One (Rules Undying Book 6)

by R. E. Carr

  “You bastard,” Steve said, baring his fangs.

  “Dog, sic!”

  Morgan lunged at Steve again, easily pinning the grieving vampire to the wall. Gail remained hidden, as two guards followed—one of them a blond Asian giant in an outfit similar to Morgan’s, minus the bondage accessories. “Ivan,” Gail mouthed, recognizing his distinctive Bond-villain-worthy features.

  “My guards said that my darling bride-to-be was with you, yet I do not see her, Steven. Why is that? Do you have more tricks up your sleeve? How did you manage to impersonate me so well, hmm?”

  “How did you find us?”

  “My guards are not idiots. I have a reflection, and you don’t. They were quite convinced it was me, however, so I think I am going to have to take you down the hall until my father has time to take a good, long look at you. He is ever so interested in freaks.”

  “I’m not in the mood to play today, Arthur,” Steve said bitterly, glancing over at Georgia’s body. The king smiled.

  “I’m not usually one for such sentimentality, but my dog here is rather attached. Of course, seeing your misery as you realize that she is indeed dead is an added bonus. Merlin scavenged all her useful parts already so really, all that is left of your wife is a dog toy.”

  Steve howled and found the strength to shove Morgan away. “Sit!”

  Arthur’s eyes widened slightly as his precious dog did indeed plop his butt on the ground without question. Ivan and the other guard immediately whipped out pistols and flanked Arthur.

  “Why did you come here, Steven?” Arthur asked coldly. “Are you really that attached to one pathetic human? You never cared for anyone other than yourself, and you know it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Steve said. “Georgia wasn’t just anyone.”

  “She was no one of any importance, yet you cling to her. It’s pathetic.”

  “I know they say that Geoffrey killed her—”

  “He did.”

  “But you set it up. You forced the issue somehow, didn’t you, your highness?”

  Arthur smiled a cold, calculated smile. He leaned in close to Steve and whispered, “Of course I did, you cretin—and I enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “I’ve waited so long to hear you say that, Arthur,” Steve said, starting to laugh even as tears rolled down his face. “I just wanted the truth. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  Steve flung his arms out wide. “And now that I know, let’s let the past be the past. After all, you are marrying my sister, aren’t you? We can keep fighting, or we can let bygones be bygones.”

  “What nonsense is this now, Steven?”

  “Lorcan wants to drag me into a war, my wife is dead—everything is chaos, and I’m bored of it already. I just want to move on . . . unless, of course, you don’t want my help finding the real Lorcan—”

  “Now, this is the Steven that I remember—ever the opportunist.” Arthur spread his arms wide and embraced Steve. As he held onto his host’s former master, Arthur whispered, “You realize I’m still going to have my father experiment on you, you dumb sod.”

  “Hey, you’ve already said it—I’m ever the opportunist,” Steve whispered in return. Arthur froze as the needle pierced his side. Steve pulled an injector pen out of his victim’s flesh and smiled. “Oh, Arthur,” he sighed. “The wonders of modern technology. I’m inside you now, and I plan to stay in there for a very . . . long . . . time.”

  “No!” Arthur cried as he jerked away. The injector crashed to the floor. Steve ducked behind Morgan and barked, “Sic!”

  Morgan rampaged through Ivan and the other guard, while Steve looked desperately around. “Pumpkin, I need you here!”

  Gail materialized next to him and the stunned Arthur. Steve grabbed Arthur by the face, stared him right in the eyes, and said, “If I’m going to suffer, you’re going to suffer too. Now bite her and drink deep. I want you to remember everything. I want you to remember . . . her.”

  Arthur lunged for Gail, sinking his teeth into her throat. He dragged her to the wall and pressed his body fully against hers, gulping her blood and moaning, while Steve helped finish off the lackey so that Morgan could focus entirely on Ivan. After a few heady moments, Gail wrapped her arms around him and licked her lips.

  “Don’t drink from him unless you want another arranged marriage, Pumpkin. He should have had enough now.” Steve dove back towards the ravenous vampire and grabbed his hand. “Enough!”

  Gail felt the venom rush into her neck as Arthur shuddered and stumbled away. He wiped his lips and snarled. “What have you done?”

  “Remember her. Remember. . . Georgia,” Steve said softly, then grabbed Gail’s hand and bolted for the door.

  29

  “I may have done something naughty.”

  Georgia opened her eyes slowly. The light burned. She slammed her eyes shut again and coughed violently. After a few moments, the realization that she no longer had a tube shoved down her throat rushed through her. She paused, gasping and wheezing, as the world began to spin.

  “There is no greater pain than to lose what you love most . . . because of your own weakness,” Georgia heard as she came to. The glaring fluorescent light had mellowed to the softer, flickering glow of torches, and damp, cool air clung to Georgia’s skin. She stared down at her decidedly more masculine hands and raised a brow. An oddly familiar figure sat across a rough-hewn table, his red hair falling long and loose over his shoulders. “My knights and my council all tell me the same thing—Guinevere is lost, and Maleagant keeps an army of berserkers hell-bent upon destroying all that we have built. As a king, I am duty-bound to listen to their wise counsel . . . but as a man, I must ask you, the bravest of all my knights, if you will take on this foolhardy quest—not for your king, but for your friend? Please . . . save her, Lancelot.”

  “Yeah, that worked out great for you, Arthur,” Georgia whispered hoarsely as the world shifted back to the obnoxiously bright room. She smacked her cracked lips, then coughed again.

  A shadow moved in the corner of her eye. Georgia turned her head, groaning at the cracking from each vertebra as she moved. She could make out tanned skin and swept-back, salt-and-pepper hair. Her visitor clicked his tongue and shook his head as he stared at a screen rather than her.

  “You do realize you are dead, don’t you?” Merlin asked, finally giving her a sidelong glance.

  “If you have to tell someone that more than once, you’re probably wrong,” Georgia managed to spit out between wheezes. Merlin sneered and yanked her sheet away. She was wrapped in enough bandages to pass for a mummy at a Halloween party, with drainage tubes and IV lines stuck into multiple points in her chest and stomach.

  Merlin leaned over her, his eyes narrowed enough to accentuate his crow’s feet. He pulled out a scalpel and cut a few strips of gauze from her shoulder. An ugly line of stitches ran from her triceps to her breast. The large black X’s hearkened to a rather different member of the Universal Monsters’ lineup. Merlin pulled a little further to unveil a healed branch of a Y-shaped scar.

  “Your heart stopped. I cut it out for study, yet somehow, it ended up back in there,” Merlin said with as much interest as someone would show reading a grocery list. “Usually my subjects that I dissect don’t need further convincing that they are indeed deceased.”

  “Like I said, if you have to explain it, you’re probably wrong.”

  Merlin chuckled. He paused as something rather like a yowl echoed from beyond his little experiment room. “It’s been a rather trying few days, Georgia. I suppose I will just have to make the best of things.” He leaned over the scar on her chest and took a deep sniff. “It doesn’t matter what you do. You are dead to the world. It’s really rather extraordinary. It’s almost as if your sole purpose in the universe is to be contrary. I shall have to do more experiments, once I see to my king.”

  “Arthur,” Georgia whispered. Merlin gave her a strange look.

  “Don’t go any
where, Corpse. I may still have need of you,” Merlin sighed before heading out of her rather limited field of view. The moment the door slammed, a hazy shadow darted to her side.

  “Oh dear,” the shadow said as it shimmered and flitted around her. “You really are very strange, Georgia. Do you remember me?”

  “Sock . . . Monster,” she wheezed. The shadows peeled away to reveal the same baby-faced bald man, wearing nothing more than an argyle modesty tube sock this time. “You’re back.”

  “I am always here . . . well, mostly always here . . . maybe not to a human concept of time, but to me, I have spent an above-average number of hours at your bedside, trying to study what the wizard studies, yet does not understand. Sock Monster, that is the first name I have been given in ever so long. I shall treasure it, Georgia-friend. You will be my friend, will you not?”

  Georgia coughed. The Sock Monster filled a cup at the sink. He sniffed it and immediately dumped it out. “Sorry,” he said with a guilty look. “That one had a sample in it.” Once he found another cup, he brought Georgia a much-needed sip of water. She attempted a smile.

  “I’ll be your friend.”

  The Sock Monster jumped for joy, spilling most of the water on Georgia’s chest and prompting him to have to get her another cup. He played with the adjustable buttons until she was sitting up enough to face him as he stood, but she lacked the strength to lift her arm, let alone give herself a drink, so he continued to hold her cup as her head cleared.

  “I haven’t had a friend in about . . .” he trailed off and started counting on his fingers. “How long ago did the French invade Russia?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Well, it was a few decades before that,” the Sock Monster said sadly. “Tell me, does anything still hurt or feel a little funny? Or maybe out of place?”

  “Everything hurts, thanks for asking.”

  “You’re welcome!”

  They sat in silence for a while until the Sock Monster seemed possessed by some exciting thought and leapt to his feet. He faded from view, then reappeared a few minutes later with an IV bag. “Did I tell you that I did something a little naughty?” he asked as he hooked what looked like blood to her drip.

  “Yeah, I heard you. Now can you tell me what the hell is going on? Where am I?”

  “You’re in the wizard’s laboratory. It’s a cold and scary place, don’t you think? When he’s not around I bring in some flowers or my pet vole, Yikitat. I’m sorry he got in your stitches once or twice, but he’s such a scamp—”

  Georgia shuddered. After a few minutes of his prattling, she found that she could wiggle her toes and feet under the sheets. “What happened . . . to me?”

  “Well, you were dead . . .”

  “I get that a lot,” Georgia wheezed.

  “And then you were . . . not,” the Sock Monster finished. “And then the wizard kept trying to make you stay dead, but you wouldn’t, so he gave up because he didn’t know that I had found the magic potion from the other not-dead-dead human, and I gave it to you because I heard the pretty one saying that she needed the potion because someone else was going to die.”

  Georgia blinked a few times. The Sock Monster scratched his chin rather thoughtfully. “Now you are not dead, but you are lost, as I am lost . . . or maybe I am the Lost. I get confused about the really old bits. I have been trying to warn the other one, but the connection is spotty. She is close though, much closer than before—”

  “I am not dead,” Georgia protested again.

  The Sock Monster nodded in agreement. “Not dead, lost. Big difference—but also sort of the same thing, I’m afraid. At least to those who do not pay attention to us, which is almost everyone.” He looked rather squirrely and began pacing around the room.

  Without warning, the scene shifted completely, and Georgia found herself kneeling before King Arthur in his original giant ginger-haired form, her knees aching against the stone. She turned her head and saw another version of herself—bruised and messy and wrapped in a tattered black cloak, with a half-braided mass of hair falling over her shoulder. Georgia looked down to see black leather armor and a chest even flatter than her own. A strand of stringy black hair fell in front of her eyes. Arthur rose from his throne and rested a massive hand on Georgia’s shoulder.

  “Once more you have done the impossible and brought our queen back to us. You have earned a place at our side for all eternity, if you would have it,” Arthur declared.

  Georgia’s mouth moved of its own accord. “My king, with all due respect, I live to serve you; but only for one lifetime, if you please.” Her voice sounded decidedly like Lorcan’s, if Lorcan had spent too much time across the channel in France. “I intend to live in service and die well to meet my gods.”

  Georgia blinked, and the clinical setting now surrounded her once more. The Sock Monster had picked up the tablet Merlin had left in her room and was deftly leafing through it. He looked over and smiled. “Welcome back.”

  “How . . . wait, do you know what is happening to me?”

  “You are sometimes here, then sometimes you are somewhere else . . . although I suppose it is really somewhen else, is it not?”

  “I think . . . I was Lancelot in King Arthur’s court. I rescued . . . me? That was weird.” Georgia managed to clench her left hand into a fist. “How would you know that?”

  The Sock Monster’s lower jaw quivered back and forth as he hunted for the right words to explain. Eventually he pulled up something on his screen and started doodling furiously with his finger. He whipped it around to show two Egyptian-style figures just overlapping—one had slightly longer hair and more finger-painted eyeliner. “See?” he asked.

  “No.”

  The Sock Monster brought the tablet closer. “See now?” Georgia instinctively raised a brow.

  “I see it, but I don’t understand stick figures,” she explained.

  “Different bodies but connected. One self now, one self then. You are . . . overlapping, you see? An emotion in one creates echoes in the other because you are the same, but you are different.”

  Georgia kept her brow raised and continued to stare at the Sock Monster. He tapped his chin thoughtfully with the tablet until his eyes lit up. “Humans are singular creatures,” he said, tapping her gently on the noggin. “One mind, one body.”

  He then pointed to his own chest. “We are legion. Many minds, many bodies; but we get snuggled all warm in singular creatures, and we forget what we are. We hide the truth because it is scary, and single is simple. However, we sometimes take a piece of the many and send it out, so it can learn and grow and change. It does not always come back. You have a piece of the legion in you.”

  “I have a vampire in me? I’m remembering his memories?”

  “Yes . . . and no.”

  Georgia let out a deep breath. She looked over at the IV connected to her. “Magic potion? It’s blood.”

  The Sock Monster nodded. “Vampire blood?” she pressed.

  “Human blood and vampire. Just a piece, not a whole. The pieces of this vampire heal rather than hurt—”

  “Lancelot . . . Lorcan,” Georgia whispered. “Is he here?”

  The Sock Monster nodded. “Next room. They take his blood to heal, but they do not understand. The pieces . . . change you.”

  Georgia tugged at her bandage corset, showing off more and more of the Y-shaped scar as well as a line along where her liver should have been, and a band across her belly. Georgia tried to scream, but only a squeak and a gasp of air escaped. Tubes cut into her flesh, while a bubbling mass of healed-over burns wrapped over her hip. Her tattoo on her pelvis was gone, replaced by a grafted patch of ice-white skin.

  “I’m Frankenstein,” Georgia moaned. The Sock Monster drew away in horror.

  “No, that is not true,” he said gently, tucking her back under the sheet. “You are the monster. Frankenstein was the doctor.”

  “When I get my strength back, I’m probably going to punch you,�
�� Georgia whispered, then yawned. Sleep overtook her quickly, but for the briefest of moments, she found herself back at Pendragon Castle, holding a sword and trembling as she begged in Lorcan’s voice, “Dear gods in the heavens, what has happened to me?”

  30

  “Remind me to punch you later,” Jonathan growled, a mix of Texas and English in his accent today. He turned and gave Gail a supremely disappointed look as she was wiping off her makeup. “I expected this from Steve, but why on earth would you go along with him?”

  “Like I can disobey his orders,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “If I had said no, he’d just whip out the whammy voice, so why bother?”

  “Are you using the whammy on her, Bro?” Jonathan’s voice morphed back into pure Texan drawl. “Screw that, I’m decking you now.”

  Gail impassively continued to strip away her Minerva von Fenstermacher disguise while Jonathan proceeded to punch Steve hard enough to send him flying over the arm of the sofa in the dingy apartment they had commandeered in Roxbury. Steve laughed bitterly as he rolled over the side, his split lip dripping blood on the carpet.

  “You were supposed to just gather intel—” Jonathan started.

  “We did. We learned where Morgan is, or does he not matter in your grand high scheme of things?” Steve fired back. “Arthur has broken him somehow, treats him like a dog. I can only imagine what he’s doing to Bam-Bam and to Pops. We also found Georgia, damn it—”

  Gail tuned out the arguing and the subsequent racket of furniture breaking. Instead she flipped open her laptop and caught her breath at the latest update from her mysterious benefactor in the Arce Monstrorum archives. Indeed, she became so lost in reading about hallucinogenic miasma compounds and their long-term effects that she jumped when a hand tapped her bare shoulder.

  “Are you with us, Gail?” Jonathan asked earnestly, now all British in inflection. “I may need a little help.”

  She turned at the waist to see Steve clutching his split lip and now more than a little blood pouring over his hand. She sighed before making a beeline for the bathroom where she snagged her bag of supplies and a particularly hideous floral towel. Gail then plopped Steve into one of the remaining intact armchairs, so she could get a better assessment of the damage.