This Side of the Grave

by Jeaniene Frost

  “Kitten!”

  My head jerked up just in time to see a flash of silver above me. I flung myself down, the sword that had been about to cleave through my neck catching me in the side of the head instead. At once, my vision went red and agony exploded in my skull. Every inner impulse screamed at me to hunch defensively and clutch my wound, but the part of me that remembered all the brutal training Bones put me through knew to strike out instead. I swung my blade where I’d last glimpsed the ghoul’s legs, putting all my strength into the blow. I was rewarded by a scream and a thump, something heavy landing on me. The blood in my vision made it hard to make out specifics, but I kept swinging, knowing from each new scream that I was hitting my mark even if I couldn’t see what that mark was. Sizzling pain erupting along my back had me arching in reflex and redoubling my efforts. The ghoul wasn’t done fighting yet.

  After several rapid blinks, my gaze cleared enough to see him. His arm was missing. So were his legs at the calves, but he had a silver knife that he kept stabbing into my back, seeking my heart. Instead of rolling away from him, I lunged forward, head-butting him with all my fury. He jerked back in a dazed way, but the sudden stars in my vision and urge to throw up let me know that my head injury wasn’t done healing yet. With pain crashing through my skull and my side throbbing like I had heat-seeking missiles doing the tango in my guts, I brought my sword down toward his neck.

  He kicked me with his stumps at the same time, knocking my aim off. Instead of cleaving through his neck, my sword buried deep in his shoulder. I tugged but it wouldn’t come free. The ghoul let out something like a snarl and a laugh.

  “Missed me,” he chortled viciously, raising his gun.

  My other arm whipped forward and the ghoul’s laugh died in his throat. He fired, but the bullets went wild, probably because he now had two silver knives in his eye sockets. He should have never taken the time to taunt me before he fired. I had plenty of other weapons aside from my sword.

  He reached for the knives—another mistake. I wrenched the gun from his hands and used it to shoot my way right through his neck, letting out a scream of deadly triumph. Then I yanked my sword free, whirling around to defend against the next attack.

  None came. Although I still heard spates of gunfire, they were far less frequent than before. The cemetery was littered with bodies, and those still standing looked like they were trying to run more than attempting to fight. For a split second, I was surprised. Yeah, I knew our group was tough, but . . .

  A flash of yellow and black caught my eye, moving with the speed of some sort of cartoon Tasmanian devil. It plowed into two ghouls who had been firing at Ian. In the next blink, there was nothing more than a crimson pile of body parts on the ground, a lithe blonde with two swords standing over them.

  Veritas? I didn’t have a chance to goggle at her before she was off in another crazily fast blur, heading for an eruption of gunfire over the hill. Within moments, that gunfire stopped.

  “Am I the only one who has wood over that little vixen?” Ian asked cheerfully even as he cleaved his sword right through the center of a ghoul. That shook me out of my momentary stupor and I started chasing down the next spate of gunfire I heard. My side still felt like it had been set on fire, but I pushed it back. I didn’t have time to dig the bullets out, and nothing else would make the burning stop.

  I continued to run toward the sounds of gunfire, clearing the crest of a small hill. At the bottom was a large memorial fountain, but that’s not what made my body seize with a fresh spurt of adrenaline. It was the sight of the short, expensively clad ghoul backed up against the fountain, three guards surrounding him in protective formation as they fired at the vampires who cut off their escape.

  “Apollyon!” I yelled, running down the hill in a straight line toward him. “You remember me, don’t you?”

  Even with the distance, I saw his eyes widen. “Reaper,” he mouthed. Then louder, in a scream at the ghouls protecting him, “That’s her, that’s the Reaper!”

  The gunfire changed direction, but I’d expected that. I dove to my right, all but one bullet missing me. It slammed into my side with the impact of a torpedo, but I kept rolling, knowing the gunfire wouldn’t cease. Unlike the movies, in real life, the bad guys didn’t quit shooting to check and see if you were dead. Those bullets chased me, but I scrambled up and kept moving, headstones exploding around me as those were struck instead of me.

  A scream preceded one of the guns going quiet. Then another one. Even as I kept running, I smiled. I knew Vlad, Spade, and Gorgon had only needed a few moments of distraction to pounce. Apollyon and his guards should have known that, too, and never focused all three of their guns on me.

  I whirled around, heading back toward the bottom of the hill. Vlad had one of the gunmen in a merciless grip, flames erupting all over the ghoul. Spade wrestled with another ghoul, but I wasn’t worried about him, because at some point, he’d managed to knock the gun away. That left Ed and Gorgon fighting with two more ghouls who’d joined the battle, but my attention wasn’t focused on them. It was on the stocky ghoul running flat-out for the gate bordering the cemetery. On the other side of that gate was a small business district, mostly deserted this time of night, but with lots of buildings and apartments that Apollyon could hide in.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I growled, running faster. That sickening pain increased, the burning in my side feeling like acid eating all through me, but I couldn’t concentrate on that now. I had to focus on the air around me, picturing it as something with form that I could mold and bend to my will. Bones’s words echoed in my mind. You have the ability. You just need to sharpen it.

  My feet lifted off the ground, but I didn’t fall. I flew, leaning into the air, letting it take me faster than I could run before. Wind rushed through my hair, streaming along my body, lifting me as though it understood my need and wanted to help. The distance between me and Apollyon grew shorter, his steps seeming so slow and clumsy in comparison to the way I arced above the ground. I streamlined my body, my hands out in front of me, aiming for the back of his Armani jacket like it was a bull’s-eye and I was an arrow. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten . . .

  When I barreled into him, my velocity plowing him to the ground hard enough to tear up the dirt, I was smiling even though a fresh deluge of pain blasted through my side. And when I came up, twisting so Apollyon was in front of me, relief made me almost immune to the strikes he got in before I had his neck locked in an iron chokehold.

  “You move and I’ll rip your head right the fuck off,” I told him, meaning every deadly word.

  Apollyon was either smarter than I gave him credit for, or he really did fear me, because he stopped struggling at once.

  “What are you going to do with me?” he hissed, the words garbled from the grip I had around his throat.

  I let out a pained laugh.

  “I’m so glad you asked.”

  Chapter Thirty-­six

  By the time we reached the fountain, Spade had killed the ghoul he fought with, nothing but charred remains were left of the one I’d seen with Vlad, and two headless bodies were on the ground near where Gorgon and Ed stood. I didn’t see Bones, but I knew he was okay. I could feel our connection, strong as ever, his emotions washing over me with intensity and purpose. Now that I had a sufficient amount of vampires close by, I let go of Apollyon, giving him a hard shove that had him bracing against the edge of the fountain to keep from falling.

  “Let’s talk about what I’m going to do to you,” I said, picking up a sword someone had left discarded on the ground. Movement on the top of the hill drew my attention for a moment, making me pause, but then I continued. “I think I’ll take your idea of celebrating a victory with an execution, only with a small reversal of who loses their head.”

  Apollyon bared his teeth at me. “Even if you kill me, my people will fight yours to the death,” he snarled. “Your victory will be naught but ashes and—”

  He stopped at my laughter, his
face almost mottled in its fury. I didn’t say anything, but instead, pointed behind him toward the hill.

  He turned, his mouth sagging a little at what he saw. Someone, I wasn’t sure who, had rounded up the remaining ghouls and brought them out in a group onto this section of the cemetery. At a rough estimate, there were a little more than twenty of them, and their hands were folded on top of their heads in the universal gesture for surrender.

  “Looks like your people know a losing battle when they see one,” I said, relishing the stunned look on the ghoul leader’s face. That quickly changed as he glared at them, his rage palpable in his expression and the harsh scent wafting off him.

  “How dare you betray me this way!” he thundered at them.

  I tapped him on the shoulder with the tip of my borrowed sword. “Hate to interrupt,” I drew out, “but you and I have still some business to conclude.”

  Apollyon looked at the sword and then at me before glancing back at the surrendered ghouls. I didn’t take my eyes off him or relax my grip on the weapon. I wouldn’t swing until he was ready, but neither would I give him a present of dropping my guard. I already knew Apollyon didn’t fight fair or we wouldn’t be here now.

  Therefore, I was somewhat taken aback when he spread his arms out, palms open. “Go on, Reaper, strike me down with flames! Or freeze me with your mind. Show my people the power they so recklessly refuse to stem.”

  Even his last moments would be filled with hateful rhetoric, I thought in disgust.

  “Give him a sword,” I said to Bones, who’d come out from behind the group of ghouls, Veritas at his side. He was blood-spattered and his clothes were torn, yet he moved with a lethal precision that said he could have fought all night. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that he’d think to bring the ghouls out here to witness their leader’s fall.

  “I don’t need any unusual power to strike you down,” I told Apollyon once Bones thrust a sword into the ground near the ghoul’s feet. “I’ve got silver bullets in my left side and they hurt like damn and wow, but pick up that sword and I’ll still beat your ass, I promise you that.”

  Apollyon looked at the blade and then back at me. “No.”

  “No?” I repeated in disbelief. “I’m offering you a fair fight, jackass! You’d rather I just hack your head off and call it a day?”

  Apollyon turned toward Veritas, dropping down on one knee. “I surrender to the Guardian Council of Vampires.”

  “You sniveling little shite, pick up that sword before I rip your head off with my bare hands,” Bones thundered at him.

  Apollyon’s expression was twisted with a crazed sort of triumph. “You can’t kill me if I surrender to a Guardian. None of you can!”

  I regarded him with amazement. This was the person who’d been responsible for bringing vampires and ghouls to the brink of war in the fourteen hundreds? And who’d made a damn credible effort to do it again in the twenty-first century?

  I’d seen a lot of villainous instigators in their final moments, but while none of them had relished their own deaths, few had ever groveled as much as Apollyon was doing now. He even edged closer to Veritas in a sort of hop-crawl, until he was clutching the blond Guardian’s red-stained pants. I couldn’t believe a person who’d devoted so much of his life to the pursuit of mass genocide could be so spineless in the face of his own defeat. It reminded me of history’s accounts of Hitler’s final hours. Looked like both of them were cowards at heart.

  “This is who you were following?” Vlad asked the other ghouls, voicing my own inner scorn. “I’d kill myself in shame if I were you.”

  Veritas looked at Apollyon, her ridiculously youthful features hardened into an expression of pure contempt.

  “You think to find mercy from me?”

  She snatched at Apollyon’s single long piece of hair, ripping it away from his bald spot and using it as a lever to tug his head back. I almost lost it right there, because damn, that was cold.

  “You repeatedly seek to destroy my people, and you think I will grant you asylum?” she all but growled.

  “You must,” Apollyon said, his voice cracking at the last word.

  Veritas straightened to her full five feet six inches, but with her sizzling power and imperial presence, she might as well have been nine feet tall.

  “Malcolme Untare, you who have renamed yourself Apollyon, for inciting others in your species to murder and insurrection, you are hereby sentenced to death.”

  He let out a shriek that Veritas ignored. She leaned in until her mouth brushed his ear, and only my close proximity let me hear what she whispered.

  “You miserable worm. Jeanne d’Arc was my friend.”

  Then she kicked him, avoiding his grasping hands to stride away with a “Die on your knees or take the fight she offered you. I care not which,” thrown over her shoulder.

  My mouth gaped at this tidbit about my famous half-breed predecessor, but I snapped it shut. Note to self: Don’t get on Veritas’s bad side. She holds a grudge for centuries.

  Then I looked down at the ghoul, feeling my former hatred ebb. For all the lives he’d been responsible for ending and his blind, centuries-long quest for power, in the end, Apollyon proved to be too pathetic to hate. He wasn’t even worth killing, but if I let him live, my current and future enemies wouldn’t see it as mercy. They’d see it as a weakness they could exploit. With a clarity I’d lacked before, I understood why Bones did what he did with my father, and why Vlad let his ruthlessness be seen more readily than his finer qualities. It wasn’t out of sadistic enjoyment or to pick fights. It was to prevent them.

  “Pick up that sword,” I said to Apollyon, enunciating each word. “Or I’ll kill you where you kneel.”

  I wouldn’t take any enjoyment out of it, but I’d do it because it had to be done. Veritas had already sentenced him to death on behalf of the vampire ruling body. If I walked away, it wouldn’t save his life. She or someone else would just kill him.

  “No,” Apollyon said, almost a whimper. Then he scrambled forward and tried to run.

  I caught him before he’d made it even a dozen feet, letting him hit me with all the power in his stocky body. He only had his hands, and I still had a really long blade.

  “Apollyon had all of you getting your hate on because of a lie that I’d become a half vampire, half ghoul,” I called out to the ghouls who watched us with grim enthrallment. “Because if someone’s unusual, then you should be afraid of them, right?”

  Apollyon tried to tackle me to the ground, but for all the years he had on me, he obviously hadn’t spent them learning how to fight—and I’d had one hell of a teacher. Despite the pain still arcing down my side, I swiveled at the last moment, leaping onto his back when his momentum still had him charging forward. Then I brought my sword against his neck.

  “You all want to know why I have abilities other new vampires don’t?” I said, digging that blade in. “Because I don’t feed from humans; I drink vampire blood.”

  And then I yanked it toward my body, cutting my hand to grip the naked edge for maximum balance, feeling more satisfaction from that public admission than I did seeing Apollyon’s head separate from his neck. All my life, I’d had to hide what I was. First as a child when I didn’t even know why other kids weren’t like me, then when I hunted vampires in my late teens and mid-twenties, and finally, my oddities this past year as a full vampire. Well, I was done hiding, hating, or apologizing for the parts of me I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t change. If some people had a problem with my differences, that was just too fucking bad for them.

  “That’s right, I eat vampires,” I said again, louder this time. I pushed his body away and stood, shaking the blood off my sword as I faced the remaining group of ghouls.

  “World’s freakiest bloodsucker, right here,” I went on. “And you know what? If that makes some of you uncomfortable, too bad. If it makes some of you so uncomfortable you want to start shit with me about it, step right up and see if I don’t eat
the hell out of you next!”

  I’d meant that last part as a threat, but somewhere in my impassioned declaration of independence from hiding what I was, I’d neglected to think through my phrasing. I saw Bones raise a brow, a muffled snicker broke out from Ian, and then Vlad laughed loud and hearty.

  “With that sort of invitation, Reaper, you might want to suggest the line form to your right.”

  “That’s not . . . I meant eat them in a bad way,” I sputtered.

  “I think you made your point, luv,” Bones responded, his face carefully blank even thought I caught a faint twitch to his mouth. Then his expression hardened as he looked at Veritas, who’d turned around to watch me behead Apollyon. “And I second it,” he said, all traces of humor gone from his voice.

  The Law Guardian stared at me. I didn’t regret a moment of my public declaration—aside from perhaps my wording—but I knew her response carried more weight than my vampire audience or the score of surrendered ghouls. She also spoke for the highest ruling body over vampires.

  At last, Veritas shrugged. “That does make you the world’s freakiest bloodsucker, but there’s no law against a vampire feeding from other vampires.” And then she turned away.

  I let out a laugh that died in my throat as movement at the back of the gate caught my eye.

  Marie Laveau walked slowly into the cemetery.

  Chapter Thirty-­seven

  I didn’t blink as I stared at Marie. To anyone who didn’t know better, the sight of one lone ghoul strolling up shouldn’t have looked frightening at all. But I knew that Marie could summon a wall of Remnants to fight for her before I could even whisper, “Oh shit.” Could I raise my own army of them fast enough to counter such an attack from her? Or should I focus my energy on trying to control the ones she raised, if it came to that? I’d assumed Marie gave me her power so that, in a roundabout way, she could help me defeat Apollyon, but had she been on his side all along? Had everything I thought about her been wrong?