He plowed back into the jungle.
"Please, Ruegger!" cried Kharker.
"Let her go! For your own good, God damn it. Let her go!"
Ruegger ran, using the senses of the wolf still
inside him to thread his way through the sultry tangle back toward the estate.
Kharker followed immediately behind. Ruegger began to run, the trees and leaves
and undergrowth raking his overheated body.
Danielle,
please, no.
He burst into the clearing that surrounded the
mansion.
Nothing.
He made his way through the catacombs and up
into the house itself, running from room to room and calling out her name, but
no one except for the Great White Hunter's servants made themselves visible to
him. Not even Harry was around. In their room, Ruegger found that all of
Danielle's things had been packed and bundled away. Over the din of his own
heart, Ruegger finally heard the roaring.
Is that
… ?
Ruegger bounded downstairs, past where Kharker
waited, through the foyer, and the front door. From the front steps Ruegger saw
the airfield some distance before him. There on the runway a little white plane
gleamed in the moonlight.
"No, please no.”
The plane shot away down the narrow dirt strip.
Vainly, he ran after it, waving his arms wildly.
"Danielle! Danielle!"
If she heard him, she didn't stop the plane on account
of it. It kept going, faster and faster, until its propellers thrust it bodily
into the gaping nighttime sky. Eventually, long after Ruegger had ceased his
pursuit to collapse on the ground, the plane disappeared into the blackness.
When he was able to, he climbed to his feet
slowly, his eyes still locked onto the portion of the sky into which Danielle
had flown, as if she might change her mind and return.
Sensing Kharker behind him, he said, "So
the Hunt was a ruse."
For awhile, Kharker remained silent.
"No," he said. "There was a ruse,
of course, but that wasn't it. The ruse was Cloire and Kilian, so that they
would take away Danielle."
"That's what you had to gain," Ruegger
said, finally understanding. "I knew it was something."
"Yes," Kharker replied sadly, but the
Darkling could hear the smile in his voice. "I had to gain something, all
right:
you
."
Chapter 4
An
alligator lunged at him against the bars, but Ruegger didn't back away. Like
all the others, it was large and vicious; this one, however, seemed to want
revenge for its imprisonment more than his brethren.
"I understand, buddy," muttered
Ruegger.
Danielle had been gone three days, and he was
worried for her. She’d been right, though, in feeling that Kharker would seek
to recast Ruegger into the image of the Darkling. So far, Ruegger had
successfully resisted his mentor’s attempts, and he had no fear that he would
be tempted. Would Danielle fare as well?
Kharker's footsteps sounded behind him.
"Ah," said the Hunter. "He'll be
the king of the swamp some day, won't he?"
"He'll be something, all right."
"What's bothering you?"
"Damnit, Kharker. I've been here three
days. What do you
think's
bothering me?"
A pause.
"You want to
leave."
"Give that man a toaster."
"Don't be childish. This isn't a jail; you
can leave whenever you want to."
"But you won't allow me to use one of your
planes."
"If it's true love, you should be willing
to stomp through the jungle for a few weeks.
Or months."
"Stop it, Kharker."
Another pause.
"It's time to
finish up that game of chess from yesterday. It's almost over. Come on,
then."
Ruegger waited a moment just to irritate him,
then relented and came with him back inside the mansion and up into the
Elephant Room, where they sat at a small table over an immaculately-carved
stone chessboard. Kharker ordered in some Costa Rican coffee and Ruegger lit a
cigarette.
"Well," he said, studying the
chessboard. "Your experiment failed, Kharker."
"My
experiment?"
"To see if, with Danielle gone, you could
get me back into the fold. To see if you could make me evil again."
"Evil," said the Hunter, chewing the
word. "What is that? Because, if you know, please tell me."
"You're evil, Kharker. I don’t normally use
that word, but sometimes it’s appropriate."
"Am I? So the mirror should tell all, then.
Let's explore that for a moment. If I am the definition for evil, then what is
it exactly? Well, what am I? Let's see ... I've accepted my nature and I
constantly revel in it. If there was a God, He would be proud that I utilize
His gifts so fully. So that is what you mean, about evil?"
Ruegger didn’t back down. "Evil is taking
joy in the pain of others.
Or simply placing yourself so far
above others that you’re indifferent to their pain."
Kharker, white, advanced a rook to a position
guarded by a pawn, a move which put Ruegger's queen in jeopardy.
"No," said the Hunter. "Evil is
just an obsolete label, a word without meaning. You know
that
as well as I do
. If you argue against me, I won't be hearing your
voice,
I'll be hearing Danielle's. She's brainwashed you,
man. Can't you see that?"
Carelessly, Ruegger thrust his queen to the
left, protecting her from Kharker.
"She hasn't brainwashed me, Khark. You
have. You've done it to yourself, too."
"Meaning?"
"That deep inside you don't really believe
what you're saying."
The Hunter smiled sadly. "You'd like to
believe that, wouldn't you, my son?"
Just as sadly, Ruegger nodded. "I would,
Khark. I really would."
Suddenly the Hunter swung a bishop out from
nowhere, and the Darkling saw that with his queen gone, his king—
"I believe that's checkmate," said
Kharker.
Ruegger toppled his king.
"You should've kept your mind on the game,
son,
” Kharker
said. “For the past few days, you've
been in a fog."
"I don't need you to teach me how to play
chess."
"No. You just need to keep your mind on the
game. Anyway, what were we talking about?"
"Evil."
"I'm tired of talking about evil. This sort
of philosophy is all hogwash, anyway. Hell, so is the rest of it."
Ruegger stubbed out his smoke. "I'm not
done with talking about it, not yet."
"You want to change my mind?"
"Of course."
Kharker leaned back in his chair. "Then
please, allow me to backtrack for a moment. You said that evil means taking
pleasure in the pain of others. You take pleasure in the Hunt, don't you?"
"I only kill murderers."
"So the killing of another killer is okay?"
"It's a gray area, but it certainly feels
better."
"Better.
More righteous."
"I don't like that word."
"I remember. But it's okay to be righteous;
it just means you know you're right."
"You can never
know
you're right. You
have to keep an open mind."
"Philosophical posturing,” Kharker said. “But
back to my point—killing other killers is okay to you?"
"It's acceptable."
The Hunter let that go. "So taking pleasure
in another's pain is acceptable if that person is wicked?"
Ruegger saw where this was going, but he didn't
know a way out of it. "I have a mean streak, Kharker. I'm not proud of it,
but I like to hurt those who deserve it."
"So you focus your aggression, then: those
you kill symbolize something to you—something worth the strain of sin?"
Ruegger recognized the line. It was from one of
his poems, a long time ago, and he couldn't help but smile at the tactics of
his old friend; Kharker would use Ruegger's own words against him.
"Yes," he said. "I suppose they
do symbolize something to me. What it is, I don't know."
"A demon from your past, I suppose.
Maybe unconscious."
Ruegger said nothing.
"Ah, here it gets interesting.
Because the only demon in your past, my son, is yourself.
I
never brought you over into the darker side; you were there when I found you.
So it's yourself that you focus your aggression on, not the murderers
themselves."
A little perturbed, Ruegger lit another
cigarette.
"You're not saying anything I haven't
thought of myself," he said quietly.
The Hunter nodded. "And you were right when
you thought it. So let's trace this aggression to its source."
"I've tried."
"And?"
"Nothing."
"It's simple, Ruegger. You despised your
parents for letting your dear Spanish Maria die of pneumonia when they could've
done something about it. So you torched their house and never looked back,
never even to find out if someone perished in the fire.
Which
is one of the reasons why you go by only your family name; in some way, you
atone for what you did to them by using their name, keeping them immortal.
At any rate, burning their house was the first time your ‘mean streak', as you
call it, fully showed itself. It was a righteous anger, too. Later, after
Amelia died, you retreated into that anger. And
later
, with my help, you came to embrace it, to love it."
"That's too simplistic."
"Feelings are
more simple
than we'd like them to be, Ruegger."
"So what's your solution?"
Kharker lit a cigar. "Answer me this. Have
you ever felt whole since you left me?"
"Danielle ...”
"I mean the anger. Have you ever felt
comfortable with it?"
"Of course
not."
"You've dealt with it quietly, privately.
All in all, very British, really, although you've spent very little
time in the U.K.
to be sure."
"Your solution?"
"You need to embrace your darkness again,
my son. I've already given you a head start."
Holding the cigarette carefully so that it
didn't betray his tremble, Ruegger sat up slowly, carefully.
"What do you mean?"
Kharker smiled. "Those humans you've been
feeding from, the ones with the black collars. The only thing that separates
them from the other humans is the collars themselves."
The world tilted. "You mean ...”
"They're not murderers, Ruegger, not to my
knowledge. They're just as guilty or innocent as anyone down there in the
prison."
Ruegger rocketed out of his chair and towered
over Kharker menacingly.
The Hunter regarded him with pleasure. "The
anger feels good, doesn't it?"
Ruegger stormed out of the room, leaving Kharker
to sit and smoke in triumph.
The battle was far from over.
*
*
*
Later,
in his room, Ruegger reread the only thing Danielle had left him: a small note
on a yellow tablet. In a rough black scrawl, it read,
I love you, baby, but
we both know I must do this. When it's finished, I’ll be whole, and we can have
a fresh start together. Until then, stay safe and don't listen to a fucking
word Kharker says.
Below this,
Danielle
was written inside a small
black heart with an arrow through it.
He crumpled the paper in his hands and lit the
corner of it with a cigarette lighter. The flame consumed it fiercely, leaving
only a small burning fragment that he flung to the floor in disgust.
"God
damn
it," he muttered and
placed his face in his hands.
His skin was hot, burning, and behind his eyes
flared the almost alien sensation of tear
ducs
swelling up. Just as soon as he was aware of it, the
ducs
calmed themselves and left him dry-eyed and empty.
Someone knocked on the door.
Without invitation, Kharker opened it and
stepped inside. Seeing that Ruegger wasn't going to offer him a seat, he pulled
up a small wooden rocking chair and plopped down across from the Darkling, who
sat on the bed.
"I'm sorry, Ruegger," he said, his
voice soft.
"For what?
I know you're not sorry
that you caused me to kill innocent people. Something I haven't done since the
War, you bastard."
"No, I'm not sorry for that. I couldn't
care less if there are a few less mortals in the world now than there were a
couple of days ago. But I am sorry that I hurt you. All I want is for you to be
happy."
"The road to Hell is paved with justifications."
"Be that as it may, it's up to you to help
yourself. Still, I can give you guidance."
"I'm sure you can."
"Don't be bitter. What you need is a symbol
of your change."
"My change?"
"From broken to
whole."
"From moral to
immoral.
From good to bad."
"Please, let's not start that again,
Ruegger. There is nothing in this world that is concrete
good
. And there
is nothing in this world that is concrete
bad.
It's all in your head.
What's important is that you enjoy yourself. And I think I have the means to
that end—a symbol of your new beginning."
"My new beginning," Ruegger repeated,
reminded of the note that Danielle had left him.
A fresh
start
.
"What is it?"
Kharker rose from his chair to the doorway,
where he motioned into the room a young woman with black hair and dark eyes and
features that reminded Ruegger strangely of—
"Danielle," he whispered.
Kharker nodded, bringing the girl to stand
beside the vampire.
"Or a reasonable facsimile thereof,"
amended the Hunter.
"What’s she doing here?"
"After the safari a month or so ago, I
offered Jean-Pierre this girl as sort of a thank-you to him for giving me such
a great birthday present. Dear Jean-Pierre
was so insecure that he thought I was mocking him. He even let the poor
creature go into the woods. Of course, once I heard about it, I sent the
retrieval units after her."
"You never were one to waste."
Kharker shrugged.
"Now you want to pawn her off on me."
"No, Ruegger. That's not it at all. She's a
symbol. Danielle is your conscience, and for our purposes this girl is
Danielle. Now, you take your time with her, say what needs to be said and do
what needs to be done. This is an important obstacle for you to overcome, so if
she leaves this room alive you will have failed yourself. Once you kill her, you
will be yourself again. You will be free."