by Faith Hunter
I watched it puncture his shirts. And knew my mistake even as I felt the silver tip slide between ribs. He crashed onto me, his claws closing reflexively on my upper arms. Time juddered and resumed its slow pace.
“No!” I hit the ground with the force of his leap, LeShawn above me. Shock on his face. Too late, I jerked at the stake, pulling it back. His eyes bled back to human. We bounced. I used the bounce to twist from beneath him. Yanking the stake. It caught on a rib and held. We were no longer at the proper angle for it to slide free. Time slowed again, flashes of reality painted across the dark of the night.
Twisting, the stake hung on the back of his sternum, trapped between ribs and the hard plate of bone in the center of his chest. His claws brushed across the metal of my jacket sleeves. Tiny clinks. The motion threw him farther to the side. Down. Hard. The landing shoved the stake into his heart with a little give. A small reduction of pressure as it entered the heart chamber. And all the way through, rubbery on the other side.
The sharpened silver tip cut through his shirt at the back. Stinging vamp blood splattered up in a thin fountain. Small droplets splashed my face. The vamp sighed. Died. Shock stabbed through me. “No. No!”
On my hands and knees, vamp blood burning my face, I cursed long and hard, spitting my words at the earth. Frustrated tears leaked from my eyes as I swore. I levered my body up, sitting beside LeShawn on the bed of pine needles, one hand on his body, my legs splayed. The endorphins of victory shot through my bloodstream, clashing with the knowledge that I had lost my best link to the witch kidnappings and the maker of the young rogues. For an instant my emotions whirled, more dizzying than liquor, hotter than sex. I had survived. I had lost. “Oh . . . no,” I whispered. I gagged with shock, the taste acidic and burning.
I took a breath that smelled and tasted of vamp blood, heavy and rank in the air. The elation dipped and died, crushed beneath the despair. “LeShawn. Crap.” Tears pooled in my eyes, making him waver in the dark.
I had to cut off his head. I knew that. It was the only way to give him true-death. If his maker were here, or if I had used the ash stakes, without silver to poison his blood, he might have been brought back. Maybe. And maybe not. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t known what I’d been dealing with until too late. Until after I had staked him.
Sitting on the bed of pine needles and leaves, I pulled my cell and hit REDIAL. When Bruiser answered, I could hear the sound of a car in the background, a faint, steady hum. “Never mind. He couldn’t hold it together.”
“True-dead?”
“Not yet. But I hit him with a silver-tipped stake. Through and through his heart.”
Bruiser put it together aloud. “If we try to bring him back, it’ll spread the poison through him before he can heal. That’s even assuming we could find his master to give him a meal. Bethany is not well tonight. Leo could do it. But he’s . . . not himself yet.”
I bet he wasn’t. I sighed, the sound whistling shrilly in the phone, and spoke mostly to myself. “I’ll put the silver stakes away for the rest of this hunt. Not that it does me much good now.” I cursed again, but my words held no heat.
“Hold off bringing him true-death until after the priestess has a chance to check him out. If he was sane enough to talk, immediately after his first rising, she may be able to tell why.”
I knew that the priestess had once spent the night in the chapel just ahead, but I didn’t know for absolute certainty she was there tonight. I hadn’t peeked in the windows. And Bruiser didn’t know that I knew about her lair, if that was what the chapel was.
And now the lying and half-truths start. But I’d tell any lie I knew to get the children back. “How am I going to get to her?” I temporized. “I’m on my bike. I can’t be carting a body across town.” All truths. Truth hiding the lie beneath it.
“I’ll contact her. Take the body to the chapel porch. Wait for her there.”
Yeah. Right. “Okay.” I managed to keep the ironic tone out of my voice. Then hope sizzled up in me. “Will Sabina feed him back—”
“No,” Bruiser interrupted. “Sabina won’t revive a young rogue. Don’t ask. She’s out-clan.”
I closed the phone without a good-bye, tucked it away, drove the bloody stake into the ground, cleaning it. I’d wash it later, otherwise the acidic vamp blood would corrode the silver. My face stung where his blood had splattered me, and I used my saliva to clean it off. When I had my breath back, I tucked my crosses out of sight and stood. Secured my weapons.
With a grunt, I hefted the body up, over my shoulder. Already it stank of new death on top of the other scents: old death, vamp blood, and the grave. He had to be permanently dispatched. Otherwise there was a slim chance he’d rise at the full moon, a rogue of a different sort; a lot more deadly than the newly risen. There had been a few accounts over the years.
Placing my booted feet with care, I carried him out of the woods and into the moonlight. He was heavy, and I was tired. Beast’s offer of strength didn’t extend to non-emergency situations and it certainly didn’t extend to carrying a vamp out of the woods. I stumbled twice and nearly dropped LeShawn once.
Ahead, I could see the chapel, candles lit in the blood-tinted stained glass windows, the light throwing bloody shadows onto the shell walkways and the grass all around. I was approaching from the back left, and as I rounded the building, I saw Sabina Delgado y Aguilera, the priestess of the vamps, on the front porch. Just as I had expected, she had been in the chapel. And maybe not all was lost. Maybe the priestess had info she didn’t know she had, which might lead me to the rogue-makers. If I asked the right questions, she might say something that would help. If I was quick with the right words. If I said all the right things and kept all the other things silent. Might, maybe, if. I was running out of time. I took a steadying breath. People skills weren’t my strongest talent.
Once again Sabina was wearing a white skirt and an outfit that looked like a nun’s habit but made of heavy white cloth. The wimple hid her hair and framed her face with white, catching the moonlight and forming pools of darker shadows. Her hands were folded into her sleeves like a mother superior’s and her face was set in an austere expression, ascetic and grave. Ha-ha. Vamp humor.
I was huffing for breath as I walked toward her, making sure my boots crunched on the grass and the shells of the walkway. Making sure she heard me coming. She didn’t turn to me, giving no indication that she heard me at all. She was immobile, still as the marble statues atop the crypts in the graveyard. A statue dressed in white cloth.
When I was twenty feet away I stopped, steadying the body. LeShawn’s hands bumped my back and buttock. I had no idea what to call her. It didn’t feel polite to call her Sabina. I said, “Bruiser—George Dumas—said he’d call the priestess.”
She didn’t turn to me and the angle made it hard to see her lips move as she said, “He did. You are Jane Yellowrock, the creature who is helping my people.”
Creature. Okaaay. That brought me down a bit. Helped me to focus. The children. And little Bliss. That was all that mattered. “This vamp just rose, his first rising, a couple hundred yards into the woods. He knew his name, was talking and coherent, walking with balance, able to take direction. Able to hold off bloodlust for a while. We were walking here to meet George and one of Leo’s scions and blood-servants to get his first blood meal. But he lost control, attacked me, and I had to stake him. I mistakenly used silver and pierced his heart.”
Slowly, she turned her head to me. Her shoulders stayed perfectly still, her head moving on the stem of her neck. The motion was almost robotic. Not human. I was glad I’d stopped so far away. Her mouth opened in her expressionless face, and she spoke with the certainty of experience, history, and Truth. A pronouncement. “A young vampire has no control. No speech. No memory. A young vampire is a ravening beast.”
Beast was silent at the insult. “That’s what I thought, until now,” I managed, LeShawn’s weight pressing me into the ground. “I think it has
something to do with his rising in a charmed witch circle and pentagram, crosses nailed to the trees at head height, and the smell of decayed blood in the ground. Blood magic.”
“No,” she whispered, the note fading in the night.
I needed her to believe me. “It’s true,” I said. “It’s happened before, hasn’t it? I’ve heard the Sons of Darkness rose without devoveo. Someone has been able to replicate that.” As I was speaking, it occurred to me that maybe I was stupid to mention the Sons again, after Leo’s reaction, but I’d thought he was just being nutso. Apparently not.
At the words “Sons of Darkness,” she started, and her eyes went half-vampy. Beast roared to the surface, and I tensed as Sabina stared at me, her gaze the most predatory I’d ever seen from her. But then the priestess seemed to win some internal battle, and her eyes eased to near human. Beast snarled and settled back.
“Listen, lady, this guy’s heavy,” I said. “And his body fluids are dripping all over me. Mind if I put him down before we continue this conversation?” So much for my people skills. I am so stupid.
But the priestess didn’t look as though her nose was out of joint at my tone. She pointed at her feet. I adjusted LeShawn’s weight with a little shoulder twitch and knee bounce and crossed to the porch. I eased him down, but his head clunked on the cement floor anyway. Good thing he was already dead or he’d wake up with a headache. I took a deep breath and blew out the strain. LeShawn hadn’t been a linebacker, but he’d been a meaty, muscular guy.
The priestess was suddenly gone. Just not there, the porch empty, leaving only a localized breeze where she had been. I blinked in surprise, looked around to make sure she hadn’t come toward me; I had started to call out when she returned just as fast, appearing on the porch holding a short stubby candle in a little glass bowl, a white plastic box, and a chair. I managed not to flinch or make any move that might be construed as prey movements. Sabina didn’t smell of fresh blood, and I had no idea how long since she had really fed, deeply enough to be satisfied. I had no desire to be her next meal.
Moving at more human speeds, she placed the chair near LeShawn and held out the candle and the box to me. I took them both and hitched a hip onto the porch, catching my breath and placing the candle so its light shone near the dead vamp’s face. The box had a baby on the top and turned out to be baby wipes, which seemed seriously weird, but I was out of my league and I had no real idea of what was normal or not. I cleaned the blood and the grave-goo away as Sabina studied the new corpse.
Several silent minutes later, she leaned down and began to cut through LeShawn’s shirt with a tiny pair of scissors no longer than her fingers. “Let me,” I said as I gripped the edges of the cut shirt and tore it from neck to hem. A final snap ripped it through. When I was done, I realized the vamp could have snapped me in two as easily as I had the shirt. Despite what she looked like, she wasn’t an old lady. She was an ancient vamp, which meant powerful. I could stop doing old-lady favors for her.
The tats on the guy’s chest were both prison tats and the kind of fancy work only a master artist can create. The black widow on his neck perched at the top of a web spanning his entire torso and both shoulders, and the other tats were caught up in the web. There were crosses and hearts and inked initials, the word “MOM” with a red rose, a tombstone with the name Mary on it, an eagle, and a pit bull. And there were scars, one from a knife wound and two from bullets; the scars had been included in the artwork. It was a tapestry of his life, of the good moments that had made him who he was, and the bad times that had shaped him with pain. There were also arcane symbols and initials—the gang tats that claimed him forever.
Sabina sighed. “I believe you.”
I looked up in surprise. “Why?”
“Those tattooed with crosses do not survive to rise. The crosses should have burned through him to the bone when he awoke.” She sat back in her chair, which creaked softly in the night. “Where is this place of magic?”
I pointed in the general direction. “And there are three other sites, older and overgrown, in the woods nearby.”
Her lips thinned and turned down, making wrinkles in her pale face. “How could this be? I am here. I would have known. I should have known.”
“Not if humans prepared the ground by day and witches set it under something like a stasis spell combined with a protective ward. Not if the vamp waited until nearly sunrise to do his work,” I said, thinking of the vamps that took the children, moving at dusk, sunlight still bright on the western clouds. Had witch magic given them protection from the late-day sun? Or were they practicing other magics on themselves? Yeah. That.
They’re not just trying to defeat devoveo. They’re trying to make an übervamp. A vamp with all the strengths and none of the weakness of regular vampires. My breath caught.
Sabina seemed to come back from a faraway place, and when she spoke it took her a moment to find the words. Or perhaps the language. How many languages and dialects did a person learn while living two thousand years? “Witch charms hid where this child rose? Powerful witch charms?”
“I’d say so, though I haven’t had a witch out here to scan the place yet. Do you recognize the scent of the makers?” My heart tripped again with hope.
Sabina leaned down again and drew the air in over her mouth and through her nose, much as Beast scented. She went still, the breath dead in her lungs. “The smell is familiar,” she breathed out, scenting again. “No.” She sat down with a sudden thump, her white skirts on the porch floor. Sitting there, she shook her head, a weirdly human gesture, her expression dumbfounded. “Surely not . . .”
I realized that Sabina, priestess of the vamps, knew exactly what was going on. She had seen the kind of vamp burial before. When she didn’t go on, I prompted, “Not what?”
“It is not possible. The maker I scent is long ago true-dead. I killed him myself.” Her face cleared of the nearly human emotion. She smelled again, her nostrils fluttering. “His heir. He made himself an heir before he died. Yes.” She sniffed again. “Yessss. His heir is now the leader, but he does not work alone. His acolytes assist him.”
My hope died. I kept the reaction off my face by an effort of will, clenching my teeth together against the setback. If Sabina didn’t know the makers, I was back to square one.
“The makers are of the Rousseau line and are young, only a few centuries old.” She stood again, moving human slow, studying me. “I cannot help you, creature who hunts.”
I figured I was the creature who hunts, and my blood spiked, sharp and fast, through my veins. But I shoved my need to know of my kind deep. Not until the kits were safe. I turned back to the body of the dead vamp.
“I did not believe that any of us could bear the power of a cross without burning.” It was said with that tone she used when making pronouncements of ultimate Truth, like a law of nature and physics, like: None of us can fly, none of us can breathe underwater, and none of us can survive without blood. But it wasn’t true.
“You did,” I said softly. “The night the”—I wanted to say liver-eater, but changed it in time—“old rogue attacked. You drove him off with a cross. A wooden cross. And it blazed like pure silver.”
Sabina Delgado y Aguilera’s eyes raged into black pits. Her fangs snapped down, three-inch-long spikes. She was on me before the crosses hidden in my collar had time to glare with light. Before I could blink. Before I could draw breath. Her motion was so fast that I didn’t have time to reach for a weapon. Her hand slammed me against the wall of the chapel so hard I heard the stucco crack. Icy fingers tightened around my throat. Her breath moved against my jaw, cold and smelling of old blood and dry herbs.
CHAPTER 17
Our sin has multiplied
Sabina was shorter than I, yet my feet dangled off the ground, my body against the chapel. Her fingers were like steel, cutting into my throat, twisting the steel chain links of the collar into my flesh, yet only the collar allowing me any breath at all. I was pinned,
my neck stretched out. I couldn’t reach any weapon that might be effective against her.
I forced my panic down, but there was nothing I could do about my racing heart or the fear-sweat that beaded on my skin. And the children had only me to help them right now. I forced my hands to fall to my sides. Held myself tightly against another brainless move.
She spoke, and I had no idea what she murmured, but it sounded like Latin, like a . . . liturgy. And this was the priestess of the vamps. I had said that they had a religion. Maybe I was more right than I had guessed.
When she paused to draw breath, I tried to speak. “Please.” My voice was whispery from my arched position and from terror building beneath my breastbone. I forced out the words. “I seek. Absolution.” With the word, a faint tremor ran through Sabina. She eased her grip on my throat. My breath whistled in my newly healed tissues. Relief flooded through me.
I had been to water, had been prepared for battle. Purified. I drew on that calling. I could feel again the sluggish current flowing over me as I dropped below the surface. The warmth of the air when I stood, my feet in the muck of the bayou bottom. The blackness when I again went under. Strange peace flowed through me, tranquility lapping at the far corners of my mind like the black bayou, dark and slow. The emotion felt as if it had been hiding, holding itself silent and still until now when I might recognize it, use it. And I understood. This fight for the kits was the reason I went to water. This was the battle Aggie One Feather had foreseen.
Serenity flowed along my skin and settled into the distant crannies of my mind and heart, sifted through my nerves and soothed my flesh. I closed my eyes. I repeated my calling. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.”
The serenity that flowed through me seemed to move through my skin, bleeding into hers. She took a slow breath.
Her fangs clicked back in her mouth, her body trembling, her eyes bled back to human. She set me on my feet and stepped away. Blood pounded into my head. The world reeled around me and I caught myself on the edge of the porch, fingers digging into the underlip. Somehow we were on the ground beside the chapel, the dead vamp’s legs near my hand. I carefully moved away as if he might stand up suddenly and attack.
