by Faith Hunter
“The Keeper of the Iron Spike of Golgotha can wield all power over all Mithrans, even the Sons of Darkness,” Grégoire said. It sounded like a quote from a story or a history. He adjusted his posture, standing straight, his feet flat on the floor. He no longer looked like a teenager lounging. Weapons bristled on him, blades of every shape and variety and style. He looked what he was, the best fighter in the Americas. And my Beast didn’t like the way he was looking at us. There was a challenge in his eyes. I shifted my own body, inching my palms down over the guns.
“Men,” Katie spat. She stood too, and stared back and forth between the other vamps. “No one knew for certain that Joses Bar-Judas was here until that foul creature Reach was taken,” she said. “Our enemies De Allyon, Silandre, and Lotus began this crisis, with black magic, not her.” Katie pointed at me.
“What she said,” I said. “Had any of your enemies known Joses was a prisoner, they would have brought the war here first, hoping to steal your artifacts, combine their artifacts with the Son of Darkness, and rule the world of the Mithrans. Boom. Game over, months ago.”
“But you discovered only the pocket watches, and not the spike,” Leo said. “Without it I am not enough to rule.”
It sounded oddly like an accusation, as if I hadn’t done my job. Since Leo wanted the spike, and I hadn’t found it, I actually hadn’t done my job. Go figure. I grunted, a nonspecific sound.
“It is still missing or in the hands of another,” Katie said. “If we had the spike now, we could control the Son and maintain peace. But we do not. There will be war on the shores of this land for possession of the artifacts of power, for control of Leo’s prisoner and Joses’ gift of power, and for the right to possess and to ride les arcenciels.”
“His gift of power?” Bethany had talked about the gift she had given Leo. Had Bethany broken the crystal that set the arcenciel free and brought down Joses for Leo as some sort of gift? Bethany had wanted to ride the arcenciel, maybe because she had seen it when it got free the first time. She had tried to literally ride it in the gym. It made an awful sort of sense for a crazy priestess. I doubted the vamps would tell me if I asked, so I led the way in indirectly and asked instead, “Ride?”
Grégoire said, “To encase them in crystal from the earth and use their power. It is not a difficult process. All one needs is a length of quartz crystal, enough blood, and the proper power source, such as the Spike of the Hill of the Skull. Power is what we discuss. Who has it and how we use it.”
“Sadly,” Katie said, “it is easy to free them. The slightest crack and they may escape.”
“A dangerous slave is then set free,” Grégoire said.
“Uh- huh.” Slave? Yeah. Slave. Vamps were used to keeping slaves. “Bethany has three Onorios, some humans, and a werewolf in her control, and a desire to ride the arcenciel,” I said. All the vamps turned to me. Not one of them looked human when they did it. More like statues whose heads suddenly spun on their marble necks. Even Del raised her head, with something like horror on her face. Grégoire’s voice was full of shock when he said, “My boys are—”
My earpiece squealed and I jerked. “Incoming! Incoming!”
Something shook the entire building, like a bomb going off. The air pressure changed as a concussive wave battered through. I heard screaming in my earbud and from the front entrance. A second explosion followed.
And all hell broke loose. Again.
I had made a huge mistake. Because all of Peregrinus’ humans had been drained and left dead in the basement, I assumed that he was out of blood-servants. I had expected primarily a magical attack. I got a human one.
I was rushing from the office and down the stairs, the vamps left to get downstairs on their own. “Yellowrock on the way down,” I said into my mic.
I heard automatic arms fire as I raced. Screaming and the sounds of pain and anger. Orders being given. Derek in command mode, telling men where to move and what to do. From his words it was clear that an explosive device, maybe a rocket, had taken out the front entry again, and that more than a dozen attackers were racing up the outer front stairs. Where had Peregrinus gotten more soldiers?
I reached the stairs to the foyer. Part of the wall to my right exploded outward and on through the wall to my left. I dropped and crawled to the top of the stairs. I could smell blood and feces and the stink of fired weapons. The entry was full of fighters, both vamps and humans, the unknown humans wearing jeans, hoodies, and gang tats. I stayed low, moving like Beast on all fours, analyzing the scene below. I wasn’t getting down to Eli this way. Leo, Grégoire, and Katie leaped over me, over the stair railing, and landed on the marble floor of the entryway. Like a well-seasoned team, they started to clear the floor of opposition. Katie fell in a rain of automatic weapons fire, blood blooming across her chest. Leo and Grégoire pulled her to safety behind a wall.
The vamps at this assault point were all ours. I could tell by the smell of them. They smelled of the thing in the basement. They had fed on it. Not that it would help them. The attackers were using guns and explosive devices, not fancy, outdated flat swords. Being faster than a normal vamp sword fighter was useless here. This was war as mankind had envisioned it. Nothing elegant about it. Just efficient and deadly.
If this attack was by humans only, then the attacking vamp or vamps were elsewhere. Before I headed down the stairwell I keyed my mic and said, “Eli?”
“Go ahead.”
“No enemy combatant vamps at front entrance strike. Humans only.”
“Copy that. No encom action here.”
I started to say that didn’t make sense when he barked, “Incoming!”
There was an explosion. A big one. I felt it through my knees and palms on the floor and I jerked the earbud out of my ear to save my hearing.
“Eli,” I whispered, sticking the earpiece back in.
“Position to the basement as per plan,” he ordered me.
It was where I’d still be if I hadn’t wanted to see what Leo had to say. Curiosity killed . . . not the cat . . . killed my friends? But Eli was alive. “Okay,” I said, relief surging through me as I backtracked through HQ.
“Roger, Jane. Or copy. Not okay. Never okay.”
I smiled and said, “Okay.” I thought about how I could get to the basement now. It wasn’t going to be easy, dang it, but at least we still had electricity and lights. I retraced my steps to Leo’s office and through one of the no-longer-hidden passageways and into the room that was situated over the green room, the waiting room that guests used when they came for appointments. The room I’d last eaten oatmeal in. The room that had a hidden elevator shaft behind it. I called the elevator and the door opened immediately. The cage was just that, a brass cage, tiny and swaying, with an uneven floor. Only one or two people could ride at a time, so the invaders wouldn’t split up their forces to take it. The cage wobbled as I stepped in. I pushed the cage doors shut and the outside doors closed too. There were numbers on the buttons but they didn’t correspond to anything that made sense, so I took a guess and punched the lowest button to the right.
The cage shook and dropped two feet. I stumbled and grabbed the ancient handrail to steady myself. “Going down,” I said. “Hopefully not at gravity speed.” I thought I heard Alex chortle, but someone cut off the sound.
The elevator ground its way down with no more drops. It opened on a floor I didn’t recognize, however, a musty area with no lights and a scent I remembered. I was one floor too high, on sub-four, the storage floor. And I was in a small, closed space. In the dark. I switched on my flash and saw clothes hanging in rows, circa somewhere in the early nineteen hundreds. The cloth was rotting and the clothing was falling off the padded hangers. I was in a closet. Still using the flash, I found the closet door and opened it to reveal a bedroom. No windows, lots of rotten wall hangings and wallpaper falling off the walls. It smelled of dust, dead insects
, rot, black mold, and vaguely of a vamp I recognized. Adrianna. The room’s door was locked from the outside. Had the flame-haired beauty been kept prisoner here? Or kept a prisoner here?
Fortunately it was an old, old door. I drew on a little of Beast’s power and put one hand on the jamb. With the other hand I yanked on the knob. The hinges fell off and the door broke in splinters. I leaped back as it fell inward, and then forward through the broken opening. I was in a dark hallway. The Judge in a two-hand grip, held low at my thigh, the flash Velcroed to my wristband, I opened squeaky doors to the left and right, seeing nothing new, everything old, with lots of storage rooms stacked with trunks and furniture, smelling of things that were no longer in use.
Then I opened a door that didn’t squeak. Inside, the room was clean and modern. And a security console was set there. I tapped my mic and said, “Alex. I just found the physical location of the second security console you hacked and merged. I have no idea what to do with it. But mark my location and send someone down here later to officially hard-wire it into the routine one. On the orders of the Enforcer,” I added, in case Leo got ticked off when he heard about it and wanted to tear someone a new one. He could try that on me.
“Roger that, Janie,” Alex said. “And, hey, Jane? We might have a problem. Soul and about a dozen cop cars just pulled into the open gate and up to the front door.”
“Crap,” I said into the mic. “Do not try to stop them. Repeat, do not. Get Del up there to tell her what’s going on. Let them know it’s vamp business. Maybe that will keep them in one place until the legal beagles decide how to handle the sounds of gunfire on U.S. soil.”
“Will do.”
I backed out of the secondary security room and found a branching hallway with stairs up and down. I went down, my feet against the wall where the rotten treads might still be strong enough to support my weight.
It took me less than a minute to discover that the stairway went all the way to the lowest subbasement and a small pocket door. Carefully, silently, I lifted up on the small latch and slid the door open. Beyond was complete darkness. Which I totally did not expect. My body protected behind the jamb, I used my flash to inspect the room, and it was indeed the room where Joses lived—or hung undead on the wall, a rack of bones in a man-shaped bag of worn and torn leathery skin. I moved the flash across him for a moment—making sure he was still secured there—before taking in the rest of the room.
It was vacant, smelling of blood and death. The clay floor where the dead had lain was empty, only dark stains everywhere to show the recent deaths. Again, I shined the light on the wall where the prisoner hung. He was watching me, black eyes glittering in the dark, the metal of the wall picked out by the glare of the light.
I moved the flash back and forth, taking in everything. The thing’s talons were embedded in the brick of the wall; rusted iron and tarnished silver bands held him in place, the bands running horizontally around the room, attached to vertical I beams retrofitted in the corners. The holes where his fingers were buried, deep in the brick, showed exposed copper wires. I smelled the stink of burned flesh and ozone on the air. That hadda hurt. Yeah. He was nutso. But that might explain why there were brownouts and electrical problems.
Gee DiMercy appeared in my flash, just inside the room, but hovering, a foot off the floor. I jumped back in shock, and he laughed, his voice bouncing off the walls. I wanted to hit him, but he wasn’t really there. Just a shadow of himself, spectral as any ghost. “What!” I demanded, forcing my heart rate to slow, trying to catch my breath.
“The priestess speaks lies. She is full of deceit.” And he vanished.
I brought my heart rate under control and blew out my tension. Dang Mercy Blade.
I pushed the thought of Gee DiMercy away and chose where I would wait, to the left of the elevator. I stepped through, pulling the door behind me. I shot the flash over Joses and caught him smiling. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His fangs were like a sabertooth cat, upper and lower, and his tongue was a black strip jutting between his jagged incisors. Yuckers. I flipped the light away from the prisoner and stepped into the room.
“Aaaaah.” The breath echoed, bouncing back from the walls.
I flinched and spun, shining the flash back on the prisoner.
“I am visited yet again by U’tlun’ta, warrior of The People,” he said.
That didn’t sound insane, or not the gibbering insanity of the usual rogue vamp. Not wanting to actually chat, I grunted at him.
“Do you not bow? Do you not genuflect in the presence of one worshipped as a god?”
“Shut up,” I said as I considered the elevator door. This close, I could hear the sounds of gunfire and the shrill screams of the injured. And the thump as something or someone landed on the floor of the elevator shaft. But the door didn’t open. The gunfire continued. I crossed the room.
“Release me and I shall give you a third of my kingdom.” I heard the breath grate in his lungs and realized he was about to shout.
Midstep, I pulled a silver-plated throwing knife and focused the flash on him.
“I shall—”
I threw the blade. It spun through the dark and sank into his throat. He made a soft squeaking sound and went silent. “War Women do not miss,” I whispered, only partway lying, “not with knives.” Though he wasn’t dead, not even now. A vamp that old could heal from a dose of silver. However, it did take care of the annoyance factor.
I took my place beside the elevator door and steadied Wrassler’s Judge. The kick was gonna be bad, but if I managed to blow Peregrinus’ head off before the battle started down here, it would be worth it. That was the plan. Like I’d said, it was lousy. And simple. But sometimes lousy and simple were best.
From behind me, I heard a thump and flipped off my flashlight. The pocket door slid open. Light speared the darkness. Air whooshed down and into the basement. I smelled Bethany, Onorios, and humans in need of deodorant. Great. Just what I needed. Not.
“Spread out,” Bruiser murmured softly, barely at the edge of hearing. His voice was intended for his dedicated headset, one not tied into mine. I knew that because I heard his voice through the air, not through the electronics. “Get in position. Stay well away from the man on the wall.”
“Ain’t no man, dude. Ain’t human,” a human said.
“Better reason to stay from him,” Brandon or Brian said, humor in his voice.
By sound, I knew that they took up positions. Their flashlights never caught me in the glare, allowing me to decide what I wanted to do. And I decided not to share my position with them. I didn’t know how compromised Bruiser was. Or if he was. Or . . . It was too much to think about.
Readying the heavy gun in two hands, I took a stance with one heel braced on the wall and both knees bent. I lowered the weapon and relaxed my shoulders. Keyed my mouthpiece and tapped it twice, code for I’m in position.
I turned off the mouthpiece, breathed in and out, and shrugged my shoulders. Okay, Beast. I’m gonna need some of that time thing you do, I thought at her, for as long as you can hold it. Don’t let me down, girl.
Price will be high.
Yeah. I figured. And I had hoped to never do this again. Silly me.
In the back of my mind Beast snorted and padded forward, taking up the forefront of my mind. She stared out through my eyes, which I kept turned away from the rest of the room to hide their glow. I stood in the dark, in a room with the Son of Darkness, armed Onorios, an insane outclan priestess, and humans. Stupid. Really stupid. But smart to be quiet if they were not on my side in this little battle to come.
Together, Beast and I waited.
Around the edges of the door I saw flashes of light and heard hollow booms. The door thundered, vibrations that shuddered my eardrums. Seen through the crack in the elevator opening, there was an unfinished room on the other side of the elevator shaft, some twenty-by-t
wenty feet in size. With the elevator secured at the top story of vamp HQ, there was room for close-quarters fighting beyond the doors. Very close-quarters fighting. On the other side of the closed elevator doors I heard a bellow of anger and the clash of swords.
CHAPTER 24
I Probably Shouldn’t Trust Me Either
The elevator doors blew inward, just missing me as I stepped back into the dark. It took a few long seconds to interpret what I was seeing/hearing/smelling. Leo stood in the shaft, wreathed in shadows, stinking of combat and explosive residue and his own blood. His swords were circling in La Destreza. To his right Katie fought, her swords whirling, her clothing catching the light, pulling it all to her, her grace and brilliance seeming to make the shadows darker. The two stepped toward the dungeon, toward me, feet lifting lightly, as if in a dance. But they had been injured with both swords and gunfire, numerous times, and crimson stained their clothes.
Peregrinus followed, lunging, lunging, lunging, his swords flashing. Humans took cover behind him, their guns firing at the dancing vamps. From the room where Bruiser and the others waited, shots were returned, steady, targeted shots, not random cover fire. Two of Peregrinus’ humans fell. The street gang raced behind the walls, out of sight. Their guns fell silent.
The gunfire assured me that whatever Bruiser and his boys had planned, it wasn’t to let Peregrinus win, which meant that Bethany was still on Leo’s side. That was good to know.
Katie moved out from Leo’s side as the fighting spread past my hiding place, into the room. That put her in line with Peregrinus. In my line of fire.
Peregrinus was dressed in plate metal from head to foot, looking like Iron Man, if Iron Man had worn blue armor splashed with bloody trim like macabre lace. He also wore the quartz crystal necklace, with the smoky inclusion of a dragon.
