Of Masques and Martyrs (15 page)

Like the vampire Erika had called Yano, Hannibal’s long hair was white. But unlike Yano, Hannibal did not look old. In fact, he was every inch the vampire lord he had made of himself. Tall and slender, with eyes a compelling, frosted blue, and a mane of flowing white hair, Hannibal looked, quite simply, cruel.

For just a moment, the world went away. Allison flashed back to the first time she’d met Hannibal. A party, at his house in Venice, for shadows and volunteers—humans who offered themselves up by choice. She had been a reporter then, working undercover to investigate a vast network of disappearances and what she thought was a murderous cult. She’d been knocked unconscious. And when she woke . . . God, those sounds . . . Hannibal had been defiling the wounds of another woman’s corpse, fucking her in the abdomen, only a few feet from where Allison lay.

“Allison,” Hannibal said, and his smile widened.

She recoiled as if he’d slapped her, then raged against her lack of self-control. Not that it wasn’t understandable. After all, she’d seen the depths of Hannibal’s depravity. She knew what she faced.

“He’ll kill you, you know,” she said as matter-of-factly as she was able.

“Yes, I know,” Hannibal replied. “If he can. So really, it doesn’t matter what I do to you, as long as you’re whole enough to lure him here.”

He misted, then, and passed through the bars in an instant, re-forming inside, only a few feet from Allison. Against her will, she found herself scrambling backward to get away from him. She remembered thinking just moments before about how strong a woman she was.

But courage only went so far.

“Please,” she said, “just leave me alone.”

“Oh,” Hannibal replied, smiling, “I really don’t think so.”

It was his smugness that did it. Allison, steeling herself against his inevitable reprisal, turned on Hannibal. Her hatred and fear boiled over together, pouring out of her in waves. Bile rose in her throat, and she spat it, hot and thick, in Hannibal’s face.

“Do your worst, you bastard,” she said quietly. “Every time you hurt me, every tear and every scream, I’ll think about what’s going to happen to you when Cody finally catches up to you.”

“Please do shut up now,” he replied.

Hannibal wiped the back of his hand across his face, then licked her phlegmy spit off his hand. As if it were the same motion, he backhanded her. Allison’s cheekbone cracked and her nose broke, blood spurting from her left nostril. She flew across the cell and slammed her right shoulder against the cement wall. She could hear something else crack on impact, and the pain screamed up into her whole body. When she landed on the cement, she was close to passing out again.

“No,” Hannibal said wearily. “Not for a while yet.”

He tore her from the ground by her blood-spattered blond hair, scalp ripping from the speed and power. That woke her up. Allison screamed, and the tears she’d known would come finally arrived.

“Don’t feel as though you can’t beg,” Hannibal teased. “It won’t make a damn bit of difference one way or the other.”

His right hand closed on her good shoulder, and with his left, he broke her arm.

Again, she began to pass out. But then the horror brought her back around. The pain and humiliation as Hannibal literally tore her clothes from her body. In seconds Allison lay naked and bleeding, cracked and broken on the cement floor. She couldn’t feel the cold of the concrete anymore.

Hannibal leaned over her and covered her mouth and nostrils with his right hand. Allison’s eyes bulged in panic. She couldn’t breathe, and for a moment, the pain was set aside. Death was imminent. Black spots appeared before her eyes, and she began to calm down. Death had its attractions. Already, the pain was fading.

The hand went away. Allison sucked air greedily into her lungs. The pain was unimportant in that instant. She wanted to live, no matter what.

“You’re a tough one,” Hannibal said appreciatively. “That’s nice. I want you to be able to appreciate this.”

Then he began to scar her.

 

In the year since the catastrophic battle that nearly leveled Salzburg, Austria, Roberto Jimenez had changed very little. His hair was a bit grayer. He was one year older, of course, forty-five now. He smiled less. Even spoke less often. And, for the first time in his life, he considered himself a failure.

Until Salzburg, Roberto had been commander-general of the United Nations Security Force. Afterwards, his job had changed. His orders were simple. Kill the vampires. No matter what it took, or how much it cost, or who he pissed off doing it.

That was the idea, anyway. But for three full seasons, he’d been caught in a tug of war between Bill Galin, the president of the United States, and Rafael Nieto, the secretary-general of the U.N. Nieto was a pain in the ass, and Galin . . . Galin was just insane. Truly, completely insane. Willing to threaten nuclear strikes to get his way, happy to have the Secret Service and CIA commit assassinations whenever the need arose.

While his old job went to someone else, Berto watched and waited, anxious to get started. And while he waited, Hannibal spread his influence over the face of the Earth, a virus with an agenda. In the days before the world knew that vampires were real, they were kept in check by a rogue faction of the Roman Catholic Church.

But the church was gone, its American splinter all that remained.

Even though some of the vampires seemed to be free of the vulnerabilities and restraints that mythology claimed for them, Hannibal’s legions of followers were not. Compared to the less violent of the vampires—and unlike both Nieto and Galin, Roberto knew there was a difference—Hannibal’s crew were far easier to kill.

Unfortunately, he’d been relegated to culling vampires in certain areas of certain cities, to hunting down specific bloodsuckers, most of which he never found. Pursuing Galin’s vendettas had cost valuable time and led nowhere. Hannibal’s followers seemed to choose major cities at random, spread all over the globe, but concentrated in America. At random, at least, until you looked at the map and realized how evenly dispersed they were. Portland, Oregon. Los Angeles. Denver. Dallas. Minneapolis. Detroit. Of course, New York and Atlanta were the worst. Hell, those cities might as well just be surrendered to Hannibal, Roberto had often thought.

Eventually, even Galin could no longer ignore the screams of the American people, and Secretary-General Nieto forced the American president to hear the screams of the rest of the world.

Finally, Jimenez received the green light he’d been awaiting for nearly ten months. Ten weeks later, with all the planning, recruiting, and training complete, all the logistics finally worked out, and with a presidential and U.N. commission that gave him unlimited freedom of command, he was ready.

As dawn broke over the elegant Altanta skyline, Roberto sat on the roof of his Humvee, on a highway overpass just west of the city. He didn’t need the night vision glasses any longer, so he picked up the high-res binocs instead. Scanned the streets for stragglers.

“Points Alpha through Omega, last check-in now, please,” he said without turning.

Inside the Humvee, his order was passed via televideo to the twenty-odd command centers located in and around the city of Atlanta. Less than a minute later, Lieutenant Sniegoski poked his head out the window.

“All clear, Commander,” the young man reported.

Roberto nodded. Waited. Watched the sun. It hadn’t completely cleared the horizon yet, and he wanted to make absolutely certain that day had arrived. It had rained yesterday, so the operation had been put off until today. But today looked to be an absolutely glorious day.

Glorious.

“Movement,” Sniegoski reported.

Berto lifted the binocs again, scanned the edge of the city. A newspaper delivery truck made its way swiftly through the deserted streets. A moment later, he caught sight of a lone man walking out the front door of an apartment building.

Without a word, he reached a hand beneath him and Sniegoski handed him a small comm-unit. He brought it to his mouth, pressed a tiny red button.

“This is Commander Jimenez, security code Gamma Chi Niner,” he announced. “Operation Moses is a go. I repeat, Operation Moses has a green light. Get ’em all out of here, people. Don’t leave a single soul. Anybody puts up an argument, you know the drill.”

Roberto sipped from a cup of coffee Sniegoski handed him. He sat and watched as the United Nations army of Shadow Fighters evacuated the city of Atlanta, Georgia. All citizens who would not come willingly were to be arrested and brought against their will. This would have been impossible even a few weeks ago, but with the city down to less than half its population, they would be evacuated by nightfall.

While the evacuation was taking place, the thermite charges would be set. A short time before dusk, the combination of thermite explosions and napalm air strikes would burn Atlanta to the ground.

Again.

Eight thousand U.N. soldiers would surround the city and kill any vampire trying to make an escape.

It was war.

“Burn, you bastards,” Roberto whispered to himself.

“I’m sorry, sir?” Lieutenant Sniegoski said below.

“Nothing, Lieutenant. Let’s move in and lend a hand. I don’t want a single human being left in Atlanta when the shit hits the fan.”

 

It had been a simple thing for Cody to backtrack and follow Erika and her vampire conspirators as they brought Allison back to Hannibal’s headquarters. They had a human with them, after all—Allison—and with Hannibal having limited their ability to shapeshift to certain forms, they couldn’t very well carry her back in their talons. No, they had to use a car.

As a particularly ugly pigeon, Will had followed them up the shore of the Hudson River until they reached Sing-Sing. Now, in full daylight, with all of Hannibal’s fang-boys and -girls hidden away inside the prison, Will sat at the counter of a small diner that opened for breakfast at six A.M., trying to figure out how he was going to get her out of there.

He tried not to think about what Hannibal might do to her in the meantime. He prayed that Hannibal’s wish to destroy him would keep the madman from hurting Allison much. But the idea of her being hurt at all was tearing Will’s heart out.

Still, crashing into the prison without thinking things through first was very likely to get them both killed.

Don’t worry, darlin’
, he thought, trying to send the thoughts to her, though Allison had no capacity to receive them.

“I’m coming for you,” he said aloud.

It would have been nice to have Peter’s input, Will thought.

“Well, why the hell not?” he whispered, and received an odd look from the waitress behind the counter, a matronly woman whose name, he had been stunned to read, was actually Madge.

Will ignored her, sipped his cappuccino, and sent his mind wandering. It was never easy to make contact in this way, not from so far. Moments of extreme danger were an exception, however. That seemed to amp the power of a shadow’s mind somehow. Which was why Will usually carried a cell phone. He didn’t have one now, of course. It was back at the airport, in a carry-on bag he would probably never retrieve.

Concentrating, he sent his mind out in search of Peter. Thought of him there, in New Orleans, with George and Joe and the others. Searched for the man who had become as a brother to him.

And found nothing.

Will panicked.
Just like Rolf,
he thought. And Erika had said Rolf was dead! Will refused to even entertain the idea that anything had happened to Peter. Just the unreliability of shadow telepathy over long distance. That’s what it had to be.

He pushed off his stool, laid a twenty on the counter, and moved to the back of the diner toward the pay phone. For a moment, he struggled to remember his code, then punched it in and listened to the phone ring in the Ursuline convent in New Orleans.

Home.

“Hello?”

“George!” Will said. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I’m old, Colonel,” George replied. “I almost never sleep. But I sense the urgency in your voice. What’s happened?”

“It’s . . .” Will began, then faltered. “It’s Allison. Hannibal’s got her.”

“My God,” George said hoarsely.

“Yeah. Well I’ll need
his
help for sure,” Will said. “Is Peter all right? I’ve been trying to reach him, but I just get nothing.”

“That’s odd,” George noted. “I hate to disturb him, but I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you. Hold on.”

And Cody held on. Several minutes passed during which he cursed the age in George Marcopoulos’s bones.

“Will?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Peter’s . . . he’s not in his room, Will,” George said. “I honestly don’t know where he is. Is there a number where he can call you?”

“No,” Will said. “I’ll try back in a bit.”

As he hung up the phone, Will’s mind was racing. If something actually
had
happened to Peter . . . but no, he had to concentrate on getting Allison away from Hannibal. Until then, nothing else mattered.

Nothing.

—PETER GABRIEL, “Red Rain”

 

 

 

 

LIGHT REFRACTED THROUGH THE MYRIAD COLORS of the chapel’s stained glass windows, bathing the pews and altar in a wash of eerie hues. At the back of the altar, the mournful eyes of the suffering Christ stared down on a solitary figure, alone in a pew halfway down the central aisle.

Elsewhere in the convent, shadows went about their business. Some slept, still more comfortable with night than day; others had gone out into New Orleans, moving through lives they had made for themselves. Some stayed inside, counseling human members who were trying to decide whether or not to accept the gift of immortality, the curse of vampirism. Still others huddled together and planned as best they could how to police a city that, for most of them, was not their home.