Manitou Blood (40 page)

Gil climbed to his feet, and pulled me up, too, even though his hands were slippery with blood. We turned to face the
strigoi
but this time I seriously thought we were finished. They advanced on us, holding their knives high. The mortician had a very long boning knife that was rusty-colored with dried blood.

The
strigoi
in the sweatshirt
blinked
into the hallway right next to us. Gil kicked at him, then karate-chopped him on the side of the neck, but the
strigoi
leaned backward at an
impossible angle, so that Gil missed him, and then he swung back upright again, and started stabbing at Gil so frenziedly that his knife looked like a blur of twenty different knives. Gil's hands and forearms were smothered in blood, and I could see a gaping slice in the muscle of his right shoulder.

“Goddamned—blood-drinking—bastards!” Gil was gasping.

The mortician ducked his head down, and the next thing I knew he was right behind me, trying to hook his arm around me so that he could cut my throat. I grabbed hold of his wrist and hit it hard against the banister, and then the hall table, and then the banister again, and then I threw myself backward against him with all of my weight. I felt his ribs crunch between me and the wall.

I was about to turn around and give him the old
Three Stooges
poke in the eyes with my stiffened fingers but suddenly he wasn't there any more. He had
blinked
back onto the porch, and he was almost running at me with his knife held up high.

Gil was wrestling with both of the other two
strigoi
and roaring, “
Aaaahhhhhhhhhhh!
” so loud that I could hardly hear anything else.

The mortician swished his knife one way, and then swished it the other. There was nothing in his eyes at all. No rage, no hatred, no madness. Nothing. But I knew that he wouldn't back off and that he was determined to kill me and slit my throat and drink the blood as it pumped straight out of my neck.

And then—he exploded. Right in front of me, only inches away,
he exploded
. There was only the softest of
whoompphs
, but his insides seemed to detonate. His head flew off sideways and his body burst into the fiercest of flames, and in only a few seconds he had dropped onto the floor and he was blazing like a KKK crucifix.

The other two
strigoi
looked around, their faces questioning,
but they didn't stay alive long enough to find out the answer. They, too, exploded, and for a few seconds the hallway was filled with burning bits of them—hands, feet, pelvic girdles, lungs, and loops of rapidly shriveling intestine.

Panting, bleeding, Gil and I looked out of the front door in thankful bewilderment. Out in the street, utterly silent, stood six or seven very dark shapes. They were only visible because of the flaming
strigoi
whose dismembered body parts littered our front doorstep. I thought that I could make out horns, and necklaces, and for a split second I thought that I saw two eyes open, as narrow as the slits in a steelworker's mask, and a molten white light too bright to be looked at.

“Monster slayers,” I said, and I couldn't hide how awestruck I was. “The People-With-Sun-Behind-Their-Eyes.”

Gil said, “First time the Injuns have come riding to the rescue.” Then he sneezed, and sprayed me with blood.

“Hold on,” I said. I kicked all the blazing body parts onto the sidewalk. The intestines were the worst because they stuck to my shoes and got themselves tangled around my ankles, and all the time I was trying to get them loose they were making a loud frying noise. Soon, however, all that remained was the mortician's fiery skull, which was lying on the doormat, burning the bristles. I hooked my left foot around it and booted it down the steps, and it bounced all the way across the street, still blazing, until it hit the curb on the opposite side.

By the time I closed the front door, the horn-headed figures of the monster slayers were long gone. Hunting for more
strigoi
, I hoped. This was
their
land, after all, the grandsons and granddaughters of Changing Woman, and because it was theirs they could draw on all of its richness and all of its spiritual power. Judging by what had happened on this doorstep, the
strigoi
needed to find themselves some pretty dark places to hide.

Gil's hands and arms were criss-crossed with cuts, and his shoulder was bleeding badly, but otherwise he didn't seem to be too seriously injured. I helped him up from the floor, and for a moment we stood looking at ourselves in the hallway mirror. We looked like two walking wounded from a full-scale war.

“Forgot to break that one,” said Gil, nodding at the mirror. “Don't want them getting into the building through there.”

“Let me get you upstairs. Then I'll come back down here and do the honors.”

It was a struggle climbing the stairs. Gil had to stop every now and then, and catch his breath.

“You should have come back before nightfall,” I said.

He leaned back against the paneled staircase. “I know. But to tell you the truth, I have a confession to make. I tried to get my wife and daughters over to Jersey.”

“What?”

“I went back home and they were terrified. The
strigoi
had tried to break into our apartment three or four times. So I got them to pack a bag and we went to the Holland Tunnel. I thought maybe, because I was military, they would let me through. But there was no way. They have barricades, they have razor wire. They have orders to shoot you on sight, if you try to get through. So I had no choice. I had to bring them back home, and barricade them in again.”

“You could have stayed with them, Gil. You
should
have stayed with them. I would have understood.”

Gil wiped blood across his upper lip. “I'm a soldier, Harry. I know the meaning of duty.”

“Well, I appreciate your coming back. At least we know that the monster slayers are out and about, and doing what they promised. Did you see that old guy blow up, right in front of me? That was something, wasn't it?”

“Harry?” called Jenica, her voice echoing down the stairwell. “Are you okay down there?”

“Battered but unbowed,” I called back.

I wrapped Gil's arm around my shoulders, and heaved him up the last two flights of stairs to the Dragomirs' apartment. Jenica was waiting for us, and she immediately helped Gil through to the living room, and together we lowered him onto the couch. Almost at once I could see that he was much more badly hurt than I had thought. The front of his T-shirt was wet with blood, and when Jenica dragged it off him, we could see that it wasn't just from the cuts on his arms. He had a puncture-wound just below his ribcage, and it was bubbling.

“I will bring antiseptic, and bandage,” said Jenica. “Meantime, Harry, press this tissues against this hole, to stop more blood.”

“It's nothing,” said Gil, peering down at it. “Minor stab wound, that's all. I had shrapnel in my leg, in Bosnia. Thirty-seven stitches.”

“How about a drink?” I asked him. “Nothing like
palinca
to ease any kind of pain, physical or spiritual.”

“Why not? I'll tell you something, Harry, when this is all over, I'm going to open a
palinca
bar on Seventh Avenue, and I'm going to call it Amnesia.”

Jenica brought in a plastic basin filled with water from the bathtub. She sponged Gil's stomach and his shoulder and dressed his wounds with Band-Aids and clean, folded handkerchiefs. Then we helped him to limp through to the bedroom and eased him down on the bed.

“What you need is sleep,” said Jenica, and she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

“Frank died in this bed,” Gil protested.

“Well, he did and he didn't. Frank isn't exactly dead yet.”

“Thanks for the comforting reminder.”

Jenica and I went back to the living room. I could have done with some sleep myself, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to close my eyes. Besides, I had to go down to the hallway and break the mirror. I doubted if the
strigoi
would try
to come back here, after the monster slayers had been around, but I decided that it was better to be over-cautious than lose my entire blood supply to some dead-eyed wacko with a box cutter.

Jenica picked up the decorated bone that we had found in Vasile Lup's casket. “You know, I have been wondering all day about this. Where it came from, why it seems to have such power.”

“I've seen something like it before. Two of them, as a matter of fact. They were bones from a wonder-worker's legs, which you could tap together, as if he was running, and you could follow him into the spirit world. They used to belong to White Bull, who was medicine-man for Crazy Horse.”

“Did they work?”

I didn't really want to talk about it, because it had been a bad experience, but I nodded. “Yes, they did. But not in the same way as this.” I reached across and took the bone away from her and lifted it up. “White Bull's bones had to be used as part of a sacred ritual . . . but this one—this has some kind of internal energy all of its own, doesn't it?”

“I ask myself, why was it lying in the Vampire Gatherer's casket?”

“Who knows? Maybe there was no special reason. After Misquamacus had roused up the Vampire Gatherer, maybe he just didn't need it any more, and so he left it behind.”

“An artifact so powerful as this? I don't think so. I think your wonder-worker left it lying in the Vampire Gatherer's casket for some purpose. And remember that when you shook at it him, he walked away, very quick, as if it possessed a magic that he could not defy.”

I examined the bone more closely. There were tiny figures carved all along it, all intertwined. The interesting thing was—unlike the figures you usually saw in Native American carving—they were all fully dressed, like white men.

Jenica said, “What I ask myself is, how did Misquamacus obtain this bone? So, yes, we know from your spirit guide Singing Rock that the very hot fire of nine-eleven forged back together again the separated parts of his
manitou
, so that his spirit was again whole. But his spirit still had no
substance
, did it?—what the nineteenth-century mediums used to call
ectoplasm
. So with no substance, how did he find the bone, and how did he carry it to Vasile Lup's casket, so that he could revive him? It is eggs and chickens.”

“You're asking me for answers I don't even know the questions to.”

Jenica's eyes were shining in the candelight. “Something is missing in this equation. I sense that somebody else is behind the scenes of what happened here.”

On the marquetry side table, among the jewel boxes and the decorative paperweights, I found a small bronze ornament of a grinning Romanian gnome. He only a little guy, but very heavy, with a pointed hat, and he was perfect for breaking a mirror. Hefting him up in the palm of my hand, I hobbled downstairs as quickly as I could.

There was a stomach-turning stench of scorched carpet and burned intestines still hanging around the stairwell, like the rottenest barbecue you ever smelled in your life, and I couldn't stop my mouth from filling up with undigested spaghetti Bolognese, before I swallowed it again.

When I reached the hallway, I gripped the gnome firmly by the base, and approached myself in the mirror. I pulled a suitably determined face, and lifted up the gnome. But I was just about to smash the mirror to pieces when I saw something reflected in it—a postcard, lying on the hall table. A postcard that certainly wasn't there before, when we were fighting the
strigoi.

I turned around and picked it up. The picture on the front showed a large white house, under a deep blue sky, with crimson maple trees in front of it, and a small circular lake.
The Kensico Country Inn, Valhalla, N.Y
. I turned it over. There was no stamp on it, and no address, but someone had scrawled
Heref.

I frowned at it.
Heref?
Maybe somebody was trying to write
Hereford
, but was interrupted halfway through.

I looked around. The question was, who had put it here? The front door was firmly locked and bolted. I had done it myself. And so far as we knew, there was nobody else in the building. All of the other residents were either on vacation or else they had gone out for one reason or another and hadn't returned. Caught by the pale people, probably, or sucked dry by
strigoi
.

I went across and tried the door of the first-floor apartment. It was locked. Then I went to the end of the hallway and tried the door that must have led out to the back yard. That was locked, too, and bolted from the inside. There was only one other way in that I could think of. The mirror.

I slowly approached the mirror until my forehead was pressed against it, and stared right into it. All I could see was me. Only the
strigoi
could have come through this mirror—but if they had, why hadn't they tried to attack us, and why had they left this postcard?

Then it occurred to me. Frank. The postcard had been left here by Frank. Hadn't he promised me that, whatever happened, he would never forget his oath to protect human life? The scrawl said “Here” and then “f.” Frank had come here to tell me where Misquamacus was hiding.

I was still staring at the mirror, trying to decide if I ought to break it or not, when I heard a piercing scream from upstairs, and a door slamming, and the sound of chairs crashing to the floor.

“
Harry!
” shouted Jenica. “
Harry, come quick!
”

I might have hobbled down the stairs but I ran back up them like a mountain goat with a firecracker up its ass. The door to the Dragomirs' apartment was wide open, and Jenica was standing outside on the landing, panting with fear, holding up the bone to protect herself. Inside, halfway along the corridor, stood a thin, wild-eyed man in a loose-fitting caftan, which was heavily soaked in blood. He had shoulder-length hair, which was dripping wet, and a scraggly, unkempt beard. He was carrying a machete, which was dripping blood onto the floor.