Signs and maps here and there offered directions to various streets or other destinations. He thought he might be underground somewhere. Perhaps in a subway tunnel? This one seemed nicer than the ones in Paris or Detroit… but when had he been to either city?
The war. He’d grown up in Detroit, but then he got drafted and went to Paris to fight the Cong and then Siobhan left him and he had that fight at the saloon, and then… no. That can’t be right.
“Alex Carlisle?” asked a voice. That same voice with the proper English accent again. He placed it with a man toward the center of the group directly ahead of him. Standing nearby, amid men and women in dark clothing, was the girl with the sugar skull make-up on one side of her face. Rosario.
The Englishman gestured to him with his cane. He wasn’t small. He wore a dark suit, made entirely of wool, with a silk pocket handkerchief, nice hat and all the trimmings.
He had Alex’s wallet. He looked at it one more time and nodded to himself. “You are Alex Carlisle, are you not?”
“Yuh. Yeah?” Alex blinked. That sounded right. Alex Carlisle. This was one of the downtown Seattle bus tunnels, underneath a shopping mall and department stores. The buses ran one floor below-but he didn’t hear them running now.
The Englishman looked at Alex’s wallet one more time and nodded to himself. “Excellent. I suppose I should wish you a happy birthday, though in truth I am here to ensure otherwise,” he said mildly. He handed the wallet to a pale man in an extravagant crimson toga with a laurel wreath on his head. “Lord Cornelius, once again you have earned the admiration of us all. I confess I expected this to take hours. Your people do excellent work.”
Alex looked over his shoulder. There were more men behind him, too, though not all were pale like the rest. The pale ones wore ‘80s fashions that didn’t seem intentionally ironic; the others dressed in ordinary street clothes. Alex saw guns in their hands. He also saw Jason and Amber stuck on their knees in front of the standing men, their hands on their heads as if awaiting arrest or execution. Neither looked particularly happy to be there.
“You okay?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” Jason grunted, “just holdin’ out as long as we-“
“You shall not speak,” interrupted the Englishman, loudly and forcefully but with notable calm. “You have already been instructed. Disobey at your peril.”
Alex looked over Jason and then Amber, finding no obvious injuries or signs of panic. They both seemed to be holding up fairly well, but that did little to assuage his feelings. Anger bubbled up within him, quickly overwhelming his fear and confusion. Anger seemed the wrong response, given his predicament, but he didn’t question it. Better to be angry than to panic.
Amber watched everything with a sense of great dread and creeping despair. She’d seen many of these faces on the sketch files kept by the task force. Most were from the west coast, but she recognized faces from New York and Miami and cities in between. Cornelius, in particular, looked exactly like his sketch. She’d thought the bit about him wearing a toga and laurel crown was ridiculous, but here he was in all his anachronistic glory. She saw the others give him all the deference suggested by his alleged lordship over Southern California.
They took her keys, her wallet and her phone when they grabbed her. Amber’s prized prop replica assault rifle now lay in a gutter outside the hotel. Thank God I didn’t keep my badge in my wallet, she thought for the third time, but that didn’t resolve one bit of this predicament.
There had to be at least forty vampires here, give or take a few mortal goons. Nobody would be impressed if she identified herself and demanded they all surrender into her custody. She didn’t think she could take even one of them out unarmed; the single vampire she’d arrested in LA weeks ago absorbed several gunshots like so many weak punches before he’d been brought down by sheer muscle and weight. The bullets that struck Kowalski’s torso that night punctured and stunned him for the briefest of seconds, but beyond that he seemed indifferent to their effects.
She watched as Lord Cornelius moved over to Rosario and handed her the wallet. “You have done well, my dear,” he said in a thick accent. “You must be rewarded.”
Rosario nodded eagerly. “Thank you, my lord,” she said, though the form of address sounded awkward from her mouth. “And my boys, too, right?”
Cornelius brushed a fond hand over her hair. She whimpered. “I know leadership when I see it,” he said. His other hand touched her collar, then trailed down her chest and her belly without regard to propriety or privacy. Rosario seemed excited by it rather than put off, and shuddered as his hand kept moving lower until he lewdly clutched at her groin.
She inhaled sharply. Cornelius swept back her hair and placed his mouth on her neck. Rosario’s eyes rolled back then and she surrendered to him as his lips spread over her flesh and then stiffened. A trickle of blood escaped his kiss to run down her front.
The crowd went silent. The distant echo of the bus tunnel remained, but aside from that the only sound anyone could hear was that of Rosario’s blissful gasps. Her breathing became labored, and then raspy, and finally ceased. The other vampires and their attendants looked on, most with obvious lust in their eyes as Cornelius drained Rosario dry.
Cornelius released her with a flourish, holding his hands up and out wide as if expecting applause. She fell away from him, but a pair of pale, young-looking women in ancient dress caught her and gracefully carried her back. Scattered applause and a few calls of approval followed, but the reactions were not uniform. It seemed as if Cornelius had just violated some social taboo, yet was powerful enough to get away with it.
“Ah. Well,” smiled the Englishman crisply. “We shall welcome her into the family, as it were, when she rises again.”
“Ugh,” grunted Alex.
The Englishman looked at him curiously. “I take it you disapprove?”
“Yeah,” Alex fairly sneered. “Gross.”
“You must have found her enchanting to have followed her so blindly.”
“I did up until this,” agreed Alex, “She’s got the vampire herp on her now.”
Cornelius became indignant. Blood still coated his chin. The crimson color of his robe made the stains hard to see except where the light reflected off the wettest spots. “Mortal chaff, have you any idea whom you address?”
“It sounded like you’re the Great Cornholio? Did I hear that right?”
Though the word meant nothing to him, Cornelius recognized the insult for what it was. The Englishman held up a calming hand, though his head bowed somewhat in a show of deference. “Lord Cornelius, if I may,” he said, and then raised his eyes toward Alex again. “Mr. Carlisle, you speak to Gaius Cornelius Vespasianus, Consul of the Republic of Los Angeles, one of the eldest of the society of night in this country. And I-“
“That name doesn’t even make any sense,” Alex spat without a second thought. “Nobody has people address them by their gens. Cornholio is either a poseur or an idiot.”
Amber heard it all, but couldn’t follow. “What’s he talking about?” she hissed.
The other young man caught it as well. At first he just shook his head, but then understanding crept over him. “Oh, no.”
The blood-stained face under the laurel crown screwed up in a rage. Cornelius tore a short sword out of a fold within his toga. “Impudent brat!” he snarled, “I will cut-!“
“Lord Cornelius, please!” cautioned the Englishman again. Two other vampires stepped out of the crowd, both of them rough, muscular men in dark leather and denim that seemed somehow just a bit off from what they should be wearing.
Alex looked at the pair curiously. Something about the long, scraggly blond hair of the one and the red beard of the other seemed familiar to him. He knew those rings on their fingers and the gold bands on their arms. They both carried large blades, one on his belt and the other over his shoulder. Both had small, light axes tucked in their belts.