The Big Smoke Page 16

  The beamers howled and chortled, slurped on sports drinks that spilled red in their rush to knock them back.

  Reece backed away to the other side of the street and called it in. He'd need serious back-up for this one. The duty sergeant reckoned an hour. Reece swore at him to speed it up, but was told half the squads were unavailable: some special op out of town. Reece rang Marshall. She didn't pick up, so he rang Felicity. She answered, her tone hushed against a background of indistinct male voices.

  'What is it, Reece?'

  'You okay?' he asked.

  'Kinda busy just now.'

  'You on this special op?

  'Aren't you in hospital?'

  'You haven't visited.'

  'Not in town, okay? What is it?

  'I've got Four Arms in my sight and need back-up. You can't swing by, I suppose.'

  'Hardly. You ring the—'

  'He said an hour to muster up.'

  'Patience is a virtue. I gotta go.' And then, almost as an afterthought, 'What are you doing out of bed, you crazy bugger? You want to lose your head?'

  'I was missing you. Watch your back, Flick.'

  'You too. And Reece — I'm sorry, all right. I wish you were here for this. Bye.'

  No 'don't call me that'. She was tense. Not in town — where was she? Wish you were here? Were they on Matheson's tail? Had Petersen and Newman tracked the kid when Reece had failed? He stared at his phone, wondering who to call and what such a call might achieve.

  Could he get a message to the kid? Tell him to come in where Reece could protect him, cut a deal; get Danica to heal Mira and everyone can go their merry way. Yeah, right.

  He pocketed the phone, took a deep breath to still his nerves.

  Nothing he could do about it. But if they did get Matheson, they were a step closer to Danica, and that meant Mira was either a step closer to being cured or forever damned. He needed to bring in Four Arms and find out who he was working for. Doubtless his employer and the person plotting against Mira were one and the same.

  One thing Maximilian could not tolerate was disloyalty. Four Arms was the key to unveiling the traitor inside Thorn and the best bet for saving Mira. Hell, if it weren't for the bedlam she'd probably be dead already, and Reece with her.

  He went back to the window. Four Arms was on his mobile. The freak looked around, suspiciously, and Reece ducked back, holding his breath. When he peeked again, the phone was gone and Four Arms had a briefcase open on the table, the lid facing Reece and the other beamers.

  'Who was it?' one beamer asked, voice muffled on account of having few teeth; and Four Arms — he could speak, who'd have guessed — said it was his girlfriend, in a fuck you tone. Speaking was one thing; a girlfriend was quite another. Reece's instincts screamed trouble.

  Four Arms closed the briefcase. He'd taken nothing out, just fiddled with something inside. He left the case and grabbed his tent-like Driza-Bone from a hook on the wall.

  He was leaving. Reece withdrew. Had he missed something? A handgun from the briefcase, perhaps? Was Four Arms on a mission; Matheson, perhaps?

  Reece got around the front and across the road in time to see the vampire emerge from the dojo and lock the door behind him. Then he got into a four-wheel-drive.

  Luckily, he drove off in the direction of Reece's car. Reece jogged after him, hoping he wasn't watching in the mirrors.

  The dojo exploded.

  By the time Reece picked himself up, the building was well alight, and Four Arms long gone.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  In his dream, Kevin sees Hunter in a bed made from a book; something about a postman. He can't quite make out the words where the cover lies rumpled around Hunter like a doona. The bed is in the centre of a bookstore; Kevin knows the place instinctively, a shop the red-eye frequents. He had tasted Hunter out west, still carried vague impressions of the man's life in his blood. Hunter leaves the bed to search shelves that stretch to the whitewashed horizon. Kevin finds the book first. Its title, written in liquid silver, is Strigoi. Kevin flicks through the pages and ends on one showing a colour plate of his mother. She's behind a window at their house, looking out, as though waiting for a visitor to arrive. Kevin tears the page out, scrunches it into a ball, and eats it. Hunter snatches the book. Kevin grabs for it, hungry for more pages. The shelves topple. He is crushed to the floor, buried under books as heavy as boulders, as suffocating as earth.

  Kevin jerked awake. Still alive. He rubbed his chest, feeling the absence of Danica's putsi. Had he lost its protection now that Mel wore it? Could Mira sense him? Could she use her blood magic to implant her strange visions in his sleeping mind?

  It was the only explanation, because vampires did not, could not, dream.

  In which case, what kind of dream was that to send? Was she teasing him? Threatening him?

  'Hey.'

  'Huh?' Kevin jerked out of his doze, feeling disoriented as he tried to anchor himself.

  Secrets among the corpuscles. The books Jasmine made him read, the diction, the schooling. Breaking glass. The earth under his feet. The fury

  Blake's pen, scratching at the edge of perception.

  Hunter, browsing paperbacks at his favourite book store

  A girl on a farm outside Rockhampton, throwing a textbook against her bedroom wall in frustration

  'You were bloodwalking,' Yoshi said, and Kevin mumbled an apology as he forced the ghosts to settle back into his bloodstream.

  'Want to talk about it?' Yoshi asked.

  Kevin shook his head, and they were quiet for a bit, just Blake's pen breaking the silence, like a chook scrabbling in the dirt.

  They'd turned off the gas lamp and opened the curtains. The night was still and silent, except for the occasional car on the main road.

  Kevin, Yoshi and Blake were sitting in the living room, the smell of dust and mould heavy in the air, the tease of blood like a mote glimmering among them. Blake scribbled listlessly where he sat at Mel's feet, but she hadn't uttered another sound. The red-eyes slept in one of the bedrooms, getting their rest before they took the day shift.

  'She's only fresh, I take it,' Yoshi said.

  Kevin's forehead creased in confusion. 'Eh?'

  'The girl who isn't your girlfriend,' Yoshi said. 'Newborn.'

  'Yeah. She wasn't always like that,' Kevin said. 'Kala, she was nice.'

  'The change affects everyone differently,' Yoshi said. 'Takes a while to find your feet. It's not an easy thing.'

  'You've been, y'know, for a while, I take it.'

  'Just a decade or so.'

  'How long you been in Aussie, then?'

  'All of that time. My sponsor brought me back with her. Clean break and all that.'

  'Sponsor? I haven't heard it called that before.'

  Blake looked up. 'Artistic, or more like a Twelve Step program?' he asked with a twitch of a smile, somewhere between jealousy and insult.

  'Maybe both.'

  Blake huffed.

  'Where in the States are you from?' Kevin asked.

  'Seattle,' Yoshi said. 'My parents worked for Boeing. Mom and Dad wanted me to follow in their footsteps, but I went to art school. Wasn't terribly good at it, so I wrote about it instead.'

  'A critic,' Blake said, scorn dripping from his tongue.

  'That's what killed me,' Yoshi said. 'There was an exhibition, minor stuff, but it caught my eye. I wrote it up for a journal, saying how the artist was ripping off a dude who'd been dead for three hundred years. Only to find out it was the same dude; testing the water after a bit of a break.'

  'Could he do that?' Kevin asked.

  'As it turned out, no. The inspiration, the talent, was gone, you see. He could replicate his previous style, but he couldn't evolve it. Couldn't apply it elsewhere, or differently. He'd lost his vision.

  'My boss — not Rodan, but my actual boss, my sponsor — she says there's a fine line between creativity and cunning, and us lot, we fall on the animal side.'

  Blake said, 'I d
on't believe that. We are vital, living beings. We think. We create.'

  'We re-create. We don't dream, pal. Can't dream. All our memories and dreams, they're all stolen from people we eat. We just take it in, mull it over and shit it out again.'

  'Our experience is unique. Our vision. Mortals can barely comprehend what it is like for us.'

  'And there's an entire level of our society aimed at keeping it that way. That painter — once my piece ran, even though only a dozen students and the editor probably read it — he vanished. Gone. Maybe he'll surface in another couple hundred years, still churning out the same old stuff. The ultimate retro knock-off artist. Can an artist plagiarise himself?' Yoshi smiled, which Kevin assumed was all the answer he was expecting.

  'Melpomene opens my mind,' Blake said. 'She's unique, an angel, a muse. She lets me imbibe the creative spark, she opens the window to my vision, she guides my hand and my verse with the world she sees through her unique eyes.'

  Yoshi shrugged, as if to say, whatever.

  'I cannot lose her,' Blake said, brandishing his pen like a sword. 'I simply cannot.'

  But the sad fact was, if Danica couldn't, or wouldn't help Melpomene, she already was lost.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Reece sat on the back stairs of his house — his family's house — on Hamilton Hill, quietly smoking as he surveyed the city before him; the rising sun throwing dirty pink light over the buildings, traffic streaming over the twin arches of the Gateway bridges, the river a silver snail trail meandering across the gloom.

  He wasn't meant to visit; too compromising, his all-but-ageless face poking around his old neighbourhood. The corp kept the yard tidy and the mailbox empty, just enough to keep the neighbours from complaining. Usually VS would've just taken the property and given him some cash or just a howdy do, but Mira had seen to it, calling it his retirement package.

  He liked to come here regardless. It was a chance to clear his head away from Thorn's stifling air conditioning and bland corridors.

  Last night had been a disaster. Four Arms on the phone, presumably a tip-off; no trace of him since. No word from Felicity. No mention of Matheson's arrest. Just a sense of expectation, of desperation. A hush in the corridors of power.

  He hadn't slept well, had awoken in a sweat, flushed and dry-mouthed, heart thudding. He'd been plagued by a familiar dream, one reluctant to release him, and all the more powerful for its repetition.

  Mira, tied down, and Hospitaller Dr Tran reaching with his upright fisted hand, blood in the hollow of the thumb, telling her there'd be no dessert if she didn't tequila. Taking his blood, feeling it worming through the noise, a banshee ripping open doors in an asylum, the corridors echoing with piercing wails and the screams of the dying; faces and entrails floating down the red-lit halls.

  Reece wiped his face, aware of the shake as the dream flashed across his vision again.

  He felt the weathered timber of the stair under his hand, the heat of the cigarette burned down almost to his fingers.

  Sunlight, lancing across the city, struck sparks from the towers. He imagined the shutters closing on Thorn's windows. Imagined the vampires settling in for the day.

  Tonight, there would be the toast of allegiance, the in-house tithe in which most of Maximilian's fangers and red-eyes gave up an offering of blood and received a serve of vampire and cow blood in return. Familiares of board members were usually exempt, relying on their bludgers for sustenance. Tonight, though, they were sure to bleed Reece, simply for the joy of being able to, now that Mira was locked away.

  Which gave him today. The best part of thirteen hours between now and sunset. He squinted at the breaking day, feeling the warmth, the turning from night cool to day heat.

  He rolled and lit another smoke, his thoughts following its tendrils into phantasmic futures, the all-too-real past.

  His mother had died here, of complications due to alcohol abuse; her body hadn't been found for the best part of a month and the papers had been outraged at this sad indictment of the breakdown of community spirit. Didn't people know their neighbours any more? There was no denying he'd felt bad that VS hadn't been on top of it. She was, after all, his mother, and they were meant to be monitoring such possible Achilles heels. Maybe that was why she'd lain there for only a month.

  The house had been empty since. It was on the side of the hill overlooking a bend in the river, the city in the distance, salubrious suburbs on the opposite bank. He could see cruise liners dock at wharves that hadn't been there when he was a kid and this house had been worth a bit, but not the mint it was now. A lick of paint, some new iron on the roof, wouldn't go astray.

  He wasn't supposed to visit the family graves, either, though that hadn't stopped him. But he'd found the headstones offered no comfort. The house was a little better. He could reach back to the heady days before the noises in the night, before the bruises around his mother's eyes and along his sister's veins. Back when it was good.

  The city had been smaller then, in geography and outlook.

  He liked to come here to remind himself of that, of them. He wouldn't often go inside, but rather, would sit here looking at the city, imagining his retirement once Mira was gone and he'd been cut loose. He wondered whether they'd allow him to slowly moulder or help him on his way; VS didn't like loose ends.

  How long would it take to find his body, if anyone did?

  He had a cache here, one of a couple. It was tempting to pry up the floorboards in the granny flat under the house, take the ID and the money and split. But the fact remained that Mira was in bedlam, and that was a hell of a thing.

  Kevin Matheson held the key to saving her and possibly Reece as well. If anyone could overcome his menopause, it was she. Mira was one of the most powerful bloodhags known, only a shade weaker than her mother, Danica. Vee had nothing on her; if he discovered that Vee had leaked the information about Jasmine Turner, had led to Mira's bedlam in an effort to take her place, he'd happily take the freak's head and what happened next be damned.

  He'd been there when Mira had bought Vee — firmly a him back then. A rare overseas journey, Reece accompanying Mira to a slave auction from a reputedly cruel and, in the flesh, distasteful vampire by the name of Laurie Lee. The bloodhag was incumbent in New Orleans, a place she liked to visit once in a while and raise some Caine. This time, she'd raised Vee, himself a bloodhag of promising power, but one she was happy to part with for a princely sum to allow a relocation to another country for another spell.

  'People tell such tales,' Mira had told him when Reece had broached the subject of Laurie Lee's entertainments: blood fresh from the vein, extracted indelicately, in rites that could only be classed as torture. There was talk of organs and puree and freshly squeezed.

  Mira had laughed, there among a mere half dozen others gathered for the bidding. 'They can imagine worse horrors to explain the simple ones, and yet, the ones they imagine somehow never surpass the reality of their own cruelty.'

  'Slavery is cruel,' he'd said.

  'Oh, I agree.' Mira put on a passable Southern accent. 'I prefer to keep my herd in line through kindness.' She touched his cheek in a way that repelled him and made him shiver.

  Before the night was over, Mira had added a blood band to her wrist, a sign of her link to Vee, now her apprentice; and they'd quit the city for the long, uncomfortable, island-hopping flight home. VS's resources did not stretch to a private jet. The journey, albeit in business class, occurred mostly at night.

  New Orleans had been hot, he recalled. As hot as Queensland. This was his home and he wasn't going to leave it. Not for anyone. Mira needed him, and it was perhaps testament to her kindness that he left the tin box under the floorboards, deliberately squashed out his cigarette and drove back to Thorn.

  The toast of allegiance was tonight, when von Schiller's minions would bleed and let Vee taste their lives, and the freak was welcome to his.

  As long as they had Mira, he wasn't going anywhere, even if it was the death
of him.

  FORTY

  Bella roused them mid-afternoon, sunlight lasering through the dusty air from behind blinds and curtains, the heat making the house creak like an old man's joints. Even the crows sounded exhausted.

  'Company,' she told them, and shortly after, from the doorway, Li Li said, 'We've gotta get moving. Clock's ticking.'

  Wrapped in blankets, they followed her to the bottom of the stairs, where she told the vampires to hop into a beaten-up Land Rover, and Bella and Ambrose to take the rear seat of a sedan.

  'No,' Blake said. 'I need them.'

  'What's this about?' Kevin asked, aware of Yoshi gripping his sword; that Li Li was well within striking distance.

  'The red-eyes are staying elsewhere,' Li Li said. 'They can pick you up when we get back.'

  'We didn't agree to this,' Kevin said.

  'You want to stand out here and debate it?'

  Blake indicated for his followers to do as Li Li said. The car drove off as soon as the doors closed, leaving Li Li to drive the Rover and Williams to ride shotgun.

  The rest crawled into the back of the four-wheel-drive, grateful for the shade offered by a canvas tarpaulin.

  'Just like old times,' Kevin said.

  Kala grimaced. She sat at the cabin end, wrapped like a lonely jillaroo in Akubra and Driza-Bone.

  'Those red-eyes could've been useful,' Yoshi said.

  'We got enough myxos,' Kala said.