Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “So how did the Cursed Ones know we were going to Cuevas?” Antonio asked, circling back to their original topic.

  Although it was generally known in the region that there was a team of hunters covertly sent out on missions to defeat marauding vampires, the grateful citizens kept their mouths closed. Father Juan received dozens of pleas for help and responded to as many as he could. Antonio had listened with wistful amusement to one of Juan’s pep talks to the team, in which he compared the hunters to Robin Hood or Zorro—do-gooders fighting established authority on behalf of the oppressed. So Antonio had imagined himself, up to the night he had been converted.

  “The vampires in Cuevas knew we were coming. They lay in wait for us. Do we have a spy?” he pressed.

  With a sigh Father Juan held up his sol y sombra—sun and shadow—to the light and studied the amber liquid. “I don’t know. I’ve worked with Skye, cast runes, summoned visions, but nothing has been clear.”

  “Skye is a strong witch,” Antonio ventured.

  “Sí,” Father Juan said. “And as you know, once upon a time so was I, serving both God and Goddess until the time of choosing. I’ve worked magicks our little witch has never dreamed of, but even I can’t tell you if we have a spy.”

  “Jamie thinks I’m the one.” Antonio said. “Maybe I am. If somehow the other vampires can read my mind, track me—”

  The priest frowned. “But you can’t track them, or read their minds.”

  “I’m different. The stench of the grave is not upon me. I live inside a church. One look at a cross and most of them are vomiting.” He ran his fingertip around the rim of his glass, his mood growing ever more somber. “Padre, hear my confession. When I kissed her last night, I wanted . . .” He turned his head, ashamed.

  “It’s past time for you to feed. You used to be so good about it, ’Tonio.” Father Juan leaned forward on his elbows, his young, suntanned face etched with worry lines. “Twice a month, the first and third Fridays. For decades. That was your promise.”

  Antonio’s shame grew. For decades he had drunk the blood of willing human donors, who knew what he was and honored his struggle to stay true to his faith and his lost humanity. Animal blood could not sustain a vampire, though many lied that it did. He remembered watching all the telecasts where Solomon told the world that vampires fed on cattle, pigs, sheep. Antonio wished it were so, but only human blood could sustain them.

  Ever since Jenn had entered the Academia, he had half starved himself, imagining what she would think, how she would feel, if she ever saw him feed. In the eyes of the Church, love was a miracle. The holiness of love inspired ordinary men and women to act like angels. It lifted them on wings closer to God.

  But the thought of Jenn’s love for him made him dizzy, as if he were falling into a bottomless pit.

  “That was your promise,” Father Juan emphasized. “To stop yourself from bloodlust and the frenzy of the curse. I help you all I can, with prayer and magick. But you must help yourself, you know.”

  “I know.” Antonio gazed up at the moon. Witches honored the moon as the Goddess in all her faces. For Antonio the moon wore the face of the Blessed Virgin. But tonight she looked like Jenn.

  I told her I would never leave her, he thought. When he was young, he had left Lita, his first love, to die. He had sworn he would not do the same to Jenn. But perhaps Jenn has left me.

  In that case she is free.

  Twenty minutes later they were back in the car; two hours later they pulled through the gates of the university. Eriko, Holgar, Jamie, and Skye erupted from the chapel and ran toward the van.

  Something happened to Jenn’s plane, Antonio thought, as he rolled down his window and stuck out his head. “Is it Jenn?” he shouted.

  “It’s not Jenn,” Skye yelled back, “but it’s bad!”

  * * *

  Eriko led the way back into the chapel, and everyone assembled near the altar under the crucifix. Eriko thought the statue was macabre in the extreme. She didn’t like looking at Jesus dying in terrible pain, so she kept her back toward it as she told Father Juan the terrible news: During the previous twenty-four hours, three Hunters had been slaughtered by vampires.

  “Three?” Father Juan murmured, crossing himself. He looked shaken. “Que descansen en paz.”

  Antonio crossed himself and echoed Father Juan, but in Latin: Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace. They all fought for humanity. But in the end, hunters fought for their lives. Alone.

  His jaw clamped with anger, Jamie crossed himself.

  “We received e-mails,” Eriko told Father Juan, bowing slightly. “They were copied to me.” As the Hunter, Eriko was the official commander of the team.

  “Was it an organized attack?” Father Juan asked. “Did you get e-mails from any other Hunters?”

  “I don’t know if they were organized. Perhaps some e-mails were sent only to you. Maybe someone called.”

  No one knew how many Hunters there were in the world. There was no confederation of Hunters—or of their teachers or confidantes. Some had chosen to make themselves known to a few other Hunters; others remained anonymous. Secrecy gave them a chance at a longer life. Last year’s Salamancan Hunter had lasted less than twenty-four hours after drinking the sacred elixir. The vampires had lain in wait, eager to take him down. Cursers went after anyone they knew trained to fight them. That was one reason Father Juan had given her a team.

  “Their governments probably sold ’em out,” Jamie bit off, “to appease the suckers.” He looked as if he wanted to spit on the floor, but would never do such a crude thing in their chapel.

  “That’s why it’s so important to be in a group,” Skye said, nervously picking at a piece of lint on her gray sweater.

  “Ja,” Holgar agreed. “Like a pack.”

  “Hardly,” Jamie retorted. “We’re not animals. At least, the rest of us aren’t.” He sneered at Holgar.

  Even when we are talking about the deaths of Hunters, we fight, Eriko thought pensively. But she said nothing.

  “I’ll say Mass for them,” Father Juan announced. “In one hour, if anyone cares to attend.”

  “I’ll assist you,” Antonio said.

  Eriko didn’t want to go. Her joints ached, she was tired, and she had no desire to think about death any more that day. But she realized that the ritual might serve to unite the team, and sighing, pondered whether it was her duty to attend.

  She looked at the others. They were angry and frightened. Antonio’s eyes were closed, his forehead furrowed, and his lips silently moving. He was praying fervently. For an instant her heart softened. Then it hardened again. He was a monster. He didn’t belong on their team or at the academy. But again she said nothing.

  I’m a terrible leader. She ticked her gaze toward Father Juan, who was watching her. Does he know that?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The war was a war like no other—for the vampires had no standing armies, as we did. Stealthy, menacing, they seemed to materialize out of nowhere, like mist; they ambushed our soldiers and tore out their throats. Our best hope against them were special-forces teams—the U.S. Navy SEALs, the British Special Forces, the Israeli Mossad, and the secretive special-ops teams of Japan, Kenya, Australia, and a dozen other countries who brought their long-standing hatreds and mistrust to the fight. There were accusations of conspiracies, collaboration, and back-room treaties with the vampires in exchange for protection. Instead of banding together against a common foe, humanity fragmented.

  That was where we came in.

  —from the diary of Jenn Leitner

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  JENN AND HEATHER

  For a miracle, it didn’t rain during the funeral. It should have rained—that was what happened in the movies whenever someone important died. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, though, and the sun shone down so hot Jenn could feel the skin on her arms starting to burn. Antonio wouldn’t be able to take it, she thought. She spent so much time awake at night, hun
ting, hiding, that she was pale for a California girl. Next to her Jenn’s younger sister, Heather, looked like a bronzed goddess with her shining blond hair, perfect tan, and gleaming white teeth.

  Mourners stood in clusters around the grave site. More in keeping with her images of funerals, most of them wore black. Her parents and their friends, other family members, and aging hippies who had known and loved the great Charles Leitner—revolutionary to some, terrorist to others. Jenn’s grandmother Esther stood alone, still fiercely proud, eyes like steel and chin firm and steady.

  Jenn and Heather pressed shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other for support. Even after two years, some things never changed. And some things will never be the same, she thought as she gazed at the coffin. While she was in Spain studying to be a hunter, she had thought often of her family. After a few months her mother had forgiven her for leaving, or so it seemed, and began to send her small care packages. Heather had written a dozen times. Of all of them, though, Jenn had missed Papa Che the most. And he was gone.

  She glanced away from the coffin, an all too familiar symbol of death, natural or otherwise. She let her gaze linger on each face, many well known to her, others seen only in pictures. Her best friend, Brooke, wasn’t there. But why should she be? Jenn hadn’t even told her she was leaving America to join the academy in Spain.

  At last her eyes fell on three men who were out of place. They were neither family nor friends nor admirers. Dressed in black suits and sunglasses, they stared steadily at her grandmother in a way that pierced Jenn’s sorrow and creeped her out. Almost as though he sensed her gaze, the tallest of the three turned and stared back, and she forced herself to look away.

  Her grandfather was being laid to rest in a beautiful old cemetery with plenty of grass and trees. The birds were singing. It was so lovely and peaceful that it was almost possible to forget that this was a place of death and sorrow.

  Almost.

  She had seen half a dozen freshly disturbed graves as she walked from the car to the grave site. She knew no one had dug them up. The dead were alive and well in Berkeley.

  Usually vampire sires waited for their fledglings to wake up, in order to teach them what they needed to know about their new existence. Here, though, the new vampires had been buried; they’d revived alone, inside their coffins. They had then clawed their way out.

  That was not good.

  Either the siring vampires were completely reckless, or they didn’t know what they were doing. Or they’re converting too many to take care of them all, she thought with a shudder. But why convert so many? To overrun us?

  The result was that there were a lot of new vampires in the area, and worse, they were vampires without mentors, which meant that they would kill anything that crossed their path. Smart vampires would only drink lightly from their victims, leaving them alive to feed from another day. Stupid vampires decimated their food supply and were then forced to move.

  If the number of opened graves in this one cemetery was any indication, there were enough stupid vampires running around to put the entire population of Berkeley in serious danger.

  Of course, the “good” vampires would argue that this chaos had been caused by the unnecessary war that America had started. Solomon was on record as saying that if the war had not happened, “lawless vampire gangs” wouldn’t be preying on the human population. It was humanity’s fault for lumping all vampires together, America’s fault for being so aggressive.

  An aging hippie with a guitar had finished singing a soulful hymn, and the minister rose to his feet. “Dear brothers and sisters,” he began.

  Jenn gave Heather’s hand a squeeze as her sister began to sob. Tears streamed down her own face, but at the academy she had learned how to keep it together so that she could live to fight another day. Standing beside Papa Che’s casket was a battle of its own.

  The minister extolled Papa Che’s virtues, carefully choosing his words around the more sensitive topics. At last he spoke about surviving family, and for a moment Jenn thought Heather was going to completely collapse.

  Jenn tried to listen, but other thoughts crowded in. She worried about the empty graves; she worried about Heather living in a land where Cursed Ones were so numerous; she imagined what they would say someday at her funeral. She shuddered. Hunters had a notoriously short life span. To be just a few months out of the academy and still alive made her an old-timer. She had beat the curve, but there was no reason to believe her luck would continue to hold. If there was one thing that Papa Che’s funeral proved, it was that sooner or later luck ran out. Sooner or later everyone died of something.

  Jenn wondered if that was the real reason the nine surviving members of her class who had not been chosen to be hunters had remained at the academy. If in reality they were being kept as backups in case she and the others died. The nine had been invited to teach the new class of recruits, and all of them had agreed. That had seemed odd. Though most were Spaniards, not all of them were. True, they hadn’t received the elixir, and vampires loved to chase down hunters. They said hunters’ blood tasted the sweetest. Did the nine stay because they were safer behind the university walls?

  It had also struck her as strange that there was only one Spaniard in her hunting team—Antonio, a vampire. But Father Juan had assured her that all was as it should be.

  “You know that in addition to saying my prayers, I threw my runes,” he told her. “All signs and portents pointed to you six. For reasons, as I have told you before, that will be made clear.”

  Maybe Father Juan already knew when and how each of them would die.

  Finally, the service ended. People began to walk to their cars to make the drive to her grandmother’s house. Jenn watched the slow procession of vehicles with a faint, ironic grimace. Her grandparents had managed to stay under the radar for years, forced to be cautious because of the outstanding warrants for their “acts of social justice” when they were young—breaking into military installations and burning the records needed to draft young men into service, bombing the headquarters of corporations that built tanks and missiles and developed biological weapons like nerve gas. Now Jenn’s father and her two uncles were handing out maps with detailed directions to everyone at the funeral.

  Jenn glanced nervously toward the men in the black suits and sunglasses. Most of the men in attendance were wearing some kind of black suit, but these three stood straight and tall and had positioned themselves in such a way that they could watch everyone, keep track of comings and goings. The warrior in her saw the warrior in them—they were on guard, as if they expected an attack of some kind. They reminded her of her team back in Salamanca, and she had no doubt that they were dangerous.

  The tallest of the three, silver-haired and strong-jawed, started walking toward the casket. His sunglasses prevented her from getting a really good sense of him. Jenn tried to gently untangle herself from Heather, who was hugging her tightly and sobbing.

  Before she could manage to free herself, the man headed straight for her grandmother. Gramma was still wanted by the law, as her grandfather had been. In her gut Jenn knew the man worked for the government.

  Leave her alone, Jenn thought, and eased Heather away.

  “Hey,” she said, taking a step forward.

  The man extended his hand, and to Jenn’s surprise her grandmother took it. Jenn stopped, watched.

  “Hello, Esther,” the man said in a twangy Southern accent.

  “Hello, Greg.” Esther Leitner’s voice was sad and calm.

  “I’m deeply sorry for your loss. We all are.” The other two men had edged closer. Jenn tensed, reminding herself the code the Salamancans lived by forbade her to harm other human beings. But if they tried to arrest Gramma at Papa Che’s funeral . . . well, she was pretty sure even Father Juan wouldn’t blame her for her actions.

  “Thank you.” Her grandmother inclined her head, regally, like a queen.

  “I’m going to miss him. He was a cunning opponent,”
Greg added.

  “He felt the same way about you,” Jenn’s grandmother replied.

  Greg nodded and then turned to go. When he saw Jenn, he stopped.

  “You have big shoes to fill.”

  Startled, Jenn stared at him, lips parting, at a loss for words. He took off his sunglasses and stared at her with piercing gray eyes. She dropped her gaze and saw that he was wearing a black Crusaders’ cross, like the red one on her shoulder patch and the Salamanca banner. From a distance it hadn’t shown against his black tie.

  “Many of us are praying you can fill them,” he said, his words barely more than a whisper.

  He left, and the other two silently trailed after in his wake. Bewildered, Jenn turned her attention to her grandmother, who was watching them go.

  “Are you okay, Gramma?” Jenn asked, realizing how stupid that sounded.

  Her grandmother nodded. “I’ll miss Che until the day I die, but he wouldn’t want me to fall to pieces. He would want me to soldier on.” Tears glimmered in her eyes but didn’t fall.

  “Who were those men?”

  “Ghosts of the past, visions of the future,” she murmured. Jenn frowned, and Esther cupped her cheek. At the same time Jenn felt the memory of Antonio’s touch, like a reflection in a mirror.

  “Very scary men,” her grandmother added. “They work for the government, tracking criminals.”

  Just as Jenn had suspected. She didn’t know why they had left peacefully instead of handcuffing her grandmother and hauling her off to prison. She was grateful, though.

  Her grandmother nodded. “He chased us for years, but he came to pay his respects.”

  Jenn marveled at how different the world was. She couldn’t imagine a vampire shaking hands with the widow of a fallen foe.

  “I’m going to miss him so much,” Jenn said, more tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “He was very proud of you.”

  Esther put her arms around Jenn. Jenn sank into them, so tired and scared, and grief-stricken down to her soul. She had never realized how much she depended on her grandfather, that she had believed that things really would be all right because Papa Che would take care of them. But he was gone.