Death Mask (Wraith's Rebellion Book 3)

by Aya DeAniege

  I finally straightened myself and turned to Quin as he stood, blood all up his arm and across his chest. Splattered over his face.

  My stomach did a funny little twirl as he turned towards me. Every bit of my screamed for me to run, but I found myself rooted in place like a deer in the headlights just staring at the truck that threatened to splatter it across the highway. I was pretty certain that few people who saw that look lived to t about it.

  He snapped something at me, but it was in another language. The hand motion towards the cooler was pretty clear, however.

  I lurched forward, my legs heavy and my knees trying to remain locked to keep me on my feet as I approached him. If I hadn’t locked my knees, I would have gone down. The muscles in my calves trembled, and there was a liquid heat in my belly. It boiled hard and fast, writhing through the emotions in that confused tumble as some part of me bribed, shouted, blackmailed, and begged the body to respond if only to reduce the punishment that was clearly coming.

  My fingers numbly fumbled with the cooler, finally getting it open as I stepped up to Quin. He yanked it from my hands in an irritated manner, then took the time to place the still beating heart in the cooler gently.

  He slapped my hand, thrusting the cooler at me.

  When men with tempers get upset, they get slappy. Trust me, I was not oblivious to the fact that Quin could explode like a volcano. We had spent a week alone, and off record. It didn’t happen often, I was told by surprised witnesses, that it must be the events around us.

  But I had never been the one to personally draw his ire, and I didn’t know what I had done.

  “I can’t touch it,” he snapped at me.

  Right, that bit. I reached into the cooler and grabbed the old heart. It was little more than heart jerky. It might have been heart shaped once, but to me, it just looked like a piece of hardened jerky.

  I slapped it against Bau’s chest as I turned my head away. Quin growled, his hand gripping my wrist and manipulating me without care of how my muscles were supposed to work. His fingers dug into my wrist, causing sharp points of pain to dance up my arm.

  I didn’t see what I did. I was not heroic in the motion.

  I would have whined and snivelled as I did it, but my father had long ago scared that response out of me. Instead, I closed the cooler when Quin motioned, then fled towards Rosalyn. He was right behind me. A hand pressed tightly against my back.

  Out of the park we went, none of us looking back.

  “Quin,” Rosalyn said quietly.

  He growled in response, which made the witch skitter away from us. As she moved forward, the hand against my back tightened, wrapping itself in the fabric of my jacket and yanking me around. His bloody finger came up and jabbed at my face.

  That made me snarl.

  Tell me off, yell at me, throw things even. But keep your fingers out of my face.

  “If you ever speak to anyone or about anyone like that again, I will break your legs and take your knees for a while. Am I understood?”

  “No, take my knees?”

  “As in remove them of you.”

  As in literally, take your knees.

  Banshee thought that was hilariously funny, but then, she was the sociopath in me. She’d probably get a kick out of murdering babies or raping people with skyscrapers, or whatever else it was that vampires were thought to do for giggles.

  I, on the other hand, blanched at the idea and stared mutely back at Quin for too long before I got my tongue to work again.

  “What did I say?”

  “That people die around her for a reason. We aren’t here to cause her more pain, Helen. There was no reason to go that far.”

  “But I needed her angry enough not to think.”

  Surely Quin understood that I hadn’t done that just to be mean. Especially considering the fact that I hadn’t been the one to kill Lu, or Death for that matter. None of it was even my fault, I was just trying to clean up a twenty-thousand year old mess caused by the witches and the vampires.

  You’d think someone would give me a damned pat on the head for not puking my guts out over having my hand crammed inside someone’s chest cavity, but no. No, everyone just got huffy and puffy and jabbed their fingers at me.

  What, no smart ass comment on that?

  Banshee was silent, or perhaps gone. I was living my emotion and accepting it in that moment, that may have been why she was suddenly without words. She had no words because for a brief moment we were one again and there was only me inside my own mind.

  “There was another way.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know!” he bellowed back, causing a dog off in the distance to begin barking. “I don’t know, but what I do know is that even at his worst, even Lu didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I will not allow you to talk to other people like that. Am I understood?”

  He raised his voice with each sentence, adding a force behind his words that made me tremble and look away.

  “Yes, Maker.”

  “Good. Now get up there with Rosalyn and don’t you dare be lippy to her or threaten to bite her.”

  What do you do if you’re a vampire covered in blood during the early hours of the morning?

  Well, it pays to have allies, family, and the people who are afraid of you enough to do whatever is necessary to prevent another visit.

  I led Helen and Rosalyn to a side street and to a house on that street. I knocked on the door, which was answered almost immediately by a soccer mom with dishevelled hair and bags under her eyes. She was barely awake as she grunted at me.

  “Morris sent me,” I said.

  She peered past me, then stepped to the side and motioned in. The three of us entered, and I proceeded to unbutton my shirt as she walked away. She returned with a plastic storage container filled with ribbon. The ribbon was dumped on the couch. Then the tub held out for me.

  I dropped my shirt into the tub and noticed how the woman eyed my stomach.

  Not how Helen had a week before, with that mingling of curiosity and hunger, and just a hint of shame. No, the woman eyed me like I was a piece of meat, objectifying me.

  I bet she whines at coffee with her friends about men making her uncomfortable.

  I understood that men were like that and that women were starting to treat them the way they had been treated for thousands of years, but it made me uncomfortable. The only time I summed someone up like a piece of meat was when I was wondering what they tasted like.

  So, when they were literally a piece of meat.

  “Shirt,” I said.

  The woman pulled out of her haze. I swear there was a hostility in the room.

  And then Helen wrapped an arm around my midsection, her other hand settling on my chest and trailing down as she put on her best ‘hungry’ face. No, wait, that was just a sex face to normal people. She pulled it off quite well. I seriously considered using the house for another hour or so.

  We don’t have the time.

  Suddenly Wraith was prudish and being responsible? I’d wonder if we had swapped places, but neither part of my soul had ever really been prudish. Resistant to sex with others, yes, but I had still liked to watch and talk about it. I doubted either of us would say no to sex with Helen for several hundred years unless there was a very, very good reason.

  Like a vampire-slash-witch who might just still be alive?

  I grumbled to myself, but kept my expression as neutral as I could. Eyes on Helen, I watched her smile falter just that little bit as she came to the same conclusion that I had.

  We didn’t have the time, not right then.

  As the woman walked back in, I looked up. She seemed to glare at Helen, then cast a furtive look to Rosalyn.

  Which told me that she had made an initial assumption that Rosalyn was my girlfriend, and Helen was the third wheel. I’m not certain what made Helen such an inadequate partner in the eyes of mortals. She wasn’t cross-eyed, didn’t have anything on her face.

>   Was I missing some modern equivalent of beauty? She was attractive enough that the vain Balor had made offers.

  It’s because they’re both blonde.

  Wraith’s bored tone almost drew a verbal response. Then I realized what he meant. Rosalyn was a different shade, but she and the woman were close in hair colour. They were also a similar height and build. It wasn’t so much that Helen wasn’t attractive enough, but that the woman had placed herself as a possible lover. She was married, however, so she immediately assumed that I would choose the woman most similar to herself as a partner.

  The narcissism of the human creature never ceases to astound me.

  I slipped my arm around Helen and glanced down at her. Her fingers were tracing the still fading scars across my chest. She seemed entranced as her fingers moved back and forth.

  It was entirely possible that she was.

  I remembered a night, shortly after being turned, when Lu was gentle with me. During that time, and the night that subsequently followed, I convinced self that things would change, that he would be a different man from then forward. Pressed tight against his side, his flesh hot with blood and my cooler from the hunger, it had been easy to fall into that trap.

  I was still young and naive then. Without centuries of experience, just my messed up, twisted childhood and a dream for something more. I had thought that the world would simply get better, that not everyone was looking out only for themselves and how they could benefit from my presence.

  Perhaps it is a part of the bonding between Maker and Progeny. That night had been the first, and the last time Lu had been gentle with me for centuries to come.

  And you know what? I think it was seven days into my immortality.

  My arm tightened around Helen, causing her hand to hesitate, fingers just over my nipple, settled on the only scar I carried from my mortality: the brand.

  “We should get going,” I said. “Back to where we came from.”

  I spoke vaguely because the human was still present. Reaching out, I took the shirt from her. I slipped it on as I focused on Helen and really looked at her.

  She was barefoot, having thrown aside her jacket at some point. Her blouse had the top button undone—again.

  How many times did I have to tell her to do up that button?

  Humans are more likely to notice shoes.

  Shoes were not my concern. It was that top button being undone. If she wanted a top to be loose around her throat, she should have chosen one with an appropriate cut. The button was there to be done up, damn it.

  Her hair was all over the place. Sticking out at odd ends. I reached out and plucked a small stone from her tangles. There was a word for that stone. Perhaps it was pebble? A stone was a stone, was a stone to me. A little grain of the earth had been in her hair. There was probably more than that one little pebble in her hair, possibly in her skin from all the tumbles and falls she had had that night.

  Pulling the shirt on over my head, I plucked at it with a small grimace. It was a worn-out t-shirt that was far too large for me. The woman’s husband must have been overweight. Or perhaps her son, whoever it was, I did not want to wear their shirt, even washed as it was. In my experience, that told me the human who had worn it last remained in the threading somehow and was sick.

  Which wasn’t overly surprising, but it did put me on an annoyed sort of edge as I bent and picked up the cooler. My bloodied shirt was handed to Helen in a grocery bag. We would dispose of the shirt ourselves, rather than risk humans doing it.

  Used to be, we did that to keep our secret of immortality from getting out. Now it was simply habit. It also kept our genetic material from showing up at multiple crime scenes. Not necessarily because we had been there, but because someone was trying to frame us.

  Which is the God’s honest truth of that matter. If I’m going to go around killing mortals and robbing restaurants, you better believe that the only evidence of it would be my own words caught on a recording device. If my genetic material turned up at a crime scene, someone was framing me. Plain and simple.

  We left the woman’s house, headed back towards Lucrecia’s. None of us said anything for the first couple of blocks.

  “Why don’t I take this all to Lucrecia?” Rosalyn asked. “You two go do whatever it is that vampires would do the seventh night after turning.”

  I stopped walking as Helen’s head snapped around. The two of us watched Rosalyn stuck her tongue out at us and folded her arms in annoyance.

  “Please, like it’s some big secret?” she asked.

  “What is?” Helen asked.

  Rosalyn jabbed a finger at her and then motioned up and down and all around, that finger turned to me and worked me over just the same.

  Witches must pass down information about vampires. Being outside of our race, they would have watched thousands of pairs going through the same motions and they would have made an assumption that none of us had done. When caught up inside of it, it was easy to ignore the obvious.

  “The bonding process is starting. Like I haven’t seen you two making googly eyes at one another?”

  Helen blushed. “I just thought, you know, body going through motions.”

  “What motions?” I asked.

  “If I was mortal, I’d be ovulating right now.”

  “Wow, you can tell?” Rosalyn asked.

  Helen nodded, the blush deepening. “For a couple of days a month, I want to just maul every man I see. Well, maybe not every man.”

  “Wow, I can’t tell,” Rosalyn muttered. “When we were trying I had to do the whole taking temperature thing.”

  It ever so slowly dawned on me, what they were saying.

  “You’re horny,” I managed to get out, which caused Helen to duck her head. “Not just baby vampire horny either. Oh, well then. Rosalyn, you remember how to get back there?”

  “Yes, I will have her text you when I arrive, so you can confirm that I didn’t do something that might cause a war between you and my race.”

  “That would be awfully stupid of you.”

  “I know, vampires hold grudges a long time.”

  “And I can kill people with my mind,” I said pointedly, not understanding why I kept having to repeat myself.

  That was pretty well the only thing that we had going for us. The fact that we didn’t need the tool or the death of the month. We just needed my damned head to work.

  Rosalyn shrugged. “Humans have this nifty thing now called a gun, and we’re pretty certain you don’t have to be alive to get our blood in you and make your power useless to us.”

  She took the cooler from me and the bag from a startled Helen, then turned and marched off down the street. Nothing about her was suspicious. She hadn’t been a part of the fight itself. Just a woman walking down the street with a grocery bag and a cooler in the early hours of the morning. She might have been off to an early morning job, for all any witness might know.

  “And now people expect us to have sex,” Helen grumbled.

  “We aren’t going to,” I responded. “Your side is ripped open, for one, and for two, the kind of sex she thinks we’re going to have doesn’t happen in a couple of hours. It is a slow tease and you begging me for it. Not a quickie in the alleyway while Bau sneaks up and kills us.”

  “Did you not just kill her?”

  “Three is a very powerful number for the witches. Hence the Oracle being three. Once for the mortal she once was, once for the vampire she should have been, and once more to cleanse the world of what she has become.”

  Helen muttered something under her breath, but I didn’t catch what she said.

  “Each time has to be different. I’m betting. So how do we do that?”

  “Great Maker had best be on her way here right now. If not, I’m pretty certain the count starts over tomorrow morning.”

  “Can’t Anna tell you the death of the month?”

  “Oh, good plan,” I said, pulling out my phone to text her. “Can’t be a volcano,
because that was sometime in the hot months.”

  “Bonus points if it’s an icicle to the heart.”

  “That’s not going to work, an icicle isn’t hard enough to get between the ribs without a lot of force and if you try to go up and under the ribs you’ve got the other problem of losing structural integrity to the point that the ice no longer carries whatever magical property that makes it able to kill a vampire. Which I’m guessing at that point is a specific degree of cold.”

  “Have you…”

  “Of course, I made a mess though, didn’t accomplish what I set out to do. Had to chase the poor bastard down and eat him.”

  “Okay, well, while we wait, could we go find Peter again?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with him, and two immortals need to die tonight, so there’s still a chance of one of them being me. I’d like to pick the bone while I still have teeth.”

  “An odd last request, but all right. You can’t eat him.”

  “I’m not going to eat him,” she said with a shake of her head, then a grimace. After a moment, she stuck her tongue out and made a disgusted sound on top of all the rest. “Eat him? As in putting him in my mouth? Ew.”

  “We don’t have to die tonight, just two immortals. There’s still a chance that it’s Bau and Lucrecia.”

  “Says the guy who neglected to mention to me that we probably had to kill the boss monster three times,” she grumbled.

  “We aren’t going to die tonight,” I said, pulling her towards me.

  “Is it weird that I miss my old life?” she asked. “Or even the first night?”

  “Back when vampires were maybe real, and nothing else existed?” I asked. “No monsters to kill, no old creatures to worry about, or witch magic to fend off.”

  “Yeah, that’s...” she trailed off. “If we had used the tool, she would have been dead the first time.”

  “It’s supposed to kill everything,” I said. “So, I suppose, yes.”

  “Okay, then let’s go to Lucrecia’s place. Make certain she’s all right and wait there for the tool.”

  “You don’t want to see Peter now?”

  “No, see my family? That’s probably not a great way to make me want to see the dawn. Let’s just go make certain Lucrecia is okay.”