One Grave at a Time

by Jeaniene Frost

  “There’s too much risk, which you’d see if you weren’t blinded by your own arrogance,” Bones said harshly.

  I didn’t know if that was him acting or me failing to make a dent in my arguments, so I wrote my answer to the accusation.

  Kramer didn’t follow Elisabeth to Spade’s. He followed my signal and found us. She’s an expert at evading him. This will work.

  Out loud I said, “Arrogant? You should talk since you seem to think you can make all my decisions for me! I’m not a child, Bones. You can’t tell me what to do and just expect to be obeyed.”

  I had to let you go out alone when you were challenged to a duel, I wrote, staring at him once I was finished. It was harder than hell, but I did it.

  He muttered a curse while running his hand through his hair. “That’s not the same.”

  My pen flashed across the page. Yes it is, and just like Gregor wouldn’t have stopped if you refused his challenge, Kramer won’t stop either. He never wavers once he picks a target, and no one can hide from the dead forever! What if he attacks me while I’m in a fight with another vampire? I’m in more danger if I DON’T go.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve faced death, and I don’t intend for it to be the last,” I said, repeating the same words he’d told me before fighting in that fateful duel. “I’ve chosen to live a dangerous life, but it’s who I am, and that wouldn’t change even if we’d never met.”

  The barest smile touched his mouth though his aura spiked with dangerous pulses of emotion-driven energy.

  “Low blow, Kitten.”

  I held his gaze with a faint smile of my own. “Someone once taught me to take every cheap shot and every low blow in a fight.”

  His stare was so intense that I half wondered if he could somehow see into my mind. That would be helpful. Then he’d know this wasn’t my pride talking. It was my experience. I wasn’t like all the other women Kramer had singled out over the centuries. No archaic system of law was against me, I wasn’t abandoned by friends and family, and I might be flesh and blood, but I wasn’t human. Just like the Inquisitor hadn’t been human for a long, long time. With me, Kramer would finally be picking on someone his own size.

  Kramer had only seen me run before. He’d never seen me stand my ground and fight. Tonight, I’d show him why the undead world referred to me as the Red Reaper.

  Bones suddenly grabbed me, his mouth slamming over mine in a kiss so fierce I tasted blood when he lifted his head. But that didn’t bother me. I licked the blood off my lips with a hunger that matched the fire in his gaze, wanting to throw him to the floor and take him with enough roughness to leave cracks in the wood. I love you, I mouthed, pulling his head down for another blisteringly violent kiss.

  He pushed my mouth down to his neck, almost forcing my fangs into his skin with the way he ground against me. I took him up on the silent demand and bit, drinking deeply when his blood came, not moaning out of bliss because I didn’t know how closely Kramer might be listening. His hands ran over me in a forceful, possessive caress while I drank, absorbing strength as well as nourishment from that heady liquid. When the crimson flow slowed to a trickle despite my suction and Bones willing it out to me, I stopped, licking his neck free of any lingering traces. I felt heavy and full, my senses buzzing from the excess of my feast. I normally drank about half that much when I fed from him, but I knew why he wanted me to drain him. He could refill, but once he was gone, I couldn’t.

  He cupped my face when I drew back, staring into my eyes while he dropped his shields and let his aura flood over me, twining into my emotions until I couldn’t tell where my feelings ended and his began. From the frustration, love, lust, and worry pouring off him, I guessed that he wanted to make love to me until neither of us could think . . . and then tie me up and pile heavy boulders on me until after the sun rose. The intensity in all those feelings told me that the absolute last thing he wanted to do was what he did next.

  “I won’t stand here and listen to any more of your ridiculous notions,” he said, nothing but coldness in his tone. “You want to throw your life away? Fine, but you’ll do it without me. I’m finished with you.”

  If I wasn’t tied so deeply into his emotions, hearing it would have crushed me. But I smiled, squeezing his hands and feeling my heart overflow. He squeezed back before bringing them to his lips and brushing a soundless, fervent kiss onto them.

  Then he let go, turned around, and walked out, slamming the back door behind him.

  Ian came into the house right after Bones stormed out. Kramer must not have been the only one outside listening. He looked at me, raised a brow, then picked up one of the pages with my hastily scribbled words and read it.

  “Since you and Crispin are now finished and I have a few hours to kill, how about that shag?” he asked with heavy irony.

  “Bite me,” I sighed, gathering up the pages.

  He winked. “Of course. My second-favorite thing to do in bed.”

  I didn’t reply to that because I knew Ian wasn’t serious. He’d read enough to realize our breakup was staged, but trust Ian not to miss a chance to be a jackass. Spade came down the staircase next. His wary expression as he looked at me said he wasn’t aware that what he’d overheard was faked. He’d witnessed a real breakup between me and Bones before and had to talk sense into both of us later, so he was probably thinking, Bugger, not this again.

  I handed him the pages and gave him a thumbs-up sign. After a few brief moments, his frown cleared, replaced by lethal intentness as he looked up at me. Then he took the pen and wrote three words in the space left on the page.

  I’m going, too.

  I didn’t say anything. After what Sarah had done to Denise, not a single argument I made, verbally or otherwise, would talk him out of that.

  Thirty-five

  The cab driver stopped along the street, and I glanced in the distance at the white outdoor theater shaped like a huge half shell.

  “Here we are,” he said cheerfully.

  I checked the meter and pulled the appropriate amount of money out of my pocket. “Thanks, and keep the change.”

  “All right. Happy Halloween.”

  That was what I was hoping for, too. I got out, watching his taillights fade away as he drove off. Then I tightened my leather jacket around me and leaned against the welcome sign, waiting.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the sky had changed from indigo to obsidian and stars replaced the last dying rays of the sun, a sleek Mercedes E class sedan pulled up, the make and model car Spade had left for Denise. Sure enough, the tinted window rolled down to reveal Sarah at the wheel, her black hair pulled back into the same sort of severe bun Elisabeth normally wore. On Elisabeth, that style highlighted features that were lovely without the slightest hint of makeup. On Sarah, it only served to make her look harsher, drawing attention to thick eyebrows that could really use a good tweezing and a mouth that was compressed into a thin, tight line.

  “If you kill me, you will never find the other women,” were her first words when I opened the passenger door.

  Her thoughts were that same blend of fear and hatred against a larger white noise backdrop that I now recognized as a mark of the insane. When we met, I’d thought Kramer had been the one to drive her nuts. Now I realized it was probably Sarah’s unstableness that had drawn the Inquisitor to her in the first place.

  “Oh, I’m not going to kill you now,” I told her, sliding into the seat. “You’ll die tonight, make no mistake, but you’d better hope it’s by someone else’s hand rather than from Kramer’s.”

  Her topaz gaze flitted to mine before she quickly glanced away. “He told me you would lie to me, but I already knew that witches were incapable of telling the truth.”

  My snort was grim. “I don’t know what warped you, Sarah. Maybe it was a shitty upbringing, maybe it was a guy you loved ditching you for another woman, but remember, ‘For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you’? You’re going to find out what
that means, and wow, will you wish you hadn’t.”

  “I won’t listen to any more of your lies, unclean thing,” she hissed. Then she drove about a hundred yards before pulling off and parking in a darker section off the shoulder. My brows lifted. Kramer couldn’t be so dumb as to meet us here, could he?

  “Is this the place, or did you forget where we’re supposed to go?”

  Sarah took the keys and got out, tapping them on the roof of the car in a nervous staccato rhythm. “Kramer says you will fly me to where he is.”

  Uh-oh. I didn’t look around for the ghost I knew Bones had sent here, but that was my first instinct. If I flew, Elisabeth wouldn’t be able to follow me, and that would mess up the rest of our plans.

  Had Sarah seen me fly? No, Bones had snatched me off that street and flown both of us to War Eagle Park. Kramer shouldn’t have seen me fly, either, because Bones had flown me when we picked up Francine, too. Maybe he was just sending Sarah on a fishing expedition.

  “Not all vampires can fly. I’m too new to have that power yet,” I told her, not moving from my seat.

  Those keys banged harder on the roof. “You’re lying again. Kramer told me he saw you fly near a cave in Ohio. You will fly me to him, witch, or he will know you betrayed him, and those other witches will pay your penalty.”

  My teeth ground together. That was right; I’d flown with Bones when we evacuated my mother, Tyler, and our pets from the cave in Ohio. We’d thought Kramer had left because the slaughter of Madigan’s soldiers had stopped, but the sneaky little shit must’ve been hanging around watching us. And he obviously suspected me of having ghost allies tailing me tonight to insist that I fly to him instead of letting Sarah drive me. Maybe I was wrong, and he didn’t think I was blinded by a vain desire to defeat him all by myself. That, or he was too careful to risk it.

  Once I arrived, it would take several hours for Elisabeth and Fabian to locate me by concentrating on my fading power. Kramer had to know how long it took him to reach me that way, so he’d know he had a good chunk of time to work within. Goddamn ghost was covering all his bases.

  I thought about how much my borrowed abilities had faded. Then I thought about all the valid dangers I’d listed if we didn’t manage to defeat Kramer sooner rather than later. There had to be a way to take Kramer on without turning my back on Bones and the others.

  Sarah banged again on the roof. “I’m not waiting any longer. If you don’t do as he says, I’m leaving.”

  Oh, I wanted to take her high in the sky, all right. And then drop her so I could enjoy listening to her screams before she splatted on the ground. But if I kept Kramer waiting much longer, I was sure he’d put his new flesh to repulsive use. Frustration made me clench my fists. If only I had more of that borrowed power left in me, but no, I was stuck at the final “sparks but no fire” stage of my abilities.

  Although . . . maybe my faded powers from Marie would still work if I gave them the proper accelerant.

  “You’re out of time,” Sarah said coldly, leaning down to stare at me through the driver’s side window.

  I got out of the car and shrugged. “All right, I can fly.” Then I flashed a toothy grin at her. “But I can’t land that well, and that’s the God’s honest truth. So you’d better brace yourself on the way down, because it’ll probably hurt.”

  I flew over the vast fields interspersed with houses and mostly empty roads, looking for the PumpkinTown farm Sarah told me about. Of course, I might have passed it several times already. The whole area was an agricultural mecca, with soybean, hay, and cornfields surrounding farmhouses, barns, and various storage facilities. At this height, the swaying golden cornfields reminded me of the night Bones took me flying, and regret squeezed a lump into my throat. Bones would be so worried when Elisabeth gave him the news that I’d flown to my meeting with Kramer, but if he used that infallible logic of his, he’d realize I still had the ability to cast a trail of bread crumbs leading to me. While this wasn’t the plan he and I had discussed earlier, it should still turn out the same. It would just be cutting it closer than either of us preferred.

  I pushed my guilt and all the softer emotions aside. I didn’t need them now. I’d need them later when I was with Kramer.

  More lights than normal clustered about a mile ahead. I flew toward them, noting derisively that Sarah had her eyes squeezed shut. No help there. Then I dropped lower to better see if one of those cornfields had a large maze carved into it. That would be easier to spot than looking for a sign that would be facing the street, not the sky. Sure enough, outside of the circle of trees that surrounded a picturesque house, barn, pumpkin patch, and stable was a cornfield with a distinct abstract pattern carved into the stalks. Unlike most of the other houses I’d flown over, this place was jumping with activity, too. Dozens of cars were parked along a cleared edge of the field. Music, spooky sound effects, and voices floated up to me. A closer look revealed that the maze had costumed people threading through it.

  It was a Halloween celebration with families and children, for crying out loud. This better not be the place Kramer had picked out for his gruesome little event.

  “Open your eyes,” I said, giving Sarah a rough shake. “Is this it?”

  She only needed to slit her eyes before she nodded. “Yes. Take us to the second field west of the maze.”

  “West? Tell me right, left, top, or bottom,” I snapped. It had been hard enough finding the place considering I was too high up to see street signs. What was probably only a forty-minute car ride from Grandview Park had taken me over an hour because I wasn’t used to navigating by the equivalent of satellite imagery. I’d looked at enough maps of the areas surrounding Sioux City to know that Orange City was up and to the right of it, but all my repeated flyovers hadn’t been stalling. It had been me being lost.

  “You don’t know where west is?” Sarah asked with disbelief.

  I wasn’t going to drop her to the ground. I was going to throw her. “Do I look like I have a compass on me?”

  Sarah waved a hand at the sky. “Can’t you use the stars to navigate?”

  “I’m twenty-nine years old, not two hundred and twenty-nine. I navigate by GPS, MapQuest, or TomTom. Not the fucking stars, ’k?”

  She sighed in exasperation. “Try the second field on the right of the maze. If that’s not it, we’ll walk until he finds us.”

  Her thoughts were still too scattered for me to detect whether or not she was lying. If Kramer really was here, I didn’t need her anymore; but in case this was some sort of test, I’d keep her alive. Stupid woman didn’t realize that my killing her would be doing her a favor.

  I aimed for the second unmarred cornfield to the right of the maze and descended. Even with the people less than half a mile away, the lack of lights over this section combined with our dark clothes against the night sky should make us invisible. I slowed as best I could and rolled as soon as I hit the ground, letting go of Sarah. That rolling meant I took out ten yards of dry vegetation in my landing, but it also meant I lessened the impact. Sarah didn’t roll, and a sharp cry of pain escaped her when she thudded down amidst the cornstalks.

  “Baby get a boo-boo?” I asked, fighting the urge to kick her while she was writhing on the ground clutching her ankle.

  “You bitch, you broke my ankle!” she thundered at me.

  With the nearby music, sound effects, laughter, and screams of delight from the good-natured scares set up around that section of the farm, none of the Halloween revelers would hear her. So I had no hesitation about walking over, calmly taking her injured foot in my hand, and then snapping it to the side hard enough for me to feel the bone crack.

  “Now I broke your ankle,” I told her.

  Sarah wailed in earnest, but though I wasn’t worried about us being discovered, it was hurting my ears. I slapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Quit crying before I really give you something to cry about.”

  That old parental threat worked. She stuffed back
her loud sobs and tried to claw her way up my arm to stand. I debated shoving her away but decided that it would take longer to get to Kramer if she was hopping and stumbling on one foot, so I let her brace herself against me. She didn’t speak, but her thoughts were a hateful mix of crazy static and delight when contemplating how I was going to burn, first on earth, then in hell.

  Charming.

  “Either you keep up or I leave you behind, I don’t care which,” I said, and started to walk. I wasn’t sure if I was going in the right direction, but if Kramer was out here, he might have seen our crash landing. The ghost would know to be studying the sky, unlike the families in the maze and the surrounding farmhouse area. I hadn’t seen any other lights in the field outside of where the revelries were being held, so if he was here, he was keeping a low profile.

  Sarah limped beside me, her fingers digging into my arm and little yelps escaping her with every hobbled step. Between that, the crackling paper noise that the thousands of drying cornstalks made as they swayed against each other, and the merrymaking from the other section of the farm, I couldn’t hear whether anyone else was out here with us.

  Goddamn Kramer. I’d wondered why he would choose a place like this for his meet up. Now I knew. I couldn’t focus on any telltale movements to spot him because everything around me moved. The corn was taller than I was, and it all looked the same, making me unable to tell if I even walked in circles or not. Noises were swallowed up by natural and artificial sounds, and all the people across the fields kept me from flying in low swoops above the area to see if I could locate him, Francine, or Lisa that way. My landing might not have been spotted, but a woman winging her way like a bat slow and low enough to detect anything in this huge moveable canvas eventually would be.

  That was why I had no warning before white-hot pain blasted through my back. Once, twice, three times in rapid succession, turning my chest into what felt like a molten lake of agony. I staggered, knocking Sarah over, who screamed as I stepped on her ankle trying to keep myself upright. Her thrashing made me lose my balance, even my innate vampire reflexes unable to keep me from falling. I flipped over at the last moment, still hitting the ground but doing it without being facedown.