He had been the one in Amber's house. The one who'd almost killed Chad.
He faded in gradually, sitting on the open cement floor with his back toward me. He was more solid this time, and I could see that his shirt had been hand-sewn, though it wasn't particularly well-done. He wasn't from this century or the twentieth—probably sometime in the eighteen hundreds.
He pulled a bucket free of the pile and rolled it across the floor, away from us both, until it hit the oakman's empty cage. He gave me a quick, sullen look over his shoulder. Then, staring at the remaining buckets, he said, "Are you going to make me tell you things?"
"It was rude," I admitted, without really answering. If he knew something that would help me get Chad, Corban, and me out of there in one piece, I'd do anything I needed to. "I don't mind being rude to someone who wants to hurt me, though. Do you know why she wants blood?"
"With blood, freely given, she can kill people with a touch," he said. "It doesn't work if she steals it—though she might do that just for spite." He waved a hand, and a box tipped on its side, spilling packing peanuts on the tabletop. Five or six of them whirled up like a miniature tornado. He lost interest, and they fell to the ground.
"With her touch?" I asked.
"Mortal, witch, fae, or vampire: she can kill any of them. They called her Grandmother Death when she was alive." He looked at me again. I couldn't read the expression on his face. "When she was a vampire, I mean. Even the other vampires were scared of her. That's how he figured out what he could do."
"Blackwood?"
The ghost scooted around to face me, his hand going through the bucket he'd just been playing with. "He told me. Once, just after it had been his turn to drink from her—she was Mistress of his seethe—he killed a vampire with his touch." Lesser vampires fed from the Master or Mistress who ruled the seethe, and were fed from in return. As they grew more powerful, they quit needing to feed from the one who ruled the seethe. "He said he was angry and touched this woman, and she just crumbled into dust. Just like his Mistress could do. But a couple of days later, he couldn't do it. It wasn't his turn to feed from her for a couple more weeks, so he hired a fae-blooded prostitute—I forget what kind she was—and drained her dry. The fae's powers lasted longer for him. He experimented and figured out that the longer he let them live while he fed, the longer he could use what he'd gained from them."
"Can he still do that?" I asked intently. "Kill with a touch?" No wonder no one challenged him for territory.
He shook his head. "No. And she's dead, so he can't borrow her talents anymore. She can still kill if he feeds her blood. But he can't use her now like he used to before that old Indian man died. It's not that she minds the killing, but she doesn't like to do what he wants. Especially exactly what he wants and no more. He uses her for business, and business" — he licked his lips as if trying to remember the exact words Blackwood had used—"business is best conducted with precision." He smiled, his eyes wide and innocent. They were blue. "She prefers bloodbaths, and she's not above setting up the killing ground to point to James as the killer. She did that once, before he'd realized he wasn't still controlling her. He was very unhappy."
"Blackwood had a walker," I said, putting it together. "And he fed from him so he could control her—the lady who was just here."
"Her name is Catherine. I'm John." The boy looked at a bucket, and it moved. "He was nice, Carson Twelve Spoons. He talked to me sometimes and told me stories. He told me that I shouldn't have given myself to James, that I shouldn't be James's toy. That I should let myself go to the Great Spirit. That he would have been able to help me once."
He smiled at me, and this time I caught a hint of malice. "He was a bad Indian. When he was a boy, not much older than me, he killed a man to take his horse and wallet. It made him not able to do the things he should have been able to do. He couldn't tell me what to do."
The malice freed me from the distracting pity I'd been feeling. And I saw what I'd missed the first time I'd looked him in the eye. And I knew the reason that this ghost was different from any I'd seen before.
Ghosts are remnants of people who have died, what's left after the soul goes on. They are mostly collections of memories given form. If they can interact, respond to outside stimuli, they tend to be fragments of the people they had been: obsessive fragments—like the ghosts of dogs who guard their masters' old graves or the ghost I'd once seen who was looking for her puppy.
Immediately after they die, though, sometimes they are different. I've seen it a couple of times at funerals, or in the house of someone who's just passed away. Sometimes the newly dead keep watch over the living, as if to make sure that all is well with them. Those are more than remnants of the people they'd been—I can see the difference. I've always thought those are their souls.
That was what I'd seen in Amber's dead eyes. My stomach clenched. When you die, it should be a release. It wasn't fair, wasn't right, that Blackwood had somehow discovered a way to hold them past death.
"Did Blackwood tell you to kill Chad?" I asked.
His fists clenched. "He has everything. Everything. Books and toys." His voice rose as he spoke. "He has a yellow car. Look at me. Look at me!" He was on his feet. He stared at me with wild eyes, but when he spoke again, he whispered. "He has everything, and I'm dead. Dead. Dead." He disappeared abruptly, but the buckets scattered. One of them flew up and hit the bars of my cage and broke into chunks of tough orange plastic. A shard hit me and cut my arm.
I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a yes or a no.
Alone, I sat down on the bed and leaned against the cold cement wall. John the Ghost knew more about walkers than I did. I wondered if he'd told the truth: there was a moral code I had to follow to keep my abilities—which now seemed to include some sort of ability to control ghosts. Though, with my indifferent success at it, I suspected it was something that you had to practice to get right.
I tried to figure out how that talent might help me get all of us prisoners out of there safely. I was still fretting when I heard people coming down the stairs: visitors.
I stood up to welcome them.
The visitors were fellow prisoners. And a zombie.
Amber was chattering away about Chad's next softball game as she led Corban, still obviously under thrall to the vampire, and Chad, who was following because there was nothing else for him to do. He had a bruise on the side of his face that he hadn't had when I left him in the dining room.
"Now you get a good night's sleep," she told them. "Jim's going to bed, too, as soon as he gets that fae locked back up where he belongs. We don't want you to be tired when it's time to get up and be doing." She held the door open as if it were something other than a cage—did she think it was a hotel room? Watching the zombie was like watching one of those tapes where they take bits that someone actually said and piece them together to make it sound like they were talking about something else entirely. Sound bites of things Amber would have said came out of the dead woman's mouth with little or no relation to what she was doing.
Corban stumbled in and stopped in the middle of the cage. Chad ran past his mother's animated corpse and stopped, wide-eyed and shaking next to the bed. He was only ten, no matter how much courage he had.
If he survived this, he'd be in therapy for years. Assuming he could find a therapist who'd believe him.
Your mother was a what? Have some Thorazine… Or whatever the newest drug of choice was for the mentally ill.
"Oops," said Amber, manically cheerful. "I almost forgot." She looked around and shook her head sadly.
"Did you do this, Mercy? Char always said that you both suited each other because you were slobs at heart." As she was talking, she gathered up the buckets—though she didn't bother cleaning up the broken one—and stacked most of them where they had been. She took one and put it inside Chad and Corban's cage before removing the used one in the corner. "I'll just take this up and clean it, shall I?"
She locked the
door.
"Amber," I said, putting force in my voice. "Give me the key." She was dead, right? Did she have to listen to me, too?
She hesitated. I saw her do it. Then she gave me a bright smile. "Naughty, Mercy. Naughty. You'll be punished for that when I tell Jim."
She took the bucket and whistled when she shut the door. I could hear her whistling all the way up the stairs. I needed more practice, or maybe there was some trick to it.
I bowed my head and waited for Blackwood to bring the oakman back with my arms crossed over my middle and my head turned away from Chad. I ignored it when he rattled the cage to catch my attention.
When Blackwood came in, I didn't want him to find me holding Chad's hand or talking to him or anything.
I didn't think there was a rat's chance in a cattery that Blackwood would let Chad live after everything he'd seen. But I didn't intend to give the vampire any more reason to hurt him. And if I lowered my guard, I'd have a hard time keeping the fear at bay.
After a time, the oakman stumbled in the door in front of Blackwood. He didn't look much better than he had when Blackwood had finished with him. The fae looked a little above four feet tall, though he'd be taller if he were standing straight. His arms and legs were oddly proportioned in subtle ways: legs short and arms overlong. His neck was too short for his broad-foreheaded, strong-jawed head.
He walked right into his cell without struggling, as if he had fought too many times and suffered defeat.
Blackwood locked him in. Then, looking at me, the vampire tossed his key in the air and snatched it back before it hit the ground. "I won't be sending Amber down with keys anymore."
I didn't say anything, and he laughed. "Pout all you want, Mercy. It won't change anything."
Pout? I looked away. I'd show him pout.
He started for the door.
I swallowed my rage and managed to not let it choke me. "So how did you do it?"
Vague questions are harder to ignore than specific ones. They inspire curiosity and make your victim respond even if he wouldn't have talked to you at all otherwise.
"Do what?" he asked.
"Catherine and John," I said. "They aren't like normal ghosts."
He smiled, pleased I'd noticed. "I'd like to claim some sort of supernatural powers," he told me, then laughed because he found himself so funny. He wiped imaginary tears of mirth from his eyes. "But really it is their choice. Catherine is determined to somehow avenge herself upon me. She blames me for ending her reign of terror. John… John loves me. He'll never leave me."
"Did you tell him to kill Chad?" I asked coolly, as if the answer were mere curiosity.
"Ah, now, that is the question." He shrugged. "That's why I need you. No. He ruined my game. If he'd done as I'd told him, you'd have brought yourself here and given yourself to me to spare your friends. He made them run. It took me half the day to find them. They didn't want to come with me—and… Well, you saw my poor Amber."
I didn't want to know. Didn't want to ask the next question. But I needed to know what he'd done to Amber. "What did you eat that let you make zombies?"
"Oh, she's not a zombie," he told me. "I've seen zombies three centuries old that look almost as fresh as a day-old corpse. They're passed down in their families like the treasures they are. I'm afraid I'll have to get rid of Amber's body in a week or so unless I put her in the freezer. But witches need knowledge as well as power—and they're more trouble to keep than they are worth. No. This is something I learned from Carson—I trust Catherine or John told you about Carson. Interesting that one murder left him unable to do anything with his powers, when I—who you'll have to trust when I tell you that I've done much, much worse than a mere larcenous homicide—had no trouble using what I took from him. Perhaps his trouble was psychosomatic, do you think?"
"You told me how you keep Catherine and John," I said. "How are you keeping Amber?"
He smiled at Chad, who was standing as far from his father as he could get. He looked fragile and scared. "She stayed to protect her son." He looked back at me. "Any more questions?"
"Not right now."
"Fine—oh, and I've seen to it that John won't be coming back to visit you anytime soon. And Catherine, I think, is best kept away, too." He closed the door gently behind him. The stairs creaked under his feet as he left.
When he was gone, I said, "Oakman, do you know when the sun goes down?"
The fae, once more sprawled on the cement floor of his cage, turned his head to me. "Yes."
"Will you tell me?"
There was a long pause. "I will tell you."
Corban stumbled forward a step and swayed a little, blinking rapidly. Blackwood had released him.
He took a deep, shaky breath, then turned urgently to Chad and began signing.
"I don't know how much Chad caught of what's going on… too much. Too much. But ignorance might get him killed."
It took me a second to realize he was talking to me—his whole body was focused on his son. When he was finished, Chad—who still was keeping a lot of space between them—began to sign back.
While watching his son's hands, Corban asked me, "How much do you know about vampires? Do we have any chance of getting out of here?"
"Mercy will grant me freedom this Harvest season," said the oakman hoarsely. In English this time.
"I will if I can," I told him. "But I don't know that it'll happen."
"The oak told me," he said, as if that should make it as real as if it had already happened. "It is not a terribly old tree, but it was very angry with the vampire, so it stretched itself. I hope it has not… doneitselfpermanentharm." His words tumbled over each other and lost consonants. He turned his head away from me and sighed wearily.
"Are oaks so trustworthy?" I asked.
"Used to be," he told me. "Once."
When he didn't say anything more, I told Corban the most important part of what I knew about the monster who held us. "You can kill a vampire with a wooden stake through the heart, or by cutting off his head, drowning him in holy water—which is impractical unless you have a swimming pool and a priest who will bless it—direct sunlight, or fire. I'm told it's better if you combine a couple of methods."
"What about garlic?"
I shook my head. "Nope. Though a vampire I know told me that given a victim who smells like garlic and one that doesn't, most of them will pick the one who doesn't. Not that we have access to garlic or wooden stakes."
"I know about the sunlight—who doesn't? But it doesn't seem to affect Blackwood."
I nodded toward the oakman. "Apparently he is able to steal some of the abilities of those he drinks from." No way was I going to talk about blood exchanges with Chad watching. "The oakmen like this gentleman here feed from sunlight—so Blackwood gained an immunity to the sun."
"And blood," said the oakman. "In the old days we were given blood sacrifices to keep the trees happy."
He sighed. "Feeding me blood is how he keeps me alive when this cold-iron cell would kill me."
Ninety-three years he'd been a prisoner of Blackwood's. The thought chilled any optimism that had survived the ride here from the Tri-Cities. The oakman wasn't mated to a werewolf, though—or bound to a vampire.
"Have you ever killed one?" the oakman asked.
I nodded. "One with help and another one who was hampered because it was daytime and he was sleeping."
I didn't think that was the answer he'd been expecting.
"I see. Do you think you can kill this one?"
I turned around pointedly, looking at the bars. "I don't seem to be doing so well at that. No stake, no swimming pool of holy water, no fire—" And now that I'd said that, I noticed that there was very little that was even flammable here. Chad's bedding, our clothes… and that was it.
"You can put me down as something else that won't be of any use," Corban said, bitterly. "I couldn't even stop myself from kidnapping you."
"That Taser was one of Blackwood's developments?"
"Not a Taser—Taser's a brand name. Blackwood sells his stun gun to… certain government agencies who want to question prisoners without showing any harm. It's a lot hotter than anything Taser makes.
Not legal for the civilian market but—" He sounded proud of it—proud and slick, as if presenting the product at a sales meeting. He stopped himself, and said simply, "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault," I told him. I looked at Chad, who still seemed thoroughly spooked. "Hey, why don't you translate for me a minute."
"Okay." Corban looked at his son, too. "Let me tell him what I'm doing." He wiggled his hands, then said, "Go."
"Blackwood's a vampire," I told Chad. "What that means is that your father can't do anything but follow Blackwood's orders—it's part of what a vampire does. I'm a little protected for the same reason I can see ghosts and talk to them. That's the only reason he hasn't done the same thing to me… yet. You'll know when your father's being controlled, though. Blackwood doesn't like your dad signing to you—he can't read sign. So if your dad's not signing to you, that's one thing to look for. And your dad fights his control, and you can see that in his shoulders—"
I broke off because Chad began gesturing wildly, his fingers exaggerating all the movements. His equivalent of yelling, I supposed.
Corban didn't translate what Chad said, but he signed very slowly so he wouldn't be misunderstood and spoke his words out loud when he answered. "Of course I'm your father. I held you in my arms the day you were born and sat vigil in the hospital when you almost died the next day. You are mine. I've earned the right to be your dad. Blackwood wants you alone and afraid. He's a bully and feeds on misery as much as blood. Don't let him win."
Chad's bottom jaw went first, but before I saw tears, his face was hidden against Corban.
It wasn't the best time for Amber to come in.
"It's hot upstairs," she announced. "I'm to sleep down here with you."
"Do you have the key?" I asked. Not that I expected Blackwood to have forgotten. Mostly I just wanted to keep her attention and let Chad, who hadn't noticed her, have his moment with his dad.
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