Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Joseph’s whole body shifted immediately into a defensive predator mode. His muscles tensed and his senses reached out to provide hyper-detailed information about the environment. First, he noticed the door. Most of the damage was in the jamb itself, as the wood had been battered in by something heavy. The deadbolt had bent slightly but the jamb had given way, splintering into the house. The smell of stained lumber was tart in his nostrils.

Inside, the darkness was heavy, but Joseph’s night vision cut through the gloom better than military goggles. He could see splinters of wood strewn on the floor from the impact on the door and something else. Scrapes of skin on the stone that were barely perceptible. He crouched down closer to the floor, keeping half of his attention directed into the house in case the intruders were still present. Joseph guessed that the dermal residue was from the bare feet of someone walking—or being dragged—into the house.

The cool, environmentally controlled air tingled his skin as he adjusted from the outdoor warmth of May. He inhaled deeply. His sharp sense of smell, evolved to stalk prey, turned to the task of identifying the interlopers. Joseph detected three distinct pheromone signatures. He almost saw the smells like one might see colors in the air, drifting and mingling. Two of them were familiar. One of those was very familiar. And there was something more. Something which excited and concerned him deeply. Blood. Joseph rose to standing. He turned and pushed the oak door closed as far as it would go with the mangled deadbolt sticking out of the side.

He called out into the cool darkness. “Alexander!”

A form stepped from around the corner, shrouded in darkness. Joseph could smell the other vampire’s essence, but also dirt, grass, leaves… disinfectant fluid? … and blood.

“Hello, Father,” he said coldly.

“You said a week,” Joseph replied.

”Oh, I just had to see you again. Family is so important,” Alexander needled.

Joseph felt the verbal jab but forced himself to be calm. His anger had already exposed him once to these two. “You broke my door. I just got the new lock installed,” Joseph replied, still tensed in case of trouble.

“And it was very strong. It took me two whole tries to bust it in. But then, you didn’t leave a window open for me, so what other option did I have?” Alexander was playing with him, adopting a petulant tone that hinted to something devious up his sleeve. It had been a hundred years since they’d spent real time together, but Joseph still knew the other man that well.

“Where is she?” Joseph could smell Alexander’s companion.

“In the kitchen. We wouldn’t dream of visiting without bringing a gift.” Alexander’s eyes flashed dangerously. “She’s keeping it company, Father.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your father.” Joseph advanced slowly toward the younger vampire, his body shifting from a defensive stance to an attack posture: tall, imposing.

“Nonsense, you’re more of a father than the human who shot his seed into my whore of a mother. I never knew the bastard until I tracked him down and tore his throat out.”

Joseph remembered it. Alexander’s obsession after his turning was finding his biological parentage and wiping them off the face of the Earth. He fed on his mother and then hunted and slaughtered his father. Joseph had tried to stop him, but his efforts had been futile. It was then, when Joseph witnessed the savagery of the being he had given this power to, that Joseph truly understood the ramifications of turning a new vampire, and vowed never to do it again.

“If you were concerned with manners, you should have let me know you were coming,” Joseph growled.

“Ah, but that would have ruined the surprise.”

“A week, you said.” Joseph took another step toward the younger vampire.

Alexander turned his head and smelled the air deeply. “Even now, I smell them on you and in this house. One of them pervades this space, and the other—” he brought his nose up against Joseph’s face “—is newer. You bedded your human recently.”

“You’ve fucked humans.”

“Not in decades,” Alexander scoffed. “Not since New Orleans eradicated Yellow Fever.”

Joseph controlled his emotions so that they wouldn’t betray him. “You should. They’re much cleaner these days.”

“They’re as repulsive as you are.”

As the two men stood nose to nose, tension building to a crescendo, Roxana called from the kitchen. “Come, my batal, dinner is getting cold!”

Joseph suspected the answer, but he asked anyway, “What did you bring into my house?”

Alexander grinned wickedly. “Your surprise…” he whispered and turned away into the kitchen.

Joseph followed his younger progeny into the next room and was taken aback. He knew whatever Alexander and Roxana had planned would be bad, but this was some kind of awful torture theater.

Tied and gagged to a chair in the middle of the dining area was a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, wearing no more than a grimy summer dress which hung torn off one shoulder, revealing her breast. She was scratched and dirty, and Joseph could see and smell that she had been living on the street for some time. But the worst thing was that she was drenched in blood. Joseph knew it wasn’t hers; two empty blood bags lay flaccid next to the woman’s chair. She looked at him with terror in her eyes, and he looked back with pity in his. He knew she would not survive the night.

Joseph glanced at the refrigerator and saw the blood leaking out. They had found his supply and destroyed it. The very thought of food made him realize he hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and was thus in a weakened state.

Roxana bowed her head theatrically to Joseph. “For you, Herr Knoblauch. We have already eaten this evening, so you may have your fill.”

It was a game for them.

“No,” he said firmly.

“How very rude.” Roxana went to Alexander and stood by his side, draping a sinewy hand up over his shoulder.

Alexander kissed it before moving behind the tied-up woman. “We found your bagged blood and figured for some unfathomable reason you prefer it, so we warmed it for you.” He traced a finger through the thickening blood on the homeless woman’s arm and across her clavicle and her neck, then brought it to his mouth to taste, an expression of revulsion coming over his face. “It’s still disgusting.”

“Get out of my house. Now.” Joseph’s mind raced, trying to figure out what he could do for the terrified young woman. Every scenario ended badly. If he somehow managed to get her out of the house alive, she would still have been abducted by two vampires and taken to the home of a third vampire, and they could all be identified.

“Tsk, tsk, father. We didn’t come here to make you kill a homeless wench. There’s business to attend to.” Alexander turned and took his opposite hand to the woman’s throat. With a small puncture device affixed like a claw to his thumb, he pierced her neck at the jugular vein. It was so fast and the claw so sharp the woman didn’t even scream. There was only a look of surprise in her wide, horrified eyes. Alexander held his hand in front of the blood as it came in spurts from the wound.

“Don’t want to make more of a mess than we already have, now do we?” He grinned happily. As the initial spurts gave way to a steady stream of blood from the wound, he licked the fresh gore from his hand. “Mmm, much better. You really should try it.” He held out his hand to Joseph invitingly. “Please, you didn’t do the killing, your precious conscience can rest easy. It’s just so much better than the reheated garbage you subject yourself to.”

The woman moaned as she felt her lifeblood oozing from her body. This was going to take a while. Joseph made visual contact with her and flashed his eyes, trying to will her to be less aware of her own impending death. But Roxana stepped between them. “Ah-ah, Bavarian. The fear makes it taste better.”

“You’re sure you don’t want any, father?” Alexander chided him.

Joseph knew he was being baited but refused to engage. As it was, as soon as these two had snatched the woman from the street, her death had been inevitable. “You’re an animal.”

“We are animals all, father,” Alexander retorted. “Nature has an order, and it is you who refuses to acknowledge it. You are a predator. You should act like one.” He sighed. “Well, there’s no point in it going to waste. My darling, help yourself.”

Roxana gave a small purring squeal that sent a shiver down Joseph’s spine as she moved to the homeless woman and pushed her head to expose the puncture wound. As she drank, Alexander approached Joseph until he was within arm’s reach. “Now to business. We want all of it.”

Joseph blinked. The change in subject was so abrupt he didn’t realize what Alexander was referring to. “All? Of what?”

“Your empire. The family business. I’ll give you credit, father, you saw what the world was becoming and built something powerful. And we want it.”

Joseph looked at Alexander, whose demeanor had turned almost contrite, and then back to Roxana, feasting on a woman tied to a chair in his kitchen, and then back to Alexander, who looked expectant, like he wanted an answer to the absurd demand.

“I see you’re at a loss for words. I’ll make it simple to understand. You have power in this world. Real power, with influence over millions. It’s more than I have, and I want it. I’d have settled for half, but then you had to go and act all holier-than-thou, and made me look weak in front of my darling wife. I really don’t want to kill you, Joseph. If only because I don’t know what that would do to the thing I aim to take from you. I want to keep it as valuable as possible. But we will kill you. If you make us. You can’t possibly stand against both of us in a fair fight. Look at you.”

Alexander stepped back, and took his own advice, looking Joseph up and down, and continued. “For as powerful as the thing you have built is, you yourself are, in reality, soft and weak.”

Roxanna finished drinking from the woman, who was still semiconscious, and stood tall next to Alexander. When she spoke, her silky voice betrayed her physical power. At nearly fifteen hundred years old, she was easily the strongest of the three of them. “Your progeny has come home to you, Bavarian, and we have proven our capacity to harm that which you love. Do not presume you are in a position to negotiate. You are not.”

She used Joseph’s own words from their encounter in the park against him before she turned and walked from the kitchen. Alexander cocked an eyebrow at Joseph and shrugged his shoulders as if to say “Women. What can you do?” and followed her.

He stopped at the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the woman in the chair, and then at Joseph. “Be a predator, Father. We’ll be in touch to arrange details. In the meantime, I have yet to experience all the flavors of the City of Angels.”

He left. Joseph heard the door creak open and their footsteps out the front stoop. He turned to the woman in the chair, who was looking at him, her eyes begging. He held her with his gaze and willed her pain away. Her eyes went glassy like a patient on morphine, and her head lolled. Joseph licked his lips, unaware that he was slowly moving towards the woman. His stomach rumbled, and his heartbeat quickened as a need overtook his senses.