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

  He knew, of course, that the calls were being made on purpose. A misdialing caller might have inadvertently tapped the numbers for his left-most phone, with its 212 New York City area code, or his right-most phone with its 310 Los Angeles area code, or even his wireless desk phone with its 617 Boston area code. But the **# area code existed only for use by the Giovanni family, and that was the prefix of his central cellular. It was his most important communications device, for it put him in immediate touch with other members of his family, and they would know the call an important one if it required the use of **#.

  Regardless, he turned off the other two cellulars. The ring of the **# phone was singular in its tone, so there was virtually no chance Benito was mistaking the ring of another phone for it, but this was becoming worrisome, so he took no chances.

  A fourth time cinched it. This was a provocation. The first time was odd, but perhaps the caller was suddenly detained and delayed his call. The second could have been the call-back that was likewise delayed, though it still aroused Benito’s suspicions.

  The third hang-up was frustrating, but no one on the other end only worried Benito that a family member was in trouble and could spare but a moment at odd intervals to make a call. The fourth call, though, had revealed it as a game. The delay before disconnection was too great, so Benito began to tabulate possible responsible parties.

  No Giovanni would have such lack of respect for this secret area code to play games on an **# line, but Benito did not know who else might possess the secret. Of course, there could be scores of others who did.

  Who among these individuals, though, would call Benito thus? A mage, perhaps a member of the Technocracy? An ancient Kindred? Of those who might possess the secret, Benito could only imagine a stinking Nosferatu playing such games. Those vile sewer rats collected more information than they could profitably use.

  None of his mortal enemies could have possibly managed to crack the security precautions that protected his phone and its communicating bandwidth from unwanted intrusion. No one accidentally overheard conversation over the **# line, and Benito knew the axiom most appreciated by Madelaine Giovanni, a famed assassin the family called upon when its need was greatest: whatever cannot occur through happenstance will not occur through intent.

  Most certainly, no one accidentally misdialed the **# area code. There were no two-digit area codes, and the only double-digit beginning that was close on a key pad was the 77 of 770 for Georgia.

  Nevertheless, the phone rang again.

  Benito quickly considered his best strategy. Feigning knowledge had rattled his opponent earlier, so he stuck to that tactic.

  “Why now?” he asked of the unknown party. He spoke with some insistence but also with a hint of concern or befuddlement so the caller might perceive an advantage and strike for it.

  There was silence, but the connection remained. Something more, Benito thought. He or she needs some bit more of evidence that I’ve seen through this charade. He wanted to press the game to the next stage, beyond the bullying that seemed to give his assailant pleasure, but he might also dramatically weaken his position if his blind guessing revealed a complete lack of credible suspicions.

  Therefore, after a moment, Benito added, “I’ve been waiting. Why now?”

  The voice from the other end was surprisingly clear, as if the call was from the next room and not from Chicago, though it was foolish for Benito to imagine his foe was still there and not in hiding. It was this clarity, though, that somehow kept Benito from panicking, or at least from revealing any panic in his voice. If the voice from the past had been muffled and revealed the speaker’s identity to Benito over the course of seconds instead of an instant, then he suspected the surprise and fear would have shown.

  There was a chuckle first. “How could you know it was me? If only you’d seen through things so well a couple of years ago, Benito.”

  Benito said, “You used subtlety then. Now without shame you reveal your bullying nature.” It was a quick quip of a response, and thank goodness words came easily to him, for he’d have otherwise been lost.

  Without further banter, the Kindred on the other end of the line said something more before disconnecting. Benito allowed the phone to clatter from his hand onto the desk. His sense of despair and helplessness was such that several minutes passed before he straightened it and the others which it disturbed as well.

  After that first hesitation, though, Benito reacted calmly and thoroughly. First, he buzzed his present secretary, Ms. Windham.

  “Sir?”

  “Cancel my plans for Atlanta but do not reopen that time for appointments.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Second, he buzzed the head of building security, his strong-willed and militant cousin, Michael Giovanni.

  “With particular attention to my own suite, double building security until I can speak with you about more specific and applicable plans.”

  “Is there immediate danger, Benito?”

  Benito exhaled for the effect of impatience. “No, or there would be no reason to save a discussion of specifics for later.” Then he hung up.

  Benito reclined in his plush leather chair and was momentarily aware of the unconscious gesture to bring his index fingertips to his mustache again. He’d best be vigilant for all such events normally invisible to him.

  Then he spun the chair around and looked at and into the Chagall hanging behind him.

  Sunday, 20 June 1999, 10:55 PM

  East Ponce de Leon Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Tireless step by tireless stride, immortal day by immortal night, Leopold incrementally left behind a life like that of the Kine surrounding him. And that was a shame, for he felt more at home among these shadows of his old life than he did inside the halls of Elysium or within the edicts of the Masquerade, which were only two of the trappings of his life among the Kindred of Atlanta.

  He felt more a part of the world, more connected to its vibrancy, its core, when among mortals than among his vampire brethren. And that was foolish, because better than any other stalking the shadows of this street, Leopold knew these mortals were damned ignorant and completely out of touch with the greatest—or at least the most relevant—truths of the world.

  It made him quiver with loathing and hate and resentment, for he knew that he was only incompletely informed himself, yet he comprehended mysteries these people could not begin to suspect, let alone fathom. The Kine still wielded great power, for otherwise the Camarilla would not order the vampires belonging to that group to maintain the Masquerade, to make certain the first priority of nightly Kindred life was to continue to hide themselves from prying mortal eyes. The Inquisition had taught the Kindred well. But the essence of mortals was weakness and vulnerability.

  Perhaps that’s what drew him to them. Especially these people, the night people of East Ponce. They were on the fringes of human society just as Leopold remained on the fringes of vampiric society. They were the artists, the poor, the mad, the whores. For his part, Leopold frankly felt he knew too much already, so participation in the events of Kindred society would only increase the uneasiness he felt among his own kind. He did not want to know that Prince Benison controlled the police department so no man or woman or child was safe even from their mortal kin if he desired it to be so, or that Victoria Ash could, with a thought, so thoroughly pillory an artist’s lifetime work that he might be forgotten even on the cusp of being recognized and perhaps immortalized.

  These were some of the basic and everyday truths of a world where creatures who lived by night also ruled the day.

  Leopold shuddered, but the terribly muggy and humid summer weather did not encourage it. Thank goodness the solstice was but two days away. That would mark the height of summer, but its decline as well.

  He stopped walking and leaned against a streetlight post, his back to the roar of too-fast cars cruising in and out of this seductive area of the city, his feet pointed toward the center
of the sidewalk.

  This heart of East Ponce, north of Little Five Points, stretching eastward from Peachtree Street and Atlanta’s downtown, was a congested area. The streets were not wide, though four lanes managed somehow to run through the area. The side-streets were packed with small houses with patches of green that passed for lawns. And Ponce itself was a jumble of the everyday and the unusual or unique. Recognizable fast food joints rubbed shoulders with eclectic coffee houses. Just east of Leopold was the neon-lit corner of Ponce and Highland, where the old Plaza Theatre still showed small-run movies and where an ancient 24-hour diner still bustled.

  Leopold felt that he should light a cigarette, but he’d quit that when he stopped breathing. It was too much effort to draw and circulate breath, and without that, the fortifying burn in the lungs was missing, and so there seemed little point to smoking.

  He watched the people pass by. Many didn’t look at him at all. Others glared at him and flared their nostrils in an effort to provoke him. But no one made a special effort to avoid him, as he did not appear threatening.

  Except for the clean T-shirt and khaki painter’s pants he wore, Leopold might well have passed for a permanent resident of the street. His hair was an unkempt mop of black that looked like it was meant to be short but had grown for six months or more without any care. His hands were filthy with dirt, which was caked under his nails and between the base of his fingers too. He had an unhappy face, like a man who was looking for something but never expected to find it. His mouth was small, and his lips pursed. Though he was quite slender and of average height and build, his face seemed heavy, almost sagging. His eyelids drooped and his too-ample cheeks seemed to contain cotton wads used to calm a toothache.

  Mostly, he was just tired. He’d been disappointed to discover that vampires felt fatigue as acutely as mortals.

  As he watched the people, he noted that while he felt comfortable among them, he still did not interact with them, except when his various needs of sculpting or dining demanded it. He wondered why. Perhaps it was genetic—or at least the Kindred equivalent of genetics, blood ties, that made him seek human company at all. It was a Kindred’s blood—not an egg or sperm—that provided his new genetic imprint, but did that overwrite what he’d been as a man?

  Leopold was Toreador, which meant, of course, that his sire—whoever she was, whatever her mortal life had been and no matter how different that was from his own—was Toreador too. And her sire, and the sire before that and before that, back however many generations it required to reach the so-called third, the legendary Antediluvian who founded the Toreador bloodline in some ancient time. This founder was only two generations removed from the hypothetical original vampire, whom Leopold had read referenced as “Caine,” the man Western mythology reviled as the first murderer.

  Leopold could come to no conclusions about whether it was Kindred blood that prompted him to act certain ways, or whether it was a clan’s predilection for a certain type of human—like the Toreador’s choice of artists, or the Malkavians’ tendency to Embrace the insane—that created such a likeness among Kindred of a specific clan. Did his Kindred blood redefine him, or did he fit the Toreador mold even before his Embrace?

  Amidst the furor of Leopold’s thinking, a thick evening mist of rain rolled in and left the streets and outdoor denizens of Atlanta covered by a film of water. Then cool air rolled in on the heels of the short midsummer storm, and this refreshed Leopold so that he did not mind the dampness.

  In fact, the reflections of the street lights in the oil-streaked lanes of East Ponce provided Leopold with a less personal focus for his thoughts. He stared into the wavering ghost images and concluded that he still carried a human program within him—the DNA and nurture his mortal parents had provided—but that was now supported, not supplanted, by his vampiric blood.

  Then he forced himself to abandon this line of thought. To some extent, it was a moot issue with him, or at least he couldn’t very well look to himself as an example of any side of this internal debate. Perhaps if he felt he knew himself better. Perhaps if he felt the past he remembered was indeed his own. He needed his past. Then, and only then, would he be able to determine more about his future.

  Leopold wondered if all Kindred lost touch with their past selves and became a new being at Embrace. If so, then surely he was a mortal reborn in the fire of blood. It was a thought that scared him, for the work of an artist could come only from experience, and without a past he had little to draw upon.

  Leopold had fed well on Michelle last night, so there was no need to worry about food tonight. He was glad. It was time he seriously addressed the matter of his sketchy past. It was time for a test or experiment of sorts.

  The walk back to his home on Piedmont Avenue was not formidable, but he didn’t wish to cover such a distance on foot twice in one evening, especially now that he was resolved upon his investigations. A phone call gained him a cab in little time, so Leopold gazed upon the hot and humid streets of his city from the backseat.

  Sunday, 20 June 1999, 11:38 PM

  Piedmont Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia

  The marble just didn’t seem to live beneath his fingers when he tried to sculpt a Kindred. He couldn’t say why, exactly. Leopold wondered if this block regarding sculpting Kindred had something to do with the past he could not clearly recall. He remembered “a” past, but he doubted it was truly his own. A neophyte in the complex scheming of the other vampires he called Kindred only because that was the civilized way to refer to a fellow vampire, Leopold now understood that some Kindred could as easily tamper with memories as he could with emotions, so he did not trust the odd past he thought his own.

  Foremost, it was too pat, too storybook—an artist willing to sacrifice anything for his work, he apparently ran away from parents who expected him to assume the family warehousing business, and instead scraped together a living in New York City. He barely found the time to pursue his craft amidst the problems of earning money for meager supplies of room and board, fighting the cockroaches away from both of the former, and refusing more chances to sell out than he could even falsely remember.

  Then the break for which every such authentic artist dreams: a benefactor, a modern-day Medici. Someone, anyone, with great wealth, who sees the heart of the artist’s work and recognizes the greatness therein, and beyond that is humbled by it. Someone who realizes how empty their lives of wealth-attainment have been and fervently feel that in the work of the artist they have discovered is the purpose that will redeem their lives.

  In Leopold’s case, this benefactor was a gorgeous woman who offered more than just her wealth. Hers was a voluptuous and pristine form that could have inspired even a mediocre sculptor to great heights of prowess, let alone an artist who actually possessed some talent. After six months as the beneficiary of her wealth and posing, Leopold finally awakened to the fact that she had other designs for him as well. Unfortunately, those designs were not sex. They involved his entrance to the ranks of the undead.

  One night—for she only posed for him at night, of course—after hours and hours of intense work, she stepped down from her platform and confidently approached her sculptor. Leopold had made some benign remark about how her lovely form deserved to be immortalized in marble, and that was when she approached. As her fangs flared and she drew Leopold toward her, she said, “My flesh shall endure longer than any marble.”

  The next snippet of Leopold’s memory recalled his face being pressed amidst her bare breasts, where he partook deeply of a vertical crimson band that ran along her sternum. Then the waters of memory muddied, and he recollected—very unclearly—nights of flight and pain that ended in her death and his deposit in Atlanta.

  Vampires might have vast powers, but they sure were clichéd storytellers. Or maybe Leopold had in fact lived a storybook mortal life. For some reason, though, he simply doubted that, or at least his subconscious mind doubted it and gave him a funny feeling whenever he contempl
ated the story.

  So Leopold was attempting to reconstruct his true past. He had compiled only three details thus far: first, the hollow ring of his supposed past; second, the fact that he could not recall questioning his past until about two years ago, and finally, his inability to sculpt anyone he knew was a Kindred. It was this final matter that most concerned him, and he’d conducted a few experiments to investigate the matter. Namely, he’d asked his friend Sarah, another Toreador neonate who had been new to Atlanta but subsequently succumbed to the Blood Curse, to set up some blind sittings for him. Specifically, he did not wish to be told whether or not the sitter was Kindred. And what had happened? Well, nothing, but that was the point. Half of the sitters had been Kindred. When he did not know their nature, Leopold had little trouble manifesting their likeness in clay. One of the sitters who was unable to be discreet about his nature so shook Leopold that he thanked the Kindred but asked him to leave—an unfortunate incident, as that Kindred was Trevor, one of the Brujah street sergeants who now bore a grudge for the slight Leopold had leveled him.

  Certainly, Leopold could imagine that his difficulty sculpting Kindred derived from his work with the beautiful Toreador (who had conveniently insisted on anonymity, he clearly recalled) who ultimately shattered his life by Embracing him and forcing him to save his life by devouring her blood. Leopold was certain even non-Freudian psychotherapists would relent on a dramatic cause-and-effect such as this case, but it didn’t seem right to Leopold.

  After all, he knew about that event, or thought he knew about it anyway, and the contemplation of it directly did not concern him. Yes, his memories of that time were terrible indeed, and there could presumably be something of the saga he was keeping from his conscious thoughts, something so heinous that the solitary event was stricken from his memory and now unconsciously caused his troubles.