“No, nothing like that around here,” his brother said, and Mason’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Just the same bomb threats and killing sprees as always.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. That’s good. But… do me a favor, Jack. Even if what I’m saying sounds a little crazy. Keep your head down. And if reports like that start popping up near you, grab Yi Ling and the girls and just… go. Go on vacation, or something. Go anywhere that those reports aren’t.”
Mason could make out Jack’s deep breath before he answered. “This has really got you freaked, doesn’t it.”
Mason closed his eyes for a moment, rubbing at them. “Yeah. It does. If you’d seen what I’ve seen in the past few days…”
“Okay, little brother,” Jackson said quietly. “Rest easy. I’ve got no desire to get sucked into playing a bit part in a bad horror movie. Don’t worry about us. We’re fine. So’s Mum. You worry about you, especially since it sounds like you’re the one living in Zombie Central right now.”
He relaxed a bit, mollified. “Thanks. Yeah, I will. Hopefully I’m just jumping at shadows, and all this will turn out to be nothing.” A beep sounded in his ear, indicating a low battery. “Um, look—I had to borrow a satellite phone to call you, and I think it’s about out of juice.”
“Sure, no problem. Just look after yourself, Mace. Oh, and before you go—how are things going with your disaster zone girlfriend?”
Mason grimaced. Oh, y’know, not so bad, he thought. First she kissed me, then she immediately had a panic attack, and the next day she turned me into a vampire.
“She still runs for the hills whenever I get within a hundred feet of her, thanks for asking,” he replied instead.
Jackson snorted. “Sorry—I’m having a real hard time picturing that for some reason. I don’t suppose you’ve actually—oh, I don’t know—told her how you feel? Just a thought.”
“Well, of course I—” Mason began, only to halt mid-sentence. He thought for a moment. “Oh. Shit.”
“Uh-huh,” Jackson said patiently. “Look, Mace. The world’s going to hell around us. Listen to your big brother on this one. If we’re destined to be sucked into a bad zombie movie, you’ll want a kick-arse sheila who loves you at your side. Life was already too short, even before the inmates started taking over the asylum. So get off the damned phone and go tell her you want to be with her.”
Mason was quiet for a long moment, the phone beeping its critical battery warning in the background.
“Yeah. Okay.” He squared his shoulders. “Thanks, Jack. We’ll talk again soon. Hug Yi Ling and the kids for me.”
“Sure. Oh, and don’t forget—I’m still waiting on that photo of your mystery woman. Goodbye, little brother.”
*
Mason was fully intending to take his brother’s advice, and just lay all his cards on the table with Oksana. He would do that… just as soon as he could figure out the best time. And the best place. And the best words to use.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you rushed into, he told himself. He only had one shot at this, so he needed to make sure everything was right. That was all.
Then, of course, Mama Lovelie informed them there would be a celebratory feast that evening, to mark the defeat of the bokor and the return of the surviving children. Mason didn’t get the impression that the other vampires felt any more like celebrating than he did, but turning down the invitation would be beyond churlish.
The village was decked out with as much of a festive air as could be expected in the middle of nowhere during a war. The food, while not rich, was plentiful—even if the smell of it threatened to turn Mason’s stomach whenever he let himself focus on it too closely. The dancing and singing dragged long into the night.
Mason made himself take part. In a way, it was a sort of test, to wander among so many humans and interact with them as people, rather than as walking ready-meals. Of course, he’d made a point of topping himself off—courtesy of Duchess, as per usual—before heading outside. Though her injuries had faded soon after she’d been able to drink from Xander and utilize the healing properties of his blood, she still looked haggard—as did Xander.
Mason made a point of speaking at length with Anel and his daughter Emily, who had taken over from him as the village healer. Anel apologized profusely for having fled Savaneaux with the children, rather than coming to Mason and Oksana’s aid.
Doing so had been a totally rational decision on the old man’s part, though, and Mason hastened to tell him that. Mason had left him alone, and Oksana had screamed shortly afterward. When Duchess brought the surviving children to the peristil and hurried off to help the others, Anel had no way whatsoever of knowing which way the battle would go.
Better to leave with the children than risk the bokor surviving the vampires’ attack and coming after them. And he’d sent help back for them as soon as he could, after all.
Since then, Anel and Emily had been caring for the children as best they were able. Mason hated the fact that he’d been in no condition to assist with that. But the last thing a bunch of traumatized children needed was for Mason to lose his composure and terrify them with bared fangs or an unearthly, glowing stare.
Because his eyes, as he had discovered with one of Mama Lovelie’s mirrors, now burned with an eerie cobalt-blue light when his hunger was roused. That had been more of a shock than it probably should have, given everything else he’d seen and experienced in the past few days. He supposed he was lucky that he still had a reflection at all.
Tonight, though, he let Anel and Emily take him around to meet the children they had rescued. He wanted to assess their condition for himself, even if he couldn’t be as heavily involved in their care as he would have wished. Mama Lovelie and others with clout in the local area were already busy trying to track down the kids’ relatives. Those with no family left, he planned to transfer to Port-au-Prince once he had a chance to speak with Gita.
And, oh, yeah—that was another conversation Mason wasn’t much looking forward to. He suspected there would be several such conversations in his near future.
When the crowd started to feel overwhelming with its warm bodies and pumping blood, he sought out a quieter area. His newly uncanny night vision caught a glimpse of someone seated in the shadows of a mapou tree, leaning back against the trunk. An instant later, his senses said vampire. A closer look revealed it to be Xander.
Mason wandered over and draped an arm over one of the low, thick branches, looking down at him.
“Lots of drunk people out there,” he said by way of greeting. “Also a group having a choof around the back of the peristil. I’ve gotta say, mate, you’re really not living up to your party animal reputation.”
Xander peered up at him. “Having a choof? Good god, man, are you even speaking English right now?”
“Smoking marijuana,” Mason clarified. “You know… weed? Ganga? Grass? Come on, Xander. I was told you were a man of the world.”
Xander just raised a sardonic brow. “I hope you’ll understand that I mean this in the most respectful way possible, Ozzie, but unless you’ve got something to say, please fuck off.”
“All right, then,” Mason said. “I’ll be blunt. You and Duchess think I don’t get it. But I do.”
“Do you, now.” Xander’s voice was flat.
“About what you saw in Savaneaux? Yeah. I do. I’m a pediatric doctor who specializes in deprogramming adolescents, and I volunteer in war zones. I’ll let you take a moment and do the math on that.”
Silence was his only response, so Mason continued, “You tried to save innocent children. You gave it your all—everything you had inside you—but it wasn’t enough. And then you watched them die right in front of your eyes. Been there. Done that. It’s tattooed into my flesh so deep that I’ll never be free of it. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?”
“Surprisingly enough, yeah,” Xander muttered.
“So, is the
re anything I can do to help?” Mason asked.
“Not really. Duchess will do what she always does—go have sex with a bunch of pretty boys until she’s able to stop thinking about it for a bit. And I’ll do what I always do—drown my sorrows in the most exotic cocktail of drugs I can find contaminating a human bloodstream.” He sighed, tilting his head back to look at the branches waving above them. “Maybe I’ll go home for a bit. Just slip away by myself for a week or two.”
“Is that wise, with the new reports coming out of Syria?” Mason asked, thinking of Oksana’s comment about them staying together recently for safety.
Mason had immediately passed on what Jackson told him over the phone, but none of the vampires had been surprised. They’d been there, after all.
Xander only shrugged.
“On the positive side, Bael’s low-level minions can’t fly, and they’re also painfully stupid.” His tone darkened. “It’s the higher-level ones you have to watch out for.”
Mason pondered that, but let it go for now. “So, where’s home for you, then? London?”
“Yeah.” They were silent for a bit, though it was a surprisingly companionable silence. Eventually, Xander added, “Actually, there is something you can do for me.”
“What’s that?” Mason asked.
“You can tell me why the hell you’re standing here like an idiot, talking to me, instead of talking to Oksana like you should be.”
Mason sighed and firmed his jaw. “Touché, mate. All right. I’m going.”
“About bloody time,” Xander muttered under his breath as Mason turned around and headed back toward the festivities.
SEVENTEEN
OKSANA STARED AT THE PLATE of honey cakes set on the table in front of her, not truly seeing them. Once, for a little slave girl living on a cane plantation, honey cake had been a coveted treasure. Later, Augustin had indulged her sweet tooth to her heart’s desire.
Now, the cakes might as well have been fashioned out of sawdust.
The sounds of late-night revelry drifted in through the windows of Mama Lovelie’s house, teasing her sensitive ears as she sat alone in the dark, with only her misery for company. She knew she needed to snap out of it. All of them were suffering in their various ways—holed up here in this little village, licking their wounds.
Realistically, though, they couldn’t hide here in the mambo’s house forever. Xander had left a terse voicemail for Tré before the battery on their satellite phone completely gave up the ghost. She knew they would travel back to Port-au-Prince soon, so they could communicate more easily with the outside world.
As much as she dreaded it, Oksana needed rather desperately to talk to Eris. He was the one with the most knowledge about the prophecy. Because of her, a ninth vampire had been called into being—but, spirits above! How could she have fucked things up so badly? Had she ruined everything?
Thirteen vampires were supposed to come together, forming a council that could stand against Bael’s power. For that, they would need to be united, surely. But if Mason didn’t hate them already, he most certainly would once he’d had time to come to terms with what she’d done to him without his knowledge or permission.
He would hate her, at the very least. It only remained to be seen whether his hatred would be able to eclipse the burning hatred she felt for herself right now.
A soft noise penetrated her accelerating spiral of self-loathing. Someone had entered the house. Her life force recognized Mason’s in the space of a single heartbeat, as though her guilt had somehow called him here to further torment her with her own failures. She pushed away from the table, poised to flee, but it was already too late. He was standing in the doorway, blocking her escape unless she wanted to shove right past him.
He was getting better at moving quickly and silently, it seemed.
“I was just—” she began.
“Oksana,” he interrupted. “I’ve been dreaming, these past few days. I’ve seen… things. I’ve seen your husband, Augustin. The man you loved. The man you killed. I’m not him.”
Her knees gave way, and she fell back into the chair.
“You are, though,” she said. “And I stole your life a few days ago, as surely as I stole it then. I murdered your humanity and condemned you to a life of darkness without your consent.”
Mason dragged a chair over to sit in front of her and lowered himself onto it deliberately. His storm-blue eyes met hers, holding them as he spoke. “I told you that I dreamed. And, all right, maybe I am somehow connected to this man from the past. I guess it wouldn’t be the maddest thing I’ve seen or experienced over the past week. But I’m still not him. I’m me, and you need to have this conversation with me. Not with a man who’s been dead for more than two hundred years.”
He was right, of course. She owed him that much. She nodded, not speaking.
“Good,” he said. “So. First things first. Do you know what happens when someone on a battlefield or in a disaster zone needs emergency medical care? Let’s say… someone’s trapped under debris. He’s unconscious, and his legs are crushed under tons of concrete.”
She stared at him, not sure where he was going with this.
“Without help, that person will die in fairly short order,” Mason continued. “But the only way to save him is to amputate his trapped limbs, which will alter his life irrevocably. He’s unconscious; he can’t give informed consent, and there’s no time to try to track down someone with power of attorney. So who decides?”
“It’s not the same thing—” she protested.
He cut her off with a shake of his head. “The doctors decide. Two doctors can agree that emergency amputation is the only viable response, and if they do, the patient’s consent is unnecessary. Doing nothing would be fatal, so doing something is the best available option.”
His eyes bored into hers. “If you and the others hadn’t turned me, would I be dead now? Yes or no.”
“Yes,” she said, pain wracking her.
“Then by human reckoning, you did nothing wrong,” he said.
She stared into his eyes with the same intensity. “And by your reckoning?”
“By my reckoning? I’m not dead. I’m still here. As far as I can see, that’s a win.”
A new question clawed its way up her throat. “Why did you come after me when I went to fight the bokor?” she asked. “Why did you leave the peristil, when you knew how dangerous it was?”
“Because somehow, I knew you needed me,” he said simply.
Mason reached out, covering her hand with one of his. She caught her breath at the low thrum of power emanating outward from the contact—deeper and more insistent than ever, now that he’d left his mortal life behind.
“I came because of this,” he continued. “You’re the one who told me there’s an unbreakable bond between us. Looks like you were right.”
She was trapped like a fly in amber between his stormy eyes and the magnetic pull of his touch.
“But, Mason,” she breathed, “I’ve done almost nothing but try to push you away.”
“True. But I know now that you thought you were doing it to protect me,” he said. “And I realized something else, though it took two different people calling me an idiot for it to really penetrate. Gotta say, I’ve been called a lot of things over the years, but not that.”
“You aren’t an idiot, Mason,” Oksana said. “Far from it.”
“On the contrary,” Mason insisted, “they were both absolutely right. I’ve been a Grade A, bone-headed fool.”
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Why would you say such a thing?”
A rueful smile tugged at one corner of his lips. “I’m a certified halfwit, because I haven’t done this again.”
His free hand came up to cradle the side of her face, and he leaned forward, drawing her toward him until his lips brushed hers—soft as the finest silk. She choked down the sob that wanted to rise and reached for him. Oksana could no sooner have stopped herself than she co
uld stop the tide. His tongue teased the seam of her lips, and he made a noise of want that shattered any misconceptions she might still have had about his feelings toward her.
His fangs lengthened, new instincts not yet under his control. The kiss deepened, and one of those razor-sharp points pierced her lower lip with a bright flash of pleasure-pain. Blood welled up—thankfully purged of the bokor’s poison now. Mason groaned, low and filthy, as he sucked the coppery drops into his mouth and rolled them over his tongue before swallowing.
He tore himself away from her mouth, breathing hard. “God,” he said. “Please, Oksana… please, I n-need—” He closed his eyes, which were glowing with a desire and bloodlust that called to her like siren song. “I need more. Nothing Duchess or Xander gave me felt right. It’s your blood I crave—”
She felt her own fangs lengthen in response and knew her eyes were glowing with violet light. In a flash, she was straddling him on the chair, pressed against him from pelvis to chest, pulling his head down to her throat.
The feral growl he released when his lips and fangs brushed the side of her neck went straight to her sex. When he pierced her skin, she gasped like a drowning woman and rolled her hips against his growing hardness, needing to feel him like this so badly, it hurt.
The sensation as he drew the first mouthful from her vein was completely different from any of the other hundreds of times another vampire had fed from her. It made her freeze in surprise, only to melt against him in ecstasy a moment later. He made low, male noises of pleasure, each swallow echoed by a twitch of the thick length she was mindlessly rocking against.
The mental link between them, which lay nascent until now, flared into life as their essences mixed and swirled together.
Finally… finally… so good… so beautiful and perfect…
His nearly mindless chant as he drank from her neck chased away any lingering doubts about the sincerity of his feelings. When he finished and reluctantly pulled away, she had to fight the wash of disappointment at the loss. He rested his forehead on her shoulder, panting.
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