Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “The weapon is valuable,” Father Juan said. “Even if it can only kill one vampire at a time.”

  “I guess you’re right. I mean, until we develop a machine gun that shoots wooden bullets, it’s the only bit of tech we’ve got.” Jamie smiled sourly at Antonio.

  “Woof,” Holgar drawled.

  “Yeah, what about that?” Jamie asked. “Any danger to other supernaturals or plain old humans?”

  “They won’t know until they can test it.” Father Juan pushed back from his chair. “The virus is more complicated than it sounds. And our side wants it back.”

  “They’re not our side,” Jamie said. “And speaking of, there’s a traitor around here, and you know it, Father.” He stared at Antonio. “Himself’s probably going to zoom off now, e-mail his sire, and—”

  In a flash Antonio leaped across the room to Jamie’s chair and wrapped a hand around the Irishman’s throat. Antonio snarled, and his eyes began to glow with red-hot fury.

  “No soy el traidor,” Antonio said with clenched teeth, fangs beginning to extend.

  “Get the bloody hell off me!” Jamie choked out, moving to slam his knee into Antonio’s chest—except Antonio flashed away, and Jamie tumbled out of his chair and onto the floor.

  “Enough!” Father Juan shouted, jumping to his feet. He made motions, and Holgar sensed a bloom of calm flooding the room. The good father had cast a magick spell to lower tensions. Sometimes they worked on the unruly Salamanca pack.

  Often they didn’t.

  “We don’t have time to waste; we’ve already lost two days,” Father Juan said. “This is what I am telling you to do.” He paused. “And . . . there’s more.”

  “Now what?” Jamie cried, getting to his feet.

  Father Juan looked supremely uncomfortable. Holgar braced himself. His thoughts turned to Jenn, and he tightened his grip on the armrest of his chair.

  “The scientist who was spearheading the project was among the survivors. He hid in a freezer in the lab, and they missed him.”

  “Sure they didn’t turn him into a Curser?” Jamie asked, glancing pointedly at Antonio.

  “He’s checked out,” Father Juan replied. “He can verify if we find the right virus. So . . . you’re going to take him along.”

  “You want us to take a civilian on a hunt?” Holgar blurted.

  Eriko blanched. “Anno, sensei . . .,” she said again.

  “You’re civilians. All of you,” Father Juan replied. “And yes, that is what I want.” Father Juan checked his watch.

  “I’ve arranged a meeting with the scientist. His name is Dr. Michael Sherman. Antonio will have to stay out of the sun. He’ll catch up with you later.”

  Antonio dipped his head in assent.

  Father Juan sat back down at his desk. “Grab some breakfast, and get your gear.”

  “Gomenasai . . .” Eriko murmured, then stood and bowed low. “Hai, hai, sensei,” she said. “Yes, Father Juan.”

  “Yes?” Jamie blinked. “Eri, this is insanity. This is not our job.”

  “Jamie-kun,” she replied softly. “It is my choice to do as our master wishes. I am the Hunter.”

  And that settled that.

  They rose as one, but as soon as they exited Father Juan’s office, they scattered in different directions. Holgar knew where the others were heading. Antonio would go to the chapel to pray and meditate. Skye would go outside to cast a circle and perform protection rituals. Eriko was off for the gym to warm up her muscles. Jamie would go to his room to break things in a fury, then pack and triple-check his arsenal.

  For his part Holgar headed straight for the kitchen.

  Once there he found a cranky priest named Manuel. The elderly man was rotund, with jowls stereotypical of his position—that of cook.

  “Father Juan never listens to me. He wakes me and insists I make enough food for all who are going out. Every time I tell him that only you will come to eat what I prepare, and every time he tells me I must prepare food anyway.”

  “Ja, tak. Sorry for the trouble,” Holgar said.

  Manuel shrugged. “Vale, vale. You are the easy one; it’s the others who are difficult.”

  He handed Holgar a plate of raw venison. Out of deference to him, Holgar took it to the empty dining room to eat. Most people at the school couldn’t stomach eating with him at mealtimes. He was intensely grateful, though, that Manuel respected his diet.

  Werewolves could eat cooked meat, but it wasn’t pleasant. It often gave them a stomachache. Their intestinal tracts were designed to process fresh, raw food. Anything more than a few hours old or cooked for any length of time tasted rotten.

  Since no one was around to watch, he picked up the meat with his hands and ate it that way. He tried to take his time and savor the flavor, though, instead of just wolfing it down. So to speak.

  Finished, he politely returned his plate to the kitchen. Manuel made the sign of the cross over him as he accepted the empty plate, and Holgar nodded his head in thanks. Like many Scandinavians, Holgar was nominally Lutheran, but if his family worshipped anything, it was the moon. He was rather like little Skye in that respect. He smiled at the thought of the English girl. His smile fell as his thoughts turned to the mission. Jamie was right. This was not why they had come to Salamanca.

  Burping philosophically, he returned to his room, where he gathered vials of holy water, a dozen wooden stakes, and a small container of garlic-flavored mints that had once been a novelty item and were now highly prized for their ability to repel vampires. He hung a four-inch wooden cross around his neck at the last. It had been a gift from Father Juan upon his graduation from the academy. The center of the cross had a lamb carved into it, while the arms of the cross ended in intricately carved wolf heads. A wolf serving the Lamb of God instead of devouring Him. The priest had a wicked sense of humor, which he mostly kept under wraps but often expressed around Holgar. There was something of the wolf about Father Juan that often made Holgar feel akin to him.

  Satisfied, Holgar made his way to the chapel. Antonio was kneeling at the prayer rail in the first pew, and Holgar took a seat two rows back. He was close enough to make his presence felt but not so close that he was intruding. He closed his eyes and waited.

  I wonder if we’ll see Jenn again, Holgar thought. There were wagers throughout the military about how long the team of Salamanca hunters would last. Today they might make someone very wealthy.

  BERKELEY

  HEATHER AND JENN

  Heather was terrified. She knew her sister and her father were going somewhere. She had overheard them talking. She was sick with worry, and the twisting in her stomach told her she was right to feel that way. Her first reaction was to try and follow them in her mom’s car. But her mom had sharp ears and would probably catch her in the act.

  You’re worried for nothing, she told herself. She didn’t believe it, though. If she was going to act, it had to be now, before Jenn finished in the bathroom. Heather grabbed her inhaler and stuffed it into the front pocket of her jeans and then made her way to the brass-cat key holder by the back door. She grabbed the spare set of keys to her father’s car, a dark blue Toyota Camry, and slipped into the garage, closing the door behind her.

  Before she could give it too much thought, Heather unlocked the trunk with the button on the key remote. In the dim light she could see the bright yellow handle and the pictogram explaining how to open the trunk from the inside. She had always been curious about that as a kid. She wished more than anything that she had tested it out to see if it actually worked. There was no time, though, so she climbed into the trunk, squeezed her eyes closed, and pulled the lid shut.

  She immediately felt claustrophobic, and her throat began to tighten. She started to twist to reach the inhaler in her pocket, when she heard the garage door open and close. She lay still, afraid that if she moved, they would discover her.

  “You’re sure?” she heard her father ask, his voice muffled.

  “Absolutely
,” Jenn answered.

  Heather bit her lip. She’d spent her childhood listening to her parents and Jenn as they talked. She knew that her father was upset and nervous. She also knew that despite her confident answer Jenn was frightened. That realization strengthened Heather’s terror, and her hand found the cord and wrapped around it, ready to yank it and escape the trunk even if meant facing the two of them.

  How do you think you can go to Spain and learn to fight vampires if you can’t spend one minute in a small space without freaking out? she asked herself. Heather took a deep breath and let go of the cord just as the engine roared to life. The car vibrated against her right cheek where it was pressed against the carpet of the trunk floor.

  The Camry began to roll backward. She braced herself as the car turned and then lurched forward. It was too late to turn back. Once they were fully in motion, she began to fumble for her inhaler again. She managed to fish it out of her pocket, and she breathed in as deeply as she could.

  The medication began to take effect just as they accelerated onto what had to be the freeway. The car bounced, and Heather’s head and shoulder slammed into the roof. She tasted blood in her mouth where she bit her tongue, and panic shot through her. Vampires could smell blood a long way away. What if they found them? How many vampires could Jenn fight off? Had she just gotten the three of them killed?

  Tears filled her eyes as terror overwhelmed her. She thought of everything she could lose: her father, her sister, her life. I’ll never be a wife or a mother, she realized. I won’t go to college, never graduate from high school. I’ll never go to prom. The last thought seemed so absurd in light of everything else that she stopped crying. Keep it together. Be more like Jenn.

  By the time they got off the freeway, her tongue had stopped bleeding, and she was a little calmer. The car made a series of quick turns until the motion and the warmth of the trunk made her nauseous. She pressed her hand to her mouth, trying not to vomit. The chemical aftertaste of her inhaler made it worse.

  At last the car came to a stop. She desperately wanted to pull the handle, roll out, and find someplace to hurl. Instead Heather forced herself to lie still, listening as the doors opened and feeling the car rise slightly as her father and sister got out.

  “Stay close,” she heard Jenn say.

  “The sun’s still up,” her father answered.

  “Not for much longer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel it,” Jenn said.

  Jenn’s words punched through Heather’s waves of nausea, and a chill skittered up her back. Jenn had been fighting vampires so long she was starting to sound like one. Sudden panic flooded her. Maybe Jenn is one. Heather forced herself to take a deep breath. Jenn was at the funeral, out in the daylight. There’s no way she’s a vampire. Then again, what do we really know about them? They say they can’t turn into bats, but Cousin Tina’s friend Mary said her sister saw one change.

  She suddenly realized she could no longer hear her father and Jenn talking. She strained her ears but didn’t hear a sound. Grimacing, she pulled the escape cord, and the trunk unlocked with a click. It worked! As a tiny spark of victory warmed her insides, she lifted the lid ever so slightly so she could glance outside.

  The world seemed shrouded in fog, and what sunlight there was disappeared long before it reached the ground. She sucked in her breath and threw the trunk lid up and scrambled out, sucking in lungfuls of the clean, cool air until her nausea subsided.

  She couldn’t see Jenn or her father anywhere. Why would they have come here so close to sunset with the fog rolling in? Her father knew better, and Jenn—

  Heather gasped. Jenn had left before the vampires took over the city. She probably didn’t know why they had chosen San Francisco as one of their headquarters. It wasn’t that they could control access by monitoring the bridges. It wasn’t that the town’s leaders had given it to them without a fight. It was the fog. When the fog rolled in thick off the bay, vampires could come out while the sun was still up.

  And it couldn’t be foggier.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Come to us, children of the light

  We have seen and heard your plight

  Let us take you by the hand

  Vampire and human together stand

  Your struggles have been long and dear

  But that’s all done now we are here

  Strife will cease through every land

  Divided we fall, united we stand

  MADRID, SPAIN

  SALAMANCAN HUNTERS: ANTONIO, HOLGAR,

  SKYE, ERIKO, AND JAMIE

  Night had fallen; Eriko called once they had reached their objective and requested that Antonio join them. The scientist was being cared for in a church by sympathetic priests known to Father Juan. Sharing Jamie’s mistrust of the entire mission, Antonio wondered who exactly had approached their master and asked for their help.

  Antonio parked in a lot and walked through Retiro Park, passing by the Fountain of the Fallen Angel. Lucifer, angel of light, had just been banished from heaven, and he was plummeting to hell, wings outstretched, arms spread in dismay. Around the base of the fountain, faces of evil leered at the pedestrians, spewing water. The fountain was older than Antonio, and when he had seen it as a child on his special visit to Madrid to make his first confession, it had terrified him. Crossing himself now, he skirted around it, filled with intense feelings of displeasure.

  Spain, will you tumble from paradise as well? Will you eventually capitulate, as so many other countries have done? Appease the vampires by pretending they’ve retracted their fangs and no long tear out the throats of your children?

  A little ways beyond the park stood the church, a small but pretty building of baroque plaster with a bell tower. All its arched windows had been boarded up. There was a sign on the door that read WE SERVE ALL WHO ARE CALLED TO THE LORD.

  Antonio walked around the side, in search of the rectory, and was escorted by a young, somber priest into a little room designed for prayer and meditation. There was a carved stone font beside the door, and he dipped his fingers in and blessed himself—the only vampire he knew who could do so.

  In an alcove a statue of St. John of the Cross with bowed head seemed to be praying for those who entered into the sparsely furnished room. Votive candles flickered before the figure, and the saint looked almost as if he were smiling. Antonio found that meaningful, as if the patron of their Academia was accompanying the group on their mission.

  The other four Salamancans sat on sofas and in stuffed chairs. Swathed in a gray wrap sweater and a matching knitted cap, Skye flashed him a grateful smile, and the rest nodded their heads, acknowledging his arrival. They were bundled against the cold. An electric heater ticked; hot air whirred. Madrid in late February was cold and damp, even for Holgar. Luckily, it had not snowed.

  Sitting on the edge of a mahogany desk, a second young priest nodded at Antonio, who nodded back. The priest had a goatee, giving him a slightly satanic cast. And standing beside the desk had to be the man they had traveled to meet.

  Antonio could have snapped the scientist in half. Somehow the man managed to embody every stereotype his profession had to offer. He was skinny and short, with pale-brown hair and watery blue eyes hidden behind a pair of thick glasses with black rims. Forty, maybe, but probably younger. And rather anxious, from the way his eyes darted around the room.

  “I’m Father Luis,” the priest said to Antonio. “And this is Dr. Michael Sherman.”

  “Hola. ¿Cómo estás? Er, ¿están?” the man asked in pained Spanish.

  “You’re not Spanish, Mick; speak English,” Jamie growled.

  “Sorry, thank you,” Michael said, noticeably relaxing.

  “American?” Antonio asked in surprise.

  “Yes.” Dr. Sherman nodded. “From the University of Maryland. Or, I was.”

  “What are you doing over here?” Holgar asked.

  The scientist pushed up his glasses. “Well, you may r
emember from your biology classes that . . .”

  “Skip all the fancy talk,” Jamie said. “Some of us have been too busy saving the world to go to school.”

  Eriko flushed, and Antonio waited politely.

  “Very well.” Dr. Sherman raised his chin. “I’ve spent several years working on finding a complete cure for leukemia, which is a cancer of the blood. I realized that with my research it might be possible to actually create a strain of leukemia, one that could be injected into vampires, which would cause their bodies to destroy them from the inside out.”

  Holgar whistled low.

  Michael sneezed. “Sorry, I have allergies.” He pulled a packet of tissues out of his pocket and blew his nose. Then he spent a second examining the contents.

  Jamie blinked and looked at the group as if to say, And we’ve entrusted technology to this dolt?

  “I think he wants to know why you were doing that here and not working at home,” Skye said gently. “In America.”

  Sherman looked around for a trash can. Spotting the one beside Father Luis’s desk, he made a ball of his tissue and aimed it at the rim. It fell on the floor, well short of its target.

  Skye tittered.

  “Sherman-sensei, please excuse us,” Eriko said, shooting her a scowl. “We don’t mean to be rude.”

  “Oh,” he said, “that’s all right. I was told that you’re a bit . . . exuberant. He smiled eagerly. “Like special-ops guys, only . . . younger.”

  “That being a relative term,” Holgar replied, and Antonio smiled faintly.

  Dr. Sherman frowned quizzically. Then he shrugged. “Well, anyway, I had approached . . . certain people . . . in my government, but they said they weren’t interested. That same night my lab—the one in America—was destroyed. I was supposed to have been in it working, but I had gone outside to get some fresh air. When I went back into the building and saw what had happened, I ran.”

  The hunters looked at one another, aware that one of their own was alone in hostile territory. Jamie clenched his teeth and mouthed a curse, and Holgar cast Antonio a sympathetic glance.