True Dead

by Faith Hunter

  Beast does not need help. Beast does not stay put, she thought at me. Into our shared head space, she sent images of hunting, killing, attacking a massive boar. Beast is best hunter.

  I thought about the terror that was pumping through Bruiser’s blood. Thought about what it meant to be the Dark Queen. Very softly, enunciating each word, I said, “You ran outside. You. In the face of enemies.”

  “This is not about me. You nearly died.”

  “Because you did not tell me. Without communication, I will do as I think best.”

  “Tell you? You did not ask.” His scent was morphing sharply from fear into anger.

  “That’s a sucky excuse,” I said, putting distance between us, sliding across the seat. “This is my HQ. My job. Mine. You will let me do it.”

  An inarticulate sound emerged from his throat and rose to a shout. “You could have died!” he shouted, fury in his eyes. Bruiser’s fists balled, and the stink of his emotions grew. “Died! I could have lost you!”

  “Yeah. That sucks. And now we know I’m mortal, unlike Leo, who was immortal and yet who is dead.” And that was the problem, right there. Leo dead. His coffin empty. Bruiser facing the possibility of another loss. Me.

  The car had come to a stop. We were at the freebie house, and I hadn’t noticed.

  “I keep trying to protect you the way I protected Leo.” He forced his hands to open and placed them on his thighs, breathing through the rage and terror. “But you are not Leo. You cannot fight your enemies as Leo fought his.” Bruiser twisted in the seat, opened the door, and stepped out to the sidewalk. “I could not bear to lose you,” he said. He slammed the door. The armored vehicle actually shook. Bruiser stalked inside the house, rage vibrating through him.

  Oddly, seeing him like that made me happy. It was like a normal human man storming into the house. Yet . . . To myself, I said, “He’s protecting me like he had to protect Leo. This sucks.”

  The privacy panel came down. “We’re all protecting you like we protected Leo,” the driver said. “It’s our job. If a vamp comes in and kills you, who do you think suffers? Us humans and our families, who might be put to death by a conqueror just for the hell of it.”

  I looked up and saw Shemmy in the rearview. I looked at the control panel and saw that Bruiser hadn’t turned off the speakers. Shemmy had heard the entire thing. “Your families?”

  “You’re the only thing standing between us and total annihilation. If an asshole takes over from you, kills you? Bruiser and Eli and Alex will be the first to go. Then all your loyal security people. Your witch friends and allies? Gone in the first tier. Wrassler and his human wife, Jodi? Somewhere at about the second layer of cleansing. You had to know all this. You saw the house that later became your clan home. You know how many died, and that was simply a clan battle. This will be immeasurably worse. This will be like Europe.”

  Where a war had raged and the death toll was over a thousand.

  Shock rushed through me like an icy wind. Leo had told me that he stood between chaos and anarchy and the safety of his people. My job was even bigger than his had been. The moment I became the Dark Queen, my power placed all of my people in danger. Every single one of them. And it was my job to protect them. I had known that I needed an army and I had worked to create one. But I needed a bigger freaking army.

  “And hey, Legs? You wrote our job descriptions. Dumas is just doing his job, and you’re not helping him.”

  It was true. I had written the job descriptions, including my own. But when I wrote them, I hadn’t considered that I might not shift if I died. I hadn’t considered that Sabina would be burned and Leo’s body stolen. I had never fully wrapped my head around the knowledge that a conquering vamp would kill my people just for funzies. That sort of head-lopping housecleaning was way beyond my understanding. A very few enemies had been dispatched when I became the Dark Queen, but wholesale killing was a baffling concept. Worse, my muscle memory always said to run toward the fight, no matter what, and Beast . . . Beast wanted to fight. She lived for it. She goaded me into the fray every single time. I had put everyone in danger trying to do things the old way, not reining in Beast, not thinking first, not staying safe.

  “So I’m an ass.”

  “Not my words. Your words, My Queen,” Shemmy said.

  Okay. Lesson learned. I needed to tell them I had learned it. Show them I had learned it. And I had to apologize to my honeybunch, big time. I blew out a sigh. “Thanks, Shemmy. I needed to hear all that.”

  And . . . Bruiser and I might have just had an actual fight. In front of the chauffeur. In the midst of feeling like an idiot, this made me oddly, weirdly happy, and it took a moment to realize that people who are bound don’t argue. This argument had just proved to me that we were normal. Just a normal couple. Laying out boundaries and figuring out how to make a relationship work, like humans, instead of typical fanghead life.

  Well, aside from all the “Kill Jane” and the “Jane is stupid” stuff.

  * * *

  * * *

  The boys were sparring on the third floor. Grunts, thumps, gasps, tiny squeals. It was noisy. I climbed the flights to the attic space, which had been converted into a gym / fighting ring / training room, two vamp sleeping closets, and a tiny bathroom. Along the walls, Koun and Tex stood, arms crossed over their chests, scrutinizing the action. Brute was sitting in the corner, watching avidly, panting with what looked like delight, his tongue lolling. Tex’s dogs were snoozing in the corner.

  In the middle of the floor, the focus of all the attention, Eli and Bruiser were sparring. Sparring hard. Not holding back. Bare to the waist, barefoot, fists landed to torsos and abdomens. To the face, finger jabs to the kidneys, kicks to the knees. Blocks effective about half the time. Eli was in loose workout pants. Bruiser was in his dress slacks, which meant he had walked in the door mad, and Eli had taken on his fury.

  Eli was the better at hand-to-hand because he was sneaky and never followed rules, but Bruiser was faster. And stronger. And he was totally involved with this fight because he was fighting his anger, his impotence to protect me.

  Fun, Beast thought at me. Play with brother and mate?

  I had options. I could join the fray. In half-form, full of vamp blood, Beast and I might be able to beat both of them together. Recently healed, that might not be smart. Or I could take the high road. I wasn’t good at taking the high road.

  Eli landed a throat punch and danced back. Bruiser gagged, the punch having missed crushing his trachea by a hair.

  Into the momentary pause, I yelled, “I’m sorry!”

  Both men stopped, dropped their guards. They looked at me, then at each other. “For what?” Bruiser asked.

  “For not knowing or thinking about being so freaking . . . killable,” I said. “For rushing in like a fool. For getting mostly dead and having to be brought back with your blood,” I said to the vamps. “For putting you all in danger, you and all my people and all their families. For being me and not learning a new way to do things. I suck at being a queen.”

  Eli barked a laugh and stepped farther from Bruiser.

  “But I promise to learn,” I said. “I will never be the proper protocol queen some suckheads and their servants need, but I’ll stop trying to get myself and the people I love killed by not listening.”

  Bruiser dropped his stance, bent over, and put his hands on his knees. He was breathing hard. His face was bruised, and his lips were a bloody mess.

  Eli looked no better, but he was evaluating us. To Bruiser, he said, “She’s worth the trouble.”

  Bruiser nodded his head and managed a deep breath through his damaged throat. He stood upright and shook out his hands. “She is. Did I hurt you?” he asked.

  “I’ll live. A little blood might help later. You want to finish this?”

  “Proper fisticuffs?”

  “
Hell no.” Eli raised his fists and danced out the kinks in his legs. “But nothing below the belt, with knees, throats, and temples off-limits.”

  “Done.” Bruiser attacked.

  I’d be happy to be in the middle of that scuffle, but I had a feeling Bruiser would just walk away. He needed the release.

  In the kitchen with a fresh cup of gunpowder green tea on the table beside me, I watched the security video of the attack at HQ. Fireballs in back. Out front, the attackers used bullets. The NOPD SWAT, uniformed members of the eighth district, and three firetrucks blocked the roads. The humans stood behind armored vehicles and barricades, waiting, SWAT team aiming through the open gates. Watching as vamps and humans raced around shooting at each other. The fireballs out back stopped. Something that might have been the Firestarter slithered like melting wax over the wall and into the darkness. Bodies were carted up the front steps, including mine. No one left through the front entrance. The gate remained open. I sped through an hour of nothing, until Jodi walked through the open front gates and up the steps, as if out for stroll.

  I knew that I would be insulated from violence from now on, and it was my own dang fault. Beast and I needed to get my body and shifting back under control. I needed to be able to shift the way we used to. I needed to go to my soul home and figure out what was wrong.

  Until that happened, I sipped and watched the sun rise out the kitchen window. Later I opened the trunk that Derek and I had brought up from subbasement four. I put the daguerreotype of Leo on the table on Bruiser’s side of the bed and unloaded the record books.

  Just as I had asked Derek, some of the journals were in English, and there was a lot of history, personal musings, often drawings and even some old photos, but there was nothing useful to the current situation, except for a small leather-bound text Derek had put in the trunk. It was titled A Brief Treatise on Witchery and Demonic Workings. It was in English, but nearly impossible to read, with print that used caps in weird places and mixed up S and F and other letters. I hunted for and found a heading that read “The Uncommon and Inexplicable Rule of Three.”

  It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the Onorio Monique Giovanni, the senza onore Aurelia Flamma Scintilla, and the other women in the hull soul home could be three Onorio types. But there were three other Onorios in NOLA—Bruiser and the B-twins, Brandon and Brian Robere. Tau, also a senza onore of some sort, was in the null prison, put there by me. Monique had wanted Bruiser to join her group of three. Why? Add in the Robere twins and Tau in the witch’s null prison, and that made another three. Assuming Monique knew about her.

  Then there were Sabina’s incoherent visions and ramblings. Her visions of Ka. What was so important about Ka N’vsita? The memory of Ka, the Firestarter, and Immanuel standing together with the blond man. Shaun MacLaughlinn was blond. Could it have been him? Had Shaun been part of Immanuel’s plan to take over from Leo from the very beginning? I tried to recall the fashions they wore, but their clothing faded into mists as I tried to force the memory. Sabina hadn’t noticed the clothes or the time period.

  What if . . . What if Ka was still alive but no longer able to change shapes. What if she was no longer an Onorio.

  What if the magic Adan used on Ka had caused her DNA to malfunction as mine had, but with a different outcome? What if that was why they needed more Onorios? That made an awful lot of sense. And if Ka was no longer able to function as a skinwalker, that left Grandmother, who was definitely u’tlun’ta, and me. And Aya was skinwalker too. We had multiples of threes with extras if needed, plenty of paras to make use of the power of the Rule of Three. With a frisson of fear, I wondered what the Rule of Three squared might accomplish.

  Where was Ka’s former master, Adan? Had he known what Ka could become? Would he have cared? Even if he had understood what that meant, Adan was a vamp and a witch. He would have done what he wanted and the consequences be damned.

  Fear shivering through me, I asked Alex, sitting at his desk only yards away in the living room, for Adan’s location. Instantly he texted me an address in Alabama. Adan was in Mobile at last sighting. I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

  Vamp life was a constant jostling of loyalties and rearranging of plans. Tangled skeins of threads to unravel, broken puzzles without all the pieces needed to put it together. All this was too interconnected to be random, as if all of this was part of a weaving created by someone long ago and managed through the years.

  Holy crap. Leo had expected all this. Planned for all this.

  And that blasted fanghead bloodsucker had dumped it all on me.

  CHAPTER 12

  Little Brother to the Rescue

  I texted Aya to beware of possible attacks and the little I knew about the Rule of Three. He texted back one word: “Acknowledged.” My brother wasn’t the chatty type.

  I also texted Brandon and Brian Robere to beware of possible assault and abduction. Brandon replied, “We are in a safe location and are well-guarded, but we will be vigilant.”

  I went back to the journals, flipping through one in Spanish and two in French. They were hard to read and impossible for me to translate, but I could pick out names. I saw one area where the names Adan Bouvier and de Allyon were on the same page. De Allyon. Who killed all the skinwalkers and drank their blood. I had killed his sorry butt and taken his head. I took a photo of the untranslated text and sent it to Alex to find someone who spoke the language of the region and the timeline, and get it translated.

  As I sent the text, vamp timelines begin to click together, almost audibly, in my mind. It was daylight, and my teapot was empty. I should be in bed after a long and complicated night, but my brain was in overdrive. Starting a new pot, with double the gunpower green, I made a strong bitter tea full of caffeine.

  It was possible that if Leo’s liver-eater son, currently known as Immanuel, and Adan (and by loyalty, Ka N’vsita) were part of one group, that sometime in the 1900s, all three somehow entered de Allyon’s service. Some peculiar version of the Rule of Three?

  And later they met the Firestarter, who hated vamps, but . . . if the Onorios were going to betray the vamps and take over from them, then Aurelia might have joined in a relationship with de Allyon. It would have been a relationship that was destined for treachery from the beginning, but that was vamp life in a nutshell.

  But there was no proof. Unless the proof was in these journals or other records from HQ.

  I checked my email and discovered that Alex had sent me the translation of La Historia de Los Mithrans en Los Americas, so I grabbed the Glob from my closet and the small box that contained that original version of the history text from my room. I placed them both carefully on the table. I’d been sent a translation before, but I hadn’t studied it with the full text on the screen and the original book open on my desk. I opened the box and looked inside at the small, nondescript leather-bound book. The first time I touched it, the leather had a slimy texture, even through the gloves I wore. Now I was barehanded, but I was protected, as I lifted the book out, the Glob already absorbing any energies that might have been woven into it. La Historia de Los Mithrans en Los Americas was small and very heavy: a history of the early years of vampires in the Americas, with important stories about de Allyon’s life. The paper was thick, with a heavy cloth content, and there were drawings in the margins.

  The first time I saw it, Sabina had sent word that I would find page 134 of interest. I turned again to that page and the drawing of a Spanish conquistador in plate armor, one boot resting on the dead body of a naked tribal man. The dead man’s hair was unbraided, tangled on the ground, a pool of his blood leaking from a large throat wound.

  His hands were furred and clawed.

  Just like my father’s when he died.

  Other naked tribal people were on the ground at the feet of the Spaniard, and two had yellow eyes like mine. Only one was alive, fear etched on the woman’s face
in stark black ink lines. Softly I spoke his name, “Lucas Vazquez de Allyon. El Rival de la Muerte.” Death’s Rival.

  Lucas de Allyon had known about skinwalkers, had killed skinwalkers. Below de Allyon’s name was a small pen-and-ink miniature of the vampire in his fully human guise, his eyes and hair dark, his forehead wide, nose Roman, wearing a Vandyke beard. The artist had captured the man’s power, his domineering personality, the brutal curl of his lips. And his disdain for anything and anyone who wasn’t him. I returned to the drawing of the conquistador and his living and dead prey, staring at the terrified yellow-eyed woman, at his feet.

  On the next page was another miniature, showing de Allyon wearing cloth pants, a puma skin over his shoulders. The puma’s head was propped on his shoulder, showing killing teeth. At his feet were more mountain lions, one with a human head, another with human hands and feet. One was a melanistic Puma concolor. All were bound and bleeding from many wounds, but the largest wounds were at their throats where fangs had torn them out. De Allyon, had been a vamp, and he had killed my kind and drunk their blood. The protectors of the Cherokee had been captured and slaughtered to feed the blood appetite of a Naturaleza vampire.

  In the next drawing, de Allyon was vamped out, fangs down, his eyes black and scarlet. He was sitting in a gold chair holding a golden bowl, filled with blood. Blood streamed from his mouth and down his naked chest.

  The last drawing had been too small to see without a magnifying glass. But, knowing what it was, I made out the image of a priest holding a sword in one hand, a blazing cross in the other. He was running, dark robes flying behind him. He was being chased by an armored man on a black horse.

  Had de Allyon had access to the iron Spike of Golgotha? Had he been the one to make the disks that helped power time circles? Had he been the one to mix skinwalker blood with the holy iron? I touched the Glob. It was warm against my fingertips. There was a disk of the iron spike inside the Glob. And a lot of my skinwalker blood. Had de Allyon been trying to make a magical amulet like the Glob? If so, why?