Clan Novel Toreador: Book 1 of The Clan Novel Saga Read online

  CLAN NOVEL

  TOREADOR

  By Stewart Wieck

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Clan Novel Toreador is a product of White Wolf Publishing.

  White Wolf is a subsidiary of Paradox Interactive.

  Copyright © 1999 by White Wolf Publishing.

  First Printing January 1999

  Crossroad Press Edition published in Agreement with Paradox Interactive

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  Love and thanks to my parents—my own Medici—for never failing to encourage my artistic aspirations.

  Table of Contents

  part one: leopold

  part two: victoria

  part three: the eye

  part one:

  leopold

  Saturday, 20 June 1999, 4:29 AM

  Piedmont Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Leopold sat with Michelle draped across his lap. They were both naked, though the cold of his workshop basement did not affect Leopold’s body as it did hers. Though unconscious, Michelle reacted to the chill. The nipples of her small breasts were pointed and ripples of goose bumps appeared and disappeared across her long legs and up the small of her back to her slender neck.

  He’d bitten her inner thigh, where the femoral artery began its descent down the length of her leg. She had feigned her passion at first, but she was slightly startled when he bit. He swallowed several mouthfuls of blood very quickly then, and her excitement became more authentic. Light-headed almost instantly, Michelle must have imagined Leopold very talented and eager to please.

  After those first few mouthfuls of blood, though, Leopold was only interested in satiating himself. He fed infrequently because he felt awkward luring women to his basement for what he knew they assumed was sex despite the excuse of modeling for him. They always laughed at that, and then took it back a little when they saw that he really did have a workshop in the basement, but then laughed again when he asked that they take their clothes off.

  It was even harder with men, because the man he might desire as a model wasn’t necessarily gay, so rarely did he get them to his basement willingly. With them, it took some careful convincing, Kindred-style.

  Like some of the girls—or perhaps they were women already, Leopold found that he was already losing the ability to guess the age of a human—Michelle simply took her clothes off and came at Leopold. So many of them just wanted a place to stay for a night. They were willing to work for the roof over their head, but the only work they knew was sex, and Leopold imagined they’d rather have it over sooner than later.

  As he did with all the potential models he brought home, Leopold had picked up Michelle along Ponce before nearing his Piedmont Avenue home. Those that seemed disinclined to join him could always be nudged a bit. Leopold knew few of the potentially awesome powers possessed by some Kindred beyond this one, but he had no trouble convincing most mortals that he was harmless and friendly.

  Michelle came along without such need to exert himself. She was a pretty girl who had obviously been on the streets just long enough to know how to use her good looks, but not long enough to understand that her good looks wouldn’t last. There was something in that tarnished beauty that fit Leopold’s mood.

  When she sought his sexual attention immediately, Leopold regretted the lost opportunity to sculpt his vision of her, but he was not interested in imposing his will over another mortal that night. He accepted her desire and hopefully did something toward fulfilling it as well. At least she would have a safe roof this night.

  He laughed a little at his idea of a safe house. He was keeping her safe by his standards, but Leopold doubted Michelle would characterize a place where she lost a couple of pints of blood to a fanged monster as safe.

  Then he sobered and swallowed his laughter. Could this be what Kindred meant when they spoke of losing their humanity? Leopold had felt the Beast—that part of him that exulted when he stalked and killed and lost control of himself—but it was a simple matter to keep it at bay if he let his conscience be his guide.

  But where had his conscience led him tonight? Laughter over draining the life blood from a world-weary soul like Michelle? Yes, he needed that fluid to live, but when had it become comical? Where was the sense of violation? Tragedy?

  He knew there were many Kindred who regretted the loss of what they considered to be the human parts of themselves. Not the superficial losses, like breathing, or even the psychological ones like sunlight. But the essential qualities that defined humanity. The capacity to love, to dream, to empathize.

  There were also plenty of Kindred who did not regret the loss, particularly the vile members of the Sabbat—those murderous and heinous vampires who cared little for Kindred other than themselves and to whom Kine were cattle indeed. Kindred of the Sabbat, and some of the Camarilla too, seemed to toss away carelessly a vital portion of themselves. Perhaps they considered such sentiments as mercy or love as the vestigial organs of mortal existence, but Leopold could not fathom the profound impact of such loss.

  But perhaps he was on that very road.

  Leopold inspected the wound he’d opened on Michelle’s inner thigh. The ragged gash where he’d bitten her was right along the line molded in the skin by the elastic of her skimpy bikini underwear. That made him feel oddly queasy. Regardless, his work couldn’t be left undone and especially when he could undo some of the harm, so he wet his tongue in his mouth and tentatively extended it toward the wound. As he licked it, tasting the blood of the injury once more, the rent skin mended. So well, in fact, that the traces of the elastic line were gone too.

  Then Leopold regarded Michelle herself. She was paler now, and prettier for it. The ruddiness of the strains she placed upon her body with hard living and low-grade drugs was somewhat washed away. Her almost luminescent skin made her starved body diaphanous and the bruises from frequent injections less evident.

  Hers was a beauty he could still capture and preserve. Many Kindred, especially Toreador, might think to cup their hands around her flame through the Embrace, transforming her into a Kindred as well. Leopold didn’t wish to have those thoughts himself, and he was pleased that such ideas were still secondary to his f
irst impulse: to immortalize her in stone.

  Leopold gave this more thought as he continued to sit cross-legged on the floor with her body supported by his bare lap. Though he was tempted, it was too close to dawn, so even a bozzetto would be rushed and ill serve the purpose of sparking his memory later.

  With one of his slender fingers, Leopold wiped a few strands of dirty hair from her face and gazed at her. He suddenly felt silly for all the attention he gave her. She was pretty, yes, but he was never one for pets, and on some level he needed to ingrain the reality of his still relatively new station in life: he was Kindred, a being that could only be considered superior to mortals.

  With that, he stroked her hair again, but this time more as if Michelle were a sleeping puppy than a person.

  It was a funny business, he thought, the means by which Kindred fed. He laughed at the dichotomy of his thought of the Kindred set apart and above humanity, while it was they who skulked about at night and lived a life akin to much earlier humans, like the ancient forefathers of ones such as Michelle who survived by hunting and gathering.

  He carefully shimmied out from under Michelle, leaving her like a rag-doll on the floor. After gathering her clothing and tucking it under his arm, Leopold then stooped, gripped her armpits, and partly dragged and partly carried her toward the stairs and up into the first-floor kitchen.

  The kitchen was a large room, as were all the rooms of the old and worn-out house. Unlike so many bachelor kitchens, though, this one was nearly spotless, though that was from complete disuse and not any sort of perfectionist attitude of Leopold’s. For the sake of camouflage for house guests such as Michelle, he did keep a few dry goods such as peanut butter and cereal in the pantry and cupboards as well as a handful of imperishables like cheap beer and frozen pizzas in the refrigerator and freezer, respectively.

  As dawn inched closer, Leopold felt cold trembles in his heart—similar to how he thought it had felt when his pulse raced—when he was yet mortal. An icy hand clutching at him and urging him to seek shelter.

  He hurried Michelle through the kitchen, down a hallway and toward a door he kept shut. He propped Michelle’s naked and deadweight body against his thighs and knees and thus freed a hand to work the doorknob. Cool air rushed into the hallway as the door opened. It was the only room of the house that Leopold kept air-conditioned, and he did that only for the comfort of his guests. The expense was little enough, and he reasoned that it helped maintain appearances.

  The room was a bit of a mess. A bed with blankets and sheets half on and half off the bed. Many articles of men’s and a few of women’s clothing were sprinkled about the floor but mainly gathered in one big pile by closet doors that folded open to the right and left. A long dresser of decent make covered with empty beer bottles and packed, but not yet overflowing ashtrays.

  Michelle’s clothes fell to the floor and then Leopold hoisted her onto the bed and covered her with a sheet and a blanket. He adjusted the wall unit air-conditioner—the house was too old for central air—and then opened the closet. A small safe was bolted to the floor beneath the draping shadows of shirts and pants on hangers.

  Leopold worked the dial and promptly opened the safe. He withdrew a few items, closed the safe and the closet doors and walked to the dresser in order to complete his camouflage.

  He spread the items across the wood surface in a somewhat random fashion. Twelve dollars—a five and seven ones. A film of cocaine powder and a nose straw. And the coup de grace: a small bag with several draws of coke still in it. This he placed underneath an old issue of Time magazine, so it seemed overlooked.

  Almost without fail, the desperate women he brought to his house would grab the cash and the coke and flee the premises before the man she didn’t remember returned to catch her or perhaps desire intercourse again. Such a small amount of coke was inexpensive enough, but it was an item of great psychological value that allowed a woman to feel it was she who had come out better for the evening. Plus, the coke explained the headache and weakness they would have after losing a fair amount of blood.

  Leopold closed the door behind him and locked the front and rear doors of the house before descending again to the basement. The basement door he bolted and barred from the inside. Only one guest had ever been so brave or greedy as to go to the great effort required to break down that door. She had taken a few small sculptures, but Leopold regained them three nights later when he fed a little more deeply than usual. Even then, she had not troubled to tamper with the root cellar wherein Leopold spent his days.

  Dawn was less than a half hour away, and Leopold didn’t wish to risk the slightest exposure, so he retired to that root cellar. The ancient doors were of heavy and practically unbreakable oak. When he’d moved into the house, Leopold had removed and reversed the doors so the heavy bar to hold them shut was on the inside. A badass Brujah could smash his way through them, and a Kine with a chainsaw could do the same, but he stayed clear of badasses, and women for whom a small bag of coke was worth overlooking a night of forgetfulness did not go to such trouble.

  So, Leopold was safe, at least for the moment and the coming day.

  Sunday, 20 June 1999, 5:00 AM

  Boston Financial Corporation

  Boston, Massachusetts

  The dark-suited man nervously tapped at one of his cellular phones. It was the newest model, sleek and wafer-thin with sophisticated programming options that allowed Benito Giovanni to perform any number of acts of amazing communications wizardry.

  His insistent tapping finally proved too much for the light object and it sprung out of position. Benito’s brow furled even more deeply, and his intense, angry eyes bore upon the black device. He straightened it and with a few deft moves realigned it with the other two cellular phones atop his massive, antique red cherry desk.

  Benito greatly preferred things to be structured and dependable, but something was definitely amiss.

  His face relaxed a bit as he gazed about his orderly office. The ivory decorations on the desk were almost fluorescent in the darkness. The perfectly polished and meticulously organized stands of oriental weapons cast strange shadows on the tables to either side of the enormous leather couch. Each end table held a set of matching katana and wakizashi, and the pommels of all four weapons pointed toward the couch. Above the couch, two original Chagalls hung in frames painstakingly aligned at the height of the third that hung behind Benito and between the absolutely spotless windows that overlooked the Back Bay of Boston.

  His black suit was pinstriped with blue, and though it was almost dawn, his tie was still wrinkle-free and wound tight about his neck. Diamond-studded cuff links were positioned to be perfect mirror images of one another, and fabulous rings of white gold and diamonds were bound around each ring finger.

  Benito was clearly of Italian extraction, and the fullness of such ethnic traits as his Mediterranean skin, black hair and handsome face made it probable that he was not too many American generations removed from his homeland. He wore a slight mustache that helped fill his narrow face, and his hands were clasped with index fingers projecting and pressed together against that line of hair above his lip. He rubbed them slowly back and forth, while his dark eyes glittered in the greenish light of the desk’s bankers’ lamp. Though in repose now, he looked like a predator, a man who was thoughtful in his stalking, yet could ambush with an extreme extroversion if the situation required it.

  He was also a powerful and wealthy man, and the office could have been that of any such man pondering unwanted and mysterious intrusions. But Benito was no ordinary man. Beyond the fact that the blood of the wealthiest family on Earth once flowed in his veins. Beyond the fact that he had risen toward the top of his family. Beyond the fact that this family was virtually unknown to the world at large. Beyond the fact that he worked only at night. And beyond the fact that he feasted on the blood of any secretary who could not properly maintain the attitude of his office while he slept during the day.

  For be
yond all these facts, and likely others of note too, Benito Giovanni, like some of his family, his clan if you would, was Kindred. Vampire. And few trifled with Benito’s rare mixture of substantial intelligence, devilish good looks, ungodly wealth, raw physical power, and eternal existence. Of course, there were other Kindred from other clans that possessed many of these advantages as well, but they were not Giovanni, and to Benito’s thinking at least, that meant a lot. Benito managed a grim grin, for even he—a Giovanni himself—was sometimes scared of his family. Even he, a powerful member of the family, suspected only slightly the extent of the power and influence the Giovanni wielded.

  But someone taunted him and had been doing so all night long. Now that dawn approached, Benito continued to wait patiently but with rising ire to see if more information would be revealed. Yes, someone was clearly stupid or immensely confident because the phone rang yet again.

  Benito pulled snug the black leather gloves he wore. They were pinstriped like his suit, and he made certain the lines were acceptably oriented before picking up the phone after its fourth ring.

  “Hello.” It was not a question like the previous three times he’d answered. Instead, it was familiar, but with a slight bite of anger, for Benito wished the caller to believe he now knew the caller’s identity.

  There was silence on the other end. Benito did not speak again, waiting silently to press a potential advantage, but also so that he might detect the slightest revealing noise.

  The connection clicked dead. Benito knew he’d gained ground. If there was another call—and perhaps there would not be since dawn was so near, though he guessed there would be at least one more so the caller might reassert his earlier dominance—then Benito believed he could crack the fool. After all, Benito had reached his present position largely because he was a skillful negotiator. He didn’t know law particularly well, though that knowledge would come in the centuries ahead, and he didn’t have a grasp of the subtleties of international economics, but he did know people. Not what gave them joy. Not what they might want. But what they did not want. What they feared. And once Benito knew that, he cracked them, often seeing them capitulate without the need to raise his voice or make subtle indirect threats.