A Dozen Black Roses (27 page)
The crossfire tore the boy to shreds in a matter of seconds, spinning him around like a top. Vere
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) staggered a few steps, a look of confusion on his ruined face, then collapsed onto the gore-strewn pavement.
"Merciful God!" Father Eamon whispered, crossing himself. He lowered his head and began to recite the Latin prayer for the dead.
The stranger wanted to tell the priest that the boy was better off, but held her tongue. As it was, she had to struggle to hide her delight in the carnage outside the window. Things were working out better than she'd hoped. As she returned her gaze to the burning ruin across the street, Sinjon appeared in the crumbling threshold of the Black Lodge. The vampire lord's finery was scorched and his powdered wig was gone, revealing a scabrous scalp through which his skull gleamed wetly.
The Pointer wing-commander consulted his walkie-talkie, then turned to bellow at the others: "Hold your fire! Lord Esher says hold your fire!"
"Lord of Hell—no! Vere!" Sinjon clambered over the barricade and made his way to where his favorite's body lay. He dropped to his knees with a pained moan. "Oh, my precious boy—look what they did to you—look what they did!" He pulled Vere's ruined corpse into his arms, cradling it as he would a child, and rocked back and forth.
All his boys were dead. Well and truly dead. Vere. Tristan. Ethan. All of them. His bloodline was no more. The loss struck him like a knife twisted in a wound. The kingdom he had built and shaped for over two centuries was dying all around him, consumed by flames and madness. Deadtown had been usurped.
Then he raised his eyes heavenward and saw, to his horror, the first fingers of dawn stretch across the sky.
"Esher!" Sinjon painfully got to his feet, swaying like a drunken man. He staggered across the debris of the battlefield to where the Batmobile sat, still throbbing out bass-heavy rap, like a bull alligator during mating season. "You win, Esher! Deadtown is yours! I surrender! I bend my knee to you and recognize you as my liege and lord!" He pawed with trembling fingers at the rear passenger window's heavily tinted glass as he glanced over his shoulder at the rising sun. His voice grew more and more panicked, until he was all but sobbing.
"I will swear fealty to you and gladly take your blood as my own! I will make myself your footstool and never once raise my hand against you, for as long as the oceans are wet! I promise you all that I am, Esher—just don't let me burn! "
Sinjon's skin prickled and itched as if he were covered in ants. Then it began to burn. He hissed in anger and pain and tried to shield his eyes with his lifted forearm. It was no good. He pounded his fist against the impassive black glass of the Cadillac, but it refused to shatter. He staggered away from the car, back toward Vere's body, but collapsed before he could take a half-dozen steps.
He had never known such agony in all the centuries of his undeath. He lay panting on the ground, his eyes filling with tears and blood as the fluids inside him began to boil. His instincts told him to find shelter, to go to ground somewhere dark and cool and safe from the burning rays of the sun, but it was too late. There was nowhere to escape. He clawed at the street beneath his belly for a few frantic seconds, in hopes of burrowing into the earth, but his wildly scrabbling fingernails met only unyielding cobblestones.
His flesh blistered like bacon in the pan. He could smell himself cooking. The skin on his face bubbled and sloughed away like wax. His eyes turned dull white as they were boiled in their own ocular fluid.
Despite the magnitude of his wounds and the pain he was in, Sinjon continued to crawl forward, groping blindly with his fleshlless hands. Although he no longer possessed a sense of touch, he knew he must be close. He wanted to tell Vere he was sorry it had come to this, butt his tongue was a piece of blackened leather. He wanted to kiss him one last time, but he had no lips.
There was so much he wanted to do. Wished he could do. Needed to do. And now, after nearly five centuries, the unimaginable had finally come to pass.
There was no.
More.
Time.
Esher watched as Sinjon dissolved under the touch of the sun's rays, a smile pulling on his lips. As an early morning breeze scattered the Freemason's ashes, he could no longer contain himself and began to laugh. He was still laughing as he motioned for the driver to leave.
"It's time to return home," he managed to choke out between guffaws. "There is nothing more to see here."
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) The stranger watched the Batmobile bounce over the broken, bleeding bodies littering the street—its front wheels crushing Sinjon's fleshless skull to powder. The Pointers shambled behind their master's car, looking as dead as their enemies. They were too tired to be boisterous concerning their victory, and many of them limped and seamed to be nursing wounds of some kind. By the stranger's estimates, Esher had probably lost well over half his human servitors to the riots and battle with Sinjon.
Which reminded her that she didn't feel that great herself. The adrenaline rush that came from witnessing the jyhad waged between the vampire lords flagged, and she was suddenly aware of how drained she was. She let got of the window ledge and sank to her knees, pressing her forehead against the cool stone.
"You need to lie down," Father Eamon murmured as he bent to help her.
"That leaves only the one, now," she grunted as the priest helped her back to her makeshift bed.
"Sinjon was bad enough, but Esher—he is the devil made flesh!" Father Eamon spat. "Now the gutters of Deadtown will run with the blood of innocents!"
"D-don't be too sure of that. I'm not out of the game yet—do you have a pencil and paper, Father?"
"Pencil and paper?"
"I need you to take a message to a friend of mine."
Father Eamon shrugged and left the room. A couple of minutes later he returned with a tiny pencil stub without an eraser and a crumpled brown paper bag that had been flattened out. "This is all I could find."
She hastily scrawled an address and phone number onto the back of the bag. "I need you to take this to Cloudy. He's an older man who lives in a basement squat a block or two over from here—"
"You mean the hippie?"
"You're the only one in Deadtown who doesn't call him 'the old hippie'," she said with a dry laugh, which abruptly turned into a violent coughing spasm, bringing up clotted blood.
"I can't leave you while you're in this condition!" Father Eamon protested.
"Do what I ask you!" she gasped, shoving the paper into his hand. "Do it or I'll die anyway! I can feel everything that's wrong inside me. Father, there's a piece of rib stuck in my heart and my right lung is completely collapsed! If I were human, I would have been dead hours ago! There's only one thing that can help me recover—and that's blood. The address on this piece of paper is that of a man who specializes in providing black-market plasma to those such as myself. I need Cloudy to contact him and arrange a buy. I need blood—and I need it bad."
Father Eamon frowned at the piece of rumpled brown paper. "If I do this thing for you—will I be acting as a tool of Satan or as a servant of the Lord?"
"I really couldn't tell you, Father."
***
"I—I was told to come here and give you this," Father Eamon said, holding up the scrap of paper by way of explanation. "She said you'd know who she was."
Cloudy's eyes lost some of their suspicion, but not their anxiety. "She sent you? She's alive?" He slipped the chain off the door and yanked it open, ushering the priest inside. "Sorry I didn't recognize you, Father!
I'm just not used to receiving company. Especially after a night like last night! I spent most of it trying to keep those fuckin' loonies from torching the place (pardon my French). It was real Helter Skelter."
Father Eamon stood in the middle of the front room, staring at the piles of books surrounding him. "I see you are a man of letters," he said, not without some surprise. "I never dreamed there were so many books to be found in Deadtown."
"I've found they help pass the time at night," Cloudy replied with a shrug. "Now, what about her? Is she okay? Is she hurt? The last I saw her, that crazy bitch Decima was carrying her over her shoulder like a sack of flour. Then all Hell broke loose, and I had my hands busy the rest of the night."
"She is alive, but badly hurt. I found her, all but dead, on the steps of St. Everhild. She asked for sanctuary and I brought her inside. I tended to her wounds and tried to make her as comfortable as possible. She claims she escaped from Esher's stronghold by killing the woman called Decima."
Cloudy shook his head in amazement. "And you say she needs my help?"
"She—she says she needs blood." It was all Father Eamon could do to speak the words out loud. "She
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) says she will die without it. She gave me this address and phone number to pass on to you. She says it's a black-market contact of hers."
Cloudy took the piece of paper and frowned at the scrawled information. "Tell her to rest easy, padre. I'll take care of it."
"May—may I ask you something?"
"Go ahead. And the name's Cloudy."
"Is this woman a thing of the devil?"
Cloudy blinked, surprised by the confusion and pain in the priest's voice. "I honestly don't know what she is, to tell you the truth. I kind of thought guys like you knew those things for sure."
"Satan is a devious foe. His devils wear different skins. Sometimes even those of priests."
"I couldn't answer about that, Father. But I can tell you what I know personally. I'll admit that what she is scares the bejesus outta me. She's saved my life twice—and both times she didn't have to. She helped that kid, Ryan, get back with his mom and saw that they got away safe. She didn't have to do any of that.
But she did. I don't know who she is, or what brought her to Deadtown, but it's obvious she's not like Sinjon or Esher—or anything else I've ever seen in this screwy neighborhood. She ain't human—but I don't know if that's such a bad thing, really. As to her being a thing of the devil— well, aren't we all?"
***
It was like a nightmare made flesh. Corpses littered the sidewalks and the stink of blood and smoke filled the morning air. Most of the dead bodies were human, and a surprising number were those of Pointers and Black Spoons. Judging from what was left of them, the gangbangers had been torn limb from limb. Dead men hung from street lamps, and at one intersection he spotted a pair of Nikes dangling from a telephone pole, the previous owner's feet still inside. Every now and again he would spot a fleshless skeleton with oversized canines among the carnage, proving that death had visited the devil's own as well as the sons of Adam. Fires, whether accidental or the product of arson, had wiped out many of the ancient tenements, and several continued to smolder within the burned-out husks. He was reminded of the newsreels of the Battle of Britain and the Fall of Berlin he'd seen as a boy. The Street With No Name was as potent a symbol of the catastrophe as could be found. While the Dance Macabre looked to be relatively untouched, Stick's Pool Hall was little more than a charred and gutted shell. He noticed with a twinge of panic that the liquor store had been looted and torched, along with the handful of crack bodegas that served as the neighborhood's business community.
Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but ruin. He knew it was his duty as a priest to go among the dead and administer last rites, but the task was a daunting one. Every now and again, he would glimpse something moving amid the debris, but for the most part there was nothing but death. Father Eamon found a grim irony in the fact that for the first time since its dark conception, Deadtown truly resembled its name.
As he continued to survey the damage, his mind kept turning back to the creature in the basement of St.
Everhild. She was somehow responsible for the destruction of Deadtown. And although the devastation that surrounded him was indeed horrible—was it the product of evil? He wished he knew. He wished he could be certain. Was the woman a servant of Satan, or was she a Destroying Angel? She did not seem to know, nor was she willing to tell him if she did. What Cloudy had told him of her motives and actions confused him even further. Could a monster have a soul, or an angel bring suffering to the innocent? And what did it mean that he, the most wretched of sinners, was the one to whose doorstep she came crawling?
***
As he knelt at the altar-rail, he noticed his hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and bowed his head even lower, praying for forgiveness and strength. This was the first day in years he'd gone without a drink.
Even if he'd wanted a bottle, there wouldn't have been a way to get one. The liquor store was no more—its meager stock of generic beer, wine and spirits looted and put to the torch. He cursed himself for being weak and afraid all those years and using the alcohol to hide from himself, if not his God. His body
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) trembled and his tongue seemed dry as sandpaper in his mouth. The saints looked down at him from their reliquaries, their plaster faces staring at him in silent reproach.