“We found him next to Corwin, knocked out cold,” Curran said. “Apparently he jumped into the fight for Derek, but he won’t tell me why.”
“Untie him,” I said.
Curran looked at me. “He has trouble controlling himself.”
“Untie him,” I repeated. “You shouldn’t keep a Crusader of the Order tied up in your infirmary, Curran.”
A tortured noise came from Corwin’s bed, the hoarse painful yowling of an animal in agony. For a moment Curran looked like he would pound his fist into the wall, but the slip lasted a mere breath and the calm expression reasserted itself on his face.
“Get him to behave,” Curran said,” and I’ll untie him.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The Crusader’s gaze had a touch of insanity to it. All Crusaders were crazy. It was in their job description. If at this moment, he broke free of his restraints, he would try to kill everyone in the room.
“I know who the upir is,” I told the Crusader. “I know what he wants.” The Crusader’s eyes fixed on me. Once he looked at you, really looked you in the eyes, you started to sweat, your muscles tensed, and you knew you had only two options: fight or flight. He wasn’t giving me his hard stare now. He was listening. “The upir can’t stay away,” I said. “Soon he’ll come here and then I’ll fight him.” I pointed to Curran. “So will he. While Curran and I are fighting and bleeding, a man will be lying here, tied to the bed because he was too stubborn to compromise.”
The Crusader spoke. “They took my weapons.”
Curran nodded. “He can have them back if he promises not to assault my people. And to stay in Keep. I can’t have him running around, fucking shit up right now. He cooperates or he stays tied to the bed.”
I looked to the Crusader. The madness flared in his eyes and died. “Agreed,” he said.
I took a knife from my belt and sawed through the restraints securing his arms. The Crusader sat up, rubbing his wrists. I offered him the knife and he cut the bonds on his ankles.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Nick,” he said. He wore the Pack’s trademark sweats and smelled clean.
I looked to Curran. “Did you force him to bathe?”
“We dipped him,” Curran said. “He had lice.”
“My weapons,” Nick said.
Curran motioned us to follow and we did. He led us out of the room to the hallway, down the corridor, and to a small room. “I have to go,” he told me, his hand on the door handle. He turned to Nick and the two men locked stares, sizing each other up. “Stay put,” Curran said.
“He will,” I told him. The Crusaders were insane, but they were still Knights of the Order. Their word was binding.
Curran opened the door for us and walked away, while we entered the room.
A lone bed flanked the wall next to a small dresser and a desk cluttered with metal. The place didn’t look lived in—no personal items on the furniture, no loose clothes. A heavy punching bag hung from the ceiling and I wondered if that was standard equipment for Keep’s rooms. Nick went to the desk, while I sat on the bed.
He had been loaded for bear when the shapechangers took him. A dozen shark-teeth gleamed on the table, next to a 9mm Sig Sauer, a .22, a shotgun, several clips, and boxes of assorted ammo. A long chain lay coiled by the shotgun. Silver, judging by the color of its metal. A short gladius-shaped sword lay on the side, flanked by several sharp dirks and a crescent-shape serrated blade designed to slice the throat. A tangle of cord and wooden parts occupied the corner of the desk—a garrote. There was a utility belt, two leather bracers, designed to hold the shark teeth, a back sheath, an r-kit, and bandages.
Nick stripped to the waist, displaying a hard scarred torso. His left shoulder was bandaged. He pulled the bandages off, exposing a raw, jagged wound, and slapped the r-kit onto it. Taking a fresh roll of gauze from the table, he began to dress the shoulder. I got up, stood behind him, and passed the bandage over his back.
We worked in silence until the wound was dressed. He put the shirt back on and strapped the utility belt over his waist.
“How long have you been tracking him?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me, his attention captured by the metal on the table. “Four years.” He slid the shark teeth one by one into their places on the bracers. “First Quebec, then Seattle. Tulsa.”
I touched the desk. “Nothing here will kill him.”
He thrust the gladius into his belt. It didn’t matter that he had nothing. He would still try.
“How did you know the upir would attack the kid?”
“The kid’s been bound to you. A natural target.”
“I’m a better target.”
“No. He wants you alive. To breed.” He stepped toward me and touched my arm. Pale luminescence shimmered on his fingertips and vanished. “Power,” he said. “Draws him like a moth to a flame.”
He didn’t need demonstrations of power. He could tell by touch. I tried to remember if he had touched me back in Ted’s office. We’d brushed against each other.
“You took responsibility for the kid,” he said. “You let him be taken.”
He was right. “Coming from a man who let himself be captured by the Pack and strapped to a bed, that doesn’t carry much weight. Tell you what, come back to me with the upir’s head and then you can judge me.”
He stared at me for a moment, his face blank and then said in his grating voice, “Fair enough.”
We moved at the same time and I stared into the barrel of his Sig Sauer while Slayer’s tip pressed against his jugular. I wasn’t sure how I knew he’d move.
The door opened slowly. Someone stepped into the room and halted. Neither of us was willing to look away. A long moment passed, and the newcomer exited. The door clicked, closing. A loud knock broke the quiet.
I grimaced at Nick. “You going to do something, do it, so I can slit your throat and move on.”
The gun barrel pointed upward and vanished back into the holster with a safety’s click. “Not now,” he said. I slid Slayer back into its sheath.
The knocking persisted. “Come in,” I said.
The door opened, revealing a female shapechanger. She turned to me. “Curran wants you,” she said.
The woman led me to the Council room in the back of the auditorium and held the door, motioning us to enter. I stepped inside and saw a dead girl on the floor. She lay on her side, her legs spread obscenely, her arms stretched forward. Moisture stained her torn T-shirt. A tiny heart on a long gold chain, the kind a teenage girl might buy for herself, spilled through shredded fabric to rest on the ground. Long scratches scarred the wooden floor, where her claws had scraped the boards. She must have changed shape before she died.
Her head stuck out at an unnatural angle, blind blue eyes staring at the ceiling. She looked young, frighteningly young, fourteen at the most. Someone had broken her neck, quickly, cleanly, in a single devastating jerk.
Curran was looking at her corpse from the gloom. Mahon sat at the wall, rubbing his forehead. There was a white piece of paper in his hand.
“The upir sent a phone number,” Curran said.
Mahon put his hand over his face. A scene played itself before my eyes: the girl lunging forward, blue eyes insane with the upir’s thoughts, changing into a snarling beast in midleap; Mahon stepping forward, huge arms grabbing her, snapping fragile bones on instinct, before the brain reacted; the girl changing back and falling to the floor . . . I didn’t ask where on her body they found the note.
“Are you going to call him?” I asked.
“Yes,” Curran said. “Suggestions?”
“He loses his temper when things slip from his control,” I said. “And he thinks with his dick.” It wasn’t much.
Curran picked up the speakerphone and dialed the number. The long tone sounded through the room once, twice. A click announced that the phone was picked up and Bono’s voice said, “I see you’ve got my message.”
“I got
it,” Curran said.
“Did you kill the little girl, cat? Is she lying on the floor someplace? Are you looking at her now, wondering if she would’ve been good to fuck? I can help you with that. She was sweet, clumsy and dumb, but sweet. A bit dry too, but she bled a lot, so that evened things out.”
Curran’s face was relaxed, almost tranquil.
“Is your girlfriend there with you?” Bono asked. He was babbling, excited, as if high on something. “The tall, dark-haired one with sharp eyes? I looked for her, but she was gone, so I took the human blonde you had before her. I’m going to have her for lunch tomorrow. The trick with fresh meat is to soften it someplace warm. But then you eat your meat raw, so educating you on subtleties of cooking is a waste of time. My children are getting your girl ready to fillet. Would you like to hear her scream?”
There was a sound of a door swinging open and a woman’s voice cut through. “Please no,” she begged in sheer panic. “Please, please, please . . .” Me. It should’ve been me. There was nothing I could do but listen.
Curran’s face was still calm. He picked up a chair and bent its metal legs into twisted curves.
Suddenly the woman choked, reaching a new intensity of terror, and broke into sobs, loud, heart-wrenching cries. Her desperation filled the room. She had no hope. She knew she was dying and she knew that there would be no escape. She screamed sharply once, twice, and fell silent.
Bono’s voice snarled, “Idiot!” and Arag’s unforgettable, inhuman whimper emanated from the phone.
“He punctured an artery,” Bono’s voice returned. “It’s so simple—cut the stomach and pull out the intestines, but no, he manages to get his claws into an artery. Now I’ll need to wash the innards. I’ll have to kill him after all.”
The whimpering receded, moving farther from the phone. “So tell me,” Bono said, “did she sound like that when you fucked her? She wouldn’t scream for me, she only sobbed. A real disappointment, that one. Are you there, half-breed?”
“I’m here. And I too have something for you to hear. Say hello, Kate.”
“Hello,” I said.
There was silence on the phone. “It’s not her,” Bono said. “She’s still in her house.”
“How’s the neck?” I asked. “Still spitting up glass?”
“She is here,” Curran said. “With me. Tonight, while you’re waiting for your corpse to get soft, think of me and her. Think of her begging me for it.”
“I’ll get her in the end.” Bono voice was taut with strain.
Curran made a loud sigh. “What is it about you and my sloppy seconds?”
Bono slammed the phone. I turned and left the room.
I WANDERED THE HALLWAYS UNTIL I FOUND THE room where the Crusader and I almost had our little show-down. Nick was gone. I hoped he had enough sense to stay in the compound. Pissing Curran off right now was pure suicide.
I closed the door and went to the window. It was raining. The gray sky spewed gray water onto the dull grass far below. The grayness from the outside seeped into the room, leeching the color from the sparse furnishing. The rain would end eventually, leaving the grass and the trees brilliant green, vivid with fresh color. Strange how something so colorless and drab could rejuvenate the world.
There was a pair of gray sweats and nothing else in the small dresser by the bed. I placed Slayer and its sheath onto a Spartan blue blanket, stripped, and put on the sweats. I started slow, stretching, jumping an invisible rope, until warmth spread through my muscles. I cracked my neck and attacked the punching bag.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Sweat drenched my sweatshirt and the T-shirt under it, and the fabric stuck to my back. Sometime after my legs began to hurt, I heard a knock. My brain brushed the sound aside. I launched another kick, connected with a solid thump, launched another before my mind put on the brakes. “Come in.”
Curran stepped into the room and closed the door. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stretched. He sat down on a chair, hands resting on his knees, looking at the floor, and waited for me to finish.
“He called back,” he said when I was done.
“What did he say?”
“He raved for a while. Promised to kill me. He won’t attack Keep.”
“You expected him to?”
“No. I hoped.”
I sat on the bed. It wouldn’t play out the way we hoped it would. Bono refused to be provoked into something rash, where numbers would be on the Pack’s side. In this new age, combat between individuals decided the fate of many.
Bono would challenge Curran. It was inevitable. Curran had threatened his masculinity; he had made it personal, and when the challenge came, Curran would have to accept it. He was the Pack leader, the alpha male who didn’t have the luxury of backing down. He would not hide in the safety of Keep, while the upir raged, murdering everyone whose death he thought likely to bring us pain.
I looked at Curran. “Your . . .” I paused searching for the right word. Girlfriend seemed inadequate, woman too impersonal. “Your lady,” I finally said. “Is she safe?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s here.”
I nodded, screams of another woman echoing in my ears. Curran looked up at me, his eyes haunted. He looked older and tired.
“It’s not that I don’t care,” he said. The screaming didn’t stop for him either.
“I know.”
“I can’t let him intimidate me.”
“I know,” I repeated quietly.
“I’m sorry,” he said and I wasn’t sure exactly what for.
He left.
I sat on the bed and thought. Everyone had a weakness. It was the law of nature that for each being there was a predator, or a disease, or a vulnerability built into their very core. The upir had to have a weakness. It wouldn’t be in any book. If that was the case, the crusader would have found it by now.
I thought about everything that had happened since Greg’s death, carefully going over events, trying to recall every detail. I thought about Bono, the places he visited, the people he might have met, the things he did.
The rain pounded harder. The sweat-drenched clothes grew cold on my back.
My room had no phone. I got up and went down the hall, trying different rooms, until I found one that did. I closed the door and dialed the number.
“Hello,” said a male voice with the smoothness of someone for whom courtesy was a part of the job description. “You have reached the People’s inner office. How may I help you?”
“I need to speak to Ghastek.”
“Mr. Ghastek is busy at the moment . . .”
“Put him on. Now.”
He didn’t like what he heard in my voice. The phone clicked and Ghastek came on the line against the background noises.
“Hello?”
I heard quiet voices discussing something. He wasn’t alone.
“You had to know,” I said. “He was your journeyman for two years.”
“I fail to understand . . .”
“Don’t,” I snarled.
There was so much fury in my voice that he fell silent.
“Tell me, Ghastek. Tell me what you know.”
“No,” he said.
I closed my eyes and tried to think clearly. I could go down there and slaughter everything in my way. I had a lot of frustration to vent. By the time they pulled me down, the People’s stable would be awash in blood. I could do that. I wanted to do it very much, but then it wouldn’t solve my bigger problem.
“He will come back for you,” I told him. “He loathes you. He’s committed now and after he kills everyone he hates, he’ll find you and you’ll be raising vampires for him and his brood. You’ll be his short-order cook.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Ghastek whispered fiercely.
“Then tell me what you know. Tell me!”
Silence answered me. A moment passed, then another.
“I have nothing to tell you,” Ghastek said and the line wen
t dead. I fought the urge to hurl the phone against the wall.
“Asking the People for information is both futile and stupid,” said Nick behind me. “They wouldn’t sell you a spare umbrella in a shit storm.”
I turned. Nick’s hair, pulled back from his face into a ponytail, looked two shades lighter. The stubble had vanished, leaving a hard but pleasant, open face. He crossed the room, moving like a mature martial artist, fully confident in his skill and no longer competing to prove himself, but still too young and too fit to grow a sensei paunch. I could tell he was both quick and trained, armed with a muscle memory that would allow him to counter a kick or a punch without pause or thought.
He stopped a respectable distance away, and I realized he smelled like Irish Spring soap. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the same man and then our gazes met. The familiar urge to step back flooded me.
“Why, you’re adorable,” I said, trying not to break into a nervous laugh. “All that you need is one of those little earrings in one ear.”
He gave me his hard stare.
“I’m just curious,” I said. “When you do that to people, do they usually start to shake and fall to the ground quivering with fear?”
“They usually just die surprised,” he said.
“Must not have worked on the upir then.”
He swung a large knapsack over his shoulder.
“Going somewhere?” I wondered, sitting down on the bed. My reaction time was probably close to his, and there was enough distance between us. If he tried anything, I had time to evade.
“Yes.”
“And how are you planning on getting past the Pack sentries?”
“I’m planning on you getting me out,” he said. “They took away my wolfsbane, but I know you have some.”
I rubbed my face with my hands. I did have wolfsbane—I would have been an idiot to venture within the Pack’s territory and not bring any. And I was probably better at using it, too. “Why would I help you escape? Do you have any idea how pissed Curran will be? I might as well slit my wrists now.”
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