Slide On The Run

Slide had nodded, knowing that a kind of unspoken challenge had been issued, but to what exactly he wasn't sure. All he knew was that Barton intended to make the predicted meeting happen. "I will look forward to it, Sir Richard."

"You do that, Mr. Slide. You do that."

After the exchange, Rosa had made it clear that it was not a good idea for Slide to be loitering in the public rooms of her Establishment. She wanted to stash him, with suitable means of amusement, in some more private sector of the house. Slide was in total agreement with that, if perhaps for different reasons. The two Green Martian hostesses, with their flexibility, ingenuity, wanton zealousness and, of course, those extra Martian orifices, would divert the body allowing the essential Idimmu, that was the core of Slide, to float free to the place of abstraction where his demon essence could, for the duration of the stoned and physical games, find an untroubled, demon stability. After all the drugs, and its prodigious journey across space and time, Slide's adopted body

now bore little resemblance to the long gone Joh

When all was done, Slide returned to ex-Yuma body. He dismissed the hostesses and dressed for the world outside. The temptation was simply to remain at Rose Coote's establishment as long as she would endure him as a guest, but, once again, his demon curiosity got the better of him. The body wanted to sleep, but Slide would not be dictated to by any a

Slide was about to leave the fake henge when he felt the movement, a motion quite beyond his human senses, but with the resonance of a solid mass to his demon perceptions. What gave him paused was the inability of his demon perceptions to pinpoint location of this mass. He immediately went on the searching defensive, but still didn't catch the intrusion until it suddenly appeared in the form of a supposedly human figure, bullnecked and powerful, dressed in a flowing black overcoat and slouch hat.

"Hold up there, daemon."

Slide halted and turned to face the intruder. He might look like a man, but Slide knew instinctively that it was no more human than he. A human was unable simply to appear out of nowhere with quite such a supernatural sense of drama, and no human could conjure the ground fog that was suddenly drifting between the trees and around the megaliths of the stone circle, and certainly no human could recognized Slide as a demon in a man's body quite so easily. He been both made and surprised, and that was not good. No choice but the bluster.

"And who might you be? You don't look like any Druid. Even a Martian druid."

The figure moved closer. "You don't know me?" In fact, Slide did know the figure, after a fashion, or at least he thought he did. It greatly resembled the man at Rosa Coote's, sitting behind Sir Richard Barton, the one who Rosa had pointed out as Nightshade, and had said smelled of vampire. Was Barton so advanced that the had the undead in his employ and had sent this one to waylay Slide?

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

"But I think you know me."

Slide was stu

conscious surface. Nightshade. More fully Joey Nightshade. The entity was also known Lupo Leomonte, sometimes Lupo Rieti. In other contexts, he was Vincent Satrielli. He was a vampire, one of the colony led by the formidable Victor Renquist, by all accounts with a career of bloody assassination that went back to the Italian Renaissance. All that Slide knew told him that such a being had no such business on Mars at all, let alone eight million years in his own linear past.

"You are Nightshade?"

"I prefer the simple Lupo."

Slide made a routine demon-to-vampire ward-off pass with his right hand, more to indicate that he had made this Nightshade, just as this Nightshade had made him, than as a gesture of protection. "I didn't know they had vampires on Mars?"

"I would rather you used the word "nosferatu". It's co

"I'll try and remember that. I also don't like the term daemon."

Lupo bowed in sardonic acknowledgment. "Then we must try and respect each other's sensitivities."

"I am still surprise that a nosferatu should come to Mars."

"Normally we don't, but She of Fable requested our presence and made it possible."

"She of Fable?"

"The queen of this…place. The former Wilhelmina Murray, and the wife of the Slayer Harker. She that was the consort of Count Dracula." Lupo did not sound as though he exactly approved of Mars. Or Harker, or Count Dracula either.

"And you just arrived here?

Lupo nodded. "By the same method as you yourself used, demon."

A mind reading vampire? How else could Lupo know how Slide had come to Mars? He let that go for a moment, however, simply contracting his mind and vampire-perceived aura locking them both down beyond the reach of any Nosferatu psychic delving. "A Carter Machine?"

"I believe that was the name of the device."

"You could survive riding the Gridley Wave?"

"I believe it was somewhat modified to make such a thing possible."

"And now you're here, the sun doesn't not bother you?"

Lupo eyed Slide coldly, less than pleased at what he obviously considered an interrogation. "Not when it is so very distant. I can feel it as an irritation, but it does me no harm."

Lupo's response was structured in such a way that it gave discreet warning that further questions on Slide's part might be considered an invasion of Nosferatu privacy. He had forgotten how sensitive old school vampires could be about unwarranted intrusions into what they viewed as their personal business. To gain information was to gain strength, but Slide knew he should, for the moment, curb his curiosity. Lupo could too easily take offense. Slide had seen vampires become offended and it was always violent and most times messy. He wasn't afraid of Lupo, but he knew, in a trial of strength, they were, at the very least, evenly matched and the outcome might be anyone's guess. Fortunately an outside distraction created a natural pause in the conversation. A trio of unsuspecting Fygglhgis came down one of the radiating paths on the far side of the stone circle. Their carapaces and tripod legs clicked as they moved, causing both Slide and Lupo to turn. At the sight of the demon and the vampire, the small crustaceans turned and beat a hasty retreat while exhibiting the body signs of three beings who have suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere.