Of Masques and Martyrs (2 page)

“Jesus! What the fuck is . . .” one of the boys shouted. Angry words laced with testosterone.

Sad counterpoint to the shrill screams that followed.

“Yes!” Erika rasped.

Together, she and Rolf melted away from the bench, bones snapping, skin stretching, shrinking, changing. A pair of filthy pigeons, too stupid to fly south for the winter, winged up into the night sky and across Washington Square Park. The birds came to roost atop the landmark arch in the middle of the park.

From there, they watched the slaughter.

Blood jetted skyward, spattering the cobblestones as five young lives were extinguished in an almost balletic act of carnage. The skateboarders never stood a chance. Ever silent, Rolf watched, with Erika at his side, as a trio of barbaric vampires feasted. For perhaps the first time, he relished his muteness. If he’d been able to speak, he would never have been able to control the urge to cry out in horror at the savagery of his own race.

For they were of his race. Semantics had separated them, and loyalties as well. He and Erika were shadows, members of Octavian’s coven, and dedicated to peaceful coexistence with humanity. These others belonged to Hannibal’s brutal clan, whose goal was the enslavement of a human race they perceived as nothing more than cattle. They eschewed the less volatile name of shadow, embracing instead the title of myth, of terrible legend—vampire.

Shadow and vampire, one and the same, and yet now forever at war. And by their very nature, the vampires were destined to triumph. For shadows did not recruit, did not steal life and thus violently draft new souls into the war. New shadows were created by individual choice. While the ranks of the vampire swelled, the number of shadows rose ever so slowly.

But the shadows counted many humans among their ranks. They were even allowed to become members of the coven, these living, breathing souls. And it was to that alliance that Octavian’s faithful now looked for some spark of hope.

Most of them.

But Rolf was different. Rolf Sechs had many reasons to want the vampire lord Hannibal dead, not the least of which was the murder of his one-time lover, a human soldier named Elissa Thomas. He also knew Hannibal better than the rest of Octavian’s coven did. Better, perhaps, than anyone but the immortal madman himself.

In the brief time when humanity and shadows had lived in peace, Hannibal and Rolf had worked together to police the vampires of the world. But Hannibal had not been in the game for any benevolent purpose. Rather, he had been there to find followers, to uncover those immortals whose personal philosophies might be aligned with his own.

He was shopping for warriors. And he found them. And when the time came that the world, human and otherwise, needed him most, Hannibal betrayed them all.

Hannibal’s crimes were an endless litany of horror and betrayal, and his perversion spread more each day. Major cities across the face of the globe cowered in fear of the dark. No matter what skirmishes they won, what nests they destroyed, the shadows could not seem even to slow the spread of Hannibal’s reign of chaos.

Rolf was tired of it. Of fighting to hold ground rather than take it. Of fighting the slaves and not the master. He longed to hold Hannibal’s head in his powerful hands and crush it, to feel the vampire’s skull shatter, and blood leak through his fingers.

He had abandoned Octavian’s coven because he couldn’t wait any longer. The only way to stop Hannibal’s campaign of terror, in Rolf’s mind, was to destroy the elder vampire himself. Thus had begun the descent into hell, the investigation which had led him here, to New York City.

Erika had come along without being asked. He knew she loved him, but he kept her at a distance. She had been there, had witnessed the horrors Hannibal was capable of. She wanted him dead as well. But it wasn’t the same thing. And he could not offer her much of a life together until this one thing was done.

So he watched. Together, they watched. They listened to the sounds of murder and saw the gore spread playfully around the park and the corpses of strong, young American boys defiled in ways Rolf—who was centuries old when Hitler came to power and still shivered in horror at the predations of the Nazis—had never imagined. Together they watched.

And did nothing.

When the vampires had drunk their fill, had painted themselves in blood and shit and danced a grotesque jig in the viscera of their victims, the savages laughed together like drunken college boys and shoved one another around in play. One by one, they transformed into huge, filthy bats, and flew into the northern sky. Confined as they were by Hannibal’s loyalty to traditional myths, the vampires could choose from a limited array of changes.

The shadows, on the other hand, could be anything their minds might imagine. Anything. From city birds, Rolf and Erika transformed once more, to become birds of prey. Two large hawks took flight from atop the arch in Washington Square Park and set off after the trio of blood-matted bats flying north.

Inside the lead hawk, the mind of Rolf Sechs burned with hatred, sang with a lusty bloodsong that the peaceful shadows rarely allowed themselves. The time had come. He felt it within him as surely as he felt the thirst upon him. Hannibal would die beneath his powerful hands, flashing talons, razor fangs. Rolf would show the arrogant elder the true face of the vampire.

 

At her lover’s side, Erika Hunter flew in silence. Though he could not speak aloud, Rolf had become quite talkative in the year they’d spent together as a couple. Telepathy was only possible among shadows of the same bloodline. Fortunately, they shared an ancestor, and she was able to hear his kind voice in her mind, and was often required to communicate for him.

Yet, over the days they had spent waiting for Hannibal’s followers to appear, so that they might follow the bastard creatures home to their master, Rolf had communicated with her less and less frequently. And when he did speak in her mind, she could feel the tension, the obsession, the darkness welling up within him.

Erika wanted Hannibal dead. Without question, the coven led by Peter Octavian
needed
Hannibal dead. But she wondered, as they flew, hawk eyes focused on fleeing bat wings, if Rolf realized how suicidal this mission really was.

They were going to die. If Erika had to bet, it would not be in their favor. Shadows, vampires. Whatever they called themselves and each other, they were very hard to kill. Through some combination of humanity, divinity, and demonic influence Erika had never completely understood, the race of shadows had achieved a kind of cellular consciousness and control. They were shapeshifters, really, and could become anything.

Or, at least, that was the potential. But long centuries earlier, the Roman church had handicapped the shadows by implanting certain psychic controls. Myths. The sun burns. The cross terrifies. Silver poisons. Running water. Native soil.

Bullshit. But psychically altered to believe in such things, the shadows’ cellular consciousness would react. A psychosomatic reaction of the most destructive and fundamental kind. It made them easier to kill. At least until the Venice Jihad six years ago, which revealed the truth, uncovered the conspiracy. The world’s shadows had begun to shake off the church’s brainwashing, but individual success had varied. Some were still susceptible to the old flaws. And Hannibal’s insistence that his followers pay heed to ancient tradition, to hunt only by night, to limit their transformations to creatures of darkness . . . made it more difficult for them to liberate themselves from the myths, thus making them more vulnerable.

So, Erika thought with amusement, the shadows had that going for them. Not much, considering the vastly greater number of the vampires, of Hannibal’s coven. But something was always better than nothing.

Not that it would help.

A siren wailed in the distance. Televisions blared from within apartments locked up tight. Cab drivers ferried home unfortunate souls who’d had to work late; the taxis’ windshields were festooned with garlic and crucifixes, in hopes that they would have some kind of effect. Erika wondered how much such kamikaze cabbies could charge for a ride home through the murderous night.

She felt the muscles in her hawk’s wings ripple as she and Rolf soared between and above the buildings of the Bronx. Erika allowed the city to distract her, to turn her thoughts away from the coming confrontation. But when the Bronx disappeared behind them, and they began to enter the more suburban area of Westchester County, she realized that they must be getting close. It wouldn’t be logical for Hannibal to be much farther away from Manhattan.

Her thoughts turned again to losing. To dying.

There were all kinds of tricks they could use to try to infiltrate Hannibal’s headquarters, wherever it was. But to kill him, and then escape with their lives? Erika just didn’t believe it was possible. So be it, then, she thought. If tonight was the night, she would die by Rolf’s side, with the blood of her family’s greatest enemy on her lips.

The Tappan Zee Bridge appeared on the horizon, and for a moment Erika thought the vampires might be heading for Tarrytown, or Sleepy Hollow, which she thought might have suited Hannibal’s taste for the perverse. Less than a decade earlier, before running away to become a capricious and clever little goth girl on the streets of Atlanta, Erika had lived in Tarrytown. She wondered if her too-straight parents still lived there, still mourned her; and suddenly she was revolted by the thought that Hannibal might have tainted the peaceful little town.

But no, the vampires flew on. What had once been an automobile manufacturing plant passed by below, and now Erika was insanely curious. This would have made an ideal headquarters.

Where then? What better place could he have? . . .

Then she saw it, in the distance, stark and cold against the trees, with the railroad tracks running alongside. A mountain of ugly gray stone and glittering silver wire, hard and silent. The Hudson River flowed past to the west, complement and counterpoint, showing the mountain what it could never have, could never be.

Up the river
. The phrase came unbidden to Erika’s mind. In gangster movies it meant being sent to prison. This prison.

Sing-Sing.

Of course,
she thought, letting Rolf see into her mind, hear her words.

The vampire bats dipped on the night air, gliding down toward the prison walls. Rolf swooped low to follow, but Erika held back a moment.

What’s the plan, Rolf?
she asked.
How do you want to go in?

She sensed his confusion, and realized that, so driven was he by his obsession, he had nearly forgotten she was there at all. It hurt. Erika knew that, fond of her as Rolf may be, he’d never really loved her. There had never been room in his heart for her. not with all the hatred there.

We’re in this together, damn you,
she thought, and directed her mind at him.

I know
, he finally replied.
I’m sorry. Part of me wants to just fly right in and wait for Hannibal to come to us.

Erika flew into the branches of a massive oak tree across the street from the prison, and Rolf circled to join her there a moment later.

He might not come to us at all,
she reasoned.
They might just kill us
.

He’ll come,
Rolf argued.
But we’ll exercise a little caution. We’ll wait until morning to go in. Then all we’ll have to do is slaughter his human servants—

It isn’t that simple,
Erika thought.

Yes
, Rolf replied.
Yes it is.

 

At dawn they dropped from the oak tree and landed next to one another on the paved sidewalk of a nice suburban town called Ossining, New York. A nice prison town. They were themselves again, Rolf Sechs and Erika Hunter. Lovers. Shadows. Briefly, they embraced, then turned to walk toward the prison hand in hand, as if they were tourists.

At the front gates of the prison, four men stood guard. It should have seemed odd to the townspeople, having four men in front of an empty prison. Erika figured over time they’d grown so used to seeing armed personnel there that it never occurred to anyone to question it. And Hannibal’s coven didn’t kill the people of Ossining. Or even nearby. That was a tenet of the old covens: you don’t hunt at home.

Erika’s long, tattered jacket flapped behind her in the breeze off the Hudson. Rolf’s broad shoulders were straight as he marched determinedly toward the gate, toward the guards. Somewhere far away, a child screamed with pleasure, already awake with the risen sun.

Every muscle tensed, Erika brought her hands up inside her jacket, reaching for the twin nine-millimeter semiauto pistols that Will Cody had given her as a gift for her birthday several months earlier. She felt the hardness of the pistol butts beneath her touch. Her lip curled in disdain as the guards suddenly noticed her and Rolf approaching. They snapped to attention, whispering between themselves like amateurs.

Traitors to their own race; Erika hated them.

No
. Rolf’s stern voice entered her mind, and he tapped her on the shoulder.

Erika looked at him and saw his eyes flicker toward her chest, hands . . . toward her guns.

Damn Cody and his fondness for Hong Kong action movies,
Rolf thought to her.
You go for the guns when you
need
them not for recreation.

Erika took her hands away from inside her coat and shot a hard look at Rolf.
Who the hell are you, my father?
she thought.

But Rolf wasn’t looking at her; he was smiling and waving at the guards.
No,
he mentally replied,
just a guy who wants to live through the next five minutes. Kill them quietly.

“Sorry, folks, they stopped giving tours about two months ago,” a guard with a natural orange buzzcut announced.