Crusade

by Nancy Holder; Debbie Viguié

  “They’re blaming our hunters for the loss of the virus,” Diego said without preliminaries.

  Father Juan grunted. “The virus didn’t work anyway.”

  Diego merged into traffic. “We know that and they know that, but that’s not how they’re spinning this. They’re also publicizing the fight on the plane.”

  “What’s going on?” Juan demanded, fear prickling through him.

  “The government has moved to outlaw hunters.”

  “No.” Juan’s worst nightmare, come to pass.

  “Sí.”

  “What can they possibly use to rationalize this decision? The hunters do the work. They’re out there killing vampires when the military can’t. They’re the only thing standing between the people and darkness.”

  “You have said a mouthful, my friend,” Diego said solemnly. His face was furrowed with worry lines, and dark circles ringed his eyes. He had aged terribly since Juan had last seen him.

  “They are too popular. The Spanish people see them as saviors, as doing for them what their government can not. And so, they are a threat?” Juan asked, trying to make sense of it.

  Diego nodded. “Now that Spain is making overtures to the vampires, they are.”

  “¡Hostia!” Juan slammed his fist into the dashboard of the car, an outburst of anger unlike any he had demonstrated in many, many years, swearing an oath a priest should not utter.

  “They knew we were going to fail. They were counting on it. They knew the virus wouldn’t work, but they couldn’t just admit that. No, instead they have to have someone to blame. They need an enemy they can actually fight in order to maintain power.”

  “Hunters,” Diego said softly.

  “Yes, hunters. Bloody hell, we’ve been looking for the weak link, the traitor within our ranks,” Juan said, looking out the window at Spain, his Spain, where he had lived for so long, longer than anyone else could imagine. His to protect.

  He was failing.

  “The traitor was our own government, one of the last to stand against the vampires. Every military man, everyone on a government payroll, every contact, any of them could have seen us, betrayed us at every turn.” Juan closed his eyes. How could he have been so blind?

  “They must have found it more attractive to end the shadow war than to continue fighting on the losing side,” Diego speculated.

  “But they couldn’t just snap their fingers and do it. They needed a new enemy, a new face to put before the people as the reason for all their suffering.”

  “Dios.”

  “We can’t allow this to stand,” Juan said through clenched teeth.

  “I’m not sure what the Church can do to persuade the Spanish government. But rest assured that as long as the Academia is owned and controlled by the Church, we will continue to support our hunters and to train new ones.”

  Juan allowed hope to flare inside himself, but the warmth was scant. “But for how long?”

  Juan glanced over at Diego, who refused to meet his eyes. They had both heard the rumors for months now about a movement inside the Church herself to make a treaty with the vampires. It was outrageous, unthinkable, and now too terrifying not to be true.

  “For as long as there is breath in our bodies,” Diego vowed, taking his hand off the wheel and crossing himself.

  Juan did likewise. “Amen.”

  “I will need your help to address the students. We’ll have to find a way to explain the situation to them, prepare them.”

  “Of course.” Juan exhaled slowly as the enormity of what was happening descended on his already very weary shoulders. “And I will need yours when I tell my hunters. If they return.”

  “You sound worried.”

  He leaned his head against the seat, envisioning his quarrelsome charges. Missing them. Hoping they were still alive.

  “They’re the right ones at the right time, but I can’t get them to see that. I can’t even get them to work together without bickering and fighting.”

  “As in the Church, so in the world,” Diego said, laughing bitterly.

  “The Resistance in New Orleans is a shambles, but at least there are people still willing to fight and die for what is right.”

  “We need more of them, and not just in America,” Diego observed.

  “I know. Now that Spain has fallen, there is no organized war; there is only the underground, the Resistance, to liberate us. Men and women living in fear and acting out of desperation, that’s all we will have now,” Juan said.

  “Then that must be our starting point,” Diego replied.

  SALAMANCA

  FATHER JUAN, HOLGAR, SKYE, JENN, ANTONIO, ERIKO, AND JAMIE

  Jenn lay in her own bed and stared at the ceiling, breathing in the familiar scents of the Academia. Upon arrival they had been told that Father Juan would see them in the morning; then they had been sent straight to their rooms to sleep. All but Holgar, that is. It was going to be a full moon, and Jenn was secretly grateful that they had arrived at Salamanca two hours before nightfall. She knew he locked himself up somewhere while he changed. She just didn’t want to see it.

  Antonio and one of the priests had taken Heather somewhere, she didn’t know where. It usually took a full twenty-four hours for a new vampire to wake up, a full cycle of day and night. It could occasionally take slightly longer, but never less.

  They’d torn out of the French Quarter and down the I-10 West in Marc’s van, preparing to chance a flight to Madrid. The sun had shone down on a man in a black suit, who was standing in front of a black, unmarked car stationed across their lane of traffic, his hands held out for them to stop. He’d worn sunglasses and a small black Jerusalem cross on his lapel.

  “There’s a private jet waiting for you,” he’d said. “Father Juan sent it. Come this way.”

  They’d followed him to the airport and through a gate in a hurricane fence. There a matte-gray private jet sat waiting on the tarmac. Eriko walked down the covered companionway, then up into the plane, followed by Jamie, Skye, and Holgar.

  As Jenn climbed out from beside Antonio, who was bundled up against the sun, she turned and looked at the man, who was holding open the car door for her. Her face was reflected in his mirrored sunglasses.

  “Do you know Greg?” she asked, thinking of the man who had spoken to her at Papa Che’s funeral.

  The man’s face was expressionless.

  “That’s a common name,” he replied. “You’d better hurry. We had to pull some strings to make this happen.”

  They all made it on the plane to discover that the windows had been blacked out. Antonio had been only slightly singed in the millisecond it took him to make it from the car to the plane, hurrying ahead of Holgar, who was carrying Heather.

  Once they took off, things got ugly. Accusations and recriminations flowed hot and heavy. Jamie was furious that they had brought her newly turned sister along, and frankly, she couldn’t blame him. She would have felt the exact same way had it been his sister, or someone else’s sister—anyone, really, except Heather.

  Holgar stepped in to try and make peace, and Jamie hit him. Eriko and Skye broke it up, dragging away their respective partners.

  Antonio didn’t speak or look at her the entire flight. Instead he spent the time with Heather’s still form, bowed over her in prayer.

  In Spain the plane had landed on another private airstrip, and a limo had taken them to the university.

  Jenn’s thoughts kept freezing back to that moment when she’d realized her sister had been turned, when she’d hefted the stake in her hand, prepared to do the right thing, and when Antonio had stopped her. Why had he done that? Was it really out of love for her, or because he thought he could find some sort of salvation in saving another Cursed One?

  There were too many questions without answers. She had hoped to at least be able to talk to Father Juan and discover why he had left New Orleans in such a hurry. Something was wrong, she was sure of it, but she had no idea what it could possi
bly be. What could be so bad that it drove him to abandon them on the eve of battle?

  He didn’t abandon us, she reminded herself sternly, flipping onto her side so she could see the door to her room. As a child she had never been able to sleep with the door closed, always fearful that a monster lurked just on the other side. Now she could only sleep with it shut and locked, for she had seen the faces of the monsters who were just on the other side.

  And I know their names, she thought, starting to drift to sleep. Her cell phone chimed, indicating that she had a text message. She reached for her phone and flipped it open. There was no time stamp, no sender information, only a single word: Montana.

  She stared for a long time. Montana was called Big Sky Country. There weren’t a lot of people there, and she guessed there were very few vampires. True to her word, her grandmother had gotten herself and Jenn’s mother out of harm’s way and had sent word where they were.

  * * *

  Skye tested the locks one more time as Holgar watched her from inside the cage. She couldn’t stop the sick feeling in her stomach as she thought of Heather, who had also been locked in a cage like an animal.

  Yet Holgar was an animal. Well, at least sometimes. When he smiled at her, it was full of warmth and laughter. But his eyes were always sad. She knew he carried with him a dark secret, but he shared it with no one. That was okay. She hadn’t shared hers with anyone either. Jamie, Antonio, and Jenn wore their pain like badges of honor, wounds received in combat. Eriko didn’t allow herself to feel. Skye and Holgar, though, buried their pain deep so no one else could see.

  “Do not look so sad, min lille heks,” Holgar said. “It’s just for the night. And it’s better this way. Safer.”

  “Safer for who?” Skye whispered.

  “For all of us,” he said, staring her in the eyes. He meant it. He really believed he was protecting them as well as himself. Maybe he was. But tonight she knew he could use some extra protection.

  “Good night,” she said softly, and then walked out of the room. She closed the door behind her and then worked her magick to create a barrier that would prevent anyone from entering the room until the morning. She hated to do it, but she was afraid of Jamie, afraid of what he might do. He was still angry, and Holgar’s wolf form was the personification of everything Jamie hated.

  “Be safe, Holgar,” she whispered before turning and heading for her own room.

  Once she had closed the door, Skye drew a circle on the floor. Normally, she preferred to go outside to perform her rituals, stand among the trees and feel the earth beneath her toes and stare up at the moon. Not tonight, though. Dark forces swirled around her, and she wasn’t entirely sure that someone or something wasn’t waiting out there in the darkness for her.

  Estefan’s face rose in her mind, and she shivered.

  She opened her trunk and pulled out the tools of her trade. She needed to purge the darkness from her mind and break the bonds that seemed to be hampering her, twisting her magick in ways she did not intend.

  “It has to end tonight,” she whispered to the darkness.

  She listened to see if it would whisper back.

  Holgar watched Skye go with mixed emotions. It was best that she left, but he didn’t want her to. None of his new pack had ever seen him change into the wolf. Father Juan had witnessed it, but not the others. It was something he wasn’t willing to share with them yet.

  But it was when he changed that he most craved contact with others. That was the wolf in him: fierce, strong, and desperately needing communion with others. The loneliness rose up to choke him, as it had every month since he had left home to train to be a hunter. It was unbearable, and he howled with the pain of it. For the first few months he had nearly quit after each transformation, convinced he could not go through the pain of isolation again.

  Stay, Skye, just this once, he thought. Maybe one day he’d ask her, when he knew she could handle watching it. He hated eating alone, but it was nothing compared to how much he hated having to go through the change alone.

  Three times Father Juan had stayed with him, and it had made it so much easier to bear. But the priest was under no delusions as to what Holgar was. Holgar had most of them fooled into thinking he was a nice guy. They didn’t truly understand the beast in his nature, and so they couldn’t be trusted to witness what happened to him when the full moon rose.

  His pulse quickened suddenly, and he began to sweat as though he had a high fever. The moon was calling to her wayward son, and it was his duty to answer. He had no choice but to answer.

  As his body began to change, Holgar howled again, singing to the moon, begging her for a mate.

  The howl of a wolf brought Eriko wide awake from what had been a mercilessly dreamless sleep. Her head pounded, and she could hear blood rushing in her ears. Her arm was asleep, twisted underneath her, but when she tried to roll over, pain raced like fire along the nerves of her body.

  She whimpered and lay still, willing the pain to stop. Overtaxed muscles were twisting, trying to heal themselves—another effect of the elixir. She had broken five bones in her hand during the battle, and they were almost mended. Her left foot was swollen almost beyond recognition, sprained and bruised all over. It would have been so much better if she had actually broken it. She had learned from painful experience that a sprain could take five times longer to heal than a break and could be reinjured much more easily.

  The wolf howled again, and it felt like the sound rattled around in her skull, pounding it from the inside.

  “Why doesn’t someone just shoot that wolf?” she groaned. A moment later she repented her words, as she realized that the wolf in question was probably Holgar.

  Holgar. He was a great fighter, a strong member of the team. She wished he and Jamie weren’t constantly at each other’s throats, though. It was exhausting trying to keep them from killing each other.

  Like I almost killed that man, that human, she thought. She relived again the horror of that moment and thanked any deity who would listen that she had been able to stop herself. She was well aware that she might not be so lucky the next time.

  She reached out her hand and grabbed two painkillers, popping them in her mouth and swallowing them whole. She resolved that in the morning she would talk to Father Juan about going to see a doctor. She needed something stronger to manage the pain. Maybe she could get a prescription for something that would actually stop the pain. Exhausted, she fell back asleep without having moved her arm.

  Jamie paced his room like a caged animal. Normally, he had no trouble falling asleep after a mission, but his blood was still boiling over everything that had happened. He had considered going to Father Juan and waking up the priest, demanding that he deal with the problems at hand, like Heather, and their pet vampire, and that damned wolf, he thought as in the distance Holgar howled.

  He walked over to his trunk and pulled out his tools and the half-formed skeleton of a gun. His grandfather had made them the old-fashioned way, by hand, and had taught Jamie to do the same. He let out a slow breath and set to work.

  Aurora knows my sire. Did Sergio send her to get me? Who is she, and what does she want?

  Brooding, Antonio kept watch over Heather’s body. Soon she would wake to her new life as a vampire, and he refused to miss the first moment of fluttering life. He had to help her, to save her, for Jenn’s sake.

  Not just for Jenn, he admitted to himself. If he could help Heather confront her beast and win, then he wouldn’t be the only one; there’d be two vampires who could control their urges.

  Couldn’t control them in New Orleans, his mind mocked him. That was part of what scared him so badly. For years he had fooled himself into thinking that all he had to do was be good, devote himself to God, and that everything would be okay.

  He knew now that that wasn’t true. Everything wouldn’t be okay, because no matter how much penance he did, how many people he saved, how hard he prayed and studied, he would still be a Cursed On
e.

  What did that mean for his chances at living a normal life, for loving, dying, or even spending eternity somewhere that wasn’t hell?

  It terrified him, because for some reason he had always believed that one day it would just stop. He would wake up and discover that God had smiled upon him and he could once again walk in the sunlight, eat real food, kiss Jenn without thinking about killing her. Or was the whispered promise of the Evil One tempting him?

  “God,” he groaned, as he bent over Heather. “Help me.”

  Father Juan sat in his office, perplexed about how the hunters had made it back home. He’d waited for a message to tell him about their flight home, but it had never come. And now they were back, telling the night guard some story about a man in sunglasses and a private jet.

  He had sent no such jet. Maybe they had more allies than he thought. Maybe it was another danger unanticipated. Something more to do with this Aurora.

  His team had sorely needed the win in New Orleans. They were fragmenting, splintering apart instead of growing closer together. Now with the added worry of the government action and the new vampire under their roof and a mysterious group that had somehow interceded on their behalf, he didn’t know how much longer he could keep them together.

  It was early. The hunters should still be asleep. He should have been too, but a message had come for him. He let the piece of paper flutter to his desk, and his heart grew heavy. The news from the States was as bad as it could be.

  God, why? You know they needed this to be a victory in order to pull them together, make them see their own potential and live up to it. And yet, nothing had changed.

  Jenn still refused to acknowledge her gifts, to take responsibility and assume her rightful place on the team. He had let her go to America hoping that it would strengthen her resolve and that she would find the courage she needed to be a force to be reckoned with. He had thrown the runes and said dozens of prayers and knew that she had been meant to go. Heather had to be worth the sacrifice, or they were all doomed. With Heather now a Cursed One, he didn’t know what to expect of Jenn.