All Hallows Night (Night Series)

by Hall, Marie

  I swallowed hard because that one still made me want to curl into a ball and cry.

  “Pandora!” Grace’s shrill voice sliced through my thoughts. She walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her, and opened her frail-looking arms to me.

  Once, I would have run to her. Hugged her with every ounce of love left in me. There used to be a time when I’d thought myself more human than demon, because of her. Because of the lies she’d spoon-fed me and made me believe.

  But I knew the opposite to be true now. I wasn’t human. Not really. I never would be. She’d played me for a fool, and all I wanted to do was shove my claws through her chest and rip her heart out. Make her hurt in the same way she’d hurt me.

  Lucky for her, Billy had gotten to me first. Made me see I needed to focus and put petty things like revenge off, at least for a while.

  Plastering a smile on my face, I stood. “Grace.” I forced warmth into her name and walked to her side, where I grabbed a hold of her elbow and helped guide her to the chair I’d been previously occupying. “It’s so good to see you.” I smiled.

  Why hadn’t I noticed the shifty look in her pale blue eyes before? Or the way her pulse increased by a notch, booming like a bullet’s ricochet in my ears?

  But even as I asked it, I knew the answer. I’d seen it happen in a million different ways in a million different people. Because when you wanted to believe something, you would. I wasn’t fooled anymore, though I wondered what she would think if she realized the shoe was now on the other foot?

  How she must have mocked me to my back, thought me a stupid idiot. I’d heard her tape recording—it’d been sent to me by the Gray Man—her laughing into the line, calling me a fool desperate to believe she actually loved me.

  I smiled wider, exposing the full length of my fangs, and experienced a cheap thrill when her eyes widened slightly.

  “Always good to see you,” I said, acting the part of the loving adopted daughter I’d once foolishly thought I was. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was scouting the village and heard rumors that I was trying to follow up on, lost track of time.”

  Grace cleared her throat and sat. Her smile wasn’t as wide as I usually remembered it. Her skin was definitely more yellow-looking. An obvious sign of a failing liver. Grace was old and would probably die of natural causes soon. But only if I let her. I hadn’t decided yet.

  She lifted a hand. “Much better furnishings this time, no?”

  She referred, of course, to her previous digs. The place Mary had decorated. It’d been a hideous amalgam of Christmas and gaudy Liberace rolled into one. This small adobe structure wasn’t much to look at on the outside, but inside it was clean. The floors were a sandy-hued tile, the walls stucco, and there were exposed wooden planks in the ceiling. Traditional woven tapestries decorated the walls in a colorful burst of pinks, teals and oranges, and extremely fat beeswax candles lit the sparsely decorated room. There was just the couch I sat on, the leather chair Grace sat on, and one floor rug.

  “Better,” I agreed. I’d always been of the less-is-more variety.

  “Aye.” She nodded, but I sensed she wasn’t altogether here. She was more distracted than normal, and I’m sure I knew why.

  I wasn’t supposed to have survived my night in Hell. And I probably wouldn’t have if Billy hadn’t been there. I saw that night so differently now, when at the time I’d been confused as to whether he meant to kill me himself or rescue me.

  The last place in the world I wanted to be was here now. I wanted to talk to Billy, wanted to figure this impossible situation out, which meant I had to be perfect.

  “Grace, you’re distracted.” I smiled sympathetically. “What’s the matter?”

  Her eyes jerked back to my face and she shook her head. “You always were good at reading me.”

  I shrugged and wondered if she knew that the night I’d returned from Hell I’d hovered over her bed with a knife in my hand, ready to slit her from neck to sternum. “You’re like the mom I never had, Grace. I just worry about you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Sooo...,” I drawled when another ten minutes passed. What was up with Grace? She was definitely not on it tonight; it had to be more than just the fact that I’d survived her betrayal. No, she was definitely off her game. “Where’s you’re assistant? Shouldn’t she be bringing my files? You told us to come to Mexico. Something to do with zombies, right?”

  Jerking as if she’d been slapped, Grace rubbed her forehead with the back of her liver-spotted hand. “I gave Lupe the night off. But you’re right.” She nodded. “I am distracted and not just about the case.”

  Feigning interest, my brows twitched. “Oh? What’s the matter?”

  Her smile was weak, never reaching her eyes. “Just a phone call I got before you arrived.” She swished her hand.

  When you live as long as I have, you come to learn tells pretty well. Most of them, believe it or not, are fairly universal across distance and language barriers. Grimaces for bad smells. Eyes widening for a lie. Swallowing compulsively from nerves.

  She was moistening her lips and swallowing hard. An obvious sign that she was nervous about something. Very nervous.

  I can’t deny that got my curiosity burning. Very few things had ever made Grace this way. She was the quintessential example of cool under fire.

  “My documents are over there.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the pitifully tiny kitchen counter. “Next to the hot plate. Can you grab them?”

  I quickly retrieved the papers and started thumbing through them. Same routine as all the other times before. “So what’s up, Grace?”

  “Zombie hive has activated for some reason. We’ve kept an eye on this part of the region for a while, suspecting that perhaps the hive might be planning something.”

  You might hear hive and feel a little confused. Point in fact, zombies are not the mindless killers books have made them out to be. They do have a pack mentality, but they only attack when ordered by their creator or, as they refer to her, their queen. Of all the paranormal baddies in the world, zombies were pretty all right by me. They liked to eat brains and mostly kept to themselves. But if you didn’t bother them, they usually wouldn’t bother you. Unless of course you were dinner and well... then all bets were off.

  But knowing that, I couldn’t help but think of the conversation I’d heard back in the bar. True, zombies ate humans for food, and yes there was a hallmark to their style of killing but I only knew that when I happened to interrupt one in the middle of feeding, which wasn’t often. Like I said, they’re not the murderous band of killers movies have depicted them to be. But uninterrupted they didn’t usually go around leaving disfigured corpses in their wake. If they were gonna eat ya, trust me, there’d be nothing left. Sort of like lions in the wild, they didn’t kill for fun.

  I flipped through the pictures of bodies, most of them with limbs missing and heads cracked open, brains oozing out of them, reminding me a little of a mealy watermelon, except more putrid-looking.

  I’d seen worse.

  Lifting a brow, I flipped to a particularly gruesome image of a desiccated corpse, maybe in his fifties. I had to judge that strictly off the liver marks on his hands. His head was gone—there was only a neck, a torso, two arms, and one leg. None of it attached, however. The rib cavity had been cracked open and two of the ribs had clearly been gnawed on.

  “Lovely.” I slipped the picture back into the folder. “They’re getting a little sloppy though, aren’t they? Not usually their style.”

  “Mm.” Grace nodded and smoothed her silvery-white flyaways.

  She obviously wasn’t in the mood to make small talk, and honestly, neither was I. This was straining the limits of my patience. “Orders?”

  Shaking her head, her gaze turned back to me. What was making her so damned distracted? Stretching my senses, I listened for the not so obvious. Last time I’d been to one of Grace’s safe houses, I’d failed to note the portal to Hell she k
ept hidden in her bedroom. Clues like that would have spared Kemen his life, would have made me realize who my true enemy was.

  I wasn’t making that same mistake again.

  It was a common misconception that the entrance to Hell was coated in fire. Not true. Hell was cold. Bitterly, brutally cold. The type of cold that sank into your lungs like a parasite and froze you from the inside out.

  I’d experienced that type of cold only once in my life, but ever since Pestilence infected me, my body was acting weird. Because the next time I’d come across the portal, I’d felt nothing. Not a buzz or flicker of awareness. That same nothing was what I was feeling now. I got the feeling that I could no longer sense it because Pestilence had been a full-blooded lower-caste demon who wouldn’t register Hell as anything other than home, permanently nullifying my ability to feel for it.

  Jutting my jaw, I realized I should have asked Luc to attach the infrared. We’d discovered that pure-blooded demons—Lower Caste and High Caste, or LCDs and HCDs—and the Nephilim transmitted color on a different spectrum and that tiny black box had also picked up an anomalous marker when I’d walked into Grace’s home. In hindsight we figured out that what it had actually picked up was the gateway.

  If I hadn’t been so freaking determined to get away from Luc this afternoon, I might have thought this through sooner rather than later.

  “Aye.” She nodded and then shook herself like a dog coming back to its senses. “The zombies. Hives rarely stay put in any one place too long, it’s how they have successfully managed to remain hidden in big towns. But the circumference of their movements has been fairly consistent. The very final picture is an aerial shot of the Sierra Madre range.”

  Yanking the picture out, I studied the overhead and widespread shot of rugged peaks and winding valleys dotted over with shrubs and trees.

  “They are somewhere within the red circle.” Her fingers fluttered in the direction of the picture.

  “Grace, our carnival is parked at least a day’s travel from this area.” My impatience was clearly evident.

  Her look was bland as she said, “Dora, you know Mexico like the back of your hand. It is nothing for you to work the carnival at night and search out the network of caves during the day.”

  My nostrils flared at the implication. “Alone? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  Did she think I had stupid tattooed on my head? Did she really think for a second that I would just blindly walk into another trap? Clearly Grace wasn’t as smart as I’d originally thought her to be.

  “I don’t think so,” I finished, tossing myself back and shaking my head. “I barely got out of the last assignment alive, or have you forgotten?”

  She licked her front teeth and the meaning glimmering behind her eyes was completely closed off to me. Grace was shielding herself in a way she never had before. Maybe she wasn’t naïve after all.

  I don’t know—obviously at this point I was a feather tossed about in choppy winds. Questioning everything, having no definitive answers for anything. Story of my life these last two weeks.

  “I’ve forgotten nothing,” she muttered. “Take someone with you then, anyone you trust. I don’t care, just find that hive.”

  And there was a “but” in there, I sensed it, felt the word dancing on her tongue... but it never came out, which left me feeling sort of like I was standing on tiptoe at the top of a sheer drop, a hundred miles up in the air, that sort of breathless anticipation of possibility. I shook my head.

  “That it?”

  She nodded. “For now.” Rubbing her skull, she winced and huddled so far into the recliner that she was in danger of disappearing within its overstuffed folds. Grace was a hundred pounds soaking wet, if that. And today she was looking more lethargic and just plain old and human than she normally did.

  She sighed. “Once you find them, come back to me, let me know where, and you’ll get the next set of orders.”

  “And the bodies littering the town? You telling me that has something to do with our zombies? ‘Cause last I checked, those rotten corpses weren’t exactly known for their speed. If they really are in the ranges, how are they making it all the way out here without anyone detecting them?”

  Damn, wasn’t that the crap Grace should have been thinking of already? It wasn’t passing the common-sense test. Zombies were almost indestructible, mainly because it didn’t matter what you did to their bodies, they still moved on. They didn’t need to breathe or even take a dump to survive. They were a lot like roaches that way. A nuclear holocaust would probably not be enough to snuff the bastards out.

  She cocked her head. “Dora?”

  My name was an obvious question and there was a wealth of meaning hidden in that one word. A million different questions, none of which I had answers for. Her eyes held an edge of freneticism to them. Gray, bushy brows lowered over a set of blue eyes that gleamed just as intelligently today as they had thirty years ago. Bird chest puffing in and out, Grace appeared to be struggling with something.

  Lifting a brow, I waited for her to finish her thought.

  Her smile was grim as she said, “I’m glad you’re okay. You know that, right?”

  I snorted. “Yup. Sure, I know that, Grace.” And with that lie echoing between us, I stood and slid the manila envelope behind my back so that it poked out of the top of my jeans. Patting my shirt back into place, I nodded.

  “Guess I’ll call you?”

  “Aye. Godspeed.”

  It took everything I possessed not to spit in her face, and invoking God’s name while addressing me... She was more blasphemous than I could, or would, ever be. I didn’t look back, I didn’t hug her good-bye, and if she suspected why, I really didn’t give a damn either.

  Grace’s days were numbered.

  She would die and I was the hand of judgment. Grace loved quoting her Bible verses, and as I walked out the door, I muttered one under my breath. Not just words, but a promise to myself, to her, to Kemen.

  “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

  Last Friday we’d set up the carnival. We weren’t that far outside Mexico City, fifty miles or so, which meant we had a nice, steady stream of prey not only from the local village but from the big city as well, but this crowd of about five hundred was nothing compared to the crowd we’d get on the first and second.

  In two days it’d be November. Halloween wasn’t a big deal in this part of the world, but Día de Los Muertos was. Already I’d seen about twenty banners nailed to the sides of businesses proclaiming the holiday and activities and events planned around it.

  One of them was the parade we’d been hosting every year for the past seven. This year Vyxen was in charge of ceremonies. I couldn’t wait to see what she had planned. And yes, I am being sarcastic.

  Shoving my hands into my pockets, I felt oddly hungry.

  My kind really doesn’t need to eat, at least not food, to survive. We’re each inhabited by one of the seven deadly sins. Some of us, like myself, carry around extra demons, but in order to survive, we have to frequently feed whatever major demon possesses us. In my case, Lust. Which means my form of “food” is usually sex. Without it, I grow weaker than a mortal and easy prey for any of my hundreds of enemies out there.

  So it was strange that my stomach was grumbling. I’ve gone days at a stretch without actual food before and usually only eat because I’m craving something, as opposed to feeling I might die of starvation. I’m not quite there yet, but I felt strangely compelled to get something.

  Stomach rumbling, I followed the heady scent trail of roasted meat to the nearest outdoor food vendor. A large group of guys and one girl were laughing and hanging out by the bar area, shoveling homemade tacos into their mouths. The griddle snapped with steak grease. The cook was an elderly woman flipping tortillas with one hand while stirring her meat-and-veggie concoction with the other. Her movements were brisk and efficient and she was cl
early ambidextrous.

  My mouth was literally watering, which felt good.

  I smiled because I hadn’t felt this sort of anticipation for anything in the past but sex. The novelty intrigued me.

  Holding up two fingers to the young girl standing in front of a tray of fresh lettuce, radishes, crema, and cheese, I placed my order. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, fifteen tops. Her cheeks were flushed a bright red from the heat emanating off the griddle and her liquid black hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and nodded at me, and her eyes instantly caught my attention.

  One was brown and the other green. It’s both rare and beautiful. And for a second I was so tempted to pretend I really am normal and can just enjoy tacos for dinner and not worry about freaking zombies, or prophecies, or Hell, or even that damn Billy.

  I was entranced by her speedy movements, how she shoveled a perfect scoop of meat, then slapped on my garnishes, and in probably less than a minute was sliding my plate to me. It was a Monday night—in the States she’d be at home, finishing up homework, getting ready for school the next day, or more than likely talking to her BFF on the phone and gossiping about boys.

  But things move differently here—it’s a juxtaposition I’ve always enjoyed.

  I wasn’t looking to find a “date” tonight, so I made sure to go to the farthest end of the makeshift countertop before I took a seat. The first bite was an explosion of crunchy brown steak, caramelized onions, and pungent garlic. Somewhere in there I even tasted a faint hint of chili pepper, a staple in this part of the world.

  The cook’s brow was total concentration as she flipped and stirred; her lined brown skin and arthritis-crippled fingers didn’t seem to slow her down one bit. She had the reflexes of a woman half her age, and somewhere in the middle of my maudlin thoughts I got shoved into from behind, causing the delicious meat cocooned in my tortilla wrapper to spill down the front of my white shirt.