It took me about a second to remember where I’d been: the old ruined church and the auction. And then I remembered Ray. I’d had him in my arms, his little body against me. I’d had him, safe and secure. But I was alone now. I’d lost him. A wave of grief washed over me and I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, I could see a bit better. I think my eyes had just gotten used to the darkness. It wasn’t a good thing.
I was in a sort of basement that must once have been part of the church. It was enormous and very dark. It must have taken up the entire space, not just below the church, but below the whole plaza. There were a couple of tiny light bulbs above, but they were weak and distant.
Several big columns supported the floor above. I was tied to one of them. I could feel the rough stone against my bare arms. Pulling and struggling against the rope showed me only that it was thick, make out of some orange synthetic material, and very tightly knotted. Whoever had tied me up wasn’t an amateur. I was never going to get out of this by my wits alone, and it didn’t seem like the stone was rough enough to cut through that thick a rope—not in the next year or so.
In this area, directly under the church, the walls were sturdy and intact, and the floor looked like the old Roman mosaic you see in every old building in Europe. After that, beneath the space that wasn’t the church proper, there were ruins, where it looked like houses had fallen into the area, and then been built over. Across from me, there was a stairway leading up to something I couldn’t see clearly—it was just too dark—but which looked like the door of a manorial house, with statues on either side. I couldn’t see what the statues were. There was movement around the edges.
Was this the lamia den that Management had told me about? Probably. But if they were still here, they were holding back for some reason.
“Goddamn it, son-of-a-bitch cultists,” a very familiar voice said.
I’d looked around in a general way, but not at the floor right next to me.
It was my mother.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
All vampires are evil, but this one was something special. Not only was she a Master vampire and power broker in the dark networks of villains, but she was… Okay, she was straight-up crazy. Perhaps it was impossible, at any rate, for a vampire to occupy the body and mind of someone like my mother, someone genuinely good and kind and loved by all, and to still have all her memories and most of her feelings, and not go batshit insane.
She was lying on the floor, next to my feet, with nothing to hold her back.
Shit. I’d rather they had fed me to the lamias. Instead, they were about to feed me to the crazy-ass evil vampire. She couldn’t turn me—the Guardian’s marks prevented that—but she could easily kill me.
Then the vampire moved…but weirdly, in a crabbed way, as though her middle were pinned to the ground. It wasn’t. I could see it wasn’t. Or at least there wasn’t a stake protruding from her back. Just her back, moving and spasming, as if her stomach were glued to the ground. She tossed her head around. Since she’d become a vampire, she’d rejuvenated some, and her hair looked just like mine, only perhaps even darker and shinier.
She twisted her head around in an unnatural way, and I wondered why she wasn’t just shape-shifting into mist and drifting free from whatever had trapped her. I’d seen her do it before.
Instead, she turned her head up, kind of sideways, so she could see me. It looked wrong. The head turning, I mean. It was not quite as bad as seeing someone turn their head all the way around exorcist-style, but it was the same sort of thing: wrong, like she should be breaking bones. And maybe she was. Vampires, particularly Master vampires, just regenerated superfast, and maybe she didn’t care if she broke vertebrae, if they just came back together.
She was staring at me, with her eyes very wide. As I stared back, she blinked, “Oh, calm down. That shadow thing messed me up enough that Brother Death got some kind of curse on me. I’m trapped as much as you are.”
It had to be some kind of magical binding instead of ropes, but I still didn’t trust her.
“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“What the hell do you care?” I flung back, because it was almost unbearable to see this creature wearing my mother’s flesh, and it was unbearable to hear it talk to me as if I were still the little girl Mom had raised, way back. This is the way she’d talked to me, when I’d come back from school upset about something; or when some boy I liked had told me I was just too weird or something. From her voice, if I closed my eyes, I’d expect her to bring me cookies and lemonade.
Only this was the vampire that had set fire to my home, changed and killed my daddy, and made my life a living misery.
She made a soft sound, “Of course I care, honey. No mom ever stops caring about her baby. I thought you’d know that by now.”
Ray. I thought of Ray in my arms, and my voice caught in my throat as I spit back, “What would you know about being a mother? You’re no one’s mother.”
“Honey—”
“No. I know you have her memories, and you think you’re my mother, but you’re not. You’re just a crazy-ass vampire.”
I could almost hear her weighing different responses. I don’t know how, because I sure as hell couldn’t read her mind, and I couldn’t be reading her breathing because she didn’t have any. Perhaps I could hear rustles as her body tensed or something. She said, “Bless your heart, if that’s what you think.”
“My mother would never help take my baby away from me. She’d have given him back to me. My mother would have cared about how worried I am and how scared Ray must be.”
She chuckled. The bitch actually chuckled, a kind of rich and satisfying chuckle. “Oh, honey, that’s not true. Sure, I want you to raise your baby, but I want you to do it right and under my protection, so that neither of you will be in danger from all the evil things that want to hurt you.”
“Evil things like you?”
“No. Not like me. I’d never hurt a precious hair of your heads. But there are things out there, Julie, things like Brother Death, who only care about your power, and little Ray’s power too, and they’ll take you and hurt you badly, just so they can get at it. I could keep both of you safe from all that.”
I had to actually close my eyes and take deep breaths because there really was no point talking to the crazed thing who wanted to turn us into vampires which, by definition, would kill us, but she was too insane to grasp that.
“You think my wanting to make you immortal is a bad thing,” she said, and I jumped, because it was like she could read my mind. “Don’t be so scared. That weird curse on you makes it so I can’t really get in your mind, but I can still read your expressions. How could I not? I’ve been looking at them ever since the day you were born.” She shook her head, and this time, I swear I heard a sound of grating bones. “I know you think that turning you would be harming you, but that’s because you don’t know. You don’t know!”
“I know that you got a demon inside you, talking through your mouth and thinking through your brain, you old hag.”
She didn’t even blink. She continued looking at my face, but her eyes were all misty-soft and it was like she was looking into the distance, into something unutterably beautiful. “I was scared once too.”
“What…of being turned? I should hope you were scared.”
She shook her head, just a tiny movement, with crunching bone again. When she talked, it started in a whisper, “That too, of course, but I was so scared of so many things. When I found out there really were monsters out there, and then I had a family, and I was so scared for all of us, all the time. Even your daddy. He wasn’t very strong, you know. Oh, sure. He was strong physically. One of the best Hunters ever. And he was strong mentally. Smart as could be. But I always knew that I was his emotional strength. He used to hold me all through the night, saying he didn’t know what he’d do without me.”
“And you killed him!”
“No. I s
aved him! That’s what you don’t understand. The night I woke up as a vampire was the first time I was really alive. I could see. I could hear. I could feel like never before. It was like all my life I’d lived in a sack at the bottom of a dark cave, and now, suddenly, I was awake. And I was strong. So strong. Strong enough to protect my family and those I loved. Strong enough to make sure nothing ever went wrong for them.”
“Like my brother?” I spat. “Ray got killed by a bunch of demons because Dad was trying to bring your skanky ass back to life!”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry about that. Yes, I should have contacted your father earlier. I should have stopped his bumbling attempts to bring me back. Thing is, at the time I had obligations that—you’ll never understand. I couldn’t be there for you then, okay? But when I learned what happened, I knew I had to be more involved. I had to help my family.”
“Help? You bit me! It’s only because these marks burned your stupid mouth off you didn’t kill me! You wrecked my house, turned my Dad into a vampire, kidnapped my ex-boyfriend…tried to murder my husband! You helped Lord Machado try to blow up time! You’ve got a weird idea of help!”
“I’ve helped you,” she insisted.
“How?”
“Like that vampire outbreak at your college, Julie!”
For a moment, for just a moment, I was back there, with the blazing science building behind me. I thought of Cynthia Anne Aiken, with the baby blue eyes, and her stupid tattoo with a quote from Anne Rice, and then my having to chop her head off and carry it around in my book bag.
“What do you mean?”
She laughed, the type of sound she used to make when us kids were just figuring humor out and told her a knock-knock joke that wasn’t really funny. She’d laugh like that, partly to acknowledge the joke and partly because the fact that we were trying at all was funny in a way. Just not the way we thought.
“What’re the odds there’d be a vampire nest formed at your school, just when you were there, pretending to be like the rest of them?”
“I wasn’t pretending.”
“You can’t lie to me, Julie. You were miserable. It was like watching a full-grown woman trying to squeeze herself back into kindergarten clothes. You wanted to be a Hunter. You’ve always wanted that, more than anything else in the world. But you were so eaten up with guilt, blaming yourself for Ray’s death and your father’s fall, you were torturing yourself living a life that wasn’t even yours.”
“It was you…”
“Sure was. I turned this dweeby English professor. What was his name again? Jan, I think. Something like that. He made a lousy vampire. Always full of himself. But I turned him because I knew he was just the sort of cocky fool who’d start a mess big enough to bring you back to your senses.”
I remembered something about a professor who had left on sabbatical around that time. A lot of the kids had been fond of him because he’d always shared his weed.
“You bitch.”
She shrugged, or something that passed for a shrug while her stomach was pinned to the floor. “You had to be reminded of your place. What were you going to do otherwise? Finish your degrees and become isolated, teaching in some university? And what would that do? Nothing. I forced you into a moment of clarity. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Tough love. You needed to wake up and remember your legacy.”
There was something there. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to admit it, but in a sick and twisted way she was right. I’d been miserable before that though I’d kept telling myself I was in no way miserable and that I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and living the life I wanted to live. It’s easy, particularly after a great loss, to tell yourself stories and to avoid acknowledging the truth.
“You caused a bunch of stupid kids to die! Cynthia Aiken was my friend, and she—”
“She was a sheep. They would’ve all gotten killed sooner or later—if not by Jan, then by something else. There’s predators and then there’s prey. Prey always die. That’s their job. What’s slaughtering a bunch of sheep if it means making sure my little girl was all right and not living a dead end life?”
What did I tell you? Crazy. Bonkers. Bat-guano insane. When the pure evil of the vampire met with the pure good of my mother’s soul, it had splintered into this nightmare.
“Why are you crying?”
I hadn’t realized I was. “Because you’re a monster.”
“Don’t cry.” She was actually trying to comfort me. “It’ll all be okay.”
With a shock I realized that in the depths of her black heart she really did love me. It was a corrupted and twisted love, one that no sane creature would understand, much less bear, but it was love. She really thought she wanted what was best for me, to protect me and guide me.
That’s how much my real mom had loved me, that even Susan the vampire couldn’t help but feel a twisted shadow of what had been. My eyes were overflowing, and my throat was too tight to swallow.
She might love me and my family, but her regard for humans and the things of humans was negligible, and her moral compass was gone. This Susan was pure evil, yet there was still something of my mother in there, and that something made me want to believe it was really her.
Above us, a door opened, and people began entering the cavernous space. No. Not people. It took me a moment, and then I realized they were the clay golem things that Brother Death had used as bodyguards.
“About damned time,” the vampire said. “Unbind me!”
Fully a dozen figures came down the stairs. Ten were the security golems. The remaining two: one of them was Brother Death, who looked human mostly, but for some odd reason was now dressed in a period-accurate cavalier costume, including plumed hat; the last was one of the weird green gnomelike creatures, about two and a half feet tall, with the big ears that twitched as he walked. He was dressed in a matching outfit to his master’s and carried a metal folding chair in his hands.
As they walked toward us, I randomly thought that it was amazing Brother Death didn’t also have a bunch of golem women fanning him or throwing rose petals in his path. The whole thing had that kind of feel—staged to show he was a very important personage, deigning to come and talk to us lowly prisoners. Who was he trying to impress and why?
Susan watched them carefully. I truly believed that she was stuck somehow, but she looked angry enough to peel herself off the floor right then, even if it meant leaving half her body behind. She was furious and barely holding back.
Brother Death stopped about four feet away. His golems stood at parade rest, while the little guy scurried around with the chair, set it directly behind his master, and then got out of the way. Brother Death took his seat…and smiled. It was a ghastly look with all those extra rows of teeth.
“So…are you two lovely ladies ready to listen?” The smile increased in size. “You could say that you’re my captive audience.”
I groaned. “Just kill me now.”
“No kidding,” Susan agreed.
Brother Death removed his big hat, set it on his knees, and gave us a very stern look. “I drove off the Condition and their shadow creature, and brought you both here, safe from harm. I’ve secured you both for your own protection. I can’t have my guests killing each other, especially before I had the chance to offer my deal. Sadly, there is only one prize to give, so whoever comes to an agreement with me first, I will remove the ropes or the curse of Quintus Emilianus, and that one will be free to take the child and go.”
“And if we don’t come to an agreement?” Susan demanded.
“I am a businessman and a respecter of deals. I have a reputation to uphold. There is always an agreement to be struck… But if pride gets in the way of cooperation, then I will result to baser options.”
I was sure all of those baser options would prove fatal, and probably hurt a lot too. “Where’s my son?”
“Somewhere safe. I didn’t want his presence to agitate you further. For a woman with a reputation f
or being cool during negotiations, you certainly become rather violent and irrational when your child is involved.”
I’d show him violent and irrational… But despite being a bundle of nerves on the inside, I tried to appear calm and collected.
“Now to business.” He tilted his head to address the vampire on the floor. “Susan—may I call you Susan?”
“Whatever floats your boat.”
“Good. As I revealed upstairs, the Condition asked me to retrieve the Kumaresh Yar, but it was mighty Asag who commissioned me to steal the child.”
I died inside as he said that, because while most of the world’s Hunters were laying siege to Asag’s house, he’d decided to get his revenge on poor little Ray.
“Susan, you have allied yourself with the one called Stricken, in the hopes of thwarting Asag’s plans, yes?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “What?”
“When there’s a war coming, better to pick a side than get drafted. I’m done being a slave to cosmic horrors. Asag, Stricken, they’re both assholes, but Stricken puts Earth first. And I live here. So what? You going to execute me for your boss?”
“You wound me.” Brother Death feigned hurt. “I’m no mere hireling. I’m an independent contractor. I sent word that I had you in my power to see if Asag wished to bid for your life, but he declared that killing you would be a waste. Instead, I was told to convey a message. You have become a powerful entity in your sphere. Asag would much rather be your ally than your enemy.”
“Go on…”
“Hold on.” I guessed where this was heading and couldn’t keep it in any longer. “I made an offer too.”
“Ah,” Brother Death said, managing to make a moue of distaste that would do credit to a society matron. “Julie.” He said my name in exactly the same tone as he’d refer to something sticking to his shoes and, unlike the vampire, he didn’t ask my permission before getting all familiar. “Yes, the Kumaresh Yar in exchange for your child. For such a precious thing, you might have won the bidding, yet we never closed the deal. You failed to deliver. Your pathetic trickery even caused a few of my more gullible guests to kill each other. Perhaps if you told me where the real artifact is now, we could come to terms.”
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 25