Broken Soul: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

by Faith Hunter

  CHAPTER 23

  The Keeper of the Iron Spike

  The staff had been decreased to shooters, swordsmen, and techies. No one who could be killed easily was still in vamp HQ. Housekeeping and the culinary staff were at Grégoire’s under heavy guard, maintenance crews at skeleton levels. It was like a stripped-down Aardvark Protocol. All the blood-servants and vamps on hand were old ones—looking well fed and grim, geared up for battle. I had never seen a vamp war, but it must have been a bloody business by the number of blades the vamps carried.

  They were, to a fanghead, wearing chain-mail armor, with titanium gorgets and steel gauntlets with fingers that looked like metal roly-polies. They still moved with the graceful speed of the vamp, but now they clanked, just a bit.

  On my part, I was decked out in my best fighting gear—the fancy leathers with plastic joint protectors and lots of silver-plated titanium chain mail. My hair braided into a fighting queue, close to my skull. Tall combat boots and more blades than I usually carried. No long, flat sword. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. But the new thigh holster, yeah. And every other weapon I could think of, with the exception of my shotgun. It wasn’t helpful in close-quarters shooting when I might take out friendly forces along with the big-bad-uglies.

  The Kid and Angel Tit were rigging backup coms, the stuff we had picked up from the storage unit, all over the place, putting portable CNBs—communications nexus boxes—on every stairwell and floor. The CNB tactical radio system was designed to work in places where physical or electromagnetic interference was high. Or underground. And on battery power. We had used them before and they had worked great, but the specs were limited. They had to be aligned, pointing in proper places and directions. It took time to set up and the system was clunky. It was also easy to ruin. A swift kick to any box would stop all comms from that location. So the Kid instructed that they were all to be duct-taped to the ceilings, which was pretty smart. Eli put the humans to work with the tape and positioning new battery-powered backup lights on the floors. It was low-tech, but was also better than nothing, and not something Peregrinus was likely to be expecting, since most of it had been purchased with cash and not recorded on credit cards.

  Go, Eli and his paranoid survivalist instincts and hoarding nature. Not that I would tell him that. He’d either be insulted or arrogantly proud. Or both.

  Eli and Derek agreed on locations for shooters. It would be a pain to create such a lousy plan and then get taken out by friendly fire, when it should be much more likely to be eaten by a vamp or a rainbow dragon or drained by the Son of Darkness.

  When everything was in place, I sent Alex and the last of the maintenance staff down to double-check the generators. Eli had covered them with metal heating blankets, the kind that he had used to preserve Wrassler’s body heat. It was a long shot, but maybe the little amount of reflective material would bounce any magic EM attacks off. Since we were all trying new paraphernalia and untested theories, I taped a single obfuscation charm on top of the first generator. It might work to keep any spell from finding and stopping the generators. Who knew? But it was the only obfuscation charm I had.

  When he was finished with the generators, Alex settled in to the security console with Angel Tit. If this worked, we’d want footage of it. If it didn’t, well, maybe our survivors could learn from our stupidity. Derek and his team and four vamp fighters were stationed at the front entrance. Eli and I chose to man the back entrance under the porte cochere, and took all the new men from the swamps with us. They’d had showers, been fed, and gotten some rest. They looked a lot less scruffy, a lot more operational, and smelled a lot better. I figured Peregrinus wouldn’t use the same entrance twice and we had to make sure that he went in the right direction when he came in. So at both entrances we had positioned fighters to herd him where we wanted him.

  On the ground floor at the back, Eli put his hands and arms to work, torqueing his body to open the elevator doors. The elevator wasn’t there, just the dark shaft, which was empty all the way to the basement, filled only with a stink on the air that spoke of mold and rot. At the bottom were the doors that would open to Joses Bar-Judas’ prison. And our pitiful plan.

  Eli and his guys settled in to wait, their purpose to lead the attackers to the open shaft and down, and I got ready to carry out my part of the plan. Which was when I was summoned by His Regal Grumpiness via a text message from Del that asked me to come to Leo’s office.

  I put the cell in a pocket and looked up to see Eli watching me. “Leo.”

  “You haven’t seen him since he was bound on the floor of the catacombs.”

  “Worse. I haven’t talked to the MOC since he tried to kill me in my bathroom. And it’s a dungeon. Catacombs are long tunnels.”

  Eli smiled. It wasn’t his battle smile, which was all adrenaline and cold intent. It wasn’t the smile he used for his lady love. It was the smile he’d have worn every day had he not chosen the military for his job. Had he not seen and done things that hardened him. It was friendship.

  I shrugged. “Leo wants me in his office.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s early yet. I don’t think they’ll attack this soon after sunset. You got a cross with you?”

  “Thirteen. Even better. I have a piece of the Blood Cross.”

  “Thirteen.” His smile widened. “Lucky number. Be careful. And pick up Wrassler’s Judge on the way. He texted that he wanted you to use it today.”

  “Yeah. Okay. That’s . . .” I shook my head at the ludicrousness of what I was about to say. “That is so nice.”

  I took the stairs because the elevator shaft was open with the elevator locked on the top floor as part of my lousy plan. “Yellowrock in stairway B,” I said into my headset. “Heading up.”

  “Copy, stairway B,” Angel Tit said back.

  I increased my speed, picked up Wrassler’s weapon, and reached Leo’s office fast. I wanted to get this over with and didn’t want to be on this floor when the trouble hit. I knocked on the door, which was cracked open, and stepped inside. On the air currents I smelled Leo and Grégoire and Katie. And Del. Oh, goody. The vamp council’s top members all in one place just for me.

  Stopping at the opening to the office, I waited. The silence was disturbing on an organic, biological level. No breathing except Del’s and mine, only two hearts beating. Del sat at the desk, a legal pad before her, a pen in her hand, and was dressed in a black sword-fighting suit, her hair up in a severe bun. She didn’t look at me, which told me something, but not what. Nothing on the vamps moved except their eyes. The three studied me in my Enforcer gear as I studied them.

  Leo and Katie were sitting on wooden stools at his desk, which made sense, as they were weaponed up like the love children of samurai warriors and the Terminator, and sitting in a chair would have been impossible. Grégoire was leaning against the wall, looking lazy, or as lazy as the unbreathing undead can.

  Their battle gear was downright pretty. Grégoire’s was a dark gold leather with an overlay of bright brass-over-steel chain mail that caught the light. Leo’s was black leather overlaid with blackened titanium chain mail and the entire outfit seemed to absorb the light. They made quite a pair. Katie’s battle gear was white with steel and looked all wrong with her white skin and ash blond hair, until I saw the white hood and face plate, like a beekeeper’s hood or a fancy version of the sword-fighting gear worn in Blood Challenges. Del had guns on her. At least three that I could see from my angle. I hadn’t remembered that Del was a gun-gal.

  Since no one said anything, I decided to make offense my best . . . offense. “You didn’t call me up here to kill me, did you? Or to pay me back for staking you? Because last time I saw you upright, you were . . . rude.”

  A fleeting smile crossed Leo’s face. “You are safe. The error of my ways has been pointed out to me by my primo and lawyer, Adelaide.” A faint smile lit Del’s eyes when she glanced up at me. Her eyebrows lifted in some kind of warning before her attention dropped back to
the paper. “My Enforcer,” Leo said. “I ask that you allow me to bind you, that we might communicate in the coming battle.”

  It sounded like a formality but I wanted to make sure he knew I was serious. I pulled a silver cross out of my neckband to dangle over my gorget. It was already glowing, with such powerful vamps present, and it brightened my dark clothing. My voice had no inflection at all when I spoke. “No.”

  “Why do you stay with our master, Leo?” Grégoire asked.

  “Money. And because I’m learning stuff I need to know.” I hooked my thumbs in my utility belt and kept my knees loose, my body balanced. I looked as relaxed as he did, but I was ready to move. My hands were positioned directly over my red-handled .380s, which I’d made ready to fire as I climbed the stairs.

  “Such as?” Grégoire asked.

  When I answered, I looked at Leo, not his heir and his spare heir. “I’ve learned the reason why all the vamps have such an interest in Leo’s prime real estate. Swamps and a river and ports and jazz aren’t reason enough. The real reason isn’t even because of the world political situation. Most of the reason is because of the magical things that are missing from vamp history. For a while, the EuroVamps thought you had them and that kept you safe, as they were afraid to attack you.” I let some of my anger at him creep into my voice. “But because of what’s hanging in the basement, all that’s changed. Joses Bar-Judas. The Son of Darkness. Is. Hanging. In. Your. Basement.”

  Leo was staring at his hands, loosely clasped on the table. Katie was resting across the tabletop, her head in the crook of her arm, staring at him, her face unguarded, and at ease, almost human. Her eyes . . . soft.

  Holy crap. Katie is in love with Leo.

  Mate, Beast thought at me.

  “Yeah,” I said to all of them.

  Leo nodded once, the light catching the curve of his jaw.

  My voice hard, I went on. “When Peregrinus got Reach’s files, he got more than hints about artifacts. He found out about the SOD.” Leo nodded again. “Now? Knowing it’s down there—that he’s down there—means that they’ll start coming. It’s out—all your secrets are known now, even if only to a limited number of people. The secret is out. Soon they’ll all know.”

  “Yes,” Leo said.

  “And what will you do with Joses?”

  “Do?”

  “Yeah. Leave him on the wall, chained and starving?”

  Leo laughed, but the sound wasn’t human. It was the royal laughter of a king who was ticked off. “Shall I set him free? Joses was riding his own arcenciel, which was set free by accident in the fight to take him prisoner. The bite it gave him tore him near unto true-death and stole what remained of his humanity. He has been raving for decades.”

  “But one bit you. And Gee.” I stopped. “Oh!” The understanding hung in my mind like a single candle flame in a dark cavern. “Once you had him, you were stumped. You couldn’t set him free. You couldn’t bring him back to sanity or control him. So you hung him up to cure, like a scion. You three had been drinking from Joses—who had survived an arcenciel bite—for years, and Gee from you. You were immune.”

  “It seems so,” Leo agreed.

  “Holy crap.” I stared at him, trying to make sense of all the possibilities that had just occurred to me. “You drank from him, like, regularly because his blood is so powerful. But you couldn’t control him until you got hold of the pocket watches I found in Natchez. Once you had a few of them with the discs made of the iron spike inside, you had a way to manage him. At least a little bit.”

  “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 wear
ing 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.