Aware that he was arguing with himself, he started for his new home—and by “home,” he meant involuntary servitude with a roof over his head. “Prison camp” had been the old term, when they’d been underground at the old site they’d abandoned. This was the new world order, no more cells, though still underground, those tracking collars ever present.
Funny, how you could control people when, with one press of a remote, their brains were vaporized. There also weren’t a lot of options for most of the vampires being held.
He was one of the few without a collar. But he needed to be able to dematerialize back and forth to Caldwell to make this deal, and there was no ghosting around when you had a band of steel around your throat.
And the Executioner wasn’t worried about him bolting. The fucker had leverage over him, the kind of thing that was just as good as an explosive necklace. But it wasn’t going to last much longer so he was biding his time. With one death, he was free—and he was of half a mind to take care of the Grim Reaper’s work himself. It would be a mercy killing at this point, anyway, two liberations for the price of a single slit throat.
Cheap, all things considering.
Up ahead, the old human hospital building loomed like something out of a John Carpenter movie where everyone but the virtuous girl who didn’t have sex with her boyfriend died in creative, bloody ways.
God, he missed the eighties. Then again, the last time he’d been able to watch a TV or listen to a radio had been right before he’d been thrown into the prison camp. So, yeah, he was current as of the spring of 1983. And maybe he didn’t miss the era; he missed . . . life and the simple freedoms he had taken for granted.
Lucan stopped at the worn stone steps of the sanatorium’s entrance. The central core of the building was a tower of closed windows, the floors rising up like a blocky spear, the tip of which was a tower topped with a lightning rod. On either side of this torso, there were two five-story wings of open porches, each extending at a wide angle to catch the prevailing breeze for failing lungs.
The place had been built to treat the human tuberculosis patients who suffered such cruel, suffocating deaths through the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Back then, the treatment for the bacterial infestation was fresh air, and as much of it as you could stand, no matter the season. Well, that and hacking pieces of your lungs out, or cod-liver oil, or inhaling hemlock.
Until streptomycin and other drugs came to the rescue in the late forties.
Why did he know all that about those rats without tails and their coughs? He liked his trivia, even if it was about shit that didn’t affect vampires. Or vampire-wolven half-breeds.
The New York Times crossword puzzle had been his favorite.
Looking down the south wing, he measured the open porches that ran all the way to the far end. The patient rooms were behind the loggias, the rusted frames of the old hospital beds cluttering the tight spaces, all kinds of debris down the hallways and graffiti marking the stained and rotting walls. The north wing was the same, as was the administrative core that anchored the structure.
Everything abandoned and decaying, only the ghosts of dead patients remaining now.
Above ground, that was.
In a way, prisoners like him and the others belonged here. They’d been discarded, too. Forgotten. And most were rotting as they shuffled around beneath the earth, their only use cutting and portioning drugs to make money for yet another despot.
“One death,” he said grimly as he reached for the tarnished brass pull. “One death, and I’m out of here.”
There were advantages to having been excised from your family.
No more leverage when it came to your bloodline ’cuz you didn’t care if the fuckers were smothered in their own beds.
The old place still had some electricity running through it, and a dusty light bulb hanging from a wire cast sad light over what had been the reception, waiting, and check-in area. From what he’d read on a plaque on the wall, the hospital had stopped treating tubercular patients in the early fifties and switched to housing the mentally ill. That had lasted until the seventies, at which point, everything had been deserted.
He didn’t think anyone was going to add a bronze plate honoring the coda that included vampires.
Diverting from the open area with its moldy, toppled chairs and chipped, cheap-wood tables, he headed to the right. The north wing’s hall was marked “North Wing”—surprise!—and there were administrative offices on both sides, missing doors allowing views into rooms with ceiling collapses and broken windows that had let in the weather as well as years’ worth of fallen leaves. In a few spots, weeds had set up shop and started to inch ascents over the stained walls.
As he went along, he didn’t bother to hide the sounds of his boots. The sentries who were watching expected him—well, maybe not back this early, but he was a known commodity, allowed to go in and out.
The farther away he went from that single bulb, the darker it got, but his eyes were even sharper than normal vampires’, his wolf side giving him a night-vision-goggle effect, everything going shades of red.
Which was how he’d known exactly where to shoot back in that alley. What a clusterfuck—
“You’re home early.”
Lucan stopped. Well, shit. Another twenty yards, he’d be down into the basement complex. So close.
He kept his eyes on his prize, refusing to turn away from the steel reinforced door that had been an installation of the new owners.
“What’s the matter, wolven. Someone take your kibble away down in Caldwell?”
“That’s right,” he said smoothly. “At the same time they removed your soul.”
The chuckle in the darkness was like a switchblade traveling across a jugular vein. Well, it would have been, if Lucan gave a crap about being alive.
“You know I’d trade places with you if you can’t handle it.”
Now Lucan glanced over his shoulder, in case this verbal poking was going to elevate to prodding—and hey, he’d be good with that. He wanted to hit something.