them somewhat cowardly. But before any of them could say anything judgemental a clown’s head appeared, looking over the bar above Dante’s head. The fearsome smiling face beneath the bright yellow wig was bad enough, but the figure was also brandishing a large blade above its head, ready to swing it down at Dante cowering below the bar.

THWACK!

The blade missed Dante’s head by a few inches and embedded itself in the bartop. The clown struggled to reach fully over the bar to get at its target. Dante, terrified by the sight above him, pressed himself as far back against the wall behind the bar as he possibly could, desperate to avoid the next swing of the blade.

Somehow, Hank, Moose and Cleavage managed to manoeuvre themselves out of the way, running along the
space behind the bar and out towards the staircase, away from danger, where they could watch the proceedings from a safe distance.

Dante could hear all manner of crashing and yelling coming from the area around the pool table as his new vampire buddies fought with the horrific clowns. His immediate concern, however, was the clown Ronald, who was leaning over the bar, leering at him, and drooling blood from his mouth, no doubt from a wound recently picked up at the end of someone’s pool cue.

Ronald quickly realized that Dante was just a few inches too far away to be caught with a swing from where he was standing, so he sprang up on to the bartop. He stood up tall, his bright yellow curly hair touching the ceiling as he loomed over the cowering figure of his enemy. He was smiling inanely, eyes wide open, blade at the ready and, more significantly, his fangs on full display. He had morphed into a vampire in the space of half a second.

For a moment the clown looked as if he would simply dive down on Dante and attack him with his blade, but he hesitated for just a moment, and Dante saw in his eyes an expression of mild surprise.

‘You’re not even a vampire,’ the clown hissed. How he had come to this conclusion was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was just the terrified look on Dante’s face. More likely, it was the fact that Dante wasn’t morphing into anything. He was just cowering on the floor as most humans do when faced with a vampire clown wielding some kind of machete.

Whether or not anyone else heard the clown’s exclamation was hard to tell because of the clash of blades and pool cues and the occasional cry of pain, fury or triumph.

Then a loud bang silenced everything.

Dante was still staring up at the terrifying figure on the bar, but the clown’s expression had suddenly changed. Where blood had been dribbling from his mouth, it was now also pouring out from a hole in the centre of his face. For no more than a second the nightmarish creature swayed first backwards
and then forwards, before toppling down off the bartop and on to Dante on the floor below. The long knife fell with him and missed Dante’s arm by a whisker before clattering on to the floor.

There followed a second loud crashing sound, that of breaking glass somewhere, and it was succeeded by the whoops of the inrushing wind.

Dante pushed the dead clown off himself and watched him disintegrate slowly into smoke and ash on the floor beside him. It was an unpleasant sight, accompanied by a rotten stink that hastened his desire to get up. Screwing up his nose and trying to breathe through his mouth, he climbed to his feet to peer over the bar.

The pool hall was in a state of absolute carnage. There were two more dead clowns on the floor between the tables. One was definitely Jordan, his soaked romper suit and lack of smile identifying his corpse. The other dead clown also had a yellow wig, but there was no sign of Reuben the green-haired leader. He had escaped by crashing through a window at the end of the hall and vanishing into the night sky. The window was now letting in an icy wind through the clown-sized hole where the glass had once been. As Dante watched, both clown corpses began to smoulder and smoke, before flaring briefly into flames which reduced them to two handfuls of greasy ash.

The members of the Shades were all on their feet and staring at Dante, who was still standing behind the bar, dumbstruck by the carnage.

‘Did you shoot that guy?’ Vanity asked.

Dante shook his head. ‘Wasn’t me. Thought one of you guys did it.’ The Shades all looked around at each other. None of them was holding a firearm.

‘That’s weird,’ said Vanity suspiciously. ‘Somebody shot that clown in the head. Who the fuck was it?’

The others all took it in turns to shrug. Obedience was holding his left arm just below the elbow where he appeared to have been cut, and Déjà-Vu was rubbing his chin as if he’d
been caught by a punch. Fritz, Vanity and Silence were all covered in the blood of the two dead and now disintegrating clowns. But no one was owning up to having a gun, let alone firing it at the head of the clown whose remains were now lying behind the bar at Dante’s feet.

The first person to break the silence was Cleavage, who was making her way back into the pool hall, followed by Moose. ‘I think we oughta get the hell outta here before Reuben rounds up a bunch of his friends and comes back here in greater numbers,’ she suggested.

‘Fuckin’ good idea,’ said Vanity. ‘He’ll turn this place into a fuckin’ circus. Come on, people, let’s roll. Head home for the night and we’ll meet up again tomorrow in the Nightjar.’ He looked over at Dante. ‘You done okay, my friend. Come to the Nightjar again tomorrow night and we’ll talk some more.’

Dante nodded, breathing a huge sigh of relief. Somehow he’d made it through another night undercover with the Shades. One thing was bugging him, though. He was only alive because someone had saved his ass by firing a bullet into the skull of the clown who had been about to kill him. And they had done so just after the clown in question had announced that Dante wasn’t a real vampire. Everyone had heard the gunshot, but had anyone heard what the clown had said?

Above all, why was no one owning up to the shooting?

Igor parked the two-tone blue-and-green camper van right outside the front of the police headquarters. It was late and the streets were largely deserted, and as most of the folks who were out at that time of night were criminals this was the last place they would be hanging around. After a quick check up and down the street Igor and his companion made their way round to the double doors at the back of the van. Pedro opened them carefully. They were relieved to see the body of the patient they had brought back from Dr Moland’s Hospital was still there, not moving. No doubt still unconscious from the blow to the head received back at the hospital as he slept. He hardly looked threatening, either. He was wearing a pair of dark blue jogging bottoms and a thin blue pullover with red sleeves, the same clothes that he had been sleeping in when they ambushed him.

Igor dragged the body out by the feet and threw it over his shoulder. Pedro closed and secured the van doors behind them as the big werewolf carried their prisoner up the steps at the front of the headquarters and in through the glass doors to the reception area. After making sure the van was locked, Pedro followed on behind, checking round to see if anyone had noticed them.

They had successfully surprised the sleeping patient in Room 43 at the hospital, and after Igor had violently slammed him over the back of the head with enough force to knock him into a different kind of sleep, Pedro had pulled a cloth bag over his head. It had been all too easy. De La Cruz had warned them that this guy could be highly dangerous. That might still
turn out to be true, but they had caught him unawares, and he had let himself be taken without any kind of fight at all.

It being the middle of the night, the reception desk was manned by just one officer. His name was Francis Bloem, a cautious, rule-bound, red-haired officer in his late twenties. He recognized the two wolfmen, and wasn’t in the least bit fazed by the sight of one of them carrying a body.

‘That the package you picked up from the hospital?’ he asked, nodding at the hooded figure.

‘It might just be,’ Igor replied. ‘Mind if we come on through?’

‘Knock yourselves out,’ the officer replied.

As Igor lugged the body through reception to the elevators at the far end, MC Pedro stopped and gave Officer Bloem an evil stare. Then he launched into one of his stupid and pointless raps. ‘Who’s gonna knock who out? I’m gonna knock you out, hear what I say, homie?’

Bloem sat with a quizzical look on his face, unsure how to respond, and by the time he realized that Pedro’s rap made no kind of sense, the werewolf pair were stepping into the elevator and heading down to the locker room beneath the headquarters. He shook his head, then buzzed Captain De La Cruz using the speeddial on his switchboard. The Captain answered after one ring.