by Butcher, Jim
The Red King took a swift step back as Martin attacked, his eyes intent. Then, when Susan appeared, his head tilted as he worked through what he was seeing.
“Please excuse me, my lord,” Martin murmured, giving a slight bow of his head to the Red King. “Drop it,” he said in a flat voice to Susan. He twisted his body more, bending her painfully, and pressing the machete’s edge against her throat even harder, until Susan’s fingers opened and Amoracchius fell to the floor, its light slowly dying.
“A trick,” said the Red King. Anger began to pour off of him. “A charlatan’s trick.” His eyes moved from Susan up to Martin. “And you have revealed yourself.”
“I beg your forgiveness, my lord,” Martin said. “It seemed the proper time. On my initiative, strike teams began removing Fellowship personnel and safe houses two hours ago. By this time tomorrow, there won’t be an operative left alive south of the United States. And our financial division will have taken or destroyed well over ninety percent of their accounts.”
“You son of a bitch,” Susan said, her voice overflowing with pain. “You fucking traitor.”
Martin’s expression flickered at her words. But his eyes never left the Red King. “I give you the Fellowship of St. Giles, my lord,” he said. “And I beg you to grant me my reward.”
“Reward,” Susan said, loading more contempt and hate into the word than should have been possible. “What could they possibly give you, Martin, to make it worth what you’ve done?”
The Red King stared at Susan and said, “Explain it to her.”
“You misunderstand,” Martin said calmly. “I have not betrayed the Fellowship, Susan. This was the plan from the moment I joined it. Think. You’ve known me for less than a decade and you’ve seen how near some of our scrapes have been. Did you truly believe I had survived a hundred and fifty years of battle against the Red Court, outlived every other operative ever to serve the Fellowship on my own merits?” He shook his head. “No. Escapes were provided. As were targets. It took me fifty years and I had to personally kill two of my fellows and friends working much as I was, to win the trust of the Fellowship. Once they admitted me to the inner circle, their time had come. Trust is a poison, Susan. It took another century to ferret out their secrets, but it is finally done. And our people will finish removing the Fellowship, in every meaningful sense, by tomorrow. It is over.”
Susan’s eyes flickered over to me, and Maggie continued to weep quietly, huddling in on herself. Susan’s face was twisted with pain. There were furious tears in her eyes as she looked at me.
And I couldn’t even speak to her.
“And what do you get?” Susan asked her, voice shaking.
“Ascension,” said the Red King. “I have no interest in admitting bloodthirsty lunatics to the nobility of my Court. Martin has proven himself—his dedication, his self-control, and, most important, his competence, over the course of decades. He was a priest for fifty years before he was even permitted to attempt this service.”
“Honestly, Susan,” Martin said. “I told you many times that you can never let emotion interfere with your duties. If you had listened to me, I’m certain you would have caught on. I would have been forced to kill you, as I have several others who were too wise for their own good, but you would have known.”
Susan closed her eyes. She was shaking. “Of course. You could make contact as often as you wished. Every time I visited Maggie.”
“Correct,” he said quietly. He turned back to the Red King. “My lord, I beg your forgiveness. I sought only to give you that which you wished, and the timing made it necessary for me to act, or see the opportunity pass us by.”
“Under the circumstances, I think I will not object, priest,” the Red King said. “If the strike teams are as successful as you predict, you will have your reward and my gratitude.”
Martin bowed his head to the Red King, and then looked up at me. He studied my face for a moment before he said, “The wizard has Alamaya’s dagger in his sash, my lord, should you wish to complete the ritual.”
The Red King took a deep breath and then blew it out, his expression becoming almost benevolent. “Martin, Martin, the voice of practicality. We’ve been lost without you.”
“My lord is too kind,” Martin said. “Please accept my condolences on the loss of Arianna, my lord. She was a remarkable woman.”
“Remarkably ambitious,” the Red King said. “Determined to cling to the past, rather than exploring new opportunities. She and her entire coterie, determined to undermine me. Had she destroyed this animal and then made good upon her promise to break the back of the accursed White Council, she would have been a real threat to my power. I take no pleasure in thinking on it, but her death was meant to be.”
“As you say, my lord,” Martin said.
The Red King approached me, smiling, and reached for the dagger in my sash.
Susan bared her teeth, still straining, but Martin was more than her equal, it seemed.
There was nothing I could do. The deck had been stacked so hard against me that even with Martin on our side, things had looked grim. His treachery had come at the ideal moment, damn him. Damn them all. There was nothing I could . . .
Long ago, when I was little more than a child, my first lover and I had devised a spell to let us speak silently to each other in class. It was magic much like the speaking stone Ebenezar had crafted, but simpler, with a much shorter range. I had never used to it communicate with anyone but Elaine, but Susan had been intimate with me—and I thought that at that moment, the only thought on our minds was Maggie.
It might be enough to establish the link, even if it was only one-way.
I grasped for the minor magic, fighting to pull it together through the dragging chains of the wills of the Lords of Outer Night, and cast my thought at Susan as clearly as I could. He doesn’t know all of it, I sent to her desperately. He doesn’t know about the enchantment protecting your skin. He only knows about the cloak because he saw you use it when we got here.
Chapter Forty-nine
Everything changed the night the Red Court died. It made the history books.
First, for the unexplained destruction of several structures in Chichén Itzá. A thousand years of jungle hadn’t managed to bring the place down, but half an hour of slugfest between practitioners who know what they’re doing can leave city blocks in ruins. It was later attributed to an extremely powerful localized earthquake. No one could explain all the corpses—some of them with dental work featuring techniques last used a hundred years before, some whose hearts had been violently torn from their chests, and whose bodies had been affected by some kind of mutation that had rendered their bones almost unrecognizable as human. Fewer than 5 percent of them were ever identified—and those were all people who had abruptly gone missing in the past ten or fifteen years. No explanation was ever offered for such a confluence of missing persons, though theories abounded, none of them true.
I could have screamed the truth from the mountaintops and blended right in with all the rest of the nuts. Everyone knows that vampires aren’t real.
Second, it made the books because of all the sudden disappearances or apparent outright murders of important officials, businessmen, and financiers in cities and governments throughout Latin America. The drug cartels took the rap for that one, even in the nations where they weren’t really strong enough to pull such tactics off. Martial law got declared virtually everywhere south of Texas, and a dozen revolutions in eight or ten different countries all kicked off, seemingly on the same night.
I’ve heard that nature abhors a vacuum—though if that’s true, then I can’t figure why about ninety-nine zillion percent of creation is vacuum. But I do know that governments hate ’em, and always rush to fill them up. So do criminals. Which probably tells you more about human beings than it does about nature. Most of the nations in South America proper kept their balance. Central America turned into a war zone, with various interests fighting to claim
the territory the vampires had left behind them.
Finally, it made the books in the supernatural community as the night of bad dreams. Before the next sunset, the Paranet was buzzing with activity, with men and women scattered over half the world communicating about the vivid and troubling dreams they’d had. Pregnant women and mothers who had recently delivered had been hardest hit. Several had to be hospitalized and sedated. But everyone with a smidge of talent who was sleeping at the time was troubled by dreams. The general theme was always the same: dead children. The world in flames. Terror and death spreading across the globe in an unstoppable wave, destroying anything resembling order or civilization.
I don’t remember what happened when the ritual went off. There’s a blank spot in my head about two minutes wide. I had no desire whatsoever to find out what was there.
The next thing I remember is standing outside the temple with Maggie in my arms, wrapped up in the heavy feather cloak her mother had left behind. She was still shivering and crying quietly, but only in sheer reaction and weariness now, rather than terror. The shackles lay broken on the ground behind me. I don’t remember how I got them off her without hurting her. She leaned against me, using a fold of the cloak as a pillow, and I sat down on the top step, holding her, to see what I had paid for.
The Red Court was dead. Gone. Every one of them. Most of the remains were little more than black sludge. That, I thought, marked the dead vampires. The half-breeds, though, only lost the vampire parts of their nature. The curse had cured them.
Of course, it was the vampire inside them that had kept them young and beautiful.
I saw hundreds of people on the ground aging a year for every one of my breaths. I watched them wither away to nothing, for the most part. It seemed that half-breeds came in a couple of flavors—those who had managed to discipline their thirst for blood, and thus carried on for centuries, and those who had not been half-vampires for very long. Very few of the latter had ranked in the Red King’s Court. It turned out that most of the young half vampires had been working for the Fellowship, and many had already been killed by the Reds—but I heard later that more than two hundred others had been freed from their curse.
But for me, it wouldn’t matter how many I’d freed in that instant of choice. No matter how high the number, it would need to be plus one to be square in my book.
Inevitably, the Red Court had contained a few newbies, and after the ritual went off, they were merely human again. They, and the other humans too dim to run any sooner, didn’t last long once the Grey Council broke open the cattle car and freed the prisoners. The terror the Reds had inflicted on their victims became rage, and the deaths the Reds and their retainers suffered as a result weren’t pretty ones. I saw a matronly woman who was all alone beat Alamaya to death with a rock.
I didn’t get involved. I’d had enough for one day.
I sat and I rocked my daughter until she fell asleep against me. My godmother came to sit beside me, her gown singed and spattered with blood, a contented smile upon her face. People talked to me. I ignored them. They didn’t push. I think Lea was warning them off.
Ebenezar, still bearing the Blackstaff in his left hand, came to me sometime later. He looked at the Leanansidhe and said, “Family business. Please excuse us.”
She smirked at him and inclined her head. Then she stood up and drifted away.
Ebenezar sat down next to me on the eastern steps of the temple of Kukulcan and stared out at the jungle around us, beneath us. “Dawn’s about here,” he said.
I looked. He was right.
“Locals stay hidden in their houses until sunrise around here. Red Court would meet here sometimes. Induct new nobility and so on. Survival trait.”
“Yeah,” I said. It was like that a lot, especially in nations that didn’t have a ton of international respect. Something weird happens in Mexico; twenty million people can say that they saw it and no one cares.
“Sun comes up, they’ll be out. They’ll call authorities. People will ask questions.”
I listened to his statements and didn’t disagree with any of them. After a moment, I realized that they were connected to a line of thought, and I said, “It’s time to go.”
“Aye, soon,” Ebenezar said.
“You never told me, sir,” I said.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ve done things in my life, Hoss. Bad things. I’ve made enemies. I didn’t want you to have them, too.” He sighed. “At least . . . not until you were ready.” He looked around at the remains of the Red Court. “Reckon you more or less are.”
I thought about that while the sky grew lighter. Then I said, “How did Arianna know?”
Ebenezar shook his head. “A dinner. Maggie—my Maggie—asked me to a dinner. She’d just taken up with that Raith bastard. Arianna was there. Maggie didn’t warn me. They had some scheme they wanted my support on. The vampires thought I was just Maggie’s mentor, then.” He sighed. “I wanted nothing to do with it. Said she shouldn’t want it, either. And we fought.”
I grunted. “Fought like family.”
“Yes,” he said. “Raith missed it. He’s never had any family that was sane. Arianna saw it. Filed it away for future reference.”
“Is everything in the open now?” I asked.
“Everything’s never in the open, son,” he responded. “There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times. Or that’s been my experience.”
I nodded.
“Sergeant Murphy told me what happened.”
I felt my neck tense. “She saw it?”
He nodded. “Reckon so. Hell of a hard thing to do.”
“It wasn’t hard,” I said quietly. “Just cold.”
“Oh, Hoss,” he said. There was more compassion in the words than you’d think would fit there.
Figures in grey gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Ebenezar eyed them with a scowl. “Time for me to go, looks like.”
I nudged my brain and looked down at them. “You brought them here. For me.”
“Not so much,” he said. He nodded at the sleeping child. “For her.”
“What about the White Council?”
“They’ll get things sorted out soon,” he said. “Amazing how things fell apart just long enough for them to sit them out.”
“With Cristos running it.”
“Aye.”
“He’s Black Council,” I said.
“Or maybe stupid,” Ebenezar countered.
I thought about it. “Not sure which is scarier.”
Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. “Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.”
“How’d Lea arrange a signal with you?” I asked.
“That,” Ebenezar said sourly. “On that score, Hoss, I think our elders ran their own game on us.”
“Elders?”
He nodded down the stairs, where the tall figure with the metal-headed staff had begun creating another doorway out of green lightning. Once it was formed, the space beneath the arch shimmered, and all the hooded figures at the bottom of the stairs looked up at us.
I frowned and looked closer. Then I realized that the metal head of the staff was a blade, and that the tall man was holding a spear. Within the hood, I saw a black eye patch, a grizzled beard, and a brief, grim smile. He raised the spear to me in a motion that reminded me, somehow, of a fencer’s salute. Then he turned and vanished into the gate. One by one, the other figures in grey began to follow him.
“Vadderung,” I said.
Ebenezar grunted. “That’s his name this time. He doesn’t throw in often. When he does, he goes to the wall. And in my experience, it means things are about to get bad.” He pursed his lips. “He doesn’t give recognition like that lightly, Hoss.”
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“I talked to him a couple of days ago,” I said. “He told me about the curse. Put the gun in my hand for me and showed me where to point it.”
Ebenezar nodded. “He taught Merlin, you know. The original Merlin.”
“How’d Merlin make out?” I asked.
“No one’s sure,” Ebenezar said. “But from his journals . . . he wasn’t the kind to go in his sleep.”
I snorted.
The old man stood and used his right hand to pull his hood up over his face. He paused and then looked at me. “I won’t lecture you about Mab, boy. I’ve made bargains myself, sometimes.” He twitched his left hand, which was still lined with black veins, though not as much as it had been hours before. “We do what we think we must, to protect who we can.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She might lean on you pretty hard. Try to put you into a box you don’t want to be in. But don’t let her. She can’t take away your will. Even if she can make it seem that way.” He sighed again, but there was bedrock in his voice. “That’s the one thing all these dark beings and powers can’t do. Take away your ability to choose. They can kill you. They can make you do things—but they can’t make you choose to do ’em. They almost always try to lie to you about that. Don’t fall for it.”
“I won’t,” I said. I looked up at him and said, “Thank you, Grandfather.”
He wrinkled up his nose. “Ouch. That doesn’t fit.”
“Grampa,” I said. “Gramps.”
He put his hand against his chest.
I smiled a little. “Sir.”
He nodded at the child. “What will you do with her?”
“What I see fit,” I said, but gently. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t know.”
Both pain and faintly amused resignation showed in his face. “Maybe it is. See you soon, Hoss.”
He got halfway down the stairs before I said, “Sir? Do you want your staff?”
He nodded at me. “You keep it, until I can get you a new blank.”
I nodded back at him. Then I said, “I don’t know what to say.”