Billy the Kid and the Vampyres of Vegas

  ALSO BY MICHAEL SCOTT

  The Alchemyst

  The Magician

  The Sorceress

  The Necromancer

  The Warlock

  The Death of Joan of Arc: A Lost Story from the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art copyright © 2011 by [TK]

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-97555-3

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Other Books by This Author

  Copyright

  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

  I never wanted to be immortal.

  Like just about everything else in my life, it happened without my asking. I didn’t even know I’d changed until I fell off my horse and rolled halfway down a mountainside. That fall broke just about every bone in my body. I could hear them snapping all the way down. By rights that fall should have killed me—but I got up and walked away.

  I knew then I was different. Really different.

  It wasn’t until much later that I discovered what I had become: ageless. I wasn’t too upset about it at first. Then I discovered that being immortal comes with some serious enemies, and only a few of them are human.

  But sometimes your friends are even more dangerous than your enemies.

  From Notes & Scraps

  Being the Private Journal of William H. Bonney

  Commonly known as Billy the Kid

  (Undated, possibly September 2005)

  1.

  “Billy, let me be very clear,” said the white-bearded Elder Quetzalcoatl. “You do not open the jar.”

  The young man in the faded Route 66 T-shirt and weathered blue jeans nodded. Hooking his thumbs in his belt, fingertips resting on the ornate buckle, he leaned over and looked at the beautifully decorated earthenware vessel in the center of the table. Its wide mouth was sealed with what looked like black wax etched with sticklike writing.

  “Don’t open the jar,” Billy repeated quietly to himself, then asked, “Why—what’s in it?”

  Quetzalcoatl remained expressionless. “You do not want to know.”

  “I do, actually.” Billy the Kid looked at the slender figure with the hawk nose and solid black eyes standing across from him. “If you want me to deliver this, the least you can do is tell me what’s in it.”

  A look of irritation flashed across the copper-skinned Elder’s face. His long serpent’s tail, bright with scales and feathers, swished beneath the hem of his white cotton robe and rasped back and forth over the floor.

  Billy reached out to poke the jar with a calloused finger. But before he could touch it, a spark crackled from one of the ornate decorations ringing its surface. Billy leapt back, shaking out his suddenly numb fingers. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked. “That hurts.”

  “I told you not to touch it.”

  “You told me not to open it,” Billy corrected the Elder.

  Quetzalcoatl’s black eyes fixed on Billy. The American immortal shrugged. “ ‘Don’t open,’ you said, not ‘don’t touch.’ ”

  “Do not touch,” Quetzalcoatl snapped.

  Billy grinned. “Then how am I going to carry it?”

  The Elder’s mouth opened and his black tongue flickered through razor-sharp teeth. “Your smart mouth is going to get you killed one day.”

  “Maybe,” Billy said. “But only when I’m no longer of any use to you.”

  Quetzalcoatl leaned toward the Kid, wisps of his beard brushing the jar, which gave off tiny blue-green sparks. “Do you know how many humani servants I have?”

  “No.” Billy’s cold blue eyes stared, unwavering, into the Elder’s face. “How many?”

  Swirls of oily color moved across the surface of Quetzalcoatl’s black eyes. Then he leaned back and his mouth opened in what might have passed for a smile. “Maybe I should let you open it,” he said. He tapped the jar with his black-nailed index finger. “This is a pithos.”

  “I thought it was a jar,” Billy said. He looked back at the table. The jar was about four feet tall, with a wide mouth above a bulging body narrowing to a circular base. The body of the artifact had been etched with horizontal lines of ancient script and spiral decorations resembling waves.

  “A pithos a jar. Didn’t you learn anything in school?”

  Billy shook his head. “We spent a lot of time on the road when I was young; there wasn’t much time for schooling, and I went to work when my ma died. I was fourteen. Anything I’ve learned I taught myself.”

  Quetzalcoatl shook his head. “I sometimes wonder why I made you immortal.”

  “Because I saved your life,” Billy reminded him with a grin. He held up his forefinger and thumb. “If I remember correctly, you were this close to ending your ten thousand years upon this earth.”

  Quetzalcoatl spun away and moved across the low-ceilinged room. Late-afternoon sunlight washed in through the large open windows, and the air smelled of exotic spices. “Just remember, Billy, I can take away your immortality just as easily as I granted it.”

  Billy the Kid bit back his response and folded his arms across his chest. He’d never asked for immortality, but he’d come to enjoy his extended life span and knew that if he was careful he could live for another one or two or even three hundred years. He’d heard stories of European immortals who had lived for more than half a millennium. His friend Black Hawk had told him that he’d once met an immortal human who was reputed to be one thousand years old. Billy wasn’t sure he believed that; Black Hawk was a hundred years older than Billy, and delighted in telling him the most outlandish stories.

  Quetzalcoatl returned to the table with a thick brown canvas sack. He shook the sack open and a handful of gnarled brown beans rattled out. “Hold this,” he commanded. Billy held the sack, coughing as the dry bitterness of cacao wafted up from the interior. Quetzalcoatl was addicted to chocolate and had the finest beans shipped in from all across South America every month. Lifting the pithos, the Elder carefully placed it in the sack and tied the neck with a strip of leather.

  “I want you to take it to this address
in Chinatown. Hand it over to the person there. I will call her as soon as you leave and tell her you are bringing it. She’s expecting it. And Billy,” Quetzalcoatl added with a ragged grin. “Do not talk to her. Don’t try to be smart or funny or clever. Just give her the pithos and walk away. Make sure you put it into her hands. And then forget you’ve ever met her.”

  “Trying to scare me?” Billy raised an eyebrow.

  “Trying to warn you.”

  “Well, I don’t scare easy.” Billy the Kid lifted the bag. It was surprisingly heavy. “You’re sounding a little nervous there,” he teased the Elder. “Who is this woman?”

  “No humani woman. This is the warrior’s warrior, sometimes called the Daemon Slayer or the King Maker. This is Scathach the Shadow, and she is deadly beyond reckoning.”

  2.

  “See you next week. Keep practicing.” The slender red-haired young woman with the shocking green eyes bowed as the last of her students left the dojo, then locked the door and turned back to the broad room. The artificial smile she always used when dealing with humans faded and her features turned sharp, almost cruel. She looked about seventeen, but Scathach had been born in the dark days after the fall of Danu Talis ten thousand years earlier. She had spent more than two and half thousand of those years on the Earth Shadowrealm. She had never been entirely comfortable among the humani; bitter experience had taught her not to get too close to them. She was always happiest when she was alone. And she had been alone for most of her long life.

  Humming a tune that had been popular in the Egyptian court of Tutankhamen, Scathach opened a narrow cupboard and pulled out a broom, its head wrapped in a yellow cloth. Starting at the back of the room, she began to sweep the floor in long, rhythmic strokes.

  The martial arts dojo was plain and unadorned, painted in shades of white and cream with black mats scattered across the gleaming wooden floor. Long beams of late-afternoon sunlight slanted in through the high windows, trapping spiraling dust motes in the slightly stale air. Four evenings a week Scathach taught karate classes, and every Friday morning she held a free self-defense workshop for women. Twice a week, she instructed a handful of special students in the ancient Indian art of Kalarippayattu, the oldest martial art in the world. None of her students realized that their teacher had been one of the originators of the ancient fighting system, which had inspired the Chinese and then the Japanese martial arts.

  “I’d better go out and buy some food later,” she decided as she swept. Scathach was vampire. She had no need for food but had long ago realized that in order to blend in with the humani world, she needed to do what they did. In the ancient past too many of her clan had betrayed themselves through either stupidity or arrogance. And the most common mistake was being seen as not requiring everyday necessities like food—fruit, milk, tea. She’d made sure most of the shopkeepers in her neighborhood knew her. She even faked poor Mandarin or Cantonese to speak to them. She knew both languages perfectly but thought it would make her less conspicuous if she seemed to struggle.

  When she’d finished sweeping, Scathach stepped into the tiny office at the back of the dojo. Like the rest of the space, it was plain to the point of austerity: it contained only a simple wooden desk with a battered kitchen chair behind it facing the door. There were no martial arts certificates on the walls—no one ever questioned her skills—but one wall was adorned with antique weapons from around the world: swords and scythes, axes, spears, nunchaku and sai, khanda and claymores. All of them were nicked and battered from centuries of use in countless fights across a hundred Shadowrealms.

  The cordless telephone and answering machine on the corner of the desk were the only modern devices in the room. The answering machine was blinking, a red 2 flashing on and off.

  A flicker of surprise shifted across Scathach’s normally expressionless face. She rarely received any calls on this phone. The number was not only private, even the telephone company didn’t have it in their records. Any calls were routed through a dozen switching points and bounced across two continents and one satellite, making the number untraceable. Scathach could count on the fingers on one hand the people who knew how to reach her here. It had been a year—no, fourteen months—since the last call, and that had been someone selling life insurance.

  Scathach shook her head slightly. This could only be trouble. And trouble meant she would have to move. She sighed. She really loved San Francisco; she’d hoped she’d be able to stay here for another decade at least before her unchanging appearance would force her to relocate to avoid suspicion. She could return in a century or so when everyone who had known her would be dead—but she didn’t want to leave quite yet.

  She pressed Play. “You have two new messages.”

  “I understand you have been seeking a certain pithos.” The voice was an arrogant rasp, speaking in a language that had not been used on the American continent in millennia. “I am in a position to give it to you.”

  “Of course you are,” Scathach whispered with a smile. Quetzalcoatl had phoned her deliberately, allowing her to see that he knew where she lived. She had recently discovered—quite by accident—that the snake-tailed Elder had the artifact in his collection of antiquities. During the past few weeks, she had visited a dozen of his agents and let them know she wanted it. She knew the message would get to Quetzalcoatl sooner rather than later, and knew that he would contact her. The Elder known as the Feathered Serpent would gladly give up the pithos to keep her from rampaging through his Shadowrealm in search of it. Scathach was likely to leave his world a smoking ruin.

  “Although the pithos is of great personal value to me, I would like to present it to you as a token of my goodwill.”

  Goodwill! Scathach was surprised Quetzalcoatl even knew how to pronounce the word. Her lips curled in a cruel smile. He was giving her the jar because he was afraid of her.

  The answering machine tape hissed for a minute and then there was a coughing sound and Scathach realized that Quetzalcoatl was attempting a laugh. “I have no wish to make an enemy of you. I was a good friend to your parents. Indeed, I believe we may even be related by blood on your mother’s side. We are not that different, you and I.”

  “You have no idea just how different we are,” Scathach murmured into the pause that followed.

  “My representative will call upon you later today. He is an immortal humani and knows of your nature. He can be a little arrogant, but I would be grateful if you did not kill him. He is useful to me.”

  There was a click and then the message stopped.

  “Well, that was easy.” Scathach grinned. She’d been quite prepared to invade the Elder’s Shadowrealm in search of the famous pithos. She pressed the Play button again to listen to the second call.

  “A long time ago, you told me that if I was ever in any trouble I could call upon you.”

  Scathach’s breath caught in her throat. It was a voice she had not heard in a long time, a youthful man’s voice with just a trace of an accent. A man she knew to be dead.

  “But when I called, you did not come, and I paid a terrible price. You failed me once. Scathach, I am in trouble now. Deep trouble. I need you, Shadow. There are vampyres in Las Vegas, and they are hunting me. I’m staying at—”

  Before he finished his sentence the call was cut off.

  3.

  Billy had driven around the block twice looking for a place to park and eventually decided that he was not leaving his precious Thunderbird at a parking meter. He found a garage on Vallejo Street and parked his bright red convertible as far away from any of the other cars as possible. Two weeks earlier someone had bumped into his door with a shopping cart, leaving a long, thin scar in the paint. It had taken him an entire day to buff out the scratch and another to repaint the door.

  Wrapping his left hand in the leather cord around the sack’s mouth, Billy hefted the heavy bag holding the pithos over his shoulder and set off down Vallejo Street toward Stockton. Although he had lived in and around Sa
n Francisco for the better part of a century, he’d never spent a lot of time exploring the city itself. Narrow streets and crowds made him nervous. He preferred the open countryside.

  He walked past two youths leaning against a wall—one unnaturally skinny, the other muscular—and saw how their eyes drifted across him and settled on the bag. They exchanged a look. Billy knew their type: he’d ridden horseback alongside them once and fought against them for the rest of his life. “Don’t even think about it, boys,” he said lightly as he strode past. “You do not want to mess with me today. Or any day.” There was something about the expression on his face and the look in his eyes that made both young men step back and turn to hurry away. Billy grinned. All bullies were cowards.

  The immortal turned onto Stockton Street, then left onto Broadway, walked past the Sam Wong Hotel and turned right into a cramped back street. He knew he was close. He consulted the address on the sweat-stained scrap of paper in the palm of his hand. He was in a narrow alleyway barely wide enough for one car. The buildings on either side were so high they blocked out the sun, leaving the alley in gloomy shadow. Metal bins, stinking with rotting food and buzzing with flies, lined one wall. Billy took care to breathe only through his mouth. He had no idea who this Scathach person was, but he didn’t think much of where she lived. Quetzalcoatl had called her the King Maker and the Daemon Slayer and had said she was a Shadow, whatever that meant. A shadow of her former self? Billy was guessing she was a dumpy old bag lady who probably kept cats. Dozens of cats. He shifted the sack from one shoulder to the other and once again wondered what exactly it contained. It looked like a Greek wine jar, but he was almost certain there was no wine in it. He’d shaken it when he’d put it in the back of his car, then pressed his ear against the rough cacao-scented cloth. For the merest instant he could have sworn he’d heard voices coming from inside the jar. Maybe it was full of Nirumbee—Little People. If so, he was in no hurry to open it. Fifty years earlier, in Montana, he’d rescued Virginia Dare from some of the little horned monsters and they’d both barely escaped with their immortal lives.