Cheating Death

by April White

  When he was satisfied that he could open it again, he gave me a quick thumbs-up and we ventured farther into the room. The fact that the lamp had been left lit made me nervous, so I looked around for places to hide. There was a long settee with a high back against a far wall that might offer a short-term solution if someone came in unexpectedly. There was also a large cabinet across from it that looked like it could hold one or maybe two of us in a pinch.

  Tom went to the desk and rifled through it quietly.

  “What are you looking for?” I whispered.

  “You felt a Monger, right? Well, every Monger in this place is a potential ring-bearer. I just want to know whose office this is.” He was growly, even at no volume, and I looked sharply at him.

  “What’s wrong?” I peered at him in the dim light of the lantern. Stress was visible in his face, and every muscle in his body seemed tightly coiled and ready to spring. My own expression filled with concern. “Seriously, what’s going on?” I whispered.

  Tom fingered a sharp, dagger-shaped letter opener on the desk. The biting words he had been about to fling drained away, and he sagged very slightly. “I don’t know. I can’t get enough air …” His whisper faded as he shifted his eyes away. He wouldn’t meet my gaze and I shot Ringo a worried glance.

  Ringo held up a hand for attention, and then we all heard it – the return of shuffling footsteps.

  Ringo dove behind the settee while Tom and I leapt for the cabinet. We pulled the cabinet closed just as the office door opened.

  I was smashed against the back wall of the cabinet with Tom’s back pressed against my front. I could feel the pounding of his heart in my own chest, and a wave of Monger sickness washed over me. I stifled a gasp against his back and clutched at him to keep my knees from buckling. Tom had never affected me so strongly before, and my Cat practically screamed her danger warnings in my head.

  I struggled to control my instinct to fling open the door and bolt, and forced myself to concentrate on slow, rhythmic breaths. Finally, my heart rate dropped enough that I could think logically.

  Tom’s Monger half had usually only caused a vague sickness in me, except during the war when he was a direct danger to us. Maybe he still hated me, which was entirely possible, but I had never been this sick around him before, even at his most dangerous.

  So maybe it wasn’t Tom who was making me ill.

  I made my fingers relax their grip on Tom’s coat, and he exhaled softly. My tension had affected him too, or maybe it wasn’t just because of me – maybe the person who had just entered the office was the source of distress for both of us.

  I had reacted so strongly that I hadn’t been able to hear movements around the office. When I focused my attention back to the person in the room, I heard what sounded like the shuffling of papers on the desk. I forced my Cat’s natural flight instinct down and got my panic responses under control.

  The paper shuffling stopped, and the chair scraped back from the desk. I held my breath. Tom’s heart hammered into my chest through his back, his shoulder blade dug into my chest, and he practically quivered with strung-out tension. I had the random thought that he would not be my first choice of someone to spoon with on a cold night.

  The shuffling footsteps resumed, and I sincerely hoped the person was headed back out the door. The Monger sickness was still in full force, but I had managed to rein it in to the point that I was functional, and my hearing was super-tuned to the motions of the person in the office. So when the shuffling footsteps halted suddenly, my stomach lurched.

  There was a pause, and then, “You there!”

  The voice was male and English, but more than that I didn’t have time to register because Tom threw open the door and lunged out of the closet.

  I stumbled into the room and then stared in utter horror as Tom hurled himself at Bishop Wilder.

  The Bishop

  “Noooooo!” I screamed. My Cat surged to the surface wanting to break free, and I struggled to hold her back.

  Ringo threw himself at Tom, but Tom had locked onto Wilder with the iron grip of every corded muscle in his body.

  “Aiuto!” the bishop bellowed as Tom plowed him into the desk. Ringo tried to grab Tom’s arms to pull him off Wilder, but Tom didn’t even seem to notice. He was completely focused on killing the man who had tortured him.

  Tom got one arm around Wilder’s throat in a headlock and pulled back with all his strength. The man’s windpipe was being crushed, and he was turning red under Tom’s grip. Wilder flailed wildly, knocking papers off the desk as he grabbed for something to break the hold that was strangling him.

  I wrestled for my own control, forcing my muscles to lock so I couldn’t Shift. The sound of pounding feet in the hallway outside the office caused a fresh surge of fear to fuel my Cat’s grab for power. I couldn’t tear my eyes from Tom and Bishop Wilder, but I couldn’t move to help Tom without losing my grip on my human form.

  “Watch it, Tom!” yelled Ringo as Wilder grabbed the letter opener and plunged it into Tom’s hand where it gripped the desk.

  My nightmare had come true.

  Tom roared and scrambled for the knife. Wilder spun out of his grip as Tom yanked out the knife and freed his hand. Blood spurted from the stab wound and then blossomed from multiple old wounds in his torso, but before Wilder could dance out of the way, Tom lunged forward with the knife.

  “No!” I screamed.

  The office door slammed open and knocked Wilder out of the way just as Ringo grabbed Tom’s elbows to hold him back. Tom yanked himself free, but the four Swiss Guard who charged into the room stood between Tom and Wilder with deadly halberds crossed.

  Tom could have easily wrenched his arms from Ringo’s grip, but with two quick moves the guards would have taken his head off with their halberds. I took a step forward and stumbled.

  “Tom!” I cried out in anguish. “You’re bleeding.”

  He blinked as though he only just became aware of his surroundings, and looked down at his hand, still clenched in a bloody fist. A wet stain of blood had spread across the back of it where the letter opener had gone in, and his palm was smeared with it.

  Wilder snarled something in Italian to the Swiss Guard who tried to help him up, and he shook off the help. Wilder turned his eyes to Tom in a hateful glare.

  “You will pay for this!” he growled in English. Then he gestured toward us and gave a command in Italian that sounded like “take them away.”

  The three of us were unceremoniously marched out of Wilder’s office by Swiss Guard who neither knew nor cared who we were or what we had to say. But honestly, there wasn’t anything to say. We had been caught inside the Vatican after hours, in a private office, and one of us had attacked a bishop. It didn’t get much more red-handed than that. The guards were so well-armed they didn’t even bother to search us for weapons. We had left our bags at Artemisia’s villa, and the only things I carried on me were my daggers, a small tin of green medicine, and my mini Maglite.

  I studied the guards that surrounded us. They moved with calm efficiency and utter certainty of their deadliness should we make a wrong move. Despite their ridiculous crimson-and-gold-striped clothing, they moved with the coiled confidence of a special forces unit, and I knew it would be very bad for my health to resist whatever they planned for us.

  We descended to a level deeper than the one on which the secret archives had been housed, and it suddenly hit me that we were going to the dungeons. I had never heard anything about dungeons in the Vatican, but of course it had them. To punish heretics, the Catholics had invented some of the cruelest tortures in history, and a city ruled by the pope would be the headquarters for that kind of nastiness.

  So, we had that to look forward to.

  The walls around us were made of stone blocks, and the air was cold and smelled fetid, like damp gym socks that had been dipped in blood before being tossed in the corner to mold. I stumbled on a step and Ringo’s hands flashed out to steady me, even as
the guard closest to me shoved me backward.

  “Thank you,” I said under my breath to Ringo. He was glaring at the guard and didn’t hear me. I looked closely at him and realized he was just barely keeping it together. I glanced at Tom and found him also wound tighter than a spinning top. I, on the other hand, was completely and possibly disturbingly calm about the whole thing.

  The lowest level opened into a decent-sized room. One of the guards who had lit our way with a lantern went in first. Rats skittered away into the darkest corners to escape the light, and I watched in idle fascination as one rat ran across the floor in such a panic that he fell through a metal grate. There was a scuffling movement below, a terrified squeal, and then silence.

  Something was down there.

  Hopefully we weren’t about to join it.

  When the guard with the lantern had decided there were no unexpected boogymen in the corners, he said something to his fellow guardsmen and all four of them filed out of the room without a backward glance at us. The heavy wooden door slammed shut, and the crossbar thunked into place on the outside.

  We were left in complete darkness.

  My Maglite was out of my pocket and on first, though Ringo was right behind me in the illumination department. He went straight to the door to check how locked in we actually were, and I turned to Tom to see how the stab wound in his hand had healed. Before I could speak, Tom seemed to just crumple in place, sinking into a heap on the dirt floor.

  “Tom!” I rushed to him, and Ringo warned me with a sharp tone.

  “Watch ‘is blood, Saira!”

  I ignored Ringo, sank down to my knees in front of Tom, and reached for his face. I cradled it in one hand while I shone the flashlight at it with the other. Tom stared at nothing and didn’t even blink in the light.

  “Hey,” I said softly. Somehow the different tone of voice drew his eyes to mine. He stared at me in silence for a long moment, and then his eyes began to fill with tears.

  “He’s here,” Tom whispered.

  I pulled him to my chest and held him close. He didn’t make a sound or touch me in return. The shivering began then, and I clutched him to me and tried to quell his tremors while I gently rocked him.

  “Shhh,” I murmured. “You’re safe, Tom.” It maybe wasn’t the best thing to say to someone in a dungeon, but at that moment it wasn’t a lie.

  Gradually the shaking subsided, and Tom pulled back from my embrace. He scrubbed at his face and left a smear of pink behind on a cheek from the blood on his hand.

  “Are you still bleeding?”

  He cleared his throat and shook his head. “It closed up when they were bringing us down here.”

  “That took too long though.” I looked at the hand that had been stabbed. His coat and shirt sleeve were stained dark red. “You lost a lot of blood.”

  He barked a bitter laugh. “I don’t miss it.”

  “If ye don’t mind me askin’,” growled Ringo, “what the bloody ‘ell is Bishop Wilder doin’ ‘ere at the Vatican?” His street accent had been diminishing bit by bit since I knew him, but he reverted back to it with gusto when he was angry.

  “How did he know I was here?” There was genuine anguish in Tom’s voice, and Ringo snarled, clearly impatient with Tom’s self-pity.

  “‘E didn’t know ye. ‘E didn’t know any of us. ‘E’s dead. We killed ‘im in 1429 after Orléans, and we burned ‘is body. That’s not the man who tortured ye, Tom. That’s the man who will.” Ringo’s tone was harsh, and his words felt like a slap.

  “I’m sure you mean to be helpful, Ringo, but seriously?” I said.

  Tom looked like a cornered animal again, and I reached out to him. “Hey, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get out of here, okay?”

  A rustling sound came from beneath the grate in the floor and we all froze. Whatever was down there sounded bigger than a rat. Much bigger.

  I looked up at Ringo with a question in my eyes, and then an ancient-sounding voice cracked. “Saira? Is it really Saira Elian?”

  My eyes widened in shock, and Ringo strode to the grate and stood over it. He shone the light down into it and then inhaled sharply. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in a stunned voice.

  “They had little to do with it,” said the voice again from beneath the grate. There was the tiniest hint of humor in it, and suddenly I recognized the speaker.

  I got up from the floor so suddenly I almost fell. “Bas?” I cried out, half-panicked, and totally horrified. I stared down through the grate and swayed against Ringo at the sight of our friend, for it really was our friend Bas, the eleventh-century Moorish Vampire we’d spent time with in France – first in 1429, and then again in 1944. “Oh God! What are you doing here?”

  “Despite pretensions to the contrary, I’d say God is scarce in this place at the moment,” he said, squinting up at me. Ringo shifted the beam of light away from his face, but not before I registered the extent of the horror that the beautiful man had become.

  He was emaciated, and his normally warm-toned brown skin was ashen and gray. His cheekbones and jaw, formerly strong and chiseled, were sharpened bone under taut bearded skin, and the bones that circled his neck looked like a metal collar. Old scars covered his bare torso, and his only clothing was a pair of tattered cotton trousers stained dark with dried blood.

  The hole he stood in was a stone-lined pit, just deep enough that he couldn’t reach the grate over his head, and just wide enough that he could sit but not stretch his legs or arms out to rest. Ringo had already bent to grip the heavy metal grate.

  “Saira, ‘elp me so it doesn’t fall on ‘im.”

  I quickly threaded my fingers through the holes in the grate and lifted. It was heavier than I expected, and even with two of us, it was hard work to pull the metal high enough to clear the stones it was seated in. When we finally hauled it to one side, Ringo laid flat on the ground and hung his torso into the hole, reaching his arms down to Bas.

  “‘Ere, take my ‘ands,” Ringo said.

  Bas shook his head. “No. It’s been too long since I’ve eaten. I’m dangerous to you.”

  I huffed and leaned back over the hole to see him. “You look approximately strong enough to catch a turtle, and I’ll slice a vein if I have to so you can have my blood.”

  Ringo spoke in a grim tone. “Between the two of us and our knives, ye can eat if ye don’t get greedy. But ye’ll ‘ave to lick the blood when it runs down our skin, because we can’t afford yer infection.”

  Tom came to stand by the edge of the hole. He looked down at Bas, and his tone had an accusatory edge. “I know you.”

  Bas peered up at him, squinting through the indirect flashlight beams. He regarded Tom for a moment. “I don’t know you.”

  Tom shook his head. “Yeah, during the war. You were in the church that burned.”

  Bas’ eyes shifted to mine. “I have a feeling that is an interesting story.”

  I looked pointedly at Tom. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  Tom looked startled for a moment, then he turned his accusing look to me. “How do you know a prisoner in the Vatican dungeons?”

  I nodded. “Bas helped us get to Orléans.” The part I didn’t say was so we could fix a time stream split and get back to kill Wilder and find you, since I was pretty sure that was what fueled Tom’s hatred of me.

  Tom regarded Bas for a long moment, and I had the sense I was watching a dominance battle in the wild. Maybe it was a Vampire thing, or maybe it was a man thing – whatever it was, the whole thing was done wordlessly, with the eyes. Bas never broke eye contact with Tom, which was very interesting given his pitiable condition. And despite how young he was, Tom didn’t look away.

  “What happened to you?” Tom finally asked.

  “Let’s get him out of there before we start grilling him, okay?” I was impatient to do something to help him so I could Clock us all out of there.

  “We still haven’t addressed the fact that I’m exceptionally
dangerous to you all right now,” Bas’ tone was mild, but I sensed tension and maybe urgency underneath his words.

  “Not to me, you aren’t,” Tom said.

  I made a sound of frustration, but Bas tilted his head a little as he regarded Tom. I was reminded that Bas had been a Shifter Eagle before he’d been turned, and he hadn’t lost the gestures of a bird of prey.

  “I was drained of my blood and apparently expected to die in this pit. I was unconscious when they threw me in here, so I’m not entirely sure of his motives.” Bas relayed the information as if he were listing ingredients to a recipe, with no emotion whatsoever, but I gasped out loud anyway.

  “Whose motives?” Tom asked carefully.

  Bas waved weakly in a dismissive gesture. “The bishop who deals with all the heretics, one of which I’ve been assured repeatedly I am. An older, distinguished English fellow of Duncan’s Family.”

  “Wilder.” Tom said in a flat tone.

  Bas looked mildly surprised. “Yes, that’s the name. Wilder. You know him?”

  Tom scowled, and I struggled to contain the scream of frustration and horror that had been building since we encountered Wilder in this time.

  There was an echo of sound somewhere above us – the clang of something metal – and I jumped.

  “Saira, get started on a spiral,” Tom ordered. I almost resisted, but he had already turned to Ringo. “Help me lift him out, but I’ll do the pulling.” Tom gazed grimly at Bas. “You can drink from me until you’re strong enough not to need them, but know that I will kill you if you try to take more than I’m willing to give.”

  There was another clang above us, but closer. It sounded like doors slamming shut. “Do it, Saira!” Tom’s tone didn’t allow for argument, and I was a little surprised I didn’t push back automatically. Instead, I grabbed one of my daggers out of its sheath, knelt down to the hard-packed dirt floor on the opposite side of the pit from the door, and started to carve spirals into the dirt.