Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  Now that I had it in my hands, I knew I was right—it was a cheap replica—but it’d have to do. I swung it at Theresa’s throat and only winged her; she grabbed my wrist and tried to wrench the weapon free, but Adrian bent over and charged her, catching her in the side and throwing her off me, only to land on top of her. He wasn’t stronger than the vampire woman, but he was heavier, and for that moment, weight was the more important advantage.

  I grabbed him by the back of his sweater and jerked him back to my side. I pushed him in front of me and said, “Run! I’m right behind you!”

  He didn’t ask where I expected him to run to. There was only one way out for us because the Barringtons were blocking the way to the back door. We had to make for the nearby front door and run around the house, back to our car—assuming we could get it past the front gate. I was fully prepared to make a whole encyclopedia of assumptions, as long as it got us out of that hall as fast as possible, and preferably faster.

  I brandished the sword, expecting any of the children to pounce at any minute, and I wasn’t disappointed.

  Raleigh flew around the corner and into view. He didn’t slow down, he just charged—making a whole bunch of his own assumptions about his personal prowess, considering that I was armed and he wasn’t. I caught him through the upper torso without even meaning to; it was that fast, that’s all—he was over there, and then he was right here on top of us.

  The wound wasn’t mortal but it was a serious inconvenience for both of us. For him, because hey, sword in the chest. For me, because he spun away from me and took the sword with him.

  I said, “Uh-oh.”

  Adrian heard me. “Uh-oh?”

  “Nothing, keep going. Here, here—go left.” I pushed him around and into the foyer, where the front door loomed like the devil’s tombstone. It was locked eight ways from Sunday. You could see the locks doubled and tripled, and set in metal plates.

  Adrian saw them and had a perfectly rational thought. He reached for the narrow hall table and picked it up like he could throw it through one of the skinny windows on either side of the door.

  “Won’t work,” I told him with a hand on his arm. “They’re shatterproof, the lot of them.”

  With that I went to work on the locks. And damn the whole Barrington clan forever and ever amen, because only about half of them were actually, you know, locked. And to think, my instinct to just run down the line and flip them all as fast as possible had looked so good on paper. I swore loudly and copiously, and Adrian said, “Hurry up!” like I was hanging around giving myself a manicure or something.

  At least his shout gave me a heads-up about Marie, who was barreling in our direction. She let out a scream like a very small hawk and went after Adrian, who had nothing but the narrow end table with which to defend himself. It was too bulky to work, or do anything more useful than hold her out of reach for a second or two.

  Thank heaven, the second or two was enough for me to crack the last dead bolt and throw open the door. Once it was ajar, I whipped the table out of Adrian’s grasp. It was hardwood, oak maybe, and heavier than I expected. But that only meant it made an unexpectedly satisfying crunch when I swung it upside Marie’s skull.

  Adrian didn’t need micromanaging; by the time I had dropped the table and returned my attention to the gaping door, he was already on the front lawn and heading around to the left.

  Onto the freshly mowed grass I ran, playing catch-up and playing it well. I was beside him in the span of a few heartbeats, encouraging him along and eyeing the house warily, knowing that I hadn’t actually killed any of them and there was still at least one Barrington we hadn’t seen yet.

  I threw a last look up at the bedroom where I’d found Isabelle, and I was truly impressed by the speed, scope, and silence of her work. She’d literally pried the entire window frame out of the building, thereby bypassing the need to smash or cut her way through the reinforced glass.

  I didn’t see her. I didn’t see even a shadow, slipping across the wall.

  Had she followed behind me? Had she believed me?

  “Shit,” I mumbled.

  “What?” Adrian panted.

  “Where the fuck is the car?”

  “I know, right? How big is this place anyway? Wait—there’s the garage. We’re close.”

  “Hell yeah,” I said as our rental Lexus came into view.

  It was a premature “hell yeah.” No sooner had we reached the car and Adrian was fighting to find the right key than the yard was brilliantly, suddenly, completely awash in columns of blinding white light.

  “What the—?”

  “Floodlights!” I squinted and wanted to howl. My eyes felt like they were boiling in my skull. “They’re back in the control room!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’re re-arming the property. Let’s go, now!”

  “I’m working on it,” he insisted, and then he had the door open, and then he’d popped the locks.

  I leaped into the leather seat and slapped the door shut. Then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I pressed the button to lock the doors, as if that would stop anybody who was chasing us. The engine turned over immediately, like a good luxury car should, and Adrian nearly blew out our back tires peeling off the lot and onto the driveway.

  Then it was Adrian’s turn to say, “Oh shit. What about the gate?”

  “We’ll ram it if we have to.”

  “I don’t think we can ram our way through it,” he said dubiously.

  “We have a better shot of ramming through the gate than ramming through a stone wall,” I said, reminding him that the entire property was surrounded by one. “Just drive!”

  The car skidded down the driveway and beelined for the gate. I was afraid he was right, but what could we do?

  I leaned over and buckled him into his seat belt, then did my own. And I prayed for air bags, because I had a feeling this was not going to go very smoothly at all, goddamn it.

  The big black gate was rolled into position, hulking there and blocking the way to freedom. Adrian slammed on the gas and the tires screeched, but I hollered, “Wait!” and grabbed at his thigh. He took his foot off the gas and hit the brakes instead, so the car fishtailed on the concrete, losing a wheel over the edge and into the grass before righting and getting the traction to go straight again.

  “Look!” I said, flailing toward a black-clad figure beside the gate. It was bent over the chain mechanism that drew the gate forward and backward, and it was doing something useful, I just knew it.

  He didn’t ask any questions. He applied the gas again, more reasonably this time, lest we smash through a gate that was actually being opened for us, slowly but surely.

  Isabelle was using every ounce of strength she had to pull the thing aside. Impossible under normal circumstances (I was sure the Barringtons had seen to that), she’d first snapped the chain and now had only the weight of the gate to fight her. She shoved it along the track until it was open enough to squeak-birth a Lexus, and she waved us through as if we had any other plans at the moment.

  “Who the hell?” Adrian asked, craning his neck to get a better look at the still-masked woman.

  She was looking back at him, too.

  The way the gate had unspooled, she was on my side of the car—but she gazed in through the window, past me, and stared at his face so hard I thought she’d crack it. It would’ve been a touching moment were it not for the shadow that reared up behind her.

  Gibson.

  I recognized his shape before I could see his face, so backlit by the industrial power spotlights.

  I tried to warn her but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her brother. And of course, she couldn’t hear Gibson sneaking up behind her.

  The Barrington seized her. Her eyes went big as nickels and she wrestled him, using her weight to pitch both of them forward, into the car. Her face pressed against my window, then smeared away from it in a smudge of cheap ski mask yarn as they tussled
within arm’s reach.

  Adrian was paralyzed, unsure of whether to gas it and go or help our mysterious benefactor.

  I spared him the agony of a decision by unbuckling myself and throwing my fist through the Lexus’s window. The glass shattered into a billion shards of blue-green safety coating and razor-sharp edges. I shoved myself to my feet, forcing my upper body out the window and grabbing Isabelle by the neck.

  Undignified and potentially painful? Yes. But it was the only thing I could get a grip on, and she didn’t hold it against me.

  Forcibly I sat myself down, towing her with me and into my lap—and smacking Gibson’s face against the door frame hard enough to dent both his forehead and the car. Stunned, he released her. It gave me the leverage to draw her all the way inside in an ungainly move that ended with us both covered in safety glass pebbles—and with her head smashed against Adrian’s right thigh.

  “Go!” I yelled, and he didn’t hesitate anymore.

  He punched the pedal.

  The car swerved, its driver-side mirror stuck on the gate. It snapped off with a pop and a scrape, and without an inch to spare, the car cleared the opening and leaped out into the relative safety of Buckhead’s suburban dream-land.

  Isabelle pulled herself off my lap and slithered into the backseat, where she picked the tinted glass off her clothes.

  The funny thing was, Adrian knew—even before she’d pulled off the mask. He knew while she was lying in the back of the Lexus, panting and looking back out the window in case they were coming after us. They weren’t. We all knew it. I think she just needed a reason to look away, because when a moment is a long time coming, sometimes it can wait a little longer. Sometimes it needs to, when the anticipation has been so much that the buildup becomes a barrier of sorts, and it needs those extra moments to dissolve and defuse.

  When she turned around and pulled the mask off over her face, her hair came tumbling out in a dark, wavy ponytail she’d twisted up under the covering. Her face was stricken—not with terror or confusion, but with a gut-twisting nervousness that maybe this was not how it ought to be. Her eyes darted to the car door’s handle; I saw it in an instant and knew she was considering just … jumping for it. Getting out now, before anyone had to talk—before there were explanations or questions, or potential recriminations and shouts.

  But none of that happened.

  What happened was that their eyes met in the rearview mirror, Adrian driving and looking back at her, for he’d been staring with certainty and relief even before she’d admitted her identity by removing the mask.

  He didn’t know what to say any more than she did, but I could feel some of the pent-up wanting in his chest, radiating toward my psychic senses with all the subtlety of an electric oven. He wanted to say that she looked exactly the same as she had ten years ago, but better now—not quite the sickly monster who’d hid in his closet while he was home on leave. He wanted to tell her how hard he’d looked for her, and how long, and how much it had almost cost him—but he couldn’t tell her anything to make her feel guilty. Despite the fact that he was driving and he could not watch her as hard as he wished, already he could see that it’d take little more than a word to send her flying away from him.

  I was on the verge of turning on the radio, just to have something to fill the pressure-cooking silence of the car, when Adrian said, “I thought you were dead.”

  But she couldn’t hear him and she couldn’t see his mouth moving, so she did not know what he’d told her.

  Isabelle couldn’t hear anything, for almost exactly the same reason that Ian couldn’t see anything. Both of them had been part of the same god-awful experiment, intended to restore sensory ability to one god-awful ghoul who’d been stripped of it all in punishment for some heinous but unknown crime.

  Someday, I intended to find him. And I intended to take away everything he’d managed to retrieve. As far as I was concerned, he deserved everything that had ever come to him and much, much worse—for what was done to my friends, before they were my friends … and for how he’d tried to do it all over again.

  I didn’t know how I’d go about it. I had only the vaguest idea where he was, and he was surrounded by money and technology and well-paid minions who’d serve him better than ghouls. But one day, one way or another, he was going to pay for what he’d done to Ian and Isabelle.

  13

  Those first few hours together were strange and wonderful, I guess.

  Strange for me. Wonderful for Adrian. Sweet but awkward for Isabelle.

  She read lips quite well, and as long as we spoke within her line of sight, she understood everything we both said without any real difficulty. This was good, because although at first no one had known what to say, by the time we were back in the hotel they were ready to try.

  It was like watching two people reach out to each other over a gulf of ten years, clasping hands, pulling hard, and drawing the chasm to a close. Or if not a close, then something more narrow and more easily bridged.

  In an attempt at discretion, I left them alone and wandered the city by myself for a while while they got reacquainted. I poked around Five Points, moseying in and out of the bars and clubs that remained open, and sitting around a park with my eyes half closed, waiting for the sun to rise enough for me to head back and crash.

  I halfway hoped someone would try to mug me so I could get a guilt-free meal for my troubles, but no. No one bothered me, and a homeless woman gave me some peanuts to feed to the squirrels. There weren’t any squirrels at such an hour; all sensible squirrels had holed up in their trees, burrows, and apartment building walls like decent, civilized creatures. But I felt like it would’ve been rude to refuse.

  From my position in the very dark park, mostly alone except for a few snoozing pigeons and the feral cats who hunt them, I pulled out my cell phone and called home.

  Ian answered on the second ring, and I almost imploded with relief. He was there. He was alive. He hadn’t gone back to California.

  “Hello, Raylene.”

  “Hey sweetheart. How’s it going there at the homestead?”

  “All’s well. Or all’s typical, at any rate. The kitten has decided that your pillow belongs to him.”

  “Awesome. I’ll correct him on that point when I return.”

  “You might want to wash it,” he said.

  “I’ll do that.”

  After a moment of quiet, Ian asked, “When might that be? You returning, I mean. I … I haven’t heard anything further from Maximilian, and I don’t know what’s going on. I’m in the dark here. More than usual, that is.”

  “Soon. Very soon. Tomorrow night, I hope—depending on what airplane ticket bounty the Internet is able to provide me. We’re all done out here. All done, and then some.”

  I could hear him frown. “What does that mean?”

  “Long story.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “Well, lots of things are long stories. I always tell them eventually, don’t I? Don’t go to California, Ian. Don’t let Max talk you into it, if you reach him again. There won’t be a convocation, and I know who killed your father. Also, I know how we’re going to get Max off your case for good.”

  “You still think you can fix this? Time is running out, Ray. It might have run out already.”

  “No. You’re still alive, so I’m still ahead. And once I get back, I’ll explain everything. You’ll see. You’ll believe me. Hey,” I said, trying to divert the topic before I felt the need to wibble and beg. “How’s Elizabeth settling in?”

  “Well enough. She’s an odd bird, but an intelligent woman. Schizophrenia, isn’t that right?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Sometimes she seems perfectly normal. Sometimes she lectures Pepper in quantum theory and how magic can change the past. Every now and again, she calls Domino ‘George.’ ”

  “Who’s George?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. Either she doesn’t know either, or she doesn’t
feel like telling us. Raylene?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “She doesn’t have anywhere else to go, does she?”

  “You looking to get rid of her already?” I asked.

  “I’m only wondering,” he said, which didn’t answer the question. “You’re accumulating new household members at a steady clip, that’s all. We may need to renovate the next floor down in its entirety.”

  “Does Pita need his own room?”

  “Pita does not need his own room. He already has his own floor.”

  “Next you’ll tell me I shouldn’t buy him a bed, because he already has the queen-sized Posturepedic in my room.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture.”

  “I think you’re right. We will need to remodel. Maybe the whole place—top-to-bottom, all four floors.”

  “Are you thinking of opening a halfway house for strays?” he asked, approximately half joking and half worried.

  “Not exactly. But I may as well tell you now, I’m bringing yet another new one home with me.”

  “A new … person?”

  “A new vampire. I don’t know if she’ll stay with us at first—in fact, I suspect she won’t. She’ll stay with Adrian.”

  I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. “You found Isabelle?”

  “Almost by accident, but not quite. I knew she was around, I just wasn’t expecting to find her so quickly.”

  “Is she.…?”

  “Deaf? Yes. I think she hears roughly as well as you can see.”

  “The poor dear.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t feel too sorry for her. She’s tougher than she looks. It’s my favorite thing about her, so far. That’s one of my favorite things about you, too.”

  “Why thank you. But now you’re buttering me up.”

  “Not at all,” I insisted. “I miss you, and I’m relieved to be talking to you. You’re alive, and you’re home. It’s all I wanted.”

  “I miss you, too,” he admitted, and then a moment of silence hung between us, occupying the line with nothing except the companionable knowledge that we were only a couple thousand miles apart, and we wouldn’t be for very much longer. “Tell me about San Francisco. Maximilian wants me to meet him in Chicago tomorrow night.”