Death Mask (Wraith's Rebellion Book 3)

by Aya DeAniege

  “We can kill them, but that’s the end of it?” I asked.

  “No Progeny of mine will be a scavenger,” Quin growled out.

  His tone of voice made Rosalyn’s tread falter. The witch fell a step behind, then caught up again and put herself on the other side of Quin. Which gave him space to reach me and do whatever he pleased.

  Smart mortal.

  “I was only asking,” I said. “It seems contradictory, don’t wolves eat the dead?”

  Rosalyn made a sound that might have been an awkward laugh.

  “Animals, not humans,” Quin said.

  “But what?”

  “The moment a human dies, the pack stops feeding,” he said. “The point of eating a human is to cause as much agony as possible in the dying moments. Not to consume the flesh. Necromancy is the witch version of feeding off the dead. Makes me wonder if she’s been feeding off them in other ways.”

  “Lu said nothing but blood has ever passed her lips, but I suppose eating a human would still count as being pure,” I said.

  “Given witches and symbolism, she may have been eating the hearts of her victims to keep her heart healthy.”

  “Don’t yell at me again, but does being a scavenger afford a vampire certain… privileges?”

  Quin was quiet a long moment. I saw the way he almost growled and knew that I would have gotten quite a talking to if I hadn’t prefaced my question. Then I saw the struggle of something, as if he were asking himself if he should give me that information, or just tell me to shut up and focus on the task at hand.

  “It does,” he said finally.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

  Quin’s response was in another language, but from the tone of voice alone, I decided it was a curse much like my own. Colourful and completely inappropriate at the same time.

  “Necromancy is frowned upon because dipping into the afterworld is not something we’ve ever done,” Rosalyn said. “We have always condemned it. We don’t know what might be brought back from this. And near as I can tell, something will be brought back. Except the world is a big place. It won’t necessarily appear here.”

  “It likely being the wolf lover,” I said.

  “We can only hope. She might be reasoned with,” Rosalyn sighed out and rubbed her face, stepping over a branch as she did so.

  I noticed that. I also saw how she seemed to turn her head as a bat flitted out of the trees of the small park we were walking past. Being an Oracle must have had its perks, but I wondered if Quin could do the same.

  No supernatural may be bitten and turned, so she said and so it was.

  Obviously, it hadn’t quite been true. Witch plus vampire venom equalled vampire, no matter how little the bite. That made me wonder about so many things, but I bit back the questions because neither of the people I was with would be able to answer them.

  “Truth be told, none of us has ever gone to the afterworld and returned to tell about it. The vampires tell quaint little dream stories, but these seem to arise years after their turning and are influenced by who in their family had died by then, and what others told them about their own period in that in between of mortality and immortality.”

  “Hey, I don’t appreciate you saying that my turning dream is nothing more than social manipulation recreating memories into something the listener wanted to hear,” Quin protested. “I had those memories from before. It happened.”

  He was religious. He believed in God.

  He had dragged me to a goddamn church on Sunday for a night service being held for local vampires and church goers who happened to share the same religion. He made me pray! Because, according to him, I didn’t know if I was religious if my parents never talked about it. I might be theist, the only way to figure out what I was, was to explore different religions until I found what felt right for me.

  Except, when I said his religion wasn’t for me, he told me that was too bad and that while his Progeny, I would attend church with him.

  “Of course, it did, sweetie,” Rosalyn said with a light pat on his arm. “Some, I suspect, are real, much like the near-death experiences some humans speak of. Most are stories made up to feel like everyone else. The only one I’ve ever heard of telling the truth was Margaret.”

  “I don’t recall seeing anything,” I said with a shrug. “Though, all of my family is alive and unfortunately kicking. No one for me to go see.”

  “Grandparents?” Quin asked.

  “Still alive,” I said.

  “She doesn’t talk much about before,” he said, turning to Rosalyn.

  “Humans are taught not to speak if they have nothing nice to say,” she said in response. “Look, the afterworld is a big, mysterious place and every race has a different view of it. Even the religions of the humans don’t always agree on what it looks like or how many parts it’s split into. Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, these are all just views of what could be.

  “Long ago the witches got together and decided that if vampires and fae and werewolves were real, they didn’t want to go poking the afterworld because something bad would happen. As a race we decided this, that’s how you know not to do it. No one is even stupid enough to try. We have enough to worry about without demons overrunning the world and nightmares swallowing up our hopes and dreams and raping people with… I dunno, trees or something.”

  “We can hope for Heaven and Hell, right?” I asked. “Because then we have a leg to stand on. Good or bad could come of this. Most humans believe in both so there must be something to it.”

  “Those religions probably condemn your existence and once tried to burn my kind,” Rosalyn said. “They’re a part of the patriarchy and have, and still are, used to render women nothing more than the property of their fathers and husbands, to be used and destroyed at the will of the men in their lives. To be Quin to Lu, as it were.”

  “When there are good people, it works,” Quin protested.

  “He believes in God,” I said.

  “At best you could say I’m agnostic? Theist? Except that isn’t even true. I know for a fact that our souls go somewhere. I know that exists. I might even believe in God, but I don’t believe in the imagery that so many religions use to justify their broken values. It shouldn’t take an invisible man shaking his finger at you to behave. You should just not be an asshole.”

  “The one we’re after doesn’t have an invisible force telling her to behave,” Quin said.

  “Do you?” Rosalyn asked. “Does Helen? Do I? It’s the humans she’s going to kill, not the witches. We’re still her sisters. Does that mean I should just walk away?”

  “Why don’t you?” I asked. “Being mortal and all, I mean.”

  “Bitch is using necromancy.”

  “You feel strongly about this, do you?” Quin asked, sounding a bit choked up.

  “He does that when women rant. It’s like his ‘yes dear’ except more adorable.”

  “She’s also crazy, thousands of years of grief and just going utterly mad,” Rosalyn said. “I almost feel sorry for her. No, you know what? I do. I feel sorry for her. The witches screwed her over, my ancestors did this to the world, did this to you, to her. They… they abused her to make her complacent. It’s no wonder she hates anything that moves.”

  My mind did a stuttering sort of halt as we stopped at a red light.

  “I’m sorry, did they use necromancy on her?” I demanded. “Is that what all your ranting is about?”

  “You can’t use necromancy to make yourself immortal, or on yourself to bring yourself back from the dead.”

  “Isn’t that what she did with the heart?”

  “If it were a human heart, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Rosalyn said in an acidic tone. “It can be used on other souls. You can steal a soul, or force it to do your bidding, like a puppet on strings. Break it just a little bit each time it refuses to comply until there’s nothing left to resist.”

  “So, when you talk about the negative effects of necromancy, you�
�re actually referring to the events of tonight?” I asked. “And not just the bit where we might be about to rip a portal into the fabric of time and accidentally unleash demons, for example, but the literal reason why things are happening tonight is because the witches, your ancestors, used necromancy on a witch they were sending into battle against vampires in a war over the life and liberty of the Great Maker? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “I suppose, yes, why?”

  “You think she’s using necromancy as a giant middle finger?”

  “I can’t be held responsible for what my ancestors did,” Rosalyn said. “That fellow, Ghengis Khan? Aren’t something like twelve percent of humans related to him?”

  “So?” Quin asked.

  “Are those descendants being held responsible for his raping and pillaging of pretty well the entire world?”

  “Didn’t he also bring about things like literacy and stuff?” I asked.

  “There was good to his bad,” Quin said.

  “He made pyramids out of the skulls of his enemies!”

  “So?” Quin asked.

  “Sounds fun.”

  Rosalyn scowled at me. I shrugged in response and looked at Quin.

  “My point is: you don’t hold those people either responsible for his misdeeds, or in high regard because one time this guy—who probably raped their maternal grandmother between twenty and forty generations ago—came inside a woman and it just so happened they were born.”

  “I didn’t say I held you responsible,” I said. “But I do feel like the witches as a whole should take responsibility and fix what their ancestors started.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s like global warming,” Quin said.

  “Oh,” Rosalyn said.

  “That, of all things, makes sense to you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “We didn’t cause global warming at its most basic, but our generation is having to deal with the consequences of our predecessors. He’s right. She is like that. If we had taken her out earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten this bad.”

  “They also jabbed their fingers into their ears and shouted nonsense when others tried to talk about it, according to Anna.”

  “No doubt someone also went on about her existence being a conspiracy by the vampires or wolves,” Rosalyn said. “I mean, we did go to war with the wolves over it.”

  “Seriously?” Quin asked, stopping on the sidewalk as the park came into view. “That’s what you were fighting over? That’s why the indigenous people of this continent had to die? Because you were denying—Jesus, Rosalyn.”

  “Hey, I didn’t take part in the war, and I think as the shortest lived of all the mortal races besides humans, we deserve some understanding.”

  “That’s the war the witches and wolves fought over? Her?” I asked. “What? How is she worth fighting a war over? Neither of you can kill her!”

  Rosalyn blinked back at me.

  “You have a way to kill vampires?” I asked.

  “No, not without necromancy,” she said sternly. “I’d have to bind her soul to my soul and then kill myself and pray it worked. Not worth it when we’ve got two weapons plus the mace and maybe the tool if we can get a hold of the Great Maker.”

  “That can’t happen,” I said.

  “The death of two parts of the Oracle may break it,” Quin said. “Helen, you seem to be flaring on and off. Glamour her.”

  “Glamour me?” Rosalyn asked.

  “You are not allowed to get yourself killed or commit suicide in an attempt to kill Bau,” I said, jabbing a finger at Rosalyn for good measure.

  “It doesn’t work like that. Vampire powers don’t even work on witches. Damn it, yours do. But it still doesn’t work like that!”

  “Protest all you like,” Quin said. “It’s called a chain command. I ordered her, she ordered you. It ups the possibility of it working and Helen here has an odd ability to get all kinds of things working that shouldn’t work.”

  Rosalyn glared at me, so I stuck my tongue out in response and blew a raspberry.

  “Well, that’s why I tagged along, so I’m useless,” she muttered.

  “Not useless, just ineffectual,” Quin said. “What exactly is your plan?”

  “A dangerous one, come on,” I grumbled, headed down the road that led to the park.

  Suddenly, I swore I could feel the approach of dawn. It was still hours away, the sky was still completely black, but something at the back of my mind ached because an exhaustion was setting in. I might even have been a little stiff.

  The problem with being a baby vampire was that you lived and ‘died’ by the sun’s timeline, not your own.

  “You’re not going to tell me the plan?” he asked.

  “Why? So you can forbid me?”

  “If you get squashed, that’s a problem. What if she has a shield?”

  “We can’t make shields,” Rosalyn said. “Boil your brains out, skin slough off, sure, but somehow stopping a weapon with an invisible barrier is beyond our capability.”

  “Bind souls together, create weapons of mass destruction, but invisible walls are out?” I asked.

  “No, not invisible walls. Just stopping a weapon with an invisible weapon.”

  “You can’t maintain the focus necessary during battle to keep a wall solid,” Quin countered. “Same reason vampires can’t just wield their powers in a fight. Helen.”

  “I’m not planning on using powers,” I said. “And I need to be the bait so that you can use yours.”

  “Oh, okay, why couldn’t you have told me that before?”

  “Because shut up, that’s why.”

  “Helen.”

  “I was afraid you’d command me not to, and then she’d just kill me instead of it working.”

  “You shall not kill others was a spoken command before she was made,” he said.

  While true, that didn’t sooth my anxiety any. Bau could have just ripped me to bits, but she’d also be over me and at Rosalyn pretty quickly, what with her being the only mortal and all. And I don’t care how many times Quin said it, I had a hard time believing a creature that old, who spent that much time with the Great Maker, didn’t know how to kill a vampire with her bare hands.

  The death bringer she had created had probably just been a back up, and she wasn’t taking any chances with Quin and I, we were supposed to be in possession of the tool. Just because she made a thing to kill all things, didn’t mean that she couldn’t kill us with her bare hands.

  It just meant she was able to kill all things with the thing.

  That makes complete sense. Try saying it without so many ‘things.’

  “You shall not bite and turn supernaturals was also spoken before her and I’m kind of on the fence as to whether or not she disobeyed that one.”

  “Fair enough, but if she could use her hands, she wouldn’t have bothered to create that weapon of hers.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said as we stepped into the parking lot. “Wait here.”

  I walked away from them, feeling vulnerable for the first time since being turned. Even in the cemetery, wandering around by myself, I had felt secure. The worst that they could have done to me at that time was snap my neck, Sasha wouldn’t have allowed it to go further than that.

  And she wasn’t around this time to save me.

  Bau might have believed in her broken mind that she was the Great Maker. It was possible that with whatever magic she had cast on herself and her heart, that she couldn’t die. Others may have thought they succeeded and discovered too late that she wouldn’t stay dead.

  Which left me wondering what was about to happen. At best, she did her little dive bomb thing and landed on my head. That’d be a quick death, right?

  In theory.

  And her legs would be broken, possibly her torso as well.

  But then, she’s now conserving blood.

  “Right, that tidbit,” I grumbled.

  She hadn’t been conser
ving it before. If she had, the divebomb wouldn’t have worked because I’m betting there was broken bone and skin involved, blood everywhere. Screaming of any mortals who saw her.

  Piss her off.

  “How?”

  You killed her baby.

  “Ohhhh,” I looked around, then turned to Rosalyn. “How’s the whole name thing work? Like prayer? Can she hear words?”

  “Yes,” Rosalyn called back to me. “As long as they are out loud, you can whisper, and she’ll hear.”

  I nodded and turned away. I started repeating her name over and over again. There was a prickling down my spine, like when my father laid eyes on me during his fits of rage.

  Trust your instincts.

  “Bau, you bitch, where are you? Hey? Hiding because I killed your precious mutt? He deserved it. I liked killing him, watching the life go out of his eyes. I liked it. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just like her, all those centuries ago. There’s a reason why the people around you keep dying.”

  MOVE.

  I stood for a moment, almost feeling like a bat had just tried to fly into my face. The feeling repeated itself, causing me to stumble backwards.

  I said move!

  In that confused moment, I swore I saw a face so very much like my own. Just like my reflection in the bathroom mirror, except a great deal angrier. Fear gripped me because it might have been nothing more than a flash.

  Or it might have been Banshee manifesting in the real world. Surely it shouldn’t have happened that quickly, but if my life was in danger, maybe?

  And my life had definitely been in danger.

  In the startled moment of realization, there had been a sound like cracking. I thought it had been inside my mind, but then as I gaped at the spot where Banshee had been, Quin blew past me, hitting me in the shoulder with the cooler as he did so. It all happened so fast that my eyes didn’t catch what was going on, just the sensation of surprise, then being smacked by my Maker.

  The cooler tumbled into my hand as I tried to catch it and right my balance at the same time.

  They had said grace could be learned, but damn what I wouldn’t give to learn some of that accidentally.