Calico eased into a sitting position, making guttural noises through the searing pain. And that was just her torso. Her head thundered and throbbed like the inside of a subwoofer at the Dead Beat Club. The room spun and she turned to the side and threw up, which added to the turn-it-to-eleven pain. When her stomach stopped heaving and she looked up, Winston stood over her.
“I’m thinking you lied,” he said.
She shook her head, which was a huge mistake, causing her to cry out.
“Then where are they? There’s no place left to hide books.”
Calico looked around the wreckage. He was thorough. Her three worktables were overturned, all the contents of her shelves were scattered on the floor. However, the large steel storage cabinet containing precious metals and gems still stood—her dad had bolted it to the concrete floor and wall.
“You mean—” she had to stop to breathe carefully for a moment “—other than the big-ass cabinet right in front of you, asshole?”
Winston tried to open the cabinet. “Where’s the key?”
Calico breathed a little chuckle. “It was in one of my storage bins, dickweed.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, then he looked the cabinet over, as though searching for a weak spot. The thing cost over five hundred bucks, there better not be any. He tried the handle again, straining against it.
“You break it, you bought it,” muttered Calico. “And if you break off the handle, moron, how do we open it after we find the key?”
He growled at her like a dog. She wondered how she’d ever missed the signs he’d been turned into a vampire? His skin was ashen—though she forgave herself that miss because she’d only seen him in the weird strobe lights and darkness outside her parents’ house, the darkness of his car, and then things turned sour quickly in the townhouse. But his eyes weren’t normal in the least. They practically glowed a weird bluish gray.
She shouldn’t have been able to move, but the rage she felt at being brutalized pushed her and she slowly, as in super slo-mo speed, leaned forward onto her hands and knees. Fuck the pain and fuck Winston. She started sifting through debris of beads and clasps and springs and pegs and polished stones and charms and coiled wire and lengths of chains.
She looked up at Winston. “Get on your fucking hands and knees and look!”
He glared for a moment and then lowered himself to the floor. “What’s it look like?”
“A fucking key.”
“And you don’t have a backup somewhere?”
“Of course I do, I’m not an idiot. The other key was carefully stashed in another bin. You fuckwad.”
She slowly sifted and moved forward, searching. But not for the key, which she hoped he wouldn’t stumble upon. She wanted the rowan heartwood stake she’d sharpened for Tabby. It was somewhere in this mess.
She worked her way toward where her woodworking table had stood, hoping the stake was close to it and not flung across the room. Along the way she found one of her yellow leather work gloves. She slipped it on her right hand and kept looking for the stake.
After only five minutes, he rose up on his knees and looked around, frustrated and impatient. “Why the hell did you hide it down here with all this crap?”
She looked at him like he was an idiot. “’This crap’ was carefully stored in containers before you bulled through it. I knew exactly where both keys were. This is your fault.”
He frowned and looked at her hand. “Why are you wearing a glove?”
She looked at it and shrugged, then went back to looking through tiny bits of this and that. She watched him peripherally watch her for another moment before he went back to all fours. She tried not to whine from the pain and the difficulty breathing, because fuck Winston.
Calico found the bundle of rowan dowels next to one of the overturned tables, the metal legs sticking up like a dead animal. Moving slowly, staying as calm as she could, she turned in a circle looking for the sharpened stake.
Cait Sidhe stared at her from across the room. Why the hell did she feel relief at seeing her? What fucking good could a ghost cat do?
The cat’s eyes roiled with molten gold. A line of fur stood at attention along the cat’s back. Her purple aura spit and crackled like flames. She was pissed, her tail twitching spastically behind her. She bowed her head to the floor. Calico almost spoke out loud, telling her she wasn’t being helpful. Then she saw the dark brown heartwood stake beneath the tip of the cat’s black nose. She would have wept if she wasn’t already crying from the pain.
Winston stood up suddenly, his eyes sweeping the room. “This is bullshit.”
Calico said as evenly as she could. “If you want the books, you gotta look.”
The vampire turned toward the cabinet. “Maybe not. I can show Lorcán where they are. That will please him. He might have the strength to tear the cabinet open. If not, I can find tools that will do the job.”
Calico desperately crawled toward the stake. “Who’s Lorcán?”
“He is my master.”
His master. The one who had turned him. Lorcán. She was utterly certain he was the vampire she’d seen in her vision, the one standing in the alley with Tabby. And now he was in Denver.
“How did he find us?”
Winston turned. She kept crawling and pretending to look for the key, the stake like a beacon in front of her.
“That is not my concern. He has come and I do his bidding.”
She stopped eye-to-eye with Cait Sidhe. She’d never been this close to the cat before and wanted to reach out and see if she could touch her, but instead, she put her hand over the stake. Next to it was the key to the cabinet.
“Found it,” she said, picking up the key.
Winston took a step toward her as she flung the key in his direction, purposefully trying to throw it past him. But he was so fast that he nearly plucked it out of the air. It flew just beyond his grasping fingers and hit the floor. When he turned, she picked up the heartwood stake and forced herself to stand. There was pain literally everywhere in her body and she almost collapsed back to the floor.
“Fuck you,” she said.
He chuckled and bent to pick up the key. She staggered toward him, lifted the stake in her bare hand, and placed the gloved hand behind the blunt end to anchor it. As he stood with his back to her, she aimed just to the left of his spine where she hoped his black heart would be—
But the asshole spun at the last moment, smashing his elbow into her cheek. She fell sideways, dazed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Calico could barely see Winston through her shimmering vision as she fell to the floor. He grinned, flashing his fangs and dropping to his knees next to her. Her eyes focused on the cut on his arm. It had stopped bleeding, despite how deep it’d been. Motherfucking vampires, she thought.
He dropped his body onto hers. An obscene action that revolted and terrified her. She struggled against him, but he just kept smiling.
“I haven’t had much blood. Lorcán turned me just—” he frowned “—Saturday night, I guess it was, not too long after I met you and left your parents’ house. Seems so long ago and I’m hungry.” He bared his fangs.
With one hand, he covered and pushed against her face while the other cradled the back of her neck, exposing it. She tried to scream, but his hand muffled her. She kicked and thrashed, but his body weight kept it to a minimum.
Terror thrummed through her like an electric shock. Fear must have masked the pain of the fangs puncturing her skin, because she hardly felt it. He drank deeply—she heard the gulping swallows and the satisfied grunting he made deep in his chest.
She flailed frantically but could barely move. The hand smashing down on her face covered both her nose and mouth. She couldn’t breathe. It was a fucking race between bleeding to death and asphyxiation. But she didn’t stop fighting, pounding her hands against him, trying to buck and wriggle free of his body. Then Winston suddenly arched backward and howled, spraying her own blood acro
ss her face.
“You fucking bitch,” he snarled, rising to his knees and reaching behind him. What was he trying to grab?
She covered the wound pumping blood from her throat with the gloved hand and used the other to punch him as hard as she could in his throat. He made a gacking noise and struck her, his punch much harder than hers. It dazed her again and she was pretty sure he’d broken her cheek bone, or maybe he’d already done that with his elbow.
He reached behind his back.
“Fuck, it burns,” he muttered and stood up, turning away from her. The stake stuck out of his upper back—far enough from the side that his hands couldn’t reach it. She thought she had dropped it when she fell after taking the elbow to the face.
She sluggishly rolled to her knees. Adrenaline helped. Still, it took all of her will to get to her feet. She was in bad shape, to put it lightly. Her vision swam and whirled, the edges dimming.
Blood poured from her throat. Her legs quivered and she fell—but she threw herself forward as she did. She used both hands to grab at the stake, somehow striking the blunt end against the palm of her gloved hand as she slammed into his back, slipped to the side, and fell to the floor.
It happened so fast that she was positive the stake must have pulled free of his body. But as she stared at him through dimming vision, Winston screamed and whipped his head back and forth. And there it was, the blunt end of the stake sticking out an inch or two from his back, blood flowing down it and spilling to the floor.
He arched backward farther and farther until it looked like he’d snap in half. Then he dropped to the floor and was still.
Jesus.
Fuck.
She covered her neck again, not like that would help. But even through her failing vision, she could see Winston’s eyes. They were open and blank, the blue gray color fading, the entirety of the eyes turning a milky white.
At least she killed the motherfucker.
She smiled and coughed blood as her eyesight faded.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As with dreams, Calico knew the hill she and Cait Sidhe stood on was in Ireland over two thousand years earlier. A new moon hid in the night sky. Clay oil lamps held by priests and priestesses lit the grassy hill. There were nine druí priests standing in a circle around a dying rowan tree atop the hill’s crown.
Beyond the priests, near the base of the hill, stood a ring of nine bandruí—female druids. They were the last line of defense if something went wrong. The women held knives, axes, and scythes into which they whispered protective incantations to imbue them with the power to strike down the beast beneath the tree if it came to that.
The tree looked like a little old person, its branches withering, standing precariously bent and gnarled from age. But it wasn’t age killing the tree. A daemón seethed within a stone cairn wrapped within the roots, an evil placed there millennia ago by the same order of druid priests. The tree was both protector and herald. When it began to die, the druí knew they had to act.
Calico and Cait Sidhe stood outside the circle of priests, near the top of the hill. They were invisible witnesses beyond the perceptions of the druí. And yet, the grass was damp beneath her bare feet, she smelled the rich verdant fragrances of the surrounding forest mixed with the burning oil of the lamps. The slight summer breeze was cool against her skin—she was naked but didn’t feel the usual dream-panic of showing up at school without any clothes. Her pain was gone and there were no marks on her skin from Winston’s attack.
She reached down to touch the large cat, whose head stood nearly to Calico’s waist. She froze when her hand touched the fur. After a moment, she scratched the crown of the cat’s head. Goosebumps rose over Calico’s body. She wasn’t awestruck by standing naked on a hill in ancient Ireland, but when she felt Cait Sidhe’s soft fur for the first time in her life, she almost went to pieces. She scratched until the cat looked up, gold eyes glowing as if saying, “Really?” before returning attention to the druí.
“Right,” whispered Calico, pulling her hand away.
One of the priests removed his cloak, he was naked beneath it, and dropped to his knees in front of the tree. Using an iron spade, he dug. The ground was wet, and it didn’t take long to reach the cairn’s stones. He bent into the hole and dug with his hands, pulling out stones and setting them aside.
After stacking over a dozen, he crawled halfway in and came back out with the wooden Príosún Daemón, the daemón’s prison. It was a box roughly the same shape and size as a shoe box fashioned from the heartwood of the rowan tree’s sister and inscribed with runes of imprisonment and protection. The box, like the tree, was failing, the dark power within rotting the wood and wearing away the protections.
Calico shuddered. She recognized the dark power of the daemón trapped within. It was the same dark creature that had attacked her in her townhouse just a few days earlier. Cait Sidhe growled. The black fur along the cat’s back bristled.
The druí meant well, but the saying about the road to Hell was quite literal on that hilltop. Calico understood their intention and it made a sort of sense. Why put the daemón in another wooden prison that would also eventually fail, when the druí felt certain they could return the daemón to Hell?
She also understood it was neither a demon nor Hell in the Judeo-Christian sense. The dark creature came from the lower realm of Tir Na Nog or, in English, Otherworld. Calico blinked in surprise as she now knew Cait Sidhe came from the upper realm. She hadn’t known that or that the cat had been sent from Otherworld to retrieve the daemón.
And what the priests didn’t understand was that the idea of how to return the daemón to the lower realm of Dubnos came straight from the dark creature’s own whispers that slipped past the box’s weakened protections.
The priest set the Príosún Daemón next to him in a dirt clearing a few feet wide that was prepared with the dark creature’s rune painted in the gathered priests’ blood. The other priests removed their cloaks and began speaking in a tongue older than humanity, a tongue taught to them in the dark whispers. The kneeling druí used the tip of the iron spade to nick his forearm, drawing blood. He smeared his index finger in the blood and then drew a rune of release on the top of the wood box. The daemón had led him to believe that the rune meant something else entirely.
Calico watched helplessly. Beside her, Cait Sidhe continued to growl from deep within her chest, her tail twitching. She took several quick steps forward, ears pressed back, as if stalking prey, then turned her head toward Calico.
She followed the cat past the priests. As the men intoned the ancient words, she watched the protections slough away from the heartwood box like dirt sliding down a cliff in a torrential downpour. Dark power flowed out.
Oblivious, the druí continued their incantations as shadow tendrils curled around the men’s feet. Their speech faltered. Confusion touched their faces a moment before they fell to the ground in convulsions.
Cries pierced the night, but not from the druí. The women surged up the hill, weapons raised. But before they reached the summit, the men rose, their eyes black with evil, their lips curled in hideous grins. As the men engaged, a last bandruí ran up the hill, heading straight at Calico. This woman didn’t carry a weapon.
Instead, she held a larger heartwood box inscribed with similar runes to the other. She had made it in secret, fearful of the druí plan. She fell to her knees next to the damaged box, snatched it up, and dropped it into the one she’d made. Sliding shut the lid, she cried out and fell backward to the ground, clawing at herself, rending her own flesh. The dark power had infected her. But within the heartwood, the daemón was trapped anew. Calico heard its frustrated screams.
Cait Sidhe hissed and crouched, her butt wriggling briefly before she sprang at the bandruí. Calico thought the cat was going to kill the woman, but she disappeared inside her. Calico stared as the woman stopped clawing herself and lay on the ground panting. The other women screamed around them. Their attack had been c
ountered swiftly and brutally and now the women either lay dead or infected by dark power.
The bandruí next to Calico sat up and looked on in horror at the carnage. Cait Sidhe, barely more than a purple vapor, slid from the woman. The cat mewled pitifully and would vanish back to Otherworld if her spirit was not bound to this plane.
It suddenly all made sense. Calico grabbed the smallest stone from the stack the priest had made, a stone that would fit in a small girl’s hand. She could feel the stone, its hardness and its weight, even though she wasn’t at all sure if she and Cait Sidhe were really there on that hilltop.
Calico needed blood. Looking around at the chaos and violence of the battle, there was sadly too much blood, but she didn’t know which had been infected by dark power. She had to use her own.
Setting the stone in the grass next to the vaporous cat, she took hold of a front paw and used her thumb to push against the back of one of the toes. A claw unsheathed. Calico slid the point across her wrist. She was shocked at how sharp the claw was as it sliced through her skin.
She dripped blood onto the face of the stone and drew the rune of Cait Sidhe. That wasn’t knowledge she’d been given in the dream. She knew the rune well. She’d seen it as a little girl, no more than five, when she first handled the same stone. With the rune drawn, the cat faded into a purple mist that rose, surrounded, and then disappeared into the stone.
Calico leaned toward the bandruí and whispered one word in her ear, “Teitheadh!” Flee!
Calico didn’t know if the woman actually heard her, but the bandruí scrambled to her feet, grabbed the new Príosún Daemón, and ran down the hill. The woman would run all the way to their village where she would gather what she could, warn who she could, and continue to flee ahead of the onslaught of the infected, who would wipe out the village and everyone left in it before going their separate ways.
Calico stood and walked around the base of the tree, ignoring the horror around her. Opposite the cairn, she bent down and dug a hole next to the roots and placed the stone inside. After filling the hole with dirt, she sat and watched the retreating figure of First Sister as she disappeared into the night to begin the first vigil. Not only had she witnessed the birth of the dark creatures, but she’d witnessed the birth of the bandruí gaiscíoch.
Dark Vigil Page 11