Read I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Online

Authors: Tony Monchinski

Tags: #norror noir, #noir, #vampires, #new york city, #horror, #vampire, #supernatural, #action, #splatterpunk, #monsters

I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (7 page)

BOOK: I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)
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We conspired to address her predicament. I
trusted Elizaveta to carry out her deception in the daylight hours
as I rested, gathering my strength. Every night we met and she
informed me of her progress. I listened and offered advice to
further draw Boris into our web. Our scheme laid and developed,
Elizaveta lured her intended to the river one night. I am not
certain of the pretense that brought the louse from his parents’
estate, though I can imagine. I left those details to Elizaveta and
her feminine cunning, which even at ten was quite well
developed.

The boy arrived on the banks of the Neva
where specified, no doubt libidinous, anticipating some sexual
foray.

Instead he found me.

I still remember his words as I approached
him,
Be
gone
rebenok
. Calling me a child,
because I appeared to him then as such. Much was his surprise when
I sank my fangs deep. I killed him slowly, muffling his
protestations, draining him there in the shadows besides the river.
Elizaveta stood at my side and observed all, undisturbed. That
Boris was aware of her presence and culpability in his final
moments seemed only just to me, somehow poetic.

We disposed of the body in the river, letting
the current carry it out to the Baltic.

Elizaveta had born witness to all, had
participated in my actions to the extent that she had delivered her
intended to my clutches. With approval she had watched, even
encouraging me with her praise. She had seen how I took my repast
and accepted me for what I was. Oh, my Elizaveta! To her I was able
to reveal all, even the secrets of my existence.

Previously I had been enamored.

From that moment she was my obsession.

An ordering principal in a universe that
lacked order, a meaning to my existence. Elizaveta: my center and
my whole. She who accepted me for what I was. More than accepted:
she extolled my nature. I pledged myself to her, my being. I vowed
to be with her always. Imbrued at that moment with the optimism of
youth. Woe that I should know then what I came to learn. There are
some vows beyond our power to see to fruition.

Such is the nature of promises we are
ill-equipped to make, much less keep.

Boris was certainly missed. A cry and hue
went up about the city in the days following; again, he was the
child of a family of means. Elizaveta made a show of despondency
for the proper audience: her grandmother, the boy’s family. Her
role in his abrupt disappearance was never supposed. Petersburg
society held that the loss was as much hers as Boris’ parents and
siblings. At night we laughed about our ruse.

When the White Nights of June arrived, nights
when the sun barely set, Elizaveta came to me.

The summer gave to the fall, the fall to the
terrible winter, and one year to another. Years passed, my
Elizaveta matured, and we were impartable after dark. On many a
night she accompanied me as I fed. I derived my sustenance from
tramps, from would-be ruffians and peasants unlucky enough to be
out so late. Elizaveta was, in turn, inevitably aghast, not at the
violence—
no
!—but that I should feed off those so mean in
position.

Very early on, she offered herself to me. I
resisted the urge at first. It was, I assure you, no minor
temptation. Many were the days I lay in rest, imagining her taste.
Many the night we were reunited, I held myself back. I wanted
nothing more than to taste her, to drink of her being as only one
of my kind can. She insisted and persisted to do so.

My will was weak, my desire strong.

Finally I succumbed to the temptation. I
found her blood to be the sweetest of nectars. It sated the
deep-rooted hunger from which I suffered. I drank long and deep,
forcing myself off my Elizaevta less I permanently debilitate her,
or worse.

Of course, I knew her in other ways as well.
I refer here to the physical; the biblical sense as it is sometimes
said. Again, the details would only sully what we felt for one
another, and you would make a mockery of our love.

Elizaveta could not resist time as I. The
years passed and she grew into a beautiful young woman. We
continued to appear in public together. To passersby I was little
brother to her older sister, then nephew to her young aunt. For my
physical appearance changed little in those years. Her lustrous
black hair fell to her waist. Her green eyes reflected more than
pure beauty by then; wisdom was in them, though only we were wise
to our relationship.

There were other suitors of course: the heir
to a maritime fortune; the son of a government official; the male
progeny of a variety of Petersburg’s well-to-do. Alas and alack,
each fell to consumption or ague, to some cachexy, a gradual
atrophy, some fatal ailment. Of course, the cause of their demise
was all my doing. Some I took to my cellar, manacled. There I drank
from them at my leisure. They were believed to have absconded,
insouciant young men of society intoxicated with the spirit of
adventure, never to be heard from again.

On occasion I invited Elizaveta to join me.
She laughed when she saw her suitors shackled in my home. The fear
in their eyes, the betrayal. Inevitably they cried out to her, much
as they could, enervated by my feedings.
You
are
in
league
with
this
demon
, one
accused her in my presence. He warned her of her soul’s fate and
Elizaveta laughed the more; his accusations only increased our
mirth. She watched the life depart his eyes as I finished him.

And then the day came when we were forced
apart.

Her family was sending her to university
abroad. She did not wish to leave me. She begged that she may move
into my home. She pled that we might go off together. However,
there were a variety of reasons I could not grant her wish. Until
my Master’s return, I must remain in our house, charged with its
security and upkeep. If Elizaveta joined me in my domicile, she
would eventually be seen. We would be found out, and that would not
have ended well.

Furthermore, there were reasons I believed
she should go. The idea of changing her had taken hold of me. That
she should join me as a child of the night, my vampire bride. If
she was to be my companion through the ages, I wished her
development to be multi-faceted and complete. A university
education would serve her well. I did not wish to let her go, but I
thought it would benefit her. She would be gone a few years; what
would three years or five or even a decade be to one such as I?

I could not change her until I had spoken to
Vinci.

It was not his permission I sought.
Nevertheless, Elizaveta would be the first I converted to our
existence, and I believed I owed knowledge of such a measure to the
one responsible for my own conversion. Moreover, there was the
matter of her own willingness—apart from me would grant her the
time to consider my proposal. For propose it I did. Our last night
together, as we lay in my master’s house, I asked her if she would
join me in defying death, in forestalling its arrival as only one
like I could. She seemed quick to answer—and I harbored no doubt
the proferred answer would be a confirmation—but I enjoined her not
to. I asked her to wait and answer me upon her return.

She reluctantly agreed. There were tears in
her eyes that night when we left my master’s house, when we walked
the Prospekt one last time. She was quiet on the Neva, holding my
hand in her own. I will never forget. She reluctantly left me at
her grandmother’s gate, and I watched her go.

The following day she departed, and though
she would come to return to Petersburg and my arms, it would not be
the last night on which we were forced to part.

Boone was snoring.

Deep in his reverie, Rainford hadn’t noticed
until that moment.

“Really, Boone, such juvenile behavior.”

The bound man snorted, shifting on the
rack.

Pomeroy reached forward and tapped Boone on
the shoulder. When he failed to respond, Pomeroy pushed him,
eliciting a wheeze and another change in position.

“He insults you!” cried Wells. “Can we beat
him
now
?”

Pomeroy was looking to his master, a
quizzical expression on his face.

“Leave him,” ordered the Dark Lord. “I have
business elsewhere.”

 

7.
5:03 P.M.

 

“Evening, Werner,” Cheeks Carlucci said to
the prison guard, the hack nodding at him, at the other men the
inmate walked with.

They called Carlucci
Cheeks
which
sounded like a joke, sounded soft, but there was nothing soft about
him. Cheeks with his dark, curly hair close to his head, his olive
skin dark enough he could pass for Puerto Rican. Carlucci and his
guys wearing what they wanted Inside, Cheeks in a jean shirt, the
arms cut off, unbuttoned over his hairy pecs and flat stomach.

It’d surprised Dickie they’d allowed them to
wear whatever they wanted, Dickie getting to keep his crucifix and
track suit. Even his tennis shoes, though they’d confiscated the
laces. Dickie thinking maybe he should have held on to his watch.
Nah
, Sully deserved it.

“That’s Werner.” Carlucci told Dickie when
they were out of the guard’s ear shot. “
Pezzo
di
merda
,” calling the screw a piece of shit.

“We got him?” Dickie meant was the hack on
their payroll, would he do things needed doing, look the other way
if something required it.

“Yeah, we got him.”

“Waste a fuckin’ money you ask me.” Jimmy
Scal walked right behind them, Jimmy’s thinning hair slicked back,
skin wan and jowly. The Scal wore tinted glasses with gold frames.
Looked like a heavy guy who’d lost a lot of weight but looked
better heavier. Dickie figured prison food didn’t agree with the
Scal.

Bianchi on the other hand…Bianchi and Nicky
walked a few steps behind Jimmy Scal. Bianchi with his elbow. As he
walked, he seemed to move side to side like some fat guys do. Nicky
young and hard, all muscle, in for a short ride.

They were showing Dickie around, filling him
in on what he needed to know. Carluci narrating with an occasional
comment from the Scal.

“We’re good with the Yays,” Carlucci said
loud enough for Dickie to hear as he raised a hand, greeting a
group of brawny black inmates on the tier. “The Brotherhood,”
nodding down to the tables where a group of white men sat, a lot of
them with their heads shaved, sleeves rolled up or cut off to show
ink, bare-torsos with more tattoos than flesh. “Far as they’re
concerned, we’re niggers like the smokes, but we can do business
with them guys. And no one fucks with the Mexicans,” the Mexicans
smaller guys with feral looks in their eyes, congregating on the
other side of the room below.

“And not every Mexican is a Mexican,” noted
the Scal.

Dickie getting a feel for his new
surroundings, wasn’t as bad as he thought it was going to be.
Bianchi complaining to Nicky about his bursitis, about how his
elbow had blown up to the size of a golf ball and he couldn’t get
the prison doctor to drain it.

They reached a t-junction and Dickie glanced
down the corridor, something drawing his gaze. He stopped and
stared, a cell cast in shadow having caught his eye, a man with a
shaved head seated outside it.

“Shouldn’t look down there too long, boss,”
Bianchi had walked on ahead a bit, turned back with one hand on his
bandaged elbow.

“Who’s that and what’s in there?”

“That?” Carlucci said of the man sitting
there, the man’s skin sallow, the guy reaching into a Styrofoam cup
and bringing whatever was in it out and into his mouth. “That’s
Renfeld.”

A crazed look on the man’s face, his eye
twitching.

“Why they call him Renfeld?” Dickie was
watching as the man drew his pinched fingers out of the cup.
Whatever he was holding squirmed in his grasp.

“His name I guess.”

“Looks like a skinny Uncle Fester,”
volunteered Nicky.

“He’s a Brit?”

Renfeld popped the beetle into his mouth.

Jimmy Scal pointed a finger to his head and
said something in Italian.

Carlucci told Dickie straight: “He’s fuckin’
nuts what he is.”

Dickie felt drawn to the cell behind the
seated bald man, like something inside it was looking out at him.
He couldn’t see anything from here. The darkness in the cell
seemingly palpable. Dickie reached up to the crucifix he wore,
making sure it was still there.

“Come on,” Carlucci’s hand on Dickie’s arm,
Jimmy Scal on the other side of him drawing Dickie away, Bianchi
holding his elbow and Nicky following.

Renfeld cocked his head like only he could
hear something, looking up for the first time, watching the five
men go. His eye twitched uncontrollably and he started to giggle to
himself, spittle flaking the side of his mouth, a finger poking
around in his cup.

 

8.
5:30 P.M.

 

Olga and Sarafina spent the day procuring and
preparing the necessary tools. They’d needed a step ladder to reach
the top of the china cabinet, and even then it was a stretch
reaching the goblet atop it, neither woman tall, both well past
their physical prime. The cup rested on the kitchen table now,
freshly polished, gleaming. Olga’s weight made it difficult for her
to venture outdoors. When something was needed, she asked Sarafina
to retrieve it, and Sarafina was more than willing to go.

They’d pushed the furniture aside in Olga’s
living room, preparing a spot on the floor where the circle would
be drawn. Eddie’s remains rested on a plastic-covered couch, under
a sheet. There was no smell. Olga had treated her son’s body with
herbs and poultices shortly after getting him home, going about her
business earnestly, lovingly. The tenderness the woman directed
upon her son, even in death. Sarafina had excused herself and gone
out into the hallway to weep.

BOOK: I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)
6.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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