ELEVENtTHE HUNT BEGINS

Happy is the hare at morning, for she cannot read

The Hunter’s waking thoughts.

— W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood Dog Beneath the Skin

As he pushed through the door that separated the lobby of the old hotel from the dark, narrow side street beyond, Angus took a moment to savor the evening air, balmy and warm even in the dead of winter. Though largely immune to the cold, he still had to admit that, after the subzero temperatures at the Arctic circle, the Florida climate made for a pleasant change.

He was less enamored of his new gray suit, white dress shirt, maroon tie and black oxfords. He knew it was just his imagination — purchased at a big-and-tall-men's shop, the clothes fit well enough — but the outfit made him feel constricted. The older he grew, the more he hated all but the loosest and most comfortable garments. It was as if, though he still felt thoroughly at home in human shape, he were losing patience with the senseless constraints and inconveniences of human civilization.

But if he was going to track a quarry through Sarasota, conventional white-collar attire would open more doors than his stained, ratty wilderness clothes. He was tempted to cut his long mane of hair and shave his beard as well, except that, due to his powers of regeneration, they’d regrow so quickly that it scarcely seemed worth the trouble. A vampire’s form clung to the appearance it had worn in life, even in trivial respects.

Angus glanced up and down the sidewalk, checking to see if any mortals were watching him. None were. Downtown Sarasota seemed all but deserted, as if the kine, terrified of Dracula, had barricaded themselves in their homes.

Patience, the Gangrel told them silently. Deliverance is at hand. Then he grinned at his own cockiness. I hope so, anyway.

He spread his arms and invoked the unique gift of his people. Instantly he felt his irksome new clothing melt away and silky- fur sprouting to take its place. His huge frame shrank. His legs shortened drastically in proportion to his torso, while his ears expanded and moved to the top of his head. Extending, his arms grew membranes which linked them to his sides.

In the blink of an eye, he’d become a large black bat. A beat of his wings sent him spiraling upward toward the crescent moon.

As usual, for a moment he couldn’t resist surrendering himself to the delights of his new body, the exhilaration of riding the sea breeze and the wonder of his altered perception. As a bat, he could detect a universe of sounds beyond the range of human hearing. When his own high-pitched cries echoed back to him, he could hear shapes.

Angus wasn’t thirsty. He’d fed last night. And thus he felt a familiar urge to forsake both Kindred and kine, to live the primal existence of an animal until the imminence of dawn sent him retreating to his lair. Resisting the impulse, reminding himself that he’d promised to catch Melpomene’s rogue vampire and that, with any luck, the undertaking might actually be fun, he began to fly back and forth over the streets and rooftops, crisscrossing the city. Above him shone the stars. It pleased him that they burned brighter here than in many other, more smog-ridden cities. He wondered if it was the influence of the now-stricken Roger Phillips and his beauty-loving Toreador that had kept Sarasota from becoming as polluted, filthy and decayed as many other urban centers of the modern world.

After a few minutes he sighted a pale, slender, frecklefaced young woman, dressed in sandals, jeans and a black Metallica T-shirt with the sleeves chopped off, slinking through a seedy apartment complex. Though the world abounded in thin, fair-complexioned kine, he was instantly all but certain that the stranger was undead. Over the course of centuries, he had developed an instinct for recognizing his own kind. He wheeled above her unnoticed, studying her, ears straining. Sure enough, she wasn’t breathing, nor was her heart beating.

Angus wondered if, by some incredible stroke of luck, he’d stumbled on Dracula minutes after beginning the hunt. He watched the other Kindred for a while to see if she was looking for prey, and if she’d take it in a way that left it dead and drained with holes in its throat, or otherwise endanger the Masquerade. Before long, noting the manner in which she crept along, scrutinizing every shadow, ignoring the noises of human occupancy, the murmur of conversation and the jangle of TV and stereos that sounded from the apartments, he decided that, far from being Dracula, she might well be hunting the outlaw herself. Melpomene had informed him that the Toreador and their allies were conducting their own frantic search.

Angus had considered revealing his presence to the local vampires and taking charge of their manhunt, but had decided against it. It was entirely possible that Dracula was some trusted member of their own community. If so, the Gangrel might have to shadow the indigenous Kindred to unmask him, and it would be easier to do that if the rest of Sarasota’s undead didn’t know of his existence. Besides, there were others to whom he could turn for aid.

He decided that he’d flown around enough to orient himself to the city. Wheeling, he headed west. In a minute, unaffected by the baseless superstitions that forbade his kind passage across open water, he was winging his way over the placid black waters of Sarasota Bay toward the narrow island called Longboat Key.

The aquarium, a four-story slab of a building, loomed out of the night just where Angus’ tourist map had said it would be. The Gangrel dived toward the ground. With the ease of long practice, and confident that his vampire body’s resilience would protect him from any injury, he began to change shape even before he touched down in the middle of a cluster of sheltering palm trees. His powerful human legs soaked up the impact.

Angus peered through the trees. As far as he could tell, no one else was around. Utterly silent despite his height and bulk, he slunk to what appeared to be the aquarium’s staff entrance.

Someone had installed two shiny new stainless-steel locks in the door, a perfect example of closing up the barn after the horse was gone. Lacking the proper tools, Angus doubted that he could pick them, but fortunately, he didn’t need to. He began to change form again.

His body and clothes turned pearly gray and then began to steam. Over the course of fifteen seconds, he melted into a roiling mass of faintly phosphorescent vapor.

In one respect, turning one’s body to mist was rather the opposite of becoming a bat or a wolf. When he put on the guise of a beast, his senses grew sharper, but when he was fog, he had no eyes, ears, or nose, and his perceptions dimmed to a murky psychic awareness of shape and position.

That, however, was sufficient to guide him to the crack beneath the bottom of the door. He flowed through it and reverted to human shape in the dark hallway on the other side.

Angus honed his vision, and the shapes of the doors lining the corridor swam out of the dimness. His eyes now shining with a spectral crimson light, he headed for the exhibits.

He had little doubt that some of the fish had seen Dracula. According to the accounts in the media, the murderer had dumped a little girl’s corpse in one of their tanks. But such creatures were nearly mindless. They couldn’t possibly remember the encounter days later.

Warm-blooded animals, on the other hand, conceivably might, and so Angus made his way to- the manatee exhibition where the two police officers had died.

Inside their tank, the massive, neckless, slate-colored animals floated, some motionless, possibly sleeping, and others swimming, their flukes sweeping smoothly up and down. Their forms reminded Angus of the seals and walruses he’d seen in the frozen north. He positioned himself in front of one of the observation windows, stared into it, and willed the manatees to commune with him. Two points of red light, the reflections of his eyes, gleamed on the surface of the glass.

One by one the six sea cows swam to the window. Their round, placid faces gazed out at him. Now linked to their minds, he could feel their friendly curiosity.

As was proper, he introduced himself, not giving his name, which would have been meaningless to them, but radiating a sense of his identity. No one, kine or Kindred, who lacked the power to converse with beasts could have understood the process, because no human language possessed the words to describe it. The manatees answered in kind, and then he asked them about the murders.

At first the animals conveyed incomprehension. They saw the two-legged shapes that moved beyond the windows, but ordinarily they didn’t pay any attention to them. There was no reason to.

With a patience that sometimes eluded him in his dealings with humans and vampires, Angus kept talking, trying to stimulate the manatees’ memories. Though the animals had little concept of either time or number, he managed to communicate that the killings had happened several nights ago. One of the men who’d died had accidentally broken a window.

The smallest manatee, an immature female with the indented white groove of a propeller scar on top of her head, exclaimed in recognition. The hole! They didn’t know' anything about any killing, but of course they remembered the hole.

The animals projected a jumble of remembered impressions so intense that for a moment Angus nearly believed that he was one of them, his heavy, rounded body suspended in cool, soothing water. It had been a night like any other, and then, suddenly, they’d heard a sharp crack and felt a shock. An instant later they’d sensed a new current in the tank, flowing not to the drains but somewhere else. Following it, they’d discovered the hole in the window’.

At first they’d been merely curious and then, as the water level dropped, somewhat alarmed. But eventually the humans who fed them had come and moved them to another tank, one without windows in the walls. When their keepers had moved them back again, the water had been at its accustomed level, and the breach in the glass was gone.

When you first peered at the hole, Angus asked, what did you see beyond it on the other side of the window? You must have noticed something.

For a moment the manatees regarded him blankly, and he decided that, in fact, they couldn’t help him. Then the same female who’d recalled the bullet hole projected the image of a woman crouching over two motionless bodies. The picture was murky and distorted, but Angus could make out a tall, slender form, a pale, oval face, short raven hair capped with a sort of beret, and a long black coat with the collar turned up.

He was somewhat surprised. He realized that, though he’d encountered plenty of depraved and dangerous female Kindred in the course of his long existence, he’d been unconsciously assuming that Dracula was male. He supposed it was a carryover from his youth, when, by and large, the men had done the raiding, feuding and killing while the women stayed home to bury them and teach the bairns to hate the enemies of their clan.

Pleased if not jubilant — it would have taken a clear view of Dracula’s face to make him truly rejoice — he thanked the manatees for their help, bade them good-bye, and retraced .his steps.

Once outside he moved away from the building and back into the palms. Then he tilted back his head and began to call with an inhuman, ultrasonic cry.

A shape like a ragged scrap of shadow swooped out of the night and wheeled around his head. Then another. Before long, he was standing at the center of a whirling, squealing cloud of bats. Smiling, he hailed them, introduced himself, and then began to give them their instructions.

TWELVES HE NEXT MOVE

All wars are planned by old men In council rooms apart.

— Grantland Rice, “Two Sides of War”

Elliott prowled restlessly around Roger’s cramped little study, which he’d decided to usurp as his own office for the duration of the crisis. Though twenty-four hours had passed, the feeling of unreality that had overwhelmed him at the conclusion of his combat with Gunter had yet to release its grip. He wondered morosely just what course of action the unofficial warlord of Sarasota ought to be pursuing, what cunning strategies ought to be springing to his mind. He felt as if he’d been forced to perform an utterly unfamiliar play, one in which he didn’t even know the story, let alone any of his lines.

He contemplated the model of the Globe Theatre, wondering if he and all his associates wouldn’t have been better off if he’d never been Embraced. If he’d lived a normal mortal lifespan in good Queen Bess’ London, then died when his allotted years were through.

Someone tapped on the door. Inhaling, he caught Lazio’s clean but slightly musty scent — he smell of a human who attended to his personal hygiene, but whose body had begun to deteriorate with age. “Come in,” the vampire said.

Lazio shuffled into the room. His aura, more vividly colored than any undead’s, was shot through with orange and gray, hues suggestive of worry and sadness respectively. “Judy said you wanted to see me,” the mortal remarked.

Elliott nodded. “Please sit down,” he said, waving his hand at one of the antique green leather chairs. He, however, remained on his feet to tower ominously over his companion.

The Toreador also kept silent for a few seconds, hoping the tactic would rattle Lazio’s nerves. Finally the mortal said, “Well? What is it? What’s happened this time?”

“Nothing,” Elliott said. Drawing on his charismatic abilities, he tried to project a subtle vibe of menace. “I just need some information.”

Lazio’s eyes narrowed in seeming puzzlement — or suspicion. “All right. Ask away.”

“Does Roger have a master inventory of all the Toreador art?”

“Well, not as such,” Lazio replied. “But if somebody went through his journals and other papers, he could identify a lot of it.”

“Who knows about those documents?” Elliott demanded. Lazio shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think their existence is any big secret.”

“But it might be difficult for most people to get at them,” Elliott said. “I imagine it would help considerably if one lived here in the house and could move around by daylight, when Roger was certain to be asleep.”

Lazio gaped at him. “What are you saying?”

“It also occurs to me,” Elliott continued remorselessly, “that Roger may have been rendered ill by some exotic, undetectable poison placed in his clothing or on his intimate effects. If so, who would have as good an opportunity to commit the act as his mortal secretary and valet?”

“That’s insane!” Lazio cried. “There are other ways that the enemy could have found the art. And anybody could have crept up behind Roger and brushed poison on his clothes, assuming that’s even what happened in the first place. And — and — damn it, I’m loyal, and everybody knows it!”

Elliott scrutinized the human’s aura anew. The envelope of light blazed the fiery red of outrage, without a hint of the shifting patterns of orange and sienna which might have indicated guilt and the fear of discovery. Nodding, the Toreador said, “Yes, I do know it, but I had to be sure. Please forgive me.”

Not entirely mollified, Lazio scowled. “How could you even imagine that I was a spy?” he grumbled.

“Well, given the security leak, I have to look into the possibility that somebody is,” Elliott replied reasonably. He’d also arranged for Roger’s house to be swept for bugs.

“Yes, but how could you think it was me?” Lazio persisted. “What possible motive could I have?”

“Speaking hypothetically, how about your age?” Elliott said.

Lazio blinked. “I’m not following you.”

“You’ve served Roger long and faithfully,” Elliott said, moving behind the desk and dropping into the comfortable, high-backed executive chair behind it, the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn’t an antique. The notes he’d scribbled pertaining to the defense of the domain lay strewn across the blotter. “And yet, for whatever reason, he hasn’t made you immortal, hasn’t given you the Embrace or even made you a ghoul. In your position, many people would resent that.”

Lazio snorted. “It’s a cute theory, except for one thing. Roger did offer me the Embrace. Many times. I always turned it down.”

Intrigued, Elliott cocked his head. “Why?”

“I grew up around here,” Lazio said, “only out in the country, in a subdivision where a lot of circus people and carnies spend the winter. D. L. Hicks, the lion and tiger trainer, owned the property next to my family’s. He let me come over and watch him rehearse the act, and I got to know him pretty well. And you know what? The big cats fascinated him. I think he even loved them. But I’m damn sure that he never wanted to be one. He understood them too well for that.”

Elliott laughed. The sensation felt odd, and he wondered fleetingly just how long it had been since he’d given vent to mirth. “Is that how you see us?” he asked. “As your own personal menagerie, performing stunts for your entertainment?” The concept was so at variance with the lofty opinion most Kindred held of themselves that, for a moment, it seemed irresistibly comic.

“Obviously not in the sense that I control you,” Lazio said.

You’ve done a pretty good job of pulling my strings, Elliott thought wryly.

“But in the sense that you’re beautiful and captivating, dangerous and alien, yes,” the mortal continued. “I’ve never regretted that I fell in with Roger. I can’t imagine a more interesting life than to exist in your world. But as myself, not a Kindred. If I thought that one of you were going to force me to accept the Embrace, I’d run screaming into the night and never look back, because I see you more clearly than you can see yourselves. I can tell how the Hunger and the long years of preying on men and women corrode the soul. 1 see which human qualities even you Toreador, the gentlest vampires, inevitably lose.”

Elliott felt uneasy, because Lazio’s words had the ring of truth. The vampire wondered in what respects he himself had changed without even realizing it, yet, if the process was inexorable, perhaps he was better off not knowing. Suddenly eager to change the subject, he said, “Be that as it may, I’m glad you’re not a traitor. Because that would have meant that you only pushed me to take charge because you expected me to make some catastrophic error.”

Lazio gestured irritably, flicking the notion away as if it were a gnat. “I assume that you’ve been interrogating other people too,” the dresser said. “Otherwise, I’m really going to feel offended. Have you found any good suspects?”

Elliott sighed. “Except for you and some of our other mortal associates, I’ve scarcely found anything else. I’d give odds that every Kindred I’ve spoken to, even the brashest, youngest member of Judy Morgan’s brood, is hiding some sort of secret. Not necessarily one that pertains to the present situation, but something. I suppose the Masquerade is to blame. It turns us all into inveterate deceivers. And it isn’t easy to pick one particular liar out from all the others.” “My money’s on Gunter,” Lazio said. “He wants to be prince, so he stirs up a crisis that will let him take Roger’s place. If you hadn’t stopped him, he’d already have done it, more or less.”

“There’s no doubt that Gunter wants to exploit the present situation,” Elliott replied. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that he helped create it. Have our other enemies promised him Roger’s throne in payment for his treachery'? If so, then what do they stand to gain from their victory? From their perspective, what makes the war worthwhile?” Lazio frowned, pondering Elliott’s point. “Just off the top of my head,” the mortal said, “maybe Gunter is paying the outsiders. Maybe they have a grudge against Roger and the rest of you, though I can’t imagine what it could be. Or perhaps they want a Prince of Sarasota who’ll back their proposals in the councils of the Camarilla.”

“Those are all possibilities,” Elliott conceded. “But it’s also possible that Gunter is innocent. We know too little to assume anyth—”

The green phone on the desk chimed softly.

Inwardly wincing at the prospect of more bad news, Elliott picked the receiver up. “Elliott Sinclair,” he said.

“I’ve seen Dracula,” said a deep, gravelly voice.

Elliott felt a pang of excitement. “Who is this?” he asked. “She’s tall, thin, young-looking and long-legged, with a white, oval face,” the caller continued, ignoring the question. “She has black hair cut in what people used to call a pageboy. On the night she visited the aquarium, she was wearing a long black coat and a beret.”

“Who are you?” Elliott said.

The line went dead.

Elliott punched the intercom button on the phone and dialed a two-digit number. As soon as the ghoul assigned to trace calls picked up the receiver, the Toreador said, “Did you get that?”

“Yes,” the servant replied in a reedy tenor voice. Elliott felt a thrill of hope, which the other man instantly dashed. “He called from a pay phone near the planetarium,”

“Dispatch somebody to investigate right away,” Elliott said. “Whoever’s out there patrolling the area. Thanks.” Breaking the connection, he turned back toward Lazio. “But they won’t find anything. Damn it!”

“Was that the woman who spoke to Judy and me?” the dresser asked.

“No,” Elliott said, “that was a man, calling to provide a description of Dracula.”

“Did he say who he was, or how he knew to call here?” Elliott grimaced. “Of course not,” he said ironically, “You wouldn’t want anyone to tell us the complete and unembellished truth, would you? What fun would that be?” “I wish we did know who you were talking to,” Lazio said, “but still, if he told you what Dracula looks like, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Assuming that we can believe him,” Elliott said, “I suppose so.” Suddenly edgy, he rose and began to stalk around the study, past the bookshelves and some of Roger’s mementos: a poster from Man and Superman, a program from Mother Courage, a prop dagger from Julius Caesar and a crystal unicorn from The Glass Menagerie. “Still, you have to wonder how many players are involved in this game, how' many sides, how many agendas. How can I make decisions when I don’t understand a fraction of what’s going on? I don’t know if even Roger could have coped with a mess like this.”

“Our people are recovering some of the art,” Lazio said, “without getting attacked. You’re looking for the leak. All the other defensive operations are proceeding as planned. I’d say that you’re on top of the situation.”

Elliott shook his head. “When the enemy does something, we react. You can’t win a war that way. You have to anticipate at least your foe’s next move, and preferably his next several moves.” He sighed. “I used to be reasonably good at it, but I feel as if that part of my mental machinery has rusted solid.”

“Let’s hope not,” Lazio said.

“Let me tell you how I see the situation,” Elliott said, continuing to pace. “Maybe you can point out something I’m missing. The enemy poisons or otherwise incapacitates our prince. He sends a rogue Kindred into our domain, forcing us to divert manpower and resources to the defense of the Masquerade. He assails our financial holdings. He vandalizes our art, and when we send out troops to protect it, he ambushes them.

“Evidently his strategy is to attack us on all levels, in every way he can, and I have a hunch that he hasn’t run out of ideas yet. That being the case, where’s the next blow going to fall?”

“Maybe the next assault is a full-scale invasion of the city,” Lazio said.

“I doubt it,” Elliott said. “Many of his opening moves were intended to frazzle and humiliate us, and, considering that none of our people has fled the domain for greener pastures, I don’t think we’re demoralized and disorganized enough to suit him yet. I imagine he’ll keep trying to soften us up. I just wish I knew —” The vampire’s gaze fell on a framed photo of Roger with one of Hollywood’s hottest new directors and he froze, his words catching in his throat.

“What is it?” Lazio asked.

“God help us all, I do know,” Elliott replied. He turned and lunged for the phone.

THIRTEEN? COMRADES

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship.

— Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock.

The narrow streets of the Little Havana district of Miami were crowded, even at two in the morning. Groups of teenagers, many wearing gang colors, strutted along the sidewalks while others, packed into cars whose stereos blared heavy metal or Latin music, cruised slowly up and down. Drug dealers and heavily made-up hookers in miniskirts loitered in shadowy doorways. Open-air stalls and push carts sold crab rolls, hot dogs, paper plates of black beans and rice, beer, Cuban coffee and shoddy plastic toys and trinkets. The warm night air smelled of exhaust, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and human sweat. Surveying the scene though one of the windows in the rear of the van, Dan said, “This place reminds me of Saigon.”

“You were in Vietnam?” Laurie asked. He nodded. “Were you in combat?”

Dan nodded. In fact, he’d seen a lot of action. Looking back, it was strange to remember just how much it had bothered him to watch people die.

“Of course he was,” said Wyatt, tucking his battery-powered electric razor, with which he’d just removed the stubble sprouting around his mohawk, back in the pocket of his white leather coat. Given the peculiarities of vampire physiology, he probably had to shave the sides of his head at least once a night. “Where do you think he learned to fight like Superman?” He gave Dan a friendly wink.

Dan hadn’t explained to the anarchs that when he’d saved them from the Brujah he’d had an infusion of giants’ blood enhancing his strength. Hoping they wouldn’t expect him to toss around any cars in the future, he turned toward the driver. “Hey, Cassius,” he said, “how are we doing?” “The traffic is hell,” the heavyset black ghoul replied. “Most of the streets keep twisting or dead-ending, or else they’re one-way going the wrong way, and a lot of the signs are either missing or in Spanish. But don’t worry, I ivill find the place.”

“You’re having trouble with the Spanish?” said Felipe, the Hispanic vampire with the weight-lifter physique and a liking for gold chains. “You should have said something before.” He rose from the floor of the van and squirmed into the bucket seat beside the Blood-Bound servant.

“Was Vietnam as terrible and as stupid as people say?” Laurie asked, pushing her rose-colored granny glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “My friends and I protested it.” She blinked. “Oh, jeez, I hope that isn’t going to be a problem between you and me.”

“Of course not,” said Dan. It still felt odd to chat with his own kind companionably, to perceive that another vampire cared whether he liked her. Odd, but nice. “It’s ancient history now. Looking back, I guess the whole thing was stupid. It sure didn’t accomplish anything, did it?” “No,” Wyatt said. “It was just another Camarilla fiasco.” Dan cocked his head. “How do you mean?”

“Why do you think you were sent over there?” replied the vampire in white. “The elders of the West have been fighting a slow-motion war with the clans of the Orient for a long time, and you poor bastards were the foot soldiers.

I’m no great bleeding-heart protector of the kine — I’ll worry about my species and let them worry about theirs — but my God, what a pointless waste of human life! It illustrates why the old order has to go.”

Laurie nodded solemnly, the way she §o_;,often did when Wyatt preached the anarch gospel.

“So how old are you, Wyatt?” Dan asked curiously. “What was going on in the world when you were human?”

“The Revolutionary War,” said the anarch chieftain, a spark of pride glowing in his eyes. “I was one of Francis Marion’s guerrillas. Did you ever hear of him?”

Dan nodded. “The Swamp Fox.”

“Right,” Wyatt said. “I really believed in the ideals_: of the Revolution. I had the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense down by heart. I thought that after we ran off the redcoats and the Hessians we could turn the colonies into a utopia.

“Then a Ventrue elder seduced me into accepting the Embrace. I guess she saw something in me that convinced her I’d make a useful addition to her brood, and frankly, it wasn’t that hard to sell me on the idea of obtaining immortality.” He smiled wryly. “I wasn’t entirely idealistic, you see.

“Anyway, the world of the Kindred took me completely by surprise. Dreamer that I was, I’d believed that vampires, virtual demigods with centuries of accumulated wisdom, must have created a perfect society, an even grander and nobler version of the nation my fellow rebels and I had been striving to build. You can imagine my disgust when 1 discovered the tyranny and cruelty with which the old dominated the young. The never-ending violence and intrigue. The unquestioning acceptance of institutions like torture, the duel, and trial by ordeal, which mortals were coming to abhor as barbaric even in the eighteenth century.

“I never regretted becoming a Kindred — eternal youth is nothing to sneeze at, even in a fascist oligarchy — but I rapidly began to despise my fellow Ventrue. How could 1 not, considering that they’d created the Camarilla and were its most fervent supporters? When Salvador Garcia founded the Movement, I ran away to join, and I’ve been fighting for it ever since.”

Wyatt grinned. Once again his revolutionary ardor seemed to give way to a more boyish, even mischievous, zest. “And it’s a pretty cool life! It’s exciting, and you make true friends.” He beamed at the other vampires. Laurie took his hand and squeezed it. Somewhat to his dismay, Dan felt a twinge of affection himself for the youth with the mohawk. “In my sire’s brood, I never had that. Everybody was always stabbing everybody else in the back, jockeying for the old gorgon’s favor.”

“I think we might be getting somewhere,” the driver said.

All the vampires in the back of the van tried to rear up and look out the windshield at the same time, a maneuver which crowded them together. Dan noticed that no one pulled away from him with a reflexive wince or shudder of distaste.

Craning to peer over Laurie’s brunette head, he saw that the character of the streets the Van was traversing had changed. Now the narrow, twisting avenues, scarcely more than alleys, really, were empty, their gutters choked with trash. There were few lights burning, and many of the shops w'ere vacant, with whitewashed or boarded windows. Little Haiti, assuming that the Kindred had indeed reached their destination, was manifestly far less lively and considerably more impoverished than the Cuban immigrant quarter it abutted.

“Can anybody see any house numbers?” the driver asked.

Turning, Dan peered through the window closest to him. A few of the doorways they were passing had had numbers once, but time had largely worn away the paint. In the dark and at a distance, even his newly enhanced vision couldn’t make the numerals out. “Sorry,” he said, “not from here,?’

Rounding a bend, the van encountered the blackened shell of a burned-out convertible which completely blocked the way. The ghoul stamped on the brakes and the panel truck lurched to a stop. “Shit,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Wyatt said, reaching for the handle of the door. “We can hoof it from here. I’m tired of being cooped up, and I think that we might find the place we’re looking for faster that way. You just turn the car around and be ready for a fast getaway.”

“You got it,” Cassius replied.

As the vampires climbed out of the van, Dan smelled a strong odor of combustion. The car obstructing the road had burned only hours ago, and it stank of charred meat as well as singed metal and paint. Moving closer, he felt the heat still radiating from it and saw the two black husks sitting in the front seat. Each had been dusted with pale yellow flower petals and a sprinkling of crimson powder.

“I wonder,” said Dan, “whether these stiffs are still here because nobody called the cops, or because the police won’t come into Little Haiti after dark. Either way, I’m guessing that this isn’t a great neighborhood.”

“I think you’ve got a point,” Laurie said. Peering warily about at the dark alleys and doorways, the heaps of rotting, stinking garbage that shifted and rustled as rats burrowed through them, and the claustrophobic passages that ran between the buildings into impenetrable shadow, she looked more like a timid mortal girl than a predator on humankind. “They say Miami is contested territory. The Camarilla and the Black Hand both claim it. I wonder if these deaths have something to do with that. The petals and the powder make them look like some kind of ritual murders.”

Wyatt put his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said gently, “whatever happened here, it’s got nothing to do with us. We’re going to be fine. We’ll nail the target and be out of town before anybody even knows we’ve been here. I mean, who’s slicker than we are?”

She gave him a game smile. “Nobody.”

“Damn straight.” He brushed a stray strand of her brown hair off her glasses. “So let’s get to it.”

Circling the burned car and its grisly contents, the vampires set off down the street. Everyone, watching not only for street signs and house numbers but any sign of trouble, peered about in a manner that reminded Dan of his old platoon making its way through the jungle.

His fellow Gls had been his last real friends — until the anarchs had made him welcome. Though he’d only known them for a couple of nights, he already felt close to them. Perhaps it was because they’d faced death together. In any case he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of selling them out.

The Kindred neared an intersection where a street sign, which some vehicle had apparently jumped the curb and run into, leaned drunkenly. Squinting at it, Wyatt read, “Southwest Thirtieth Street. All right, we’re nearly there!” Heading right, the vampires turned the comer. The cross street was as black and empty as the last one.

Why, Dan wondered, should he betray his friends? In recent years, he’d become a little too cynical to believe now that the anarch cause would ever actually improve the lot of the common vampire; but on the other hand, he didn’t have anything against it, either. Certainly its dogma was more congenial than the authoritarian strictures of the Camarilla. Nor did he have any particular desire to aid Roger Phillips and his vassals against their enemies. The bastards had certainly never done anything for him!

A chalk drawing, a double circle quadrisected by a cross, with cryptic symbols incised in the four sections, gleamed on a crumbling brick wall ahead. Jimmy Ray, an anarch with a hillbilly twang in his voice and an Elvis haircut, whom Dan had yet to see without his black wraparound sunglasses, muttered uneasily: “More voodoo stuff.”

Dan reflected that he’d undertaken this mission because

Melpomene had promised him a place in vampire society. But now he already had one. Why, then, should he follow through?

Ultimately, he could only think of one reason. He’d given the Methuselah his word. But his infiltration of the anarch cell had required him to pledge his loyalty to them as well. Therefore, he was going to be a liar and a traitor no matter what he did.

He was still mulling over his dilemma when he and his companions came to a doorway sealed with a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the bars was a sort of tunnel that led to a small courtyard with a dry, fungus-spotted fountain in the center. The air inside smelled of cooking, of roast chicken and goat, conch chowder and fried plantains.

Wyatt pointed at the numerals someone had crudely scratched on the wall beside the gate. “Seven ninety-five,” he said. “We’re in business.” He smiled at Dan. “Would you care to open this?”

“Sure,” said Dan. He gripped the gate and pulled. After a moment the lock broke, and the barrier lurched open.

When the vampires skulked into the courtyard, it became apparent that they’d found an apartment complex. Clotheslines ran back and forth between windows and rickety balconies, slicing the square patch of sky at the top of the enclosure into sections. Dan could hear people snoring, and a rhythmic squeak of bedsprings that indicated that somewhere a pair of insomniacs were making love.

“This way, I think,” murmured Wyatt. He led his companions toward a shadowy doorway on the left. Dan wondered if the anarch leader was responding to a bit of psychic inspiration or a more mundane source of information.

The doorway opened on a staircase. As the vampires climbed, the risers flexed beneath their feet. Now the air smelled of dry rot and mice. Dan could hear the rodents and other vermin skittering through hollows in the walls.

At the top of the stairs was a single door. Wyatt stepped up to it, touched his fingertip to the keyhole, closed his eyes, and froze. After a moment, Dan whispered, “What are you doing?”

For another second Wyatt didn’t answer. Then, blinking like a mortal awakening from slumber, he said, “Just trying to see if one of my skeleton keys will fit this. I think it will." He put his hand in the pocket of his white leather coat, paused again and then brought out, not the ring of keys that Dan had been expecting, but a single brass one. He eased it into the lock and twisted it. The bolt disengaged with a click.

“Why didn’t you try a skeleton key on the gate downstairs?” asked Dan.

“Outdoors, I wasn’t as worried about being quiet,” replied Wyatt, grinning, “and hey, with a moose like you around, why should I do all the work? Shall we?” He pushed open the door.

Beyond the threshold was a spacious loft, an artist’s studio redolent with the sharp smell of turpentine, illuminated by the silvery moonlight cascading through the skylight. Canvases stood on easels or, completed, leaned against the walls. Inside another doorway along the left-hand wall, hearts thumped slowly and breath hissed softly in and out of mortal lungs.

“Let’s trash us some art,” said Jimmy Ray, pulling a plastic spray bottle out of his pocket. He sauntered to one of the easels and spritzed down the canvas it held. The harsh tang of the solvent stung Dan’s nose. The paint steamed, bubbled and ran, reducing the picture to a meaningless smudge.

The remaining anarchs sauntered into the loft and began to ruin other paintings. Removing his own container of solvent from inside his jacket, Dan moved to do the same. He felt a twinge of shame. Since becoming a vampire, he’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of, things that, by any sensible standard, were worse than vandalizing a bunch of pictures; yet something about this particular act made him feel petty and mean. But he guessed that if he wanted to remain in his companions’ good graces, he had no choice.

As he twisted open the nozzle of the bottle, he casually scrutinized the painting before him, a vision of yellow lions and blue parrots in a tropical forest, rendered in what he thought was a rather childlike style of simple shapes and primary colors. For a moment it merely seemed kind of pretty and kind of strange, and then it seemed to change before his eyes.

Even as he froze in awe, he realized that the picture hadn’t truly altered. Instead, he was perceiving it with a depth of appreciation of which he’d previously been incapable. He saw how the seemingly rudimentary forms and garish hues combined to form a single gorgeous, exquisite gestalt. How the meticulous brushwork created the illusion of depth and texture. He felt as if he’d glimpsed a different world, one infinitely richer and more beautiful than the quotidian reality in which he’d always dwelled.

Something touched him on the arm. Startled, he jerked around so violently that Laurie recoiled a step.

“Are you okay?” the petite former hippie asked. “You were just staring at that picture and then, when I spoke to you, you didn’t hear me.”

Dan hoped he was all right; he was damned if he knew. “Sure,” he said. “I was just, you know, checking it out for a second.”

Laurie turned to look at the canvas. Warily, Dan followed suit. He felt relieved when, though it still looked more beautiful than he could have imagined a minute ago, it failed to hypnotize him as it had before.

“It’s a shame to ruin them, isn’t it?” Laurie said wistfully. “But Wyatt says that if it makes the Toreador stupid with rage, or destroys their will to fight, it will be worth it.”

“Makes sense to me,” Dan said. “What the hell, there are plenty of pictures in the world.” Laurie gave him an affectionate pat on the arm, then advanced on a painting of a dilapidated wooden sailboat.

Steeling himself, Dan aimed his bottle at the canvas before him, then faltered again. Finally, squinching his eyes shut, he convulsively clenched his finger on the trigger. When the painting sizzled, he had to strain to hold in a sob.

Fortunately, the act of desecration became a little easier with repetition, though it always felt as if a piece of himself were dying along with the work he was destroying. By the time all the art had been ruined, he was desperate to flee the scene, frantic to escape the sight of the ravaged masterpieces. Fighting to keep his voice steady, he said, “I guess we can go.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Not quite yet.”

“Why not?” Dan said. “Are there more pictures in another room?” He didn’t think he could stand it if there were.

“Nope,” said Wyatt, “or at least, not as far as I know. But can you hear the painter and his family, snorting and wheezing away?” He nodded at the doorway in the left-hand wall. “I’ve been instructed that tonight the war is entering a new phase. It’s time to start killing the Toreador’s pet kine.” He smiled at Dan.

He’s watching me, Dan realized, waiting to see my reaction. Wyatt might believe that his newest recruit was a genuine convert to the anarch cause — Dan was almost certain that he did — but that didn’t mean that he was ready to stop testing him. The cell leader was too wary a conspirator for that.

Thirty years of deceiving and preying on humans, of watching them age while he remained young, had hardened Dan, attenuating his emotional bond to what had once been his own kind. Still, the thought of slaughtering helpless innocents sickened him, and the notion that one of the prospective victims had created the beauty the vampires had just finished ravaging made the prospect even more loathsome. But once again, whether he wound up staying with the anarchs or betraying them, it wouldn’t do to reveal his revulsion.

“Good thinking,” he said, smiling back at Wyatt. “After all, what’s the point of destroying the paintings if you leave the artist alive to make more?”

“Exactly,” Wyatt said. He beckoned, and the Kindred stalked toward the doorway. Jimmy Ray’s fangs slid over his lower lip.

As the would-be murderers slipped into the artist’s living area, Dan positioned himself at the back of the procession in the hope that it would keep him from actually having to commit any of the violence. He wound up gliding along beside Laurie. Her expression seemed resolute but somber, and he wondered if she found the business at hand as distasteful as he did.

The vampires passed through a sparsely, shabbily furnished living room, dining area and kitchen, and then into what must have been the bedroom hall. The hiss of respiration and the muffled thud of heartbeats grew louder. Dan smelled the pungent tang of sweat.

Suddenly Jimmy Ray lunged through a doorway. Dan heard bedsprings squeal, and a brief thrashing sound. When his companion reemerged into the hall, he was holding a skinny, naked black boy in each hand, clutching them by their throats. Half-strangled already, the children squirmed feebly.

Wyatt and Felipe darted into a room farther down the passage. The other vampires followed them. By the time Dan made it through the door, the duo in the lead had dragged a black man and woman, nude also, out of their battered, sagging, four-poster bed. Felipe was restraining the man, a middle-aged, partially bald, paunchy guy with paint-stained fingers, by dint of his superior strength. Wyatt was gazing into the slender, trembling, long-necked young woman’s eyes, paralyzing her by force of will.

“No!” cried the artist, mad with fear. “No! No!”

“Sorry, amigo,” said Felipe. “This is what you get for running with the Camarilla.”

“No!” said the painter. “You’re making a mistake! I don’t even know what that is!”

“That’s too bad,” said Felipe. “They should have told you what you were getting into.” He buried his fangs in the immigrant’s neck. The human wailed.

The black woman shuddered more violently and moaned. Her heartbeat raced. “It’s all right,” said Wyatt soothingly. “It will all be over very soon.” He took her in his arms and bit her.

Jimmy Ray handed one of the now-unconscious children to Laurie and ripped out the throat of the other, savagely, wastefully, spattering blood on himself and the floor. The intoxicating scent of the vitae suffused the air.

Laurie shivered and squinched her eyes shut. “Oh, Christ,” she whispered, as if she were mortal and a lover had caressed her. She dropped to her knees, clutched the other boy to her bosom, and began to feed.

Nor was Dan immune to the effects of the spectacle before him. Hard as he tried to stay calm, to cling to his inner disgust, the smell of the blood and the slurping, gurgling sounds his companions made as they sucked it from their prey were kindling his own Hunger. By the time Wyatt offered him the woman, he was eager to finish draining her.

He pressed his mouth to the twin punctures that his companion had made, and the world dissolved into pleasure. Finally he noticed that the woman’s heart had stopped, and her vitae had begun to cool and lose its savor.

As Dan lifted his head, Felipe licked the artist’s wounds closed and carried him to the window. “Take this, Sarasota!” he said, his voice giddy with high spirits, and hurled the body through the glass. The resultant crash hurt Dan’s ears.

No doubt curious to see where and how the body had landed, Felipe stuck his head out into the night. His body tensed. “Oh, shit,” he said.

Dan dropped the woman’s corpse on the floor, strode to the window and looked down. The painter lay facedown on the crumpled roof of a black limousine. Eight men — vampires, judging from the pallor each displayed — who’d evidently just gotten out of the limo and the sedan parked behind it, stared up at Felipe and Dan for another moment, and then reached inside their coats.

FOURTEEN*TH E SAMEDI

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise

Dan recoiled, then saw that Felipe had yet to do likewise. He grabbed the anarch’s arm and yanked him back inside. An instant later, a hail of gunfire blazed upward through the window.

“What the hell’s going on?” Wyatt cried. For once the vampire in white looked rattled.

“There are Kindred out there,” said Dan. “Since they seem to be pissed at us for killing the artist, I guess they’re Prince Roger’s people.”

“They must have figured out that we meant to start killing their proteges, and come to take the kine and his family to safety,” Wyatt said. “Not that that matters now, God damn it.” He pulled his shotgun out of his coat. “How many are there?”

“Eight that I saw,” Dan replied, drawing from the back of his jeans the stainless-steel Smith and Wesson Model 669 that he’d commandeered from the anarchs’ armory.

“We could make a stand here,” said Jimmy Ray, peering nervously about.

“We could try,” Dan said, “but we don’t know how many guys there are, or what kind of weapons they have to use against us. You get a dozen vamps dropping through that skylight at once, or the enemy blasting this dump apart with explosives, or setting it on fire, and we could be pretty well screwed. I think we ought to try to get away.”

“If that’s what we’re doing, we need to go now, before they box us in,” Wyatt said. He pivoted, scatter-gun leveled in one hand, the tail of his white coat sweeping out behind him, and strode toward the exit of the apartment. The other Kindred trotted after him.

Reaching the door, Wyatt cracked it open and peeked out onto the landing. Dan tensed, half-expecting another barrage of shots to smash through the panels. Then Wyatt pulled the door all the way open. “So far so good,” he said. “Come on.”

Running with the quiet, sure-footed grace of the undead, the Kindred bounded down three flights of steps without incident. Dan could hear rapid heartbeats and quick, fearful breathing behind the closed doors on the landings. Evidently the gunfire had awakened the residents of the other apartments. He wondered if anyone had called the cops, or if everybody was simply lying low, hoping that whatever trouble was happening, it wouldn’t happen to them.

The vampires plunged onto the second-floor landing. Wyatt grabbed the wooden knob at the top of the newel post and swung himself onto the final flight of stairs. Guns barked and rattled up at him. He grunted, and his feet flew out from under him.

Jimmy Ray and Felipe snapped off shots at the gunmen massed at the foot of the steps. Laurie grabbed Wyatt and hauled him up. Dan spun and kicked one of the doors on the landing. It flew open, crashing against the wall. “This way!” he cried.

As he scrambled into the apartment, he noticed that it was cramped and essentially unfurnished, with ancient, dingy paper peeling off the walls. Mortals lay everywhere, a few on stained, dilapidated mattresses, others on piles of rags or newspaper, and some on the bare linoleum. Most of the humans were content to cower and avert their gazes, but one chunky woman, the scleras of her wide, dark eyes the yellow of a stained tooth, reared up and babbled in what Dan assumed was Creole.

Whatever she was saying, he had no time for her. He brandished his pistol and bared his fangs, and she shrank back from him. Momentarily uncertain of his directions, scrambling over several of her fellow tenants, he made his way to a window. Then he saw that it overlooked the courtyard, and that a pair of sentries were stationed there. Hoping to find a better way out, acutely aware that the gunmen they’d encountered on the stairs were only seconds behind them, he wheeled and led his companions on into a tiny room at the rear of the apartment.

Here the residents were packed in like sardines. He stepped on some of them as he made his way to the window. Peering out, he saw a narrow street which forked into two even narrower ones at the end of the block. As far as he could discern, no one was standing watch on the pavement below.

“Come on!” he said, and hurled himself at the window pane. The glass shattered, and he plummeted toward the sidewalk below, falling in a rain of glittering shards. He landed awkwardly; the impact slammed him down on one knee, tearing his jeans and the skin beneath. He leaped up and spun around —

To see that none of his comrades had followed him into the open. Guns banged, the muzzle flashes lighting up the darkened window, as the anarchs fired at the pursuers swarming after them. For one terrible moment Dan was afraid that his new friends wouldn’t make it out, that he was alone again, alone forever. Then, the white tanktop inside his coat now dark with blood, Wyatt leaped. His friends began to scramble after him.

Dan ran to Wyatt’s side. Up close, the vampire with the mohawk smelled of vitae and gun smoke. “Are you all right?” Dan asked.

“The bullets... hit my lungs,” said Wyatt, smiling, his voice a ghastly whisper. “Good thing Kindred... only use them to talk.” Pivoting abruptly, he raised his gun and fired.

Dan turned to see that Felipe, Jimmy Ray, and now Laurie had jumped to the pavement. Wyatt was shooting through the window to discourage anyone from leaping after them. After pumping off a couple of rounds, he wheezed, “Now... back to the van. We’ll try... to lose the bastards.”

Laurie peered up and down the unfamiliar street. “Do you know which way it is?” she asked fearfully. Wyatt pointed and they started running, turning periodically to fire behind them. Guns barked back from the window, but none of Prince Roger’s people had dared to follow their quarry into the open yet. Dan was sure that would change in the next few seconds.

Wyatt began to stagger. His wounds couldn’t threaten his existence as they might a human’s, but the blood loss and trauma could certainly weaken him. Laurie put her arm around him, but she lacked both the strength and the stature to help him along at anything like the necessary speed.

“Let me,” said Dan. He shoved the Smith and Wesson back in his waistband, took Wyatt from her, and lifted the anarch leader in his arms. She gave him a grateful smile, the vitae smeared around her mouth making the expression look peculiar.

They ran on, through the intersection and down the right-hand fork of the Y. Wyatt kept grunting and going stiff as Dan’s stride jarred him. Then, behind them, bursts of automatic-weapons fire rattled. Felipe stumbled and nearly fell.

Awkwardly shifting Wyatt to one arm and grabbing the

Model 669 with the other, Dan spun around. Two vampires were running at them as fast as swooping hawks, fangs bared, blasting away with assault rifles

Dan and the anarchs returned fire. One of the pursuers dropped and the other dived for cover in a recessed doorway. Dan could hear the footsteps of more of the enemy pounding up the pavement, and car motors roaring to life.

“Get off... the street,” Wyatt wheezed, vitae seeping from his mouth. “Go between the... buildings. Easier to shake them off our tails.”

As his companions began to obey him, the Toreador who’d dropped lurched up and resumed shooting. Leaning out of his doorway, his partner did the same. Startled, Dan and the anarchs scrambled frantically to get out of the line of fire.

And, as Dan realized an instant later, by doing so, they’d inadvertently split up. Because they’d been spread out along the street, in their haste they’d lunged into at least two different gaps between thebuildings. He and Wyatt were in one and the remaining anarchs were somewhere else.

Dan decided it would be suicide to try to link back up with his friends by retracing his steps. He’d run right into the arms of their pursuers. It would be better to keep going forward, hoping that he and the remaining anarchs would spot one another along the way, or, failing that, meet up at the van. So, cradling Wyatt in both arms again, he dashed on, vaulting over the heaps of trash that choked the narrow passage. Wyatt’s shotgun slipped from, his hand to clank on the broken brick pavement. His eyelids drooped shut, and his head lolled.

Plunging into an alley, Dan peered up and down, looking unsuccessfully for some sign of the other anarchs. All he could detect was the pounding footfalls of Prince Roger’s, vassals, still racing along behind him.

He wondered fleeting.ly whether, if he crouched motionless; behind some piece of cover, his newfound powers of concealment would keep him safe from discovery. But he wasn’t at all confident that they’d shield him from the notoriously keen senses of the Toreador, and even more dubious that the force that masked his own presence would veil Wyatt’s as well. And so he hurtled on through a maze of unpredictably twisting passages, always fearful that his sense of direction was playing him false, or that the way would dead-end at some impassable barrier.

Plunging into a small, pentagonal space defined by the grimy back walls of five decaying tenements, where it looked and smelled as if garbage had been accumulating for years, he paused, trying to decide by which passage he should exit. And at that moment, a cold voice said, “Who are you?”

Startled, Dan jumped and then peered wildly about. Though the voice had seemed to come from nearby, he couldn’t see the person who had addressed him. But he could still hear the sounds of pursuit echoing through the labyrinth of passages; there was no way to know whether the Toreador had lost his trail or not. Hoping that the speaker lacked the means to detain him until the hunters caught up with him, he said, “We’re just passing through.” And strode on toward one of the alleyways on the other side of the courtyard.

“Stop!” cried the unseen presence. “Stop, or I’ll hurt you!”

“Screw you,” muttered Dan, breaking into a run, and then pain ripped through his knee. Losing his balance, he fell heavily, pinning the inert form of Wyatt beneath him. He frantically disentangled his arms from the other Kindred and sat up. Looking at his leg, he gaped in horror.

He’d only scraped his knee when he’d jumped out the window, a minor injury that wouldn’t have slowed him down even were he still mortal. But now reeking, suppurating flesh was sloughing away from the injury as if he had an advanced case of gangrene.

“I told you I’d hurt you,” said the invisible speaker, a gloating note in his voice. “Little Haiti belongs to the Samedi. No one hunts here without our permission.”

Dan had heard rumors of the Samedi. Supposedly they were a vampire clan who’d arisen in the Caribbean: rotting, corpselike creatures as hideous as the Nosferatu, though less diverse in their deformities, with the uncanny ability to inflict a similar decomposition on others by sheer force of will. “We don’t want to hunt,” said Dan, his senses probing the shadows, still to no avail. “We just want to get out of here.”

“Too late,” said the Samedi. “You trespassed and killed some of our kine. You showed disrespect, and now you have to pay the price.”

Dan imagined that it was a payment neither he nor Wyatt would survive. Then, finally, he heard cloth rustle on a cracked concrete stoop to his left.

Suddenly twisting, praying that his supersensitive hearing really had pinpointed the noise accurately, he fired his automatic. A stooped, leprous, noseless thing clad in filthy rags seemed to materialize out of empty air even as he recoiled against the door at his back.

Unfortunately, the Samedi wasn’t badly wounded, and it had an Uzi in its ulcerous hand. It shot back, and a spray of bullets riddled Dan’s chest. The world dissolved in a flash of pain.

Dan struggled to focus through the agony, to aim and fire again. His next shot hit the Samedi in the forehead and blew the back of its head out. The deformed vampire collapsed in a heap.

All right, Dan told himself grimly, so much for that. He was messed up, but he thought he could still walk. Surely the van couldn’t be much farther. All he had to do was stand up, pick up Wyatt, and keeping mov—

Fresh torment blazed through his wounded torso. Skin and muscle softened and oozed off his broken ribs. He thrashed convulsively, and the gun tumbled out of his hand.

A second Samedi, this one wearing a necklace of human finger bones, a top hat and a clawhammer coat with a wilted white carnation boutonniere, shambled out of the shadows. It had a stake in its nearly skeletal hand, and its long, white fangs shone in the moonlight. They were the only part of the creature that didn’t look decayed.

Dan tried to grope for the Model 669, but the pain of his wounds and their putrefaction made him too spastic. In a moment perhaps the paralysis would pass, but by that time, he suspected, the Samedi would have the stake in his heart, immobilizing him permanently.

The Haitian undead knelt beside Dan and raised the wooden weapon over its head. Dan managed to lift his hands and fumble at his attacker, only to discover that he still lacked the strength to push him away. And then Wyatt reared up and clutched at the Samedi’s shoulder.

The Samedi jerked as if the vampire in white had thrust a blade into it. An instant later Dan felt a fierce heat glowing from inside his attacker’s ravaged body. Boiling blood gushed from the Caribbean Kindred’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth and sundry lesions, burning trails in its rotten flesh as if it were acid. Wailing, the Samedi lurched to its feet, blundered to one of the tenements, and dragged itself to the door.

“Little trick... my sire taught me,” Wyatt whispered. “Guess the bitch was good... for something.”

Dan realized that he and his companion had to get moving. There might be more Samedi lurking about, or the Toreador might appear at any moment. Trembling with exertion, he dragged himself to his feet. For a moment the world revolved, and a lance of torment stabbed through his injured leg, but somehow he kept himself from falling down again.

He stooped to pick up Wyatt, but the anarch captain shook his head and rose unsteadily. “Can walk now,” he wheezed, smiling. “Way you look, I think I’d... better.”

Swaying, clinging to one another, they gimped through two more cramped, lightless alleyways. As they emerged from the second, Dan saw the burned convertible, and beyond it their vampire comrades, Cassius and the van, exhaust fuming from its tailpipe, no more than thirty feet away.

jimmy Ray, Felipe and Laurie dashed forward. “Thank God!” the former hippie cried, her bellbottoms flapping around her legs. “We were afraid—” When she faltered, goggling at him in dismay, Dan realized that she’d seen, or smelled, the pockets of gangrene in his body.

“They’re just wounds,” he croaked. “They’ll heal.” At least he assumed they would. In his experience, you could destroy a vampire, but not permanently cripple or even scar one. Their powers of regeneration simply worked too well, even against the occult powers of their fellow undead. “Just get us on the van and get us out of here.”

Ten seconds later the panel truck was hurtling through the night. Dan felt weak as a kitten, and every bump jolted pain through his damaged body. Nevertheless, he forced himself to sit up and peer through the rear window until the vehicle reached the interstate, making sure that no one was following it. Afterward, he slumped down on the floor. Laurie took his hand in her cool, soft fingers, and then, though dawn was still hours away, he drifted into slumber.

FIFTEEN:TH E TRAITOR

Where we are,

There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood The nearer bloody.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

As Elliott opened the front door of Roger Phillips’ mansion, he could feel a tingling warmth in his cheeks; when he paused to check his appearance in the mirror, a Venetian antique with an ornate gold wreath for a frame hanging on the right-hand wall of the foyer, he saw that his cheeks were still flushed with freshly stolen blood. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told his associates that he was leaving the estate because he needed to hunt. He simply hadn’t been telling the whole truth.

Lazio entered the hall while Elliott was twisting his head from side to side, inspecting his silvery hair. Being discovered at such a moment made the Toreador elder feel momentarily foolish, even though he knew the mortal was accustomed to actors and their primping. “It’s about time you got back,” Lazio grumbled.

“Why do you say that?” Elliott replied. “Did something happen?”

Lazio shrugged. “More reports came in.”

“I’m sure you were as capable of listening to them as I would have been.” Elliott smiled wryly. “We’re all worried about what’s happening, Lazio, but you have to allow me a little down time. Even the Duke of Wellington took a break occasionally. 1 know, I used to drink with him; or rather, he drank and 1 pretended to. Now, what’s the news?”

“Our people finally located Darrell Burroughs, Roger’s novelist friend, but they were too late. The man and his date were already dead. The enemy made it look as if Burroughs brought her back to his house, walked in on a burglary in progress, and the criminal killed them both.”

Elliott felt a pang of sadness leavened with a perverse thrill of satisfaction, because Burroughs’ murder proved that he’d guessed right. The Toreador’s adversaries did intend to murder their mortal proteges. Elliott had been correct to take steps to bring the humans to Sarasota for safekeeping.

“Pierre Devereaux, that Haitian painter, was murdered, too, along with his wife and children. Did you know him?” Elliott shook his head. “Someone must have decided to offer him patronage after I stopped taking an interest in such things.” For a second he felt vaguely embarrassed by his ignorance.

“Well, he was eccentric,” Lazio said sourly. “Once his work started selling he had plenty of money, but he insisted on staying in Little Haiti in Miami, living little better than he would have if he’d still been stuck in Port-au-Prince. He didn’t even have a phone, so we couldn’t just call him and tell him to get himself up here. We had to send people after him, and they caught Dan Murdock and his friends at the scene of the crime.”

Elliott’s muscles tensed with anticipation until he noticed the reddish brown, a color suggestive of frustration and disgust, flickering in the mortal’s aura. The Kindred sighed with his own disappointment. “1 take it that when you say ‘caught,’ you don’t mean ‘captured,’ do you?”

“No,” Lazio replied, “the bastards got away again. They shot their way clear, then lost our people in the streets and alleys. Apparently that part of the city is like a maze.”

Elliott clasped Lazio’s shoulder. “Don’t fret about it. They can’t stay lucky forever. We’ll catch them next time, or if not them, somebody from the other side.” The Toreador smiled crookedly. “Although it would be nice to hear some good news.”

“There is some,” Lazio admitted, sounding as if he resented having to relate it. Elliott gestured toward Roger’s study, and the two men walked in that direction. “A number of the clients are here already, and others are on their way. But there are some, people who don’t know their benefactors are Kindred, who said they were sorry but they couldn’t just drop everything and rush to Sarasota, not on the strength of one mysterious phone call.”

“Then someone persuasive will have to visit them in person,” Elliott said as they stepped into the den. A Toreador with the proper charismatic talents could influence a mortal to do all manner of things, a fact of which he’d frequently taken advantage.

“With some of them, that’s already arranged,” Lazio said, dropping heavily into one of the green leather chairs. As Elliott perched on the edge of the desk, he noticed that the dresser looked haggard and weary. Attending to Roger’s business both by day and through the night, Lazio had often made do with little sleep; but apparently, in the face of the current crisis, he was resting even less than usual. “I’ll make sure that the others are taken care of, too.” The mortal rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Have you thought about what to tell them? Charming as you Toreador are, you can’t be vague about the threat forever, or they’ll get fed up and go home.”

“Every human artist has a Toreador sponsor, who presumably knows him better than the rest of us,” Elliott replied. “If the patron thinks his client can be trusted with the secret of the Masquerade, then we’ll let him in on it. As for the rest of the mortals... I don’t know, we’ll tell them that our international investment cartel has run afoul of Muslim fundamentalist terrorists who’ve threatened to destroy us and everyone we cherish. That might sound plausible enough to satisfy them for a few days, and with luck, by that time the worst of this mess will be over;”

Lazio smiled, his expression a mixture of hope and skepticism. “Do you really think so?”

“We just need one break,” Elliott replied. “One prisoner, to rat out the architects of this harassment. And then we’ll show the enemy what war really is.”

Lazio nodded thoughtfully and then said, “There’s another problem you should be aware of. With all the local kine taking steps to defend themselves from Dracula, some of our people are having trouble hunting.”

“We’ll have one of the old hands, perhaps one of the Brujah, give stalking lessons. Beyond that, well, we do have human friends who understand our true nature. We can ask them to bleed a bit for the good of the cause. And our neonates can still derive nourishment from animal vitae.” Lazio raised an eyebrow. “Nobody’s going to be very happy about those last two measures. I mean, you Toreador think it’s poor form to feed on your friends, and animal blood supposedly tastes vile.”

Elliott shrugged. ‘“Needs must when the devil drives.’ Is there anything else you need to tell me? Has anyone found a Kindred answering Dracula’s description? Have we received any more anonymous phone calls?”

“No,” Lazio said.

“Then for God’s sake, go to bed,” Elliott said. “You’re exhausted.”

Lazio waved him off. “I’m all right. You might need me.” “1 imagine that, working together, we Kindred and ghouls can keep the lid on things for a few hours,” Elliott said dryly. “If not, we can always wake you. Go. Grab some liquor or

warm milk on the way, if you need it to help you relax. This is the down side of maneuvering me into being a leader. You have to do what I say.”

“Yes, sir,” said the mortal sarcastically, rising from his chair. “Despite this presumptuous treatment, I am glad I pushed you into the job, and not just because the domain needs you. Judy’s right: you’ve come back to us. Roger would be so happy, if only he were well.” Lazio trudged back into the hall.

Elliott stared after him, pondering what the dresser had said. He wondered if he was changing, shaking off the pall of despair that had enveloped him for so long. It was true, at certain moments he was too busy, too caught up in the ongoing struggle, to brood over Mary’s death. But sooner or later something, like, ironically, Lazio’s remarks just now, would remind him of the tragedy, and then his grief came flooding back. Indeed, he felt horribly guilty for having allowed it to slip away in the first place, even though he was well aware that his wife wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer until the end of time.

Sighing, he tried to set his personal problems and perversities aside. He had work to do. Unbuttoning his double-breasted jacket, he moved behind Roger’s desk and sat down in the executive chair to look at the notes he’d left on the blotter.

Elliott would have been the first to admit that the scheme he’d concocted was a simple one: select an office in a house where all the suspected traitors come and go at will. Spread important-looking papers across the desk, leave the door unlocked and the room vacant, and see who sneaks in and examines them. But in his experience, simple plans were frequently the best.

First he picked up the documents, held them to his nose, and inhaled deeply. Though Kindred didn’t perspire, and were likewise free of most of the other metabolic processes that contributed to a human’s body odor, they still sometimes possessed a scent discernible to another vampire with unnaturally keen senses. But all Elliott smelled was paper and ink.

Next, sharpening his vision, he peered at the pages front and back. Undead skin was rarely as oily as that of a mortal, yet it occasionally left traces even so. But the only fingerprints were his own.

Conceivably, there was no traitor. The enemy might be spying on the Toreador electronically, even though they hadn’t found a bug, or by occult means. That was one of the many problems with fighting an unknown supernatural opponent. There was no telling what extraordinary capabilities he possessed.

Alternatively, perhaps the spy hadn’t gotten around to studying the papers yet, had suspected a trap and avoided them, or was good enough at his job to look them over without leaving any evidence behind. But Elliott had one more examination to conduct before he set the documents aside for another night. He closed his eyes, tried to empty his mind, and held the notes against his face.

Elliott wasn’t as psychic as Roger, or as any number of other Toreador and Malkavians he’d known over the centuries, but occasionally he could manage the feat of psychometry, gleaning information about an individual from the psychic signature he’d left behind on some object that he’d handled. And after about thirty seconds, he experienced an instant of vertigo before an image wavered into existence before his inner eye. He saw Schuyller Madison poring over the papers, his pale aura tinged with the murky red and blue of malice and suspicion.

Elliott winced. He’d hoped that the traitor, if indeed he existed, was neither a Toreador, an elder, nor someone he deemed a friend. Sky was all three. Elliott couldn’t imagine what inducement could have persuaded the poet to turn on his sire and his clan.

He supposed that he’d better go find out. His feelings an untidy mixture of anger, excitement and sadness, he rose and marched from the office.

A ghoul directed him to one of the gardens behind the house. Seated on a marble bench, Sky was gazing raptly at the moon, looking so inoffensive, so himself, that for a moment Elliott wondered if the incriminating vision might have been merely a product of his imagination. Night-blooming flowers, generally the most common blossoms in a vampire’s garden, perfumed the cool evening air, and surf whispered on the beach.

Sky turned and smiled at Elliott. “Over the years,” he said, “I’ve written a dozen poems about gardens in the moonlight. I wonder if I’m good for one more. I saw a shooting star fall into the Gulf a few minutes ago. Perhaps I can work that in.”

“We have to talk,” Elliott said heavily. “I know that you’re the spy.”

Sky’s soulful eyes blinked in apparent confusion. His wan aura flickered with a rainbow of shifting colors, the signature of startled bewilderment. “What are you talking about?” he said.

Elliott shook his head. “You can drop the act. It’s quite convincing, and coming from me, that’s a compliment. But I left the notes sitting out in Roger’s study as a trap to enable me to determine who crept in and perused them. They don’t actually contain any important information; but then, you already know that.”    .

“All right,” said Sky, spreading his hands, “you caught me. I confess, I did read them, because I was curious and, to be frank, because some of us are still concerned about your ability to direct the defense. I wanted to gauge the quality of your ideas. But I swear I never passed information to any outsiders.”

“Nice try,” Elliott said. “But my clairvoyance vouchsafed me quite a vivid vision, one far more informative than those I generally achieve. I even saw your aura. Since you thought you were unobserved, it was clouded with your treachery, not shimmering innocuously as it is now.”

A hardness, a bitterness came into Sky’s face, twisting it into a countenance Elliott had never seen before: virtually the visage of a stranger. “A particular shade of ethereal light, glimpsed in a dream,” the poet said. “Not a superabundance of evidence, to turn you against an old friend. Yet you’re convinced, aren’t you?”

“Reluctantly,” Elliott said. “It should have been Gunter if it had to be anyone at all. Why did you do it? Why would you help destroy art?” It was all but unimaginable that any Toreador, unless his spirit was as damaged as Elliott’s, could be a party to such a desecration. “Why betray your clanmates to foes who meant to kill them, and poison poor Roger?” Sky’s lips quirked into a mirthless smirk. “Is that your theory, yours and the sagacious Dr. Potter’s? No one poisoned Roger, not in the sense you mean, though I admit to helping others lay him low.”

“Why?” Elliott repeated. “Roger loved you and treated you like a son. The rest of our brood esteemed you, too. And you never really cared about wealth or power.”

“Can’t you guess?” Sky cried, with such unexpected vehemence that Elliott nearly recoiled. “Not even now? f didn’t want to do any of it! The memory of doing it, and the knowledge of what I’m supposed to do next, has been driving me mad! He enslaved me with a Blood Bond!” Drops of scarlet vitae: seeped from the poet’s eyes, mingling their scent with the fragrance of the flowers.

“Who did?” Elliott demanded.

“Drink a Kindred’s blood three times and you become his servant,” Sky said somberly. “Well, over the years, he must have forced me to drink thirty times, and his vitae is more potent than you can imagine. No one could have resisted, not even infinitesimally. Sometimes I think I don’t even recall the person I used to be.”

“If that’s true,” Elliott said gently, “then no one will condemn you for what you’ve done. Tell me who Bound you, so I can help you win your freedom.”

Still crying, Sky laughed bitterly. “Much of the time, I didn’t even remember what had happened to me. He had so much control over me that he could erase my memory like a chalkboard. Even when I did remember, 1 couldn’t speak of it, any more than I can reveal anything substantive to you now. But I always prayed that my dear friend Elliott, the man I considered even shrewder than Roger, would discern that something was wrong with me and investigate. Alas, you never did. You were too busy agonizing over Mary’s death to spare a thought for the other people who loved you. But now, when it’s too late, you want to ride to my rescue! It’s rather comical, in its way.”

Trying to repress the guilt that Sky’s reproach had inspired, drawing on his charismatic powers, Elliott knelt in front of the other Toreador, clasped his hand, and stared him in the eye. “It’s not too late,” he insisted. “So far, we’re holding our own, and you can help us carry the fight to the enemy. Tell me what you know.”

Sky smiled mirthlessly. “What I know,” he said. “Actually, I know a lot. Once he had me fully in his power, he told me things. I don’t suppose he has any true confidants. I wonder if a creature like that can be lonely.”

“Who are you talking about?” Elliott said. “The leader of our enemies?”

“Milton’s Satan,” Sky replied. “At least that’s who he reminds me of. Beautiful, arrogant, and very, very cunning. You only think you’re holding your own. He’s been planning the attack for decades. He’s anticipated every move you’ve made, every move you can make. Every step you take carries you closer to disaster.”

Sky sounded so certain of what he was saying that Elliott felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “But why does he want to destroy us? Did one of us offend him in some way?”

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Sky laughed harshly. “Of course not! Could an ant offend you? That’s what we are compared to him: tiny, crawling insects.”

“The hell we are,” Elliott said stoutly, as much for the benefit of his own morale as Sky’s. “You wouldn’t feel that way if he hadn’t bewitched you, and I daresay the feeling will pass when we destroy him. If his quarrel with us isn’t personal, then what is he trying to accomplish?”

“To draw your master — or mistress rather — his opposite number, into the open.”

Elliott frowned in perplexity. “Do you mean Roger?”

Sky sneered through his bloody tears. “No, fool! You see, this is why you’re doomed. You don’t understand anything. You can’t even feel the fingers that lift you up and move you from one square to another.”

Elliott kept gazing into his fellow Toreador’s eyes. “No more talking in riddles. Tell me the enemy’s name.”

Sky shook his head. “I can’t. I wish I could, but your influence is nothing compared to the power of the Bond.” “Please,” Elliott said, squeezing the other vampire’s hand, “fight it! Don’t make us torture your secrets out of you.”

“I don’t think that would work, either,” Sky said, “but i’ll spare you the trouble of trying.” Suddenly, moving with inhuman speed, he tore his fingers out of Elliott’s grip and kicked him in the chest, sprawling the actor on the ground.

Sky thrust his hand inside his coat, evidently reaching for a weapon. But quick as the traitor was, Elliott was faster still. He scrambled to his feet and snatched his Beretta 92F out of its shoulder holster, beating the poet to the draw.

Sky inclined his head in acknowledgment of the other Kindred’s superior agility. “I remember when we used to spar and fence,” he said wistfully. “I never could beat you in any sort of physical contest, though 1 fancy I gave you a few bad moments at the whist table. Well, this sorry business is ending better than I thought it would, in that it’s ending sooner. Farewell, old friend, and if you can find it in your

heart to forgive me, carve some of my verses on my tomb.”

“What are you talking about?” Elliott said.

“Behold,” Sky said, and then his reedy body burst into crackling blue flame.

Elliott recoiled. Like many vampires, he had an instinctive dread of sunlight and raging fire, two of the few forces that could actually destroy him. Struggling to overcome his fear, he dropped the Beretta, peeled off his coat, and lunged toward the furious heat and glare, intent on using the garment to smother the blaze.

But it wasn’t possible. Even as Elliott reached for Sky, the fire finished devouring the poet and went out in the blink of an eye. Shrouded in the folds of the jacket, the surviving vampire’s clutching hands encountered only Sky’s blousy embroidered shirt and powder-blue silk ascot, in the process of tumbling to the ground.

Elliott inspected the traitor’s clothing. Though dusted with the wisps of ash that were all that remained of Sky, they weren’t even singed, nor was the grass around his empty trousers and sandals. Obviously the fire had been supernatural. Sky’s mysterious master had provided him with an occult means of suicide, just as a human spymaster might have equipped an agent with a cyanide capsule.

First Mary, then Roger, then Rosalita, and now you, Elliott thought sadly. I didn’t save you, either. You were right to condemn me, because I should have been able to.

He felt a renewed desire to abandon the fight, to retreat to some secure haven and grieve, but the feeling was counterbalanced and, in a few seconds, drowned by a swell of rage. He realized that he couldn’t retire from the world, not yet, because he wanted to avenge his clanmates too badly. He wanted to watch their tormentors burn on a pyre. He wanted to cut their leader’s head off with his own hands.

He picked up his automatic, returned it to its holster and put his jacket back on, making sure it hung evenly. Then

he gathered Sky’s effects and, weeping, trudged toward the house.    .

Clutching a cellular phone, scurrying along, Karen met him halfway up the path. “What’s wrong?” she exclaimed. “Why are you crying?”

“I found out that Sky was the security leak,” Elliott answered.    .

The younger Kindred goggled at him. “I can’t believe that!”

“It wasn’t his fault,” the vampire said somberly. “Someone on the other side” — involuntarily he pictured the malevolent, godlike, bat-winged Lucifer of the Dore illustrations for Paradise Lost — “forced him to accept a Blood Bond. If only I’d noticed — but that’s water under the bridge. When I confronted the poor fellow, he killed himself.” He grimaced. “As usual, I didn’t learn a damn thing. But maybe there’s a clue to the enemy’s identity in these clothes, or in Sky’s home. I doubt it, but we’ll check. Now, I gather that you wanted me?”

“What?” The dark eyes behind the amber lenses widened. “Oh! Yes! Palmer Guice wants to speak to you.” She offered Elliott the phone.

Inwardly, Elliott winced. Guice was a Ventrue Justicar based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a particularly highhanded and officious magistrate of the Camarilla. Even in the best of times, the Toreador might have received a communication from him with the same enthusiasm that a mortal would have greeted a visit from the police or the IRS. Of course, it was conceivable that Guice was calling to offer the vampires of Sarasota genuine aid in their hour of need, but Elliott’s instincts insisted otherwise.

He gave Sky’s belongings to the female Toreador, accepted the phone from her and, switching it on, raised it to his ear. “Hello, Palmer,” he said with all the unruffled charm he could muster. “It’s been what, twenty years?” “Nearly that,” the Ventrue replied. His; voice was a

mellifluous bass that always reminded Elliott of Father Christmas and doting uncles in sentimental Victorian novels. The justicar invariably sounded genial and sympathetic, even when picking some malefactor apart with a scalpel. “Your young friend seemed a bit rattled once I told her who I was. I hope you aren’t teaching your childer to be skittish of other clans, or of those humble officials charged with the enforcement of the law.”

“Perish the thought,” said Elliott, allowing a hint of irony to enter his voice. Guice would expect no less. “We teach them that we’re all one big happy family in the Camarilla.” Guice chuckled. “Oh, indeed, indeed! I’m glad you haven’t lost that sardonic wit. People told me — but people always gossip, don’t they, especially about charismatic entertainers embroiled in some lurid tragedy. Let’s not get off on that. How are things going down your way?”

Elliott assumed that Guice knew about Roger’s illness. Since the prince had gone mad on stage, in front of an audience of his peers, the entire Camarilla must know. “Roger’s resting comfortably. Lionel Potter’s treating him, and we anticipate a full recovery.”

“That’s splendid,” Guice said. “And what of your other problems?”

Elliott wondered grimly just how much the justicar knew about those difficulties, and exactly how he knew it. “Everything’s under control.”

“Of course it is,” said Guice. “With Kindred such as yourself at the helm, how could it be otherwise? Still, I trust you understand that you and your people don’t have to shoulder the burden alone. Your brothers and sisters stand ready to assist you.”

“We appreciate that,” said Elliott, “but —”

“I’m going to convene a Conclave in Sarasota,” Guice continued inexorably. “We’ll gather Kindred from across the South, perhaps the entire country, and discuss how best to ensure the security of your domain.”