“Nigellus is known to play the long game,” Rans said. “It comes with immortality, I suppose. But if humanity has proven anything, it’s that propaganda works. With enough time and resources, any group can be convinced to hate any other group.”
I thought of the way many of the tithelings referred to the Fae as ‘the Enemy’ rather than by their proper name. I also remembered the look of disgust on Fatima’s face as she spoke of them. The seeds of abhorrence had already been planted, and my own distaste for the Fae had kept me from seeing it clearly.
“You’re... disturbingly right about that,” I murmured.
“Once that hatred has taken root,” Rans continued, “I suppose it wouldn’t be too difficult to convince the tithelings that accepting demon-bonds so they can leave Hell is in their interest.”
I heaved a sigh. “This whole situation is messed up beyond belief. Seriously—how the fuck is this even my life now?”
The look Rans threw me was sympathetic. “I’m oddly familiar with the feeling, believe it or not.”
I could imagine that, yes, he probably was. All I’d done to attract attention from the supernatural world was to have the temerity to, y’know, be born. All Rans had done was to nearly die of the plague in a medieval village in England. He hadn’t asked for a random vampire to show up and turn him. He certainly hadn’t asked for that same vampire to abandon him immediately afterward, leaving him with no understanding of what had been done to him or what he’d become.
I silently vowed that we wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen to Guthrie.
“Get some sleep,” I told Rans. “There’s a video feed for the penthouse security system in Guthrie‘s office, right? I’ll keep an eye on it while you rest, and I’ll send that email to Vonnie while I’m at it.”
A strong hand cupped my cheek, and I bent willingly into a kiss. Despite the circumstances, I felt my eyes sliding closed as warmth spread down my spine.
“Wake me if anything happens,” he said, after pulling away with a final, soft brush of his lips against mine.
“I will,” I promised, reluctantly leaving the room. Behind me, Rans took up a position sitting next to the door with his back braced against the wall—presumably to make sure Guthrie didn’t wake unexpectedly and get past him while he was resting.
* * *
After sending my untraceable email to Vonnie and getting no immediate response, I spent the day making sure that no Fae were about to sneak past the building’s security measures and pop up to the penthouse unexpectedly. I also ate Guthrie’s food, feeling guilty at first about being such a horrible houseguest, only to feel even worse when it occurred to me that Guthrie would never again have any use for human food.
I cleaned myself up as best I could without leaving my self-imposed security detail for any significant length of time, ducking back to the office to check on things between shampooing my hair and shaving my legs. There was nothing to be done right now about my current tragic case of the Wal-Marts. Rans and I had come here with nothing more than the clothes on our backs. He’d managed to scrounge something fresh to wear from Guthrie’s closets, but in my case, ‘the clothes on my back’ meant borrowed sandals from Hell, a pair of wrinkled sleep shorts, and the shirt Rans had handed me after I’d lost mine in the California foothills.
The hours dragged by. I checked on the two vampires in the bedroom intermittently, but they were both sleeping like the dead. Or rather, like the undead. One would think I’d be used to the ‘no breathing’ thing by now, but nope—it still took me by surprise every time.
Finally, around mid-afternoon, I heard the sound of movement from the master bedroom and cautiously went to see what was going on. Rans was standing in the doorway, one arm outstretched behind him in a silent warning to stay back. I came close enough to get a glimpse past his shoulder, and found Guthrie sitting up in bed with a hand clamped to his temples as though to combat a headache.
His fingers fell away as he became aware of our presence by the door. Guthrie’s eyes skated past Rans to fall on me, and they were glowing with an amethyst inner light.
The part of me that had evolved from ancient proto-humans living in a world of saber-toothed tigers and cave bears wanted to shrink back, seeking invisibility when faced with a dangerous predator that had just centered me in its sights. In front of me, Rans seemed to grow in stature, his aura crackling around him like a warning.
“Are you back with us yet, mate?” Rans asked, his tone level but unyielding. “Or do you and I need to go another round before I get you a fresh blood bag out of the cooler?”
Guthrie blinked. A dazed, unfocused look slid across his pleasant features... but at least that meant those disconcerting eyes were no longer pinned on me.
“Rans?” Guthrie rasped. “What—”
His voice cracked on the word, and he doubled over, one hand clutching at his chest and the other at his stomach. I drew in a worried breath and started forward without thinking, but stopped short at Rans’ sharp gesture.
“Not yet, love,” he said grimly. “Stay outside for a few minutes. I’ll call you in when it’s safe.”
“All right,” I whispered, and stayed where I was as Rans closed the door, cutting me off from the room.
At least this time, there was no screaming. Combined with the spark of recognition he’d shown, I took that to mean Guthrie was no longer out of his mind with bloodlust—but that parading a warm-blooded snack around in front of him before he’d had a blood bag or two to take the edge off would still be a bad plan.
As he’d promised, a few minutes later Rans opened the door and tipped his chin, indicating I should enter. The bed was empty; it took me a few seconds to notice Guthrie jammed into the far corner of the room with his knees drawn up against his chest. There was blood staining his t-shirt; I tried to ignore it.
“Guthrie?” I asked softly.
Guthrie’s eyes had returned to their normal deep brown, and the grayish cast beneath his complexion had lessened. Even so, his expression held the distant, shell-shocked air you sometimes saw in news reports about people trapped in war zones or the aftermath of a natural disaster. I wasn’t at all sure he’d even registered me speaking to him.
His mouth worked for a moment before words emerged.
“Wh-what’s wrong with me?” He frowned, looking around the bedroom as though he’d never seen it before.
His nostrils flared, scenting the air, and his attention landed on me again. His eyes lit up, but this time the violet glow receded almost instantly. I stood my ground, trying to look more like a person and less like something that might be fun to eat... none of which meant that I wasn’t poised to high-tail it out of there if he came at me. I might be getting better at the whole ‘self-defense’ thing, but I also wasn’t an idiot.
Rans crossed the room and lowered himself smoothly into a crouch in front of Guthrie’s huddled form, just out of arm’s reach.
“What’s the last thing you remember, mate?” he asked. “Take your time. Think about it a bit.”
Guthrie still looked lost, like someone who’d been plucked from the Earth’s surface and deposited on an alien planet with no explanation. I could sympathize... at this point, I was growing way too familiar with that feeling. His eyes darted from side to side as he searched his memory, becoming visibly more upset as his brain refused to cough up the relevant information.
“I don’t...” He trailed off. “What day is it?”
I opened my mouth to reply, only to discover to my consternation that I had no fucking clue what day it was. Talk about the blind leading the blind.
“Thursday,” Rans offered. “I’ve never been a fan of those, really.”
Guthrie’s gaze zeroed in on him. “But that... that... can’t be right...”
His nostrils flared again, and he looked down at the red stains on his shirt. An expression midway between fascination and disgust sculled across his face.
Rans sighed, resting his elbows loosely on his
knees and clasping his hands together in front of him. “Guthrie, mate. Your old demon buddy finally decided to collect on your soul debt via the medium of a fatal heart attack. Very nasty... but also a slow enough option that Zorah and I were able to get here before you slipped away from us completely. I brought you over as a vampire to keep you from dying. I’d apologize, but the truth is I’d do it again under the same circumstances, so there’s not really much point.”
I watched as various emotions registered across Guthrie’s expression. Disbelief, anger, fear, bitterness. His eyes were still fixed on the red stains on his shirt, and his hand came up to splay across his sternum. Helplessly, he looked up at Rans with an air of sudden desperation.
“Ah... yes. Quite. The thing that’s driving you insane with how wrong it feels?” Rans said. “That would be the sudden lack of a heartbeat, after a lifetime of having one. For what it’s worth, your heart was pretty well knackered after Myrial got hold of it. You’ll get used to the silence before long, if it’s any consolation.”
Guthrie’s face had taken on a definite ‘blue screen of death’ look, but he eventually managed to ask, “Myrial?”
I drew in a deep breath and straightened my shoulders, bracing to take over with the next bit of bad news. “Your demon. He probably used a different name in his dealings with you. Multiple names, in fact. Myrial visited you in a couple of different forms over the years. She... he... is an incubus. Or a succubus. They can change sex at will.”
The blue screen of death remained static; the cursor behind Guthrie’s eyes circling endlessly. And I felt like the worst kind of bitch for dumping a new atrocity on the poor guy right now.
“Go ahead, love,” Rans said, as if reading my mind. “Probably best to rip the band-aid off all at once, at this point.”
I steeled myself. “Okay, then. So... a couple of decades after Myrial bound your soul, she came back in female form and, uh, slept with you. Apparently. Then she used your stolen genetic material to impregnate my grandmother. So it turns out, you’re almost certainly my biological grandfather,” I finished weakly. “Surprise.”
The good news was, something stirred in Guthrie’s stricken expression that wasn’t blank incomprehension. The bad news was, that ‘something’ was rage. I tried very hard not to assume that his anger was directed at me, despite the twenty years of emotional and psychological fuckitude trying to convince me that it was.
Guthrie turned his focus back to Rans, rather than responding to my words directly. “He finally tried to kill me? The demon?”
Rans nodded. “And reap your soul, yes.”
The eerie inner light flared in Guthrie’s gaze. “Then you should have let me go.”
I shuddered, gripping the doorframe. “Guthrie, no. That filthy piece of Hell-trash doesn’t deserve your soul.”
A snarl twisted his lips. “It doesn’t matter if he deserves it. He still has it. At least if I’d died it would finally have been over. The two of you did this to me for nothing!”
Rans shifted forward until he was resting on one knee, the movement bringing him close enough to lift a hand and cup it around Guthrie’s nape, squeezing lightly. I hoped he wasn’t about to get it chewed off at the wrist for his trouble.
“Let’s be clear on something, old friend. Zorah didn’t do anything to you,” Rans said, not entirely truthfully. “This is all on me. If you’re going to take out your anger on someone, you’ll do it on me, and me alone.”
Guthrie glared at him, anguish warring with the rage in his expression. “Why? Goddamnit, Rans—why?”
Rans drew breath to speak, but the air remained trapped in his throat as he searched for a suitable response.
“Because I’m a selfish wanker and always have been,” he said eventually. “Because neither of us wanted to lose you.”
Guthrie just stared at him, his head moving back and forth in dazed negation. “You’re still going to lose me, you fucking idiot. He’ll reap me again as soon as he realizes what’s happened.”
“Maybe not,” I told him, hoping against hope that I was right about that. “It turns out, you’re one hell of a valuable commodity as a vampire. Pun intended.”
We quickly filled him in on Nigellus and his plot to use vampire blood to raise a new army of demon-bound undead soldiers. To his credit, while Guthrie looked dazed, he didn’t check out on us completely. When we were done, he blinked slowly at Rans, his eyes settling back to human-brown again.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I really hate your guts sometimes, you sanctimonious English bastard.”
Rans settled back on his haunches. “Don’t feel bad. I tend to get that from a lot of people.”
I huffed out a breath, trying to turn the conversation onto a more practical path. “So, anyhow—the good news is, you might not die again right away. The bad news is, at the moment, we have no plan that’s worth a shit.”
“Yes. And we’re also running low on blood bags,” Rans added.
I stared at him. “We’re what? You know, you might have mentioned that earlier!” I huffed a sigh. “Well, that’s just brilliant.”
THREE
“I’LL JUST NEED TO pop around one of the other hospitals and steal some more,” Rans said, rising from his crouch in front of Guthrie. “We should also train you to feed from a live human as soon as possible, mate.”
I drew breath to speak, but Rans jabbed a pointed finger in my direction without even looking. “Not from you,” he finished, cutting off whatever I might have been about to say.
Guthrie used his hands on the wall behind him to push himself into a standing position. He still looked shaky and shell-shocked, but his knees held and his eyes stayed their normal human color.
“Yeah, no... I get it,” I said, not arguing the point. “Guthrie, normally I’d offer. Really, I would. But I’m part succubus, and succubus blood has kind of a predictable effect on vampires.” I swallowed, trying to moisten my dry throat. “I’m also really sorry I had to dump the whole ‘biological granddad’ thing on you, and believe me—I don’t expect anything from you because of it. I mean... unless you want there to be something—”
I was babbling. I cut myself off and tried again. “Anyway... sorry. About the blood, I mean. But I don’t think either one of us want you sporting an uncontrollable grandpa-boner after drinking from me.”
Guthrie stared at me for an uncomfortable beat. “Tell you what. I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Maybe you can pretend you didn’t say it, and the two of us can just go from there?”
“Motion seconded,” Rans said.
“Good plan,” I agreed meekly.
“The sooner I go for the blood, the safer it will be for you to stay here alone with him, Zorah,” Rans stated. “You said there was a second hospital nearby, yes?”
I tried to corral my wayward thoughts. “Yeah, St. Mary’s. I’m pretty sure it’s near Forest Park, anyway.”
“Bellevue and Clayton Road,” Guthrie said quietly. “You’re seriously stealing blood bags from hospitals for me?”
Rans raised an eyebrow. “Hospitals and donation centers are about the only places where one can find blood bags in their native habitat, mate. It’s just for the first couple of days, to make sure you’re able to control yourself while we get you weaned onto something with a heartbeat.”
Guthrie leaned a little more heavily against the wall he was using to prop himself up. “Fuck.”
“At this point, it’s either undead or dead-dead, I’m afraid,” Rans said with a brief shrug.
“And I already told you which one I would have preferred,” Guthrie snapped.
I hid my flinch as best I could.
“Okay... um, Rans, you should probably go, then,” I told him. “We’ll be all right here for a bit, and then the three of us can figure out what to do next.”
A phone buzzed, cutting through the tension in the room. Rans looked down at his pocket, nonplussed, before pulling it out. He frowned at the screen and handed it ov
er to me without comment. The name Len Grayson lit up the screen above the handset icon. I swiped it to answer.
“Len?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my tone.
There was a brief pause, and then Len said, “Zorah. Hey. Look... I’m sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t have hung up on you like that, girl.”
I turned away from the others, even though with vampire hearing involved, it only granted the illusion of privacy.
“No, I understand,” I told him. “Believe me. I do.”
“Even so,” he said. “It’s just that things haven’t been... good. Since, y’know—since that night.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. I get it. And honestly, Len—I’m the one who’s sorry. You and Tris should never have been involved in that mess in the first place.”
The line went silent for a long beat.
“Len?”
A sharp exhalation. “Right. Anyway, what did you need? Are you in trouble or something?”
Guilt stabbed at me for even considering dragging him back into things, but—
“Mostly, we need a car big enough to transport several people at once. And... possibly someone to pick up some basic clothing and supplies for traveling?”
“Okay, Z. I guess I can do that. Where are you, anyway?”
“In an apartment building across from Forest Park. I can text you the address, along with the codes for the parking garage and the elevator.”
“I just got off work. Let me swing by the house and change, then I’ll come over, all right?”
“You’re the best, Len,” I told him. “Seriously. I owe you big-time.”
“I’ll be there soon, Z. Later.”
He hung up, and I handed the phone to Rans so he could text Len the location and security codes.
“Who was that?” Guthrie asked, with a small frown furrowing his brow.
“Friend of mine with a big car and a bigger heart,” I explained.
“Not to mention, very little sense of self-preservation,” Rans added absently, slipping the phone back in his pocket. “Which is helpful, since I’ve just thought of something else he might be able to help us with.”
The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set Page 71
