Birth of a Dark Nation (38 page)

He hopped out of the van and I watched
carefully as he went to work. I couldn't hear him over the
unceasing U Street traffic, but I could tell by his stance that he
was fearless. He bobbed his head around like an executive director
trying to earnestly seal a donation from a major funder. Suddenly,
his spine straightened and he seemed to grow more powerful by the
second as the burly bouncers lost control of their own minds. They
each walked down the street.

Justin looked back at us and gave a thumbs-up
signal.

"Great work!" Dante said, patting Justin on
the back.

"What did you tell them to do?" I asked.

"I just said they should take a walk down to
the National Mall and take a nap."

"Well, that'll do it. Let's go in."

We entered the club, closed the door tight
behind us, and took three steps down to the main floor, lit with
soft neon lights in shades of pink and blue. We walked through the
foyer and the place opened up. All the patrons were gone. Chiyoko
was wiping down the bar in preparation for leaving. She looked up,
noticed the three of us, and calmly put her towel down.

"It's good to see you again, Justin," Chiyoko
said, combing her fingers through her long black tresses,
interrupted only by the rogue blond streak.

"So you do remember me?" he asked.

"Of course I do," she replied faintly.

"Listen up. It's just us, Chiyoko," Dante
said, revealing a crossbow with a wooden stake he had concealed
under his long coat and aiming it directly at her heart. "What
you're going to do is tell us everything we want to know."

"And after that?" she asked.

"There is no after that," Dante growled.

Chiyoko's eyes darted all over the room in a
panic. She knew we had her covered and there was no way out. Her
eyes began to water.

"I've never been in the inner circle of the
Anubis Society. I don't know much. But I'll tell you everything I
do know."

"Don't waste my time, lady," Dante said.

"Don't worry. I won't. But please, can you
just relax? I'm not your enemy."

Justin pulled up a bar stool and sat down. I
scowled at him.

"About twenty vampires live at the mansion,"
Chiyoko began. "Nigel and Cassandra are the master and mistress of
the house. They're a few hundred years old, both European. They
have a manservant and a maidservant. The manservant is named
Andre—a black guy. The maid is Sasha Forzani."

"Why do I know that name?" Victor asked.

"She's pretty old—and she gets around. Then
there's Malcolm. He's the muscle. He's ruthless and cold, and will
skin you alive if he can."

"Who else?" I asked.

"Nobody of note. About half of them seem to
believe what Nigel believes."

"And what's that?"

"That the Razadi are their biggest threat.
And the other half think you guys could be great allies."

"What about Orlando? What are they doing to
him?" I asked.

"I don't know. All I know is that he's being
held captive. There are rumors that they're experimenting on
him."

"And he's still at the house?" I asked.

"Yes, he's definitely at the house."

"Why did you join them?" Justin asked.

"You ask too many fucking questions!" I spat
at Justin.

"No more than you. He's just a baby. Leave
him alone," Chiyoko said.

"As you're well aware, my father was the
innovator behind the Kobayashi Gaming System in the early 1970s,"
she continued. "His advances in the video game industry were
genius; he was approaching his first billion by the time I was
born. I wanted for nothing for the first two decades of my
life.

"I got sick in 1977, a few months after my
twentieth birthday. The doctors quickly determined that it was
ovarian cancer. They put me on an aggressive course of chemotherapy
and gave me a radical hysterectomy. I was weak, ten pounds
underweight, and utterly bald. But I survived. For a time.

"Two years later, the cancer came back with a
vengeance and spread fast through my body. I couldn't eat. I slept
all day and lay in pain all night. I couldn't even use the bathroom
by myself. It broke my father's heart to see his only child cut
down in the prime of her life.

"One night, my father brought a shaman to
come see me, a kind of witch doctor. I was too out of it to
understand what it was they were saying, but it didn't feel right.
Didn't feel right at all. Nevertheless, I was dying. We were
desperate.

"A few days later, my father came into my
room with a tall man. He was the handsomest man I'd ever seen. I
felt self-conscious meeting him. He came to my bed and began
cradling my face.

"My father told me 'Chiyoko, don't worry. Mr.
Yamaguchi is going to fix you. He's going to make you all
better.'

"And I asked him 'Is he a doctor?'

"My father told me, 'He's better than a
doctor.' And Mr. Yamaguchi didn't even say a word. He just bared
his fangs and bit me in my neck. I was too weak to scream.
Everything went black.

"When I woke up, it had already been done.
Mr. Yamaguchi had nearly drained me of all my blood, and fed me his
own blood. He was now my maker. Not only was I beholden to him, but
so was my father. In exchange for saving my life, my father sold
controlling interest in the Kobayashi Gaming System to the
Tsukuyomi Club of Japan—the ruling vampire organization in the
country. The old fool thought he was saving my life, but what he
really did was send me to an eternal hell on earth.

"It wasn't long before he realized what he
had done. When he saw what I was, what I was truly capable of, he
had a stroke and lingered in a coma for weeks. I played around with
the idea of giving him the same curse he had unleashed upon me, but
I decided against it.

"When he died, the Tsukuyomi Club thought it
would be best for me to take over. And I did, serving for twenty
years as the always young, always beautiful CEO of Kobayashi. I
tried to age myself over the years, giving myself a white streak of
hair and aging my style, but ultimately I had to give it up. But
I'd be damned if I'd let the bastards who made me into a vampire
take control of my family's company.

"So, I did what any other bitter nightwalker
would do. I hired my local yakuzas to assassinate my board of
directors, all at once. Oh, you would have loved it, Victor. Such a
well-executed execution. The black sludge of evil vampires filled
the boardroom like swamp scum in post-Katrina New Orleans. Anyone
who escaped a staking was burned alive. And I saved the best of my
vengeance for my maker, Mr. Yamaguchi. My yakuzas subdued him, tied
him to an antenna on top of Kobayashi Tower, and left him there to
fry in the sunrise. Of course, I couldn't be there myself, but I
watch the tape of his disintegration often."

She cackled. I glanced at Justin, who
remained transfixed.

"Once the board was eliminated, I took
control of the Tsukuyomi Club's shares and became majority
stakeholder once again. I filled the board with my most trustworthy
yakuzas and directed them to appoint one of my distant cousins as
the new CEO. I'm still one of the wealthiest women in Japan, even
though the world thinks my cousin is."

"If you're so wealthy and powerful, why are
you tending bar in America?" Dante asked.

"I'd be lying if I said it was an
anthropological study. Truth is, I came here on vacation, which I
shouldn't have. Nightwalkers killing each other is a big no-no in
international vampire law. So when I got caught, I was tethered to
the Anubis Society. Of all the lodges and societies in this
hemisphere, I had to get stuck with the one that has the religious
nut as the head. At least working at this club, I get to have a
steady supply of upscale dinners. And seeing Steve every week has
been an added bonus."

"You've been seeing Steve every week?" Justin
asked.

"Of course I have. That's the way the society
kept tabs on you."

"What?!" Justin exclaimed, standing straight
up at the bar.

"Don't worry. He doesn't do it on purpose. I
hypnotized him once I found out who you were. He really does love
you as a friend. I would never have gotten him to spy on you
willingly."

I could see Justin turning ill.

"I really do hate the Anubis Society, though.
I'm not like them. If I could escape my tether, I would. There's
only one problem: I hate daywalkers just as much as
nightwalkers."

In one swift motion, Chiyoko produced a huge,
partially rusted blowtorch from underneath the bar and aimed it at
Dante.

"Blowtorch!" Justin yelled, as he dove to the
ground.

The trigger on her weapon stalled. She tried
to fiddle with it, but it was too late for her.

"Shoot her!" I screamed.

Dante pulled the trigger of the crossbow and
the stake penetrated her heart in less than a second. Chiyoko
screamed.

"Thank you!" she coughed, before her final
death transformed her from the inside out. He skin shriveled and
tightened against her skeleton and darkened like a raisin. Her body
fell to the ground behind the bar. We got up and ran to the end of
the bar to see what happened, and, as I expected, there was nothing
left but a puddle of what looked like tar.

"Holy fucking shit," Justin said.

"And that's how a vampire dies," I said.

"She told us all of that…and was going to
burn us to death anyway…" Justin mused.

"That's what vampires do," I said.

"They can't all be like that," Justin
argued.

"You'll see. Now clean this up so we can get
out of here."

"I'll never understand how you pop up with a
new vehicle whenever you want," Justin said to me as we got into my
black Corolla.

"I guess nobody ever told you just how
wealthy we are, huh?"

I asked Justin, as he drove the three of us
to our next target, a stakeout at the vampire mansion in Northwest.
Dante silently rested in the backseat as the sun threatened to set
in the early afternoon.

"Well the foundation's wealth is public
information—almost three hundred million dollars in the bank. Which
is crazy!"

"You think that's crazy? That's only ten
percent of our wealth."

"Wait."

"What?"

"The Razadi have three
billion
dollars?"

"Yeah, I guess, something like that."

"How in the entire fuck did you guys get
three billion dollars? Y'all were picking cotton in the old
south!"

"An entire fuck? Not a portion of a
fuck?"

"Nigga! Where the money come from?!"

"Why are you so excited?"

"Because you are richer than Oprah. Ain't no
black folks richer than Oprah except Jesus."

I laughed hard. Justin was hilarious when he
wasn't busy being needy.

"Our wealth comes from a lot of places. The
Dominican Razadi became foresters after we left. Lumber was big
business back then—still is. The business spread throughout the
Caribbean and down into South America. Then we picked cotton, of
course, and made fabric. Everybody needs clothes. Bought up a bunch
of real estate. Made some investments. And, you know, maybe we
bootlegged gin."

"So it's not exactly…legal…"

"All money is dirty, is it not?"

"Y'all didn't trade slaves, did you?"

"Of course not."

"Drug trafficking?"

"Are we counting weed?"

"Oh jeez."

"No Justin, we never trafficked drugs or
people."

"That's just a lot of money."

"And we were very astute in our business
dealings over the years. Just know that as the times changed, so
did we. Babarinde has us all well taken care of."

"Okay," Justin said. He fidgeted with his
seatbelt as we paused at a stoplight.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"Are you nervous about going back to the
mansion?"

"I'm anxious. Not afraid."

"You know I have your back, Justin."

He looked sideways at me as the light turned
green and he accelerated.

"You don't like me."

"I don't have to like you to have your back.
Anyway, what those vampires did to you was criminal and I'm looking
forward to seeing you get your personal revenge."

"This isn't about me, this is about
Orlando."

"You don't even know Orlando."

"But I know you. And I'm one of you.
So…there's that."

We pulled up at the end of the cul-de-sac
just as the sun set.

"It won't be long before they start filing
out," I notified Justin. "That's how they do. It's like anybody
else with a night job. They wake up with the sunset, shower, shave,
whatever else, and then head out."

"Do they really sleep in coffins?"

"Yup. If even a pinpoint of light hits them,
it's curtains. They sizzle, pop, and turn into that sludge you
saw."

"Gross. So they're all in the basement, I
guess."

"Probably so."

"They'll be on their guard since Chiyoko
disappeared last night," Dante said, as he sat up in the
backseat.

"I know. We'll need to trail the first one
that comes out, corner him, and make him talk," Justin said.

"Again with the talking?" I asked.

"Yes. We need information, not bodies."

"Vampires don't leave bodies, stupid."

"Listen, you know what the fuck I mean. We
know Orlando is in there. If we could just run in there with a
battering ram and get him out, we would. But all we know about the
interior is what I saw when I walked in. We don't know if Orlando
is in a room or a dungeon or a closet or what-the-fuck-ever-else
there is in that goddamn house. Every vampire we isolate gets us
closer. And don't you want to know
why
they have him?"

"Alright bitch, damn. You over here running
your mouth and don't even see the chick coming out the house."