I grunted out a gravelly sound of agreement. “Well, we’ve got Kitty’s help no matter what, now. So hopefully that’ll turn up something.”
“…other than her body,” Tamara added quietly.
I stared at her.
“That…was a little dark, wasn’t it?”
I nodded. “…Just a little.”
She sighed, gave up on fully drying her hair and leaned against the wall. “I just…”
The Moroi trailed off, so I finished the thought for her. “You feel guilty about getting her involved again. And hurt, again. And you’re worried that it’ll get worse before it gets better.”
She narrowed those dim, beautiful sapphire eyes at me. “Hey. I’m supposed to be the Moroi here, remember? Not you.”
I snorted. “Yeah, but this is obvious.” I grabbed her towel as it fell and tossed it into the shower room pile. “I’ll just point out one thing: if we hadn’t gone to see Mr. Alvarez tonight, he still would have died, and Kitty would never have known why.”
“Do you really think her knowing is better?” She kicked off the wall, and we headed downstairs. “Look what it’s done to her. Now she’s locked onto this mystery like a Pitbull.” Tamara frowned as I slid aside the rocky barrier blocking the stairway. “She’s changed so much in just a few months…I saw a new side of her tonight, one I don’t quite get. Not yet.”
“It’s the Fae part,” I supplied. Tamara stumbled on the stone steps and I caught her arm, steadying her until her tired legs could recover. “I think the moment Alvarez offered to help her, a sort of connection was made between them. Especially since he was already a friend of her mother’s. And for Lan to come in and harm him, and right in front of her no less…” I might not be a Fae expert, but I’d known Hershel long enough to put a few things together.
“To her mind, he…what? Took something away from her? Committed some sort of crime?” Tamara went to her room, and I followed, pushing aside the shimmery cloth curtain. “The Fae are weird.”
“But…predictable, too. If you give them something, they owe you. If they give you something, you owe them. If you take something away from them…they owe you.” I shrugged. “It’s like the natural order of things to them. Almost like a compulsion, I guess? A geas. They have to settle debts, to make things ‘right,’ to correct imbalances. And I don’t think they have a choice.” I thought back to earlier. “Like Hershey said, it’s in their blood.”
She wrinkled her nose. “And it’s weird thinking of Kitty as one of them.” Tamara crossed her windowless underground room and popped open a mini-fridge, quickly unsealing a large pre-packaged dinner and stuffing it into a microwave almost too small to contain it. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember her bringing either of those in. “Not that I like what happened to the poor guy either, mind you.”
“Can’t disagree there.” I glanced around. Tamara didn’t keep her room terribly tidy, but hers was more “sloppy,” while mine said “post apocalypse hovel.” I hadn’t found the motivation to clean much…since Lori left, to be honest. But maybe it was time to start again. For reasons. “What do you think about what Lan said? That Alvarez was trying to…warn us about something?”
“Absolutely accurate. I saw him try to speak a couple more times while the EMTs were working…but he never regained consciousness enough for me to make anything out.” The Moroi tried to shake the haunted shadows out of her eyes as she grabbed her food and took a seat on the edge of her sagging, second-hand mattress. She glanced up at me and patted it invitingly; the narrow bed creaked quietly in complaint as I accepted her offer. “In fact, I don’t think Lan lied about anything—or even exaggerated. He was telling us straight as he saw it. Which is scary when you think about it.” She eyed me. “And what did you think about your first close encounter with a distant cousin?”
“My whuh?”
She grinned. “Binh Tuan Lan,” Tamara enunciated fluidly, “was a Jiangshi.”
I thought it over. “Huh.” I thought about it some more. “Well, shit.” I caught the amused twinkle in her eye. “I assume this is bad, then? What do you know about them?”
“Not as much as I’d like, and nowhere near as much as I do about the other three types of vampire.” Tamara sighed.
“You didn’t read old romances about them when you were little, too?” I poked her in the ribs, grinning, and was rewarded with a twitch and the faintest of blushes.
“Quiet, you.” She leaned against me as she ate, and I leaned a little against her as well, proximity lending us both support after the long night. “I know they originated in Asia, where they have managed to maintain a sizable region almost free of Sanguinarian influence, despite their supposedly small numbers—a feat I personally think is due to very extensive ties in the mortal world.”
“Never letting the bloodbags get an influence foothold in the first place.” I nodded approvingly.
“Otherwise, the Jiangshi are clannish—they keep outsiders at arm’s length,” Tamara continued around a steaming mouthful of turkey and gravy. “Probably to protect their secrets. They’re only about as old as the Sanguinarians are, maybe a little older.” She shrugged. “Like I said, I dunno a lot of details.”
“What about powers? Weaknesses?” I scrubbed my feet back and forth over her chunk of woolly black carpeting, trying to feel the threads. “You know, useful stuff.” I grinned. “I already figured out that he tried to eat me.”
“Jiangshi eat magic. Essence.” When she met my eyes, it was with a flicker of fear in her own. “That’s what he was trying to do to you.”
Having passed through the experience relatively unharmed, the idea held less terror for me than it seemed to for Tamara. “You thought he could…de-animate me?”
The Moroi turned away, hiding her discomfort by leaning over and lighting the cheap black glass incense burner next to her bed. I hoped it wasn’t also a silent commentary on my lack of success in the shower earlier. “To be honest…” She sat upright, plopping her family-size dinner back in her lap. “He can probably feed on a lot more than just the energy animating you.”
I snapped my fingers, and she twitched at the sudden sound, shooting me a playful, short-lived glare. “Like the thresholds at the houses we found,” I said, nodding at the revelation. Tamara nodded along with me. “And…probably your powers, too.”
She went still for a moment. “Didn’t think of that one,” she admitted, going in for another hungry mouthful. “Though it also seemed to affect him properly, at least for a little while.” She stared up, and I followed her eyes to the wall-spanning galaxy poster across from her bed. “Honestly, a lot of what he did caught me off guard, so I was fighting on instinct back there. Not much thinking it through going on.” She flashed me a grin. “Maybe—”
“—I’m rubbing off on you?” I shared her smile. “Could be worse. I think?”
She shook her head, amused. “Anyway, we know that the original Jiangshi were simply magically animated corpses. Basically zombies whose wills were strong enough to remove their own talismans: the spells of control created by the magicians that animated them.” She looked at me, then back to her food, chewing slowly. “And, as corpses, they should be something like you. Stronger, tougher…”
“That seems accurate. Though he seemed more…alive than me, too. Somehow.” I thought back to the fight; my memories of Lan’s attempt to feed on me were blurry and barely coherent, but the rest of the brutal scuffle had remained intact. “He wasn’t quite as strong or as tough as me, but he was at least as quick. Or maybe that was just an illusion cast by his vastly superior skill.”
“Probably a bit of both.”
I nodded; I’d figured the same. “Anything else to go on? So far, all I’ve got for strategy is ‘hit him with something really big.’”
She paused. “Legend says the only way to kill them for good is to cut off the head and burn the body. Might or might not be accurate.”
“So, no help for me. Gotcha.”
&nbs
p; “Well…try not to let him get too close. He had to get right up on you and stay there to drain you.”
“So…he has no weaknesses, and I can’t get up close and personal with him?” I frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “Actually…I can work with that.”
She stared at me for a moment, a fond glimmer in her eyes. “Well, I believe in you. If anyone can manage to pull out something crazy and ride it to a win, it’s you.”
“Watch out. You’re gonna make me blush.” I stared at the rug. “In all honestly, I’m more concerned with what he said than what he can do.” I absently chewed at the intact side of my cheek. “And if he’s working alone, or if we’ve got an extra breed of vampire mixed up in the whole alliance business.”
“I think if he were part of a larger Jiangshi plot…we’d know it by now. And we probably wouldn’t keep walking away from it.” Now it was Tamara’s turn to sigh. “That said…he did sound a little…zealoty, didn’t he?” She chewed thoughtfully. “I wonder how—and if—he’s tied into the rest of this mess. It’s got to be connected, somehow.”
I nodded, staring at the smooth curve of her neck and shoulder a little too long, before returning my attention to the woolly midnight rug. “Probably. But either way…he sounded almost religious to me. And if we’ve got a zealot on our hands, he’ll be trouble no matter what his powers and allies are. He really won’t give up.”
“You don’t think much of religion, do you?”
A deep, dead breath wheezed its way out of me. “Yes and no? I’ve seen some evidence. The existence of Meladoquiel. The power of High Hill Church. The bite of an anointed knife.” At that last one, the Moroi winced; too late, I vividly recalled Charles emptying half a magazine of blessed nine millimeter rounds into a possessed Tamara’s stomach. I frowned. “I don’t have to agree with a person’s beliefs to respect them, but…” I shrugged. “I dunno. My dad was the same way, you know? So was my uncle. Maybe it’s inherited.” I grinned as a memory floated to the surface. “Once, when I was still in my teens, I remember one of those door-to-door people coming by, trying to get my uncle to come to his church. He brought up the whole belief thing.”
“What’d your uncle say?”
“That he’d been on a battlefield after the gunfire stopped. Heard the screams of forgotten soldiers and civilians alike. And that he didn’t see how a man could gaze at the aftermath of war and still believe there was a god.”
“Shit,” Tamara stared off for a moment. “That’s some heavy stuff.”
I took a breath. “From what little he told me, so was Vietnam.” I shook my head and turned the question around on her. “What about you? I seem to remember you throwing ‘goddess this’ and ‘goddess that’ around a couple of times. There anything to that?”
She chuckled in response. “Yes and no?” She grinned. “My family actually hands down a mostly oral tradition of She of Many Faces, from somewhere back in the Sumerian-Babylonian days. As a deity, she’s more or less a mixture of Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte, and a few others from across the centuries.”
“Really?” I wondered if she was just messing with me.
Tamara chuckled, but also nodded earnestly. “No shit. The story goes that she’s worn many guises over many, many years and in many civilizations, and that she’s with us still, guiding us. That the different names and roles are just different aspects, or her just changing with the times.” The Moroi abruptly rolled her eyes. “But honestly? I just say it out of habit. I don’t think many of us actually believe in her anymore, except maybe Mother and some of our eldest.” Despite her flippant tone, the Moroi grew introspective for a moment. “Mostly we just pay her lip service, I guess…up until something really bad happens.” She fell quiet, the remainder of her food sitting uneaten, and I frowned.
“So…” I finally caught her attention again and grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “Are we gonna talk about how awesome you were back there?”
“Who, me?” Her playful smile became a sudden blush, a hint of rose red blooming on alabaster cheeks and catching both of us off guard. “I…was really worried back there, actually. Scared. The emotions really got to me, I guess. Especially after Fright, I thought I might….” She cut a look at me, a glint of tarnished sapphire through long, perfect black lashes. “I put pretty much everything I had into that fight, I think.”
I swallowed a sudden mouthful of anxiety at her choice of words. “Yeah, you really went into fucking overdrive on him.” Were her feelings for me really that strong? “And actually…that’s something I’m worried about, Tam. As amazing as you were, you’re not exactly…um…”
“I’ll be alright.” For once, the Moroi’s lie couldn’t have been more obvious. Something in her tone told me to leave it alone, but I couldn’t.
I cared too much.
“Will you?” My eyes sought hers, but she dodged my gaze. “Tam, you’re…getting weaker. You have been for a while now. You have to know that. You’re going to have to—”
“Feed more?” Tamara’s words came out so bitterly edged I could feel it, the emotion laying thick on my skin for an instant like grease in the air. I’d been an instant from saying the same, and the words died a quick death on my tongue. “Believe me, I’d love to. More than you know.”
“I—”
“No, you don’t understand.” She stole my words again, speaking over me without effort. “Even after what you went through, you don’t know what it’s like for a Moroi.”
I opened my mouth, but closed it again as she turned back to me, her eyes flashing fitfully as she stared into the depths of mine. “You don’t know what it’s like to look at the people you love and taste them in the air, to take tiny, involuntary sips when they get excited, when they laugh, when they give you a hug…” The edges of her eyes melted and ran like liquid for a moment. “…when they hold your hand…” The words came out in a whisper; she blinked once, and her eyes were solid and dull once more.
I took a deep, useless breath and swallowed hard. I had the sympathy—but not the words to express it, especially with Tamara’s barely-restrained emotions hammering me.
“You don’t know what it’s like to taste that and to always crave more, even knowing what it would do to them; knowing that you’d lose them forever.” Suddenly she was on her feet, pacing, her conflicted emotions a buzz of static electricity in the dusty air. “To have to force a part of you, deep down inside, to even care…”
She shook her head emphatically, slinging sapphire tears to the floor. “And then to see in their eyes an endless progression of the times you’ve failed.” I started to get to my feet, to go to her, but the Moroi met my eyes again and something in my legs turned to stone. “The times you went too far and someone else didn't come back.” Tamara ran her hands down her own neck and shoulders, her eyes momentarily a million miles away. Finally, she crossed her arms hard across her chest and refocused on me, on the present. “You’re not the only monster here, Ashes. Sometimes I think you forget that.”
“…The Adventure massacre…it wasn’t your fault…” I managed. “Not really—”
“No,” Tamara whispered, her voice distant and ethereal, like a breath of gossamer in the air. “That’s just a small part of it all, really.” I could see the ghosts of her past haunting her eyes, even before she spoke. “It’s those closest to us that taste the best, you know. True for Meladoquiel…and true for me.” The words were a hungry hiss.
Despite myself, I shivered. Was that my emotion or Tamara’s that traced its way down my spine? I couldn’t tell. “Still…” I struggled to speak, my words tiny in the wake of hers. “If you don’t feed, you’ll—”
Tamara’s hand lashed out, a flicker of alabaster lightning. “I’m tired of feeding, Ashes!” Her voice rung in the air as she slapped her food from the bed, spraying a stripe of lukewarm gravy across the rug. “Tired of trying. Tired of eating.”
Still as a statue, she stared at the gravy dripping thickly from her hand. “But I’m tired of
starving, too.”
Without warning, Tamara’s legs quivered and her knees hit the floor. As her energy bottomed out, I finally managed to break free of her emotional spell and move toward her, desperate to offer whatever comfort I could scrape together.
I froze as she looked up, icy tears tracing their way down her flawless cheeks. “My family made it easy, you know?” Her voice had dwindled to a small thing, like mine. “Easier, anyway. Emotional support. Contacts. Places. And now all that’s gone, too.”
Wordlessly, wishing I could cry with her, I extended my hand.
She shook her head.
“Tam…”
“I…I need to be alone, Ashes.” The Moroi smiled a small, false smile, her eyes clouded by tears.
I stood there, silent, for a long moment before finally dropping my hand.
Then I went to my room, wearing my loneliness like a cloak, unable to remember feeling quite this helpless.
9
But it followed me home
The day dragged at me with stubborn fingers, despite the thick layers of stone above my head.
Just as stubborn, I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep.
But something…something wouldn’t let me.
Not a dream because Strigoi didn’t dream. Not a sight because my eyes were sealed shut like coffin lids. Not a sound because my hearing atrophied to nothing during my mandatory rest.
So then why was my body struggling to stir, seemingly of its own accord?
Slowly and clumsily, I forced my eyes open, letting in unfocused shapes and shades of gray. I focused, straining, and tried to pry sounds from my tomblike environment.
“There you are,” Lan commented quietly.
Too little too late, I understood the warning my deadened senses had been trying to convey to my day-addled mind.
I spasmed at a single stab of unfamiliar pain as the stake pierced my ribs on the left side, diving deep into my heart. The pain was fleeting, there one instant, gone the next.
Dreadful Ashes Page 10
