Death Mask (Wraith's Rebellion Book 3)

by Aya DeAniege

  Troy got out of the car and closed the door behind him.

  Quin turned in his seat and looked at me. “Troy is in a place right now. The world feels a lot more than it does for you, so you need to go along with it.”

  “But… Quin, I still have a tear in my side. My hair is a freaking mess, and I haven’t eaten all night. I’m hungry.”

  There was a knock on Quin’s door. He rolled down the window and accepted a bundle from Troy, then rolled the window back up.

  “Can you feel that right now?” Balor asked.

  “Feel what?” I responded.

  “Feel the hunger?”

  “Of course I do,” then I thought about it and smacked my forehead against the back of the passenger seat. “No, not that or my guts or the multiple things that must be wrong with me.”

  There was a knock on my window. I opened it and took a bundle of clothing and brush from Troy. After closing the window, I went about the process of changing.

  “So I get starved because I can’t feel?” I asked.

  “No, you aren’t being fed because you aren’t hungry,” Quin said. “Also, the damage on your body will help us get out of the country. Just trust me on that one.”

  “What do I do with the dirty clothing?” I asked, rolling it all together.

  “You change fast,” Balor said in an impressed tone.

  “I grew up with brothers?” I said in response, uncertain how he was expecting me to answer. “And no door as a teen.”

  Balor opened the glove compartment and pulled out a bag, which I stuffed my soiled clothing into. As Quin finished changing, I went about the task of trying to tame my hair.

  “Did someone throw a fan at me?” I asked. “Because I haven’t been this tangled since that day the wind took me by surprise.”

  “You fell from a cloud vortex and towards the ground,” Quin said.

  “So I should be happy that I don’t have to cut it all off and start over, got it,” I said as the brush got stuck.

  I worked my fingers into the knot and found that my hair had gotten tangled around something. It took a few minutes, but I managed to get it untangled.

  “This looks like bone,” I said.

  “Probably from when you were bashing her head into the ground,” Quin said. “Or when you were using the mace to pulverize her entire body.”

  “Shouldn’t it have taken one hit?” I asked.

  “No, she was still alive, Death was certain,” Quin said.

  “Okay, then why does my mouth taste like blood…” I worked my tongue around the inside of my mouth. “And dust?”

  “To kill a vampire in this moon, you have to take them like a harvest.”

  “English, Mr. Fedora.”

  “You have to eat their brain and heart.”

  Balor’s head snapped around as I leaned between the front seats. I looked at Quin, watching as he pointedly stared out the front window.

  “Does that mean I’ll have a case of the nibbles every time I see a dead body?”

  “No idea,” he said.

  “Well, at least it killed her,” I said, sitting back against the seat.

  Troy slipped into the car. “They’re wondering if we’re going to show up,” he said.

  “Right, the pesky interview,” Balor muttered. “Let’s go.”

  We entered the building as one. Balor to my left, per his position on the Council, and our Progeny behind us. Helen and Troy were both looking sleepy, as mortals might after being up all night. Having them there would end any question about whether they were alive.

  Some few might figure it out, put two and two together as mortals put it, but they wouldn’t matter much.

  In a week, the baby vampires would not quite exist. The stock would make comments on them, sightings and filing taxes. My stock, while they couldn’t do work specifically for me, would eventually say that they fell in love, got married, and one day tragically die in a car accident. While cliché, it worked very well. There might even be an orphan from their wild love affair, one which would never know that the pair weren’t their parents and who would maintain the story. The orphan would, of course, have their way paid for them and be well looked after.

  We would even provide identification and plan out that life for them in some small town whose name is always forgotten and constantly moving to avoid stalkers.

  Sometimes it takes a night or so for a plan to come together, but we always figure it out. Making them completely disappear after the charges that had been laid against us was simply foolhardy, we knew that now.

  Hey, we might be immortal, but we’re still allowed to make mistakes and be stupid sometimes.

  “Makeup,” someone called.

  Balor and I looked at one another and grimaced.

  “Is there a way to avoid that?” Balor asked. “What with, well, vampires and makeup tend to cause sneezing.”

  Maintaining the ruse we had started with the interviewers. At his words, the entire area went utterly still. There was a whispering fight at the back of the room. One of them approached us and looked us over, then to Helen and Troy.

  “They seem a little waxy, they’ll need it,” the woman said, peering somewhere above my eyebrows. “Amazing skin condition considering when you were turned.”

  “I was a rich man’s whore,” I countered.

  An eyebrow arched, then she turned to Balor.

  “And your excuse?”

  “I was always vain,” he purred out. “We only carried scars from our mortality. My skin was not so nice as a mortal, but we’ve learned, along with some help from the healing factor of being immortal.”

  We had both suffered skin blemishes while alive, but a blemish is not the same as scarring. Once turned, we rarely had pimples or reddening as if chaffed. The little veins would remain, though with time grow paler like our skin. Moles and the like would also remain. But so long as the face wasn’t scarred during life from too much picking, or an injury, we all looked quite pretty afterward.

  At least, as long as we maintained a cleaning routine that was more than soap and water. Only Amma could get away with using sand and still look like a goddess.

  The woman made a sound at the back of her throat and walked around me to approach Helen and Troy.

  “No lipstick, eyeshadow, or mascara for her,” I snapped out.

  “Keep talking like that, and you’ll make your Progeny jealous,” the woman laughed as she turned to me.

  She met my eyes and paled.

  We hadn’t agreed on being the predator, but if they insisted on being assholes, I’d give them the same face I showed strangers and stock. The look that reminded them that they were prey and I was the big bad wolf.

  “He may be a vampire under the Council, but Quin has the autonomy of any other predator,” Balor said. “That means that so long as he doesn’t kill you or leave evidence enough to be convicted, he won’t be held accountable for his actions.”

  Then he patted me on the arm twice and turned away. I stared at him, wondering if he had lost his mind. Council law was no murder, even if we couldn’t be traced. We were supposed to support that law, which meant not telling mortals we could kill them, if we did it in a smart way.

  “Oh, look at that wisp of a boy!”

  “Man,” I corrected idly.

  “Modern mortals don’t like the insinuation that an adult might be looking at a child,” Helen chimed in as the makeup artists approached her.

  “That’s a boy,” Balor said quietly in Gaelic.

  I shifted my attention for a moment but saw nothing. Frowning, I turned until I was facing Balor entirely. The man frowned at the spot he was looking at, then turned his attention to me. I arched an eyebrow, and his lips pressed together into a thin line.

  He had obviously made a mistake in commenting on something that no one else could see. I almost dismissed it, but then I latched onto the moment and analysed it. There were a couple of options, the first being insanity—but all of us were a little
mad sometimes—and the second was power. The second made me want to question further because I wanted to know if he was seeing a ghost, a creature that was invisible, the afterworld, or if he was inadvertently reading minds by seeing people act out the things which they wanted to do but couldn’t.

  I had to bite my tongue and really focus on the other people to keep from saying something.

  We were fitted with microphones on our shirts and offered little pieces to go in our ear, which we declined. Apparently, some guests used them to get information from someone off stage. We hadn’t brought anyone to help in that matter.

  “As mortal friendly as we can be,” Balor murmured in Gaelic, his accent suddenly getting heavier, his voice a little deeper.

  It would be more difficult to understand what he said to others, as it was little more than a mumbled growl. I got the feeling that Balor dropping into that language meant that he’d be more willing to bite, snarl, and claw at me. We all reverted at some point, but when we dropped into our native tongues, that was when we reverted to that time. As far as I knew, the last time Balor spoke Gaelic was when he had been a king.

  And I hadn’t been joking about his reputation. He might not have been the one cutting arms off and hanging vampires by their ankles in the sunlight over a bonfire, but he still had those connections. His hound had enjoyed the work, and would be more than willing to do it again.

  Especially to me.

  The Council didn’t know the hound’s name, simply used the name the Oracle had given him. The Warlord.

  “Mortal friendly is for the mortals,” I responded in Latin.

  A couple of people skittered away, but Latin wasn’t quite as dead as we would want it to be. That was also why I had used that language, because one or two might know, but it would also be picked up by the microphone and someone later on would hear the warning.

  “Sumerian?” Balor asked with an eyebrow waggle.

  “You look a fool,” I countered in the language.

  “This way!” someone chimed in as Balor and I scowled at one another.

  “Linked to this moron for a century,” I grumbled as I walked off.

  “You’re not so pretty yourself,” he called after me.

  “English,” Helen hissed after us. “Unless you plan on translating for the tablet’s sake.”

  “So much for making it fiction,” I muttered in English.

  “Plans change, even for immortals,” Troy quipped.

  “Especially for immortals, my boy, especially for us,” Balor said, raising a finger to shake it once as we were told to sit on a couch.

  We sat as they told us to, with Balor and I on one side, and Helen and Troy on the other. The moment the person walked off, I stood and motioned. Troy and Helen moved over, placing Troy right by Balor and myself on their other side.

  I looked around the stage and sighed out as someone sputtered. Ever so slowly, I turned towards the sputter and made a questioning sound at the back of my throat.

  “I had you sitting over there,” they protested.

  “This is where I belong,” I said.

  “But they want shots—”

  “I care not if I make your task in filming a vampire—who you don’t believe is a vampire—more difficult.”

  Mortals expected us to speak like that, and I must admit, I loved doing it just to mess with them. They were too afraid to interrupt me, so I could go on for hours and hours while answering one question. I could be wordy, I knew it, and I didn’t care.

  “It’s fine,” the interviewer said as she stepped onto the stage. “It’s fine, just let it be.”

  Balor and I turned to the woman as one. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t say why.

  “Boudica, but blonde,” Balor said.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s what that is,” I said. “Except I never met her.”

  “That’s right, you avoided my territory, given my demand of any vampire who ventured into it.”

  Every vampire ended up under Balor and offered to his hound.

  Oh, yes, Balor is what a human would call a slut. He’d sleep with just about anything that moved or irritated him, but he only offered first if he was really interested. At some point over the next century, he would offer to either have sex with me, or to spread his legs for me. I wouldn’t take it as an insult, because I knew that was what he did.

  If he couldn’t have sex with it, he tended to kill it. Thus, I had to make a decision at some point about just how attached I was to my limbs, and if Balor was able to make an exception based on my background.

  “You’re a horny pervert,” I countered.

  “I could have been the best sex of your life.”

  “Still not happening.”

  That was not the offer. That was just a joke on his part. The fact that I hadn’t woken to him climbing into bed with me was either a testament to his attachment to Troy, or his fear over my ability to kill him.

  We had that little back and forth in English. It seemed to put a few of the mortals at ease. The topic put me on edge. No vampire brought up their past unless they wanted something. Balor was not one to break that rule. He might remind us that he had once led his own faction, but that was the extent of his talking about his history.

  What I had told Helen a week before had been everything that I knew for certain about Balor. I knew his court had a hound, I knew what payment he demanded of any vampire even visiting. I also knew that those who said no or resisted ended up dead or in pain, and that he was a notorious slut.

  I didn’t know who his Maker was, the names of anyone else in his faction, or how exactly he ruled beyond rumours and little events that had happened over the years.

  The interviewer did her introduction and then went about explaining who we were. The Council had set up the interview, and I assumed they had been clear about what topics could and could not be touched. We hadn’t been told what those topics were ahead of time, or I hadn’t is what I should say.

  Possibly because whoever set it up—I assume Lucrecia did—had been upset with me when the questions had been arranged.

  I doubt we put anyone in danger by doing the interview. It was a relatively small channel, those within the city may have seen it. So, a few thousand people. The same number might have retained that there had been a warrant issued, but that wasn’t to be brought up.

  Here’s the thing with everyone, mortal and immortal alike: there’s just too much information in the world to observe everything.

  Most of us blur out a great deal about the world. If we took it all in, we’d be overwhelmed.

  Unless you knew the context of everything you were viewing, you wouldn’t get the whole. Some watching the interview may have been confused about Troy and Helen. Some might have assumed they were our Progeny. Some may have heard and paid attention to the warrant and known that it was our way of showing that there was no need for it. A few might even think that having the pair there was a threat to everyone else.

  Only those who had taken part in the night, and perhaps the interviewers studiously recording and backing up everything, would know exactly what was going on and who they were.

  But an interview on a small, nameless channel somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area was not something for us to be concerned about when we wouldn’t be in Canada as of two hours after the interview. It was simply a small interview setup with a local channel that had realized that the new vampires were right in their own backyard. We were rewarding the clever humans, in a way.

  “Can I start by asking about the, uh, ruffled look?” the interviewer asked, looking at me and smiling, cocking her head to the side as I frowned at her.

  “Oh,” I said, jumping when Helen jabbed me in my ribs. “Yes, I’ve been working closely with Wraith. Tonight we brought down a very old vampire who meant to cause trouble.”

  “We heard nothing of this.”

  “That’d be the point, wouldn’t it?” I countered.

  “What he means is that it was Council bus
iness. The governments which have acknowledged our existence have been very clear. They will not help us with our problem members. And it’s understandable, mortals cannot kill us, so why put mortal lives at risk?

  “With that in mind, the Council has chosen to deal with vampire problems out of sight of mortals. We will not involve your police forces in anything vampire, not if we can help it.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, clearly struggling for a moment. “How interesting. Uh,” her head turned slightly, probably listening to the little thing in her ear. “Do the events of the night have anything to do with the incident over the highway?”

  “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” Balor said, turning to me. “Incident over the highway?”

  His asking that wasn’t just asking it. While the words were spoken in a questioning tone, they should have been more of a demand and a snarl. Balor wasn’t upset because something had happened over a highway, he had known about it. We had been having a conversation at that very time.

  We had once convinced an entire town that there were aliens overhead when something happened that I’m not supposed to share.

  No, Balor was upset because humans were talking about it. His anger was more of a general anger, not a real thought at all.

  “Interesting,” I said. I nodded once, then decided to do a good old gas lighting. “I do find it interesting that now that we have come out, humans are blaming us for everything from a woman abandoning her family, to things falling from the sky. Because I do believe that was what I heard earlier tonight, was that there was some meteor shower. How could a meteor shower be our fault? We can’t fly.”

  Troy almost said something but wound up ducking his head and scratching at his shoulder instead.

  Smart asses get eaten.

  That could be fun.

  He’s male.

  Still might be…

  I frowned and glared at my hand, trying to type away on my leg. I rubbed leg and looked up again.

  “We have received countless requests from humans for the entire vampire population to kill themselves. Because we eat you, and in that eating might kill you.”

  “There’s concern about the enslavement of the human race. It’s perfectly natural to have that reaction.”