“Stake me,” Ramon said. “I’ll find Nico in hell, try to get his advice.”
“He’s due to be risen soon,” I said. “Maybe we can just wait it out?”
“Is it worth the risk?” Ramon asked. “We can’t raise Nico early, but we can still consult him.”
“How long do you want to stay down?” I asked, hoping it wouldn’t take long. The only medicine I had for my growing anxiety at the time was Ramon’s constant company. I’d grown quite fond of him. No, we weren’t in love. We were vampires. But that didn’t mean I didn’t relish his company or appreciate his flirtations.
“Give me a month,” Ramon said.
“A month?” I pulled at my own hair. “Why so long?”
“I just need to be sure I have enough time to track down Nico, ma chérie. Trying to locate a soul in hell—even for someone who knows the lay of the land as well as I do—can take some time. It’s a pretty spacious place. And vampire wraiths aren’t exactly souls. They all look the same until you can get them talking.”
“Alright,” I said. “One month. But not a day longer.”
Ramon nodded. “And be sure to bury me beneath the stump of my favorite lime.”
I shrugged. “Why does it matter where I bury you?”
“The soil there is well seasoned with human blood, ma chérie. It’s good for my complexion.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”
I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I did it. But before I plunged the stake through Ramon’s chest, I leaned over and kissed him on the lips. Definitely not love. That couldn’t be it. Carnal desire, perhaps. A demonstration of trust—maybe that was it. But no. Not love.
He kissed me back, tangled his fingers in my hair, and when he didn’t suspect it, I plunged an iron stake into his chest. I closed his eyes, ran my fingers through his soft brown hair. I took a deep breath and dug his temporary grave. One month, Mercy… just one month…
24
HUNTING WITHOUT RAMON at my side felt somehow wrong, like I was cheating on him or something. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the thought. Nico said that the life cycle of a vampire is a bit strange like that.
At first we lose our humanity, and we have a great void that gets filled little by little every time we feed. For a while what remains of one’s humanity is just old habit, mental patterns formed in one’s former–human—life.
But over time, as that void is filled with human souls, we become less monstrous, more human again. But it’s not a humanity like the one we knew before, it’s a great melting pot of pieces of thousands of souls, accumulated through every feed, that begins to awaken human-like emotions. New vampires are dangerous because they lack control, but they still have certain repulsions, a few lingering moral qualms left over from their human lives. Thus, they drink human blood and still feel the horror over what they are and the things they do. Over time, that fades.
Then, vampires entire middle age. It takes a few decades to begin to set in, and it can last for centuries—depending on how regularly one feeds. Middle-aged vampires are, in some ways, more dangerous than younglings.
The old memories of human life are faded, any lingering moral qualms or instincts that perplex a new vampire are absent. But we still have a great void—in middle age we’re still driven to feed, though not as frequently as before.
Freed of the bloodlust, we are cold and calculating. It isn’t that we don’t, on occasion, overstep or take risks—a la the Senator Johnson situation—but we hunt with more precision, a good dose of viciousness, and we have enough time between cravings to stalk our prey for weeks in advance.
By the time we reach maturity—like Nico—we hardly need to feed at all. We begin to recover the semblance of a conscience. We seem more human, even though at such an advanced age we are more powerful than ever.
Until a vampire has entered this stage they are not eligible for the Vampiric Council—the “United Nations” of vampires, located in central Romania, aka Transylvania. Yes, I know it’s cliché. But that’s exactly where it’s headquartered.
Nico founded the council himself, but over time felt that he had grown too restless, had entered a level of maturity beyond even what they possessed… and he set out on his own, to begin his larger project of securing a better world for the future of vampire-kind.
That’s when he turned me—a half-century or so after leaving the council and returning to America, the place he’d known as his home during his human life. It was a full-circle for him, perhaps because he knew his human birth was quickly approaching.
I casually wondered if, on account of not having a heart, I was somehow progressing though these stages at an expedited rate. I couldn’t explain the feelings I had for Ramon, the sense of loss I experienced when he left. Did I love him? Did I miss him?
Please… But if I was entering “maturity” as a vampire, I might be experiencing human-like emotions that mimicked such sentiments. I had to keep my wits about me. The last thing I wanted was to become something of a softy. I had to maintain my edge. I was ruthless. I was heartless. I wasn’t going to let a few human-like emotions get in the way of that.
Still, I found myself choosing targets who were less likely to evoke such feelings. No children. No parents—because I knew they’d be missed. Politicians were still fair game so long as I was smart about it and utilized my compulsions effectively.
The easiest targets were misogynistic men. Men who thought they could talk dirty to women, who thought they were somehow entitled to use females however they pleased. Their egos and insecurities made them easy prey. Plus, there was nothing more satisfying than the look of fear in their eyes, the tears they’d cry, when they realized that they were no longer in control… that I was making them my bitch.
Most of the time I didn’t even compel them to forget it. I wanted them to remember how it felt. Besides, the chances of them telling anyone what happened were slim to none.
I must’ve pulled that same routine several nights running. I didn’t even need to feed. I didn’t even have the craving. The power trip, bringing grown men to their knees who thought they were big shit, was the real rush. After one such night I stopped to check on Ramon’s grave.
It was a part of my routine as I’d make my way home prior to sunrise. His chosen resting place wasn’t exactly the most secure place, but he insisted—he had a thing for that stump of a lime tree, it was the one thing he’d been tasked to take care of by his brother when he was a human, before he’d been turned and killed him.
His brother had taken him in when no one else would—Ramon had been a drunk, a useless scoundrel as a human. His brother gave his life meaning by taking him in even though he’d been newly married and giving him responsibility. He’d been tasked to tend the garden.
Apparently after Ramon was first discovered and they managed to subdue him, they cut down the lime tree and buried him there, where Ramon had been hiding all the severed limbs he’d been feeding from. The long and the short of it is that the lime tree had deep sentimental value for Ramon, and if he were to wake anywhere else… well, he’s notoriously difficult when he first awakens. The familiarity of the place went a long way to helping him get quick control over his hunger pangs.
I stood there, a sinking pit in my stomach, when I saw that someone had removed his stake… His grave had been unsettled… and he was nowhere to be found.
Even worse, it was less than an hour before sunrise. I didn’t know who had unstaked Ramon—but absent any mangled corpses in the vicinity, I assumed whoever it was knew what they were doing. Someone who could move quick enough to escape a crazed Ramon… or someone who wasn’t human at all.
While I didn’t have any proof of it, I certainly had a hunch, a feeling in my gut, that Alice had done it. She was the only one who’d been onto us at all, who’d ever posed us any kind of threat in recent years. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she raise Ramon and run off? There was no sign of a struggle—and if two vampires
had been going at it in the courtyard, there would have been significant damage. Why raise him at all rather than exhume him and extract his heart?
There was only one reason I could think of that made any sense. Ramon wasn’t her target. I was. And what better bait would there be than to set Ramon loose on the city? She knew I’d have to go after him. And when I did, she also knew I couldn’t control the situation.
I’d have to go wherever he went, deal with whatever issue arose in my effort to subdue him. It wasn’t getting him home that would be the problem—a simple compulsion would do. It was cleaning up whatever mess he might have made before I got to him that would present the problem. Which meant I’d be distracted… I’d be vulnerable…
25
BEFORE WE STAKED Nico, there was one thing he wanted me to be sure to do: keep tabs on Annabelle Mulledy. She was the girl from the Voodoo world who he said was responsible for abandoning him in the Otherworld, leaving him to battle with Baron Samedi for years before making the bargain that turned him into a vampire and returned him to earth thousands of years earlier.
Nico had a long revenge game in the works—he knew a bit about her history. She’d been assaulted by a Voodoo witch, a Caplata, as a child. Her parents were bitten in the process—but Nico wanted me to make sure her parents got bitten by me first.
That way, they’d be of his lineage. One ability Nico had that frankly, I wished I did, was the ability to summon his progeny at any time. He didn’t do it to me often, but he could. Anyone in his vampiric bloodline. If I could do that, hell, I’d summon Alice and finish this up. Worst-case scenario, Nico could do it after he rose. But I suspected Alice knew that—which was probably why she’d made this desperate move now.
Anyway, the girl Nico was so intent on getting his revenge on—Annabelle Mulledy—became obsessed with all things supernatural after being attacked as a child. It tends to happen when, after an attack, you find yourself possessed by a ghost. According to Nico, it was the ghost inside her that made her particularly dangerous.
Annabelle and her sister, along with their soul-bound familiar, were like a three-girl paranormal investigation team. Not exactly the most professional group around, but from what I could ascertain they were actually pretty good. Having a “connection” with someone from the beyond, I imagined, gave you an edge in the field. Plus, unlike the Order of the Morning Dawn, investigators are more driven by the truth—discovering it, explaining it, etc.—than by some kind of holier-than-thou mission to eradicate vampires (and witches) from existence.
It gave me an idea. What if I could use these girls to seek out Ramon on my behalf? This was the plan—compel someone to claim he was attacked by a vampire and hire the sisters. I could compel them myself, but the older of the two sisters was pretty good with wards.
The last thing I wanted to do was to give them any reason to start hunting me. Not that I couldn’t handle them, but I had enough on my plate as it was. I’d hire someone who would be trustworthy, someone they’d be quick to listen to. Someone who wouldn’t under most circumstances hire quirky paranormal investigators unless he was desperate. A police officer, perhaps. Make sure they reported back all their intelligence to the cop, kept the “client” apprised.
Ramon wasn’t particularly difficult to find when he was unrestrained. I’d do it myself if it didn’t mean falling into Alice’s trap. But with the girls on Ramon, I could use their intel to snag him quickly. In the meantime, I could focus my energies on tracking Alice.
Step one—find a cop. I really played it up. Gave him a little bite, snapped a quick photo of it before it healed. Compelled him to go get some bloodwork done. While I hadn’t drained him enough to turn him, my venom would undoubtedly show up in his system. If the officer was going to convince these girls to help, I needed him to have more than just an interesting story. I need him to seem like a victim, someone who needed their help, and someone with enough evidence on hand that the Mulledy sisters would believe from the start that something supernatural was afoot.
Step two—leave a trail of evidence that would lead them to Ramon. Believe it or not, tales of Ramon’s exploits from back in the day—the eighteen-thirties, after he was first turned—still survived. Our house was a regular pit-stop on some of New Orleans’ “haunted city” tours, and the story of Ramon was one they often told.
No one really believed it. While some of the locals had come to even embrace the nickname that Nico had given our house—Casa do Diabo—no one really thought vampires lived there. At least, not in the present day. I made sure that the officer believed he’d been attacked just outside our home. I even disturbed Ramon’s grave a bit—I’d tidied it up before—just to lend credence to the legend that I was reasonably sure the Mulledy sisters would discover when they started researching the location. If all went according to plan, they’d find Ramon, wherever the hell he was, and try to lure him back here.
I expected I’d have to stake him. I didn’t think the girls had it in them. But I watched from between the curtains of the house as the two sisters subdued Ramon. Annabelle, the younger sister and the one whom Nico particularly despised, managed to harness her familiar’s abilities and animated tree roots to envelop Ramon’s body. The odd thing—Ramon wasn’t fighting as much as I knew he could. Did he want them to stake him? It was like he was eager to go back to hell, like he’d left something there undone.
I rolled my eyes as Ramon shouted haunting warnings to the girls. “He’s coming back! He’s coming for you!” Ramon was talking about Nico; he knew who the sisters were as well as I did. Ramon was right, of course. Nico was coming back.
But they dismissed his words as those of a raging lunatic. The older Mulledy sister grabbed the iron stake that I’d conveniently left next to his regular grave and, while the younger one continued channeling magic that kept him bound in tree roots, the older one slammed the stake into his heart.
I had to admit, these girls were good. And the younger one especially wielded an intriguing power I’d never encountered before. It wasn’t witchcraft, not exactly, but it was a power I hadn’t seen wielded in years. Not since Moll was alive. A power over the elements, over nature itself. I suspected Nico’s interest in the girl was not merely about vengeance—there was something else there, too. Something, as a former witch, that piqued my curiosity.
For the first time in decades I picked up my old wand. I hadn’t really cast a spell since Moll was alive, but she’d said I had promise, enough promise that if I’d combined my vampirism and my witchcraft, she believed I’d be an unparalleled force… a force that could take down the Order. I was a combination of both things that the Order hated the most—vampirism and witchcraft.
I wasn’t sure if I should leave Ramon staked or revive him. He’d seemed to go all too willingly. Was there a reason he wanted to go back, or did he just not resist because he knew I could revive him in short order?
I pulled the stake from Ramon’s chest. He opened his eyes, crazed with bloodlust. This time, I was there to make sure he handled it properly. I still had Alice to worry about, so I kept my wand tucked in my back pocket, just in case. My magic was rusty, but it was one thing she might not be expecting from me if she tried to come at me again.
I held onto Ramon as he shook in terror.
“Send me back, Mercy! I have to go back… It’s Alice… she’s…”
“Ramon, calm down,” I said. “What about Alice?”
“She keeps coming and going, in and out of hell. She’s feeding Edwin information, propaganda from the Order about how to move on, leading him into the light.”
My stomach sank. I’d always known it was a possibility—I still had the fetish that the Caplata had given me to bind him. But that Caplata was long dead. How else would I access the crossroads, find a way into hell in my corporeal form so I could bring the fetish with me, and then bind Edwin to it and prevent him from escaping hell? And now it was clear what Alice was doing. She had someone—Charlotte, most likely—working wit
h her, staking her and reviving her in turn.
“Ramon,” I said, “was Alice the one who revived you last time?”
“Yes,” Ramon said. “But she only did that to get me out of her way. So she could get Edwin alone.”
So Alice hadn’t been watching my back all that time. She wasn’t all that worried about what I’d been doing at all. In fact, she’d been staked again, down in hell, trying to kill me by freeing Edwin. It was a brilliant plan, but she had to deal with Nico and Edwin in the process. But if Nico was there… why was Ramon so worried?
“Isn’t Nico taking care of it?” I asked.
Ramon shook his head. “He’s lost his mind. He’s consumed with the baron. Rambling on about a bargain that the baron must fulfill. He’s been there too long, Mercy. We have to bring him back.”
“We have to wait a year,” I said. “Any sooner than that and his existences will overlap… He said we couldn’t risk that no matter what. It would destroy him.”
“Then you have to send me back,” Ramon insisted. “Alice is making strides in her influence over Edwin, and I’m the only other one influencing him at all.”
“You take on Alice in hell,” I said. “I’ll try and track down her staked corpse. She has to be around somewhere.”
Ramon nodded. I gave him a quick though strangely passionate kiss. I almost pulled back out of revulsion—death breath is real, folks. But so was my desire. Of course it wasn’t love, but it was the closest thing I could muster, and I hoped it would give Ramon extra motivation. He had one year—at that time I’d revive him and Nico both. And if he didn’t succeed, if Edwin left hell, I’d die and they’d both be damned there forever. So would I. Either way, I’d see him in a year.
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 85
