CHAPTER 3





The morning wind bites Ariadne all over, but she endures the shivers, nestles closer to Andrei to feed off his warmth. He moves his hands across her small shoulders.

“See?” She twists in his arms to face him. “Wasn’t this worth it?”

They stare together at the bare quad, looking like a giant scale model of the campus grounds, but missing all the little cardboard students. At this hour of the morning no sane people are awake. She pities the sane.

She feels Andrei’s breath through the rise and fall of his chest at her back. “Hrm. I never thought I’d say it, Ari, but I’m glad you got me up at this ungodly hour.”

The sun has bubbled up from below the horizon like an egg frying sunny-side up on the pan of God, orange, quivering, beckoning.

Ariadne smiles. “See what you miss by sleeping in?”

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

With the sudden start of a patient receiving an adrenaline injection directly into the heart, Ariadne awoke. She could swear the song she had been trying to remember ever since the cab ride had run through her dream in its entirety, but now it dissolved into wisps of smoke in her mind. With a shrug, she swung her legs over the side of her slab and got up.

In Ariadne’s room—her cell—it was always night. She didn’t need the lamp on her desk, didn’t even know if the bulb still worked. Years ago, she had wanted it as a reminder of her old life. Now, it was only a piece of jetsam she hadn’t yet gotten around to disposing of.

Here, buried deep within the underground levels beneath Liliane’s mansion, no carpet covered Ariadne’s floor, no paintings or tapestries adorned the walls. There was no furniture save a concrete slab for sleeping and a locked steel box inside which rested her two best blades. She didn’t need anything more.

Her nightly ritual began with sharpening her swords. Katanas forged from tamahagane, Japanese iron sand, their steel had been folded over a dozen times in the forging and then cooled with clay. The nakagocarved into each face bore the name of an undead swordsmith from Kyoto whom Liliane claimed had been plying his trade since the days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Prince had presented them as a gift to Ariadne on the night when, after nearly two years of grueling torment, she determined that her pupil had earned them. Ariadne had never been more grateful for anything in her life. She’d wanted to erupt in sobs and fling herself at her lady’s knees, but knew by then the penalty for showing such weakness.

Tonight, for almost two hours she ran the ceramic cross-bar across each side of each blade, wiped them up and down with oil. Then she spent another hour practicing her martial arts with robotic precision, after which she simply ceased. She did not sweat, did not pant, did not feel the satisfied rush that followed calisthenics in her living days, nor the prickly need for a shower. No fog of sleep hung over her. She was awake, lucid, and all this time she had been planning.

At last she put on her usual functional black bodysuit and her Sherrif’s jacket, and walked through the halls of the haven to Liliane’s study. Ariadne’s senses were edgy enough tonight that she imagined she could detect the rats skittering on the floorboards of the abandoned Victorian house that lay above the subterranean complex. Liliane’s study was the only place where she accepted the complete silence.

Few had permission to enter the Prince’s private wing without a specific invitation. Liliane had adorned her room with wall-to-wall books, statuary, hanging vines, and a Japanese rock garden. Ariadne spared none of these a second glance as she opened Liliane’s antique writing desk and removed the city map. She plotted the pattern of rebel sightings, extrapolated Roarke’s spheres of influence, and attempted to triangulate his position.

Within an hour she was ready for the briefing. The clock on the wall read 9:30 P.M. when the five other Kindred entered the training room.

They stood, if anything, too much at attention. Likely it was their first visit to Liliane’s study. Most of the veteran soldiers were elsewhere, assigned to protect the elders, but for all their lack of experience, four of the soldiers standing before Ariadne had proven their prowess. She was confident in their abilities, their brutality, their efficiency, and their loyalty.

The fifth member, a newcomer, stared at Ariadne appraisingly. His red hair was cut buzz-short, his eyes a washed-out green. A shamrock tattoo twisted around his right cheek, the tip of its stem ending in a mouth that was poised to bite into his ear with bladelike teeth. There was a hunger in his eyes that Ariadne couldn’t help but notice.

Her fingers clicked the enamel switch on the slide projector, a relic of classrooms from her parents’ generation. “Some of you have yet to see combat against Roarke’s forces. You need to know what you’re up against.”

A square of light appeared against the white linen sheet Ariadne had draped over one wall of the study, revealing a muted color photo of a scarecrow incongruously placed in the center of a fashionable Beacon Hill brownstone dining room. The scarecrow was female, wearing an elegant evening gown torn in a dozen places, straw apparently erupting from every break. Its eyes, ears, and mouth also spewed straw like vomitus frozen in mid-spew. Ariadne waited until she saw the narrowing of the others’ eyes, and then the flinch-back.

The scarecrow wasn’t stuffed with straw at all, but mud.

It also wasn’t a scarecrow, but the body of Antoinette, an elder in Liliane’s court whose face was hardly unfamiliar to them. As Ariadne clicked slide after slide, the assemblage saw how the mud had burst its way from the inside out, through the very pores of Antoinette’s skin.

Mud was smeared across the rest of the dining room in pentagrams and spirals. Silverware was jammed into the walls, the table, the artwork, and the light fixtures.

“We don’t know how he does this,” said Ariadne. “The mud, or preserving Antoinette’s image on film. Just as we still have no idea how he grew his arm into a sword after I sliced it off the night he began the rebellion. Everything we know about the wizards tells us that our kind can’t use their magic. But that grimoire of Nadine’s must have taught him something before I destroyed it, as he’s quick to keep reminding us.”

One of the soldiers shook his head. “You mean Roarke sent us these pictures?”

“Yes. He wants us to be afraid.”

Ariadne looked over the troops to see how well Roarke’s strategy had worked. She was pleased to note that they were quickly recovering their composure.

The tattooed man was even smiling. Ariadne took note of that, too.

“Roarke’s strategy, as far as we can tell, is that he has no strategy, beyond causing chaos. Each act he commits is more bizarre than the last. His forces will hit an elder’s house and burn it to the ground, or do something like this instead. Antoinette’s recovering now.”

If by recovering, you mean lingering on as a gibbering wreck, Ariadne added mentally.

“He seems to want to provoke us, to threaten the anonymity of the Masquerade or to force us to do the same in order to fight him.”

The tattooed man coughed.

“Yes?” Ariadne raised an eyebrow.

“There’s no strategy you could find, you mean.”

Ariadne saw the others stiffen and subtly put a few inches distance between themselves and their comrade. This newcomer was the latest waif to wander into Liliane’s sanctum. All Ariadne knew was that he came with a reputation for savagery and violence, belied by his lean, nimble form and his baby face.

She called him out and he snapped to attention, but in a mocking fashion, saluting and winking, clicking his tongue. The others looked to her expectantly.

Insolence from Bourne, the childe of a high-ranking elder, was one thing. From this street rat? Quite another.

Ariadne called the new recruit forward, and with much preening he strutted toward her. She asked his name.

“What, they didn’t tell you?”

“When I ask you something,” she said softly but firmly, “you will respond immediately. What is your name?”

“Patrick O’Malley.” He held out a greasy hand. “But you can call me Po-Mo.”

She left his hand hanging. Instead she stepped closer to Po-Mo, until she was just inside the boundaries of his personal space. He bristled. Ariadne had found that Kindred, more even than kine, seem to resent this sort of intrusion; it was some sort of instinctual animal challenge.

“Are you prepared to follow my orders to the letter, immediately, without question? No matter what they are?”

“I guess,” said Po-Mo. “But word is, you’re only ten years dead. What makes you so special?”

Now the others were staring. One was slowly shaking his head and mouthing the word “no,” but Po-Mo either didn’t see or didn’t care. “Word is, you don’t even know who your sire is.”

Someone whispered a desperate “shut up” to him.

“Now, I’ve only been here a little while,” Po-Mo said, “but I see the lay of the land. ‘Come one, come all,’ says the Prince lady, but somehow it’s just Licks who can name their family trees who are in charge. All the elders are like, a zillion years old. ’Cept you. Before I go where you say, I think it’s only fair I know what makes you so special.”

“Po-Mo,” Ariadne snapped, “remove your flak jacket.”

“Awright.” He rolled his eyes. “Whatever you say.” He removed the garment, showing off his well-chiseled pectoral muscles, playing to the small crowd.

“Po-Mo,” Ariadne said slowly, clearly, “unholster your gun and shoot yourself in the foot.”

He blinked. “Say again?”

“Wrong answer,” she said, and delivered a backhand with blinding speed, smacking him in the face and sending him reeling to the ground. The others’ eyes all tracked him as he staggered and started to rise. No one offered a hand.

Ariadne could see rage bunch the muscles of Po-Mo’s neck, but he stood back up to attention.

“Po-Mo, take your gun and shoot yourself in the stomach.”

“I don’t know what you’re playing, but I ain’t going to—”

She lashed out again. He was ready this time, for her backhand. But she only feinted with it. As he reacted to the false move, she drew her blade. Ariadne cracked Po-Mo’s legs with the flat of her sword, sending him to the ground again.

Ariadne moved back as, muttering curses, Po-Mo rose to his feet, this time in fighting stance. His fangs were out. His eyes blazed with anger.

“You crazy bi—”

“Po-Mo.” Her voice cut through his words as surely as her blade. “I want to see if you detect a pattern here. In a moment I am going to order you to take your gun and shoot yourself in the chest. If you refuse, the next order will be to shoot yourself in the forehead.”

“And if I say screw you?”

“Then I do it for you.”

“I’d like to see you try, you—”

Before the rest of the words escaped his mouth, she lunged forward, grabbed the gun from his holster, spun him around, and locked him in a full Nelson. He tried to flip her over, tried to break her hold, but she was too well positioned. She cocked the gun, pressed it to his temple.

“I’m told you’re a good fighter, Po-Mo,” she said. “It would be a shame to take you out of the roster because you’re spending the rest of the night in blinding pain while you heal from a bullet wound to the brain. A chest wound will heal much quicker, especially if it’s clean.”

Po-Mo made a valiant surge, and for a moment it looked as if he would break free. Then Ariadne stepped on his foot with her heel. The crunch of bone was audible, and he grimaced, eyes bulging.

“I’m going to let you go now, Po-Mo. I’ll then give your gun back to you and order you to shoot yourself in the chest. I suggest you obey.”

She did just that. And she waited.

Po-Mo looked her in the eyes, sizing her up, making whatever calculations he felt he had to make.

“Po-Mo,” she said slowly, softly. “Shoot yourself in the—”

He turned the gun around on himself and fired. A bang and then a splatter of red splayed like a Jackson Pollack painting on the far wall of the training room.

The others looked on, some smiling, as Po-Mo fought back a cry of pain, taut muscles visible all along his face. He clutched at his chest, then slowly staggered back to standing posture.

Ariadne nodded her approval. “Weapon down. Collect your flak jacket and get back in formation.”

Po-Mo holstered his gun and silently returned to the line. He stood at attention, a thin red river trickling slowly down his chest, across his crotch, dripping into a small pool on the floor.

“Now, the briefing.” Ariadne picked up as if nothing untoward had happened. “For the benefit of those who might be a little new to this—” she eyed Po-Mo with the hint of a smile “—Roarke’s forces are small. After last night he likely has only nine or ten actual Kindred under his command, although we all know he’s not above ghouling mortals into obeying him without question. Intelligence reports estimate his mortal followers at between fifteen and twenty. He might even be having his forces Embrace, but newly made vampires are more of a liability than an aid in battle, so if he’s expanding the ranks in that way it’ll be a while before we see any new Licks. And this war will be over in less than a while.

“During that time, though, Roarke’s men are going to cause all the trouble they can. His magic, wherever it comes from, gives him an edge, as does his reliance on hit-and-run attacks. Roarke thinks we can’t be everywhere at once. We’re going to prove him wrong by doing just that. We’ll break into two-man patrols around any target that could conceivably be seen as strategic, or even as vulnerable.”

“When can we bring the fight to him?” someone asked.

“Soon,” said Ariadne. “It’s become clear that we can’t just annihilate his forces the way we thought we could when the war began. So it’s time for new tactics. We need to capture someone and interrogate him, so we can pinpoint Roarke’s base of operations. We have some ideas about its location already. Obviously, it can’t be in Boston proper.”

Another soldier spoke up. “That’s what everyone always says. But Roarke’s got all that weird magic. Maybe the wizards are letting him crash with them.”

Ariadne shook her head. “Boston’s been a wizard town for centuries, and they’ve never let our kind join their club, no matter what powers they have. Liliane’s pact with the Merlins makes it very clear that the only Kindred entitled to Boston real estate are right here in this court. None of the nearby Princes would dare shelter him, which leaves Roarke with only scattered bits of unclaimed turf: Malden, Medford, maybe even North Cambridge. Let’s start the patrols and see what we find.”

She drew herself up. “I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake here. Each and every one of you had a reason to come here—something or someone you fled, someplace you didn’t belong. Then you found your way to us. Here, the world you knew no longer exists. Here, you’re valued. If Roarke succeeds, here vanishes. Do I make myself clear?”

The heads nodded, eyes locked on her.

Ariadne’s own gaze lingered for a moment on Po-Mo. His eyes were defiant, but his mouth remained closed. The wound in his chest continued to seep blood.

“We take in anyone here,” she said to him evenly, “but not without rules. New Jerusalem will be a citadel of order and harmony. If you want to be a reaver, I hear Roarke’s recruiting. But that’s not a job with much long-term security.”

She snapped to attention. “So we swear,” she called out.

“So we swear!” the others answered with fervor.

Po-Mo lingered for a moment. Ariadne did not shrink from his gaze. It took everyone a while to see Liliane’s vision, and some never came around at all. They just mouthed the words until they got tired or discouraged and wandered away.

“How?” he asked, his voice ragged from the pain he was fighting.

“Think before you mouth off next time,” Ariadne said simply, “and I might teach you a few things.”

“I ain’t talking about how you took me down. I’m talkin’ about how you became what you are with no sire. I ain’t got no sire, neither. Poser got himself staked. But you sayin’ that here, I can rise as high as you, even with that?”

“Prove yourself,” said Ariadne. “Better yourself. Reap the benefits.”

For a moment, Ariadne saw a crimson flicker in Po-Mo’s eyes. Was it the dawning of an appreciation for New Jerusalem, or the fires of ambition, stoked and beginning to gain strength?

 

 






CHAPTER 4

 

 

Blades hidden in the unassuming guitar case over her shoulders, Ariadne joined Hera as the two walked up from the subterranean depths, out into the main hallway of Liliane’s old Victorian house. They stepped into the night, indifferent to the cold winds blasting across Eagle Hill, ruffling lawns and sending hooded teenage boys running girlishly for shelter. Their feet made no sound as they descended the slope the concrete of which shielded Liliane’s underground safehouse, or as they passed an overgrown courtyard where a homeless man gazed sightlessly over the bay to the pale lights of the P.J. McArdle drawbridge across the Chelsea River.

Beyond the tanks of liquefied natural gas that dominated the sickly gray-white city sky, the city of Chelsea was barely visible through a dull, smoggy curtain. For the past ten years, as far as Ariadne was concerned, it might as well have been Europe, and the river the Atlantic, so confined had her universe grown. She traced the hidden boundaries between the neighborhoods where the wizards would and wouldn’t tolerate Kindred, the neighborhoods where other Kindred’s respect for Liliane’s demesne began and ended, the neighborhoods where mortals tended to be more or less suspicious.

I may be bound in a nutshell, she mused, but at least here I’m queen of infinite space. One look at the respect and fear in Hera’s eyes as she walked alongside Ariadne confirmed that.

Ariadne broke the silence. “This is a new night.” The phrase was something Liliane always said, when welcoming a new urchin into the court. It meant that the past was past.

Hera turned to regard her. She had been twirling her curly hair, now dyed green, around her fingers compulsively for the duration of the walk.

“Liliane only says that for crimes committed before joining her, not after.” Hera paused. “I failed her, and you, that night when Roarke rebelled. I ran. You should have told the Prince or punished me yourself. Why didn’t you?”

“After Roarke’s split, we couldn’t afford to lose any more warriors,” said Ariadne. If there was more she wanted to say, she couldn’t seem to find the words.

East Boston’s vertiginously steep streets spilled the two Kindred down past small clustered apartments with barred windows, Spanish food marts with gang logos painted on their tightly shut iron grates, Italian restaurants-slash-bars the patrons of which huddled around the glow of TV screens as if for warmth.

“So, are you worried about the Council?” Hera said, after a time.

“I clean up my messes,” said Ariadne. “The Masquerade is safe.”

They passed lengthy streets of brick buildings interrupted by gaps where half-demolished foundations sat; Ariadne could never tell if someone was building something new in these spots or blasting something down. Ariadne saw a few wooden slat houses interspersed between them, all of which were slanting or buckling or deformed in the way her childhood plastic Barbie Castle playset got melted when she left it in front of a space-heater one night. In one spot, a squished-thin triple-decker, the kind that you could find squeezed between two other buildings, stood alone, abandoned lots on both sides. In the middle of a bunch of houses with boarded-up windows stood an inexplicable green pasture with a miniature set of streets, all named after 1950s movie stars—John Wayne Lane, Judy Garland Drive—except all these “streets” were little more than footpaths. Several streets led to dead ends, gravel roads, or fenced-off areas of the airport tarmac.

Ariadne’s thoughts drifted. She remembered Andrei once saying that East Boston shouldn’t even really exist. It was a half-landfilled island surrounding Logan Airport. To arrive by car meant driving as if to the airport but veering off at the last moment onto a disused overflow parking ramp that spilled you out into a residential area. “Boston’s backstage,” he would call it. “Its twilight zone.”

Hera interrupted Ariadne’s reverie. “I know you’re careful about the Masquerade. You’re the Silent Knife. What about the rest of . . . what about that new guy, Po-Mo? All it takes is one slip. I mean, we’re fighting with swords on city streets. It’s only a matter of time before the sheep start looking up. All the Council needs is the slightest hint that the mortals know what we are . . .”

Her voice trailed off as Ariadne stared her in the eyes. “Are you thinking of holding back for fear of breaking the Masquerade?”

“N-no. Your training’s been great. But I’ve been focusing on the fighting, not on how to keep the fighting quiet. I’m . . . I’m worried.”

“Then fight,” said Ariadne. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

The look in Hera’s eyes told Ariadne she would have left it there, wouldn’t have asked her again. But Ariadne could tell Hera’s doubts hadn’t been quieted. A ten-minute diversion now might save them a lot of trouble in the battle to come.

“This way.” Ariadne suddenly broke down a side street.

Hera followed, past laundromat after laundromat, a plethora of beauty salons, a few garages that had been converted to churches, and one giant cathedral in the middle of a groaty parking lot. Trash lay everywhere. Ariadne stepped catlike over the maimed frame of a bicycle, entered a small yard, and knocked on a pair of storm shelter doors.

Hera stared expectantly, one hand hovering around the holster for her knife, half-hidden by her denim jacket, until plywood creaked aside.

A thin, aquiline face poked up from the darkness within—a sixteen-year old boy dressed in a Georgetown sweater and running pants. The quick narrowing of his eyes in a predator’s assessment revealed him as Kindred.

“If you’re here to ask about last night,” he said without introduction or pleasantries, “it’s covered. Leave me alone, I have work to do.”

“I’m here to make introductions.” Ariadne gestured to Hera.

“No need,” said the boy. “You’re Hera Ortega, daughter of Hernando and Inéz Ortega, aged twenty at time of your Embrace. Your sire was Utrece, a primogen of the Lowell Court. When you flashed your fangs at an old rival from high school, he publicly flayed you as an example to the others about keeping the Masquerade. You ran. Liliane found you starved and half-insane in a maintenance tunnel of the Orange Line. You’ve been a soldier in the Sheriff’s brigade ever since. How am I doing so far?”

Hera rocked on the balls of her feet, eyes narrowing. “You’ve . . . I . . . I’ve never met you before. How do you—”

“It’s my business to know things, and to control how much others know.” His voice grew testy. “Right now you’re keeping me from doing that business. So if you’ll excuse me—?”

He began to close the door, but the wood smacked against Ariadne’s hand. He fought futilely for a few seconds to push it back.

Ariadne ignored his efforts. “Here, this is Archibald. He hates when people call him Archie. He’s our Raven.”

“I prefer the title media relations manager,” Archibald grunted as he tried to close the door again, but Ariadne’s hand didn’t move an inch. He gave up with an exaggerated huff. “The title you use isn’t only inappropriately melodramatic, it’s inaccurate. Ravens can be taught to speak and convey information. They can’t alter the message—which is entirely what we are supposed to do.”

Hera blinked. “I . . . I don’t—”

“Archibald’s job is to keep news of our activities suppressed.”

“Not suppressed,” Archibald said indignantly. “Any idiot in some tinpot dictatorship can try to suppress news, which of course never works. It only creates a backlash. I workshop news.”

The wan teenager stepped aside and with a hand indicated a bank of a dozen computer screens glowing in the dark, faintly illuminating wall-length cork boards full of newspaper and magazine clippings.

“Wait,” said Hera, “you mean when Roarke set fire to that elder’s house the other night, you made the papers report something different?”

Archibald rolled his eyes. “No, I did not. You think I control every firefighter, policeman, and beat reporter in the gaddamned city?”

“Don’t be modest,” said Ariadne. “Archibald has contacts at the Globe, the Herald, the Phoenix, and every other paper worth mentioning. Don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Archibald huffed. “But those contacts aren’t the important ones at all. Any wet-behind-the-ears media relations manager can get a major newspaper to move a suspicious fire from the front page to page twelve. But why waste your political capital? Get them to run it on the front page in all its full-color glory. Let them get it out of their system.

“The key is that they never follow it up. The next day, there’s nearly always something juicier to print there. Rich white girl goes missing in Barbados. Political candidate takes bribe, has a mistress. Homeland Security raises the terror alert. This was all so much harder in the days before the Internet and the twenty-four hour news cycle. Now I just make sure an email lands in the right box at the right time, and the mass media’s natural amnesia takes care of the rest.”

Hera stared. “That’s it?”

“That’s it?” Archibald reared back. “That’s the magic of it. If you walk into a newsroom and use mental compulsion on an editor, someone’s going to notice. In the information war, that’s the equivalent of street-boxing. A media relations manager? He’s a martial arts master. He uses info-judo, lets the wheel of the news cycle do his work for him.”

“What about activists?” Hera insisted. “Independent media? Conspiracy nuts? Stubborn cops who won’t let go? I mean, aren’t there some people out there who’ll want to follow up on stories of people with swords running around Boston’s backstreets?”

“Sure,” said Archibald. “They’re my best friends. Easiest way to kill a story is for me to feed the truth, or at least selected chunks of it, to the conspiracy blogs. I tell them that there’s a civil war going on between two factions in the local vampire courts, and they’re all over it right away.”

His mouth widened in pride, revealing the skinniest of fangs. “Of course, when I say ‘vampires,’ they understand it to mean secret government black-ops supersoldiers, genetically bred for use both abroad against various enemies and at home against domestic-resistance movements. Funding for it all gets laundered through Halliburton, enhancement drugs get stored in Wal-Mart facilities, and so forth. I usually just nudge, and the conspirosphere runs with it in directions I could never dream up. No legitimate outlet would touch the story with the proverbial ten-foot pole then.

“As for stubborn cops—well, I don’t have to dig too far in most cases before I find something they’ve done that, once it hits the papers, ruins them for good. Drug habit, affair, kiddie porn . . . it’s already there. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually had to fabricate anything. Find the info, pass it to the papers through legit channels, and the wheel does the rest. Info-judo.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It’s incredibly difficult,” said Archibald. “Getting harder the longer this war goes on. The fact that I make it sound easy is a testament to just how elite I am. That’s a reputation I won’t be able to keep for long, though, if you won’t leave me alone to get back to work.”

Ariadne turned to her partner. “See? What happened to you in Lowell won’t happen here. Liliane doesn’t let it. She has the Ravens and other resources as well.”

Hera nodded, her expression more confused than convinced, but Ariadne could sense a shift.

“Thank you, Archibald,” she said to the Raven, and half-nodded.

“Hey, this isn’t a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ariadne,” he spat back. “I’m not a stop on the tourist circuit. Don’t bring your nubes by my place again.”

“In your information editing, Archibald, try not to erase your memory of that Lupine I decapitated and saved you from last September.”

Ariadne smiled a saccharine smile. Archibald looked anywhere but at her.

“There’s info-judo, and then there’s the truth. Don’t forget it.” She finally released her hand from the storm shelter door, which the Raven pulled shut with a loud bang.

“Th-thanks,” said Hera. “I mean, for trying to make me feel better.”

Ariadne wanted so much to reach out and clasp her on the shoulder. That was the whole point of New Jerusalem, wasn’t it? A world where age and clan meant less than the common bond between all Kindred?

But New Jerusalem couldn’t be enjoyed before it was built.

“I didn’t do it for the sake of your feelings.” Ariadne fixed Hera with sudden coldness. “I did it for the sake of your efficiency. Now come on.”

The gratitude that had been pooling in Hera’s eyes, green like her hair, turned first to confusion, then to embarrassment, then to determination.

The Sherrif’s jacket rested particularly heavy on Ariadne’s shoulders as the two women vanished into the night.

*   *   *   *   *

 

Roarke’s men seldom bothered to hide their scent. Ariadne had tasted the blood of this target before, could pull it out from the diesel stench of the freight trains and the stink of the Taco Bell on Broadway.

“Taco Hell,” Hera muttered. “Where bad little tacos go when they die.”

The target was a waif of a girl who betrayed what she was by wearing shorts and flip-flops in the freezing air. If her mortal friends noticed, they didn’t seem bothered, but Ariadne did note how they kept a few feet of distance even as they talked on their stoop. Though she was obviously newly made and her skin still looked brown and bright, there was the scent of predator about her—a predator too young to know that stealth was all that kept her from becoming prey.

Flip-flops! Ariadne shook her head. The waif wouldn’t even be able to run.

The only problem was, even on a cold night such as this, people were still out and about. Packed into coats and gloves and mufflers, they walked their dogs, bought late-night lottery tickets, and drove, drove, drove everywhere. Traffic in the city was eternal.

Ariadne and Hera stalked down a side street, shielded by the bumper-to-bumper cars parked against every millimeter of curbside. An attack here was out of the question; no amount of info-judo could cover up a fight out in the open.

They waited nearly two hours until the gaggle of girls dispersed and Roarke’s minion walked hand-in-hand with one of them into the house. Ariadne tensed. This had all the markings of a trap.

Hera cocked her head inquisitively.

The Prince needed a captive. The thought of another stakeout, maybe even on another night, suddenly seemed unbearable to Ariadne.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “If it’s a trap, let’s spring it in their faces.”

Hera bit her lip and nodded. “Frontal assault. I’ll take the lead.”

Ariadne shook her head. “No. My mission, my risk. I’ll draw their attention from the front while you sneak around the back, find the least likely point of entry, and use it.”

“But Ariadne—”

“This isn’t a time to prove anything to anyone,” she snapped. “If this is a rat’s nest, we don’t stick around to clean it. We just grab a rat and run. Got it?”

Hera stared at the house for several seconds, then nodded. She turned her back on Ariadne and bled away into the darkness.

Ariadne caught sight of a vaguely Hera-shaped blur circling the house, selecting an oak tree behind it and beginning to climb. The Sheriff then steeled herself, stepped out from cover, and made a beeline for the front door, eyeing the building’s windows for the telltale motion of snipers.

The door was locked. As quietly as possible Ariadne seized it and snapped it loose. The cracks of light from its removal revealed movement, and Ariadne immediately flipped the door sideways, charged with it like a battering ram.

She felt the impact, heard a shout and a fall. Tossing the door aside, she barely had an instant to take in the apartment—a messy aggregation of clothing-covered futons, a brown carpet giving way to a dirty-linoleum kitchenette—before the waif scrambled to her knees from a prone position.

Ariadne tackled her into the room beyond, away from the prying view of the street. They rolled along, scattering newspapers and dog toys, impacting against a glass table with enough force to shatter it.

Roarke’s waif growled, fangs out, claws drawn, bucking and kicking, a ball of fury and animal urge for self-preservation. Ariadne’s knees pinioned her captive’s legs; one elbow pinned the girl’s shoulder, the other flexed as she held her sword high.

The face of girl beneath her became a mass of wrinkles, her eyes red, her mouth wide, revealing the full length of her fangs. She hissed the way any doomed beast did, in one last hope to scare a foe away with an empty threat. Her free arm raked Ariadne across the face, tearing five lines into her cheek.

A shadow fell across them, and Ariadne rolled off her opponent and out of the way as a male form lunged at her. Ariadne could smell the Vitae inside him—another Kindred, which likely meant even more were waiting.

He swung a crowbar in feverish arcs. Ariadne lifted her sword and parried as best she could. She felt her heel smack up against a dresser. There was precious little room to fight in so cluttered an apartment, but she could use that to her advantage.

As the fallen girl began to get up, Ariadne timed the crowbar swings, dove low beneath the next one and grabbed the girl, using her to slam into the newcomer, sandwiching them both against a bookcase. Books rained down upon them. In the confusion Ariadne stepped back and lopped the girl’s head off with her katana.

The male dived away, stumbling on fallen bric-a-brac as he did. He swung the crowbar wildly, trying to keep Ariadne at a distance.

“You bitch,” he growled. “You killed her!”

Ariadne gave no answer. She watched the pattern of the crowbar swings, looked for her opening.

“Silent Knife.” He took a clumsy swipe that she easily avoided. “You don’t suck blood, you suck ice!”

Another swing, another miss.

“You weren’t ever human. You were born a freaking monster!” Another swing. “Say something, dammit!”

Ariadne feinted a swing, ducked low and kicked to the stomach, the knee, the stomach again. Her opponent crumpled, off balance, and with a surge forward she threw him to the ground. As he started to rise she brought down her blade, pinning the man to the shag carpet through his sternum. His fingers froze around the crowbar and his arm locked, a statue of an intended action.

He was trapped. His head lolled back and forth, and he began to cry out. Ariadne moved in, covered his mouth with her hand. With exertion, she crushed his cheekbones and jaw, ending his cry in a useless gurgle. She paused, considering, and then methodically seized each kneecap and separated it from the leg.

Ariadne paused to consider her groaning captive. One step closer to Roarke, one step closer to normalcy in the demesne. Ariadne ran her hand slowly across the scars on her cheek, feeling them knit as the pads of her fingers passed.

Roarke would be defeated.

And what then? a small voice inside her asked.

When New Jerusalem was realized, when they had made Liliane’s ideal city a reality, would Ariadne’s life still be an endless series of battles? She tried to imagine a preferable alternative, some other role for herself, and came up only with the image of the here and now, the pinned creature beneath her, helplessly spewing out his fury, trying with futile shivers to unstick himself from the floor.

A crash resounded upstairs, followed by a truncated scream.

Hera!

“Stay there,” Ariadne hissed to the pinned man, then tore up the stairs. Why had she delayed so long? She should have been securing the house, or ordering a withdrawal, the instant she had a prisoner.

A shadowy figure plunged at her from the stairwell above. Ariadne grabbed her in mid-flight, planted a foot between those of her opponent, used her attacker’s momentum to fling her down the stairs to land in a heap on the floor. Ariadne could hear the soft crunch of vertebrae, the bursting of sacs and the snapping of tendons, followed by a low moan.

She turned to see the face of the mortal girl who had been the female Kindred’s hanger-on. She had been an insider the whole time, one more element of the trap. Only mortals seduced by the power of Kindred blood or mental compulsion so heedlessly threw their lives away like that. But how extensive was the nest? Two Kindred, one mortal? That couldn’t be the end. Even a ghouled mortal couldn’t have challenged Hera enough for that kind of scream.

Ariadne rounded the stairs cautiously, emerged in a hallway crowded in by the tapering walls of the house’s triangular roof. A perfect bottleneck. Hera lay sprawled in the hall, trying to rise shakily from the floor. Her face was a mangled mess of crimson, her nose a sinkhole.

Ariadne looked up at four doors along the hall, all opening at once. Figures came at her en masse. She stopped counting at three. Ariadne fought them in the hall, on the stairs. She threw punches and kicks, sliced flesh, broke limbs. They pushed her into a wall with enough force that her body made an impression in the plaster, white shards flaking all around.

Fangs and knives flashed by her face. She swept her foot in an arc that felled two rebels. She leapt upon one of them, her fangs at his throat, ripping it open even as her leg flew out and struck the gut of another. Their punches and kicks found her body. There was no room to dodge them. She fought through the pain, walking a slow, choreographed dance through showers of saliva and blood, sword swinging.

The world organized itself into an easy, understandable pattern of weight and balance, of resistance and give. She felt as if she were a mere extension of the universe around her, a tree or a waterfall acting as nature intended of it, wanting nothing more. Just when Ariadne wished this sensation would last forever, the final rebel fell and the spell broke.

Ariadne fought a wave of vertigo but remained standing. Seven fallen forms lay at her feet, mortal and Kindred alike. She pulled herself up, inspected all the nooks and crannies of the upstairs to confirm that these had been the last. Then she returned to Hera’s mangled form, searched inside herself for any fire of concern and found only cold embers. Whatever the rebels had done to Hera, it would heal. Everything healed these days, didn’t it?

Clean-up had to be completed first. Ariadne descended the stairs, found the ghouled girl lying like a broken doll at their foot. Her eyes were glassy, frozen in shock, but the vein on her neck still pulsed with the fading throes of life.

“That’s all you ever got to be,” Ariadne said. “Someone’s weapon. Doing your appointed task until you met something or someone stronger. Did your existence mean anything at all?”

The girl did not, could not answer. Her eyes moved sightlessly in their sockets, perhaps trying to track down the source of the voice. There was a desperation in that movement, in the very rise and fall of her chest, a defiant attempt to keep living.

Ariadne bent low, ran her hand across the girl’s sweat-soaked forehead, found it ice-cold. “It’s over now,” she said in a voice entirely devoid of mercy or deliverance, a voice that could have been an auto-reader announcing the weather. She extended her fangs and plunged them into the girl’s neck.

Liquid fire ran up Ariadne’s fangs and filled her arteries, flooding her with emotion that she could deceive herself into thinking was her own. Ariadne felt the bruises and tears from the battle healing, but fought back the urge to drink her victim dry, to replenish all her own lost strength and then some. Instead, she picked up the girl’s shattered form and carried her upstairs to where Hera’s prone form awaited. Her comrade needed the Vitae more than she did.

At the top of the landing, Hera’s clothing remained—a denim jacket, cargo pants, combat boots, even her two bowie knives—but the Kindred herself was gone, reduced to a woman-shaped pile of ash, black as polished onyx and shining in the flickering light of the hallway. Ariadne had seen plenty of Kindred turn to earth and dust in her time, but this was different. And Hera had been very much herself just a few moments earlier.

Ariadne dropped the mortal, fell into a fighting crouch. Had she missed a rebel? Her search had been thorough, or so she had thought. She raced downstairs, saw her surviving captive still pinned, helpless, to the rug. What had happened?

Her eyes darted to the splintered door in the front hallway, to the empty frame that revealed the street beyond. Who had walked by, and what had they seen?

There was no time to investigate any of this. Ariadne tore the cover off the futon, wrapped up her captive, slung him over her shoulder, and headed out the back door. The plan had called for her and Hera to walk the captive back, feigning mutual drunkenness, but that option was gone. Fortunately, the neighborhood was rough enough that anyone who saw her would be hiding. The brave ones might place a call to the slow-to-respond cops. Mostly they’d just recognize trouble and turn away. Better, in a place like this, not to know what was happening. Poverty and desperation wielded its own sort of info-judo.

Ariadne hurried through the back alleys, putting a few blocks between her and the battle site. Agonizing minutes passed until the coast was clear enough for her to tear open the trunk of a car and stuff her captive inside. With impossibly bad timing, the first few bars of that tune she had remembered in Andrei’s taxicab rang in Ariadne’s mind as she hotwired the vehicle. Daaa-da-da-daaa, da da da . . .

She made tracks for Eagle Hill, looking in the rearview mirror constantly. It was a stupid habit, she realized, as a Kindred pursuer would cast no reflection. So why, then, did she imagine she could see Hera’s face every time she glanced up?

 

 




 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.