Midnight's Daughter

Chapter Ten

My mood wasn’t improved when I found, after dragging my bloodstained self through a large section of Vegas’ demon bars, that most of my old contacts either had left town or were currently doing a Benny impression. It wasn’t until the sky had turned a pale, cloudless blue, announcing the official end of the year’s rain, that I managed to dig up an old acquaintance.

I don’t get out West much—the proximity of MAGIC is a big deterrent—but once in a while a job results in a jaunt to the area. I found one of the guys I occasionally use for backup when that happens in the middle of packing for his patented rat-on-a-sinking-ship routine. Another hour and I’d have missed him.

“Jay, good to see you!” I slammed the door to his cheap hotel room—rentable by anything from the hour to the month—and smiled. It made the sort of impression I was hoping for, mainly because of the dried blood matting my hair and the grimace my split lip made of my grin. I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror yet, but the reactions of the crowds in the bars had been enough to tell me that intimidation probably wouldn’t be a problem.

“Dory!” The Nsquital demon’s face, which was able to pass for human if you squinted, turned violet and sprouted little bumps that looked like acne. They weren’t.

“You spray me and I’ll kill you before I melt.” I flashed a little fang, but held out weaponless hands. “I came to talk, Jay. Relax, would you?”

“I… I wouldn’t poison you, Dory. You know that.”

“Sure. That’s why I came by.” I sat down on the lumpy mattress and thumped his plastic suitcase. “Lucky I caught you, huh?”

“You know how it is.” Jay was back to ugly-human mode, his oversize teeth, jug ears and carrot top making him look like a grown-up version of the MAD magazine guy. The baggy corduroy trousers—necessary because jeans tended to show the tail—and ratty, oatmeal-colored tee didn’t help with the cool, but they did give him a pathetic edge that sort of relaxed me. “I don’t like the neighborhood so much now that it’s a war zone.”

That was probably the truth. Nsquital don’t like violence. Their position as the twice damned—the literal translation of the name—ensured as much. They were a motley crew of many demonic races, mostly of the minor-functionary level, who had obtained a measure of freedom because each one had killed its master and fled from punishment. They could be found and dragged back by whatever had replaced their dead owner, but most weren’t worth the trouble of hunting. Jay had slaughtered a minor servant at Mammon’s court whom nobody had liked much anyway. Its replacement would stir-fry him as a matter of policy if it ever stumbled across him—like in a war zone, for instance—but otherwise he was probably okay.

Unless somebody ratted him out, of course.

“This visit was well-timed, then. If you’re leaving, you won’t want to drag all that heavy weaponry with you, right?”

He sighed, blinking faded blue eyes that had always reminded me of an accountant’s. Of course, that was what he’d once been, sort of. “Aw, come on, Dory. You have any idea how many times I’ve been held up this week? A guy’s gotta make a living.”

“Exactly. So why are you turning down a customer?”

Jay look shocked. “You’re planning to pay me?”

I smiled. He paled again, but never got more than a violet blush this time. “Well, not exactly.”

“Dory, you know I don’t do credit. This is a strictly cash-and-carry business.” It would have been a better line except for the wobble in his voice.

“Fine. Then get me something to carry out of here, and I won’t cash in the bounty on your head.”

Jay’s shoulders slumped in defeat, which didn’t bother me much, as it was a standard bargaining tactic with him. But then he started to cry and I got shifty. I hate it when anything cries. I wanted to slap him to make him stop, but there was a chance that would only intensify the water-works. And I couldn’t tell him I’d been kidding about the bounty, since it was the only thing he was afraid enough of to give me what I needed.

“Um, hey. Look, Jay, don’t—”

“I knew something like this would ha-happen,” he wailed, collapsing into a heap. “I was trying to get out, but I wanted to sell off the rest of my stock first, for traveling m-money. Greed!” he screamed. “I should have known it would get me in the end!”

“This isn’t the end, dumb ass,” I said, dragging him off the floor. “Would you shut up and listen? I am not having a good day. Make it better and nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

“But I don’t have h-hardly anything left!” he moaned. “I told you, I spent most of the night s-selling out. Bargain-basement prices, too. I’d have kept something back for you, Dory, I promise! But I didn’t know you were in town!” He started to leak again. I looked around for a tissue but couldn’t find one.

“So tell me who is left that can help me. All my contacts beat you out the door.” I was facing a personal apocalypse and was all but defenseless. Typical, but so not good.

Jay wiped his tears on the rough bedspread and looked at me with watery, hope-filled eyes. Maybe the nasty, blood-covered freak wasn’t going to kill him after all. “Not many,” he finally said. “The dark mages have been stockpiling everything they can get their hands on, and once they figured it out, the Senate started doing the same to try to keep as much as possible out of the mages’ hands. Then they both began threatening anyone who supplied the other, and then started stomping on them. That’s when I decided to get out of town.”

“The Black Circle is planning something, then, something soon.”

He nodded, eager to be helpful now that he’d decided he had a decent chance of living through this interview. Why did people always assume I meant them violence? Even a dhampir can have a mellow day.

“Word is, they’ve got some powerful new ally, only nobody is naming names.” Considering that I’d just left Drac surrounded by dark mages, I didn’t really need one. “Most people think they’re going to hit MAGIC again, but I’m not so sure. The rumor is that someone let them in the first time—that they had a mole who gave them the keys to the wards, but of course they’ve all been changed since. Going after that place now would be nuts.”

“What’s your theory, then?”

“Me?” Jay suddenly seemed to recall that having opinions wasn’t usually healthy in our circle. “I don’t think anything. I only want to get out of here before—before it gets worse.”

When the demons start leaving, it’s not a good sign. I sighed. Vegas was going to have to fend for itself; I had other problems. “Okay, how about this? Where is this stockpile the dark mages are making?” He stared at me for a minute, and then his lips started to tremble. I thought he was about to start blubbering again, so was sort of relieved when I realized he was laughing. Even if it didn’t make sense. “What? Are you stoned?”

Jay just laughed harder. While I waited for him to get himself under control, I took the opportunity to rifle through his suitcase. He was right: other than a few human weapons I could steal from any sporting-goods store and a cloaking spell in a crusty old vial that looked like it might have gone off, he was clean.

“You… you’re really going to do it, aren’t you?” he finally gasped.

“Do what?”

”Hit the mages,” he said eagerly.

I shrugged. “Depends on how hard it’d be. But I’m going to need a lot of stuff, and they have it.”

Jay licked his lips and darted a nervous look around. “I’ve heard some things. Nothing definite, but I might have… an idea. The mages, they don’t… they worry about the Senate, you know? And the Silver Circle, of course. But the rest of us… they don’t think we matter.”

There was a tinge of anger to that last comment that interested me. “Like they robbed you at will,” I said slowly, watching his reaction, “and killed Benny without a second thought.”

“Benny?” Jay looked shocked, and I remembered that they had worked together off and on. Might should have left that out. “He’s… dead?”

“That’s why I look like this. I went to him first for supplies, but when we were making a deal last night, a group of dark mages torched his warehouse with us still inside. I got out, but Benny… sorry, I know you liked him.”

Jay didn’t cry again, but he stared at the stained carpet like he didn’t even see it. “I told him he should get out,” he said softly. “But he said it would be okay. That I should leave, because of the bounty, that it was getting too hot for me here. But he wouldn’t go himself.”

I put an arm around his bony, hunched shoulders. “I thought you’d have heard. The warehouse went up like a Roman candle.”

“No. I ran out of stock around midnight and dropped by a place, got some Chinese.” I hoped he meant takeout. He saw my expression before I could hide it. “Mu-shu pork!” he told me indignantly. “And then I came back here.”

“Well, I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you.”

“I’m glad you did.” This was said with a note of unusual—for him—resolution. “I’m glad I didn’t leave sooner.” He hopped up from the bed and hefted the suitcase. “There’s something I need to do before I go. Something for Benny!”

I grabbed his arm. “That’s great and all, Jay, but you’re forgetting—I need some information.”

“Don’t worry,” he assured me, throwing his remaining possessions haphazardly in the already stuffed case. “I’m going to do more than tell you where you can find those bastards. I’m going to show you!”

That’s how I came, three hours later, to be leading a bunch of motley-looking trolls, demons and a few humans—mostly friends and ex-employees of Benny’s—toward a boarded-up bowling alley in a bad part of town. I really hoped this plan wasn’t as psychotic as it sounded, but for once at least it wasn’t mine. Jay had dragged me to see Benny’s secretary, a large female Bergtroll, or mountain troll, named Olga. She had a broad nose shaped like a squashed mushroom and an impressive golden beard, and her tiny eyes were still red from crying. After hearing our proposition, she had grabbed her battle-ax and her Rolodex and started organizing some payback. I’d spent several hours feeling pretty useless, waiting for the troops to assemble and some semblance of a plan to be formed, although Olga did show me to her bathroom, where I managed to get most of the blood off.

Once everyone assembled, the pace started to pick up, and so much swearing, weapons waving and mage bashing had been going on that I hadn’t actually heard the plan. I just intended to grab whatever I could while the troops took the mages apart, assuming vice versa didn’t prove to be true. In my own defense, I did try to talk them out of it, but the lynch-mob mentality had taken over and there wasn’t much I could do. Olga had merely crushed me to her enormous bosom and promised to see that no one hurt me. I grabbed a couple of knives and a.44 automatic out of Benny’s office equipment and silently returned the sentiment.

It was almost funny, as our crew of forty or so pissed-off amateurs and a few gimlet-eyed professionals surrounded the small buff building. “Stay behind me, small one,” Olga said, then eschewed subtlety to bash in the door with her ax.

The rest of the crew took their lead from her and made doors for themselves through windows, service hatches and, in the case of one particularly large mountain troll, a brick wall. I followed Olga in as soon as her considerable girth managed to squeeze through the door. It was a bit of a letdown to realize that the building was empty. Even worse, it had the feel of a place that had been so for a while. No electricity lit the overhead lights, a fine layer of dust coated everything and the only discernible odor was a faint reek from the rows of red and blue shoes behind a low counter.

I leaned against one of the concrete block walls and watched the mob take the place apart. “No one here,” Olga said, squinting about with her inadequate eyes. I doubted she could see very well despite the numerous holes that had been knocked in the place, letting in midday light, but her sense of smell was probably as good as mine and I didn’t smell anyone.

“Should we tell them?” I asked, lighting up.

“No, let them have fun.” She hopped up on the counter, which groaned slightly under her weight, and watched the destruction. “What you think?” she demanded when I didn’t comment.

I closed my eyes and mentally filtered out the smell of weed, mildewed pleather and sweaty troll. A faint but discernible trace of stale air wafted to me from somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what’s behind all the shoes.”

Olga hefted her ax and swung around to face the collection. She cleaved the center section clean in two. “That,” she said helpfully.

I regarded the set of stairs going down into bare earth with disapproval. I hate dark staircases, especially when I know I won’t like what I’ll find at the other end. I glanced at Olga. “It might be better if we don’t try to take everyone down. Don’t want anyone blocking the exit.”

She nodded and called a huge troll over. He had on a pair of jeans, which surprised me, since I hadn’t known they made them in that size, but no shoes. I caught myself staring at his knobby feet, which had the usual number of toes for a troll—three—and made myself stop. “Wait here,” she told him sternly. “Don’t let others pass. If we not back in half an hour, come down and kill everything.”

He grunted, which I had trouble deciphering, but Olga apparently understood. No one else appeared to have noticed us, which wasn’t surprising considering that the demons were setting the red pleather booths on fire and the trolls had started throwing bowling pins through the unlit beer signs. Their aim was pretty lousy, but there were a lot of pins, and the resounding crashes and tinkles of glass seemed to amuse them. Troll bowling.

I turned to Olga. “There’s no chance in hell anyone down there doesn’t know we’re coming. Let’s take a quick peek, but if I tell you to run back up the stairs, you do it, no arguments. Okay?”

“You funny little woman,” she said, and started down the stairs. I sighed and followed.

I have better-than-human eyesight in the dark, but even I couldn’t see much on those stairs. I don’t doubt that Olga was completely blind, but she never faltered. Trolls aren’t exactly graceful, but they have a low center of gravity for climbing around mountains and fjords, so I figured I was more likely to fall than she was. Luckily for me, four hundred pounds of troll stood between me and whatever was down there, something I found vaguely comforting.

When we finally ran out of stairs, we found ourselves in a tunnel carved out of the local sandstone. It looked like some of the deeper areas of MAGIC—those the vamps preferred to the upper levels belonging to the mages—except for the claustrophobically low ceiling. There was only the faint illumination from the stairway to guide us, and I couldn’t see a candle or lantern lying about, which was odd in a place even infrequently used.

Olga and I changed positions, after I explained that I might have more luck detecting the various nasty surprises a group of dark mages could have left for us, but she chafed at my pace. Drac had taken my key ring and its charms along with everything else, but I compensated somewhat by scattering clumps of dirt ahead of us to see if any obvious traps had been left. Nothing happened—not even a minor early-warning ward sizzled—which made me steadily more nervous as we progressed. It didn’t help that the farther we went from the stairs, the harder it was even for me to see anything.

Because of the almost nonexistent light, I found the rockfall by running into it. Olga plowed into me and I got a mouth full of sandstone dust before we sorted ourselves out. So this was why nothing had tried to stab, incinerate or crush us on the way in.

“Rockfall,” I said, spitting. “There must be another way in, on the other side.”

“Yes, but where?” Olga asked sensibly, pushing me to one side. “We go through here.” With sheer brute strength, she hacked her way into the blockage, clearing a path twice as wide as me through a six-foot-deep pile of rocks and dirt. Even at my best, it would have taken me thirty minutes or more of hard labor to make that hole; she managed it in about two. I made another mental note: avoid wrestling trolls.

When I stopped choking on clouds of dust, I found that I could see again. Olga’s patient expression was visible in the light of a nearby lantern tucked into a nook. It threw hard shadows on the walls, showing us a wide, innocent-looking stretch of corridor that I didn’t trust at all. The mages might have caused the fall to block off a vulnerable entrance, but any regularly used areas were going to be guarded by someone or something. And since these were dark mages, it would probably be something lethal.

“We’re going to have to be more careful from now on,” I told Olga, who gave me an impatient look. I noticed that she had her ax in hand, and nodded. We were on the same page.

It took us almost ten minutes of very cautious movement to get to the large cavern at the end of the hall. But maybe ten seconds after we entered, I got two big clues as to why nothing had grabbed us. A complex ward called the Shroud of Flame leapt up behind us, blocking the way back, and a wall of emotion hit me so hard that it literally knocked me off my feet.

The sensations were familiar, and highly unwelcome. So was the scene that accompanied them, superimposed over the real one like a movie shown on a see-through screen. I could still see the cavern, but most of my attention was caught by the images of my past that flickered and changed in front of me. It was like someone had accessed the part of my memory labeled “good riddance” and was doing a top-ten most-hated-events countdown. Only it seemed they were starting with number one.

A dark-haired child woke up in a nest of blankets next to a fire. It was summer, so there was no need to sleep inside one of the cramped wagons, which always smelled of body odor and garlic, in the surrounding circle. The only others up at this hour were two camp dogs worrying something near the edge of the clearing. The girl threw off her blankets and smoothed her clothes before going to see what it was. The food was usually hung from tree limbs to keep animals out of it, but sometimes a rope would break, and she knew she’d catch hell if the dogs were eating the smoked ham they had acquired at the last village. I wanted to scream at her to run and not look back, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. She couldn’t hear me, and even if she could, she was far too stubborn to listen. Then or now, I thought as my eyes followed her small form toward the two large dogs.

The shaggy gray creatures were part wolf—wild, half-feral things, kept around by more food than they could scavenge, and used to scare off interlopers. They were about as far from domesticated as they could get, but it had never occurred to her to consider them dangerous. Dogs of any kind don’t usually bite the hand that feeds them, but Dili, named after the fact that he had never been quite right in the head, was gnawing on something that looked a lot like a human arm. Baro, his huge mate, had something in her mouth, too, which a beam of early-morning sunlight showed clearly as the head of a middle-aged, bearded man.

The girl screamed then, at the sight of Tsinoro, leader of their kumpania, being breakfast for dogs. She screamed for quite a while before she realized that no one was coming out of the brightly painted wagons littering the small clearing. Her cries would have raised the deaf, much less a company of people used to reacting quickly to any sign of trouble. She should have been able to sense immediately why no one had come—her sense of smell was good enough to discern the miasma of blood and feces that radiated out of the small wagons even without her entering them—but she wasn’t thinking clearly. Wasn’t, in fact, thinking at all, being in a panic to find someone, anyone, still breathing.

She ran to the nearest wagon, one of the largest since it belonged to Lyubitshka, the chovexani of the clan, who was respected for the power of her magic. But it quickly became obvious that it had not been strong enough to help her this time. The girl stared at the mutilated body of the most powerful person she knew, and began to shake. She was afraid, not only that whatever had killed the wise woman would come for her, as well, but also because Lyubitshka had yelled at her just the day before for tearing a hole in her favorite blouse when laundering it, and now there was no way to obtain forgiveness. Having someone so strong go into the spirit world angry with you was the worst thing her young mind could imagine. Lyubitshka would make a powerful muló, a vengeful spirit that returned to seek out those who had wronged it in life.

After stumbling down the steps of Lyubitshka’s wagon and looking wildly around for the angry muló, the girl went a bit mad. She ran to throw open the doors of each wagon, but found only more corpses inside. After her increasingly panicked investigation proved that she and the dogs were the only living things left in the kumpania, she collapsed near the fire, exhausted, tearstained and shivering in shock. Even after her natural resilience kicked in to calm her slightly, she didn’t bother to wash herself or even look for salvageable items to pack. She was not so young that she didn’t know the proper way to treat the dead, and there was no one else to do it.

I watched her dig a pit in the middle of the clearing, to which she dragged each body after wrapping it in a blanket to avoid handling it directly and risking marimé, or uncleanness. They should have been dressed in their best clothes, but there was so much blood, and some were not even whole anymore, that she didn’t know where to start making them presentable. She arranged the bodies in the hole, and piled on top of them their extra clothes, jewelry, tools and best dinnerware as custom required. There was no beeswax to use to close their nostrils and prevent an evil spirit from entering them, but considering how many wounds most of them had, she doubted the spirits would find animating these bodies very useful.

As she piled earth on top of the heap of the dead, she sobbed for them, even those who had considered her unclean because of her parentage. They had been her family, or as much of one as she had ever known. And now they were gone. Sweat and dirt mixed with her tears, and her nose started to run, but she didn’t wipe it away. She wasn’t finished yet.

She turned the horses loose and ran them away from the camp, since tradition allowed their continued survival. But everything else had to be destroyed. It was a laborious process, but she finally managed to break every remaining plate and glass, kill the two dogs and pile great armloads of brush around each wagon. She lit the fire and stood off to one side, watching everything she had ever known go up in flames. She would soon start to feel hungry and worry about how she was to survive when all the money and salable objects of her kumpania were now cursed and useless. She would wonder who would take her in, since the other Gypsy bands would certainly blame her for the tragedy, just as she was starting to blame herself.

She was not very old, but she knew what they whispered about her when they thought she couldn’t hear. She knew why they had taken her in, and what she could do. Killing the occasional vampyre who tried to hurt the kumpania was no more difficult for her than any of the other chores—gathering firewood or doing the wash—that were regularly demanded. She remembered nothing of the night before except going to sleep as usual, but there had been other odd periods of blackness in her life, and stories told of actions she had taken during them that she knew nothing about.

And one irrefutable fact stared her in the face: she was the only one left.

The fire spread to some nearby trees as she stood there, but she made no move to escape the heat. I felt again her despair, and knew she wouldn’t have cared much if the fire had consumed her, too. The kumpania had fed and clothed her for years, and all they had asked in return was protection. She was there to ensure that the ancient nightmares that walked abroad at night, the things that even the strongest Rom man couldn’t fight, did not decimate their small group. The group had not always been kind, but they had kept their bargain. What did it matter if she had to drink from a separate bucket or if they went out of their way to keep from touching her? They had seen to it that she never wanted for anything. And how had she repaid them? With the very fate they had been trying to avoid. She ought to let the fire take her. They were right—she was unclean, and her birth had ensured that she would never be anything else.