Death's Mistress (52 page)

Marlowe’s boys were good. I wondered what they planned to do with him. I decided I didn’t care.

I emerged onto a busy cross street in time to see the vampire pass into a pot noodle place on a corner. I followed and found it jam-packed with waiters shouting orders, people standing three and four deep at the counter and crowding the small tables. But a quick glance around told me that my two weren’t among them.

I headed through the swinging door to the kitchen. I’d expected to be called on it, but I merited no more than a disinterested glance from the staff, who were sweating bullets trying to keep up with all the orders. I crossed to the back door, which was propped open to help with ventilation.

Outside, a graffiti- covered wall loomed over a small space filled with a stone table, a lot of cigarette butts and a heap of garbage bags. A tattered awning fluttered overhead on a small breeze. The remains of someone’s dinner sat on the table, being nosed at by a few flies.

It was dark. It was quiet. It was utterly boring.

I glanced back at the kitchen, where the staff were still scurrying around, ignoring me. They seemed way too comfortable with guests roaming around their private preserve. I had the feeling a lot of people came this way. The question was, where did they go then?

I paused beside the table. Despite the utter normalcy of the scene, something was wrong. It took me a minute to realize it was the garbage.

The flies buzzing about the half-eaten meal were totally ignoring the bounty in the trash bags nearby. I walked over to the pile, my nose twitching. Not at what I smelled, but at what I didn’t.

I’d expected the pungent odor of soured beer, the sharp acid of wilting vegetables, the stench of rotting meat. I’d expected it to smell bad. But it didn’t. It didn’t smell like much of anything, which was fair because it wasn’t actually there.

It’s never a good idea to stick anything you’d mind losing through an opaque ward. I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of real garbage bags had been piled in a corner. The third one I tried yielded an empty industrial-sized aluminum foil container. In the center was a long cardboard tube, which I fished out and took back to the ward.

It wasn’t fancy, but my makeshift periscope allowed me to peek beneath without risking my head. The tube didn’t immediately catch fire or get chopped in two, which I counted as a plus. Of course, that didn’t mean that there were no booby traps, just that any that existed were farther down.

The tube showed me a flight of steps leading down to a safety door. Light radiated through the ornate grille casting black traceries of shadow over the stairs. It also cast the silhouette of someone in the room beyond the door, tipped back against the wall, with what looked suspiciously like a rifle in the crook of one elbow. I couldn’t get a scent reading on him, but not because of the ward. The sweet pungency of high-quality weed drifted up the stairs, filling my nose to the exclusion of anything else.

The fact that he had a rifle didn’t mean he wasn’t a vamp, but the weed probably did. Drugs had no effect on the vampire lack of a metabolism and so were uninteresting to them. They had plenty of other vices to compensate.

I stood up, tucked the tube inside my jacket and jumped through the ward. Any lingering doubt I’d had as to the type of doorkeeper I was facing wore off when there was no immediate response to the small tone the ward sent out at my entry. By the time the shadow’s bootheels hit the cracked cement underfoot, I was already at the bottom of the stairs and reaching through the iron cage to grab him by the shirt. A quick slam of his head against the unyielding doors knocked him out and the keys were in his pocket.

Simple.

What wasn’t so simple was what was reverberating off the walls. It sounded like drums or too many hearts beating too fast. I couldn’t pin it down, but it was doing bad things to my blood pressure. I stepped through the door and over the inert guard, taking a second to attach him to the grille with the cuffs he’d thoughtfully had in his back pocket.

A couple of small red dots had stuck to my jeans. I peeled one off with a thumb. It said “forty-two.” I flicked off a few more, and they had numbers, too. They were spilling out of a box with a lot of red, fewer orange and a couple of bright yellow circles. All had numbers, except for the yellow ones.

I took one of each, appropriated the guard’s flashlight and headed down the corridor. It sloped away on a sharp incline, not quite as steep as the stairs but close, and the thrumming sound got worse the farther I went, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. There was something familiar about it, something I’d heard before, I just couldn’t place it.

And then I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

A door slammed open at the end of the corridor, and a guy staggered out, obviously inebriated. A wash of light, noise and strong smells spilled out along with him. I caught the door before it closed and found myself in the back of a large room lined with sloping stadium-style seats and packed with people. I couldn’t see much else, because a couple of hulking shapes blocked my view.

The two vamps looked at me, one bored, the other just plain mean. The bored one said something, but I couldn’t tell what. My hearing is better than good, but the noise level was incredible. The commotion going on behind them had reached a fever pitch, and the crowd was chanting and stomping their feet.

That was the weird sound I’d heard: the collective pounding of hundreds of feet on a dirt floor. The place looked like it had once been a cellar, one of the mass of old structures undergirding Chinatown. They and the tunnels that connect them were once used by the tongs as escape routes in their constant feuds, but these days, they’d mostly been converted to underground shopping malls and storage areas for smuggled Gucci knockoffs.

This one appeared to have been appropriated for another purpose.

Golden graffiti traced along one grimy wall, but unlike Fin’s, it wasn’t scrolling. Instead, a running outline of abstract shapes girdled a list of names, with numbers scrawled alongside them. They were odds, I realized, recognizing the formula.

The bored guard pointed at the yellow dot on my clothes and hiked a thumb to the left. I didn’t know what that meant, but he moved out of the way, letting me pass, so I went in the specified direction.

I stayed near the wall, and edged around the crowd, trying to search for a familiar figure in the crush. It wasn’t easy, as it was standing room only in the back, and my head only came up to the shoulders of a lot of the people. But here and there I caught glimpses of what looked like a live-action version of Olga’s chess set.

A powerfully built male ogre in a leather loincloth was jabbing a long spear at an equally minimally attired troll. The troll had a club, but he wasn’t using it. It lay ignored on the ground, the heavy wood a poor substitute for his own stonelike hands.

He appeared to be trying to crack the ogre’s head between them like a nut. The ogre didn’t seem in favor of this idea and kept jabbing the spear at the troll’s small eyes. Considering how useless troll eyes are anyway, this seemed a bad strategy to me, and it had the double effect of pissing the troll off.

Luckily for the ogre, who was maybe half the troll’s size, mountains of troll flesh do not move quickly. He was just keeping ahead of the massive hands, one of which smashed down into the floor with a bone- shaking thud. The troll was becoming frustrated, and the ogre was growing tired. This wasn’t going to last much longer.

I spied a kind of box seats overhead, in the form of a platform jutting out of the wall. It looked like it had been built over the entrance to another tunnel. A rickety-looking set of wooden stairs went up to it and the back disappeared into darkness.

I headed for it, hoping that the stairs would give me a better vantage point from which to scan the room. There was a vamp at the bottom of the steps, which had a rope stretched across them, but he caught sight of the yellow tag on my shirt and let me through. I was halfway up when the stairs, which had been vibrating slightly to the enthusiastic stomping of the crowd, jittered more violently.

A man staggered out of the darkness at the top, a spill of bright red blood cascading down the front of his white dress shirt. I had a few seconds to recognize Geminus as he teetered on the edge of the platform, along with the gaping wound in his throat, the knife in his back and the disbelief on his features. Then he was falling, hitting the ground in the middle of the two combatants, his blood leeching out to stain the arena sands.

It looked like that ancient seer had been right, after all.

For a moment, I could see the warm glow of Geminus’s power melting through his skin like sunlight through gauze. It turned everything white and gold, the entire room bathed in flickering fox fire. It was strangely beautiful, but unlike the rest of the room, I didn’t waste time staring. I’d seen enough dead vampires to know what was coming.

The young aren’t too showy in death, having little power to expend. But Geminus had two thousand years of pent-up energy, and it had to go somewhere. And unlike with Elyas, his masters weren’t around to absorb any of it.

My foot hit the top stair as a sudden burst of brightness flared at my back. I glanced behind me to see white-hot tendrils snaking around the body on the floor, and then a flash—and for a moment, Geminus became a human torch of impossible brilliance. I put on a burst of speed as something huge lashed through the room, an unseen current that trembled on the air, shaking a rain of dust from the rafters. And then the world fell away in a clash of thunder.

I was halfway down a sloping corridor, but the backlash was enough to pick me up and throw me half a dozen yards. I landed on my side and rolled, wincing away from the sheer brightness of it, shielding my eyes with my hands. I don’t know if the stairs collapsed as Geminus’s death released his power, or if everybody panicked and headed for the main exit. But nothing followed me down into the depths of the tunnel except for a billowing wash of dust and a lot of screams.

I lay on the floor, bruised and dust-covered for a second, breathing heavy. Until part of the roof collapsed, sending me scuttling down the tunnel on all fours, trying to stay ahead of the rain of dirt and moldy bricks. It felt like a dozen fists pummeling me, and I could see cracks in the round ceiling above, spreading rapidly.

There was a side tunnel up ahead, and I dove for it, afraid I was about to become a permanent resident of Chinatown. But the expected destruction never came. These tunnels had been here since the nineteenth century; I guess they’d withstood worse.

I hugged the wall anyway, my breathing labored in my ears. I don’t like dark places. I really don’t like dark, enclosed, underground places. And the fact that this one just happened to have a murderer running around in it wasn’t helping my phobia.

I pulled a flashlight out of my jacket. My eyesight is good enough that I don’t always need one, but I carried it just in case. The steel body did double duty as a club, and it felt reassuringly solid in my hand as I clicked it on.

At first, all I saw was tumbled brick, dirt and dust in the main corridor, and dark stone laced with cobwebs on the side. But then the light glinted off a dark smear on the floor. Blood; fresh.

I crouched, listening intently, and heard some faint cursing from somewhere deeper in the labyrinth. It could have been anything or anyone. I was sure plenty of people used these tunnels, and murderers wouldn’t be likely to call attention to themselves by swearing up a storm. But I didn’t have a trail at all in the other direction, and no knowledge whatsoever of the maze down here. I followed the blood.

It wasn’t hard. Along with the spattered trail, there was a wide swath of slightly cleaner floor, near one wall, with some odd marks around it. They didn’t look like they’d been left by shoes or boots, more like something had been dragged through the grime. Something that might have been struggling, because some of those markings looked a lot like handprints.

And then there was the blood. I could have probably followed it without the flashlight, the smell was so strong. Stronger than it should have been, for such a thin trail.

I knelt and ran a finger through the century’s worth of muck on the floor, bringing a small sample to my nose. And flinched away, an electric charge shooting up my spine. Vampire blood. From an old one, based on the feel. It was rich and dark, closer to black than red, with a strange, almost velvety texture. Very old, I decided, looking up.

The thought made me hesitate. I didn’t think of myself as particularly cowardly, and for once I had plenty of weapons and no compunction at all about using them. But a wounded master could drain me of the blood he desperately needed to heal before I even got close enough to spot him. And no weapon would help me then.

But he had to know I was here; this close, he could smell every breath, hear every heartbeat. And he wasn’t feeding yet. He was, however, cursing a lot more. But not in English. I listened, frowning, as I inched forward, and figured out what language he was corrupting about the same time I rounded a bend and saw him.

He was slouched on the filthy floor, inching along on his elbows, his back legs dragging through the grime. His once-white tunic was drenched in blood, much of it still wet. The dampness had picked up the furred gray cover of dust that had collected near the walls, like foam on the sea, as he dragged himself forward. The result was so startlingly like an enormous dust bunny that I just stared at him for a second, frozen in shock.

“Anthony?”

The esteemed consul of the powerful European Senate looked back over his grubby shoulder. And an expression of profound relief chased away the almost panic on his features. “Oh, thank the gods!”

I blinked. That wasn’t the reception I usually received from vampires, much less master ones. I moved forward, and he grasped my hand, already babbling before I could so much as get a word out.

“We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here
now
.”