“Well, at least until you get up close and personal with them.”
“Did you know she was capable of that?” There was no hint of the accusation I would have expected from him, just the usual mild curiosity I’d come to associate with Alex.
I shook my head as I pushed up onto my feet. The cold had seeped into my legs and simply standing was more difficult than I would have liked.
“We need to get inside,” I said. The snow was heavier now, slanting down across the beach so that the sand and promenade before us had all but disappeared from view. Looking up at the promenade, snowflakes clung to my lashes and burned my skin as they struck my face.
“If we go in there and…” Alex hesitated and I knew what he was hinting at. Whatever Carmine had done to those things, they were different, changed somehow, and not just because they were dead.
I’d seen zombies once before, the real deal, too, not the kind George Romero had imagined in his movies about the apocalypse. The kind of zombies only a true Vaudan priest could conjure forth, and they were scary as all get out. Nothing could stop them. They weren’t mindless, shambling along in search of brains as popular culture liked to pretend. The ones I’d seen had the drive and desire of whatever their conjurer had imbued them with. Intelligent, they were capable of planning ahead in order to reach their goal. But you could touch them, fight them, and ultimately stop them.
But this, this was different. How could you fight something you couldn’t get close to without it crippling you? And they seemed harmless enough right now but what would happen once Carmine decided to have them turn on us?
I shivered and clamped my teeth together to stop the chattering sound from echoing.
“I don’t really have a choice,” I said, wrapping my arms around my body a little tighter.
He stared quizzically at me. “Is it a gorgon thing?” he asked. “Is that why your lips are blue?”
I stalked away from him, ignoring his questions as I followed the small group up toward the Pavilion.
It was so much harder than I would have liked to make progress. The snow that had fallen had quickly frozen over, making the hill a deadly game of two steps forward, four steps back. In the end, the only way to make any real progress at all was to climb up the grass covered slope of the cliff face surrounding the building.
My fingers were entirely numb by the time I made it into the foyer. To my left sat a set of doors that led into a large hall that now stood empty and dark. Directly in front of us was a stairwell that led up to the next floor. I could hear the murmur of voices but they were low and muffled making me think the building was soundproofed. Alex joined me a moment later. He could have gone ahead, his movements in the cold weren’t hampered the way mine were, but for some reason he’d stayed with me.
Under the yellow overhead lights, his face was ashen and his lips had taken on an unnatural blueish tinge that reminded me of the girl who had grabbed my arm.
A young man with black hair almost as long as mine, sashayed out through a set of double doors that led into the stairwell and paused. The moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he was a vampire. He smelled of the grave, that distinct scent of dirt and mouldering things that only the truly undead have. Unlike some of the others I’d had the pleasure of staking in the past, he did not have even an ounce of power outside of the usual abilities afforded to those who joined the darkness.
He eyed us both, his inhuman gaze sliding over our appearance before he tutted his irritation.
“You’ve kept us waiting,” he said, the slight French inflection in his voice betraying his heritage more than his dark hair and eyes ever could. He flashed a set of pearly whites in our direction that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the jaws of a shark. “She’ll bleed you for that.”
“I wasn’t aware we were expected,” I said dryly.
He snorted, a rude sound that did nothing to endear him to me. “She knows every move you’ve made since you arrived,” he said, “even before you arrived.”
“Where’s Jack?” I asked, masking the unease that started to uncoil in my stomach. How long had Carmine been keeping track of me? The thought that she’d been watching me while I went about my business, not knowing she was there, just didn’t sit right with me.
“Occupied,” the vampire said, flipping his dark hair back over his shoulder, redolent of a popular high-schooler from one of the many teenage movies that existed. “She thinks it’s better if he’s out of the way… for now at least.”
“I want to see him,” I said, remembering the panic in his voice as he’d ran for the cliff. Carmine had something or someone Jack cared about, and as much as I disagreed with the things he’d done, the atrocities he’d allowed Carmine to commit, I couldn’t leave him to his fate. Doing so would only make me as bad as the monsters I was hunting.
The vampire gave a Gallic shrug. “Tough.”
A growl of frustration crept past my lips and the vampire started to laugh.
“You think standing here growling like some sort of animal is going to change my mind?” He grinned at me and swiped at the non-existent tears in his eyes.
“No,” I said, “this might.” As I spoke my hand found my whip and I flicked it free. The tip cut through the air with a whisper of sound before coiling around the vamp’s throat.
Jerking my arm back, I felt the silver tooth at the tip bite into his flesh as the scales snapped together, digging into his throat with just enough force to send him to his knees in front of me.
The vamp clawed at his throat, scratching and tearing bloody gouges, but his struggles only caused the whip to bury itself further into his flesh.
“Where is he?” I asked again, pushing aside the numbness that had taken over my fingers and hands from spending time in the cold. I focussed on keeping my grip steady, wrapping the end of the whip up around my arm. It was a dangerous move, one that I usually preferred to stay away from, but I couldn’t take the chance that the vampire wouldn’t rip the whip from my numbed hands.
He glared at me, which, considering the way his eyes bulged, looked more comical than anything else.
I relaxed my hold and the whip loosened just enough to allow him to squeak the words out.
“In the theatre,” he said, “upstairs to the left.”
I nodded and jerked the whip roughly. The vampire’s eyes widened for a moment before they rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the ground. He wasn’t dead, just unconscious, but it would still take his body some time to recover from having his larynx crushed.
“You sure you want to do this?” Alex asked.
“We can’t leave him there,” I said before releasing a sigh. “I know he wants to help, he wants to make things better here, but Carmine has something on him preventing him from breaking free of her hold.”
Alex nodded. “And what about Grey? What if he’s here and—”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. It was painful just to think about it and getting the words out was akin to ripping them from my body piece by bloody piece. “I told you already. She isn’t going to just throw him away, she needs him, needs me, and the only way she can have me is if she keeps Grey safe.”
“She’s nuts, Jenna, do you really believe she’ll keep him alive?”
“I have to,” I said, “because right now it’s the only thing keeping me from charging in there and confronting her. Until I know what she plans to do with me, I can’t take that risk.” The words tasted bitter on my tongue but I knew it was the right move to make. Adrian had been right, I couldn’t just rush headlong into this, no matter how badly I wanted to. Grey needed me but so did all the innocents that Carmine would destroy to enact her vengeance.
Alex shrugged. “Fine,” he said, “I mean, I know you’re right, it’s just…”
“You don’t want to leave Grey to face Carmine alone,” I finished for him, my heart squeezed in response.
If you’re wrong… I shoved the thought aside violently and s
tarted up the stairs past the vampire on the floor.
“What are we going to do with him?” Alex asked, pausing next to the body. “If we leave him here, won’t he just alert Carmine to what we’re doing.”
I shook my head. “You heard him, she already knows everything I’m doing, Alex. Chances are, we’ll get to the top of the stairs and run headlong into her hoard.”
“I love it when you’re optimistic,” he said wryly. “You’re just a regular ball of sunshine.”
“I try.” I took the stairs two at a time and prayed that the movement would be enough to limber me up and thaw the last of the ice from my limbs by the time I made it to the top.
Chapter 34
Surprisingly, the foyer was empty when I reached the top of the stairs. I’d manage to convince myself with every step I took that Carmine would be there, grinning down at me with the sheen of madness in her eyes that even now haunted my nightmares.
Following the directions the vamp had given us, I veered left at the top of the steps and pushed out through another set of double doors that led to a long cream painted corridor. Old photographs lined the walls but I didn’t pause to look at them. I passed through another set of doors and came to a halt in another entrance area.
“Shit,” I muttered as Alex caught up to me.
“What’s wrong?”
“He said we’d find Jack down here but…” I gestured to our surroundings and the distinct lack of the peacekeeper.
“There’s a theatre space through there,” Alex said, pointing out another door I’d missed on my initial observation. “It’d be just like the vampires to be dramatic.”
I followed Alex as he pushed open the doors and stepped into the dark auditorium. The only light came from the green exit signs that sat over the doors but it wasn’t enough to illuminate the space entirely.
Pausing, I let my senses stretch out to our surroundings, searching for something, anything that would tell me we were in the right place.
I didn’t have to search very far. My ears caught a faint rustling and I held my breath, straining to pinpoint the exact location the noise was coming from.
“Use this,” Alex said, thrusting an oblong object into my hands. My fingers slid along the smooth plastic surface and I depressed the rubber button. A beam of light cut through the darkness, chasing back the shadows from where we stood, but the light only served to make the darkness that much blacker beyond the scope of our beam.
Alex flicked on his own torch and proceeded to sweep the shaft of icy light around the space.
“There,” I said, nudging his arm as I raised my own paltry beam of primrose yellow so that it illuminated a hunched-over figure on the stage at the front of the room.
“Jack,” I called out. It wasn’t a risk. If we were sharing the room with a bunch of vampires, they’d have known we were here before we even set foot in the room. As predators, their hearing was only matched by the shifters and werewolves who relied on their senses for survival and hunting.
They’d have heard the rapid pitter-patter of our hearts thudding in our cages of rib-bones and the gentle puff of our lungs as they expanded and contracted with each breath sucked through our lips as we stood in the hall outside. For all I knew, they might even have heard us when we were still out on the promenade, but I hadn’t ever thought it worth my time to ask a vampire just how good their hearing truly was.
The figure moved, rocking back on their heels, and the soft whisper of sound came again, making me think of dry grass and twigs rustling in the autumn breeze.
Jerking my chin toward the opposite side of the room, I started down the aisle nearest to me. Alex moved noiselessly away, the only indication that he’d understood my meaning was the flash of his light as it bobbed across the room.
“Jack, we’re coming up, okay?” I didn’t want to startle him. We didn’t even know what he could do, and taking a preternatural being by surprise wasn’t the smartest move in the world. The last thing I wanted was to find myself on my ass.
The closer I crept toward him, the more I realised the noise was coming from whatever he was cradling in his arms. Hopping up onto the edge of the stage, I edged around until I was standing directly in front of him.
Jack was hunched over, his shoulder’s rounded in toward his centre, his face resting on the bundle of dry sticks in his arms.
“Jack,” I said gently, “can you hear me?”
He shifted, and the sound of dry branches grating off one another met my ears. I aimed the light slightly down from his face, not wanting to blind and disorient him more than he already was.
“They gave her back to me,” he whispered, his voice low and guttural as though he hadn’t used it in quite some time.
“Who, Jack?” My gaze flickered down to the bundle in his arms and my breath hitched in the back of my throat, my heart constricting painfully as I noted the paisley fabric of a dress half rotted and the dry tendrils of auburn hair woven around the sticks. The moment I saw it, I was reminded of Simon and the husk in the bed that had once been his body. But this wasn’t even a body.
“What is that?” Alex asked from directly behind me.
“A poppet,” I said, “at least I think that’s what it is.”
“The kind the fae leave as a changeling?”
I shook my head. “No, this stinks of witchcraft, or at least some kind of combination of the two…” I watched as Jack continued to cradle the bundle.
“Jack,” I spoke softly, crouching next to him, “who is she?”
“Lily.” He spoke the name reverently, his love for her palpable.
He continued to rock her back and forth, a gentle crooning sound escaping his throat as he stared down at the dry bundle in his arms.
It was a pitiful sight and my chest squeezed in response. I wanted to wrap my hands around Carmine’s throat and choke the life out of her for the pain she had caused for so many. I didn’t know if Jack’s Lily was alive or dead. Where Carmine was concerned, I couldn’t help but fear the worst.
“We’ve been married more than a hundred years,” he said. “She’s as beautiful today as she was back then…”
A sickening knot twisted in my stomach.
“Is this why you couldn’t stop Carmine,” I asked, “because she was keeping Lily from you?”
Jack shook his head and raised his eyes to mine. “The vampires took my Lily from me more than fifty years ago, ripped her throat out and tossed her body from the cliff…” His eyes started to mist over with unshed tears and he glanced down at the poppet in his arms once more. “They destroyed her. When I pulled her from the water she was—” He choked off, unable to finish his sentence. Not that he needed to. I’d seen my fair share of bodies pulled from the sea and they weren’t something I wanted or needed to remember.
“Jack,” Alex said, “that isn’t Lily you’re holding.”
I shot him a dirty look over my shoulder but Alex shrugged. “He needs to know, Jenna, we need his head back in the game and that isn’t going to happen while he’s mooning over a bundle of kindling.”
“For once, can’t you show just a little compassion?”
“No.” His answer was curt and there wasn’t a hint of emotion in his eyes as he spoke the word.
“I thought I’d lost her forever,” Jack continued to speak, not paying any attention to the conversation we were having next to him. “When I buried her, I felt her take a piece of me with her. Every day I had to get up and carry on while wishing I could crawl into the ground next to her.”
“Jack…” I started to speak but I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around how I was supposed to explain to him that what he was clinging to wasn’t his dead wife back from the grave but instead another of Carmine’s mind-fucks.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” A female voice spoke from the darkness at the back of the room.
“Is that her?” Alex asked, shining his beam down the centre aisle and pinpointing a young woman in her twenties.
“She has a name,” she said. “Emily Roberts at your service.” She giggled then, covering her mouth, an almost girlish gesture that had me gauge her age at around nineteen, twenty max.
“You’re the vampire’s representative,” I said. “I thought you had to be human to hold that position.” I left out the part where I thought older might also be of benefit.
The young woman shrugged and the lights in the auditorium clicked on overhead, bathing us all in the rich yellow tones of the stage lights. She was holding something in her hand and it wasn’t until she raised it into the light that I realised it was a cell phone.
“Times change. DeVille wanted someone with a little more bite.” She grinned and proceeded to brush an imaginary strand of chestnut hair behind her ear with her free hand. “He chose me, well, Carmine chose me,” she said proudly, “and I have served my mistress well ever since.”
“So where is she, then?” I asked, pushing back onto my feet. I could sense energy gathering but I couldn’t pinpoint just where it was coming from. “This wonderful mistress of yours.”
The woman laughed, the sound like breaking glass. Jack cringed on the ground, burying his face in the folds of fabric that kept the bundle in one piece.
“You’ll see her soon enough, it’s not time yet.”
“Time for what?”
She held one perfectly manicured hand up, her gel nails sparkling under the spotlight that beamed down on her. “One moment please.” She stared at the cell phone screen and then tapped something out, her nails making little clicking noises each time they struck the glass
“This is ridiculous,” Alex said. Emily raised one finger, gesturing for us to wait, her eyes still glued to the screen in front of her.
Finally she finished typing and raised her eyes to us once more.
Stakes and Stones Page 27