How to Wake an Undead City

by Edwards, Hailey

  Aware nothing I said would change his mind, I nodded before remembering he couldn’t see. “Okay.”

  Odette’s sentence would be life, given her advanced age, and Lacroix would never see the moon rise again if the Grande Dame got ahold of him. This was my one chance to ask them the questions that had plagued me my entire life and get answers straight from the source.

  Once Linus finished his work, I smudged the ward protecting us from being overheard.

  We had agreed Boaz would leave first, but we had no way of tracking his progress. Thirty seconds after he should have been clear, Linus exited the room. Half a minute after that, it was my turn. I discarded my shoes for fear the damp sneakers would squeak on the tile, and I padded into the hall with my heart drumming in my ears.

  A prickling sensation crept down my spine, and I didn’t have to look to know the doorway I was passing opened into the room full of card-playing vampires. Their conversation was low, their focus on the game absolute. At least until the simple action of me walking, covered in sigils, stirred the faintest breeze.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “Blood.”

  Four vampires shoved from the table to crowd the door less than a yard away from me.

  “Herbs.”

  “Necromancer.”

  There was no time to check with the others, no way to discuss how best to handle this. I had to eliminate the threat before they raised the alarm and we all paid the price.

  Careful not to cut too deep, I nicked the tip of my pointer and drew sigils on the wall of compressed air insulating me. I let my focus narrow to the vampires, to the danger they posed me and my friends, and I slammed my palm against the sigils, sending a wave of energy through the room.

  The blast killed them all, turned them to ash that floated down in blackened flakes.

  “Pick up the pace,” Lethe whispered directly into my ear. “We just started the countdown.”

  Sooner or later, these vampires would be discovered. Sooner rather than later if we didn’t hurry up and begin neutralizing the rest. Neutralizing. Such a sanitary word for murder. But what bothered me more than the scene before us was the fact I couldn’t decide if what I felt was relief over having mastered the sigil or horror over such power residing in me.

  These vampires had killed humans and necromancers alike. Not all of them had made that choice of their own free will, but some of them had, and we had no way to tell the difference. With Lacroix alive, there was no difference. He was in total control of them, one way or the other, and all we could do was hold tight to the belief that what we did was for the greater good.

  We reached the main floor and found more vampires posted at all the windows and doors.

  Unable to coordinate with the others, I stuck to the plan and began sweeping my quadrant for signs of Lacroix and Odette. I didn’t have to go far before I heard her laughter bouncing off the walls as she told stories of her daring youth—her words, not mine—that proved she had edited her life story for my ears.

  Creeping forward, I reached a doorway and peered around its molding to spy on a queen addressing her loyal subjects.

  Odette lounged in a chair, elevating her, while more than a dozen female vampires simpered at her from their places on the floor. Most appeared so enrapt by her tales, I had to wonder if Lacroix hadn’t ordered them to pay her their undivided attention. Perhaps to free him up for his own pursuits.

  Now that I had her in my sights, I blanked. I had so many questions, but it’s not like I could ask them over the heads of her undead ladies-in-waiting. Lacroix was absent from the court, but I bet engaging with her would bring him running.

  As the thought occurred to me, an unforgiving hand closed over the back of my neck, its cruel fingers digging into my flesh, and Odette tossed a loving smile toward me but not at me.

  Lacroix.

  “Even blinded from seeing your future,” she said smugly, “I knew you would come straight to me.”

  “What brings you for a visit?” Lacroix marched me forward, ruining the sigil so Odette could see me too. “Have you come to relay your terms for surrender?”

  “The Society will not surrender, and neither will Savannah.” A growl tickled the back of my throat. “Neither will I.”

  The sound made him pause. “You’ve been spending too much time around gwyllgi.”

  “Nasty beasts.” Odette fluffed her layered skirt then clucked her tongue at Lacroix. “I don’t see why you ever employed them.”

  “They came highly recommended,” he said shortly, “and they did their jobs well. I had no quarrel with the pack.” He mashed his lips together. “Until Evangeline.”

  “That woman,” Odette seethed, “did this world a favor when she passed into the next.”

  Odette couldn’t be more wrong. Mom was alive and well, in Woolworth House.

  “Did you know?” I doubt Maud told Odette about how she preserved Mom, for her sake as well as mine, but Odette was a seer. She might have figured it out on her own. “About Mom? Did you know?”

  “How could I not?” Her face settled into familiar lines as she frowned. “I was there when she died.”

  She had misunderstood me, answered the question she thought I was asking, and it had me tasting bile.

  Woolly’s memories—Mom’s memories—of the accident included the squeal of tires as she bled out.

  “You drove her off the road,” I said aloud, and it sounded just as crazy as it did in my head.

  “I despise motorized transportation.” She shuddered. “I much prefer to walk, but sacrifices must be made.”

  That exact preference would have immediately eliminated her from a suspect pool, had there been one. But Mom’s death had been treated as a hit-and-run, not a murder. And Odette didn’t have a license. I hadn’t even known she could drive. We walked everywhere when I visited her on Tybee. I saw now there was a reason for that, another careful layer applied to her alibi.

  “Don’t cry, bébé.”

  Tears raced, hot and fast, down my cheeks. “She was my mother.”

  “She was an insolent young woman who betrayed her husband’s memory by fleeing with his child after his death.” Lacroix shook me like a dog. “She had no right. None. You are my blood. To do with as I see fit.”

  “They were planning on moving away.” I glared at him through watery eyes. “I read her letters to Maud.”

  “Your mother—” He snapped his teeth together. “George fell in love with her. That was not our plan. He was set in her path to make her fall for him, to birth a child of my line in the hopes our calculations were correct, that breeding him to a Marchand would produce a goddess-touched child.”

  The news my father had been hand-picked for my mother sucker-punched me. But Lacroix’s fury was a balm all its own. Dad had loved Mom. I might have been engineered, but I had also been conceived in love, and when Lacroix caused a rift, Dad sided with her. He would have walked away from Lacroix, from his title as heritor, and… “How did my father die? The truth.”

  “A clan member challenged his right to inherit. They fought. My son was slain. That is the truth.”

  But not the whole truth. A clan member, not a cousin, as he had confided to me at the ball.

  No doubt there were other inconsistencies in his version of events, but I could never spot them all.

  “You’re the clan master. You choose your own heritor. That means you decided to replace George before he defected with Mom and took me with him. You set his death in motion.” The tears staining my cheeks dried. “Who killed him?”

  Lacroix didn’t condescend to answer, but then, I should have known.

  Danill Volkov had been Lacroix’s heritor when he kidnapped me, but Volkov spun me a tale about how he was only thirty-five, and I had believed him. Thinking back on it, he might have wedged that tiny fact in my brain long before Linus had protected me with a tattoo and given me a nudge not to question it. Otherwise, I was just that stupid that it had never occurred to me h
e was older. Much older.

  “Volkov killed my father.” I couldn’t feel my lips. They had gone numb. “For the title and…for me.”

  Suddenly, Volkov’s rabid insistence I belonged to him made a lot more sense. As did the avowal he gifted me. His blood in my tattoo might have provoked his possessive instincts, but the reaction had seemed extreme from someone I hadn’t known all that long. But if he had killed my father, and I was part of the prize package, he had been waiting twenty years for me.

  That was a long time for a vampire to fixate only to be thwarted. Not so long for a Last Seed, in the grand scheme of forever, but maybe Volkov wasn’t so old after all. Just enough to best my father, just enough to be hungry for more status, just enough to be willing to accept betrothal to an infant.

  Lacroix’s old-fashioned sensibilities would have demanded legitimate heirs, which meant his plan had been to discard Volkov, who was sterile, in favor of another human Lacroix relative who could impregnate me after his transformation. But Volkov must not have known that.

  And just when the murky waters of my life ran clear, Odette waded in to muddy them again.

  “George was a lovely man, but he was weak.” She tsked. “He fell prey to your mother. She, more than anyone, killed him with her selfishness.”

  Blocking out the cruel taunt, I sifted through all she had said and done and found no real truths. I wanted more than evidence of her envy, her pettiness. I wanted the reason why she hated my mom.

  “Fame has made you vain,” I told her, jabbing her in a tender spot, “but no so vain you would kill my mother out of envy.”

  “You give me too much credit.” She rose to her feet. “Do you know what Maud was working on when Evie died?”

  “No.” I recoiled when she laid her hand on my cheek. “She didn’t talk much about her projects.”

  Many of them were NDA protected or too dangerous to share the details with a teenager. Particularly one she was training as an assistant versus a practitioner.

  “An elixir that granted eternal youth.”

  Necromancers turned humans into vampires at whatever age they signed on the dotted line and made the wire transfer. The potential market for such an elixir was there in humans who wanted to spend eternity in their prime, sans fangs, but Maud had never been one to waste her time on vanity.

  “Why would she…?” I shut my eyes to stem the tide of grief. “She wanted to give Mom forever with Dad.”

  Necromancers enjoyed extended lifespans, but Last Seeds lived forever unless they were killed.

  This was more proof that what my parents had was real. They loved one another, so much that even Maud had been moved to take strides toward ensuring their bond endured beyond a single lifetime.

  “After George died, Maud stopped the experiment.” Odette lowered her hand, her fingers curling into a fist at her side. “I appealed to her vanity, to her pride, but she would not be coerced. Without George, there was no point. Evie wouldn’t want eternity without him.” Her eyes, small behind her thick lenses, crackled with fury. “Maud gave no thought to others in similar circumstances. She doomed more love than existed between those two by quitting her study. She was selfish, and so I decided to be selfish too. She took from me the best chance I had of spending eternity with my Gaspard, and so I took Evangeline, the person she loved best, from her.”

  “Bold enough to commit murder,” I said coldly, “but not brave enough to take the credit.”

  Odette slapped me so hard my head jerked to one side, and I tasted copper. “You are your mother made over.”

  “Thank you.” I nailed Lacroix with as much loathing as I could muster. “You let Odette have her way. You figured with Dad gone, if Mom was out of the way, I would have no one. You expected to waltz in and claim guardianship as my paternal grandfather, but Maud wouldn’t give me up. She must have suspected you were involved in my parents’ deaths.” I laughed softly at Odette. “Maud had no idea you were hooking up with Lacroix. She would have ruined you, both of you, if she had known.”

  “Maud trusted me.” She tapped her forehead to indicate her third eye. “I would have seen if she had an inkling what I had done and decided to move against me.”

  “You couldn’t see me.” The story I had been told, that Odette was blinded to my future so that I could make my own decisions, was a lie. Just like everything else she had ever told me. But I wasn’t certain if this meant she could see my future, or if she had merely invented fake reasons to flatter her blind spot. “Why didn’t Maud take the same precautions?”

  “Your mother was responsible for masking your future, and at great cost to her health. The instant those treacherous gwyllgi helped Evie escape, she branded you with a sigil used on all goddess-touched necromancers in the Marchand line to hide them from discovery. She carved years off her life to protect yours, and we might never have located you had she not returned to Savannah.”

  “She placed her faith in Maud,” Lacroix intoned, “and Maud failed her.”

  “Maud had no idea she was luring Mom into a trap.” I struggled against Lacroix and was rewarded with a biting reminder of his nails that I couldn’t get free unless I started a fight I couldn’t yet win. “That’s why you hung around, isn’t it, Odette? You stayed in Savannah, near Maud, hoping Mom would reach out one day and you would be there to intercept her.”

  “Beach living suited me.” She touched the shells braided in her hair. “That part was no hardship.”

  There was just one more thing I had to know, already knew, but had to hear from her lips. “Did you kill Maud too?”

  “You were withering away beneath her tutelage.” Odette softened her voice. “You wanted to be a practitioner. It’s all you ever talked about. Your power would have outstripped hers, and so she placated you with warding.” She laughed, amused. “A goddess-touched necromancer ignorant of her birthright, left as a custodian for an old house and traded off to marry her sister’s son like chattel.” Her eyes glittered. “Clarice would have figured it out after you wed Linus, and she would have clapped her hands with glee to have bought such a fine mare to breed into her line.”

  Teeth bared, I channeled Lethe to full effect. “Did. You. Kill. Maud?”

  “Who else could have slipped past her wards?” Odette twisted one of her thin braids, admiring the athame in her hand. Its slender blade reminded me of the Grand Dame’s admission that such a weapon had been used to kill Maud. Perhaps even that very one. “You must have asked yourself a thousand times. The old house too, yes? Maud trusted me, bébé. Her home, it trusted me too. The poor thing had no idea. None. I made sure of it. Even while you were in prison, I visited Woolworth House to reinforce the sigils I placed that night to erase Maud’s death from its memory. I had to be certain, you see, that I would remain above reproach.”

  The stairway leading up into my head loomed, but taking that path was too easy, and I had taken it too often. There was no point in asking why she had stolen Maud’s heart. She took it out of spite, I believed, to punish Maud for perceived sins against her.

  Dragging Lacroix back into the conversation to distract him from the hand I slid into my pocket, I challenged him. “You let me go to prison for her murder.”

  “Scion Lawson was staying with his aunt that weekend. He was meant to take the blame. You beat Linus to the scene, and there was nothing we could do. Given the status of all those involved, and the severity of the crime, the Elite acted too quickly for either of us to intervene. The best we could do was make arrangements to ensure you received the blood to which you had become accustomed.” He clucked his tongue at Odette. “I was quite displeased by how things resolved, but that was then. Here we are, all together, as we always should have been. You will wed my heritor and give me immortal children with my blood in their veins. That is your purpose in life, your reason for existing.”

  “I’m engaged.”

  “Phillip,” he called, ignoring me, “heat the brand.” Using one of his nails, he sliced through the
collar and back of my shirt to expose my spine. “This is a beautiful piece. Your lover is a talented artist.” He touched the design and hissed. “You’ve been branding the sentinels with these as well.” He heard my sharp intake of breath and laughed. “At first, we assumed it was a memorial design, but its true purpose became clear soon enough. We have discovered if you burn through the topmost layers of skin, cauterizing the lines, it nulls the sigil.”

  Meaning his people had captured and killed more sentinels. “You’re a monster.”

  “I am a man with a vision. You will come to share my perspective in time.”

  “I’m done with this conversation.” I pulled out my hand, flicked open the knife. “I’ve gotten all the answers I need from you both.”

  “Petulance is an unattractive quality in a woman.” He tapped my spine. “I will soon remedy that.”

  Phillip arrived with an electric cattle brand one of Lacroix’s people must have smuggled in. The tip of the wand glowed red and distorted the air around it with heat.

  “Any time now,” I muttered.

  “I do applaud your spirit.” Lacroix accepted the brand, twisted it this way and that, admiring its glow. “This will hurt, quite a bit. I will do my best to dull the pain, after.”

  Seconds before the metal pressed into my skin, a bullet pierced Lacroix’s hand. His fingers seized, and he dropped the brand with a clang, cursing in his native language. Before he could recover, a brutal impact drove him to the ground and brought me down with him. Vicious snarls revved beside me, music to my ears, and blood flew as a gwyllgi gnawed on the hand digging into my nape. Lacroix released me with a shout.

  “You guys didn’t waste any time.” I scurried back and fished the stake out of the front of my bra, grateful he had checked my spine and not my chest for the protective tattoo. “I was starting to think Lethe talked you into making a burger run.”

  “We just wanted you to get your answers,” Boaz drawled from somewhere to my left. “Goddess knows you’ve waited long enough to hear them.”

  “Kill them,” Lacroix ordered, his fangs lengthening to wicked points. “Take the scion as leverage, and bring my granddaughter to me.”