Dead Rising

by Debra Dunbar

  I frowned, thinking. Bella seemed okay now, but she hadn’t been injured before having the seizure. I could only hope these guys could ride this out because there was a necromantic spell or summoning coming our way.

  Then it hit me. Bella. Shay. That was the night Dario had ditched me on the curb and I’d needed to walk home, the night the Robertson family had been summoned from their graves. The first night Russell had performed his magic on his family.

  And Shay hadn’t risen, hadn’t come to him, not because she was buried far away but because she wasn’t dead. Well, sort of not dead.

  I lowered my sword and gaped at the vampire convulsing on the floor, new wounds opening beside the old and adding their dark blood to the soaked carpet. Summoning the spirit of a living human would do nothing. Outside of demonic action, our spirits remained solidly in our bodies until we died. But vampires weren’t truly alive, and thus their spirits were in a sort of transition zone between this life and the next.

  The seizures suddenly made sense. Russell was summoning the souls out of the vampires. Shay had survived it, but these vampires were weak from their injuries. Plus I was sure the necromancer was putting considerably more force into this spell than one meant to awaken a beloved sibling.

  They were going to die—this vampire and probably the others, too. And I still had no idea what to do to help them. Think. Think. I had nothing handy to anchor vampire souls in their bodies, no research to fall back on. I had only one idea, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant for anyone in this room.

  I placed the sword tip-down on the floor and grasped it low. Touching my heart, I went down on one knee and made the sign of the cross with my other hand.

  “Jesu, luys im chanaparhy.”

  A tunnel of light shot from me across the room, creating a wall in front of the injured vampires. I spun around and did another. And another until there was a ring of light surrounding them all. It wouldn’t last, but it didn’t need to. It only needed to be enough to disrupt the summoning.

  It seemed to be working although my blessing was giving them all a heart attack. Instead of two vampires screaming, I now had eight. Arms and hands shot up to shield their eyes. I saw Leonora paw at her skin, faint blisters forming on the pale flesh. It wasn’t touching them, but the presence of the holy light wasn’t without effect.

  “Turn it off! It burns. Turn it off!” she shouted, waving a hand in front of her as if she could push the light away.

  I couldn’t turn it off. Not yet. Because while my light was causing everyone pain, the two injured vampires had stopped convulsing. A few burns were better than having one’s soul ripped out, at least in my opinion.

  A spell takes seconds to disrupt, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I counted down from twenty then dismissed the passageways. Holding my breath, I watched the vampires on the floor, praying they wouldn’t begin convulsing again.

  “What the hell was that?” Lenora spat. Her teeth were dark with blood, and her eyes pale, as if she had cataracts. “If you ever do that again, I’ll rip your throat out.”

  I took a step closer to Dario. He was examining the injured vampire. The others seemed to have suffered no worse than blistered skin after proximity to my blessed pathway. “I had to break the spell. The necromancer. He’s using his spirit-summoning ritual to pull the souls from vampires and kill them.”

  “How can he do that?” Leonora asked.

  “Technically you’re dead. The spell works on the dead.”

  “I get that.” The Mistress stood and gestured toward the vampire on the floor. He wasn’t breathing, and with vampires I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “But how? And why weren’t all of us affected? How can he target just the injured ones?”

  He couldn’t. It was a different sort of targeting all together. “He needs a focus item in order to call forth a spirit. In theory, if he were powerful enough, he wouldn’t need a focus and he could do a blanket summoning. If he did that, then all of you would have been affected. He’s not that powerful. Somehow he managed to get a focus item from the vampires that had seizures.”

  “A focus item?” Leonora’s eyes were beginning to lose their cloudy film, and her mouth was no longer bloody. “What, like hair or fingernail clippings?”

  “That’s not the foundational path of this spell. It needs an item of significance.” I thought back to the collection I’d seen in the ruins of the Robertson family home. “A beloved stuffed animal, a favored piece of jewelry. There needs to be a significance on the part of both the caster and the spirit. Something the mage clearly identifies with the intended recipient of the spell, as well as something that the victim recognizes as their own.”

  The stronger the emotional tie to the victim, the better, but any ownership tie would do for a focus.

  “The stolen items.” Dario walked over to me. “Last week when that blood donor poisoned his vampires and we first found the symbol, there were items stolen from the house. For the most part they weren’t items of value, so we thought it was just an annoyance act.”

  “Can you put together a list of everything stolen and which vampire the objects belong to?”

  Dario exchanged a glance with Leonora. She nodded. “There might be one or two items that we miss. I don’t always inventory my belongings every night, and I’m sure others don’t either.”

  “That donor wasn’t here long that night, so I’m thinking it would be items in plain sight—ones that would be noticed missing. And certainly a vampire would remember if a human physically assaulted him and took something from his pocket.”

  “Bridget’s ring was taken,” one of the other vampires spoke up. “She was really upset about it since it was the only item she had left from her human life.”

  Again, Dario and Leonora did some kind of wordless exchange. What the heck were they “talking” about?

  “And him?” I motioned toward the vampire on the floor, the one who still wasn’t breathing.

  The woman still hovering over him looked up, her face strained. “A scrap of cloth. His shirt was torn in the fight that night. And Marcus said he lost an earring. We didn’t think anything about it at the time, figuring it must have fallen out earlier when he was out hunting.”

  “We’ve all had something taken,” Leonora spoke up, her face whiter than usual. “Every one of us.”

  “We need to tell her.” Dario’s eyes were fixed on Leonora. “She needs to know.”

  Know what? I had the feeling whatever I needed to know wasn’t going to be something I was happy about.

  The vampire Mistress glared at me. “That human stole the scepter. It was Aubin’s from when he was turned a thousand years ago in France. We tortured the thief, killed him, but all he gave us was a copy of the symbol we asked you to research and information that some man had paid him to steal it as well as anything he could get his hands on. We weren’t as worried about the other stuff. The scepter is the symbol of our Balaj. It signifies our family, our territory, and our leadership.”

  Scepter. Why couldn’t they just use articles of incorporation like everyone else? “Please tell me it’s just a pretty stick with a ball of glass on top of it.”

  Dario shook his head. “It’s more than symbolic. Remember when you said there was an artifact in the Temple that would allow a necromancer to command an army of the undead? Well, this does the same.”

  Chapter 28

  LET ME GET this straight, Aubin had an object that controls and commands an army of undead. He lugs this thing around Europe and across the ocean. Then your family, headed by Aubin, was cast out of your territory in Haiti and spent nearly a century roaming up the east coast of the U.S., trying to find a new spot to establish your Balaj. The whole time you had this scepter and didn’t use it? How exactly does this particular artifact even work? Do you wave it at the other vampires and command them to get out? Do you bonk the other Master over the head with it?”

  Leonora didn’t seem to appreciate the dark humor I was try
ing to bring into the situation. “We can’t use it without a magic user with enough strength to power it up. Aubin had seen it used once when he was young, and recognized the value of such an item. We’re immortal, and with that comes patience. An object such as the scepter is worth holding onto, even if we only have the chance to use it once in a thousand years.”

  “But you did use it,” I said.

  Dario nodded. “When we came to Baltimore. There was a magic user in Virginia who agreed to activate it and help us seize this territory.”

  I got where this was going. “In return for what? I doubt this magic user would have agreed to use a scepter to control undead without sizable payment.”

  Leonora sneered. “Of course. He wanted us to kill a rival, pay him a sum of cash.”

  “And he wanted the scepter,” Dario added.

  Of course he did. No magician worth his salt would walk on by an artifact like that. Heck, I wanted the scepter, too. Although as a Templar, it was kind of in my job description to collect items like this and take them to the Temple.

  “He didn’t get the scepter, obviously.”

  Leonora made a grunt sound that I took for a laugh. “We got our territory, then killed the mage.”

  I winced. I understood, though. A magic user wouldn’t have given up trying to get the artifact, even if the scepter hadn’t been part of the deal.

  Dario glared at his Mistress, then turned to me. “We were starving, exhausted, we’d lost over half of family members and were giving up hope.”

  All of that was history. What now mattered was that a powerful magical device was in the hands of a necromancer. “So why hasn’t he used it before now?” I mused.

  Leonora shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he’d rather kill us than order us out of Baltimore.”

  I blinked realizing she was probably right. Russell wanted his family to have their revenge. Stealing the scepter was probably a way of ensuring that Leonora couldn’t control the specters he summoned. Not only would that throw a huge monkey wrench into his plan, but he’d hate the thought that vampires once again controlled his family. But now?

  “Exactly how does the scepter work?”

  Russell had called forth murdered dead to attack the vampires, and now he was using focus items to rip their spirits from their bodies. What was plan C? Because there had to be a plan C.

  Leonora took a deep breath and looked around. “Dario, you stay here. This sort of thing needs to be discussed in private.”

  I didn’t like the idea of being alone with a vampire that had threatened my life not two hours earlier, but Dario nodded and turned to attend to an injured vampire, leaving me few choices. If I wanted answers, I’d need to trust Leonora.

  It was much easier to trust her on a full stomach with my sword in hand.

  I followed her out of the room, through a maze of hallways and up a narrow set of stairs to a dark room. She flicked a match against the wall and lit a series of candles that lined the room. “This is my room. It was Aubin’s before, and now it’s mine.”

  “You sleep here?” It seemed odd that she would, given the public nature of this house and her vulnerable position during the daytime hours.

  “On occasion. There was a time when we dared not rest above ground, when the killing rays of the sun weren’t the only thing we feared.”

  The vampire walked around the room, the elaborate silver candelabras. The room was huge, windowless with brocade wallpaper in brown and gold. A giant four-poster bed sat against the far wall, fur pelts draped across the gold satin comforter. The room was rich, opulent and reminded me of Opal’s comment about how Old World Leonora was—French Old World.

  “Templars. I was Aubin’s first offspring, turned over six hundred years ago. Usually over half the vampires in a Balaj are the children or direct descendants of the Master. Such a blood bond creates a tie of loyalty and ensures obedience. It’s important, you see, for the Balaj to act as one. To be ‘on the same page’ as humans now say.”

  “What does this have to do with Templars? Or the scepter?” I didn’t have the patience for this monologue while vampires downstairs died and a potentially dangerous magical artifact lay in the hands of a necromancer.

  Leonora waved a hand at me.

  “During your crusades, vampires were slaughtered by the thousands. I didn’t matter if we broke the ridiculous human laws that shouldn’t apply to us or not. Death came to any vampire who crossed paths with a Templar. In later centuries, heretics were less of a priority for the Templars and they began to hunt supernatural creatures with the purpose of ridding the world of them. Of us.”

  “Not all,” I argued. “We no longer kill heretics, and we no longer blindly kill sentient beings simply because humans are part of their food chain.”

  She laughed, the sound musical and appealing. I suddenly saw Leonora without the leather, as the human she would have been in France six hundred years ago. “No, now you are the kingmakers. Don’t deny it. You hold the knowledge and items of power that would let Templars rule the world if they so chose. Instead they choose to watch, picking who would suit their needs best, and ensuring those individuals rise to leadership positions.”

  I wondered what the hell she was talking about, and I asked her.

  “Do not think to unseat me, Solaria Angelique Ainsworth. I know you favor Dario, that you tease him with the idea that you might someday consent to be his blood slave. If it comes to a battle of power between the two of us, he will die. I hold the loyalty of a majority in this Balaj. I am the eldest, the one with greater power.”

  “But you don’t have the scepter.” It was a stretch, but I figured these topics were somehow connected.

  She swung around to face me, tendrils of black hair flying around her creamy shoulders.

  “I can hold power even without the scepter. Do not think I will be so easily replaced by another of your choosing.”

  Oh good Lord. She thought I was some kind of kingmaker. The idea was just as funny as me being the vigilante paladin of Baltimore.

  “So the scepter makes the Balaj loyal to you? It enforces their obedience?”

  There was a hint of fangs between her blood-red lips. She had to be upset if she was losing control like this. “I’d always been told that the scepter was for commanding armies of the undead. I never realized until a century ago that the undead it commanded weren’t zombie humans or ghosts.”

  Leonora sat carefully in one of the wing-back leather chairs opposite the bed and motioned for me to take the other one. I did, careful to keep my sword at the ready. The room was romantic in a strange, Gothic kind of way and I wasn’t sure that Leonora didn’t have ideas beyond a private chat in mind, her preferences for soft blondes aside.

  “None of us realized the power the scepter granted just through possession. We can’t use it. No one can without magical powers and skill. Still, the one who owns it commands the loyalty and obedience of the Balaj.”

  “No one knew this?” It seemed inconceivable that they hadn’t realized such a thing. How could they not know that their loyalty was magically enforced?

  The Mistress shook her head. “No. We normally owe fealty to our sire. Vampires want a leader to follow, and automatically look toward the eldest and strongest. We thrive in groups with definitive lines of hierarchy. Lone vampires are vicious and quickly fall to human law enforcement or to other vampires. There was nothing to indicate that Aubin wasn’t just an especially charismatic leader.”

  “But what happened? When did you realize otherwise?”

  Lenora steepled her fingers under her chin. “Richmond. In order to secure the assistance of the magic user, Aubin had to leave the scepter with him. A few days later dissention began. Older members of the Balaj began to question Aubin’s judgement and leadership. I was by no means the eldest among us at that point, but as Aubin’s offspring, I knew him best. I also was the only one who knew about the scepter and that he’d needed to loan it out to a magic user.”

 
“But Dario knows. And given that you were discussing it downstairs, others in the Balaj know, too.”

  She nodded. “Yes. When we defeated Aubin in the coup, we needed to steal the scepter from him. That gave us the strength to rebel—even those of us who were his offspring.”

  And now it was gone, and Leonora was facing a division in her ranks. She must be desperate to get it back, but that didn’t explain the danger of such an item in Russell’s hands.

  “You said that Aubin made a deal with a mage to use the scepter in order to gain the Baltimore territory. What happened? What does the scepter do when a mage with the knowledge and power uses it?”

  A smile flickered at the edge of Leonora’s lips. “It commands armies of undead—vampire undead included. They’ll fight for you, die for you, vacate a territory and kill each other for you. Whatever the magic user commands. We could all rise from our sleep and walk into the noonday sun if a mage holding the scepter commands it.”

  She stood and paced as I watched her and digested all this. They’d known the theft of the scepter and the magical symbol were related. No doubt that had been what they feared, not a group of spirits rising from their graves for vengeance. And that’s why Dario had been so cagey about how they’d come across the symbol. I was a Templar, and if I knew about the scepter, I’d be duty bound to find it and haul it away to the Temple—far away from vampire hands. But how had Russell found out about the scepter, and why had he waited this long to use it?

  “Tell me about this guy in Richmond. Do you know anything about his magical specialty? His training and abilities? What exactly happened to the Balaj that used to call Baltimore home?”

  She sighed, her shoulders dropping as she exhaled. “I believe he was involved in demonology, but beyond that I’m not sure. Aubin was not specific about what happened to the vampires in Baltimore. We made our deal, then arrived to find the city cleared and ready for our occupancy. Later a group of Renfields were sent to Richmond to dispatch the magic user.”