Chapter 7
John sat in the stone courtyard in front of the hotel, waiting for the sun to set and his watch to tell him it was time to meet Alexandra and her lover up in the hills.
He had not checked into the hotel, but had parked his rental car down by the pier in an all-night lot and slept in the backseat. He knew he was being paranoid, but he felt safer not using the credit card and phony ID Cyprien had given him. He might have to use the vampire's resources, but he didn't want to give him the means to track his movements.
A small collection of exclusive shops had been built on the west side of the hotel courtyard to cater to the whims of the guests. John watched stressed-out parents herd their children into the ice-cream shop, while pretty girls with bored boyfriends in tow idly browsed the clothing boutique.
The scents of sunshine, expensive perfume, and engine exhaust dwindled as John smelled something less civilized.
A young, grungy-looking man dressed in dirty clothes and a knit cap and carrying a sagging backpack passed by John as he went to a garbage can outside the small designer sandwich shop. The drifter took the protective green hooded lid off and bent down, rummaging through the trash before he straightened and with eager hands unwrapped a crumple of paper. He grinned and bit into the half-eaten sandwich inside.
John remembered doing the same thing when he was a kid on the streets. Sometimes he had staked out certain garbage cans in particular so that he could get the food thrown in them just after it was discarded. He had never stolen or begged for food for himself, only for his little sister.
Alexandra had hardly ever complained, even when he couldn't get the milk she always craved. She'd been just a baby, but somehow she'd known.
A man in a white apron with his sleeves rolled up stepped out of the sandwich shop. He smelled of Calvin Klein and cheap mayonnaise. "Hey," he shouted at the drifter. "Get out of there."
Rather than taking off, the drifter stuffed the discarded sandwich into his mouth, making his cheeks bulge, and bent over the garbage can again, reaching for something inside.
"Hey." The aproned man came over and shove him away from it. "You deaf or something, you bum?"
John got up and strode over, stepping in front of the drifter. "Knock it off."
"He's eating out of the tricking trash can," the man complained. "It's making my customers sick."
John looked at the avid faces watching them from inside the shop. Two girls were openly laughing. "They don't look so green from here."
"Now look," the aproned man said, glowering at John from under his brows. "This is private property. We got city ordinances against vagrants."
"You fucking hypocrite," John said, the rage coming over him so fast he didn't even think to resist. "You probably waste enough food in one day to feed fifty people."
"Yeah, well, this ain't no soup kitchen." To the drifter, he said. "You got two minutes to clear out of here before I call the cops." He stabbed a finger at John. "Same goes for you, asshole." Muttering to himself about bleeding-heart liberals, the aproned man stalked back into the shop.
Hatred ballooned inside John. He felt like going in after him and grabbing the self-righteous bastard by the throat, and shaking him until his false teeth popped out of his mouth.
A dirty hand touched his arm.
"Let it go, man," the drifter said. "He ain't worth spending a night in the drunk tank." He sized up John with speculative glance. "There's some good places to sleep down by the dock, if you're looking."
"I'm not drunk, and I have a place to sleep." Still glaring at the windows of the sandwich shop, John reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. "Here." He gave the drifter Cyprien's credit card. "You can use this at any ATM. The pin number is seven-four-one-two. I think it's got a five-grand limit."
"You for real?" The drifter took the card as if it were made of solid gold. "It ain't stolen, is it?" He immediately tried to hand it back. "I don't want to get busted."
"It's not stolen." John felt better, lighter. "My sister has a rich boyfriend. He gave it to me, but I don't need or want his money."
"If you're sure." The drifter stuffed the card down the front of his grimy trousers, and then offered his hand. John shook it. "Thanks, man. You're a walking saint." With a quick glance at the sandwich shop, the man reached into the garbage can and retrieved a partially eaten slice of pizza. He grinned at John. "I can't resist pepperoni and mushrooms. My favorite." He began to munch on it as he wandered around the side of the building.
John heard a siren drawing close and walked down a block to where he had parked the rental. He ducked inside and waited until the patrol car passed, and then started the engine and drove off.
John went down to Cannery Row and parked the rental by a small movie theater. He had enough money left in his wallet to buy a ticket, and went in to sit in the back row of the theater. When the film started, he slouched down and closed his tired eyes.
Back when they lived on the streets in Chicago, John had learned how to sneak into movie theaters. He'd stand out of sight by the ticket booth and wait until a large family bought tickets. He would scoot out, leading Alexandra by the hand, and walk in right behind them. Nine times out of ten the usher wouldn't check the number of tickets given to him, and would assume he and Alex were part of the family group.
Movie theaters were good, safe places to sleep. In between shows, John would take Alex into the restroom, and keep her there until the ushers were finished cleaning the aisles. Then he would return for another two-hour nap.
Sometimes just before the show started, he pretended he'd left something in the front seats, and scout around for any buckets of popcorn or boxes of candy wedged in the seats: the ushers always missed those. Once he found an unopened box of SnoCaps. Alex's favorite candy. He would have let her eat the entire box during the next showing, but by then Alex had learned that treats were precious. She'd carried the box around for a week, eating the candy one or two pieces at a time.
Sweet, sweet boy. Thin, bloody fingers caressed his cheek, his chest, his cock.
He opened his eyes to look up at the petite blond woman. She had returned to the bedroom they had locked him in, but now there were no guards to stop her.
Did you miss me? She had changed out of her ball gown and now wore a yellow silk negligee that did more to reveal her body than conceal it.
John knew what she wanted. Leave me alone.
I don't believe I'm going to do that. Elizabeth smiled as she fingered the bandage Alexandra had put on the side of his throat, and then ripped it off. They say you were a priest. I find that very arousing.
She had taken the thin braids out of her golden hair, the ends of which brushed against his chest as she straddled him. She rubbed herself against him, her smooth brow furrowing when his body didn't respond.
You deny me?
The stink of mildew and damp wood filled John's head, promising to take him back to the alley behind the produce warehouse. Where he had slept with Alexandra one night when he was eight years old, in a small fortress he had fashioned out of moldering fruit crates. Where the rats had prowled after dark, furtively looking for any fresh meat.
No. John couldn't go back there again.
Then give me what I want. She ground her crotch over his.
She repulsed him, but he feared the memory of the rats more. He seized her waist and rolled over with her, yanking up the transparent nightgown and baring her pelvis.
Elizabeth scowled and pushed at him. Get off.
John knew she had Kyn strength, and in the next moment fully expected to feel himself flying across the room. But she didn't use it against him as she pushed. She was only going through the motions; her eyes gleamed with excitement.
John felt his blood turn to ice as he realized what she wanted him to do. It didn't arouse him, and it didn't frighten him. It enraged him.
His hands wrapped around her neck. He shook her like a doll. You think you can make me rape you? he shouted. I'm not an animal.
Oh, but, sweet boy, you are. Elizabeth undulated beneath him, her lips pouting. We know everything you've done, how you've forced yourself on other women, and you loved every moment, didn't you? Shoving yourself into them, making them take it, making them do those dirty, dirty things to you.
He slapped her. Shut up.
The blow split her lip, spilling blood onto her chin before the cut instantly healed. She gave him a gory smile. Those things you wanted her to do to you.
No. John shook his head, releasing her and desperately trying to scramble away, but her hands became manacles around his wrists.
She smiled. Didn't Alexandra want to do them?
Horror destroyed the loathing and lust inside him, and then Elizabeth was pulling him down, her bloodied mouth wide, her lips peeling back from her fangs—
Mister.
"Mister."
"Mister."
John jerked awake, startling the usher standing over him.
"Theater's closing, mister," the young boy said. He looked at John's face and retreated a few steps. "You gotta go now."
"Sorry." John pushed the sweat-soaked hair out of his face and forced his tired body out of the folding seat. The usher followed at a safe distance until John staggered out of the theater and into the night.
John didn't dare go to sleep after that, but drove around the empty streets of Monterey for hours, the radio in the rental car turned up loud enough to keep him from thinking.
Fog slowly rolled in from the bay and swaddled the apartments and cottages and mansions in damp, white mist. John passed an ancient VW Bug, its battered, rusting body still bearing some faded remnants of the psychedelic art a stoned hippie had hand-painted on it forty years ago. In the space next to it a red Maserati gleamed, a sleeping demon on wheels, its vanity plate reading. 2FAST4U.
That made curious sense to John. Everything was happening too fast.
He drove up to the small military base on the hill above town and parked outside the gates. In a few hours, a lone bugle would pierce the air at oh-six-hundred, rousing the soldier-students from their dorm rooms. Some would walk down the steep hill to have breakfast in town, while others wandered into the chow hall, where they practiced in low voices the tongue-twisting dialogues for their Arabic-, Russian-, Korean-, and Chinese-language classes.
But for now the linguists at the Presidio and the owners of the VW and the Maserati slept, safe in their beds, assured that all was as it should be, and the world would continue, as it always had, to spin day into night, night into day.
None of them. John was sure, would dream of rats, or rape.
At last the time came to go up into the hills. John drove up as far as he could on the dirt road, and then took his case out of the back of the rental and went the rest of the way on foot. He waited at the lightning-struck tree he had chosen as the meeting place. A few minutes later, a limousine pulled off down on the dirt road below him. John waited until he saw his sister, her lover, and their bodyguard step out before he turned on his flashlight.
"Johnny?" Alexandra called, shielding her eyes with her hand as she started up the incline.
For a moment John thought he saw a little girl, her small hand taking a SnoCaps out of the box, her baby teeth nibbling carefully at the nonpareils. Then his vision cleared, and he saw Alexandra, the woman in the green silk dress.
No, not a woman anymore. A vampire.
They came, his sister, and her lover, and their bodyguard, and stopped a few yards away. Their wariness didn't make him angry, only wistful. Once his sister would have run to him to throw her arms around him and babble a thousand questions. Now, after all that had happened, she kept her distance, her hand curled around Michael Cyprien's. He didn't have to see her face to know her eyes would be as guarded, her expression as shuttered, as his own.
The scents of lavender and rose twined together, taunting him as much as seeing his sister's fingers threaded through Cyprien's.
It was the way things had to be. That John had in large part caused the rift between them, all for the sake of the calling he had abandoned as worthless, didn't make the estrangement any easier.
"The security guards will be driving by here in five minutes," he said. "We'd better move."
Cyprien said something in archaic French to his bodyguard, who returned to the limo. To John, he said. "Phillipe will see to the guards."
John didn't like Michael Cyprien. He had never wanted anything to do with the Darkyn, not after they had taken his sister from him. But the Brethren had to be stopped, and there was no one else he knew with the power and resources to do so. Officials from the real Catholic Church would never believe him without evidence, and the order had infiltrated their ranks with so many imposters that it was impossible to know whom to trust.
"You look like shit." Alexandra said, releasing Cyprien's hand to walk close to her brother. She sniffed. "You smell worse. When was the last time you had a meal or a bath?"
He couldn't tell her that he couldn't remember. "I've been busy."
John guided them along the old trail he had found during his first visit to the place, and around the crumbling adobe to the first of the underground entrances. He pulled away the mat of dead weeds camouflaging it, and took the tire iron out of the case he carried.
Alex stepped in front of him. "Allow me." She bent down and worked her fingers into the seam of the heavy iron door, and lifted it as if it were made of Styrofoam. "Was this left open like this?"
"It was padlocked, and completely covered with branches and dead leaves and weeds. I had to rent a metal detector to find it." He directed his flashlight into the tunnel. "It goes down forty feet. There's a ladder on the side, but it's slippery. Be careful climbing down."
His sister blew a short raspberry. "Please." Without warning she jumped in.
"Alexandra." John snatched at the empty air where she had been, and then knelt at the edge, trying to see her. His light showed her standing at the bottom, gazing back up at him.
"Come on, Michael," she called up to them before stepping out of the way.
"We don't climb." Cyprien said to him, almost apologetically, before he too jumped in.
John reconsidered walking away and leaving them to it. They were the ones with the superhuman abilities, not him. This wasn't his war. He didn't belong to either side. But he couldn't trust Cyprien and the Darkyn any more than the Brethren, and someone had to stand up for the humanity caught in the middle.
John pocketed his flashlight and climbed down into the tunnel.
Below the surface, the vertical accessway opened into an intersection of four ten-loot-high horizontal tunnels that ran off in opposite directions. Here the air was cold and stale, soured by the rotting smell of mildew. Water dripped somewhere, the impact of the drops echoing through the tunnels like the first moments of a rainstorm. Scurrying feet retreated as the mice and rats that had nested nearby fled the light.
"These passages are lined in cement," Alex said, touching one wall.
"It's built like one of those old bomb shelters from the fifties," John told her, and flipped a switch next to the ladder. Light illuminated the corridor intersection by the ladder. "Another reason I know they haven't totally abandoned this place. The electricity was never cut off."
"How much have you seen down here?" Cyprien asked him.
"I didn't have time to do more than a quick walk-through of about half the facility. There are offices and records rooms down there." He turned to the opposite passage, which was gated with iron bars. "The dormitories are through there."
"Give us the grand tour," Alex suggested.
He took them first to the eight dormitory rooms, each filled with twenty single beds. "They were keeping the kids in here." He pointed to the doors, which locked with dead bolts from the outside.
"How do you know the occupants were children?" Cyprien asked. "They might have used these rooms for members of the order."
John went to one of the beds. "Too small for adults." He demonstrated by reclining, and had to bend his knees sharply to fit on the short, narrow frame.
Alex bent down to read some faded numbers and letters stenciled onto the end of the frame. "'AK-nine-one-nine-eight-one.' The last four might mean the year 1981."
"Perhaps the year it was manufactured," Cyprien suggested.
"No, there are different numbers and letters on each bed." John told him. "They probably branded them on the kids' arms after they abducted them and shipped them off here. The way the Nazis did to the Jews in the concentration camps."
"That's kind of a leap, John." Alex said as she straightened and gazed at the other beds. "Twenty per room, that's a hundred and sixty kids. No one could take that many children and get away with it."
"Thousands of children go missing every year." John told her. "Most of them are never found. The Brethren are well organized and own extensive property all over the country."
"If this is how they've been recruiting members for the order," she said, "we need more evidence than some numbers on an old bed frame."
"They weren't just recruiting kids for the order," John told her. "They were experimenting on them." Her shocked reaction made him glance at her lover. "Didn't you tell her what I found?"
"I thought it would be best if Alexandra saw these facilities first before we drew any conclusions." Cyprien said. "Young children get sick quite often. What you saw could have simply been an infirmary."
John didn't care for the way Cyprien looked or spoke to him, as if lie were indulging a fretting child. "You know exactly what monstrous things the Brethren can do, and you're defending them."
"I know what they do to me and my kind." Cyprien said. "We have never known them to hurt human children."
"Well, they have." John told him. "I found a laboratory set up to perform experiments on large subjects. Too large to be lab rats."
Alex's gaze moved to Cyprien and then back again. "Are you sure they weren't experimenting on monkeys or other large primates, like gorillas? It's repulsive, but it happens."
"Other than the Brethren, I haven't seen any evidence of animals down here." John told her. The anger flared up inside him. "How can you make excuses for them? These were children."
"I'm not making…" She blew out a breath. "Show me this lab. John."
John took them back through the corridor and into an adjoining passage. Alex halted a few times to look through the dusty windows in some of the doors.
"These look like some sort of treatment rooms," she said.
"They were cleaned out: there's nothing left in them but the exam tables and empty cabinets." He stopped in front of a set of double doors. He hated going in, but it had to be done. "This is where they did the real dirty work."
He walked around the room as Alexandra examined the equipment.
"Okay, we've got some extremely decrepit EEG and EKG machines, a sucky treadmill, lousy endoscopes, Jurassic-era blood pressure monitor, intravenous equipment with unsafe needles—is that really a defibrillator?—a crappy ventilator…" She stopped at one cart. "And what very well could be the world's oldest incubator."
"Look at the tables," he insisted. The first time he had, he'd vomited. "The straps on them."
Alexandra went over to one of the flat sheet-metal tables and inspected the perforations in the surface before gingerly unbuckling one of the leather restraints. She examined the inside of the leather before putting it down. She went to the cabinets and opened each one, pulling out some of the dusty contents.
Cyprien came to stand beside John. "The Brethren despise us, but they believe they are protecting humanity. I am not defending their methods, but I cannot believe that they would kidnap or harm human children in their mission to destroy us."
"You're right about one thing. John," Alexandra said as she closed the last cabinet. "Everything in this room indicates that the subjects who were treated here were human beings." Before John could say anything, she held up her hand. "I can't say for certain that they were kids, and if they experimented on them, they didn't do it here. This lab is set up to perform standard tests and monitor physical conditions. They have some emergency equipment. John, but nothing out of the ordinary."
She still didn't believe him.
"Why would they need to do that?" he demanded. "Test and monitor the children for what?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "I need more information. You said there were records."
John look them to the offices at the end of the next tunnel, and gestured to the barricaded doors he had been unable to open.
"I only brought bolt cutters with me the last time, so I couldn't get in." He pointed to the three steel bars at the top, middle, and bottom of the door. "These are welded in place."
Alex peered through the webbed glass at the rows of old metal filing cabinets. "They cleaned this place out pretty thoroughly before they left. Those cabinets could be empty."
"Then why seal the room?" he asked her.
"Good point." She glanced at Cyprien, who took hold of the other end of the center bar welded across the door. Together they pulled it off, the steel tearing like tin foil, and then they did the same to the other two.
John brushed past them and went to the first cabinet, almost pulling the empty drawer out completely in his haste to open it. He bent and opened the one beneath it, and the next. The entire cabinet, as Alex predicted, was empty.
"No, there has to be something in here." He moved to the next cabinet, jerking at drawer handles and finding it empty, and then the next, and the next, until a drawer flew out of his hand and hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. He stared at the small crater it made in the wall before landing on the linoleum floor. "Where are they?"
A cool, gentle hand touched his cheek. "Johnny, stop. Michael, would you give us a minute?" Alexandra waited until Cyprien left them before she guided John to a chair and sat on the edge of the desk beside it.
"I was so sure I'd find the proof in here." His eyes felt hot and dry, his eyelids lined with sandpaper. Something like a laugh came out of his throat. "I should have known they wouldn't leave any evidence behind."
"It's obvious from the dormitory that they were keeping some kids here," she said in a placating tone. "There's just not enough left to indicate why. Maybe if we can find out where they're operating from now, we can go to the media with that. Anderson Cooper just got back from filming starving Afghan farmers growing opium poppies for the Taliban, you know. He'd jump all over a story like this."
"I'll never find them." John felt defeated. "They use the Church as a front, so it could be any Catholic program, parish, or building anywhere in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of places they could be."
"Michael will help," she told him. "The Kyn have some amazing resources we can use. We'll find out the truth, John, and we'll expose them. I promise."
The truth. That was the key.
"We have to go back to Chicago." He hesitated. "There's a vampire living there, the one named Jaus. He can touch people and make them tell the truth. I know, he did it to me in Florida. If anyone knows how the order recruits new members, it's Archbishop Hightower."
Alex looked startled. "You want Val to work on Hightower? I don't know, John. We try to avoid contact with the Brethren. They do unfriendly things like torture and kill us."
"If I brought the archbishop to Jaus, would he do it?" he countered.
"He probably would for me." She looked past him as Cyprien came back into the room. "I have a favor to ask."
Alter she related what John said to Cyprien, he agreed to make the trip to Chicago. "After the problems we encountered with the order while tracking Thierry Durand in Chicago. I am not inclined to risk exposing Suzerain Jaus or his jardin again. Still, there are ways it can be done safely, and as Alexandra says, Valentin is a friend. It is almost dawn; we should go now."