Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  Her eyes glazed over for a moment as she stared at a sword-wielding knight in a halo about to attack a dragon. There were rumors that Father Juan had been an exorcist before he became director of the academy and, from there, master of the Salamancans. It frightened her badly to think that Antonio didn’t entirely trust their master. But there again she was working overtime to trust in someone, something. And that always ended badly.

  Candlelight flickered across taut, tired faces as hunters and underground rebels drank wine and got to know each other. Jenn was exhausted, dozing in the corner despite all her attempts to stay awake. Ghost or no ghost, she was just about to go to bed—with flashlights and candles blazing—when three more members of the Resistance arrived: two women and a guy. They were tired and shaken. New Orleans PD had spotted them and shot at them, but they’d successfully eluded the police, arriving at the safe house after doubling back two miles out of their way. They brought word that Aurora had formed an alliance with Christian Gaudet, the vampire king of the French Quarter. There was movement in the air, excitement. Something big was going to happen, and Aurora had a hand in it.

  “What do you mean, Tina?” Marc asked the woman—Tina. Right. Jenn had been introduced. She was too tired to remember much of anything. “What ‘big’?”

  “The vampires are laying claim to territories,” Tina replied. “We think they’re throwing down. Like they’re going to have a war between themselves, now that they’ve defeated us.”

  “That would be good for us,” Holgar said. “They divide; we conquer.”

  “We don’t conquer shite,” Jamie muttered.

  Tina’s cheeks reddened. “We still don’t know Aurora’s location, but she’s somewhere in the French Quarter.”

  “That’s helpful,” Jamie groused.

  The others shifted, probably as tired of his snarking as Jenn was. Tina continued her report. There was no information on Heather, and no one had seen Skye. Antonio showed them the crystal—more properly called a scrying stone—and they discussed Aurora’s Mardi Gras deadline.

  “Have you heard anything about why she would set a deadline like that?” Marc asked.

  “Why do any of it?” Jamie countered, pushing his chair backward and leaning up against the wall on the rear two rungs. He’d had a lot to drink. “Why not kill the Hunter—even though, of course, Jenn’s not actually the Hunter—but why not kill her in San Francisco? Maybe the girl is a birthday present for Christian Gaudet or some nonsense.”

  “Her name is Heather,” Jenn said through clenched teeth. She wanted to slap him. He was arrogant and mean.

  “I was referring to you,” Jamie shot back, giving her a hard look. “She expects you to come to the rescue. She’s waiting for all of us. I mean, please. It’s pretty clear she wants six heads on her wall, not just one. Sorry, make that seven, with the sister.”

  “Maybe the deadline was imposed by someone else,” Holgar suggested. “Her chieftain, or whatever they have.”

  “They’re not Vikings,” Jamie retorted

  “Or her lord or her king. Her CEO. Perhaps Aurora has to prove something,” Holgar said. “You know how that goes, Jamie.”

  Jamie glared at him. Slamming his chair legs onto the hardwood floor, he reached for the bottle of red wine on the table and poured himself another glass.

  “I doubt Aurora has to prove anything to anyone, a bossy bitch like her.” He guzzled down the entire glass like water and let out a small burp.

  “Stop drinking so much. If we are attacked tonight, you’ll be no good to us,” Antonio snapped at him.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Spain,” Jamie said, unsteadily setting his empty glass back on the table. “You know me. Always ready.” His eyes narrowed. “Same as you.”

  Marc cleared his throat. “If I may say, mes amis, for a team you don’t seem very . . . teamlike.”

  “We’re new at it,” Holgar told him.

  “And we suck at it,” Jamie drawled, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his black leather jacket. “Smoke, Antonio?”

  Jenn studied the faces of the Resistance fighters with anxiety as they watched the Salamancans. Distrust. Unease. Why did Jamie bait Antonio? Did he want them to realize that Antonio was a vampire? Did he hate him so much that he’d jeopardize their chances of rescuing Heather?

  Jamie put his lips around a cigarette and drew it out of the pack. Then he reached for a candle on the table and lit the end. Awkward silence settled around the room. Jenn’s head drooped forward onto her chest. She began to sink into sleep, hearing the talk around her. She began to dream of St. John of the Cross in his dark cell, praying.

  Where have you hidden yourself,

  And abandoned me in my groaning, O my Beloved?

  You have fled like the hart,

  having wounded me;

  I ran after you, crying; but you were gone.

  Antonio de la Cruz, where is your soul?

  * * *

  Antonio carried Jenn into the nun’s cell that Suzy had fixed for her. A battery-powered lantern sat on a small table beside the cot, and Suzy had wiped down the white plaster walls. Fresh floral sheets—the top sheet decorated with red roses, the bottom sheet a field of purple violets—and a soft white blanket dressed the mattress; there was also a fluffy pillow in a white case. A plain cross hung over the bed. He liked the uncluttered look of their lodgings. In his life Antonio had grown up with stark simplicity. It hadn’t been much of a stretch to embrace a vow of poverty when he’d entered the seminary in Salamanca.

  But celibacy was another matter. He gazed down hungrily at the young girl in his arms, then gave his head a shake and laid her gently on the bed. She let out a sigh but didn’t wake up. He moved tendrils of dark red hair from her forehead and resisted the urge to kiss the worry lines away. Her eyes were sunken. She was under so much strain. He remembered how it had been, leaving home to join the seminary, his mother so proud of him, joy and sorrow warring in her gaze as she gave him a blessing. Her only grown son. Spain was tearing herself apart in a civil war, and the young men were leaving the villages to fight.

  Except for Antonio de la Cruz, called by the Holy Spirit to Salamanca to become a priest. Many criticized him—with his father dead, he was the man of the family. How could he desert his mother and siblings when the world was collapsing?

  He had struggled. Night after night he had prayed for guidance. And each night his answer had been the same. He had to go to Salamanca and become a priest.

  “God is calling you,” his mother said to him, as she made the sign of the cross and reached on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. His six sisters stared wide-eyed from the doorway. The oldest, Beatriz, was holding his only brother, Emilio, named for their father. Beatriz wore a black veil over her hair; her fiancé had died in a skirmish in the mountains. She had sworn never to marry, and if the family could have managed it, she would have left after his funeral to become a nun. But her money from sewing was desperately needed. Everyone in the family worked, except for Emilio. Raquel, the littlest girl, gathered sticks to sell as firewood.

  They all told him to go. All, that is, except Rosalita Hernandez.

  Rosa, newly from Mexico, with her shiny twin black braids looped and pinned to her head and held in place with enormous satin flowers, and with her outlandishly embroidered Mexican clothes—all ruffles and ribbons. Rosa, Rosalita, Lita.

  She sang and twirled like a pinwheel when she walked, sixteen and so lovely, so fair. Lita was their neighbors’ niece, and he had no idea why she’d come to Spain, because anyone with relatives in Mexico was moving to the New World to escape the war in the Old. But Lita came alone. Shy yet wanting to become part of the community. Eager to fit in.

  All the men wanted her. He wanted her too. And Lita—he was the only one to call her Lita—dragged him behind the barn and kissed him, took his hands and wrapped them around her waist, and giggled at his astonishment. He’d been so shocked. None of the other girls he knew behaved like
that around him. He was off-limits, the village son promised to God. They treated him like a eunuch.

  But she teased him, and whispered to him about how sweet it would be, although they had never done any of the things she told him she wanted to do.

  “How can you leave to become a priest, mi amor?” she whispered into his ear as he came to say good-bye to her in private. “God wants you to be with me. He wants you to enjoy the pleasures of a wife.”

  “Ay, niña, stop,” he begged her.

  He went hot as she giggled and nibbled at his earlobe. “Oh, you’re so innocent, cariñoso, so precious. Let me sully you a bit so God won’t be so insistent about stealing you away from me.”

  “Lita,” he said, gasping, telling himself to walk back around the barn and leave, just leave.

  “You think I’m so forward,” she guessed. “You’re shocked. But if I don’t make the first move, nothing will happen. You’re not a priest yet, ’Tonio.”

  “But I already belong to God,” he replied, and she shook her head.

  “If you were, you wouldn’t have come to see me alone. You knew what I would do.” Her dark eyes glittered. Her lips were full and moist, and her fingertips tickled the sides of his neck. She looked upward. “I’m fighting You for him,” she said to the sky.

  “Lita, no,” he begged. “Don’t make fun. God will strike you down.”

  “Antonio de la Cruz, don’t be silly. God is a bigger person than that.”

  He was at the seminary when the bombs of Spain’s civil war fell on his village. They didn’t suffer, he was told. They didn’t have time. There would have been nothing he could have done to save them, and he would have died with them. His confessor, Father Francisco, had suggested that perhaps God’s voice had called him so insistently for the purpose of saving his life.

  Father Francisco put his hand on Antonio’s shoulder. “He called you to serve him, mi hijo, with all your heart, your soul, and your life. Be a good priest. A wonderful priest. Take your vows, and keep them.”

  He was keeping that vow now—never to let harm come to another woman who loved him, whether that harm came from her enemies or from him. He was unclean, a Cursed One, but God had granted him grace. At least, that was his belief. He hadn’t been able to save Lita, but he could save Jenn—or at least die trying.

  As awful as it was to contemplate, he did believe that God had saved him by calling him to Madrid. He did believe that he had escaped Sergio to serve a larger purpose in the divine plan. And he suspected Father Juan knew more about those plans than he was willing to say.

  But he knew, somehow, that that plan concerned Jenn. How, he couldn’t yet say.

  He withdrew his hand from her forehead, stood and turned, nearly running into Father Juan, who had been watching him from the doorway. If vampires could blush, Antonio would have. As it was, he gave his shoulders a little shrug and raised an eyebrow.

  “Which temptation is the stronger?” Father Juan asked, ticking his glance from Antonio to Jenn and back again.

  “I’m not hungry,” he replied. “Thanks to you.”

  The priest cocked his head and gestured to the hall. The two left Jenn’s room, Antonio closing the door quietly behind him. Then he crossed his arms over his chest, waiting to hear what the priest wanted.

  “Why are you angry with me?” Father Juan asked point-blank.

  “I’m not,” Antonio replied, and then he realized it was true. He was angry. “Because she shouldn’t be here. She’s not strong enough—”

  “She should be here,” Father Juan countered. “Have you lost so much faith in me?”

  “I . . .” He trailed off. “Did you find anything in the hall?”

  “No. Answer me, please.”

  “Maybe it’s I who shouldn’t be here,” Antonio said.

  Father Juan made a fist and pretended to sock him in the jaw. Then he grew serious. “Is the call of the Cursed Ones too strong for you to withstand?”

  “There is no call,” Antonio said. “But Father, I think this team is a mistake. There’s too much rancor. I half expect to be staked from behind.” He looked hard at Father Juan, as if it should be obvious that the group was, as Jamie himself would say, “all arseways.”

  “When I found you, you had lived in the catacombs beneath the chapel for how long?” Father Juan asked him. “You’re new to the world again, Antonio.” His eyes took on a faraway gleam. “While I’ve been in the world much too long.”

  “Who are you?” Antonio demanded. “Who are you, really?”

  The priest shrugged. “Maybe I’m a ghost who likes to frighten young girls in hallways.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” Antonio ran his hands through his hair. “I trained these people for you. I’m loyal to the human race, and hunted by my sire because of it. If there’s lack of trust between us, it’s that you don’t trust me with the truth.”

  Father Juan extended his arm, showing Antonio the gauze dressing on his wrist. “Every time I allow you to feed, mi hijo, I trust you with the truth.” He patted Antonio’s shoulder. “In due time, ’Tonio.” Then he patted his chest. “For now, trust me.”

  NEW ORLEANS

  AURORA, HEATHER, AND SKYE

  Aurora turned to Christian Gaudet as he moved out of the shadows and prodded the captive girl through the bars of her cage with his bare foot. Bare-chested, with amber hair cut into a shag and then pomaded, Christian was wearing a pair of black jeans and a single silver earring in his left ear.

  Like most vampires who had achieved a certain status and had sired others, he was arrogant. Christian fancied himself the lord of New Orleans. It both amused and offended Aurora.

  Christian hadn’t seen what she had done to his little brat at the door. She contemplated letting him live a while longer. He had his uses, and even though they had the run of the city, he and his had not grown as lazy as the vampires in San Francisco.

  “She’s wheezing again,” he told Aurora. Then he glanced at the front door, which had just closed behind Skye and Nick. “Are you sure those two can be trusted?”

  “No,” she replied easily. “But then, no one can.” She reached behind herself with her left hand and felt for the extra-sharp stake as she extended her right hand to him. If he moved wrong, if he blinked wrong, he was dust.

  He blinked.

  She moved.

  “Ah, too bad,” she whispered, when it was done. She picked the silver earring up out of the ashes and tossed it into Heather’s cage.

  “For you, my pet,” she said.

  “Yo, I’m sorry,” Nick said half an hour later, as he and Skye emerged from the sewer next to one of the levees by the Mississippi River. “I know you want to join her court. But I’m never going back there. She’s crazy. You look at her cross-eyed, and—” He pantomimed being staked. “So, like, good luck, dudette.”

  Then he bolted and ran into the late-night traffic. Car horns blared, and she winced as she watched him weave across the road. She was relieved beyond the telling that he had bailed on her. Ever since they had left the lair, she’d been working overtime on how to get rid of him without staking him. Despite the fact that he was a bloodsucking monster, she kind of liked him. That made her a bad hunter, she supposed.

  I’ve always liked the bad boys, she thought, smiling grimly as he reached the other side of the road, turned, and waved. Unlike Estefan, this Cursed One at least wore his evil for all the world to see. There were hours yet until dawn, and he might feed. He might not be the kind of vampire who left his victims alive. She should have staked him.

  She was equally relieved that she’d been able to avoid drinking Heather’s blood. It was only after Aurora had agreed that Heather smelled sick that Skye had realized that the invitation to drink had been a test—one that she had mercifully passed.

  Skye pulled out her scrying stone and conjured energy to power it. As she gazed into the surface, the pale light built inside. Then she held it up and panned her surroundings. Scrying stones were ancien
t tools of the craft, but once GPSs and cell phones had been invented, they’d been relegated as quaint and ineffective. She thanked the Goddess for her extremely traditional parents, who had raised her to know all the old ways. Those old ways were serving her well now.

  As were the traces of magick she had scattered down in the sewer. They would lead her back to the vampire lair so the Salamancans could rescue Heather—after they rested up for the rest of the night, so they could go in fresh with the sun. She hugged herself, pleased that she’d pulled this off. Maybe Jamie would notice, and finally be impressed with her instead of mooning after Eriko, the unattainable ice goddess. Maybe that was why he lusted after her—because he knew he could never have her. That made her safe. Jamie was so guarded, and so bitter. Beside him Nick was a puppy.

  “We’re all so dysfunctional,” she murmured aloud. What mad plan did Father Juan have, force-fitting such mismatched personalities together? They’d only been a team for a few months, and in her opinion it wasn’t working out at all.

  As a white NOPD squad car with the star and crescent logo slowed, she slipped into the shadows on the banks of the river. New Orleans was under a curfew. It would be beyond ironic if Father Juan had to come down to a police station to bail her out for being out on the mundane city streets, after she had successfully snuck into and out of a vampire lair.

  The cruiser crept slowly down the road as the passenger window rolled down and a flashlight passed over the top of the bushes she hid behind. Reluctantly summoning more magickal energy, Skye created a version of the spell of seeing she’d used to prevent her reflection.

  A tingle at the back of her neck made her blink. It traveled up her neck and over her head. She felt her face with her right hand, then stopped moving as the flashlight froze on the swaying leaves.