Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “But how—”

  “I’ve had documents for your whole family standing by, in case it ever came to something like this. I’ve been updating them every year since the war broke out.” Gramma Esther’s features hardened. “Of course I figured your father would be . . .” Her voice caught, and she clamped her jaw shut. Then she exhaled.

  “By the looks of your pupils you may have a mild concussion. If you can’t see a doctor, at least keep yourself awake for the next twelve hours.”

  Jenn leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, then grabbed her duffel bag and stepped out onto the curb. As much as she hated the idea, she checked her bag through so that she wouldn’t have to dump all the stakes. She just hoped that the vials of holy water would survive the trip.

  Staying awake on the plane turned out to be a lot easier said than done. She watched the movie, a cheesy love story, in an effort to keep herself awake. Half a dozen times she caught herself just dozing off and jerked up her head, fear making her heart pound.

  Just keep it together, Jenn, she coached herself.

  Once the plane landed in Biloxi, she was relieved to find her bag circling the baggage carousel. An armed soldier stood beside a poster featuring a man in a hard hat smiling at a woman unfurling a set of blueprints. The woman’s canine teeth were very slightly elongated. WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WE’RE ON THE MOVE!

  Walking past the soldier, she grabbed her bag, then showed her matching claim check to an airport security official in a white shirt and navy blue trousers who was eyeing everyone as they left. The official studied her for a beat, then waved her on.

  Outside, she caught sight of a guard tower. As casually as she could, she pulled out her phone and called Father Juan again. He sounded worried, but he told her everything was fine.

  Hoisting her duffel over her shoulder, she glanced toward the taxi stand, but the sign read IN-STATE DESTINATIONS ONLY. She blanched and turned to look at her fellow travelers.

  “Oh, golly,” she said, striking a pose and putting on a Southern accent. “Excuse me, y’all, but is anyone heading toward Louisiana? My maw-maw just called and told me she couldn’t make it.” She fluttered her lashes. “I just don’t have the faintest idea what I should do.”

  A dozen people shifted away from her. A guy with a beard leered at her and opened his mouth to speak.

  Before the letch could get a word out, a middle-aged woman wearing a bright blue sweater decorated with teddy bears holding American flags glared at the man and stepped between Jenn and him. She flashed Jenn a kind but concerned smile.

  “Land’s sake, honey,” she said. “You shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing. My husband, Oral, and I will be happy to take you.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, ma’am,” Jenn drawled. “I surely cannot tell you how grateful I am. It’s so scary being out here by myself.”

  “Don’t you worry,” the woman said. “Oral’s gone to get the car. Where are your people, sugar?”

  “Just outside New Orleans,” she replied boldly. The woman paled visibly; the letch frowned, and several of the onlookers traded looks.

  “We’ll get you as close as we can,” the woman said, sounding a little strained.

  “Thank you,” Jenn said.

  A moment later she found herself squeezed into the uncomfortable backseat of a red and white Mini Cooper between two massive mounds of luggage. As the car pulled away from the curb, she hoped that the driver didn’t get lost on the way to Louisiana. Or attacked.

  MADRID

  SKYE, HOLGAR, ERIKO, JAMIE, ANTONIO,

  AND DR. MICHAEL SHERMAN

  Eriko stepped carefully into the blackness on the other side of the reading room wall, the light from the flashlight barely illuminating her path. She didn’t like anything about the mission. She didn’t like Dr. Sherman, who was bringing up the rear with Antonio. He was too jittery to be trusted.

  “How can you tell if someone’s a vampire?” Eriko heard him ask.

  “They have no heartbeat,” Antonio said.

  “That’s all?”

  “Unless they’re hungry,” Antonio replied. “Haven’t you ever seen a vampire?”

  “Actually, no.” Sherman looked sheepish. “My work’s been done with computer simulations. The next step is subjects. We’ve been hoping your people might help with that.”

  Eriko was offended, but tried not to show it. She had not become the Hunter to round up test subjects. Still, if this American could find a good way to kill them . . .

  She came to a staircase, long unused. The brass railing was caked with dust and cobwebs, and it angled down steeply into a seemingly endless chasm.

  “Down the rabbit hole,” Skye murmured, and Eriko held up a hand for silence.

  They all filed wordlessly down, light on the balls of their feet. Eriko began to wonder if there was a landing or a floor, or if they were going to the hell Father Juan believed in.

  It felt a little like what she imagined hell would. Her muscles were sore. She ached from head to toe. Bending her knees as she walked downstairs was excruciating. The elixir gave her great strength, speed, and healing abilities. It worked, however, only with the body she already had. That meant that the muscle buildup was overpowering for her frame, and she often found herself waking in the middle of the night with crippling pain. And it was getting progressively worse.

  At last they came to the bottom of the stairs. Light was coming from somewhere past a long corridor. There was enough of it that Eriko could shut off her flashlight. Vampires could see well enough in total darkness, but they could see better with the lights on, like humans. Lucky for her team, who would not inadvertently announce their position with flashlight beams.

  The others grouped quietly behind her, waiting for her to do something, waiting for her to lead them. It was not the heroic life of the single samurai that she had envisioned when studying and training to try for the reward of the sacred elixir. After the hideous deaths of her two best friends, Yuki and Mara, she hadn’t wanted friends. She had focused all her energy on one objective—becoming the Hunter, walking alone as an emissary of revenge. She had been the strongest, the stealthiest, seeing herself as a solitary ninja.

  She had never envisioned herself as a team leader.

  They crept silently down the hallway. Eriko signaled for Antonio to go first and for Holgar to bring up the rear. She wanted to see what was coming at her and to know what was following her.

  The light grew brighter as they moved down the corridor. Through square glass windows cut into double doors of steel, she and Antonio could see into a large room filled with men and women—maybe vampires—in lab coats, and more scientific equipment than she had ever seen before in one place. Big machines with wires and buttons, glass tubes, and a huge microscope or maybe a laser. Wooden tables holding steel clamps and stacks of petri dishes. It looked like a crazy science-fiction movie set. It also seemed pretty sophisticated to have been set up quickly, but the haphazard placement of some of the machines indicated that some haste had been involved.

  She made a gesture to Dr. Sherman, who came up beside her and peered carefully through the window. He studied the room for a moment, then whispered, “There.” He pointed at a small refrigerator with a glass front panel, on a far table to the left of where they stood. Inside it she could see a rack of vials with clear liquid.

  “Are you sure?” she dared to whisper, even though vampires had superior hearing.

  “They look like mine,” he whispered back. “Lavender caps, green labels.”

  As if on cue, one of the women in the room put on blue rubber gloves and a hood with a plastic mask, then crossed to the refrigerator. Eriko tracked her, detecting fear in her movements as she drew closer to the refrigerator. It was obvious that she was afraid of what was inside.

  Eriko’s arms and hands began to shake, but whether from exhilaration or exhaustion she didn’t know. Her heart trip-hammered; it jittered out of rhythm when she was under strain. And she hurt all over. B
ut that couldn’t matter now.

  Taking a deep breath, she met the eyes of each of the others in turn. She gave a quick nod. This was the moment. They had gone over it a thousand times. And one glance at the room had told her that their plan should work.

  Making a fist, she indicated that they should all get ready. When she opened her fist, that would be their go signal. Then she found peace within herself, ready to face death if need be, and almost welcoming it through the haze of her pain.

  Eriko’s fist opened, and Antonio sauntered into the room calmly, quietly, as though he had every right to be there. He had no lab coat, but not all the vampires in the lab wore them, either. Because he had no heartbeat, no one bothered to look up at first. By that time he had stationed himself just behind and to the left of the refrigerator. He took a quick look around—scores of laptops on wooden lab tables, a more robust mainframe computer, banks of equipment that looked to his untrained eye like oscilloscopes and stereo speakers, rows and rows of test tubes and a couple of giant centrifuges, and microscopes galore. So much high-tech equipment, capable of such incredible things. Where did magick end and science begin?

  He counted fourteen vampires in the room. He wondered if there were more in another room. Surely they’d surround such a prize with more security forces.

  For one wild moment he wondered if he could simply open the refrigerator, grab the vials, and take them out the same way he’d walked in. But soon—any second now, in fact—he fully expected someone to realize that he didn’t belong there.

  He turned and nodded once toward the hallway, where the rest of his team was concealed. While he’d been doing recon, they’d been preparing for their entrance.

  The primary signal was not his to give.

  Adelante, he urged Eriko, his leader. Let’s get it going.

  Then Jamie burst into the room, a Molotov cocktail in each hand. With a shriek he tossed them at the far wall right into a bank of the speakerlike objects.

  The explosion rocked the room and nearly threw Jamie off his feet. Antonio managed to stand his ground. Moments later the other hunters poured into the room, each stopping only long enough to behead the vampires who crossed their paths, using short swords pulled from scabbards on their backs.

  Sherman flew over to Antonio’s side, eyes bulging, but still far calmer than he had been earlier.

  “Get the virus,” Antonio said, without explaining why he wasn’t going to get it himself. “I’ll cover you.”

  Antonio heard a high, piercing cry. Eriko was staking one vampire even as another threw itself at her. As he had anticipated, more were streaming into the room from a door in the northeast corner.

  Holgar roared as Skye’s attempt at a fireball singed the hair on his head as it whizzed by his ear. He howled, ducking, and shot across the room, knocking over a lab bench. A laptop smashed to the concrete floor.

  Three vampires raced toward Antonio; he braced himself for their attack as two more Malditos sealed off metal double doors—which had to be the main entrance to the laboratory. The only escape lay back the way they had come.

  The first vampire reached Antonio. Antonio moved with lightning speed to the side and then, with all his strength, drove the stake through the C.O.’s back into his heart.

  Eriko leaped into the battle to help him face the two remaining vampires. They fought back and forth, both sides seeking the upper hand, until finally Antonio staked Eriko’s vampire, then turned and did the same to the other one.

  “What are you doing?” Antonio demanded, as he watched the scientist insert a syringe into one of the vials from the refrigerator.

  The small man was standing in a tripod formation, legs spread wide apart, holding a syringe in his hand. “Making sure it’s the real thing. I need someone to test it on.”

  That didn’t make sense. Sherman had already said he’d never tested it on a real vampire. But at that very moment, a Maldito was rushing toward Antonio. So he stepped out of the way and then tripped him, following him to the ground to shove his knee against the vampire’s throat.

  “Then do it!” he bellowed.

  The man dropped beside them and injected the vampire in the throat. Antonio tried not to wince at the proximity of the deadly virus. He suddenly realized that there were too many questions he hadn’t asked, like if the disease could spread from one vampire to another.

  The vampire shouted and began to writhe. Sherman shouted, “Yes!”

  Antonio felt his spirits rise . . . and then drop.

  Nothing else happened. The vampire lay still, blinking up at him. Antonio looked at the scientist, who was staring intently at his test subject. The smell of infection coming off him nearly made Antonio gag. That was when Antonio realized what was wrong with the man.

  “You were studying leukemia because you have it.”

  “First my father, then my daughter, now me,” Sherman affirmed.

  Around them all was chaos, and it seemed so absurd that they sat quietly, like a tableau in a Christmas pageant. The vampire didn’t struggle, as though sensing that if he did, Antonio would kill him in a heartbeat.

  “It doesn’t work,” Sherman said finally, looking chagrined.

  No virus. For a single moment Antonio felt a surge of relief almost amounting to joy. Then he staked the vampire and stood and turned to report to Eriko, but she’d seen the demonstration. She nodded but didn’t say anything as she staked another vampire.

  “Retreat!” she shouted. “Now! Go, go, go!”

  Antonio turned back just in time to see Sherman, his face covered in blood, grabbed by a tall vampire and heaved across the room as if he were weightless. He yelled, then smashed hard into the wall. Antonio staked the vampire and then dashed over to the man, falling to his knees beside him.

  The scientist was dead. His eyes were frozen in abject terror, and he had no pulse nor breath. Why feed from diseased blood instead of just breaking his neck? Antonio wondered. There was blood near the two marks on Michael’s neck where he had been bitten. But that didn’t explain the blood on his mouth.

  A terrible suspicion filled Antonio, and he pried wide the scientist’s mouth. Blood coated his tongue well. Antonio sniffed. It wasn’t his blood; it was someone else’s.

  Dios, no! Has he been converted? he wondered. I heard his beating heart. Didn’t I?

  Antonio couldn’t take that chance. He yanked a stake out of one of his pockets and readied to plunge it into Dr. Sherman’s heart.

  An explosion rocked the sealed door to the laboratory. The blast threw Antonio to the far wall and knocked the stake from his hand. A moment later a dozen men dressed in all-black body armor, wearing gas masks and carrying crossbows, emerged from the smoke. They spotted the inert scientist and immediately headed in his direction. One of the men tossed his weapon to another, hoisted Sherman’s corpse over his shoulder, and disappeared back into the smoke.

  The other men seemed to melt into it as well until only one remained. A black Jerusalem cross hung from his neck, the black bleeding into the black of his clothes so that Antonio almost didn’t see it. The man looked at him and raised his hand in a salute, and then he, too, stepped into the rolling plumes and vanished.

  “Let’s blow,” Holgar roared.

  “Something we can agree on,” he heard Jamie shout.

  They made it to the passageway and took the stairs toward the secret entrance into the library. Antonio ran backward, keeping his eye on the lab, and prepared to take out anyone who was following them.

  It took him a minute to realize that nobody was.

  Upstairs, alarms were going off.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Eriko told them. “Now.”

  EN ROUTE TO NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  HEATHER

  Heather lay in her cage, wet with sweat and limp with blood loss. The pain was excruciating, and she curled her knees up tighter to her chest. She could still feel Aurora’s teeth sinking into her neck. The pain had been unlike anything she had ever
experienced. It had been dwarfed, though, by the horror of the forced intimacy.

  Aurora’s arms had been like steel as they wrapped around her, pulling her close and holding her tight. For just a moment her lips had been whisper soft on Heather’s skin. It had tickled right before she bit her. Then there had been the feeling of being torn apart—not just skin, but mind and soul as well. She had felt the blood pumping from her into Aurora, and she had screamed and cried and begged for death.

  It had seemed to last for nearly half an hour, but she knew that couldn’t be. Jenn had told her that a vampire could drain a human of blood completely in five seconds. She wasn’t dead. She could feel that with every painful heartbeat and agonized breath. It had to have been only a second, even though it had felt like a lifetime.

  When Aurora was finished with her, the vampire had made a purring sound and then dropped her back onto the floor of her cage. Heather didn’t know how long she had lain like that, curled up. She did know that at some point someone—she thought it might have been the vampire with the dead asthmatic sister—had shoved a bowl of what smelled like taco meat into her cage. She couldn’t have lifted her head to eat it if she’d wanted to.

  The smell of the meat made her nauseous, and it dawned on her that they were planning on keeping her alive, at least for a while. Which meant that Aurora or someone else would take her blood again, against her will. Last year Tiffany had told Heather that you couldn’t turn into a vampire just by getting bitten. Heather hadn’t wanted to know why she was so certain. Solomon had said the same thing on TV, but Heather hadn’t believed him. He was a vampire. A Cursed One, like Jenn called them. A lying monster, just like Aurora.

  But now she hoped that that was the truth. She would rather die than become a vampire. She wasn’t sure if she believed in heaven, but being a vampire would be a living hell.

  I’d kill myself first, she thought. For the first time in her life she prayed.

  Please, God, let me die first.