“I’m not a little boy, I’m not, I’m not, I’m NOT!” Vulkan shouted, but when he tried to step away from the Headmaster, he felt locked into its shadow.
“Did you think you were my only pupil, Conrad? You’re not. I have other ones with the potential to be even stronger than you. It’s not your strength I fear, Conrad, but your weakness. I see this city falling before your kind, but not by their power. You’ve done what we wanted to do; now time has come to retreat…”
“Retreat?” Vulkan repeated incredulously. “No! This is my city now, my Babylon! I won’t run from four humans…”
“Taking ground is one thing,” the Headmaster said, “keeping it is another. Take your lieutenants and as many others as you can, and leave this place right now. Cross the mountains to the west. Start again. I can help you just as I did before…”
“WHY?” Vulkan shouted. “WHY ARE YOU AFRAID?”
“Because of what our enemy will use against us. This city…”
Vulkan clapped his hands to his ears. “GET OUT!” he shouted. “You won’t make me afraid! You won’t make me lose! Nothing can hurt me!”
The Headmaster stared at him for a long moment, and when it spoke again, there was an edge of sadness and anger in its rasping voice. “I treated you as a…a special son, Conrad. My hope for a new beginning.” The thick shadow hovered, dark folds enclosing the prince. “So you would deny me, wouldn’t you? After all these hundreds of years, you would deny me in a moment?” The eyes began to burn with savage ferocity.
“I have taught you well, perhaps too well, but now I see what was beyond my power to give you. I could never make you grow up. You will be seventeen years old forever, filled with the childish needs and fantasies of youth. You haven’t taken a kingdom, Conrad, I’ve given it to you. So be it. What is forever to you is to me…an episode. Now you have your kingdom. Protect it as you will. But you’re correct in one thing, my pupil. School is out.”
The shadow began to turn like a whirlwind, while above it the two blazing yellow lamps of its eyes continued to burn into Vulkan’s skull. Vulkan shuddered, the cold rippling through his veins. The shadow twisted itself into a frenzy, then began to roll up upon itself like a black scroll of ancient parchment; in another moment it had begun to fade. The merciless eyes were the last to disappear, darkening like unplugged lamps. When the Headmaster was gone, the stadium around Prince Vulkan swirled away, shimmering like a mirage, the bright banks of lights going out one by one.
And then Prince Vulkan’s eyes opened in darkness.
He lay still for a few moments, wondering about the implications of his dream. He felt uneasy, chilled, unprotected. They were old feelings, and they stirred up memories of his human existence like dark debris from the bottom of a pond. Four humans? Coming to challenge the king of the vampires? It was absurd.
After a while he raised his arms, threw the coffin lid back, and stepped out of his bed of warm, protective dirt. He stood in the first-level basement, a large network of corridors and rooms that had been filled with old, broken furniture, cardboard boxes, crates, and stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines bound together with rotting twine. In one of those boxes Prince Vulkan had found yellowing glossies and old placards advertising the films of Orlon Kronsteen. There had been a picture of the man in vampire makeup, hovering over a young blond girl who slept unaware. It had greatly amused Prince Vulkan to see the Hollywood impression of his kind. The face in that photograph looked stupid and lethargic, not nearly hungry enough. Once while walking the streets of Chicago’s Southside near Cornell Square after nightfall, Prince Vulkan had stopped with Falco—dear, departed, traitorous Falco—before a blinking marquee that said DAMEN SOUTH THEATER and beneath that, DOUBLE CHILLS! CURSE OF THE VA PIRE—Chr stopher Lee & COU TESS DRAC LA—Ingrid Pitt. Of course, he’d had to see them, two old vampire movies scratched to shreds, really quite humorous. He’d seen silent movies before in London, but now not only did they talk, but they were in color too! Some of the people in the sparse theater audience laughed at the vampires on the screen. Prince Vulkan, acting more out of impulse than hunger, had moved across the balcony and sat behind a man who was snoring with his mouth wide open. Vulkan could peer through the balding skull at the inner workings of the brain and see that man’s entire life—wife named Cecilia, two children named Mike and Lisa, images of a small apartment with a Swiss-style cuckoo clock on the wall, piles of papers and bills on a desk beneath a small, yellow-shaded lamp, buddies crowded around in a dark tavern with swords crossed above the bar, a glass of beer on a napkin that said McDougall’s. That man wanted very much to be young again, carefree, hot-rodding along a street called Brezina in a red car with a foxtail on the antenna. In less than twelve minutes, from the bite to the ingestion of the blood, Prince Vulkan had altered that man’s destiny. And now that man, Corcoran by name, was one of the several hundred vampires in Chicago who awaited the Master’s triumphant return.
It was time to call the dogs in for the night. Prince Vulkan concentrated on finding the largest of them, the gray-blue wolf that had taken control of the pack. His eyes rolled back in his head as he searched, but he couldn’t find the dog. Like a wisp of cold wind or an errant shadow, he went beyond his body, casting his mental eye like a fiery globe out into the storm. He couldn’t feel that dog anymore; the link between them had been inexplicably severed. Now he could feel some of them out there, but it was a confusion of pain and dumb rage. He searched among them, touching their minds. They were out of control and afraid. Vulkan picked up mental impressions of thunder and lightning, dreaded fire, a pain that crushed and scorched. Quickly he allowed himself to come back. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, their pupils narrowed into tight slits. Something had happened to the pack’s leader. The dog must be dead. But what—and who—had killed it?
He hurried along the corridor, past the rooms where Kobra and his other lieutenants would just be drifting up out of sleep. He climbed a long, curving, stone stairway that led to a three-inch-thick oak door and, beyond that, to the castle’s main floor. He unbolted the door and stepped out into a wide central corridor that ran the width of the castle. Beside the door, at the foot of another curving, stone stairway, stood Kobra’s motorcycle, most of the black paint now scoured away by the force of the storm.
“Roach!” Vulkan shouted, his voice roaring through the castle’s hallways, alcoves, and chambers. “ROACH!”
He hurried upstairs, shoes clattering on the rough stones. The second-floor corridors whispered with turbulent winds that had found their way in through chinks and cracks. There were many windowless rooms here that also held coffins, and already many of the vampires were drifting from chamber to chamber like specters. They moved quickly out of his path as he approached. One of them, a beautiful blond woman wearing a blood-splattered black dress, fell to her knees and tried to kiss his hand, but he hissed at her and wrenched away. His mind was on more urgent matters.
“Roach!” he screamed again, and in another moment he saw a bright spot of light ahead of him, getting nearer. Roach had a flashlight in his hand. “I called for you!” Vulkan said, his eyes blazing. “Where were you?”
“I heard, Master, but I was…starting the fire in the council chamber. It’s ready for you, Master…”
Vulkan looked beyond the man’s eyes; it was simple because Roach’s mentality was so childlike, so pliable. He saw what Roach had seen just a moment earlier: That corkscrew of sand in the golden urn, twisting around and around with its hypnotic rhythm. Roach had prepared the fire and the maps, but he’d been entranced by the urn. He was oblivious to anything else, like a child with a strange toy. He got out of Roach’s mind quickly because it teemed with dark shapes and shadows, the memory of hands around the throat of a woman whose facial features kept shifting, a body rolling down a dimly lit staircase and coming to rest at the bottom like a broken-necked doll, swarms of rats and roaches kicking in their death agonies. “Something’s happened to the dogs!” Vulkan said, th
en recalled the Headmaster’s voice: “There are four who would come to destroy you.” “Someone may have gotten past them!”
Roach looked startled. “Who? Someone…past the dogs…?”
“Come with me.” He moved past Roach along the corridor to yet another narrow stairway that curved up to a double-bolted oak door. He unlocked and opened it, stepping out on a wide balcony that stood perhaps fifty feet above the ground. He strode across to the stone parapet and looked out into the night; he heard quite clearly the distant, confused howling of the pack. Yes. He was certain now. His first line of defense had been broken. But what of the second? He leaned over and looked down.
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary; the main gate was still closed, the courtyard fortified. But then he caught a glimpse of movement just on the other side of the gate, and he saw two men—two humans wearing some kind of masks and breathing apparatus—down where the iron traps had been laid. One of them was injured—he could see the trap clamped around the figure’s left ankle—and the other one was trying to pull him away from the gate toward the line of dead trees a few yards away, where darkness and the terrain might give them concealment.
Vulkan grinned. When he’d realized that his initial defense had been broken, that someone had actually managed to come both through the storm and past the dogs to reach him, he’d been filled with uneasy concern and a sort of dreadful wonder. “Four are coming,” the Headmaster had said. “They endure.” But the Headmaster had been wrong. There were only two, both of them already weak. One lay prone, and the other looked as if he might fall at any moment. There were only two, and they had come up this mountain to their deaths. The Headmaster had been wrong.
“Wrong!” the prince shouted. “Beware of what? Of you?” He began to laugh, his mouth opening and the long fangs sliding out of their sockets in his jaws. The laughter—a cold, harsh chuckling—went on for another moment, then stopped abruptly. Vulkan’s eyes narrowed. He watched the man struggling with his wounded—or dead—companion. “Go down and find Kobra,” he said to Roach. “You and he bring those two—what’s left of them—to the council chamber. And understand—I don’t want them touched. Not yet.”
Roach nodded eagerly and scurried across the balcony through the door.
Prince Vulkan leaned over the parapet, watching the two men with great interest. How did these two manage to find him? he wondered. What had brought them up the mountain? Did other humans know where he was hidden? If so, his refuge was not quite as safe as he had thought. The Headmaster’s warning echoed in his head, but he brushed it aside. Some sport was what he needed to take his mind off the Headmaster. Yes! Sport! Fun and games, like the rapier contests, the bear versus boar fights, the battles between dogs and rats that his father the Hawk had enjoyed so. If these two humans could endure the journey up the mountain in this storm, if indeed they were so good at enduring hardships, then surely they could endure a little more for the pleasure of the vampire king and his court. Surely.
FIFTEEN
Ratty probed ahead with the lantern. Its weakening yellow glow stitched patches of shadow together like a golden needle through dense cloth. The tunnel still climbed, as it had for the last two miles, its floor slick with seepage.
Palatazin’s legs and back were weary, and several times he’d had to lean against a wall to rest, so their progress had been drastically slowed. Droplets of sweat gleamed on his face, and now he was fighting claustrophobia and the continual feeling that something was stalking them from behind, perhaps allowing them to continue as a cat might allow a mouse to exhaust itself in a futile effort. He could feel something cold back there, and several times—when he sensed the chill closing in at the back of his neck—he’d taken a box of matches and a spray can from the pack, lit it, and turned to protect the rear. He’d never seen them back there, but he could hear scuttlings and angered hisses just beyond the light. The flame was keeping them away. For now.
They’d passed beneath more manhole covers, and Palatazin had climbed up to look out, to see if he recognized anything from his earlier drive to Kronsteen’s castle. Sand and wind slapped his face, but the storm didn’t seem quite as fierce up here as it had below. Visibility was a little better, and he could make out the dark shapes of white stucco and redwood-frame houses perched on the hillside. They kept climbing. Palatazin was fearful of missing the turnoff altogether. Perhaps they’d already missed it. He couldn’t be certain.
His spine started crawling again. He was aware of the noises behind him; he lit a match. In its reddish flare, he could see several pairs of dead, bullet-hole eyes perhaps ten feet away. The vampires—there were at least three—scattered into the darkness, anticipating the lick of flame from the spray-can torch. He took the spray can out of the pack, popped its cap off, and pressed the button down, spraying it toward the match. The flame erupted in a dart of red and blue. The vampires hastily retreated into the shadows, and Palatazin could hear their angered hissing and curses.
They continued climbing, Palatazin guarding the rear. When the flame began to sputter, he could see the vampires creeping toward them, faces vulpine and hideous, just beyond the limit of the fire. There were three, two young men and a girl, anger exploding in their eyes with swirls of silver and red.
“Put it down, old man,” one of them whispered. Palatazin heard the voice quite clearly, echoing through his head, but it didn’t seem as if the boy had moved his lips.
“Go on,” the female vampire whispered, a cold grin across her face. “Put down the fire like a nice boy—”
“NO!” Palatazin shouted. His vision seemed to be fogging over, the darkness creeping up on all sides to consume him.
“They’re in your mind!” Tommy said sharply. “Don’t listen to them!”
“Please,” the female said and licked her lips with a black tongue. “Pretty please.” One of the others feinted for Palatazin’s arm, and Palatazin almost released the button. The can was getting hot in his hand, and he knew the propellant would only last a minute or so longer.
Suddenly Ratty stopped. “Hey? You hear that?” he demanded, his voice cracking with tension.
Palatazin tried to listen over the voices whispering in his head. The three vampires were getting bolder now, darting in toward the flame, and trying to knock it from his hand. “I hear it!” Tommy answered. “Dogs howling up there!” Palatazin tried to concentrate over the tauntings of the vampires, and immediately he could hear it too—a ghostly chorus of wails floating somewhere above them.
“We’ve got to find a way up!” he shouted, and then he heard the female whisper, “No you don’t. You want to put that down and stay with us, don’t you?” The flame sputtered once, twice. Now the tunnel seemed filled with the reek of burning aerosol and oily smoke. One of the other vampires lunged for Palatazin, but he thrust the weakening flame in an arc across the boy’s face; the thing screamed shrilly and staggered back.
Ratty found a ladder and pulled himself up. When he pushed the cover aside, the merest hint of muddy brown light filtered down into the tunnel, but it seemed enough to keep the vampires away. They stood clustered together hissing like rattlers in the shadows, and Palatazin heard a silvery, sweet voice in his mind say, “We need you here with us. Please stay…please stay…”
And for an instant he wanted to.
“We’ve got to go up here!” he shouted as the wind churned around him and off down the tunnel with a faint whistling. The flame went out. Behind him, Tommy was just on his way up the ladder to Ratty waiting at the top. The vampires stood beyond the limits of the light, but when Palatazin started up the ladder, one of them darted in and grabbed his ankle, trying to pull him back down. He kicked free and saw a pair of hideous fangs exposed in the thing’s mouth as it tried to bite his ankle, then it screamed from exposure to the fractional light and scurried away. As Palatazin reached the top and squeezed through, he heard a distant, weakening whisper, “Don’t go…don’t go…don’t…”
The storm thra
shed around him, and now he heard the howling somewhere off to his left, terrible and shrill. The three of them moved forward, the wind about to throw them off balance from all directions. In another moment Palatazin saw a couple of houses that he thought he recognized, though he couldn’t be sure. Then out of the gloom rose the familiar dead trees and the narrow road snaking up Outpost Drive.
“We’re close enough!” he shouted to Ratty, shielding his face with his arm. “The castle’s at the top of this road!”
“I’m scared shitless of the bloodsuckers, man,” Ratty shouted back, “but I’m sure as hell not going back into that tunnel! You dig?”
Palatazin nodded. “You okay?” he asked Tommy.
“Okay!” the boy answered, keeping his hands cupped in front of his mouth and nose. He staggered, nearly knocked over by the wind’s force.
“Then we go up!” Palatazin took the lead, with Ratty bringing up the rear. They linked hands, fighting upward. The wind was fierce, and Tommy fell a couple of times, almost being swept away before either Palatazin or Ratty could help him. They passed a low-slung vehicle that looked like a jeep but a little larger crashed against a tree on the left-hand side of the road. A little further ahead they came to the partly obscured carcasses of several dogs. There was howling all around them now, and Palatazin could feel eyes watching them from the overhang of rocks above the road. When he peered up through slitted eyes, he could just barely make out the shapes of dogs crouched there, crying into the storm. Several times a dog would leap out of the darkness to snap at their heels, then it would vanish just as quickly. One of them, a collie, bounded up behind Ratty and yanked at his leg, throwing him to the ground, then skittered away.
Palatazin knew they’d be within sight of the castle in a few minutes. He was certain some of the vampires—if not all—were already awake. Soon the castle would be crawling with them, as would the city below. The backpack full of stakes weighed heavily on him, and ants of fear scurried in his stomach. He hoped he could catch some of the vampires still in their caskets, particularly the king, although logically he might be among the first to awaken. Theirs was still the element of surprise, though, and that was vitally important. This was what the army would call a suicide mission, Palatazin told himself. Getting there is not the difficult part of it; coming back safely is. But he’d known that all along and accepted it just as he was certain his father had accepted the fact before him. It was the boy he was sorry for.