“The world has gone mad today. And good’s bad today. And black’s white today. And day’s night today,” sang his stickpin.
“Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames and monsieurs, meine Damen und Herren,” Mastiff began to an audience of English-speaking, Upper Midwestern translife, “let me introduce you to our fabulous main course, on special tonight for only nine ninety-nine a plate. That’s nine hundred ninety-nine dollars, for the privilege of tasting the most talked-about woman in America today, Lisa Stensgaard. That price includes, of course, fresh blood to accompany your meal.
“She’s exclusive to the discriminating clientele of the Skyline. Only you will be able to answer the question on everyone’s lips: What happened to Lisa Stensgaard?”
Don’t play with your food. First lesson old One-Eyed Jack ever taught me. Leave it to a human to go for sexy presentation. Sparkle might fill movie theaters, but it doesn’t do much for cuisine. Hollywood gives the humans such lame ideas about translife.
Both zombies were pulling hard on her arms, forcing her down into the guttered autopsy table. Fresh jugs waited under the drain to collect every precious drop of blood, and Ravelston stood ready with wineglasses.
As the golem bent over her, chef’s knife at the ready, she suddenly threw herself toward Buck. Or perhaps it was Tooth. One zombie plus one desperate woman plus the tipping platform managed to yank Tooth (if that was who it was) off his feet and impale him on the golem’s outstretched knife and sent Buck backward off the platform.
Both zombies grunted in outrage as they bounced bloodily into the kitchen pit.
Stensgaard scooted backward as the golem mechanically wiped the knife and struck again.
“Chef! Stop her!” Mastiff shouted.
Breathing hot and hard, Stensgaard jumped off the platform and among the diners. She sprinted between the widely spaced tables, upending a busboy cart that one of the guests had pushed into her way. Otherwise the rest were satisfied with just watching the escape attempt.
Perhaps they thought it was dinner theater.
“Stop her,” shouted Mastiff, waving his shiny top hat in frustration from the balcony.
The skeletons went about their business of mechanically filling knocked-over water glasses and picking up dropped forks. You get what you pay for, Mastiff.
Stensgaard didn’t bother with the door. Instead she grabbed the busboy cart and followed it through one of the great river-facing windows and down onto the patio.
All I could do was shake my head. If she got away, the Templars would be investigating all of southwest Wisconsin and the surrounding states inside twenty-four hours.
“Looks like the special’s off . . . and running,” Lasseur said. “I can’t wait to see what’s planned for dessert. A heroin addict launched from a cannon, perhaps?”
Someone had to set this mess to rights, and for the sake of the staff of the Skyline, I’d undertake it. I grabbed Ravelston by the arm and pulled him toward the hole in the glass.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems . . .” Mastiff said. “It seems . . .”
“Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!” sang the stickpin.
“THIS NEVER WAS my kind of show,” Ravelston said, his arms tight across my back as the horse trotted through the cloudy Wisconsin night. The tall quarterhorse was deeply unhappy about carrying a vampire. “Running down food in the dead of night.”
I’d had to bring him. I could ride quickly, but I couldn’t track a bus driven through a glass blower’s.
“How do you keep yourself fed? Just the restaurant?”
I couldn’t see his face much out of the corner of my eye, but it looked like a cheek muscle twitched.
“Tweed suit,” he said.
Wasn’t sure I heard him right so I yelled over the hoofbeats. “Come again, please?”
“She WENT downhill here, sir. TURN to the right, if you please. A tweed suit. Just put on a tweed suit. Especially if it’s a few decades out of date. No one suspects you of anything. I tell you, if you ever need to lie low somewhere, find yourself a secondhand tweed suit. When I must eat, I visit the hospitals and nursing homes. Someone like me, smelling like mothballs, wool hat in hand wandering around a nursing home peeking into doors—no one gives me a second look. I look for those on their last legs. Dementia, pain . . . not much vitality in their blood, of course, but I feel as if I’m doing them a service.”
“Was it always like that, or did you change over time?” I’d known a vampire or two who’d quietly starved themselves to death because the routine got to them. Talky old bloke would probably go that way.
“It was my daughter, poor creature. She’d had it all, smarts, looks. WANTED, NEEDED to keep it. Best turn left here, I think she’s down this gully.”
“Your own daughter.”
“We lost my wife early on, so it was just the two of us. I think the possibility she wouldn’t have to outlive me got in her head. She’d been away years, just a postcard here and there from various spots in Mexico or Rio. Then she came back. I SHOULD have known something was odd about her, years traipsing around Puerto Vallarta and the Caribbean, but pale as moonlight. Still, who wouldn’t hug their daughter even if there was rather too much white about the pupils.”
“How did she get into it?”
“Some young hotshot. Hardly KNEW the art himself, and here he was building a posse. That’s what he called my daughter. Part of his posse. Nothing so dignified as bride, or mate, or with the implied responsibility of sister. She was in his posse. The world and its young hotshots. Those are just the kind of customers Mason wishes to cultivate. As if they are going to be touring the Mississippi Valley, antiquing for old farm implements and rare beer bottles.”
“What ever happened to her?”
“The Templars, I think. She called me, once, said some men were after her and I MUST move and change my name. She loved the game, the game she called it, and played it risky. Just here—I can hear panting from those trees.”
I thought about asking if she’d ever tried his tweed suit, but even the horses I exhaust don’t deserve that much cruelty. In any case, we were almost on top of Lisa Stensgaard.
“Shall you take care of her, or shall I?” I asked.
“Must we?” Ravelston asked. He stared at the copse of hillside poplars. I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the horse stomping, but his instincts were intact with the night at its zenith.
“It’s that, or the Templars will be burning you all out by noon the day after tomorrow.”
“Perhaps—Oh, I suppose you’re right. She’s just about the age of my daughter. Funny how the bits of human existence linger on. Like a nursery rhyme from childhood.”
“Along came a spider,” I muttered.
Wait a tick—
“Come out, my dear,” Ravelston said. “I’ll make it quick, and I GUARANTEE it’s pain free and rather pleasant. I went through it myself not so many years ago, you see.”
“No. Let me go, please. Please!” she said, stepping from the copse. Her legs were scratched by thorns, and they shook.
“Lisa,” I called. “Lisa, I know you didn’t ask for this. You didn’t ask for anything but a holiday in the sun. The only thing you did was talk to the wrong guy in a bar, I suppose. Bad break for you. But I think I can give you a choice. You can just accept that you’re a casualty of an ancient battle, or you can help us out. Maybe even get revenge against the man who imprisoned you in that tank.”
“Is this a trick?” she asked.
“More of a treat,” I said. “For us, at least.”