(Well, ‘stood out’ was perhaps a generous phrase, considering the lack of much of anything still standing. It was not an especially cheering thought, and Siobhan did her best to brush it aside.)
She stared down at the shooting star for a moment before she tucked it into her pocket. She wasn’t even sure why she was holding onto it. She didn’t know the child it had belonged to. But if that child was never going to get to see outside the city, then Siobhan supposed that at least some part of them should get to.
*
Siobhan jumped down from yet another mound of debris, though as she landed on the asphalt below, she tripped over the crumbled fender of a car and crashed face first into Allambee’s chest. On the one hand, she was glad he had caught her. On the other hand, crashing into any of the Vampire Lords, even the most jovial and bombastic of them, was not something Siobhan generally wanted to do.
She blinked up at him for a moment before she quickly disentangled herself from him and backpedaled, only for him to have to catch her by the elbow when she nearly tripped over the same fender again.
“Graceful,” he acknowledged pleasantly.
Allambee wasn’t an especially large man (nor was he small by any means, though), but he generally seemed to fill whatever area he was in regardless of his actual size and the size of the space.
Siobhan and Jack had woken the Aboriginal man up in Australia some weeks back, and he had been the only Lord to give them a more or less friendly greeting upon being awoken. He had square-ish features and dark skin, a bit like cinnamon. His hair was black and generally unruly, as if he had simply decided ‘too long’ at some point and had given himself an impromptu haircut with a knife. (Thinking about it, Siobhan supposed it was not an entirely improbably idea.) His eyes were dark enough that they overrode the bronze entirely, and still so dark that Siobhan had never actually been able to tell what color they truly were.
She scowled at him and folded her arms. “I would’ve been fine,” she insisted, followed by a guess of, “are you checking in on me, too?”
“You and everyone else, yes,” he returned dryly. “You’re very defensive,” he pointed out. “Did you know that?”
She waved a hand at him impatiently.
Locking his hands together behind his back, he wondered, “Has it occurred to you that we’re making these rounds for our own benefits? Few of you are old enough to have met a previous reigning Lord. Even those of you who are old enough did not actually do so, generally by virtue of living on a different landmass, or at least on the opposite end of a landmass. We’re meeting our people. It’s hardly an insult.”
Siobhan fell silent, blinking at him. That…probably should have occurred to her. It wasn’t like it was a completely outrageous idea. She just didn’t expect that sort of rationale to come out of the Vampire Lords.
“I’ll remind you,” Allambee added, sounding amused, “that we, too, were as human as you once were, albeit far, far longer ago than you were.” He tipped his head to one side, his expression turning overly earnest and expectant. “With that hiccup out of the way, since I am checking in, are you holding up?”
Siobhan sighed and let her head thump down into her hands. “I’m holding up just fine,” she confirmed. “Or at least as just fine as can be expected. Thank you for asking.” She peered through her fingers in time to see Allambee offer a cheerful, beaming grin.
“Wonderful to hear,” he confirmed.
“Has anyone else bowed out to the city limits?” she wondered, standing up on her toes and peering into the distance, though she could see nothing through the dust in the air and the skeletons of toppled buildings.
“Only a couple,” he returned. “You’re a remarkably resilient bunch,” he added, with something like pleasant admiration in his tone. “Even if you all seem to be taking the deaths of strangers very personally.”
Siobhan thought of the shooting star in her pocket, but the only answer she offered was a shrug. “We’re a very empathetic bunch of misfits,” she offered blandly, her hands settling on her hips.
Allambee snorted out a wry laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind in the future,” he returned dryly before he turned and began to make his way down the street. Lifting a hand to wave, he added, “Holler if you need something. I imagine someone will hear you.”
*
Barton was barking in the distance, but Siobhan couldn’t bring herself to be concerned with it. It had been…a day. The night was barely half over, and it had already been going on for too long, with rubble and bodies in every direction. She doubted most of the victims had done anything warranting so much as a parking ticket, and yet they had been struck dead for the sin of existing.
On top of that, it felt like the air was buzzing, as if she was waiting for something to happen but she herself hadn’t even realized what yet. She wondered glumly what else Chambersburg might have in store for her, before she buried the thought again. She could feel bad about everything later, once they were all back at the manor. Until then, moping and self-pity were for the weak.
She dragged a hand through her hair, shaking a few larger chunks of concrete loose and listening as they tumbled down from her current perch, clinking against metal and concrete as they went.
She wanted a bath. And some ice cream. And some O-. And a nap. They didn’t even need to be in that order. But she shook her head quickly. Moping and self-pity were for the weak, after all. She didn’t have time for that. Especially not when Barton was still barking somewhere on the opposite side of what had once been a strip mall. Siobhan supposed she should go check on him, and she knew that later she would feel bad for ignoring him, but she was thirty feet in the air, staring downward at what seemed to be an endless expanse of death and wreckage. Her dog’s tantrum didn’t seem like the most important thing in the world just then as her gaze scanned slowly across the ground.
Siobhan couldn’t even bring herself to be surprised when she spotted Regina on the ground below her. It was a bit strange seeing her so dressed down, though, her mass of pin straight black hair out of its usual complicated twist of braids and instead simply gathered back into a ponytail and her shirt and trousers covered in a fine coat of dust. Her skin was a sunless shade of acorn brown, and her eyes were blue beneath the bronze.
“Checking in?” Siobhan guessed, hopping down from the bared girder she was climbing on. It offered her a decent view, true enough, but her view didn’t actually offer her much else to see.
Siobhan was too tired for the words to be sarcastic, so they mostly came out sounding mildly inquisitive, though she suspected she knew the answer already.
“That was the idea,” Regina confirmed, “but it seems I have a new purpose.” She lifted a hand, pointing skyward.
Slowly, Siobhan turned, tipping her head back and staring upward.
Above the wreckage, hovering placidly, an archangel stared down at the rubble and the vampires scattered throughout. Every so often, his four gleaming wings fluttered, keeping him aloft.
“We have company,” Siobhan observed after a moment.
“Indeed.” Regina’s voice was mild. Archangels, though, were nothing that they had not handled before. “A scout, I suspect. Come to see just how many vampires are gathered here and to assess what we’re doing.”
Slowly, Siobhan asked, “What are we doing about him?”
“Well, Harendra and Allambee were simply going to rip his arms off and let Dask’iya burn whatever remained of him, but Osamu and I had an idea,” Regina answered, lifting a hand to beckon Jack closer once she spotted him. He loped over, closing the distance in a flash. While a regular vampire could not compare to the speed of a Vampire Lord, it was still nothing to sneeze at.
“Osamu will jump up and grab him,” Regina informed them, “and then you two, Alistair, and Myrtle are going to fight him to a standstill and restrain him. And we are going to bring him back to the manor.”
“Wait, we’re what?” Jack squawked before he could contain himself.
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“We are in over our heads, Jack,” Regina stated blandly. “If we are going to find out how to stop this,” she threw her arms out to the sides, gesturing to the entirety of what was once Chambersburg, “then we need someone with inside knowledge. We need to figure out whatever we can from him.”
Jack’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment as he tried to come up with some sort of argument, but in the end, he had none. They were in over their heads. True, the Vampire Lords had killed two seraphim in the recent past, but it had taken all five of them to do so, and they had no idea how many seraphim it had taken to raze the whole of Chambersburg to the ground.
Grumbling sullenly, he folded his arms and nodded. “Alright,” he huffed.
Siobhan reached out, linking her fingers with his. “We’ll go meet up with Alistair and Myrtle,” she offered, giving Jack’s hand a tug to lead him away. She didn’t bother to ask if there would be a signal. It was pretty hard to miss when a Vampire Lord decided to jump that high straight up; they would see when it happened, and they would definitely notice the impact of the landing afterward.
Jack fell into step beside her as Regina waved them off, and they loped into the wreckage.
They found Alistair and Myrtle waiting on a reasonably clear patch of cracked asphalt, Barton still barking at the sky a few yards off.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Alistair offered cheerfully, his boyish grin in place. “Didn’t you guys take out an archangel all on your own?”
“Twice, actually,” Siobhan corrected, settling her hands on her hips. “There was that one in Australia.”
“Now you’re just bragging,” Myrtle sighed, though she didn’t sound truly annoyed.
Of the myriad of vampires that had been at the manor of late, Alistair and Myrtle were two of the only ones who lived there full time, along with Jack and Regina, and now Siobhan.
Alistair, Siobhan was pretty sure, had not been any older than seventeen when he had been turned. He hadn’t quite grown out of his baby-faced stage, his features still soft and boyish. His eyes were bright blue in the right light, though it was largely hidden by the sheen of bronze, and his hair was a mop of strawberry blond that usually looked as if he had been standing in front of an industrial fan for a few minutes too long. He was pale and spattered with freckles, lean and lanky, and he still had the slightly stretched look of a boy still growing.
Myrtle, conversely, was a reasonably short woman, presumably somewhere in her thirties when she’d been turned, though Siobhan had yet to actually get that information out of her. Her hair was a frizzing, dark brown mass piled on top of her head with too many bobby pins to imagine, her skin had an oaky undertone to it, though she was just as sun-deprived as every other vampire, and her eyes were such a dark shade of brown they nearly overpowered the bronze glaze. Though she was short, her shoulders and her hips were broad enough that she still couldn’t quite be described as petite.
They were a pleasant enough duo on the whole. Siobhan was fairly sure they handled most of the daily upkeep of the manor when they weren’t preparing to wrangle an angel or hopelessly looking for nonexistent survivors in a wasted hellscape.
Osamu strolled past them casually, and all four of them tensed, readying themselves for whatever would happen. Siobhan clicked her tongue and patted her thigh, and Barton slunk back to her side, his hackles still raised and his ears still folded back against his head, even if he was finally silent.
Quickly, Osamu scaled his way up the swaying remains of a building, climbing the metal with ease. When he made it to the highest point, he jumped.
The archangel braced for the impact, two wings spreading behind him and the other two folding around him like an improvised shield, but a single archangel against a Vampire Lord—even a Vampire Lord who didn’t intend to cause any fatal damage—was almost laughable.
Osamu seized him by one pair of wings, and the archangel had no choice but to plummet along with him back to the ground. The ground rattled with the impact, cement and asphalt skittering across the ground. Quickly, Osamu pried the archangel’s shielding wings away from him and backhanded him once across the face, just to stun him for a moment as Siobhan and the other three closed in.
Osamu vaulted away, abandoning the archangel to the four garden-variety vampires in a hurry. If they wanted to bring the archangel back to the manor in one functional piece, then a Vampire Lord accidentally killing him would be rather the opposite of productive.
It didn’t take long before the archangel was on his feet, but Siobhan and Jack were already upon him, both of them seizing a wing. Alistair was next, latching onto a third wing, which left Myrtle to latch both hands around the archangel’s neck. His throat bobbed beneath her fingers as he swallowed.
“You’re coming with us,” Myrtle informed him pleasantly. “You can try to fight, but you’ll lose body parts, and we’ll make sure you’re missing a lot of them before you die. You can try to get away, but there are twenty-six vampires and five Vampire Lords in the city right now. You won’t make it. Which brings us back to you being rendered into small pieces very slowly.”
Slowly, as the archangel looked around to see more vampires slowly gathering, approaching through the wreckage, the fight went out of him. His wings went lax, his arms fell to his sides, and he swallowed beneath Myrtle’s grip.
“Well,” he began in a voice like velvet over oiled glass, “since I’m being given so many options, I suppose I would be honored to go with you.”
Great. Just what Siobhan needed in her life. Another wise guy. Why did everyone have to think they were funny?
CHAPTER TWO
They locked the archangel in an empty storage room in the manor, where he knew that he was surrounded and that if he tried to escape, the odds of him actually managing it would be next to zero. Where he knew that his options were ‘stay’ or ‘die.’ Angels seemed no more keen on dying than anyone else Siobhan had met.
For a couple days, she saw nothing of him. She asked Jack, but he simply shrugged broadly and admitted, with some slightly hurt confusion, “Regina isn’t telling me what’s going on.”
So, on the third day, Siobhan decided to pay him a visit on her own, urged on by the same curiosity that had compelled her to track comets across the sky. She wasn’t sure why, but she made sure she had the shooting star from the mobile in her pocket. A good luck charm, she supposed. It couldn’t hurt, at any rate.
Saying that the archangel was “locked” in the storage room was entirely metaphorical. Locks were of a little use when even a garden-variety vampire could simply break a door off of its hinges. Their guest likely could have flown straight up through the ceiling, unimpeded, save for the knowledge that he would be dead shortly after doing so.
So it was a simple matter for Siobhan to just open the door to the storage room and step inside.
The archangel sat in the middle of the floor, his legs crossed beneath him and all four of his mercury black wings folded tightly to his back so they would fit in the confined room. His eyes were closed and his hands rested lightly his knees, and Siobhan couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or meditating. Truth be told, she wasn’t even sure if angels needed to sleep.
He had skin like coffee a bit too heavy on the cream, and his hair was an odd slightly metallic brown. It was braided away from his face and pulled back into a tail, though she guessed it would come about to his shoulders. He was wearing armor made out of a material that Siobhan couldn’t recognize, black and slick and caught somewhere between metal and fabric, formed to his body like a second skin.
He was broad across the shoulders, with a trim waist, and even sitting down, Siobhan could tell he would tower over her. His features were…pretty. It was the only word she could think of to describe them. Angular and sharp, with a straight nose and a stern brow. She might have even called him gorgeous, save for the fact that he was too symmetrical and too calculated, perfect to the point of uneasiness. What should have been beautiful was instead eerie.
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br /> Slowly, his eyes opened as he looked up at her, his glowing violet eyes boring into her.
“You are different from the last few of your kind who have spoken with me,” he observed quietly. “You are…lesser.”
Siobhan rolled her eyes. “You’re great at making a first impression,” she drawled blandly.
“Is that something I should care about here?” he asked pointedly. “Will that help my odds of eventually getting out?”
“It won’t hurt them,” she returned, her voice sugary sweet.
With a sigh, he rolled his eyes. At least, Siobhan was pretty sure he rolled his eyes. It was a bit hard to tell, what with the glowing. He seemed remarkably human, all things considered. She wasn’t sure how he managed to justify killing anyone—let alone an entire city—when he didn’t seem appreciably different from the people who had been living in the city.
“Is this a new method to get information from me?” he wondered blandly. “Rather than threatening to remove pieces of me, you will simply irritate me into compliance?”
The Vampire's Bond 2 (The Bonded Series) Page 2
