Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “Is it wise to leave a calling card like that?” Skye asked nervously, breaking the silence. Their presence at the university was a secret—though not well kept, as many of the locals had started to request their assistance. The Spanish government knew of their existence but did not openly acknowledge them, explaining away the activity at the University of Salamanca as a small garrison of mixed Spanish military forces. In a way that was true. Three of their teachers were Spanish military officers. The three taught many of the combat classes; one of them, Felipe Santasiero, had also been Jenn’s Spanish tutor.

  As for the real Spanish armed forces, those who knew the truth resented the Salamancans, calling them las pulgas—the fleas. General Maldonaldo of the Spanish army feared them. A conservative man, he knew the Salamancans used magicks . . . and magicks, he believed, were the work of the Devil. The Devil was alive in all the bloodshed and mayhem; General Maldonaldo did not wish el diablo to drink any more Spanish blood. He would never have accepted that Father Juan shared that wish.

  Jenn shifted her weight as she looked at the pennant. Her back was throbbing. “If planting our flag in the dust of dead Cursed Ones makes the C.O.’s even a little bit afraid of us, I’m all for it.”

  “Unless it’s a code,” Jamie said. “Like, ‘Got the memo, thanks. Still not dead.’”

  “Jamie, please. He’s one of us.” Skye glanced over at Antonio. “I’ve thrown the runes. We can trust him.”

  “Most vampires stink, and Antonio doesn’t,” Holgar said in his Danish accent, making as if to sniff the air. “Besides, he saved my life.” He looked at Jamie. “Yours, too. Last time we were out. That is, how you say in English, ‘sweet.’ And sweeter for you, Jamie, since your life means so much to you.”

  “Down, boy,” Skye murmured, placing a hand on Holgar’s forearm. “We’re all on edge. But it does seem like they were expecting us.”

  “Cast magicks when you get back,” Eriko suggested. “You and Father Juan together. Perhaps you can scry the source of a leak. We may simply have been unlucky.”

  “Born under a bad star,” Jamie said. He grimaced at Holgar. “Or a bad full moon.”

  Holgar sighed. “It’s not wise to bait a werewolf.”

  Jamie showed his teeth, then spat in the ashes. “Fine. You know I’d love to rabbit on, but I’m jacked.”

  Skye pursed her lips, and Eriko nodded. Jenn was at a loss. Two years at the academy and two months as teammates, and Jenn still couldn’t keep up with a lot of what Jamie said. It was bad enough that Skye had a thick Cockney accent, Antonio liberally laced his English with Spanish, Eriko swore in Japanese, and Holgar had a tendency to talk to himself in a series of growls, howls, and yips that only a dog, or another werewolf, could understand. With Jamie it was somehow worse. She understood the words he used but couldn’t even begin to fathom half their meanings.

  “He wants to go,” Skye said, by way of translation. “He’s tired. We all are.” Skye the peacemaker.

  Tacitly agreeing to drop their hostilities, the six fanned out, walking in a circular formation in the event that there were more vampires. Skye had put out the fires in the houses visible from the plaza area. Slowly, people began to congregate, some emerging from the forest where they had sought refuge. When they saw the hunters, they broke into a chorus of cheers. Men in jeans and business suits, girls Jenn’s age all fashion-forward and trendy. A guy in a Hellboy T-shirt held up his cell phone, filming them.

  “Bloody hell,” Jamie said. “They’ll be wanting us to pose and sign autographs.”

  “We should do it,” Skye said. “You know there’s a lot of hunter haters out there.”

  “That’s in America, not Spain,” Holgar insisted.

  “I need a smoke,” Jamie said.

  “Antonio, you should get out of here,” Eriko cautioned. So far no civilians had ever discovered Antonio was a vampire—most of the time you couldn’t tell just by looking at him—but there was no reason to take unnecessary chances. The smell of blood from something as small as a paper cut could bring on the bloodlust, which would make his fangs grow and his eyes flash red.

  “I’ll be at the van,” Antonio said, turning to go.

  Jenn trotted up beside him, and his sharp features softened. He took her hand and squeezed it, not too hard. He could have shattered every bone if he wanted to. He was even stronger than Eriko.

  Behind them the cheers grew louder. The survivors were rejoicing. Soon they would grow more sober, as some of their wounded joined the ranks of their dead. Jenn had seen it before. It would be worse this time; so much of the town had been burned. It would take a long time to rebuild. She felt guilty at her relief that she wouldn’t have to help clean up and help them start over. She didn’t know anything about creating, but thanks to the academy she knew a lot about destroying.

  “I’m glad you’re not hurt,” Jenn told him, trying to shut out the sounds of cheers that were growing in strength behind them. “When I saw you land in those flames—”

  “Jamie’s right,” he interrupted her, the red glow of bloodlust back in his eyes. A thrill skittered up her spine. His fangs were beginning to lengthen.

  “He’s right to mistrust me,” he went on. “And he’s right to think there is a traitor among us, or a spy at the Academia. Someone told those vampires we were coming. We were very lucky none of us were killed.”

  “Well, none of us were,” she reminded him, swallowing hard.

  “Not yet,” he replied, his voice rough and deep. And his eyes glowed full on at her beneath the glistening silver rays of the Spanish moon.

  She lowered her gaze and trudged to their white Mercedes-Benz Vito van. Skye’s protective spells had kept the van hidden from strangers and untouched by fire. The oak grove it was parked in, on the other hand, had been half consumed, and much of the smoldering remains would be nothing but ash by dawn.

  Antonio slid behind the wheel, and a couple of minutes later when the others joined them, Jenn found herself wedged between Holgar and him. It’s like those old horror movies I used to watch with Papa Che when I was little: werewolves and vampires, she thought, and instantly felt very silly and even more guilty.

  In the backseat Jamie lounged between Eriko and Skye, and he was snoring loudly before they were back on the road.

  “Can’t you do anything about that?” Antonio asked through gritted teeth. His hearing was sharper than theirs, which made him a great lookout.

  And could make him an even better traitor. . . .

  Skye muttered a spell, and silence descended. Jamie was still snoring; they just couldn’t hear it anymore. Then the witch did some work on Jenn’s back and mercifully took away the pain. Jenn wearily closed her eyes, bone tired, yet as wired as if she had drunk twenty cups of the thick Torrefacto-roasted Spanish coffee she’d become addicted to. She wished she had some now to wash down the dust and soot and blood that coated her tongue and mouth. Even more than that she wished that she could sleep like Jamie.

  Jamie was the only one who was able to sleep through sheer force of will. He said it was good to rest at every opportunity, because you never knew when and where violence would erupt—something he had learned from his IRA family in Northern Ireland. His parents were dead, savaged a few years before by local Belfast werewolves who were working with the Cursed Ones—who, Jamie claimed, were working with the English. The older hatreds were still there; so were the warriors fighting for the cause of a united Ireland free of English rule. Though Jamie wanted to, the group never went after werewolves, only vampires.

  Jamie had mad fighting skills, but just like the rest of them, he’d still had to train hard to become a hunter. Modern weaponry was forbidden, mostly because it was ineffective against a vampire. To kill one of them you had to move in close and risk your life. Jamie had been training with his grandfather to be a gunsmith before he left to study at the academy. The only thing the Salamancans were likely to kill with a gun was each other. Given the tension between team members, fear
gnawed inside her that someday it might actually come down to that.

  “Gracias, brujita,” Antonio said to Skye as Jenn sighed and moved her shoulders, indicating that Skye’s magicks had soothed her burns. Thank you, little witch. Skye liked it when he called her that. Skye had sensed magickal power emanating from Father Juan, so she had told him that she was a witch. A White Witch, in fact, one of many White Witches who considered themselves Wiccan followers of the Goddess. There were Dark Witches, too, called warlocks by some, who followed the God in his many evil aspects and practiced dark magicks. Both branches of Witchery tried to stay off the radar of the common people, and White Witchery had gone underground, fearing the vampires would exploit them as they had the werewolves and force them to become allies. Some vampires sought out witches to use as weapons; others wanted to wipe them out because witches could detect the presence of vampires. Skye was the only witch at the academy, and at first she had tried to hide her magickal skills from the others. White Witches were healers, not fighters. And so she was an anomaly.

  But Antonio had welcomed her. And had explained his belief that fighting was a form of healing—just as weeping was a form of prayer.

  She liked the way he thought, and she was fascinated by his ardent belief in his Catholic religion. His devotion to the Virgin Mary was like her devotion to the Goddess. He believed many things that she didn’t, such as the concept of sin and the necessity of salvation—but the purity and simplicity of his faith charmed her. Skye liked that. She liked him. She had assured Jenn over and over that Antonio really was a man—a vampire—they could trust. Every spell she had cast to judge him had shown that. But maybe vampires could manipulate the magickal forces of the universe—just as they had manipulated the human race. We want to live in peace. We want to be your friends. We drink the blood of animals.

  The road twisted and turned through the Spanish countryside, trees and brush weaving shadows in the high beams of the van. Unlike Jenn’s home in California, there were no streetlights, just incredible, inky darkness. Antonio could see better than anyone else in the van, but even he had his limits. She glanced at him nervously, but he kept his eyes straight ahead.

  Beside Jenn, Holgar licked his wounds. She tried not to grimace, but it was disgusting. Holgar’s body healed itself much faster than a human’s could, and he often helped it along by cleansing his injuries as his wild brethren did. She knew it even made Antonio a little sick, and he had had a lot longer—over sixty years—to become accustomed to such things.

  In the backseat Eriko and Skye were talking quietly. Both of them were upset about how many villagers they had lost, and they were puzzling over the apparent ambush. Jenn was upset too, but her mind was occupied with other worries.

  She had hesitated. She hadn’t been up to the fight. She didn’t belong. She knew it. There were six in their team, six Salamancan hunters. Of those six, four had superhuman abilities.

  Holgar’s wolf nature had been revealed during their first semester of training when, though locked away by Father Juan, his raging howls had pierced the night of a particularly bright full moon. Plus, one day he’d forgotten and licked his wounds after a training drill.

  The students had learned of Skye’s witch nature soon after that, as if no one saw any point in trying to hide just how much of the supernatural was present in their currently unnatural world.

  Jenn had braced herself for even more shocking revelations . . . but even with that, she hadn’t been prepared for the most stunning disclosure of all:

  Antonio.

  No one had known about Antonio until the night of graduation, when he was paired with Jenn to go on a vampire hunt—their final exam. By then, her crush on him had transformed into a deep longing. Her sense of betrayal was enormous when she’d found out that he was, in essence, the same kind of monster she had sworn to kill. Everything she had learned about vampires in her classes, from her teachers, and in the Hunter’s Manual, insisted that all vampires were evil. Cursed Ones, who must never be shown mercy. And then to discover that the guy she wanted was so very, very much the wrong guy for her—or for anyone with a beating heart, and a soul . . .

  But then to learn that he’d been studying to become a priest before he had been “converted,” as it was called, and that even if he’d still been human, he would be off-limits to her . . .

  Don’t brood. You’re tired. You do this when you’re exhausted. It was like her mini-vacation into despair. Like hitting her head against a wall because it felt so good when she stopped.

  The last supernatural member of the cohort was Eriko. As the Hunter, Eriko had the incredible power born from drinking the elixir.

  The last two members of the team, she and Jamie, were ordinary humans. With the exception of Antonio, Jamie had more combat experience than all of them combined. The Irish hothead was a vicious street fighter, and he had a gift for strategy—where to strike to cause the most damage and confusion. That was why, Jenn suspected, no one pushed to get him thrown off the team. Jamie did nothing but quarrel, argue, and accuse, but they needed him.

  So that left her. Just Jenn. That was how she thought of herself—nothing special. She brought nothing distinctive to the group—no street smarts, no extraordinary abilities, and even her Spanish was the weakest. More than once she had thought that for the good of all she should leave. Every time, though, Father Juan had stopped her. Secretly, she was grateful. A lone hunter was an easy target and an easy kill. Even if she survived her first night alone, where would she go?

  It was a crazy, mismatched group, but these were crazy times.

  Jenn had applied for entrance into the academy as soon as she had heard there was a special school that trained people—young people—to fight vampires. Such schools had apparently been in existence for centuries, but they had fulfilled a different purpose—to train one Hunter to battle the vampires in each local town or region. In her History of Vampirism class, Jenn had learned that during the Dark Ages many of these schools had been lost, and even the academies themselves had lost track of each other until each thought it was alone. Each surviving academy continued to train single Hunters, often regarded as a knight or a saint or both, who would protect his—or her—small territory. The Hunter of Salamanca had protected the university, the town, and the nearby villages.

  Then the vampires had revealed themselves to humanity. Their spokesperson, Solomon—young and rock-star hot, with red hair like Jenn’s—had stood beside the president of the United States and offered his hand in friendship. Solomon hinted that the vampires had access to the secret of their own immortality, and that they would share it if they were treated as “global partners.”

  “As equals,” Solomon declared.

  And the United States president—old, gray, tired-looking—had taken Solomon’s hand. Celebrities rushed to party with the vampires and to be photographed and interviewed with them. Talk shows booked vampires to boost their ratings. Movie stars married them. Politicians and corporations courted them. It had all happened so fast. It had all been so exciting.

  Solomon was so charming, affable, and funny. Jenn’s girlfriends at school had hung his picture in their lockers and used it as wallpaper on their laptops. Vampire avatars and icons sprung up all over social networking sites. Vampires were completely, totally cool.

  Then Nina, the president’s teenage daughter, was kidnapped. The search for her was intense, and Solomon and the vampires dedicated themselves to finding her . . . or so they claimed. People prayed, generals threatened, and the first lady wept and begged Nina’s captors to release her daughter.

  When Nina finally surfaced, her kidnappers showed her on live TV. She had been changed into a vampire. “Converted,” in vampire jargon. The CIA joined forces with other intelligence groups to figure out where Nina was, and located her in a remote village near the Arctic Circle, where it was dark nearly all the time. The Marines went in, along with a camera crew, and people saw how savage vampires could be as they attacked the
human liberators. Instead of handsome Solomon, whose followers drank blood from blood bags and butcher shops, these vampires ripped open the throats of armed soldiers. Blood gushed and sprayed.

  Sergeant Mark Vandeven carried Nina to safety. As soon as he set her down, she attacked him. Corporal Alan Taliaferro staked her through the heart, and everyone who was watching saw what happened to vampires when they died.

  Corporal Taliaferro was interviewed afterward. He was hollow-eyed and shaken.

  “She was a monster,” the marine was quoted as saying. “There was no girl there anymore, just a demon.”

  Solomon claimed a radical fringe group had converted her. He insisted that these “renegades” must have forced Nina to drink from one of them, a violation of all that most vampires held sacred. To decent vampires, sharing their blood with a human was a sacred act, and the human had to be willing.

  “The mortal must ask to be converted,” Solomon explained on national TV. “It’s very much like the Christian notion of Holy Communion.” Sensing how terrified many of his new allies had become, he went on to remind his viewers that a vampire bite couldn’t convert a human; not one or two or even a dozen bites. A human had to drink the blood of one already reborn into immortality.

  “Willingly,” he’d added. “This was a senseless tragedy, and it had nothing to do with civilized vampires like us.”

  But too many people saw the marine’s interview on YouTube—monster, demon; the haunted look in his eyes said even more than his words. A few weeks after the video went up, his body was found drained of blood, and slowly many came to realize that there were no decent vampires.

  It was then that regular Americans began to call vampires “the Cursed Ones.” It was once a phrase written in ancient, musty books safeguarded by a few aware elite, then passed on to people like Jenn—hunters who had dedicated themselves to destroying the Cursed Ones. The name caught on, becoming truncated—“C.O.’s,” “Cursers”—and instead of being viewed as exotic newcomers, vampires were finally regarded as the enemy.