by J. K. Beck
And then …
And then …
Nothing.
Shit.
Frustrated, she dropped her arm, and saw Nicholas looking at her with a small smile.
She scowled at him, feeling grumpy and ineffective. Magic flowed in her veins, and she should have been practicing all along. If Kiril was afraid that the curse affected her control, then wasn’t practice the way to fix that?
Not that she could do anything about it now. What’s done was done.
“It’s probably better this way,” Nicholas said. “If the Alliance is trying to get a bead on your magic, it may not be a good idea to ratchet up that magic.”
“I guess,” she said, but she still regretted the years she hadn’t practiced.
“Maybe he didn’t want you skilled at magic, because then you wouldn’t need him,” Nicholas said.
She frowned. “Kiril? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t it? He was bound to you—tightly from what you say—and his life has been defined by his purpose. He is your protector. If you can protect yourself, where does that leave him?”
“No,” she said, but the word was weak, because she couldn’t truly argue the logic of what Nicholas said. “Kiril loves me.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
She didn’t answer, thinking of her brother. He must be going out of his mind with worry. She wondered if he could sense her now, all the way across North America and the Atlantic Ocean. Was he at his desk, writing frantically, working his fears out in story after story? Or was he blocked, unable to lift a pen until she was back with him?
Or was he coming after her?
He was—she was certain of it. The bond between them was intense. More so than with regular siblings, she knew, and she was certain it was the binding spell that kept Kiril so focused on her, so close, sometimes even to the point where she wished that she could slip away from him and hide.
He’d come. There was no question in her mind.
The thought worried her, and she wished that she could sense him like he could sense her. But she couldn’t, and she had no way of knowing if he’d somehow managed to follow her. And if he had, was the Alliance following him?
“This one,” Nicholas said, stopping in front of a small marble tomb around which bits of chalk had been dropped. Nicholas picked one up, then knelt by a corner and wrote a neat “N.M.”
“When will we know?” she asked.
“We’ll check back tomorrow night. If he will meet us, the message will be left in the flower vase,” he added, pointing to a small metal vase protruding from the concrete. There were no flowers in it. “In the meantime, we’ll find someplace safe to wait. How do you feel about a hotel? Blackout shades. Room service. A hot bath and a large bed?”
“I feel pretty good about it.”
“As do I.” He looked at the sky. “We still have an hour before dawn, but I want to get off the street. Let’s hurry.”
Since she had no particular interest in hanging around a graveyard any longer than she had to, she fell in step beside him as they headed back toward the front gate. He stopped short after only a few yards, though, and held up a hand. He pointed toward the shadows as he stepped in front of her. She turned to peer into the dark, her pulse pounding as her adrenaline level skyrocketed.
Nothing. No one.
Just the darkness and the graves, the wind twisting among the tombs.
But Nicholas remained tense, his head tilted, as if he’d found a scent in the air. All things considered, he probably had.
He cocked his head and started moving forward, easing them out of the cemetery.
Fine by her. She was ready to be inside. Someplace safe, where they could regroup. Someplace away from shadows that moved in the night and—
Something grabbed her from behind—a rope! She struggled, but it was no use; the rope simply tightened around her waist. And in front of her, she heard the low, growling laughter of a snarling weren male.
A male who held a stake poised right over Nicholas’s heart.
Nick recognized the male who held the stake to his heart as one from Gunnolf’s inner circle. Several yards away, Gunnolf himself held the rope that bound Petra, his fiery red hair seeming to spark in the dim glow of the moon.
Around the perimeter stood three other weren, all holding weapons.
Five against two, and considering his vampire gifts and the fact that none of the five would touch Petra, those just might be good odds. The trick was to get the ball rolling without ending up with a stake through his heart.
“I helped you,” Petra was saying to Gunnolf. “I helped you and Tiberius, and you both just fucked me over.”
“It’s nothing personal, lass,” he said. “All creatures have a right to survive, aye?”
“This isn’t my fault,” she said.
“Perhaps that’s so,” Gunnolf said. “But it changes nothing.” He yanked the rope, drawing Petra closer.
Fearing for her, Nick feinted back, away from the point of the stake, then lashed out with a solid punch as the weren regrouped and slammed Nick to the ground.
He kicked up, catching the weren hard in the jaw, then recovered the stake and slammed the weapon into the weren’s throat before climbing to his feet and racing toward Petra.
But he was all out of time.
Gunnolf had a knife—a huge fucking knife. So huge that he could easily slice Petra’s throat without risk of touching her.
No, no, goddammit, no!
But before Gunnolf could thrust the knife forward, a wormhole opened, and suddenly Serge was there, grabbing Gunnolf by the leg and ripping him away from the rope, freeing Petra.
And in the process ripping Gunnolf’s leg off as well.
“Come on!” Nick yelled, urging Petra toward him as Serge ignored her completely, and turned his attention to the other three weren who had stepped in to help their leader.
She raced toward him, and they turned back to face the monster. In the short time it took for Petra to get to Nick’s side, Serge had made mincemeat of the weren.
He was half man/half wolf now, having absorbed more of the werewolf essence, and he snarled as he moved closer to Gunnolf, who lay bleeding on the ground, but still alive.
“Stop!” Petra screamed, which Nick thought was a completely useless thing to do when they needed to be getting the hell out of there.
Or maybe not so useless.
Serge stopped, turning his head to look at Petra from where he stood over Gunnolf, surrounded by bits and pieces of weren bodies.
In the distance, they could hear more weren troops arriving. Serge heard it, too, cocking his head in that direction, and then leaping back through the still-open wormhole.
On the ground, Gunnolf groaned.
“Come on,” Nick said, and they raced back the way they’d come, the opposite direction from the troops, until they reached the back wall of the cemetery near Ferrante’s tomb.
They were up and over in seconds, then racing down the street.
A Bentley screeched to a stop in front of them, and Nick froze, calculating his odds, weighing his options.
Beside him, Petra stood stock-still, and he could smell the fear on her.
Behind them, the weren troops were coming over the cemetery wall.
The Bentley’s door opened, and a man’s voice called out for them to “Get in! Get in!”
That voice.
“In,” Nick said to Petra, motioning her into the car, then following her, slamming the door and locking it just as the weren reached the car.
He settled back into his seat and sighed. And as Nick met the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, he could only hope that he hadn’t just made a huge mistake.
CHAPTER 27
Petra’s heart was pounding as Nicholas slid into the backseat of the car beside her. The driver looked human, about fifty years old, with silver-gray hair that stood up in tufts, as if he spent most of his day running his fingers
through it. He’d floored the accelerator, and now they were speeding down the Parisian street, taking corners wildly and quickly losing the weren who loped along, their swiftness no match for a car.
It was because of that as much as the fact that Nicholas had gotten into the car with him that made her trust the man.
But now that they had gotten free of the weren, she wanted to know who he was. No, that wasn’t true. She suspected she did know.
Now she wanted to find out if she was right.
“Marco Ferrante?” she asked.
From the front seat, the man banged the steering wheel. “So clever! So clever! I could tell how sharp you were,” he said. “From the connection, you know.”
He braked at a light, then turned to face them both in the backseat. Nicholas, she saw, sat still and tense, as if he was on guard, ready to bolt if need be. Considering the story he’d told her about their parting, she understood why. But Ferrante appeared to hold no grudge.
“What connection?” she asked.
“Ah! There’s the bracelet,” he said, his eyes on her wrist. “How lovely it looks on your wrist. I have not seen that bracelet for a long, long time.”
She swallowed as a series of small shivers raced up her spine. “You know this bracelet?”
“Manus fati,” he said. “The hand of fate,” then turned back to the front as the light changed to green.
She glanced sideways at Nicholas, not sure what to make of either Ferrante or the fact that he knew the inscription carved into her bracelet.
“Why are you here, Marco?” Nicholas’s voice was tight, making it clear to Petra that he didn’t trust Ferrante. She kept one hand on the door latch, just in case. “Why?” Nicholas repeated.
“I was looking for Ms. Lang.”
“For Petra?” Nicholas asked, still with that harsh, cold tone, as if he was poised to run. Or to attack. “And how did you know so precisely where to find her?”
From the front seat, Ferrante sighed. “I told you. We have a connection, she and I.”
“A connection?” Nicholas repeated. “How the hell do you have a connection with Petra?”
Ferrante looked up, his eyes glancing back at them from the rearview mirror. “Because I am the one who made her the way she is.”
“Are you hearing this?” Elric asked. They were in a vehicle borrowed from Division 18, and he had the radio tuned to the local Alliance frequency. “Goddamn, it’s a fucking bloodbath, and Gunnolf was barely left alive.”
“I hear it,” Tariq said, forcing the words out between clenched teeth. The reports blaring out over the radio were almost hysterical, as if procedure and form had been lost to terror. And it took a lot to terrorize Alliance officers.
“The monster is here,” Vale said. “Fuck me. I do not want to face that thing.”
“We don’t have to,” Tariq said. “Our goal is the girl. Find the goal, kill the girl, destroy the monster.” He looked at his teammates. “We walk back into Alliance HQ as fucking heroes.” Shit, he just might end up with his uncle’s newly empty Alliance seat.
“The brother,” Vale said, pulling the small silver tracker from his bag. “We keep our focus on the brother, and he’ll lead us to the girl.”
“We know he came to Paris,” Tariq said. “And we know the girl was right there in the middle of the carnage.”
“Sooner or later he’s going to hone in on her,” Elric said.
Tariq smiled and pulled away from the curb, sliding neatly into the predawn traffic. “And we’ll be right there when he does.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Petra demanded, beating Nick to the punch. “You made me this way?”
“Do you remember what we sought all those years ago?” Ferrante asked, turning just long enough to look at Nick. “You and I and Giotto?”
Nick hesitated, uncertain if the question was relevant, or if his old mentor was baiting him, laying the groundwork for revenge, long overdue. “I remember.”
“Of course you do,” Ferrante said. “Forgive me. The question was cruel. That was not my intention.”
Nick glanced sideways at Petra, who looked equally baffled. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”
“I achieved our goal. It took me another ten years of examining the world, traveling to the far reaches of the earth before designing detailed—and often dangerous—experiments. I spent countless hours recording observations, trying to understand the mechanical underpinnings of the universe, of time, of life itself. But finally—finally—I achieved that which I’d searched for all my life—immortality.”
“Since it has been more than seven hundred years since our last meeting, I had assumed as much,” Nick said, making Ferrante chuckle.
“True, my young Nicholas. But what is also true is that my success came at a heavy price.”
“What price?” Nick asked, fearing the answer.
It wasn’t Ferrante who responded, though. It was Petra.
“Me,” she said. “Me, and Vivian Chastain, and others like us.”
Once again, Marco met her gaze in the mirror, his smile sad. “Yes,” he whispered. “As I said, the price was steep. And, I assure you, unintentional.”
“I’m still not following,” Nick said, his mind flipping through everything he knew about alchemy, about chemistry and biology. “Tell me how. Exactly.”
“The details, no.” Nick started to protest, but Ferrante held up a hand and aimed a stern look into the mirror. “I long ago swore never to repeat to another soul what I did, because I see now that my actions were a sin against God.”
“Did not God give men minds to explore? And was it not your exploration that led to your immortality?”
“You will not engage me, Nicholas, so do not even try. I will not share the details, but I will tell you the story. Listen, or don’t. It’s up to you.”
Nick glanced sideways at Petra, but she was leaning forward, eager to hear what he had to say. He understood why. Hell, he felt the same way. “Go on.”
Ferrante nodded. “The process was complicated, and one that used both mineral and biological elements. It required the extraction, alteration, and reintroduction of various vitreous fluids into a number of subjects.”
“Wait,” Petra said. “Just so I’m clear. This curse was made in a laboratory?”
“I’m afraid so, although ‘curse’ is perhaps the wrong word. It’s more of a by-product.”
“A by-product,” she repeated, her voice dry. “Nice.”
“As I said, your situation was entirely unintentional. I used assistants. Volunteers. And one was your ancestor. I am deeply sorry.”
“But—” She cut herself off, trying to make some sense of what he was saying. “But how can my family’s curse be the by-product of something you cooked up in a laboratory?”
“That would require me to go into details, and I—”
“And the blue moon thing,” she continued. “How can that be the result of a chemical experiment gone wrong?”
Nick reached out and touched her sleeve, then shook his head ever so slightly when she looked his direction. He agreed with her—Ferrante was holding something back—but now wasn’t the time to push. Ferrante had come with a purpose of his own, and Nick wanted to let him get to it so that he could see the bigger picture of what was going on. “The bottom line is that you figured out a way,” Nick prompted.
“And that way created the by-product. The curse,” he said to Petra. “Three volunteers assisted me. Three were inflicted by the curse, and I swore to them—swore—that I would search for a way to lift it. That bracelet was my bond.”
“But what does that have to do with a connection?” Petra asked. “You said it was because you’re the reason behind the curse that there’s a connection between us. How?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It is one of the mysteries of alchemy. But I can summon that connection. Have always been able to summon it, all through these long years.”
Nick breathed slowly,
reaching out with his own connection to Petra, and could feel within her both belief and wariness. Like him, she could sense that there was some truth in Ferrante’s story. And like him, she knew that there were large omissions. Not lies, perhaps, but certainly not the full story.
Ferrante had told them as much at the outset, though, stating outright that he wouldn’t tell them the precise method by which he achieved immortality. Was that what he was withholding? Or was there something else? Something more insidious?
Nick considered the question, and as he did, he felt Petra’s thoughts move on as curiosity filled her. Curiosity, and fear.
She was, he realized, thinking of Serge.
“What about the monster?” she asked, as Nick released the blood connection. “Do you feel a connection to it, too?”
“What an interesting question. Why do you ask?”
“Because I do. I can feel its rage and its need to kill. And earlier, at the cemetery, when I told it to stop, it did.”
“You controlled Serge?” Marco asked, sounding both surprised and concerned.
“Yeah. I think so. I didn’t think that was even possible. I didn’t think they had control, much less that they could be controlled.”
“He’s changed over time,” Nicholas said. “The rage is still there, but it’s more intense and focused. Less frenetic. And from what Luke has reported, the monster seems to act with awareness, not the way you’ve seen it the first few hours out of the gate.”
She managed a grin. “I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse. But at any rate, we know he won’t hurt me. Kill me, and the monster’s done. So the question is, should I do something? Should we try to find Serge? Maybe I can stop him. Control him?”
Ferrante’s laugh was coarse. “Perhaps—perhaps—you have some level of control, young lady, but can you tell where the monster is?”
“No.”
“Then while you are searching for him, the Alliance would surely be searching for you.”