This Side of the Grave

by Jeaniene Frost

  Yep, this was who we’d come here for.

  “Hi, Timmie,” I said in a low voice.

  His head whipped up, revealing a face with five o’clock shadow on his jaw and faint lines around his eyes and mouth. He looked different from the gangly boy who’d been my neighbor seven years ago when I was a college student by day and a vampire hunter by night. In addition to the stubble on his face, the laugh lines, and his hair being longer, his frame had also filled out to a stockier, more muscular physique. Getting older looks good on him, I mused.

  “How do you . . . ?” he began. Then his voice died away while his eyes widened.

  “Cathy?” he managed. He looked me up and down, his shocked expression changing into a smile that wreathed his face. “Cathy! I knew you weren’t dead!”

  Chapter Nine

  Timmie continued to stare at me with a mixture of glee and disbelief. I smiled back, happy to see hints of the boy I’d been friends with amidst the differences in the man in front of me. When Tate told me Timmie was the troublesome reporter we needed to collect tonight, I’d been stunned, but pleased at the thought of seeing him again.

  “I can’t believe it,” Timmie marveled. “You look exactly the same, except, uh, you didn’t use to dress like that before,” he added as goggled at my outfit. Then he made as if to hug me, but stopped when he noticed the man striding up to my side.

  “You!” Timmy burst out, losing the smile while he blanched. “God, Cathy, you’re still with him?”

  I smothered a laugh at the incredulity in his tone. “Yep. Married him, too.”

  Bones gave Timmie a grin that managed to be predatory even though he didn’t flash any fang. “She does indeed look very fetching, but if you continue with that particular line of thought, I’ll neuter you for real this time.”

  Timmie’s cheeks reddened. “I—I didn’t . . . I mean, I wouldn’t . . .” Then his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You don’t look any different, either, except your hair’s dark now. Neither of you look a day older than the last time I saw you.”

  Fear wafted from him as he looked back and forth between me and Bones, putting it all together with what he’d learned about this club. I watched him closely as I waited. The Timmie I’d known had been open-minded and kind, albeit ignorant about the undead like everyone else. How much of who he used to be was still left in the person in front of me? Had the years changed not just his appearance, but his tolerance as well?

  “I’m right about all of it, aren’t I?” he asked at last, very softly. “Some of these people . . . they’re not human.”

  “No, they’re not,” I answered in a steady tone.

  His face paled even more as he looked around at the people by the nearest bar. On the surface, nothing about them looked different from patrons gathered around any other bar, especially since Timmie couldn’t see the handful of ghosts circling over the last seat on the left. But every so often, emerald would glint from a person’s gaze. Or someone would move with a quickness that Timmie’s subconscious would register even if his eyes couldn’t follow.

  Finally his shoulders squared as he looked back at me and Bones. “You two aren’t human, either.” A statement, not a question.

  “No,” I said gently. “We’re not.”

  He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Those guys, the ones who grabbed me . . . they were gonna eat me?”

  No use lying about that, either. “Oh yeah. Definitely.”

  He glanced at Bones. “But you won’t.”

  Bones arched a brow as if disputing that. I elbowed him while I said, “No, Timmie, he won’t. Neither of us will hurt you.”

  “Tim,” he replied, then gave me a wry smile. “No one’s called me Timmie in years.”

  I smiled back. “Sure. And it’s Cat, by the way.”

  “Cat.” That wry smile remained. “Guess it suits you better than Cathy.”

  “No,” Bones said.

  Timmie’s—Tim’s—smile faded. I glanced at Bones in confusion. “No what? You think I look like a Cathy?”

  “No to what he’s about to ask you,” Bones replied. “You already owe her for saving you from those other blokes. Don’t thank her by asking for another large favor.”

  Tim clapped his arms around his head. “My God, you can really hear . . . ? Well, stop it!”

  Bones laughed outright. I had to admit Timmie did look funny clutching his head, but I didn’t join in Bones’s chuckles.

  “Try wrapping tinfoil around your nog next, see if that works better,” he suggested devilishly.

  I gave Bones a sharp look, sorry he couldn’t read my mind anymore to hear my mental reprimand. “Stop it. I might have been tempted to do the same thing myself when I knew certain people could eavesdrop in my head.”

  Tim let his arms down. “I don’t care what he says, you gotta help me,” he got out in a rush.

  Bones rolled his eyes and then gave Tim a glare that would have struck most people mute out of terror. “Right thick, aren’t you? Let’s see if I can’t explain my position better outside.”

  Off the premises, where violence was allowed? “Don’t even think about it,” I drew out warningly.

  “Not for that,” he replied, though his mouth twitched in a way that said the thought had crossed his mind. “Believe me, Kitten, you’ll have wasted your time saving him before if others hear what he’s about to ask you.”

  That didn’t sound promising. But I needed Timmie—dammit, Tim!—for something, too, so I’d hear out his request. Didn’t guarantee I’d agree to whatever he wanted, but I’d listen.

  “Okay. Let’s go outside and talk.”

  Timmie gave Bones and me a speculative glance. “Before we go, I gotta know: If mind-reading abilities are real, there’s something else I wondered if fiction got right about vampires—”

  “Ask me if I sparkle and I’ll kill you where you stand,” Bones cut him off with utmost seriousness.

  “Not that.” Timmie’s mouth quirked before his expression became serious and, oddly, hopeful. “When I go back to my apartment, is it true that, uh, your kind can’t come inside?”

  I hated to destroy his sense of safety, but believing that would only be dangerous for him.

  “Sorry, that’s a myth. Vampires don’t need to be invited to go anywhere they want to.” I didn’t add that we’d already been in his apartment earlier, finding out from his roommate where Timmie would be tonight. Not that the young man remembered Bones and me questioning him once we’d given him a few flashes of our gaze, but I thought that was more information than Timmie could handle at the moment.

  He was silent. “Shit,” Timmie said at last, with heartfelt emphasis.

  I nodded. Sometimes, that word summed things up better than I ever could.

  “Let’s go, before people start to wonder what we’re blathering on about,” Bones said, inclining his head toward the door.

  We walked past the crowded parking lot toward the empty one ahead. It was far enough away from the real entrance of Bite that no one should be able to overhear us, aside from Tiny and Band-Aid, who still kept watch in their car. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but Timmie’s scent was a mix of excitement, fear, and determination. Whatever he wanted to ask meant a great deal to him.

  “Look, if your girlfriend vanished after sniffing around looking for proof about vampires, chances are she’s dead,” Bones stated once we reached the chain-link gate.

  I winced at his bluntness. Timmie also looked shaken, but then he raised his chin. “Nadia’s not my girlfriend, and I don’t believe she’s dead. You don’t know her. She’s my best freelance reporter because she can charm anyone into doing what she wants.”

  Bones snorted. “I don’t care if she was Helen of Troy and Scheherazade combined, obviously someone caught her and wasn’t pleased about her snooping. The fact that she wasn’t sent back to you afterward with her memory erased and a new desire to quit reporting doesn’t bode well for her.”

  I winced a
gain, but Bones was probably right. There was a reason the world didn’t know about the undead, and that was because vampires and ghouls were zealous about keeping their existence a secret. Some of them too zealous, like the vampires that had been about to make Timmie a nighttime snack.

  “We could check around,” I said, giving Bones a slight shake of my head when he looked like he was about to object. Yes, we had a lot of urgent matters on our plate, but Timmie’s pleading expression made me unable to say no.

  “Discreetly, of course,” I added. “We’ll start by asking Verses if he remembers seeing her, then show her picture to your people, Mencheres, some of your allies . . . maybe one of them will know where she is.”

  I didn’t hold out much hope for Nadia turning up alive, but at least this way, Timmie could feel like he wasn’t abandoning someone he cared about. From the look on his face, the fact that Nadia hadn’t been his girlfriend wasn’t due to a lack of interest on Timmie’s part.

  “Really?” he said. Then Timmie grabbed me in a hug. “Thank you, Cathy!”

  We were never going to get each other’s names right.

  “I’m not promising that we can find her, but we’ll look,” I said, giving him a light squeeze back.

  Timmie let me go, flashing a crooked smile at Bones. “Aren’t you going to threaten to pull my nuts off for that?”

  A dark brow arched. “Not at the moment.”

  “Cathy, what happened seven years ago?” Timmie asked. “Why did the feds claim you were shot trying to escape after being arrested for killing the governor and your whole family? I knew that was bullshit. You could never kill anyone.”

  Something between a laugh and a snort escaped Bones. I shifted uncomfortably. Here’s hoping I never had to explain to Timmie the reason behind my nickname of the Red Reaper.

  “Well, the part about the killing the governor . . . that was true, but he totally had it coming. He was involved in some very bad shit and my grandparents were murdered because of him. Then this secret unit of the government recruited me to work for them—”

  “Men in black!” Timmie interrupted triumphantly. “I knew they existed. Those creeps have been sabotaging my stories about the paranormal for years!”

  I stopped myself before I rolled my eyes. “Uh, yeah, but why are you surprised by that? They couldn’t just sit on their hands while you scared the hell out of people telling them things they’re not ready to hear.”

  Timmie bristled. “I can’t believe you’d say that. The public has a right to know—”

  “Bollocks,” Bones interrupted crisply. “Governments might lie to their people for selfish reasons most of the time, but this one they’re spot-on about. Think there wouldn’t be worldwide hysteria if the masses knew they shared this planet with creatures from their bedtime stories? A nuclear bomb would cause less devastation.”

  “We could handle it,” Timmie said, his chin jutting out further.

  Bones let out a derisive noise. “The day your kind stops killing each other over skin color or which god someone prays to, I might believe that.”

  I cleared my throat, defensiveness for my former species rising within me. “Considering what’s going on with vampires and ghouls at the moment, I’d say humans don’t have a monopoly on lethal bigotry.”

  “Yes, but it’s been six hundred years since our kind last clashed over such matters,” Bones muttered.

  “Really? What happened six hundred years ago?” Timmie asked, echoing the same question that popped into my mind.

  Bones’s expression cleared, becoming inscrutable. I knew him well enough to know such a reaction meant he’d just spilled something he hadn’t meant to, though I didn’t know what the big deal was. Six hundred years was a long time. Whatever happened back then should have no bearing on the potential trouble stirring between vampires and ghouls today . . .

  Premonition slid a cold path up my spine. The past few days, hearing my mother and uncle parrot the same ill-founded arguments I’d once used had reminded me time and again of when I’d first met Bones. Something teased the edge of my mind from that time. A long-forgotten memory of what Bones said the second night we met, when he thought another vampire sent me after him because he couldn’t believe I was a half-breed.

  Suppose I believe you’re the offspring of a human and a vampire. Almost unheard of, but we’ll get back to that . . .

  “Bones, whatever happened to the other half-breed? You said half-breeds were almost unheard of, and Gregor mentioned at least one before me, right?”

  He let out a slow hiss, something he didn’t do unless he was upset or aroused, and these were not titillating circumstances.

  “Kitten, now’s really not the time—”

  “My ass,” I cut him off, voice hardening as my suspicions were confirmed. “Talk.”

  Timmie cast an interested look between the two of us, but didn’t say anything. Bones ran a hand through his hair in a frustrated way before meeting my gaze.

  “Let’s take a drive. Need to bring your mate home anyway.”

  So he was being very cautious about being overheard. No way would we drive straight to Timmie’s apartment and drop him off before we explained how we needed his help with the ghouls. I gave a short nod before gesturing to Timmie.

  “Come on, our car’s this way.”

  “I brought my own,” he began, stopping at the glare Bones threw him. “But I can always come back and get it later,” Timmie lamely finished.

  “Wise choice,” Bones commented. “After you, mate.”

  Chapter Ten

  We were several miles away, cruising down Interstate 70 with Bones’s usual disregard for the speed limit, before he spoke again.

  “Once before, in the fourteen hundreds, a woman was widely known to be half vampire. There might have been others in history, but they managed to remain anonymous. She didn’t. Her name was Jeanne d’Arc, but you’ll know her better as Joan of Arc.”

  For a second, I thought Bones was kidding, even though he wasn’t the type to pull silly pranks. Then that same stunned part of my brain acknowledged he stared ahead at the road with a deadly serious expression, so this wasn’t a joke.

  “Joan of Arc?” I repeated. “Saint Joan? She’s the only other known half-breed?” Talk about a hard act to follow!

  “This was before my time, but I’ll repeat the story as Mencheres told it to me. Back in her day, Joan was well-known to humans for her battle skills and religious convictions. To vampires, she was also outed as a half-breed after one saw her actions on the battlefield. Apollyon seized upon her unusual status to sow seeds of rebellion among ghouls in Europe. He claimed Joan could be the most powerful undead creature in the world if her vampire abilities were combined with those of a ghoul, and if so, Joan would unite all vampires against ghouls.”

  “In other words, the same shit he’s spouted about me.” My initial surprise vanished under a wash of anger. “I don’t suppose she intended to do any of that, either.”

  “Apollyon didn’t have a shred of proof at the time—and none has been found since—but there were still those fearful or gullible enough to be swayed. Ghouls began withdrawing from undead society, attacking Masterless vampires. Then they openly attacked smaller vampire lines, picking off the weakest and less connected first. Rumors began to swirl that they were amassing an army for a full-scale attack on all vampires. A species showdown seemed inevitable, but once Joan was executed by the Church, a truce was negotiated between vampires and ghouls. Apollyon has been relatively quiet since . . . until recently.”

  Right, when another half-breed came on the scene for him to use as a scapegoat for his genocidal tendencies. And now the same scenario looked to be happening all over again with the recent attacks on Masterless vampires.

  Timmie’s mouth hung open in almost comedic fashion, but I only felt anger coursing through me. “It wasn’t just the Church who made sure Joan was burned at the stake, was it?”

  Bones closed his eyes briefly. “No
, luv. Even after her death, some of Apollyon’s ghouls were still afraid of her. They dug up her bones and ground them into powder to make certain Joan could never be brought back.”

  “And the vampires let her burn,” I said. My voice rose. “She was their sacrificial lamb, her death the price for their truce.”

  His gaze was so dark and bottomless that I almost felt swallowed by those brown orbs. “Yes and no. Joan was offered a choice to become a full vampire instead of facing the stake. She chose to die instead.”

  The strangest sort of grief snaked through me. Even though Joan had been dead centuries before I was born, a small part of me still felt like I’d lost a friend. She was the only other person who’d known what it was like to live as I had—fitting into neither the human world nor the vampire one. She’d been punished for her unwanted uniqueness like me, too, but even if she’d chosen vampirism over death, Joan’s persecution from Apollyon might not have ended. Not if all half-breeds who changed over ended up as strange as me. I was as much of a full vampire as I was ever going to get, but because of my oddities, the ghoul leader was still trying to use me as kindling for the fires of war.

  Right then I determined to kill Apollyon. We hadn’t wanted to do that to avoid strengthening his cause by turning him into a martyr, but even if I had to make it look like an excruciatingly painful accident, that ghoul was going down. It wasn’t enough to stop him or discredit him. He’d only bide his time until another half-breed popped up in history and then use that person as a poster child to rally fear-bought support in another quest for power. I would not let that happen.

  “No wonder you’re so wigged about Apollyon being behind these recent attacks,” I said quietly. “And you should have told me all this before.”

  “That creep is still alive?” Timmie blurted, sounding aghast.

  “I was going to tell you, Kitten.” His mouth twisted. “Though I admit to a great abhorrence for the subject, as you can imagine.”