They wanted him—she wanted him—because he defied them. Because he clung to his fading humanity with his newfound vampiric strength, because he would not fall before the power of the Dark Society. He was a threat to them, a danger to their future on this earth.
He was an if.
If he fought them and won, would there be others who stood with him? Could there be?
Next time…next time. “Draw your gun,” Lawson repeated.
“Do you think…one of them is in there?”
“I think one of them is out here. Draw your gun and if I lose control…just keep it ready.” He needed a taste from his Japanese bottle of cattle blood to steady his nerves and dull his desires, but there was no time for that. The best thing to do was to get out of this house as quickly as possible, yet that closed door in front of him must be opened.
“Don’t move,” he told Ann. When he opened the door the rush of the blood-smell hit him in the face and set all senses aflame like a torch touched to pitch-soaked linen. It burned through him in an instant, nearly sending him to his knees. Or sending him at Ann Kingsley like a ravaging juggernaut. He did not hesitate; he walked into the room and shone his lamp upon the scene of carnage.
She disobeyed him, but she had to. She stood a few feet behind him and to the side, and she had to turn away for a moment to be sick but Lawson needed her to look at the bodies. There were three, a man and two women. Not much left of them, but enough to tell what they’d looked like.
When Ann could speak she said, “Those…are the servants. My father is not here.”
Lawson saw a declaration upon the pine-panelled wall. He lifted his lamp toward it. It was scrawled there in crusted gore, and as the flies spun around and around in angered clouds both he and Ann read the writing.
Revenge is a dish best eaten bloody.
“My father,” Ann repeated, in a voice near breaking, “is not here.”
They couldn’t leave without searching the rest of the house. They did so with their pistols ready to fire a silver angel at anything that moved along the light’s edge. But Ann was correct, as Lawson had figured she would be: her father was not there.
Once outside, Lawson had uncorked the Japanese bottle and had a drink of the cattle blood concoction that his friend Father John Deale procured for him from a New Orleans slaughterhouse. Ann had walked off a distance, even in the dark, and Lawson could say nothing to her so he let her alone.
She had as much to settle now with the Dark Society as did he. Lawson could image the vampires raiding her father’s mansion, coming into the house like whirling blades on a violent wind, all fangs and claws and depraved desires. And he knew she must understand that if indeed her father and her sister were still alive and had been turned they would be yearning in their own fever to taste her blood and turn her.
It was their way, and they would not—could not—stop until all in this world travelled by night.
Piano music and harsh voices spilled out from the canvas folds of the Cristal Palace. Snowflakes whirled through the smoky air. Lawson and Ann stepped from the street’s frozen mud onto the green boards of the sidewalk, and he started to push through the entry into Perdition’s only den of entertainment.
But stopped.
He turned toward the direction they’d just come from, where the Perdition Hotel stood like an unsightly brown-boarded lump on the mound of a hill.
“What is it?” Ann asked, knowing he was sensing something beyond her reach.
“We’re being watched from the hotel…second floor, third window from the right. A man was standing there. He just pulled back.”
“One of them?”
“A human,” Lawson said. He lifted his chin as if smelling the air like an animal. He sought what he’d come to think of as the “atmosphere of the unholy”. Whether that was a particular burnt-flesh smell or a rushing of the ichor within him or simply the awakening of a sense of threat that humans possessed but was a thousand times stronger in the vampire he did not know. He just knew he had it, and it told him to be wary. “I’m not feeling any of them within close range.”
“Someone just curious?”
“The man from the train was curious.” Lawson had seen the man at the hotel when he and Ann were getting the keys to their rooms. Aboard the train, when the man had stared fixedly at Lawson once more, the vampire had thrown his Eye and entered the mind of Eli Easterly, for that was a name written in memory on the inside page of a well-used Bible, there in those corridors of the mind. Within seconds Lawson had walked through Easterly’s mansion and found scenes there that told of a tormented life…a life still in torment.
“Well,” said Lawson, quickly scanning the darkening sky, “we have work to do.”
He pushed the canvas aside and they entered. The place was crowded, noisy and nearly stifling hot with all the bodies packed in and a pot-bellied stove burning wood at the back. Smoke from cigars, pipes and cigarettes swirled around the figures and floated in a blue cloud at the ceiling amidst a score of oil lamps hanging on nails. On the right side of the establishment was a long bar backed by a mirror in an ornate silver frame. A few tables were set around and in a corner out of the way was the music-offending piano and its player, a bald-headed black man with a long gray beard. On the left side of the Palace were card tables, a roulette wheel, a big spinner for Put & Take and various other stations designed to separate the crowd of miners from their money. In one sweeping glance the vampire gunslinger took in games of Faro, Keno, Mexican monte, Chuck-A-Luck, craps, Newmarket, and about as many variations of poker as there were tables. A winner’s holler seemed to go up every five seconds, followed by an equally loud bout of cursing and otherwise bitter language from the losers. Eyes went to Lawson and Ann but didn’t linger, because the wheel and spinner were turning, cards were being slapped down on green felt and ivory dice were tumbling.
Lawson made his way to the bar with Ann following close behind. He ordered a whiskey from a wizened bartender who likely kept a shotgun within reach at all times. “Anything to drink?” Lawson asked Ann, but she shook her head. Just as well, Lawson thought; the whiskey was something to toy with, for the strength of these potions was designed to further stupefy a man into betting against a dealer’s high hand.
He reached back, unclasped the strap of his goggles and removed them. They went into a pocket of his overcoat, which he would be inclined to remove but that might bring the pickpockets stumbling toward him in an affectation of drunken friendship. As it was, here came the bar girls, two of them. They wore their makeup as if it had been applied by children just learning how to fingerpaint. Their frilly dresses were new, though, likely supplied by the management; one was as bright blue as Lawson figured the Mediterranean to be and the other as orange as an overripe pumpkin, which suited the woman’s figure. On their way toward Lawson they took the opportunity to flick hats and press the backs of men at the tables. He saw others moving through the throng, all of them wearing the bright frilly dresses that must’ve come up by train all the way from San Francisco: pink as summer lemonade, green as a backwoods meadow, purple as a dream of passion, red as new-spilled blood.
Before Lawson had a chance to scan the crowd for the face of Eric Cavanaugh, Blue was upon him. She wore a frozen smile that must be painful to her jaws. The pain showed in eyes that were nearly as blue as the dress. She had blonde hair that had likely been pinned up earlier but now drooped from the weight of heat and smoke. Her makeup made her almost as pale as himself, her lips a garish slash of crimson and little spots of rouge coloring her cheeks. A small black beauty mark had been applied just at the corner of her left eye.