Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “Come no closer, or you will die,” she warned.

  “Ah,” he said, sounding amused. “I have been watching you, Aurora. I find you special. Do you know what your name means? ‘Dawn.’ I have not seen one in centuries.”

  She shook, not understanding him, seeing only a man in her cell who meant to do her harm.

  “I’ll kill you,” she promised him.

  “I was right. You have the heart of a fighter.”

  “I—I do.”

  “I walk the dungeon at night, looking for those I can . . . help. And I can help you, Aurora.”

  “I will gouge out your eyes and—and ruin your manhood.”

  He was silent a moment. “Perhaps, in time, you will be strong enough to fight back. But for now . . .” He seemed to raise a hand, darkness against darkness.

  And suddenly she knew: He was to be feared more than Torquemada.

  “No!” she wailed. “No, please, don’t hurt me! For the love of God, I beg you!”

  Then he pulled her against his chest, wrapping himself around her, muffling her screams. He was as cold as the grave. His icy hand came over her mouth, and his other hand held her by the back of the head. She beat her fists against his chest.

  He cut off her air supply, and she stopped hitting him, instead fighting wildly for air. The world dissolved into dots and blurs; her eyes rolled back, and she slumped into his arms. He loosened his hold slightly, and she began to suck air into her lungs, smelling him—the world—oranges, and roses, and pine trees. His arms were sinewy, his chest broad and muscular.

  “Listen to me, Aurora Abregón,” he whispered. “They are coming for you. They saved you for last, because you are the most beautiful of all the Abregóns. They will torture you even if you beg to confess. To appease their vengeful God they will ruin you, and disfigure you, and then they will burn you. Your family is gone. You are alone.”

  Gasping, Aurora let out a heavy sob. She shook her head and burst into tears. He covered her mouth with his hand again, and her body spasmed. Weakened as she was, she had no strength left to fight him. And yet defiance burned like a flame inside her.

  “I can end your torment,” he said, “in one of two ways. If you wish to live, nod your head. If you wish to die, do nothing.”

  Too exhausted to move, she lay still. He sighed and lowered his lips to her neck. A searing chill moved through her skin and crept into her blood. It burned. She didn’t know what he was doing, but she whimpered.

  He moved his lips to her ear, and he hissed. Then he ran his lips along the crown of her hair, as the world spun and cracked, and she knew herself to be in terrible danger.

  “Do you wish to live?” he whispered.

  Aurora nodded. Desperately.

  BERKELEY

  JENN AND HEATHER

  As Heather quietly watched her pack Jenn couldn’t help but feel that she’d made a terrible mess of things. Curled on her bed, Jenn’s little sister looked young and vulnerable, dressed in her yellow ducky pajamas and green socks, a can of root beer cradled against her chest. Heather’s eyes were swollen from crying. Both girls were exhausted. The day had been very long, and the fight with their father had taken a toll on all of them. Driving back from the funeral, their dad hadn’t said three words to Jenn. Heather had kept looking from her father to Jenn and back again. Their mother had stared out the window, either oblivious or pretending not to know what was going on. Jenn wasn’t sure how her mom had been able to ignore the tension.

  Jenn folded the black dress she had borrowed from Skye for the funeral and placed it between her extra pair of skinny-leg black jeans and the black T-shirt and leggings she usually wore to bed. She hadn’t worn pajamas since she’d arrived at the academy. If they were summoned in an emergency, she was one step closer to being dressed for battle.

  She added her little toiletry bag, then replaced her stakes and vials of holy water. Her weapons had to be close at hand; back in Spain no hunter ever left the academy’s grounds unarmed. It was ten o’clock at night in Berkeley; she thought of the empty graves and wondered how many newly made vampires would rise from their graves that night, tearing out the throats of their victims more like werewolves than vampires, because they had no mentoring sire to show them how to drink.

  I can’t do anything about that tonight, Jenn thought, ripping open the Velcro pockets of her cargo pants in a methodical pattern, top down, rip rip rip. She stuffed in a couple more glow-in-the-dark plastic crucifixes and checked the water level on both the plastic and glass bottles of holy water—glass was for throwing, since the vials would shatter on impact. The prepeeled garlic cloves were turning brown in their airtight containers, but they wouldn’t lose their pungent power for at least another week.

  She slid a six-inch stake into a long pocket along her hip. She’d whittled it out of a branch from a tree in their backyard in the predawn hours before the funeral, when she’d been too wired to sleep. She’d have to throw it away when she got to the San Francisco airport; she had no checked luggage, and it would be considered a weapon.

  “That thing’s so short,” Heather said, sipping her root beer. “You’d have to get pretty close to, um . . .” She made stabbing motions.

  “Drive a stake through the vampire’s heart,” Jenn finished for her. “Yup. Pretty darn close.”

  Heather’s eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. The look of hero worship on her face embarrassed Jenn. She felt like a fraud. She was a fraud. She had nearly gotten Eriko killed.

  Maybe I should stay here, she thought. I could teach Heather how to fight, and we could try to defend San Francisco together. But that wasn’t what she was really thinking. She was spooked, badly, and when she got back to Spain, she needed to sit down with Father Juan and tell him what was in her heart—she was afraid she was going to get someone killed. It would be a relief to confide in him. Confession, they said, was good for the soul. But would it be good for her life span? What if, instead of reassuring her, he kicked her out?

  Exhaling, she hefted the bag over her shoulder, and Heather jerked, setting down her root beer.

  “You’re not leaving now?” she asked shrilly.

  “It’s dark,” Jenn replied as she deposited the bag beside the closed bedroom door; then, realizing that she was talking like a hunter, she added, “so the vampires are out. It’s too dangerous.”

  Heather glanced at the window. “Tiffany might be out with one of them right now, letting him . . .” She ran her hands through her silky blond hair. “Tiffany’s family has joined a Talk Together Team.”

  “No way,” Jenn said, frowning at her. Talk Together Teams were groups of humans and vampires who met to try to “bridge the gap”—to explain away the war and the fact that vampires killed people and drank their blood. When they’d heard about them in Salamanca, no one had believed it. Then they’d seen posters plastered on the walls of the ancient Spanish city announcing Grupos de Paz—Peace Groups—which were essentially the same thing.

  “That’s crazy. That’s just . . . beyond insane,” Jenn said, sitting down on her bed. She picked up her field jacket, the one with the Salamanca patch, and decided she should conceal it in her duffel bag. The Velcro patch might come unfastened, revealing her as anti-vampire. If people were into Talk Together Teams around here, hunters would not be welcome.

  “Daddy,” Heather began, and then she glanced at the door and lowered her voice. “He says they’re only getting rid of the people who attack them.”

  “Like me,” Jenn said. “I know he’s furious that Gramma Esther called Father Juan to tell me about Papa Che. He hates me.”

  “Oh, no, he doesn’t.” She looked again at their closed door and put her arms around her knees. “He doesn’t believe in what you’re doing, but he loves you. Like he loves Gramma and . . . and Papa Che.”

  Jenn remembered overhearing arguments between her father and his parents—more often with Papa Che than with Esther. Jenn’s grandparents had been underground since before her d
ad’s birth, always running and hiding, like escaped prisoners eluding hunting hounds. Her father had hated his life—he could still recite the string of fake names he’d had to use, and after a couple of glasses of wine he’d recount some of the lies he’d been forced to tell: that he’d transferred in from a school in Mexico, where his father had worked for a gas company. That his transcripts had been lost in the mail.

  It seemed like every time he’d begun to make friends at school, get on the football team, fall in love, Che would get word from the underground that “the Man” had picked up their scent again . . . and the Leitners would leave town in the middle of the night. When Jenn’s father had turned eighteen, he’d refused to run any more.

  And no one had ever come for his parents . . . until the great Che Leitner was dead.

  Sometimes Jenn wondered if that had made him even more bitter—that all the hiding had been for nothing. What had he thought of the men at the funeral?

  Jenn sat down on the bed and took a sip of Heather’s root beer. Tears welled in her little sister’s eyes.

  “You have to try to make him understand how dangerous the vampires really are,” Jenn said.

  Heather raked her hands through her thick hair. “Why would Daddy listen to me? I’m the baby. The one who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You’re the smart one.” She reached for Jenn’s hand. “You have to take me back with you.”

  Jenn gave it a little squeeze. “Do you even have a passport?”

  Heather frowned. “No. I thought you guys could get me, you know, clearance or something.”

  Maybe Father Juan could do something like that. Jenn had no idea; she’d have to talk to him again. But to smuggle Heather out of the country against her parents’ wishes . . . maybe it was going too far.

  But the world had gone too far. The war had changed everything.

  “We have to make Daddy listen to us.” Jenn pulled back the blanket and comforter on her bed. “He’s kind of doing to you what Papa Che did to him, you know? Making decisions for you based on his ideals, forcing you to live in fear.”

  “Except we’re not running and we should be,” Heather muttered. “Running for our lives.”

  I can’t argue with you there, Jenn thought angrily.

  She pulled back the covers, lay back in her bed, and stared at the ceiling. Her mind worked furiously; she thought about the team. Heather would freak if and when she met Antonio. That almost made her smile as she drowsed but never really slept. She was too wide awake and too troubled—and too out of her element. The bed felt too soft, and the house was too quiet. Salamanca was her home now.

  “What is it like?” Heather asked, startling Jenn.

  “What’s what like?”

  “The academy.”

  Jenn sighed. “You know all those movies where they show you what boot camp is like if you join the army?”

  “It’s like that?”

  “Worse,” Jenn said.

  “Why did you go?”

  “To get my own room.”

  A pillow sailed through the darkness and landed on Jenn’s head. Fortunately, she had been expecting it. She suppressed a laugh as she hurled it back at Heather.

  Jenn threw it a little too hard and felt guilty when Heather grunted at the impact. For just a moment, though, it was like the last several years had been some terrible nightmare. She didn’t know how many times they had lain awake as children, talking in hushed voices to avoid waking their parents.

  There had been so many dreams. Jenn remembered the endless talks about things like homecoming and Christmas presents and what their weddings were going to be like.

  And their wedding nights. An image of Antonio blossomed in her mind. God, was she insane? He was a vampire.

  “Seriously, why?” Heather asked, distracting her. Jenn blinked, trying to remember what they were talking about. “Why did you go to the academy?”

  “There were a lot of reasons. It seemed heroic, romantic. I think I wanted to be like Papa Che and Gramma—to change the world, or at least save it.” She smiled grimly. “And it didn’t hurt that it made Dad angry.”

  “He really, really loves you,” Heather insisted.

  Jenn flipped onto her side. “He has a strange way of showing it.”

  “He told me once that you were fearless.”

  Shocked, Jenn fought the urge to burst into insane laughter. Fearless? Me? It was absurd. She was a bundle of fear.

  “Dad’s a big fan of fear,” Jenn replied. “Fear keeps you from doing dangerous things. Keeps you ‘safe.’”

  “That is totally like something he would say.” Heather fluffed up her pillow. “What do you learn at the academy? Do you have uniforms? What about coed dorms? Are the boys cute?”

  Jenn sighed. She had been hoping for a decent night’s sleep, but that clearly wasn’t in the cards.

  It was a Monday, and her father commuted into San Francisco on the BART train to his job as a software engineer. Jenn’s mother used to own an art gallery, but it had been shut down at the end of the war because some of the canvases had been found to be “inflammatory.” There had been a few protests in her favor, but people had far more pressing issues than someone’s “boutique business,” as one local politician had termed it.

  Now she did volunteer work, taking meals to shut-ins, some of whom had been wounded in the fighting. Jenn’s father didn’t like her doing it; it seemed “provocative.” There were other, “less political” things she could do if she wanted to be helpful.

  She asked the girls to come with her for the day, and Jenn said yes because she wanted to spend time with her mom, and also to make sure she was safe. Heather had been allowed to stay home from school, so she went too. The streets were littered with posters about Talking Together Teams and curfews. Soldiers in khaki with submachine guns stared stonily at the pedestrians and the cars. The U.S. government was collaborating with the enemy because it insisted that a truce had been reached and that the two races, vampire and human, were living in peace. But the presence of these human vampire lackeys, keeping that peace while their vampire masters stayed out of the sun, told the lie. It was said that Solomon had promised the new president that he could become a vampire after he pushed through the legislation Solomon wanted—such as making it a capital offense to so much as enter the lair of a sleeping vampire.

  At a stoplight Jenn locked gazes with a soldier who couldn’t be much older than she was; his eyes looked dead, and mean. Cursed Ones had done that. She hated them.

  It began to rain; around noon Jenn’s mother tried to call her husband to see if he wanted her to pick him up so he wouldn’t have to take BART in the bad weather. He didn’t answer his cell, which was unusual, and Jenn saw how nervous it made her mom. She started talking fast, almost babbling with fear, and Jenn was relieved when it was time to go home.

  Jenn found her father in the den, sitting in his old leather recliner. He was watching TV, and he held a glass of something brown that smelled like alcohol. Jenn guessed that it was Scotch.

  “You’re home early,” Jenn’s mother said, relief clear in her voice.

  “Yeah, our meeting was canceled,” he replied vaguely. “There didn’t seem much point in sticking around.”

  “Oh.” She kissed him and went into the kitchen to make dinner. Heather loitered, obviously wanting to talk about going to Spain, but he asked her to help her mother so he could speak to Jenn alone.

  “Jenn.” Her father patted the arm of the brown-and-white-checked couch, which sat at a right angle to his recliner. He took a sip from his glass, then drained it.

  She sat down and watched him closely. He looked strained, tired.

  “I gave you up for dead when you left,” he said abruptly.

  She bit her lip, not sure what to say in response.

  “I knew where you were going, what you planned to do. You didn’t do a very good job of hiding your trail.”

  “Then why didn’t you try to stop me?” she asked quietly.


  “I knew that if you stayed, it was just a matter of time before you said or did something that would put all of us at risk. Your mother, your sister . . . I couldn’t protect you all.”

  “But you figured you could keep them safe without me around?” she asked, struggling to keep the pain out of her voice.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jenn knew she should say something, apologize too for running away, or at the very least accept his apology and offer him forgiveness. More than one conversation with him had gone badly, though, because she didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut. She finally just nodded, hoping it was enough of a response.

  “I never wanted you girls to grow up with the constant fear that I did. I just wanted you to be safe.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “When you left, I was sure you would be killed. I resigned myself to it. Seeing you at the funeral, I was proud of you. You’ve become so much like your grandmother. You’ve got her strength.”

  “Thank you,” Jenn said, blinking back tears.

  “And I realized I needed to tell you something. You’re right . . . about the vampires. You always were.”

  Jenn stared at her father in shock. He had finally admitted it, but it seemed so sudden. She looked again at the pain in his eyes and the glass clutched tightly in his fist. “Dad—”

  “Something happened today.” He set the empty glass down on a side table and wiped his forehead. “Do you remember Tom Phillips?”

  “A little. He had a German shepherd named Gunther.”

  “Yes.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. And then he looked at her. Hard. Tears welled in his eyes. “They said he’d been in a car accident.”

  “Oh.”

  “But his wife called.” He shook his head. “It was something else. Not an accident.” He leaned toward her. “An attack.” His face crumpled. “And he was so good to them. So . . . loyal.”

  Jenn waited, sensing that there was more.