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Chapter Twenty-three

Even though the floor was no longer flashing beneath the footrests of my wheelchair, I had trouble focusing on the carpeting as we rode the elevator down. So far my ears were sharper than my eyes: I recognized Kurt's voice immediately.

"We are allied with fools and incompetents," he complained behind me. "The countess wanted him awake by sunset and yet they drugged him a second time. She is furious!"

"She would certainly be more furious if he had escaped after awakening this afternoon," said a second voice—Graf, maybe—it certainly wasn't Jahn. "I understand their caution."

"Bah! If he was going to escape, he would have left with the bloodhair at daybreak."

"Maybe he feared the sun . . ." Since I had never heard Graf speak, I would only be guessing so, for now, I dubbed him "Skippy."

"If so, then he would hardly attempt an escape in the middle of the afternoon. He stays out of obligation to the hostages. He is honorable, this one." Kurt sighed. "Perhaps he is older than they say he is. Honor is such a rare commodity in this generation."

"Perhaps," Skippy allowed, "but I still understand their caution. He killed at least five of us now and he is only half as strong and half as fast as the rest of us. He is dangerous, this one!"

"Yes," Kurt agreed, "yes he is. He has the powers of a Doman, and some say that he is more Sire to Dracula than the Prince of Wallachia was Sire to him. Last year he destroyed the Egyptian necromancer, Kadeth Bey—something entire armies had failed to do for over four thousand years. His blood gives his chosen immunity from the sun and he has secrets that Our Lady both fears and desires."

"I would have second thoughts about facing him in single combat."

"You fear for your physical existence," Kurt said. "I fear more for his power to break my oath."

"You call him Warlock?" The awe and fear in his voice almost made me grin. Of course Skippy's use of the term was the ancient alias for "Oath-breaker," not the pop-cultural designation for a male witch, popularized by femophobic sexists and instructional television like Bewitched.

"She calls him Cséjthe," Kurt countered. "We swore an oath to the bloodline."

"We swore an oath to serve the House of Cachtice!"

"Cachtice, Cséjthe, linguistic hair-splitting. They are one and the same."

Skippy wasn't mollified. "But Erzsébet Báthory is eldest survivor and head of the bloodline. She is royalty. If he is of the blood, he still must swear fealty to her or be destroyed. If he does swear and she embraces him, he has no authority but that which she grants him. There can be no conflict. Our oath binds us to the eldest head of the line."

"Perhaps."

A frantic note crept into his voice. "There is no perhaps! Unless you choose to break your own oath and turn rogue."

"Not rogue," Kurt mused, "not if I am allied with another Doman."

"No," Skippy admitted. "Not rogue. But just as dead. You would ally yourself with a Halfling who has no demesnes. His werewolf lover has abandoned him, his two Thralls are less wamphyri than he, one of whom would betray him for the Embrace of any vampire lover, and you would have the combined might of the East Coast demesnes arrayed against you. To what purpose?"

"I would have my honor," Kurt replied quietly.

"Honor? Ptah," spat the other. "Your discontent is well-known, my friend. The countess has her eye on you. See what your honor gets you when push comes to shove!"

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. I kept my head down but rolled my eyes up as we moved into the corridor and around the corner: Gen/GEN was just down the hall. Feeling was starting to flow back into my fingers and toes but it was too little and too late. I couldn't run and I wouldn't hide.

I could only play the meager hand that was dealt me.

Any variant of poker and I was screwed; my only chance was a hand of Fifty-two Pick-up . . . 

They wheeled me into an office just two doors down from the Gen/GEN lab.

The woman who had once introduced herself as Elizabeth Cachtice was waiting for us. "Mr. Cséjthe, can you stand on your own?" she asked curtly.

A very dazed-looking Chalice Delacroix was by her side, still wearing the little black cocktail dress she'd had on the night of the BioWeb fundraiser. One strap was broken, possibly during the scuffle at Montrose's place, and a dark breast nudged the loose fabric aside like a Hershey's kiss attempting a curtain call. She swayed like a young tree in a high wind.

"Countess," I replied, trying to match her tone and mask my concern, "can you sit on it?"

Báthory's response was immediate and swift. She swung her arm, sweeping the top of the desk clean; the lamp and the phone went flying to crash against the far wall. "I don't have time for this," she hissed. "I have a video-conference set up in the genetics lab and two dozen envoys from the various enclaves waiting for us! I need you up! I need you healthy-looking! And I need your unquestionable obedience! All in the next ten minutes!"

"Well then," I drawled, still having a little trouble with making my mouth work properly, "it seems you've got a little problem."

"Have I?" Her eyes glittered in the backwash of the crumpled lamp on the floor. "Let's see if I can kill a bird and a bat with one stone!" She threw Chalice down on the desk and pinned her wrists above her head with one hand. More stunned than dazed now, Chalice gave no evidence of resistance but Báthory tightened her grip so that the muscles in her forearms bunched. "Bring him here," the countess ordered.

I was rolled up to the edge of the desk. Báthory handed me my teeth. I just stared at them in my hand. Was I ever going to spend a day in this place without someone handing me my fangs? Kurt took them from my hand, opened my mouth, and slid them into place. I didn't know which was more surprising: that he did that or that I let him.

The command was given to hold Chalice's legs, and Skippy moved to grasp her ankles. She groaned as the two vampires pulled, stretching her on her back across the desk. Báthory reached down with her free hand and ripped the front of the little black dress from neckline to hem.

"I caught this little bitch down in the containment labs last night! She was destroying the viral loads for Operation Blackout! I have already executed the security personnel who should have prevented such a thing from happening. The only reason that she is still alive is that she contributes to my hold over you. If you do as I say, she may live a little longer. If you disobey me, I will flay her alive and render her body fat into bath soap!"

"What do you want?" I asked carefully.

"First of all, I want you to drink."

"Drink?"

"Her blood. I need you to be able to walk and function with the appearance of health and the assumption that you are acting of your own volition."

"And then what?"

"We will go into the Gen lab and you will swear fealty to me before a roomful of witnesses with a camera recording the event for the other enclaves as well as my people back home. There will be an exchange of blood: mine for yours. Normally we both would drink, but I'm not sure that it is wise for me, given the unusual effects your blood seems to have on both the living and the undead. So, I will hold your blood in trust. You will drink mine as part of your blood oath to me. Then the oath will be administered and sealed. I expect you to speak and act as though you do these things of your own volition and that you do it willingly, if not eagerly.

"Make no mistake, however: I will maintain a psychic hold on your mind. You may not do anything without my permission. At the first hint of rebellion I will shut down your higher brain functions and you will become my puppet. And after this evening is over and we are back in my stronghold, back east, I will kill her as slowly and painfully as I can devise while you watch and listen. And when I am done, you will be forced to eat her remains. Some of which will be pre-chewed. Do I make myself clear?"

I swallowed bile and nodded.

"Do we have an understanding?"

"S-sure," I said. "N-no problem. I was just afraid you were still going to force me to sleep with you."

I knew it was mistake even before I said it but the words just came tumbling out of my mouth like eager puppies looking for mischief. Báthory's hand curled, her fingers becoming curved talons, and she raked Chalice's belly, trenching red furrows in her dark skin with inhumanly sharp fingernails.

"There, Mr. Cséjthe," Báthory crooned with stomach-churning sweetness, while Chalice moaned and twisted in the vampires' grasp, "I've prepared your trough. Drink up."

I opened my mouth to—to—what? Defy her? Threaten her? I had no leverage. Anything but unquestioning obedience on my part was only going to make things worse. After a moment's hard thought I spoke anyway: "I'll drink if you leave the room."

"And why should I do that?" Báthory wanted to know.

"I'm shy."

Báthory's verbal evaluation was somewhat different and a lot more vulgar.

"I'll drink," I tried again, "but I don't want an audience. This is a difficult thing for me. Feeding is . . . is . . . very private for me."

"Private?" Báthory's lips curled in an unpleasant smile. "I don't care where you bite her, Cséjthe. I am not leaving you alone until our business is done in the next room. Now we're running out of time." She reached across the desk, grabbed a handful of my hair, and pulled my face against Chalice's wounded stomach. "Feed!"

I rolled my face away from Báthory, smearing Chalice's blood across my nose and cheeks. As I did, I bit down hard on my lower lip, making twin punctures in my flesh with my artificial fangs. My own blood began to dribble down my chin and I turned my face back, backwashing my own blood into the torn flesh of Chalice's abdomen. As I turned, she sucked in her stomach, forming a shallow basin for the blood to pool in. I caught a little reverse tide, as well—more than I had counted on and it flooded my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I swallowed convulsively and nearly choked.

It was like tasting whiskey-laced honey and crank.

During my gradual transformation over the past year or so I had supplemented my diet with blood that had been clinically donated, packaged, frozen, stored, thawed, reheated, and eventually served in cradles of plastic or porcelain. Those rare occasions that I had tasted of a living host was when the blood was freely offered—a gift given, not forcibly or painfully taken.

This was utterly different.

As strong as the burning brightness of Chalice's blood had seemed when I sipped from her arm a few nights before, it paled in the supernova of now. It was as if her body had transformed into some kind of bipolar brewery and crystal meth lab, distilling the neural cracklings of her synapses and pain receptors into arterial white lightning. It was a heady blend, containing neurotransmitter lattice-works of codified adrenaline and compressed dopamine poppers that exploded at the back of your eyeballs, sizzled across the channels of your cerebral cortex, crawled through your chest like a prickling army of electrified lemmings, and detonated like depth charges in the murky depths of the hindbrain. It was like tasting colors and sounds, a symphony of dark energies that surged and thrust and hummed and spun, sucking me down and down into warm, pulsating wetness.

Dimly, I realized I was pushing my face against her tortured abs, trying to burrow like a mole into darkness. I pushed away but it took great effort.

I wiped at my bleary eyes: Báthory's amused face swam into view. "You've never really slaked your thirst with the wine of violence, have you Cséjthe?" she mocked. "Pain is the greatest aphrodisiac."

I wanted to say something rude and vulgar. I wanted to deny the dark power that had suddenly enveloped my senses and stripped away the veneer of humanity, but I was suddenly bereft of reason, of rational thought.

Of humanity.

I looked down but my eyes wouldn't focus. I wondered if Chalice had escaped and then wondered who or what I was even thinking about. The desk was a smorgasbord of chocolate sweetmeats, a buffet of fudge brownies and devil's-food delicacies, a cacophony of caviar and cocoa. And the stripes of cherry topping were like an irresistible dessert, a homing beacon to the tongue, the gravity well of a dark and mysterious star. I felt my face drawn downward, pulled by irresistible forces, and then, for a moment, could see flesh and blood in human form once more.

Chalice . . . 

I had to save her.

I had to have her!

The difference of one little letter: "s" or "h." Save her, have her, save her . . . have her . . . 

So thirsty . . . 

No.

Hungry!  

I bit down on my lower lip again and the pain was like a sleepy sensation buried under an avalanche of thrumming desire and appetite. Blood dripped from my mouth as I lowered it toward her chocolate sweetness. Crimson drops pattered across the scarlet slashes and her belly fluttered like the dance undulations of an Egyptian houri. She whimpered and I felt the tattered remnants of self-control snap taut like a threadbare flag in a sudden gale, a furnace wind from the soul.

I lowered my head (God help me, I couldn't stop myself) and I pressed my lips to her wounds. But I held that line against her velvet skin. More viral-loaded blood drooled from my mouth and I used my tongue to lave it into the open furrows, fighting the gripping, tightening, squeezing impulse to delicately slip its tip down and in, to gently probe, to slide—

I snapped my head back and Chalice moaned again. There was a different quality to the sound escaping her throat, this time. An undercurrent of a sigh. A sub-harmonic of surrender. I blinked and it seemed as if the cuts across her stomach were smaller, now. More shallow. I turned my face toward hers and saw that she had raised her head; her eyes were clear and locked on mine.

"The Blackout virus," she whispered. "It's a genetic tar baby—"

Báthory released her wrists and slammed Chalice's head back against the desk. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she was gone. My eyes searched her face, her throat, her upper body for any indication of breath. I reached to feel for a pulse and Báthory was around the desk before I could touch the side of her neck.

"No time for that," she said harshly, taking my arm and hauling me up and out of the wheelchair. "You can play with your new toy as soon as we're finished with the night's festivities."

I was able to walk now but Kurt took my left arm and Skippy my right and thery proceeded to support me between them like a vampire sandwich. Báthory stepped into a small washroom to the side of the entrance and produced a couple of wet towels. "Here," she said, tossing them so that one actually settled over my head. "Clean him up and then bring him in as soon as he's presentable."

She exited the office without a backward glance.

It took more than a couple of damp towels. I ended up with my head in the sink before it was over and about three-dozen paper towels and a whole roll of toilet paper before I was ghoulishly presentable.

During the process, I looked up at the face in the mirror.

It wasn't mine.

It was Chalice's.

And she looked even less substantial than I usually did.

Chalice?  

/Chris . . . I have to tell you . . ./  

My God, you look like a ghost!  

/I'm not sure but I think I am . . ./  

Oh my God! I've killed you!  

/Don't be an ass . . . that bitch killed me after you did everything you could to save me. . . ./  

Oh dear Lord, I am so, so sorry!  

/We don't have time for this . . . listen . . . I have to tell you something . . . something important . . ./  

Uh, okay.  

/They came looking for us at your friend's house . . . there were too many of them . . . I think they staked the boy. . . ./  

I felt a pang in spite of the fact that he was an annoying little twerp: I hadn't really disliked him all that much.

/After they brought me back to BioWeb, they put me to work under the supervision of one of the security guards . . . with Krakovski gone and the big move scheduled for tonight . . . oh, this is taking too long to explain . . ./   

Just cut to the chase.  

/The genetics of race is both more complicated and more simple than you might believe . . . skin color and hair texture and facial features are only superficial variations in the human race that are based on climatological influence rather than true genetic divisions . . ./  

I know. The externals of human appearance are actually determined by less than 0.01 percent of our genes while patterns of thousands to tens of thousands of gene markers determine other distinguishing characteristics like intelligence or susceptibility to certain diseases—things that really matter. I don't think the general has a clue as to what kind of a genetic smart bomb he's sponsoring. I figured it must have a melanin trigger— 

/It does . . . and it's very indiscriminate as a result . . . some Hispanics may be more susceptible than some Negroids . . . and more than a few Caucasians may trip the viral trigger, as well./  

That doesn't sound like it's very well designed.  

/Oh, it is . . . for its actual purpose, that is. You're right when you say that the general doesn't know what he's turning loose on the world. But the Blackout virus is actually a ruse, a classic example of misdirection./  

So it doesn't really work?  

/Oh, it does after a fashion. My people are seeing twice the mortality rate from this strain of the flu than from any previous year. There will probably be some kind of increase for other population vectors, as well. But it isn't a doomsday virus. Except to the people who die from it./  

So what is the point of developing this—what did you call it? Genetic tar baby? If it's only marginally more effective than Mother Nature and bound to set off alarms at the CDC, USAMRIID, and every genetics research facility around the globe?  

/That, it turns out, is precisely the point. As soon as the word gets out that there's a flu bug that singles out people of color the shit is going to hit the fan. There will be demonstrations, riots . . ./  

To say the least.   

/I am saying the least. Because once it comes out that the virus has been artificially tailored, the white establishment becomes public enemy number one./  

"Anarchy," I whispered.

Her ghostly reflection nodded in the mirror. /To say the least./ 

So, the end result is a social meltdown that is potentially more destructive than, say a virus with a fifty-percent mortality rate!  

/See how easily you're distracted by the social implications of the secondary virus? That's the real point of Operation Blackout. Any damages accrued are just bonus points. The real, end-of-the-world haymaker is the Greyware Project!/  

I shook my head, trying to clear it as much as deny this new premise. They're both bad news but I think the Blackout virus—God, doesn't that sound like something straight out of the Klueless Klutz Klan—is the greater and more immediate threat in end-of-the-world terms. 

/That's what everyone will think. Resources may be divided in attempting a cure for both but the greater attention and pressure will be directed toward the melanin marker. That's part of her plan. To give the Greyware virus a chance to spread unchecked./  

And?  

/The influenza is virulent: Everyone will get it!/  

But it only kills old people, right? I shook my head again. I don't mean that like it sounds. 

/It kills both the elderly and the unborn./  

So the very old and the very young?  

/I'm not talking about human fetuses. This flu is a super-combinant virus—much like the virus that turns the living into the undead. Except it's designed to operate backwards./  

And a big "huh?" here.  

/You told me the vampire virus was composed of two separate viruses, one which lives in the bloodstream, the other taking up residence in the saliva. Your condition is unique because you were only infected with one of the two virae./  

Okay . . .   

/Well, that's how you get a white-supremacist paramilitary organization to work with a bunch of vampires: Greyware was originally conceived as two-stage, piggybacked virus. Virus A: the flu, a general, low-grade, all-purpose infection that would infect everyone but be no more virulent than a mild cold. In fact, its base design is more along the lines of the cold virae than the influenza models. Virus B: piggybacked onto A as the all-purpose transporting agent, it was designed to trigger upon encountering telomeres of reduced lengths in the host's cells. It didn't have to be powerful to kill hosts of advanced age. Younger victims either would not trigger the secondary agent or would be healthy and strong enough to throw it off with little difficulty. That was the initial design./  

But Báthory tampered with the design?  

/Yes. The blueprints I saw last night show a tertiary virus, piggybacked behind B. Virus C is actually wired directly to A and uses the mild, flulike symptoms to mask its own purposes./  

Which are? The connection suddenly flared in my mind. Oh dear God! The unborn! It's designed to sterilize the host! 

The ghost of Chalice Delacroix inclined her head. /As one generation passeth away . . ./ 

So passeth the end of the world. And no one will notice until it's too late. I stared into her translucent eyes. Are you sure? 

/I would need a month or more of research and testing to be sure. But she certainly believes it. And the documentation lays it out in no uncertain terms. The only thing that doesn't make sense is why would a vampire want to bring about the end of the world? Or, at the least, eliminate her food supply?/  

That's easy.  

/It is . . . ?/  

Yeah. The short answer is, she isn't.  

/She isn't . . . ?/  

A vampire. I think she's something else. Not only some thing, but also some—  

Skippy yanked me away from the mirror. "Come on, man. Time to join the family."

I got in two backward glances as they walked me out the door. The mirror was as empty as the eyes of the corpse sprawled across the desk.

"Gentlemen," I said as we trundled down the hall to the door marked Gen/GEN, "the countess may be the Big Boo around here and I know that if she says 'bat,' everybody flaps . . ."

Skippy grinned but Kurt was listening very carefully.

" . . . but if anyone other than myself so much as touches that poor girl back there, I will dedicate the rest of my unlife—however short and difficult—to fucking them up beyond all recognition." I hadn't raised my voice but Skippy stopped grinning. "Do I make myself clear?"

Kurt nodded. "Crystal."

Gen/GEN looked different packed with people. There were about a dozen vampires, another dozen human soldier-types, and yet another dozen or so humanoids that were neither alive nor undead but as different from one another as the inhabitants of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Shakespeare said that there were more things in heaven and earth than we could dream of—perhaps he was referring to the denizens of that twilight realm in-between. Báthory, it appeared, had drawn most of her recruits, allies, and servitors from an otherworldly zip code.

The military attendees dressed uniformly (if you'll pardon the implied pun) in gray shirts with black ties and pants. Again, no insignia but that unmistakable carriage and attitude that set them apart and suggested martial discipline and training. The BioWeb vampires were dressed semiformally. No ties or joint color coordination but they dressed so as not to raise eyebrows as they passed among humans on the outside. The rest were a sartorial mixed bag: they dressed more like extras from The Rocky Horror Picture Show than envoys and ambassadors from unworldly realms. Perhaps this was the contingent from the Peewee Herman Dimension.

Since no one was wearing paper hats and booties I figured the need for "clean room" standards was at an end. That or perhaps paper-wear just wasn't festive enough for the fête that was about to commence.

I stood off to the side, flanked by my escorts who were doing their best to look more like an honor guard and less like my handlers.

I tried taking my mind off my broken promise to Robert Delacroix by contemplating the logistics of tonight's departure. If we were supposed to fly, I wondered whether the juxtaposition of a plane's wings and fuselage presented any impediment to vampires with hypersensitivity to a cruciform design.

Obviously the drugs still retained some finger-holds on my cortical folds.

Meanwhile, Liz was working the room.

There was the usual blather about being united in an important cause and how great things would come to pass due to the efforts of those gathered here tonight. I wasn't following too closely as I was trying to fight my way through the residual buzzing in my head and reach out to Deirdre.

Either the lines were down or she wasn't answering.

Now Báthory was putting an interesting spin on the events of this morning. About how her research had uncovered some unique properties in the family bloodline—proving, by the way, her incipient superiority over lesser vampires and humans and, thus, her divine right to rule as she saw fit.

Yadda, yadda, yadda . . .

Then there was the matter of The Dragonspawn—how he had been sired by Dracula, achieved the powers of a Doman and more, had slain a dozen vampires, himself, including Drac and the ancient sorcerer Kadeth Bey—it took me another moment to realize that she was talking about me. The big buildup was designed to lend significance to our pending alliance by magnifying my own importance.

Blah, blah, blah.

Finally, she announced that a little demonstration was in order.

Theresa was brought forward (sorry Toots, you can run but you can't hide) and she looked terrible. Not as bad as she would if Krakovski hadn't been scalpel-tated this morning, but bad nonetheless.

What are you doing? I asked, shooting the thought straight at Erzsébet's forehead.

It furrowed as if in pain. <I think another demonstration is in order,> she shot back.

If she intended to mindsmack me, the last vestiges of the tranquilizer must have still cushioned my brain from the brunt. That or the ingestion of Chalice's amped hemoglobin was reinforcing my own shields and defenses.

Hey, I'm still a couple of pints low from this morning, I reminded her.

<You just fed.>  

That was a snack, not a meal. The idea of referring to Chalice Delacroix as a snack was repugnant but I made the emotion work for me. I sent that ambiguity back at her in the guise of uncertainty, along with: Not to mention the residual dope in my system, thanks to your toy soldiers. Might throw off your demo in ways you haven't considered. 

She scowled and glanced over at a video camera on a tripod and wired to one of the lab computers. Hello: we're live for the folks back home in the Big Apple. Don't want any screw-ups that can't be re-spun later.

<Well, later then. For now I'll keep her nearby for insurance.>  

Yeah, you're in good hands with All-Stake. Looking at her face I was forcibly reminded why I never went out on a second date with a woman who didn't have a sense of humor.

"Join me, Mr. Cséjthe," she commanded aloud. She backed it up with a mental booster shot that pulled me away from my fanged bookends before I even had time to consider the directive. The Báthory Dog and Pony Show was under way in Supermarionation.

She motioned to me to approach and I staggered, stiff-legged, across the room to join her before the crowd. If you want to see me do my thing, pull my string.

A lab tech joined us. It wasn't Spyder. I wondered how ole Spyder was and whether any of his brains had actually leaked out of his ears. It sort of felt like mine was having a little slippage in that direction.

The tech slipped a needle into my forearm and withdrew two vials of blood in short order. Another tech swiveled the camera as one of the vials was carried over to a testing tray and prepared for analysis.

Here, and before the world—or at least the East Coast underworld—my lineage to the Báthory-Nádasdy line was to be revealed and validated. Too bad I was properly dressed instead of hanging out of one of those backless gowns we had appropriated this morning: it was the perfect moment to moon the audience.

It took just a few minutes for the results to be analyzed and verified: I was descended from the House of Cséjthe. But apparently not the House of Nádasdy. I thought of the Countess Báthory's storied premarital dalliance with a gypsy lad and the baby girl who was spirited away into the unknown mists of history.

So, it was true: on some level of generational reckoning, I was a bastard after all.

It was time for another speech and Báthory used the opportunity to diagram my place in the coming New Order. While she yakked, another voice began to whisper in the back of my head.

>Cséjthe . . .<  

Huh?  

>Cséjthe, are you anywhere near an exit?<  

Vlad? That you? I thought you were a drug-induced dream fragment.  

>We're outside the building. If you can get close to an exit, we'll—how do you say—bust you out.<  

You're here? In Louisiana?  

>In Monroe. Right outside BioWeb's rear emergency exit.<  

You came to rescue me? Talk about morte ex machina! Wow, someday my prince did come!  

>How can you jest at a time like this? You do not know Erzsébet Báthory!<  

I think you're probably right.  

>Can you slip away?<  

No can do, Uncle Morte. I'm surrounded by hostiles, still throwing off some kind of tranquilizing agent in my bloodstream, and I'm being mindstrung like a puppet: my body is not my own.  

>We share a blood-bond, Cséjthe. I may be able to break her hold on you and reinforce your will over your own flesh and blood.<  

May? I don't suppose you'd be willing to improve the odds by coming inside?  

>That woman has kept me on the run for decades and you ask me to walk into her lair now? You ask too much, Soulgiver.<  

What did you call me?  

"Cséjthe," interrupted our Mistress of Ceremonies, "it is time for you to take The Oath."

Kurt approached with a pair of crystal goblets and a small golden knife. I guess they needed something ceremonial and, in matters involving undead flesh, silver was a big no-no.

Our dominatrix of ceremonies took the knife first and ran the blade across the side of her neck. A living woman would have produced an arterial spray that would have spattered the far wall. Báthory's carotid artery produced a dribble that was quickly caught in one of the crystal goblets before her preternatural flesh resealed itself with no hint of a scar or blemish.

She handed the blade to me and mindwhispered: <I'll make the cut at the base of the neck and away from the artery.> 

The knife was in my hand but it might as well have been hers: she was still pulling the "strings."

"Now would be a good time," I murmured.

<A good time for what?>  

>To give Mr. Cséjthe the gift and curse of free will, Betya.< I felt Báthory's hold on me evaporate.

<Who is that?>  

"The Blue Fairy, Geppetto," I said, taking advantage of her surprise and confusion to pull her into my embrace. "Guess who just became a real, live boy."

I might be slower than a full-fledged vampire but I had the element of surprise: within the space of a single heartbeat I was standing behind her, my left arm clamped about her throat and my right hand pressing the scalpel-sharp blade against the back of her neck. "Nobody move!" I yelled. "Or I'll slice through her spinal column before anyone can say 'heads up'!"

The crowd looked more amused than upset. Was that because they knew I didn't have a prayer of getting out alive or because this passed for entertainment in the soap opera of succession?

"What do you want?" she croaked, being very careful not to add any pressure to the golden edge nestled between her third and fourth vertebrae.

"From you? Nothing. I've already got what I want from you." I nodded toward Kurt, who was still holding the crystal goblets, one of which held the dark, rich red essence of the countess' four-hundred-year-old veins. "I want Kurt, however, to give your blood to the lab tech. I want to see what happens when they run your genome through the database."

She tensed in my grasp. "My genetic profile is already in the database!"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. If it were, you wouldn't be able to connect me to the Báthory line. Erzsébet Báthory's grave is in northeastern Hungary, in the village of Ecsed. I believe her genetic samples were collected years ago so that the database wouldn't be corrupted with incorrect data. The wrong genome in the wrong field and flags would start popping up all over the place as you added hereditary listings."

"This is absurd!" she protested.

"What do you expect to prove?" Kurt asked.

"He's stalling!" Báthory exclaimed.

"Am I?" I asked. "It's a matter of history that the Countess Báthory dictated her last will and testament to two cathedral priests from Esztergom on July thirty-first, 1614. Three weeks later she was found dead, face down in her sealed chambers, by one of her guards."

"I was faking," she snapped, starting to squirm again. "How do you think I arranged my escape?"

"Good fake," I said, cutting into the back of her neck so that the edge of the blade touched the top of a vertebrae knob. She immediately stopped moving. "Erzsébet Báthory was fifty-four when she died and showed it. Did you fake that, too?"

"Kurt!" she cried, "he is cutting me!"

The head of her undead household stood next to the lab tech, clutching the crystal goblet of his mistress' blood in agonized indecision. "My lady, what would you have me do?"

I jerked her into a tighter embrace. "Run the blood, lapdog; or the countess dies the Second Death!"

He hesitated another two beats, then thrust the goblet into the technician's hands. "Run the countess' DNA," he ordered. "Hurry!"

"What are you doing?" Báthory screeched.

"Saving your life," her servitor replied.

I was hoping for the opposite result.

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Contents
Framed

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Contents

Chapter Twenty-three

Even though the floor was no longer flashing beneath the footrests of my wheelchair, I had trouble focusing on the carpeting as we rode the elevator down. So far my ears were sharper than my eyes: I recognized Kurt's voice immediately.

"We are allied with fools and incompetents," he complained behind me. "The countess wanted him awake by sunset and yet they drugged him a second time. She is furious!"

"She would certainly be more furious if he had escaped after awakening this afternoon," said a second voice—Graf, maybe—it certainly wasn't Jahn. "I understand their caution."

"Bah! If he was going to escape, he would have left with the bloodhair at daybreak."

"Maybe he feared the sun . . ." Since I had never heard Graf speak, I would only be guessing so, for now, I dubbed him "Skippy."

"If so, then he would hardly attempt an escape in the middle of the afternoon. He stays out of obligation to the hostages. He is honorable, this one." Kurt sighed. "Perhaps he is older than they say he is. Honor is such a rare commodity in this generation."

"Perhaps," Skippy allowed, "but I still understand their caution. He killed at least five of us now and he is only half as strong and half as fast as the rest of us. He is dangerous, this one!"

"Yes," Kurt agreed, "yes he is. He has the powers of a Doman, and some say that he is more Sire to Dracula than the Prince of Wallachia was Sire to him. Last year he destroyed the Egyptian necromancer, Kadeth Bey—something entire armies had failed to do for over four thousand years. His blood gives his chosen immunity from the sun and he has secrets that Our Lady both fears and desires."

"I would have second thoughts about facing him in single combat."

"You fear for your physical existence," Kurt said. "I fear more for his power to break my oath."

"You call him Warlock?" The awe and fear in his voice almost made me grin. Of course Skippy's use of the term was the ancient alias for "Oath-breaker," not the pop-cultural designation for a male witch, popularized by femophobic sexists and instructional television like Bewitched.

"She calls him Cséjthe," Kurt countered. "We swore an oath to the bloodline."

"We swore an oath to serve the House of Cachtice!"

"Cachtice, Cséjthe, linguistic hair-splitting. They are one and the same."

Skippy wasn't mollified. "But Erzsébet Báthory is eldest survivor and head of the bloodline. She is royalty. If he is of the blood, he still must swear fealty to her or be destroyed. If he does swear and she embraces him, he has no authority but that which she grants him. There can be no conflict. Our oath binds us to the eldest head of the line."

"Perhaps."

A frantic note crept into his voice. "There is no perhaps! Unless you choose to break your own oath and turn rogue."

"Not rogue," Kurt mused, "not if I am allied with another Doman."

"No," Skippy admitted. "Not rogue. But just as dead. You would ally yourself with a Halfling who has no demesnes. His werewolf lover has abandoned him, his two Thralls are less wamphyri than he, one of whom would betray him for the Embrace of any vampire lover, and you would have the combined might of the East Coast demesnes arrayed against you. To what purpose?"

"I would have my honor," Kurt replied quietly.

"Honor? Ptah," spat the other. "Your discontent is well-known, my friend. The countess has her eye on you. See what your honor gets you when push comes to shove!"

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. I kept my head down but rolled my eyes up as we moved into the corridor and around the corner: Gen/GEN was just down the hall. Feeling was starting to flow back into my fingers and toes but it was too little and too late. I couldn't run and I wouldn't hide.

I could only play the meager hand that was dealt me.

Any variant of poker and I was screwed; my only chance was a hand of Fifty-two Pick-up . . . 

They wheeled me into an office just two doors down from the Gen/GEN lab.

The woman who had once introduced herself as Elizabeth Cachtice was waiting for us. "Mr. Cséjthe, can you stand on your own?" she asked curtly.

A very dazed-looking Chalice Delacroix was by her side, still wearing the little black cocktail dress she'd had on the night of the BioWeb fundraiser. One strap was broken, possibly during the scuffle at Montrose's place, and a dark breast nudged the loose fabric aside like a Hershey's kiss attempting a curtain call. She swayed like a young tree in a high wind.

"Countess," I replied, trying to match her tone and mask my concern, "can you sit on it?"

Báthory's response was immediate and swift. She swung her arm, sweeping the top of the desk clean; the lamp and the phone went flying to crash against the far wall. "I don't have time for this," she hissed. "I have a video-conference set up in the genetics lab and two dozen envoys from the various enclaves waiting for us! I need you up! I need you healthy-looking! And I need your unquestionable obedience! All in the next ten minutes!"

"Well then," I drawled, still having a little trouble with making my mouth work properly, "it seems you've got a little problem."

"Have I?" Her eyes glittered in the backwash of the crumpled lamp on the floor. "Let's see if I can kill a bird and a bat with one stone!" She threw Chalice down on the desk and pinned her wrists above her head with one hand. More stunned than dazed now, Chalice gave no evidence of resistance but Báthory tightened her grip so that the muscles in her forearms bunched. "Bring him here," the countess ordered.

I was rolled up to the edge of the desk. Báthory handed me my teeth. I just stared at them in my hand. Was I ever going to spend a day in this place without someone handing me my fangs? Kurt took them from my hand, opened my mouth, and slid them into place. I didn't know which was more surprising: that he did that or that I let him.

The command was given to hold Chalice's legs, and Skippy moved to grasp her ankles. She groaned as the two vampires pulled, stretching her on her back across the desk. Báthory reached down with her free hand and ripped the front of the little black dress from neckline to hem.

"I caught this little bitch down in the containment labs last night! She was destroying the viral loads for Operation Blackout! I have already executed the security personnel who should have prevented such a thing from happening. The only reason that she is still alive is that she contributes to my hold over you. If you do as I say, she may live a little longer. If you disobey me, I will flay her alive and render her body fat into bath soap!"

"What do you want?" I asked carefully.

"First of all, I want you to drink."

"Drink?"

"Her blood. I need you to be able to walk and function with the appearance of health and the assumption that you are acting of your own volition."

"And then what?"

"We will go into the Gen lab and you will swear fealty to me before a roomful of witnesses with a camera recording the event for the other enclaves as well as my people back home. There will be an exchange of blood: mine for yours. Normally we both would drink, but I'm not sure that it is wise for me, given the unusual effects your blood seems to have on both the living and the undead. So, I will hold your blood in trust. You will drink mine as part of your blood oath to me. Then the oath will be administered and sealed. I expect you to speak and act as though you do these things of your own volition and that you do it willingly, if not eagerly.

"Make no mistake, however: I will maintain a psychic hold on your mind. You may not do anything without my permission. At the first hint of rebellion I will shut down your higher brain functions and you will become my puppet. And after this evening is over and we are back in my stronghold, back east, I will kill her as slowly and painfully as I can devise while you watch and listen. And when I am done, you will be forced to eat her remains. Some of which will be pre-chewed. Do I make myself clear?"

I swallowed bile and nodded.

"Do we have an understanding?"

"S-sure," I said. "N-no problem. I was just afraid you were still going to force me to sleep with you."

I knew it was mistake even before I said it but the words just came tumbling out of my mouth like eager puppies looking for mischief. Báthory's hand curled, her fingers becoming curved talons, and she raked Chalice's belly, trenching red furrows in her dark skin with inhumanly sharp fingernails.

"There, Mr. Cséjthe," Báthory crooned with stomach-churning sweetness, while Chalice moaned and twisted in the vampires' grasp, "I've prepared your trough. Drink up."

I opened my mouth to—to—what? Defy her? Threaten her? I had no leverage. Anything but unquestioning obedience on my part was only going to make things worse. After a moment's hard thought I spoke anyway: "I'll drink if you leave the room."

"And why should I do that?" Báthory wanted to know.

"I'm shy."

Báthory's verbal evaluation was somewhat different and a lot more vulgar.

"I'll drink," I tried again, "but I don't want an audience. This is a difficult thing for me. Feeding is . . . is . . . very private for me."

"Private?" Báthory's lips curled in an unpleasant smile. "I don't care where you bite her, Cséjthe. I am not leaving you alone until our business is done in the next room. Now we're running out of time." She reached across the desk, grabbed a handful of my hair, and pulled my face against Chalice's wounded stomach. "Feed!"

I rolled my face away from Báthory, smearing Chalice's blood across my nose and cheeks. As I did, I bit down hard on my lower lip, making twin punctures in my flesh with my artificial fangs. My own blood began to dribble down my chin and I turned my face back, backwashing my own blood into the torn flesh of Chalice's abdomen. As I turned, she sucked in her stomach, forming a shallow basin for the blood to pool in. I caught a little reverse tide, as well—more than I had counted on and it flooded my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I swallowed convulsively and nearly choked.

It was like tasting whiskey-laced honey and crank.

During my gradual transformation over the past year or so I had supplemented my diet with blood that had been clinically donated, packaged, frozen, stored, thawed, reheated, and eventually served in cradles of plastic or porcelain. Those rare occasions that I had tasted of a living host was when the blood was freely offered—a gift given, not forcibly or painfully taken.

This was utterly different.

As strong as the burning brightness of Chalice's blood had seemed when I sipped from her arm a few nights before, it paled in the supernova of now. It was as if her body had transformed into some kind of bipolar brewery and crystal meth lab, distilling the neural cracklings of her synapses and pain receptors into arterial white lightning. It was a heady blend, containing neurotransmitter lattice-works of codified adrenaline and compressed dopamine poppers that exploded at the back of your eyeballs, sizzled across the channels of your cerebral cortex, crawled through your chest like a prickling army of electrified lemmings, and detonated like depth charges in the murky depths of the hindbrain. It was like tasting colors and sounds, a symphony of dark energies that surged and thrust and hummed and spun, sucking me down and down into warm, pulsating wetness.

Dimly, I realized I was pushing my face against her tortured abs, trying to burrow like a mole into darkness. I pushed away but it took great effort.

I wiped at my bleary eyes: Báthory's amused face swam into view. "You've never really slaked your thirst with the wine of violence, have you Cséjthe?" she mocked. "Pain is the greatest aphrodisiac."

I wanted to say something rude and vulgar. I wanted to deny the dark power that had suddenly enveloped my senses and stripped away the veneer of humanity, but I was suddenly bereft of reason, of rational thought.

Of humanity.

I looked down but my eyes wouldn't focus. I wondered if Chalice had escaped and then wondered who or what I was even thinking about. The desk was a smorgasbord of chocolate sweetmeats, a buffet of fudge brownies and devil's-food delicacies, a cacophony of caviar and cocoa. And the stripes of cherry topping were like an irresistible dessert, a homing beacon to the tongue, the gravity well of a dark and mysterious star. I felt my face drawn downward, pulled by irresistible forces, and then, for a moment, could see flesh and blood in human form once more.

Chalice . . . 

I had to save her.

I had to have her!

The difference of one little letter: "s" or "h." Save her, have her, save her . . . have her . . . 

So thirsty . . . 

No.

Hungry!  

I bit down on my lower lip again and the pain was like a sleepy sensation buried under an avalanche of thrumming desire and appetite. Blood dripped from my mouth as I lowered it toward her chocolate sweetness. Crimson drops pattered across the scarlet slashes and her belly fluttered like the dance undulations of an Egyptian houri. She whimpered and I felt the tattered remnants of self-control snap taut like a threadbare flag in a sudden gale, a furnace wind from the soul.

I lowered my head (God help me, I couldn't stop myself) and I pressed my lips to her wounds. But I held that line against her velvet skin. More viral-loaded blood drooled from my mouth and I used my tongue to lave it into the open furrows, fighting the gripping, tightening, squeezing impulse to delicately slip its tip down and in, to gently probe, to slide—

I snapped my head back and Chalice moaned again. There was a different quality to the sound escaping her throat, this time. An undercurrent of a sigh. A sub-harmonic of surrender. I blinked and it seemed as if the cuts across her stomach were smaller, now. More shallow. I turned my face toward hers and saw that she had raised her head; her eyes were clear and locked on mine.

"The Blackout virus," she whispered. "It's a genetic tar baby—"

Báthory released her wrists and slammed Chalice's head back against the desk. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she was gone. My eyes searched her face, her throat, her upper body for any indication of breath. I reached to feel for a pulse and Báthory was around the desk before I could touch the side of her neck.

"No time for that," she said harshly, taking my arm and hauling me up and out of the wheelchair. "You can play with your new toy as soon as we're finished with the night's festivities."

I was able to walk now but Kurt took my left arm and Skippy my right and thery proceeded to support me between them like a vampire sandwich. Báthory stepped into a small washroom to the side of the entrance and produced a couple of wet towels. "Here," she said, tossing them so that one actually settled over my head. "Clean him up and then bring him in as soon as he's presentable."

She exited the office without a backward glance.

It took more than a couple of damp towels. I ended up with my head in the sink before it was over and about three-dozen paper towels and a whole roll of toilet paper before I was ghoulishly presentable.

During the process, I looked up at the face in the mirror.

It wasn't mine.

It was Chalice's.

And she looked even less substantial than I usually did.

Chalice?  

/Chris . . . I have to tell you . . ./  

My God, you look like a ghost!  

/I'm not sure but I think I am . . ./  

Oh my God! I've killed you!  

/Don't be an ass . . . that bitch killed me after you did everything you could to save me. . . ./  

Oh dear Lord, I am so, so sorry!  

/We don't have time for this . . . listen . . . I have to tell you something . . . something important . . ./  

Uh, okay.  

/They came looking for us at your friend's house . . . there were too many of them . . . I think they staked the boy. . . ./  

I felt a pang in spite of the fact that he was an annoying little twerp: I hadn't really disliked him all that much.

/After they brought me back to BioWeb, they put me to work under the supervision of one of the security guards . . . with Krakovski gone and the big move scheduled for tonight . . . oh, this is taking too long to explain . . ./   

Just cut to the chase.  

/The genetics of race is both more complicated and more simple than you might believe . . . skin color and hair texture and facial features are only superficial variations in the human race that are based on climatological influence rather than true genetic divisions . . ./  

I know. The externals of human appearance are actually determined by less than 0.01 percent of our genes while patterns of thousands to tens of thousands of gene markers determine other distinguishing characteristics like intelligence or susceptibility to certain diseases—things that really matter. I don't think the general has a clue as to what kind of a genetic smart bomb he's sponsoring. I figured it must have a melanin trigger— 

/It does . . . and it's very indiscriminate as a result . . . some Hispanics may be more susceptible than some Negroids . . . and more than a few Caucasians may trip the viral trigger, as well./  

That doesn't sound like it's very well designed.  

/Oh, it is . . . for its actual purpose, that is. You're right when you say that the general doesn't know what he's turning loose on the world. But the Blackout virus is actually a ruse, a classic example of misdirection./  

So it doesn't really work?  

/Oh, it does after a fashion. My people are seeing twice the mortality rate from this strain of the flu than from any previous year. There will probably be some kind of increase for other population vectors, as well. But it isn't a doomsday virus. Except to the people who die from it./  

So what is the point of developing this—what did you call it? Genetic tar baby? If it's only marginally more effective than Mother Nature and bound to set off alarms at the CDC, USAMRIID, and every genetics research facility around the globe?  

/That, it turns out, is precisely the point. As soon as the word gets out that there's a flu bug that singles out people of color the shit is going to hit the fan. There will be demonstrations, riots . . ./  

To say the least.   

/I am saying the least. Because once it comes out that the virus has been artificially tailored, the white establishment becomes public enemy number one./  

"Anarchy," I whispered.

Her ghostly reflection nodded in the mirror. /To say the least./ 

So, the end result is a social meltdown that is potentially more destructive than, say a virus with a fifty-percent mortality rate!  

/See how easily you're distracted by the social implications of the secondary virus? That's the real point of Operation Blackout. Any damages accrued are just bonus points. The real, end-of-the-world haymaker is the Greyware Project!/  

I shook my head, trying to clear it as much as deny this new premise. They're both bad news but I think the Blackout virus—God, doesn't that sound like something straight out of the Klueless Klutz Klan—is the greater and more immediate threat in end-of-the-world terms. 

/That's what everyone will think. Resources may be divided in attempting a cure for both but the greater attention and pressure will be directed toward the melanin marker. That's part of her plan. To give the Greyware virus a chance to spread unchecked./  

And?  

/The influenza is virulent: Everyone will get it!/  

But it only kills old people, right? I shook my head again. I don't mean that like it sounds. 

/It kills both the elderly and the unborn./  

So the very old and the very young?  

/I'm not talking about human fetuses. This flu is a super-combinant virus—much like the virus that turns the living into the undead. Except it's designed to operate backwards./  

And a big "huh?" here.  

/You told me the vampire virus was composed of two separate viruses, one which lives in the bloodstream, the other taking up residence in the saliva. Your condition is unique because you were only infected with one of the two virae./  

Okay . . .   

/Well, that's how you get a white-supremacist paramilitary organization to work with a bunch of vampires: Greyware was originally conceived as two-stage, piggybacked virus. Virus A: the flu, a general, low-grade, all-purpose infection that would infect everyone but be no more virulent than a mild cold. In fact, its base design is more along the lines of the cold virae than the influenza models. Virus B: piggybacked onto A as the all-purpose transporting agent, it was designed to trigger upon encountering telomeres of reduced lengths in the host's cells. It didn't have to be powerful to kill hosts of advanced age. Younger victims either would not trigger the secondary agent or would be healthy and strong enough to throw it off with little difficulty. That was the initial design./  

But Báthory tampered with the design?  

/Yes. The blueprints I saw last night show a tertiary virus, piggybacked behind B. Virus C is actually wired directly to A and uses the mild, flulike symptoms to mask its own purposes./  

Which are? The connection suddenly flared in my mind. Oh dear God! The unborn! It's designed to sterilize the host! 

The ghost of Chalice Delacroix inclined her head. /As one generation passeth away . . ./ 

So passeth the end of the world. And no one will notice until it's too late. I stared into her translucent eyes. Are you sure? 

/I would need a month or more of research and testing to be sure. But she certainly believes it. And the documentation lays it out in no uncertain terms. The only thing that doesn't make sense is why would a vampire want to bring about the end of the world? Or, at the least, eliminate her food supply?/  

That's easy.  

/It is . . . ?/  

Yeah. The short answer is, she isn't.  

/She isn't . . . ?/  

A vampire. I think she's something else. Not only some thing, but also some—  

Skippy yanked me away from the mirror. "Come on, man. Time to join the family."

I got in two backward glances as they walked me out the door. The mirror was as empty as the eyes of the corpse sprawled across the desk.

"Gentlemen," I said as we trundled down the hall to the door marked Gen/GEN, "the countess may be the Big Boo around here and I know that if she says 'bat,' everybody flaps . . ."

Skippy grinned but Kurt was listening very carefully.

" . . . but if anyone other than myself so much as touches that poor girl back there, I will dedicate the rest of my unlife—however short and difficult—to fucking them up beyond all recognition." I hadn't raised my voice but Skippy stopped grinning. "Do I make myself clear?"

Kurt nodded. "Crystal."

Gen/GEN looked different packed with people. There were about a dozen vampires, another dozen human soldier-types, and yet another dozen or so humanoids that were neither alive nor undead but as different from one another as the inhabitants of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Shakespeare said that there were more things in heaven and earth than we could dream of—perhaps he was referring to the denizens of that twilight realm in-between. Báthory, it appeared, had drawn most of her recruits, allies, and servitors from an otherworldly zip code.

The military attendees dressed uniformly (if you'll pardon the implied pun) in gray shirts with black ties and pants. Again, no insignia but that unmistakable carriage and attitude that set them apart and suggested martial discipline and training. The BioWeb vampires were dressed semiformally. No ties or joint color coordination but they dressed so as not to raise eyebrows as they passed among humans on the outside. The rest were a sartorial mixed bag: they dressed more like extras from The Rocky Horror Picture Show than envoys and ambassadors from unworldly realms. Perhaps this was the contingent from the Peewee Herman Dimension.

Since no one was wearing paper hats and booties I figured the need for "clean room" standards was at an end. That or perhaps paper-wear just wasn't festive enough for the fête that was about to commence.

I stood off to the side, flanked by my escorts who were doing their best to look more like an honor guard and less like my handlers.

I tried taking my mind off my broken promise to Robert Delacroix by contemplating the logistics of tonight's departure. If we were supposed to fly, I wondered whether the juxtaposition of a plane's wings and fuselage presented any impediment to vampires with hypersensitivity to a cruciform design.

Obviously the drugs still retained some finger-holds on my cortical folds.

Meanwhile, Liz was working the room.

There was the usual blather about being united in an important cause and how great things would come to pass due to the efforts of those gathered here tonight. I wasn't following too closely as I was trying to fight my way through the residual buzzing in my head and reach out to Deirdre.

Either the lines were down or she wasn't answering.

Now Báthory was putting an interesting spin on the events of this morning. About how her research had uncovered some unique properties in the family bloodline—proving, by the way, her incipient superiority over lesser vampires and humans and, thus, her divine right to rule as she saw fit.

Yadda, yadda, yadda . . .

Then there was the matter of The Dragonspawn—how he had been sired by Dracula, achieved the powers of a Doman and more, had slain a dozen vampires, himself, including Drac and the ancient sorcerer Kadeth Bey—it took me another moment to realize that she was talking about me. The big buildup was designed to lend significance to our pending alliance by magnifying my own importance.

Blah, blah, blah.

Finally, she announced that a little demonstration was in order.

Theresa was brought forward (sorry Toots, you can run but you can't hide) and she looked terrible. Not as bad as she would if Krakovski hadn't been scalpel-tated this morning, but bad nonetheless.

What are you doing? I asked, shooting the thought straight at Erzsébet's forehead.

It furrowed as if in pain. <I think another demonstration is in order,> she shot back.

If she intended to mindsmack me, the last vestiges of the tranquilizer must have still cushioned my brain from the brunt. That or the ingestion of Chalice's amped hemoglobin was reinforcing my own shields and defenses.

Hey, I'm still a couple of pints low from this morning, I reminded her.

<You just fed.>  

That was a snack, not a meal. The idea of referring to Chalice Delacroix as a snack was repugnant but I made the emotion work for me. I sent that ambiguity back at her in the guise of uncertainty, along with: Not to mention the residual dope in my system, thanks to your toy soldiers. Might throw off your demo in ways you haven't considered. 

She scowled and glanced over at a video camera on a tripod and wired to one of the lab computers. Hello: we're live for the folks back home in the Big Apple. Don't want any screw-ups that can't be re-spun later.

<Well, later then. For now I'll keep her nearby for insurance.>  

Yeah, you're in good hands with All-Stake. Looking at her face I was forcibly reminded why I never went out on a second date with a woman who didn't have a sense of humor.

"Join me, Mr. Cséjthe," she commanded aloud. She backed it up with a mental booster shot that pulled me away from my fanged bookends before I even had time to consider the directive. The Báthory Dog and Pony Show was under way in Supermarionation.

She motioned to me to approach and I staggered, stiff-legged, across the room to join her before the crowd. If you want to see me do my thing, pull my string.

A lab tech joined us. It wasn't Spyder. I wondered how ole Spyder was and whether any of his brains had actually leaked out of his ears. It sort of felt like mine was having a little slippage in that direction.

The tech slipped a needle into my forearm and withdrew two vials of blood in short order. Another tech swiveled the camera as one of the vials was carried over to a testing tray and prepared for analysis.

Here, and before the world—or at least the East Coast underworld—my lineage to the Báthory-Nádasdy line was to be revealed and validated. Too bad I was properly dressed instead of hanging out of one of those backless gowns we had appropriated this morning: it was the perfect moment to moon the audience.

It took just a few minutes for the results to be analyzed and verified: I was descended from the House of Cséjthe. But apparently not the House of Nádasdy. I thought of the Countess Báthory's storied premarital dalliance with a gypsy lad and the baby girl who was spirited away into the unknown mists of history.

So, it was true: on some level of generational reckoning, I was a bastard after all.

It was time for another speech and Báthory used the opportunity to diagram my place in the coming New Order. While she yakked, another voice began to whisper in the back of my head.

>Cséjthe . . .<  

Huh?  

>Cséjthe, are you anywhere near an exit?<  

Vlad? That you? I thought you were a drug-induced dream fragment.  

>We're outside the building. If you can get close to an exit, we'll—how do you say—bust you out.<  

You're here? In Louisiana?  

>In Monroe. Right outside BioWeb's rear emergency exit.<  

You came to rescue me? Talk about morte ex machina! Wow, someday my prince did come!  

>How can you jest at a time like this? You do not know Erzsébet Báthory!<  

I think you're probably right.  

>Can you slip away?<  

No can do, Uncle Morte. I'm surrounded by hostiles, still throwing off some kind of tranquilizing agent in my bloodstream, and I'm being mindstrung like a puppet: my body is not my own.  

>We share a blood-bond, Cséjthe. I may be able to break her hold on you and reinforce your will over your own flesh and blood.<  

May? I don't suppose you'd be willing to improve the odds by coming inside?  

>That woman has kept me on the run for decades and you ask me to walk into her lair now? You ask too much, Soulgiver.<  

What did you call me?  

"Cséjthe," interrupted our Mistress of Ceremonies, "it is time for you to take The Oath."

Kurt approached with a pair of crystal goblets and a small golden knife. I guess they needed something ceremonial and, in matters involving undead flesh, silver was a big no-no.

Our dominatrix of ceremonies took the knife first and ran the blade across the side of her neck. A living woman would have produced an arterial spray that would have spattered the far wall. Báthory's carotid artery produced a dribble that was quickly caught in one of the crystal goblets before her preternatural flesh resealed itself with no hint of a scar or blemish.

She handed the blade to me and mindwhispered: <I'll make the cut at the base of the neck and away from the artery.> 

The knife was in my hand but it might as well have been hers: she was still pulling the "strings."

"Now would be a good time," I murmured.

<A good time for what?>  

>To give Mr. Cséjthe the gift and curse of free will, Betya.< I felt Báthory's hold on me evaporate.

<Who is that?>  

"The Blue Fairy, Geppetto," I said, taking advantage of her surprise and confusion to pull her into my embrace. "Guess who just became a real, live boy."

I might be slower than a full-fledged vampire but I had the element of surprise: within the space of a single heartbeat I was standing behind her, my left arm clamped about her throat and my right hand pressing the scalpel-sharp blade against the back of her neck. "Nobody move!" I yelled. "Or I'll slice through her spinal column before anyone can say 'heads up'!"

The crowd looked more amused than upset. Was that because they knew I didn't have a prayer of getting out alive or because this passed for entertainment in the soap opera of succession?

"What do you want?" she croaked, being very careful not to add any pressure to the golden edge nestled between her third and fourth vertebrae.

"From you? Nothing. I've already got what I want from you." I nodded toward Kurt, who was still holding the crystal goblets, one of which held the dark, rich red essence of the countess' four-hundred-year-old veins. "I want Kurt, however, to give your blood to the lab tech. I want to see what happens when they run your genome through the database."

She tensed in my grasp. "My genetic profile is already in the database!"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. If it were, you wouldn't be able to connect me to the Báthory line. Erzsébet Báthory's grave is in northeastern Hungary, in the village of Ecsed. I believe her genetic samples were collected years ago so that the database wouldn't be corrupted with incorrect data. The wrong genome in the wrong field and flags would start popping up all over the place as you added hereditary listings."

"This is absurd!" she protested.

"What do you expect to prove?" Kurt asked.

"He's stalling!" Báthory exclaimed.

"Am I?" I asked. "It's a matter of history that the Countess Báthory dictated her last will and testament to two cathedral priests from Esztergom on July thirty-first, 1614. Three weeks later she was found dead, face down in her sealed chambers, by one of her guards."

"I was faking," she snapped, starting to squirm again. "How do you think I arranged my escape?"

"Good fake," I said, cutting into the back of her neck so that the edge of the blade touched the top of a vertebrae knob. She immediately stopped moving. "Erzsébet Báthory was fifty-four when she died and showed it. Did you fake that, too?"

"Kurt!" she cried, "he is cutting me!"

The head of her undead household stood next to the lab tech, clutching the crystal goblet of his mistress' blood in agonized indecision. "My lady, what would you have me do?"

I jerked her into a tighter embrace. "Run the blood, lapdog; or the countess dies the Second Death!"

He hesitated another two beats, then thrust the goblet into the technician's hands. "Run the countess' DNA," he ordered. "Hurry!"

"What are you doing?" Báthory screeched.

"Saving your life," her servitor replied.

I was hoping for the opposite result.

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