“He’s upstairs talking with John.”
“Already? My, my, he isn’t wasting a minute this go-around, is he? With me it was a year, and with you dear, sweet Trevor, it was what, at least three months?”
Trevor returned her icy grin. No matter that nearly a century had passed since the woman had fallen from Victor’s favor, she had never forgiven Trevor for their sire’s seemingly limitless affections. And not for the first time Trevor rued the fact that of all their sire’s past loves, he alone was the one abiding constant in Victor’s long life.
“It’s nothing like that,” he said, swallowing his pride. “John made a scene, and Victor took him up to their room to lie down.”
“Poor John, he has no idea what’s about to happen to him, does he?” Celeste sighed. “But you’ll be there to help him through, won’t you, good and ever-faithful Trevor. You’ll nurse him through the pain and the heartbreak just as you did me—oh wait, that’s right.” Her lips pressed tightly together in a smile that promised venom as she said, “You didn’t.”
“Trevor, a whore for my funeral? You shouldn’t have,” a voice behind him said. Trevor turned to find Victor joining the small group.
“Victor!” Celeste gushed. “Why, I wouldn’t have expected to see you looking so vibrant, what with your death and all.”
“Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” he joked, taking her hand and kissing it. “What are you doing here, Celeste?”
“Well, I couldn’t let one of my sire’s rebirths go by without stopping in to honor it, now could I?”
“How sweet, seeing as how I’ve missed, how many of yours is it now?” Victor asked. “It’s so hard to keep track these days.”
“Seven, but what’s a couple of deaths between friends?”
“Indeed,” Victor said, grinning.
“How’s John?” Trevor asked, diverting the conversation to more civil topics.
“He’s upstairs,” Victor said, eyeing the Adonis on Celeste’s arm. “He’s resting.”
“Lying sprawled on the bed, no doubt,” Celeste volunteered, “ready for you to cut out his heart and tear it in two.”
“Celeste, I think perhaps—” Trevor said, attempting to intervene.
“Oh no, my dear,” Victor replied, “I only crush the hearts of those I never loved.”
Trevor tried again. “Victor, let’s not do—”
“You? Love someone?” Celeste laughed. “Victor, you say the most adorable things.”
“Enough! Both of you,” Trevor snapped. “Not with company present.”
“Quite right, quite right,” Victor agreed, eyeing the crowd filling the room, and then, “Speaking of company, Celeste, you haven’t yet introduced us to your latest toy.”
“How rude of me.” She beamed, turning toward her escort. “This is Jean-Claude.”
“Jean-Claude.” Victor offered a hand in greeting. “Nice of you to come.”
“Jean-Claude hasn’t licked English yet,” Celeste explained, taking Victor’s hand and lowering it back to his side, “just like he won’t learn to lick you.”
“Celeste, I’m hurt you would even think—” Victor’s words were cut off by a scream coming from behind the library’s closed doors. It was punctuated by the sound of shattering glass from across the room.
Trevor’s eye was caught by a streak of movement crossing the room as the young waiter raced toward the library. He kicked the door open to reveal Scarlet pressed against the room’s large mahogany desk with John on top of her, lathered fangs at her throat.
“Hey!” the waiter shouted. John looked up just as the young man flung his empty tray. The metal disk went swirling through the air to lodge deep in the man’s throat.
Gasps escaped the crowd. The small cluster standing by the French doors looked on in horror as their centuries-old secret was revealed. The waiter reached behind the library’s door and produced a sword.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Victor asked.
The young man leapt onto the desk. As John yanked the tray from the bloody gash in his throat, the waiter replaced it with a swipe of his sword that severed head from body.
The waiter hopped from the desk and turned to a frozen Scarlet Harvey, the headless body tumbling to the floor at her feet.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The woman’s eyes were wide and vacant as she watched blood pour from the corpse’s open neck and pool onto the room’s thick carpet.
“Are you all right?” the young man asked again more forcefully, shaking her.
“What was that thing?” she asked, never taking her eyes of the body.
“Questions later, run now!” he ordered, shoving her out the library doors back into the study.
Their movement broke the spell over the room, and the crowd erupted in screams of panic as they ran for any exit they could find. Some ran out the study’s doors and through the front hall to their cars parked in the driveway beyond. Others raced for the French doors and into the night. They could be seen wading their way across the estate’s soaked lawns as the rain continued to pour down on them.
Within a moment the chaos had ended and the room stood empty but for the waiter and the remaining members of Victor’s blood-clan.
“You bastard.” Victor’s words sliced through the silence of the room, quiet and deadly. “You dare come into my home and slaughter my family? I’ll kill you where you stand, you coward. I’ll skin you alive and wear your flesh as a trophy.”
“It’s you, isn’t it?” The words were Trevor’s. He watched the young man standing before the fireplace slowly spinning the hilt of his sword in his grip.
“It’s me,” the waiter agreed.
“It’s who?” Victor spat. “Who is this gnat that I’m going to crush?”
“Victor, it’s him,” Trevor explained, “the hunter that’s been cleaning up the city, ridding it of the werewolves and the goblins, the ogres and the other trash.”
Victor smiled. “So now you’ve come to the burbs? Lucky us.”
The waiter shrugged and said, “Figure you look hard enough, you can find trash anywhere.”
Movement out of the corner of his eye caught Trevor’s attention. While the others had the waiter’s focus, Jean-Claude saw his opening. He leapt, fangs and claws at the ready. He swiped at the man with his jagged nails but missed. By the time his hand passed by the other man’s face, four severed fingers were tumbling to the ground. Jean-Claude lifted the stump that had been his right hand. Blood gushed from where fingers had been. Too late Jean-Claude looked back at the man as the sword plunged through his chest. It pierced his heart and blossomed out his back in a spray of crimson.
The body slid off the length of the waiter’s sword and crumpled to the floor. The swordsman shook his head and said, “Damn, but I hate killing the pretty ones.”
“Jean-Claude!” Celeste howled, racing toward the waiter. She was brought up short as the point of his sword pressed against the flesh of her bosom.
At the other end of his sword, the waiter smiled that twist of a smile. It revealed the single dimple in his cheek that Trevor had been so enamored of just moments before. He said, “Do your worst, blood rat.”
A brief moment’s reflection and Celeste turned and retreated toward the front hall. The swordsman grabbed a small marble statue from the mantel and threw it at her. It connected with her skull as she passed through the doorway. Her head jerked to the right and slammed into the door frame.
Stunned, but still on her feet, Celeste shook her head as the man advanced on her, his sword extended. Without warning, she batted the sword away. He tried to recover, but she leapt on him, her teeth at his throat and her claws digging deep into his back. Losing his balance, the man tumbled over the arm of the chair Trevor had been seated in. It skidded out from under him, and he slammed hard into the stone floor of the room, his sword slipping from his grasp.
The waiter tried to shove Celeste off but she held on tight. Instead the two combatants rolled so that she was on the floor while he straddled her. He tried to pull away, but her claws ripped through his tuxedo shirt and shredded the flesh of his back as they rolled again. He slammed the palm of his fist under Celeste’s jaw to keep her fangs at bay while he reached for his sword. It lay several feet away next to the chair’s leg.
Trevor felt Victor move to intervene, but he placed a hand on his chest to stop him.
“But it’s Celeste,” Victor said.
“Precisely,” Trevor agreed.
“We have to help her,” Victor said, trying to push past the hand restraining him.
Trevor cast him a sideways glance and smiled, asking, “Do we? Really?”
Victor looked to his friend and then back to the woman. Trevor could see a lifetime of arguments and regrets play across Victor’s face as he watched Celeste struggle with the man. A grin crept across Victor’s face and he finally said, “No, I don’t suppose we do.”
Trevor shared a smile with his sire and turned back just in time to see the waiter rip free one of the large hoops dangling from Celeste’s earlobes. A spray of blood trailed in its wake. He plunged the earring down into Celeste’s eye. It ruptured the cornea and passed through the squishy gelatin to dig into the socket.
Celeste screamed in agony, releasing the man and groping at her face. He jumped up and ran for his sword, turning back just as Celeste raced after him, the earring still dangling from the center of her eye. He leapt onto the chair’s seat and made several slashes that landed deep cuts across Celeste’s face, driving her away.
“My face! My face!” she screamed, covering her mangled features. “My beautiful face!”
“Trust me,” the man said, drawing his sword back for the killing stroke, “it wasn’t all that beautiful to begin with.”
Celeste opened her mouth in a snarling hiss and the man rammed the weapon deep into her mouth and on up toward her brain. It caught on the top of her skull, and he jammed harder till it cracked through the bone and ruptured her head. Grey matter dribbled out the hole, catching on her blonde curls before landing with an indelicate
plop
on the floor.
Placing a foot on the body’s shoulder, the swordsman pulled the blade from the woman’s skull and wiped the blood and goop of her brains onto her dress. Trevor could see the man was in no hurry. Neither were he and Victor, for that matter. They stood quietly before the French doors like hunters ready to spring, or prey ready to bolt—both knew better than to reveal which.
A flash of lightning on the lawn was answered by a rumble of thunder from the clouds.
“Who
are
you?” Victor asked the man standing amid his fallen family.
“My name’s Dyson, and you,” the waiter answered, pointing his sword at him, “are Victor Goodman Crowley, three hundred and twelve years old.”
“Three hundred and six!”
“Give or take.” Dyson grinned and that single dimple reappeared in his cheek. “You’re freshly reborn which, if memory serves, is when you’re at your weakest.” He continued to speak as he walked slowly across the room toward the two men, his sword en garde.
“How do you know all of this?” Trevor asked.
“It’s my job to know,” Dyson said, then added, “Mr. Whitworth, age two hundred and sixty.”
It was Trevor’s turn to smile and say, “Give or take.”
Victor watched their interaction, then sighed. “Oh, Trevor, you always did have the worst taste in men.”
“Shut up, Victor.”
“Well, it’s true. Even now when he’s killed John and Celeste and that French fellow, here you are flirting with him—another of your round-faced retards from the Midwest. You’re pathetic.”
“And what about you?” Trevor retorted. “Not five minutes after promising me a life in the heavens you’re diddling some secretary at your own funeral.”
“Legal assistant,”
Victor corrected. “She’s working nights toward her law degree.”
“Oh well, with that pedigree, I can’t imagine why you haven’t turned her already.”
“You are an elitist snob.”
“And you are a vile whoremonger, sticking it in wherever you can.”
“Would you two shut the fuck up!” Dyson said, standing just a few feet from them.
“Excuse me, young man, I will remind you you’re in my home,” Victor reprimanded.
“Dude! This is why I hate you guys,” Dyson said. “Always bitching. Always caught up in your own little dramas, thinking the whole world revolves around you, thinking everyone’s got the time to just sit by while you yammer on and on and on.”
“Speaking of yammering on,” Victor said, rolling his eyes.
“You traipse around, seducing people just to drink their blood then leave them for dead. Don’t you feel anything? Remorse? Regret? Is there an ounce of humanity left inside you? Of all of the fairies—and I mean all of them: elves, ogres, werewolves, dwarves, goblins, every last one—your kind are the most disgusting, heartless creatures I’ve ever met.”
“Oh, and what of you, Mr. Dyson?” Victor asked. “All of twenty-three? Twenty-four? Who are you to judge us? What regrets do you have in your
long
life? What would you change if given the chance? Let’s just find out.”
Victor’s eyes turned to slits as he grasped his friend’s hand. Trevor’s mind reeled for a moment as he joined Victor in invading Dyson’s brain. A flurry of images opened to him…