“Depending on how this goes down, Antonio might peel off and go inside the lair alone,” Eriko added. Antonio nodded.
“No,” Jenn blurted.
“Jenn, he’s a vampire,” Holgar said.
“Can you please say that a little louder?” Jamie grumbled at him.
“I’ll go inside. Let me go. She’s my sister,” Jenn argued.
Eriko narrowed her eyes at Jenn. “Aurora knows you. She doesn’t know Antonio.”
“Are you ready?” Marc asked, striding over to them. “We’ll suit up and get weapons—and we will be armed—and—”
He stopped speaking as Father Juan walked into the room. His face was drawn, and his cheeks were ashen. A young man in a clerical collar was standing beside him.
“This is Father Gilbert,” Father Juan announced. “He’s the priest who sent us the information about Marc’s group.”
“Hello,” Father Gilbert said. Jenn thought he didn’t look old enough to be a priest. His forehead was creased and his face was drawn. “I came to find your master because we’ve gotten word of trouble.”
He turned his attention to Father Juan, who nodded grimly.
“I have to go to Spain,” he said. “Now.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Humanity is on its knees
Giving us whatever we please
Lick our boots and whine like dogs
In your own demise you are the cogs
Beg us now to let you live
Tell us what else you can give
And we will laugh and tell you no
It’s time for mankind to go
NEW ORLEANS
THE HUNTERS OF SALAMANCA, THE RESISTANCE, AND THE CURSED ONES
They were trundling back to the French Quarter in one larger van, all of Salamanca and Marc and his three, and Antonio was terrified. He hadn’t felt that particular emotion in a long, long time. When the team needed him most, he was losing control—for some reason he couldn’t fathom. Something dark and magickal was surely at work, and it had more power over his monster than he did.
Skye and Alice had worked with Father Juan to put magickal protections on the van in which they rode, masking it as a moving van. Father Juan had provided the incantations, from what arsenal of arcane and magick lore Antonio didn’t know. Father Juan’s magickal repertoire was uniquely his.
The spell casting hadn’t been easy, and Father Juan had said a lot of things in Latin that only Antonio understood and would have blushed to repeat in any language. Father Juan had been able to verify that there was a magickal force working against them, but he couldn’t confirm if it was Papa Dodi. He didn’t know if it was voodoo, or White, Dark, or Black magick, either. Alice’s loa was silent on the subject too. When the job was finally done, all six hunters had squeezed in, and Marc and his three—Matt, Bernard, and Suzy. More fighters would be driving separately, and more cells would join forces once they reached the French Quarter. Weapons were cached—guns—while the Salamancans carried everything they needed for their traditional hand-to-hand combat.
Antonio didn’t know how Marc had gotten the word to the other cells, and at the moment he was too preoccupied to care. He fought to keep his bloodlust down, aware that at any moment he might burst into full feeding form with red, glowing eyes, razor-sharp fangs.
Father Juan was getting a ride from Alice to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, or as close as they could get. Father Gilbert had left as quietly as he had arrived, still insisting that he couldn’t get involved.
The streets on the parade route in the French Quarter were cordoned off to vehicles. A few quick questions at a gas station off the highway had revealed that the Krewe du Sang parade would begin on the eastern side of the Quarter, on Franklin Avenue. Marc got as close as he could; he pulled into the narrow alley of an abandoned apartment complex—there were a lot of those—and the group silently filed out. On the brick wall someone had spray-painted VAMPIRES SUK GO TO HELL CURSED ONES. Marc smiled grimly when he saw the words.
It was seven o’clock, time for the two groups to separate. Marc’s goal: to kill as many vampires as possible. Team Salamanca’s: to save Heather Leitner. Both: to make a difference.
“Bonne chance,” Marc said to Eriko, including all the hunters in his wish for good luck. Marc’s group was planning to rendezvous with another cell about a mile away. Others would join them. His gaze rested a moment on Antonio, and he narrowed his eyes; then they softened at the sight of Skye, who was weaving a spell on behalf of the Resistance fighters.
“The good news is that we’ll create a diversion for you,” Marc said. He took a deep breath, and Antonio saw the resolve on the face of the warrior. He knew that feeling. Every night that he’d been a Maquis, he had known his life was in God’s hands. But on some missions the risks were greater than on others. That was when the possibility of death became the probability of death. Marc was placing his team in the column of probability.
“Banzai,” Eriko said, bowing, saluting the quartet—Marc, Bernard, Suzy, Matt. Japanese tradition revered the kamikaze, the warrior prepared to die for his cause. The four bowed back, Marc bowing lowest.
“Let’s go,” Eriko told her people.
They left in ones and twos, going in different directions to avoid attention. The hunters wore no body armor, no jackets, nothing to call attention to themselves.
Nick had placed Aurora’s new lair off Decatur Street, by the cathedral. It was on the parade route for Krewe du Sang, which the hunters would reach about half an hour after the parade started, at eight o’clock.
The Vieux Carré—the French Quarter—was festooned with purple and green garlands, and glittering ropes of beads and feathers swathed across the streets and looped along the balconies. Crowds jammed the streets, some half-dressed in black leather and lamé, others in jeans, shirts, ball caps, cowboy hats. Scores of them were carrying beer in plastic cups. Above, on the balconies, women flashed the crowds by pulling up their T-shirts, receiving strings of gold beads for their trouble.
Two belly dancers in red and purple wigs danced through the crowds to appreciative hoots and hollers. Four men dressed like Santa Claus started dancing with them.
So much of it was forced, like a performance, a show. Smiles were plastered on; people were drinking very heavily. Jenn saw a woman turn her head and begin to cry. A man hugged her, bent down, tried to reason with her. Sobbing, she wiped away her tears and took his beer. She drank it down.
But other people seemed genuinely happy. Overjoyed, even. It was so insane.
“Look,” Jenn murmured.
Antonio looked in the direction she pointed. On the next balcony over, four armed members of the New Orleans Police Department stood unsmiling, watching the crowd. They wore helmets and full riot gear. The balcony directly across from them on the other side of the street contained three more officers, also suited up for action.
In fact, armed law-enforcement officers clogged the upper floors of all the rainbow-hued and brick buildings. And with each cluster of police officers, other people were holding up video cameras and cell phones, recording everything. The people below them knew it. Though they laughed and caroused, few of them looked up.
“Avestruces,” Antonio muttered. “Ostriches.”
“How are we going to pull this off?” Jenn asked into his ear. He jerked away from her, feeling himself change.
Wheeling around, he spotted Skye half a block down. Antonio said to Jenn, “Keep walking,” and hurried through the crowd toward the witch. Half-drunk pedestrians saw him and blinked, then either laughed, cheered, or swallowed down their beer and took a step away. It was clear that they didn’t know if he was a real vampire or not.
He reached Skye. She gaped at him, and he shook his head, needing her to focus.
“Can you do anything?” he asked. “If Marc’s people see me like this . . .”
“I don’t know.” She wove her hands and whispered in an ancient language he didn’t kno
w. He began to relax, and that worried him: He needed to be alert.
“Don’t fight me,” she said. “There.”
His fangs had retracted. He no longer felt the fire in his eyes. He said, “Thank you.”
Eriko appeared at his shoulder. She raised a brow.
“I’ll begin recon,” he said. “See if they’re still at the lair.”
She inclined her head. “Good luck, Antonio.” Her voice was cold. She still didn’t trust him.
He turned and caught sight of Jenn in the crowd. She was gathering up her red hair into a ponytail. He saw how her hands shook. Her heart was pounding so fast he was afraid she might have a heart attack. He looked hard at her. It might be the last time he ever saw her.
Te amo, he thought. I love you. But he forced himself not to mouth the words. Already he could feel Skye’s spell begin to weaken, so strong was his instinct to release the beast.
Staring at him, Jenn bit her lower lip and nodded at him. Was she saying “I love you, too”? He might never know.
Leaving Eriko and Skye behind, he moved through the crowd. Holgar was up one block, across the street. Antonio turned around to see Jamie sauntering beside Jenn. A flash of jealousy caught him by surprise.
He looked at the numbers on the street signs and began to cross the street. The alleyway between a gumbo shop and a stand selling Mardi Gras souvenirs was his best hope of entering into Aurora’s new lair, boldly located in a brick building with a VACANT sign on it.
But as he started across, the world erupted into craziness.
Calliope music, discordant, off-tune, blasted through the night. Explosions like cannon fire shook the gaudy street decorations, and everyone screamed. Red fog or dry ice or magick rolled down the center of the street as police officers on horses trotted on either side of the unfolding cloud, ordering people back. In the confusion they obeyed, most of them well trained in Mardi Gras etiquette and safety—during a parade, you stayed on the sidewalk.
Then a voice came over dozens of loudspeakers:
“Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for Mardi Gras, vampire-style! We bring you Krewe du Sang!”
And suddenly, as if they had materialized out of the night air, a gaggle of vampires wearing grotesque masks depicting full bloodlust capered and marched down the street—at least twenty. The women were dressed in elaborate ball gowns of purple and green, the men in matching satin coats and breeches, all were crowned with powdered white wigs, as from the court of Marie Antoinette in the eighteenth century in France. They were tossing throws to the audience, some of whom had frozen in horror. But as the mounted police officers trotted by on their horses, the onlookers forced smiles and laughter onto their faces and reached their hands for the loops of beads—strings of silver and gold vampire fangs. Antonio did a double take and then realized they weren’t vampire fangs but actual human teeth, filed to look like fangs.
Then the first float appeared, its sides covered with swirling spirals of red roses and silver crescent moons, and a sign that read WE WERE THERE!
The float was a re-creation of a Parisian ballroom, complete with a baroque silver and crystal chandelier suspended over a wooden dance floor. Candles burned, flickering as red fog swirled up and around the dancers, who were attired in gowns and coats like the walkers before them. Harpsichord music played as they danced the minuet.
The next float showed a castle—Antonio recognized it as a Spanish-style castillo—and before it stood a human man dressed in a brown robe with a hood. Another man dangled, his feet barely touching the ground, his arms bound by the wrists to a gibbet—a crossbar extending from a thick column. At the base of the column human skulls had been stacked.
WE WERE THERE! the side of the float proclaimed. Antonio wondered if the onlookers knew that these two figures were humans, with heartbeats.
And if they realized that the skulls were real.
The castle rolled past him, and then the third float towered above the previous two. On one end was a re-creation of a modern city, all glass and steel skyscrapers, and on the other the brick buildings and lacy verandas of the French Quarter—combined, they made a miniature of New Orleans itself. On top of the tallest steel and glass building, rising about six feet from the bed of the float, a striking vampire dressed in a plunging green and purple gown, her black hair held in place with purple combs, smiled and tossed beads at the people.
Aurora.
The vampire who had threatened Jenn’s life, and taken her sister. His enemy.
And his sister by blood.
No, he thought, feeling his face shift. Just because we’re both vampires, that means nothing. That would be like saying that Jenn and Adolf Hitler are kin, because they’re both human.
“Good evening, New Orleans!” Aurora cried over the loudspeakers as she tossed her gold and silver strings of fangs. She had a Spanish accent. So, like his sire, Sergio, she was Spanish. And . . . like him.
Did crimson light gleam in his eyes? Or had Skye successfully masked him? Now he wished the glamour away and the startled gasp of an elderly woman dressed in a Mardi Gras T-shirt and a ruffled gauze skirt told him he was hidden no longer.
Antonio heard the heartbeats of the crowd—sporadic, accelerating. The body knew no difference between intense excitement and abject fear—adrenaline was adrenaline—and faces were taking on the desperate, overwrought thrill of a mob. Trying to please, to show that they weren’t afraid. That they loved their vampire overlords.
Another cry rose up, and Antonio looked back at the float. Emerging from one of the modern buildings, a man in a business suit joined Aurora. The crowd cheered and screamed.
From one of the older buildings a black man in a caftan emerged. He was dressed as a voodoo bokor, with a bone necklace and a round, feathered cap. Was this Alice’s Papa Dodi? He held a staff with curled horns jutting from the top; a live cobra coiled around the horns. Beside him danced a vampire who was dressed as Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death—black top hat decorated with little white skulls, bones, and feathers, a white skull mask across his face. He wore all black, and white gloves, and a necklace of human bones.
Baron Samedi was one of the dark gods of death, also worshipped by some vampires, who had as many cults and religious practices as humans. And there was Alicia’s loa, Ma’man Brigit, the baron’s wife, wearing a veil dotted with rotten flowers. Perhaps tonight Brigit was siding with the vampires as well.
“Papa Dodi!” someone shouted. “No!”
The bokor turned and stared into the crowd. Then he lifted the staff with the snake coiled on it and threw back his head. He shouted in a strange language. The cobra coiled around the horns of the staff, then moved faster; then it began to smoke. It shook and sizzled, as Papa Dodi continued to chant. Distant drums began to pound. The creature shuddered.
Suddenly, the cobra expanded to twice its size, then three times, and it hissed at the crowd, tongue flicking. The crowd cheered wildly, as if it were part of a performance, a crazy Hollywood special effect.
Magick. Voodoo. Evil.
The drums beat, frenetic, hollow, menacing. Something was rising, something was coming.
The float rolled past. There was no sign of a human girl. Jenn had described Heather in loving detail; Antonio felt as if he had met her. Of the vampire parade Antonio had seen enough—more than enough.
He had to get across the street, to Aurora’s lair, before the parade ended. But the police were there, and the crowd was becoming more frenzied. Humans crushed around him in waves, pushing him along. They were shrieking, cheering. Kaleidoscopes of faces whirled around him. Beer sloshed on him
“Vampire, bite me!” a woman in a spangled bra cooed at him, throwing her arms around him. Then she looked past him and started shrieking.
“Look, look!” she ordered him. “She’s going to convert the mayor!”
Cries and groans rose up, like a geyser of humanity’s defeat, and through the scarlet smoke he saw Aurora in her full predato
ry appearance—her eyes of crimson and her sharp fangs. She grabbed the man in the business suit and sank her teeth into his neck.
“Oh, my God!” the woman screamed, covering her face. “It’s . . . oh, God!”
He stared hard at her and said, “That’s what it’s really like.”
“No,” she said, beginning to sob, “no, it’s . . . it’s . . .”
“If she doesn’t feed him her blood, he will be safe,” Antonio added. Dead, maybe, but not converted.
But in that moment, Aurora gestured to the cobra. It shot downward toward her and sank its fangs into the fleshy area above her heart. She cried out as if with ecstasy.
As she held the mayor upright, she positioned her hand around the cobra’s head, just behind its fangs, and yanked it free. Blood trickled from her chest. Papa Dodi took the serpent from her, and she pushed the mayor’s face against the wound. He began to drink.
The man would rise again, Antonio knew.
Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks.
“Get out of here. Now,” he told her.
He moved on, as the tide of the crowd changed in a moment to panic. They were surging, rioting; he couldn’t see Jenn, or any of the others. They were spilling into the street, some running in the opposite direction, in sheer terror, but most of them had no idea where they were going, what they were doing.
Pushing against the sea of humanity, he got across the street.
He ran silently to the back of the brick building, debating how to go about gaining entry. He should go through the back door, up the interior stairs, and through the red door, which stood at the southern end of an interior central courtyard. Go in, assess the situation, and report back.
He heard the craziness: sirens, whistles. The screams. People losing their humanity, whether permanently, or just through mob frenzy, he couldn’t say.
And he made a command decision. He wasn’t going to endanger Jenn and the others. He was going to go in, grab Heather, and run for it, staking any who got in his way.
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