Angel of Vengeance Read online

  AVAILABLE NOW FROM TITAN BOOKS:

  THE SUPERNATURAL SERIES:

  HEART OF THE DRAGON Keith R.A. DeCandido

  THE UNHOLY CAUSE Joe Schreiber

  WAR OF THE SONS Rebecca Dessertine & David Reed

  THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES:

  THE VEILED DETECTIVE David Stuart Davies

  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

  Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman

  THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN Daniel Stashower

  THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD David Stuart Davies

  THE MAN FROM HELL Barrie Roberts

  THE STALWART COMPANIONS H. Paul Jeffers

  THE SEVENTH BULLET Daniel D. Victor

  SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE Fred Saberhagen

  DR JEKYLL AND MR HOLMES Loren D. Estleman

  THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS Edward B. Hanna

  THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA Richard L. Boyer

  THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA Sam Siciliano

  THE RUNESCAPE SERIES:

  BETRAYAL AT FALADOR T.S. Church

  RETURN TO CANIFIS T.S. Church

  ANGEL

  OF

  VENGEANCE

  TREVOR O. MUNSON

  TITAN BOOKS

  ANGEL OF VENGEANCE

  ISBN: 9780857685377

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

  144 Southwark St.

  London SE1 0UP

  First edition: February 2011

  10 987654321

  Copyright © 2010 Trevor Munson

  Cover images © Shutterstock.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  To my parents, Tom and Sharon, whose love and encouragement has always served as the light that allowed me to chase my dreams to whatever dark places they might lead.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Black doctor’s satchel clutched tight, I stop beneath the naked bulb that burns next to a chipped paint door marked 3B. It’s late for a house call, but then I’m no doctor.

  Knock-knock. I wait.

  3B swings open and a scrawny white guy blinks out at me. With his oversized Adam’s apple, thinning blond hair, and wire-framed glasses, he looks like a mild-mannered accountant. He smiles at me friendly-like. It’s a sweet smile. A smile you can trust. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that looks can be deceiving. I should know.

  “Michael Ensinger?” I ask, and watch as a look of suspicion creeps across his bland features.

  “Who’s askin’?”

  “My friend here,” I say, showing him the pearl-handled .38 revolver I’ve taken from the satchel.

  “Woah, hey. Hey,” Michael says. I enjoy seeing the sullen look depart as he puts his soft, never-seen-a-hard-day’s-work-in-his-whole-life hands up in front of him like a bank teller in an old western. “What is this? What’s goin’ on?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “’Kay. S’talk.”

  “Not here. Inside. Can I come in?”

  Scared, he nods nervous consent.

  “No. You have to say it. Can I come in?”

  With only eyes for my gun, he says, “Yeah, yeah. Come in.”

  Green light. I back him inside at gunpoint. I close the door behind me, spin the bolt lock, look around. The place is run down, but neatly kept, everything in its place.

  Behind him on the tube, a bound-and-gagged naked blonde is being dragged across a room by her hair by a guy in a black hood. Looks like I interrupted Mikey in the middle of a little sadistic jack-off session.

  “Nice show. Find it on PBS?”

  “Screw you, man. What d’you want with me?”

  My lack of response makes him more nervous and he swallows. I watch that huge Adam’s apple bob up and down inside his Ichabod Crane-neck. Best not stare too long.

  “A-are you okay?” He has seen something he doesn’t like in my dark crystal-ball eyes. Something that doesn’t bode well for a long, healthy future.

  “I’m fine. Where’s your bathroom?”

  He gestures vaguely. “D-down the hall.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “What? Why? I mean, I thought you just wanted to talk.”

  “I do. In the bathroom.”

  Ensinger looks like he wants to argue the point, so I cock the gun. It dummies him up nice and I follow him down the short hall and into the ugly tile bathroom. I pull the door shut behind us and inspect the facilities. The tub is filthy. It will have to be cleaned.

  Keeping the gun on him, I root under the bathroom sink and come up with a scrub brush and a can of Comet. I hold them out.

  “Clean the tub. It’s disgusting.”

  He looks at me like I must be joking, gives me a smart-ass smile. “So what, you go around breaking into places and force people to clean?”

  I smack the grin right off his face. His glasses go flying. He crumples by the tub. It’s all the answer he gets. “Get to it.”

  Cowering, he fumbles for his glasses, puts them back on. Then, with jittering hands, he runs the hot water, sprinkles the Comet and begins to scrub like a good boy.

  Behind him I carefully remove my tailored suit jacket and roll up my sleeves. Noticing my increasing state of undress from the corner of his eye, Ensinger stops and looks at me nervously. I point to the tub. “Focus.” He goes back to it. The rhythmic scrape of the brush against the porcelain sounds like a train locomotive picking up speed for a long uphill haul. Seems appropriate.

  “What’s going on? I don’t know what’s going on,” he says, sounding like a scared nine year-old boy.

  “What’s going on—” I explain as I remove my fedora and set it beside the sink where it will be safe and out of the way, “is I’ve come to see you on behalf of someone you know real well.”

  “Who?”

  “Elizabeth Lowery.”

  His eyes go wide at the mention of the name. The brush stops. He turns and looks at me. “N-no. I didn’t—That wasn’t me. The—the cops, they had the wrong guy. That’s why they let me go. They had the wrong guy.”

  “Uh-uh. They had the right guy. They only let you go because Elizabeth was too scared of you to testify. Isn
’t that right?”

  “No.”

  “Way I heard it, when you were done with her, the docs had to sew up parts that shouldn’t have to be sewn up.”

  “No. You got it wrong. I swear to God you got it wrong.”

  “You’re not working,” I say. I set the gun down—I don’t really need it, it’s more for effect than anything else—and light a smoke.

  Nearly done now, he goes back to it, scrubbing away as he tries to work it all out.

  “So what, she—she hired you to come here?”

  “No. I’ve never met her. This was my idea. Call it a hobby,” I say, doing my best impression of a smokestack.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong and—and I’m sorry,” he mewls.

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  “Y-you do?”

  “Sure. You like to hurt girls. I used to know someone like you. He liked to hurt women too. Only difference was he was my old man and the woman he liked to hurt was my mother. He beat her to death and went to jail while I was still too young to stop him... ” I shake my head, blow smoke. “Regret like that, it stays with ya.”

  The scrubbing stops again. Beside the tub, Ensinger turns and looks at me as I loosen the knot in my tie, take it off. “Of course, now, my mom, she chose him. Elizabeth Lowery didn’t even get that chance, did she? She never got to make the decision one way or the other because she didn’t know you existed. And if she had, she wouldn’t have given you the time of day, would she, Mikey? That’s what really gets you, isn’t it? That’s why you pick the ones you pick.”

  Ensinger just stares at me, the truth of things frozen on his face.

  “Rinse it,” I say.

  I extinguish the butt in the drip from the sink faucet and drop it into a ziplock bag I keep among the other items—glass vials, funnel, ball-gag, hacksaw—in the satchel.

  Hands trembling, Ensinger spins the knobs and turns the showerhead on, rinsing the frothy gray bubbles down the drain. Finished, he sits with his back against the tub and looks up at me.

  “Nice job.” I pick up the gun and gesture with it. “Get in.”

  “Please—please don’t hurt me.”

  “I don’t like to repeat myself. It makes me sore. Real sore, if you want to know the truth. Get in the tub.”

  He sees in my eyes that there’s no room for argument. He gets up and gets in.

  “Lock the drain.”

  With a sob, he pulls the metal drain tab up, and looks up at me with the same feverish, glassy-eyed stare I imagine a cow must give the butcher just before the stropped blade is dragged across its neck.

  “I’ll never do it again. I swear to God I’ll never do it again.”

  I let go now. I’m over the brink. The change has begun and just as with the moment of release during orgasm, Moses himself couldn’t hold it back. The pain of transformation is as awful as it is sweet. Bone is displaced as my brow wrenches forward. My face elongates. My fangs grow. My jaw comes unhinged. My eyes grow black as they fill with blood.

  Seeing it happen, the look in Michael’s eyes tells me he’s just now realizing how much more there was to learn about the reality he thought he knew. I don’t feel the least bit bad for him. Predators like him are a waste of skin in my book, which is why I only hunt predators like him. No women. No children. No innocents. Those are the rules. I’m no hero, but the way I figure it, if I’ve got to kill people—and I do—might as well be ones who deserve killin’. It’s how I live with myself, so to speak. It’s how I deal with what I’ve become.

  “I know you won’t,” I say.

  1

  Nightfall comes with an ache. I feel the sinking sun deep in my bones the way old people sense a coming storm. My thirst awakens like the first signs of narcotic withdrawal. Parched with a sandy desert thirst, I rise.

  I push open the lid of the industrial-size deep freeze that serves as my coffin. The freezer preserves me; slows the cancerous rot that gnaws me from the inside out during my waking hours. Though vastly slower than normal decomposition, the ever-constant stink of decay is an ugly truth about being undead. One of those little tidbits no one tells you about before you become a vampire.

  Frostbitten air trails me like a cape as I step naked into the dark confines of my North Hollywood digs. The place isn’t much to look at, just a shabby two-bit office with a kitchenette and half-bath, but it’s home.

  I don’t have much in the way of furniture or appliances; I’m not what you’d call an acquirer. I can list all my major possessions in twenty-five words or less: desk, chairs, answering machine, phone, filing cabinet, mini-fridge, freezer, fedora, five suits, two pairs of shoes, a car. Oh yeah, and a gun. The adjectives’ll cost ya extra.

  I move out of the kitchenette into the office proper. The freezer motor hums dully in tune with distant traffic noise from the 101. There is a numb, mildly pleasant pain as my frozen limbs begin to thaw. I barely notice. I have bigger concerns. Shivering, not with cold but with thirst, I stiff-leg it over to my desk and twist the light on. I punch a button on my answering machine. No messages while I was on ice. No nothing.

  My trembling fingers tug a side drawer open and fumble with the zipper of my worn leather kit. In the light, I notice that they are coated with a fine layer of dust from the graveyard dirt that pads the bottom of my cold-storage coffin.

  Time to fix.

  I go to the small refrigerator that sits on the floor just below the office’s single aluminum foil-covered window. The neighbors probably think I’m running a meth lab, but the fact of the matter is the sun and I aren’t exactly on what you’d call speaking terms. Haven’t been for a while now.

  I kneel. My frozen knee joints pop with the force of a twenty-two caliber pistol. I open the refrigerator door to find only five crimson glass vials remain. Damn. I thought there were more. I grab one and hold it up to the refrigerator light, enjoying the brownish-red tint of the liquid that hugs the vial walls. Except for red, vampires see the world in only black and white. So all things red are to be savored. Adored.

  Eager for my fix, I hurry now. I carry the vial back to the desk. I take an old-fashioned, sawbones-style needle from the sterilizer and assemble it, screwing the tip and casing together. I pop the cap from the vial and poke the gleaming tip into the ichor. I pull the plunger back, drawing a good portion of the thick blood into the casing, before carefully replacing the cap on the vial, saving the remainder for later. Then I strangle one ice-cold bicep with a rubber garrote, pulling it tight with sharpened teeth.

  Over the years, mainlining has evolved as my favorite way of taking blood. There is a comfort in the ritual that I have grown to love. A holdover from my days as a smack addict. Any junkie will tell you that the effects are stronger and the relief more immediate and a little goes a lot longer when you shoot it. What can I say? Old habits die hard.

  I smack my arm, searching for a non-recessed vein. Finding one, I jam the needle home before it can slip away on me like a snake in water. I have to jam it hard to break through my permafrost skin. I depress the plunger. Goddamn but it feels good. Even old blood. Fresh is best, but any blood will do. Just so long as it’s human.

  I withdraw the needle, lick the tip clean. Tasty. My jangling nerves recede with my teeth. My thirst abates.

  As always, the initial high makes me sleepy. I drowse in my chair, staring from under half pound lids at the framed black-and-white photograph perched on one corner of my desk. It’s a snapshot of me posing with my old band mates, taken after a show at the Million Dollar Theater on Third and Broadway in late ’43. Good guys all of them. And me the only white boy in the bunch.

  I reach out with sandbag arms and take the frame in both hands for a better look at the me I used to be. Tall and too thin; almost sickly. Probably from the drugs. Dark hair. Darker eyes. Wise-guy grin. A chin in constant need of a shave. Good looking but not too good looking, if you know what I mean.

  I shake my head. I barely recognize tha
t kid. With all I’ve seen and all I’ve done, I feel I must look different, but I probably don’t. Hard to know for sure.

  Despite rumors to the contrary, vampires do have reflections. The random observer would see my human image in a mirror, but when I look I can only see the monster inside; the way I look when I transform. When every day’s a bad day in the mirror, eventually you just stop looking.

  The black phone in front of me rings shrilly. Enough nostalgia. I set the photo down and pick up.

  “Yeah?”

  A smoky female voice blows over the line. “Mr. Angel?”

  “Speaking.”

  “My name’s Reesa Van Cleef. I have a job I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d rather talk about it in person. Would it be possible to meet?”

  “Anything’s possible. When’s good?”

  “I’m free tomorrow during the day. I could come by your office—”

  “No good. I’m busy tomorrow.”

  “The next day then.”

  “Actually, Ms. Van Cleef, I prefer to work at night. I’m a little funny like that. Call it a quirk.”

  “Oh, I see...”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, it’s just that—well, I work nights too. I’m a performer; a burlesque dancer. I do a retro lounge act at the Tropicana five nights a week.”

  “I see.”

  “Would it be too much trouble to ask you to come to me?”

  Normally it would. Normally if a client wanted my help they could damn well come here. But seeing as I could use the work and being as this particular client was a burlesque dancer, well, I figured I could make an exception just this once.

  “Sure. When?”

  “How ‘bout tonight? My first performance is at ten. It’s a little racy, but if you’re not the type whose sensibilities are easily offended why don’t you come see it? We can grab a drink at the bar between shows.”

  “Sure,” I say again. It’s a long time since I’ve been out on the town for anything other than work or blood.

  “Great. I’ll put your name on the list,” she says in a voice as playful as a tongue on an earlobe. “You’ll know me. I’ll be the one in the red feather boa and not much else.”