by Faith Hunter
I could taste his fury, building, hot and feral, but controlled for all that. Had he come to raise the young rogue? I remembered the smell of Hurricane Ada’s lightning when I first came here, my curiosity what a lightning strike in the middle of a major working would cause. He’d walked off, angry and alone. His rogue had risen without him. Had risen early. . . .
So where would he go? Where would he start another circle? Someplace where he felt safe? Would he go back to the vamp graveyard, a place where he’d worked for a long time and never been discovered? Vamp-fast, I raced back to Bitsa and fired up my bike. With a screech of wheels, I tore from the park and toward the river, the traffic lazy and slow this time of night.
I called Bruiser’s cell on the way, alerting him that I’d be setting off alarms. He didn’t volunteer to meet me there, didn’t comment that I was alive. He sounded distracted. He promised to turn off the system and hung up. No British gallantry or etiquette in him tonight.
I reached the vamp cemetery and wove Bitsa off the old road and around the gateposts, cutting the engine when I was inside. Exhaust fumes rose around me, poisonous and rank. The silence of the dead filled the night. I unhelmeted and set the kickstand. Pulled the Benelli from its harness rig and checked the load. Again. I clipped a flex strap to it and slung it to my back, easier to pull from than the riding rig.
I set four silver crosses on chains against my chest as a twofer: they’d glow if a vamp was nearby, and they’d poison any vamp who touched them—well, except for Leo, if he was to be believed. I pulled two stakes, careful to make certain that they were both silver tipped, and held them in my right hand, one pointed out, one pointed in. My largest vamp-killer in my left hand, its eighteen-inch blade bright in the night, I stalked into the graveyard.
My night vision was better than most humans’, I figured because of all the years I’d spent in Beast form, so I didn’t need a flashlight. The white marble walls of the crypts were shining pristine beneath the nearly full moon. The white shell pathways glowed against the black ground. Dull reddish light flickered in the stained glass windows of the chapel, a single candle indicating that someone was present. Sabina Delgado y Aguilera, the priestess of the vamps, was home. I wondered if she was taking callers.
I checked the crypts, satisfied that they hadn’t taken damage. Then I walked around the graveyard, taking in the night through nose, mouth, eyes, ears. As I walked, the skin on the back of my neck rose. A feeling of tiny claws skittered up my back. I had a feeling that I’d missed something when I was here last.
I wasn’t prescient. But I was getting a bad feeling.
CHAPTER 16
They killed me already
I checked the old sites for new activity of a rising-rogue sort. There was nothing new at any of them, but at the third one, my feet touching the displaced circle of shells, I smelled something bad. The smell of death, rank and sweet and foul.
I moved upwind into the trees, away from the graveyard. Drawing on Beast’s instinct, night vision, and svelte, lissome grace, I moved between the thickly growing trees, silent, not a leaf cracking beneath my boots. Sweat trickled beneath my leathers. I carried the vamp-killer in my left hand, the Benelli in my right, the butt stock collapsed so I could hold it one handed.
As I walked, the sickly sweet smell of death grew, and beneath it, an even older scent—blood left to rot, the sacrifice for whatever dark magic had been done here. Floating along under the blood and death scent was the ozonelike taint of witch magic. Magic only recently spent. Magic still fresh and potent, smelling of piney woods and mushrooms, roses and fresh-turned earth, with a hint of brine, the scent of an earth witch with strong abilities and affinities for growing things and with the soil itself. Or maybe two earth witches, working in tandem. And under it all was the scent of dark rites. Fear, blood, and sacrifice. My hands clenched on the weapons and I relaxed them only by an effort of will, focusing my attention back on the scent signatures and what they might mean. I didn’t like this. Not at all. The musk of my own fear-sweat joined the heat-sweat trickling down my sides. I unfolded the stock and held the Benelli at ready, able to fire one-handed if needed for a close-range shot, or quickly brace it with my left arm for a more distant one.
I didn’t smell the fresh odor of anyone, maybe not since Ada. So the magic had been set on a timer or a trigger, warded for scent so no one could find it, and was only recently initiated. Since I hadn’t smelled the site or the magics when I was here last, it had likely been under a stasis spell, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t someone coming soon. Or someone approaching from downwind of me. The back of my neck itched, an uneasy worry. I remembered the smell of angry vamp at the city park rising site. He had come back to see what rose, to inspect his scion.
Holding Beast close to the surface, I moved through the trees with catlike grace, slowly lifting and placing each foot. As I moved, I felt for my direction and decided I was heading vaguely north. Beast was better at knowing her bearings than I, but worse at translating and communicating her directional sense. I was sweating heavily, the new leathers’ mesh pockets not a big help without a bike-generated breeze.
A tingle of broken magic brushed across my skin. I stopped. I had found a new ten-foot-wide circle in the trees, the shells still covered by debris from the hurricane. I sniffed, parsing the various scents, analyzing. Something was different here. Vamps rose on the third day after they were turned and died their first death. But from the smell, this one had been in the ground a lot longer. Long before Ada. Something said this was important.
Both instinct and experience told me that the many kidnappings of the witch children were about these vamp risings. With the thought, fear started to rise but I crushed it. I couldn’t give in to emotion until the children were safe. I would not. I forced my mind back to the puzzle.
Why would witches and vamps work together to steal witch children? Why graves with crosses? And why leave a newly turned vamp longer in the ground? It was senseless. It had something to do with the curse and the curing process—but what? Stopping, I leaned against a tree, my vertebrae pressing through leather into the rough bark. I listened, sending out my senses to taste, scent, hear, feel everything on the night breeze. Traces of magic floated along the skin of my hands and face, appearing tattered, smelling scorched. In Beast-vision, the traces looked much like the broken wards on Molly’s house.
Ahead, something groaned softly and breathed through thick tissue, the sound making me think of a congealed mass. I tossed the vamp-killer lightly up and down in my hand, making sure of a firm, sweat-free grip. Ever more slowly, I moved deeper into the woods, staying downwind. The four crosses on my chest began glowing palely, alerting me to the presence of a vamp.
Something coughed. The sound was human, or almost, long and retching. A glob of something gooey was spat and my stomach wanted to turn. Beast’s hackles rose, the skin and fine hairs along my neck and shoulders reacting to her instincts, in a rippling of raised flesh. She pushed my nausea down and away, looking through my eyes.
I slid through the trees, silent as a predator stalking prey. I saw movement as something paler than the trees lifted. It resolved into an arm, rising to wipe a face. A male, black, wearing a once-white shirt and dark pants, stood in a little clearing just ahead. His feet were bare. Moving drunkenly, he sat on a downed tree, coughing and spitting. I was about thirty feet away, close enough to study him with my better-than-human night vision. The pants resolved into jeans, and the shirt into a long-sleeved dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and a T-shirt underneath. He was about twenty, with tats up the side of his neck and along his arms in full sleeves. The neck tat caught the moonlight, revealing a black widow, red-dotted abdomen the size of a silver dollar beneath his ear, and its legs wrapped around his neck as if it held on while pumping venom into him. I was pretty sure it was a gang tat.
He smelled of old death and decayed blood and fear. The reek of the grave. Grave dirt and a degenerated slime clung to him. I must hav
e made a noise, because his head came up, inhumanly fast. Far faster than a new vamp should have been able to move. He vamped out, fangs like small needles snapping down and eyes going blacker than the underside of hell. Without a visible tell, he attacked. My crosses blazed with light. A delayed fear response hurtled into my throat.
I raised my left arm to block him and fired one-handed, a three burst, the barrel lifting with each shot. He dodged around the first two blasts, so fast I could see his motion in overlays of images, white shirt shifting back and forth. The blaze of firing burned out my night vision, the last shot pointing to the sky, going wild.
He took me down. Crashing into the brush. I grunted as his weight landed on me. Fear slammed through me. His hands on my wrists shoved my arms apart and down. Trapping me. His fangs tore at my throat. Hitting the silver rings on the leather. Ripping through to the silver chain-mail collar beneath. He screamed with pain. Pulled back. And met my eyes. Spat. He drove for my face with his left claws.
One hand free, I jerked away. His claws landed where my head had been. It was not the uncontrolled action of a young rogue vamp.
It was the action of a trained warrior.
I punched with the vamp-killer into his unprotected side. But he was no longer there. He was on the far side of the shell circle. Vamped out. Holding his stomach. “Hungry,” he said. “Please.”
I rolled upright, taking up my weapons with me. Dropped the Benelli on its strap and slung it back, out of the way. I pulled two stakes, silver tipped and wicked sharp, and started across the clearing. Beast-fast. Before I realized that he had spoken. I halted so quickly I nearly tripped. This was a newly risen vamp—I knew it by the size of his tiny, needlelike canines, by the sight of the disturbed grave in the center of the pentagram. I knew it. No newly risen vamp was capable of coherent speech. They were rabid, feral killing machines, gaining the memory of speech over time. They had one need, one function—to eat. And through meeting that need, they killed. But this guy talked. He had said please. And he wasn’t attacking. The silver crosses weren’t hurting his eyes. He was . . . watching me.
I could hear my breathing, strident in the awful silence. Dread crawled along my skin like slimy snakes in the darkness. I brought my breath under control, but when I spoke, my words were breathy and puny sounding. “You understand me?”
After a moment, he nodded. One quick downward jerk of his chin. He understood.
And then, suddenly, as if it had been there all along, waiting, I understood. The timing of the disappearance of witch children had never corresponded to the appearance of young rogues. Because these young ones were in the ground a lot longer than the expected three days. They were bound into the ground with a spell, like a stasis spell, to keep them there . . . in the hope that longer in the ground meant greater sanity. The vamps I was hunting had managed to raise a vamp that was sane right away. With no need for curing, no insanity. No curse. No devoveo.
All the other young-rogue risings had been failed experiments. But this time it had finally worked.
But why the crosses in the trees? Maybe the spell that kept the vamps in the ground longer was also intended to make them immune to the power of the cross. Vamps who didn’t suffer from the curse, and didn’t suffer from the cross. “Crap,” I whispered as the implications flashed through my mind. The experimenter had wanted to make sure his creations weren’t flawed.
The value of a spell to raise sane young was enough to start a war over. Rousseau, St. Martin, and Mearkanis—were all three involved? No. Just Rousseau. No other clan scent was on this.
“Hungry,” he said again, the word whispered and rough.
“I know you’re hungry.” His throat worked with need at my words. I held up the vamp-killer, letting the moonlight through the trees catch on the silver. “But if you can wait, if you can hold off, I’ll get someone here to help. Understand?”
He nodded again and closed his eyes. “Hurry. Don’t know how long . . .”
My mind raced. The first young vamp I’d taken down in this city had been restored to his sanity enough to make it into a club, into the ladies’ room, and attack a woman. He’d made a mate for himself. He’d claimed territory. Not normal. Not for a new rogue. They got their name from their lack of sanity. Why hadn’t I thought of that until now? Because I was settled into the rut of my own expectations.
I sheathed the stakes and pulled my cell, praying for bars. There were three, and though I really didn’t want to call any of Leo’s people, not after the big boss tried to eat me for dinner, I didn’t have a choice. I speed-dialed Bruiser. When he answered, I said, “I have a newly risen vamp in control of his faculties, behind the chapel at the vamp cemetery. He says he can wait for a blood meal if you hurry.”
“Talking? Not possible,” Bruiser said.
“Fine. I’ll stake him and we can argue over it later.” The vamp across the clearing tensed and blinked slowly. I shrugged to show I wasn’t serious.
Bruiser cursed once, succinctly. “Leo is . . . not available. I’ll bring one of his scions. Try to keep him alive.” The connection ended and I folded the phone back into its pocket.
“You got a name?” I asked the newly risen guy.
He seemed to think, and as he did, the sclera of his eyes bled back white, as if the act of answering a question brought him back to his humanity. “LeShawn. LeShawn . . . B . . . Brandt.”
They didn’t remember their names. Not for five years or more. “LeShawn, you think you can make it through the trees about two hundred yards?”
“T . . . try,” he said. His fangs retracted and his human teeth were chattering in the heat as if he was cold. Which I imagined he was. They were always cold when they hadn’t fed.
I controlled my fear and my breathing, making sure my reactions didn’t push him over the edge. When I was calm, I pointed with the stakes again. “That way. You go in front.”
He moved slowly, his feet shuffling in the underbrush. He shouldn’t even be able to walk yet, or at least not without that zombielike lack of coordination. It took the newly risen a lot longer than this. A lot longer. Yet the girl who had risen in the park had been a typical young-rogue vamp and she had been under this same spell. Why not this guy?
Because of Ada and all the ambient energy she had brought ashore. The lightning had disrupted the stasis spell.
Near me, LeShawn paused and raised his head, that weirdly snakelike move they all had, and sniffed. “You smell good. Like meat and . . . sex.”
“Move along or you’ll smell like dead meat.”
He laughed. Crap. He laughed. That totally human laughter that took most of them a decade to relearn. He looked back at me, the grin still on his face. His eyes were human, brown irises with night-wide pupils. On my chest, the crosses decreased their glow. His eyes lit on my neck just below my jaw, the sliver of unprotected skin, and he breathed deeply, closing his eyes. “You smell so . . . good.”
My crosses brightened, a weird fluctuation I’d never seen before. “LeShawn. Snap out of it or I’ll stake you and you’ll be true-dead. LeShawn.”
His eyes opened and he was partly vamped out. “They killed . . . me . . . already.”
“Who killed you, LeShawn?”
He shook his head and gripped his middle, whispering, “It was dark. Hungry, hungry, hungry.” But he turned and went where I pointed, back south, his bare feet noisy in the underbrush. I kept fifteen feet or so between us, and my shotgun up. I hoped it was enough space for me to react if he vamped out and came at me again.
This vamp was the key to understanding the kidnappings. To finding Angelina and Little Evan. This vamp could talk. Hope soared through me, but I wrestled it down alongside the fear.
It looked as though we’d make it. I could see the chapel through the trees, glowing whitely in the rising moon. LeShawn slowed, his back to me. He put out a hand to steady himself as he stepped between two trees. His claws were out, sharpened and two inches long. They pressed into the dry white woo
d of a dead tree with small snaps as he tightened his grip. With his other hand, he gripped his middle. Stopped. My crosses began to glow again, making me blink against the brightness.
He was breathing hard, the reek of dead tissues stinking on the night air. I kept my voice steady, not reacting to the fight-or-flight impulse flooding my system. “LeShawn? Keep it together, man. Keep moving.”
He turned, allowing me a half-profile view of his face, and dropped his head. “Can’t. Can’t do it . . .” His hand on the tree made a fist. Cutting his palm. I smelled vamp blood, like dried sage on the air, sharper than the stink of death. He held out his hand, seeing the thin blood there. He put his palm to his mouth. And sank his teeth in. Sucked.
“LeShawn?” I took a single step closer.
“Hu . . .” He quivered. Fell back against the tree, facing me, pressing his jaw into his palm. Sucked hard at his own torn flesh. He sobbed with frustration. “So . . . so hungry. Hu . . . huuu . . .” In a flash he leaped at me, eyes insane with bloodlust. Vampy rogue insane. Time did that little shift and he seemed to slow, hanging in midair. Snarling. I raised the stake, gauging his arc. And he came down. At me. Onto the tip of the stake.
