by eden Hudson
“Stop!” Scout’s ear-piercing whistle cracked through the attic again. “Stop it! Let go of him, Clarion. And stop struggling, Tough.”
The coyote crushing my windpipe unlocked his jaw, let go of my neck, and shifted back into human form so he could grab my throat.
Clarion growled, reddish-brown vamp venom smeared across his mouth and in his teeth. He turned his head and spit a wad of it on the floor.
The vamp reaction was to hiss at him. Or maybe it was my reaction. Somebody inside me had had it up to here with this asshole. Clarion didn’t know. Scout didn’t know. She didn’t fucking understand what she was asking. How many vamps could I make in one day? How many souls could I drag down to Hell with me?
“It’s the plan to make new crowspawn,” Lonely said.
“What about it?” Scout asked.
What do you think? I threw my hands up at her and the coyote’s grip on my throat tightened.
“The tarnished one’s not a fan,” Lonely said, smirking.
Clarion’s eye went from Lonely to me. His grip on my throat eased up.
“Then we’re on the same page. I was going to object to that method, too.” He stood up and held out his hand to help me up. “But you still need to get some control over yourself. You can’t attack everybody you disagree with.”
I reached for Clarion’s hand, then pulled up short at the last second and gave him the finger.
“Mature.” He rolled his eye. “Whatever. I still agree with Tough. This isn’t a war you can win by being faster or stronger or harder to kill. And you definitely can’t win it by willingly turning your own people over to their side. Holy wars aren’t won by numbers or strength; they’re won by faith.”
That almost made me laugh. I’d been in a holy war not that long ago and it damn sure seemed like the legion of unkillable badasses who outnumbered us ten to one got that win. Oh yeah, and my dad, the epitome of faith, got his head cut off by Kathan. So screw that theory.
But I still couldn’t do it. Even if we lost, even if every single human in this fight died screaming, I couldn’t make anyone a vampire. I couldn’t put anyone through that. I just…couldn’t. Not for anything.
My hands started shaking again and my heart pumped once, so hard it felt like the damn thing had tried to punch through my chest.
The coyote and the crow both looked at me, ears perked up. They quit gawking a second later when the vamp healing started, though. Maggots chewed through the shredded skin and cartilage of my throat so fresh tissue could replace it.
Even though he was the one who had tried to rip my throat out, Clarion winced and looked at the window. Lonely just looked like he felt bad for me. Whatever rapid healing they had must’ve been way more awesome than mine. Me, I was getting used to it. I’d only been undead for about seventy-two hours, but I’d already been pinned to a wall with a set of wooden TV stand legs, stabbed with a broken piece of a porch swing, had my chest caved in and lung collapsed by my girlfriend’s twin, had my ass handed to me by the big bad boss man himself, been scratched up by Mitzi, had my skull cracked by a fucktard with a wooden baseball bat, and somewhere in there I’d caught on fire. Twice. It’d been a busy few days.
“So, what then?” Scout said. “If we can’t engage them on their own level—”
“Which you can’t,” Clarion interrupted. “Not even as vampires. Angels are the ultimate war machines, designed first as armies of Heaven, then—”
“Then what do you suggest we do?” Scout snapped.
“We go back to basics Old Testament style,” Clarion said. “We pray, we wait for direction, then we follow that direction to the letter.”
No, we get the sword, I thought.
Up to then, Lonely had been watching Scout and Clarion go back and forth. When I thought that, though, Lonely craned his neck so he could look at me sideways. His expression creeped me out. Crows are so weird. They never just look straight at you.
“Mikal’s sword?” Lonely asked. Or maybe he was just saying it out loud so everyone would hear. It was hard to tell.
The Sword of Judgment, I told him. Cut somebody once with it and—boom—final destination time. It’s what Colt used to send Mikal to Hell.
Lonely relayed what I’d said to Scout and Clarion.
“I saw the sword once before,” the coyote said. “A long time ago. Sounds like that’s going to be the key. So, where is it now?”
Everybody looked at me.
How am I supposed to know? I rubbed the place where the back of my neck connected to my skull, trying to stop the dull, thudding headache. Somehow these psychos had dragged me into this talk-it-out fest with them. Next thing you knew, I was going to be arguing about chains of command and primal unit distribution. You geniuses are supposed to be the brains here. If we’re down to relying on me, we’re fucked.
Lonely laughed his crow-caw laugh. “Smarts. That’s what we need. Intelligence.”
Like research, I said.
Lonely tapped one of his nose piercings, then pointed at me and nodded.
Okay, so maybe I’m not completely useless after all, I told him. I know who we need to talk to.
Tempie
I kept the separate piece of me close beside Kathan’s all-business piece for the rest of the day, trying my hardest to avoid thinking that what I was doing amounted to spying on the only creature who could ever sincerely love something as disgusting and broken as me. Kathan knew I was there, but that didn’t change the fact that what I was doing was two-faced and wrong.
But I didn’t bring back that separate piece of me.
Sometime after Rian left, another foot soldier reported in. Relevant information flooded the all-business piece of Kathan like character specs from one of those role playing video games Leif and his friends used to be so into. This soldier went by the name of Mal these days, but in the old days he had been called Molech. He and his twin, Chemosh, had been given charge of Modesty. It wasn’t a job Kathan had been about to trust to Rian. Rian’s worth lay in the unquestioning following of orders, not imagination or creativity. Due to their brutal and bloodthirsty nature Chemosh and Molech had been two of Mikal’s favorite soldiers.
“Modesty?” Kathan asked.
Molech leered. “You were right. She doesn’t lose consciousness unless we drug her, and her pain tolerance is almost at the same level as ours. She’s got all the physiological signs of being the other half of Destroyer.”
Kathan nodded. He’d never doubted that my twin was the Destroyer, only whether or not he could control her. If he let the foot soldiers break her, then offered to end her suffering, she would jump at the chance. He was sure of that.
It was strange that Kathan could know me so intimately, but have no understanding at all of my twin. My power had been easy to unlock because my anger was always on the surface, a red-hot burner waiting for someone to lay their hand on it. Desty was different. She pushed the anger down, blocked it off, let it simmer and pressurize until something tripped her trigger, as our dad used to say. He had another saying for when that happened, too. He called it “when the shit hits the fan.”
I knew Desty. She was my other half. There were times when she seemed so soft, so vulnerable and naive that I could barely stand to think about her out walking around in this awful world as if she wasn’t this fragile, stupid thing. But underneath all that, Desty had a core of steel surrounded by a layer of dynamite. You could only push her so far before she started to push back—and when she started to do that, there was no negotiating with her.
Kathan knew me literally inside and out, knew that he had me, that I would do anything he asked, but he didn’t realize that if Desty decided not to take his offer, she would die before she changed her mind.
“The child?” Kathan asked.
Molech’s eyebrows drew together and his mouth straightened into a thin, hard line. “It’s a resilient little bastard.”
Kathan considered this with a certain black humor. It would be just like the spawn of a Whitney t
o cling to life like tongues of holy fire clung to his former brethren. But perhaps it was even more than that, he thought. If Modesty didn’t lose consciousness from beatings and torture, but drugs put her out like a light, then perhaps it was the same for the child. Perhaps her spawn couldn’t be killed by violence or physical assaults, but only by some form of poison.
Was it too late, though? Had conception changed her irrevocably? If he couldn’t return Modesty to “bred in the blood the same, borne in the flesh the same” as her twin…
Hell, can’t hurt to try poison first. He chuckled to himself at the thought, then turned to Molech. “I’ll deal with it. Let the rest of the soldiers know it won’t be much longer. If they want a shot at her, they need to get their licks in now.”
“Yes, sir.” Molech was grinning again as he left. Kathan recognized the look. He’d seen it on the foot soldier’s face before, at Mohenjo Daro.
Another piece of me broke off and spoke up. My conscience, maybe. You should be feeling something. He’s talking about torturing your sister and killing a baby.
Feelings won’t help right now. Anyway, I didn’t have the ability to feel things yet. That part of me was still caught up in a maelstrom of mind-blowing intensity that drug makers and angel-porn directors could only imagine in their gushiest wet dreams. I’m observing. Gathering research so I can make an informed decision. Like Desty would.
You’re putting off the inevitable, that little voice in my head said. You have to betray someone. So, who’s it going to be? Your sister or your savior?
Desty
I curled up in the corner of the pitch black cell. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Right around body temperature. The walls and floors—and I assumed the ceiling, too—were padded. No sound got in or out. No light, either.
This had to be the place Colt had talked about—the lunatic’s cell. The box Mikal had stuck him in and left him for God knew how long. He’d said the dark had almost suffocated him. That there had been nothing but the worst things he’d ever done and thought, that he’d been able to feel his mind falling apart.
I had read articles on extreme isolation, how most of the civilized world had banned it from criminal interrogations because it was cruel and unusual punishment. Torture, those studies called it.
It made sense that someone like Colt—with the amount of guilt and pressure he felt, with nothing to look forward to but torment and humiliation at the hands of the most sadistic enforcer the world had to offer—would lose his mind in the lunatic’s cell. The lack of external stimulation turned all focus inward. Not exactly good news for a guy with plenty of preexisting psychoses to exacerbate.
But I couldn’t remember a case study that detailed the effects of isolation or sensory deprivation on an otherwise mentally healthy person who had spent the last several hours being beaten and raped and—and—
The cool, clinical distance evaporated. I felt foot soldiers’ fingernails digging into my thighs, prying my legs open again. But this time instead of burning flesh, cold metal wire forced its way inside of me, snagging, ripping…
A hoarse voice whimpered in the darkness.
Me. The whimpering was coming from me. I was curled up on the floor of the lunatic’s cell, hugging my knees to my chest. My heart raced like it wanted to explode. I was hyperventilating, shaking, sweating.
But alone. I held onto that. For now, I was away from them.
That was where Kathan’s logic broke down. Putting me in the lunatic’s cell between…sessions…was a mistake. Maybe it indicated Kathan’s prejudices about the human race. Maybe he assumed we were all like Colt, a minefield of psychoses waiting to explode. Or maybe they had just needed somewhere to throw me while they brainstormed fancy new ways to make me pay for helping their mortal enemies send Mikal to Hell and blow up their home.
Whatever their reasoning, it was faulty. The isolation and silence gave me time to recover, and introspection was practically my middle name. I could figure out my next move if I could just stay calm and objective.
“So, what do we know?” I asked the empty cell. My voice sounded oddly flat. Affectless, a psychologist might have said. But affectless was lightyears better than inconsolable weeping.
We knew that Kathan thought I was pregnant, but he couldn’t be right. Tough and I had used condoms every time. Except that last time, but he was already a vampire by then. Vampires couldn’t get anybody pregnant. Could they? My high school Health class hadn’t covered sex with the undead.
“Non-issue,” I said. “Move on.”
The fact that Kathan thought I was pregnant was the significant thing, because it meant I was different from Tempie—either “in the blood” or “in the flesh”—and that meant he couldn’t enthrall me, even if I agreed after all this. According to Jax’s translation, Tempie and I had to agree to become his joint-familiars if we were to become the Destroyer. But Kathan had to know that I wasn’t going to be real excited to kiss him after all this.
So, why keep me around? And why promise to promote whichever foot soldier killed the imagined fetus? One had to assume it was an attempt—however misguided since I couldn’t possibly be pregnant—to get me back to identical with Tempie. Why keep me around at all if I was just going to say no when he tried to inflict his essence on me again?
“Fallen angels use the truth to lie,” I told the lunatic’s cell.
So, what was true and what was the lie Kathan wanted me to believe?
No answers revealed themselves.
I took another deep breath and released it, then pulled my legs up tighter to my chest and rested my chin on my knees.
The skin on the inside of my thighs felt stiff with dried blood. One more thing to log away for another time when I could deal with it. If such a time ever came.
But was it just blood? Was some of it amniotic fluid? Was some of it…fetal?
“No,” I said. Because I couldn’t be pregnant.
But the pain seemed to flare up from all directions at once. I hurt. All over. Inside and outside and deep in my chest so badly that the pain climbed up my throat and clawed its way out in loud, sternum-cracking sobs.
I was never getting out of here. Unless I died or Kathan made me his joint-familiar, this torture was going to go on and on until I died.
The sobbing cut off sharply and a new sound filled the cell. Screaming. It took me a second to realize that sound was me. I smacked the floor with both palms as hard as I could.
I didn’t want a baby. I hated Tough and whatever faulty condom he’d bought. I hated him for pumping sperm into me and I hated my body for sucking that jizz up and turning it into a living organism. I hated the foot soldiers. I hated Kathan. I hated the God who had brought us here, who stood back and watched it all happen to us poor, pathetic humans, watched us get raped and broken and torn apart by life.
I hated everyone and I wanted them to pay.
Tough
I’ve done exactly eight minutes of research in my life, back in tenth grade, when Jax told me that there was an anatomy book in the library that showed an up-close and personal view of the human vagina. I searched for that book for eight minutes over lunch one day, then gave up. A couple months later, Mitzi and Jason hired me and I forgot all about paper vaginas. Who needs a book when you can get the real thing for free? Or in my case, in trade for your reputation, your dignity, and eventually your soul.
Research wasn’t my thing, it had been Jax’s. It’d been Desty’s thing, too, but screw her. If you run out on your boyfriend and hop into bed with the asshole who killed your boyfriend’s whole family, you automatically get excluded from the list of people whose thing research is.
So research was Jax’s thing. And when Jax was alive, where did he go when he needed to know something?
The Witches’ Council.
After I told Lonely, he rounded up his little cousin, Cash, and a crow girl I hadn’t seen since elementary school—Talitha something—then they headed across town.
It didn’t occ
ur to me until right after they left that they were going to be close enough to the trashed bakery to smell Colt’s blood. That sick, dizzy feeling of having two brains—one that wanted to suck up my dead brother’s blood with a crazy straw and another that wanted to curl up and bawl like a baby—swam up around me.
Scout looked at me and opened her mouth at the exact same time as Clarion took a breath to say something.
A shiver rolled down my spine and twisted itself into the muscles of my back and neck. I had to get out of that damn attic.
I headed for the pull-down steps, grabbed the two-by-four frame and swung myself down to the first floor.
The tattoo parlor was at capacity, maybe a little over. Eight or ten crows were hanging out by Lonely’s chair, all pierced to hell and dressed in black. Half of them had on leather jackets even though it’d been in the low thousands every day this summer. They weren’t cold like me. Some vampire heat-sense made the crows pop up at right around human temp in my brain. I figured the coyotes would be hot, but something about the crows—maybe the all-black dress code or maybe just the way they moved in those jerky bird-movements—made them seem like they should be icy. Whatever passed for logic in my brain thought if your magic could turn a person into a cold, dead NP, then you should be cold yourself.
I got so caught up in thinking about the heat signatures of the gang of crows that it took me a few minutes to realize everybody was looking at me. The crows and coyotes I could handle—you grin sideways at a crow and you stare down a coyote, everybody knows that—but it was the humans who got to me. Kids from Scout’s army. Tawny Hicks, Jim and Drake, and at some point, Addison had showed up. People I saw every night at the bar and every day around town.
They were looking at me—really looking—like they’d been waiting for me.
That was how the grown-ups had looked at Dad when he told them what they were going to have to do. Fourteen years ago, in the basement of Halo’s church, Dad had stood up in front of his congregation, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other holding a cup of coffee, and he’d told them that they were going to have to fight, that most of them would probably die, but they were going to stop the fallen angels before their evil spread any farther.
