The general shook his head. “We can’t trust a non-Movement vampire to carry out this kind of job. Especially not if he is her sire. You know as well as I do the kind of pain that causes. She is not likely to inflict it on herself.”
“I’m sorry, Carrie,” Max said, taking my hand and squeezing it.
It couldn’t end like this. My mind raced. Nathan had given me some training, but I would be no match in a fight with an assassin. On top of that, I had no idea where I’d find Nathan or if I’d find him in time. For all I knew, another assassin might be headed for him this very moment.
“Let Max do it, then,” I blurted.
Max started, as though he’d just woken to find himself in an unfamiliar room. “What?”
“Please, General.” I gripped the edge of the desk until my knuckles turned white, silently willing him to bend. “Max and Nathan were friends. I trust him to get the job done. I know he won’t let Nathan suffer.”
“Your trust in Harrison does not concern me.” The comment seemed even colder in Breton’s crisp, British accent. He took a deep breath, frowning. When he exhaled, his expression lightened. “Fine. Harrison, tomorrow evening you’re on a flight back. But I don’t want her within a ten-mile radius of the final kill. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal.” Max picked up the kill order from the desk and folded it, slipping it into the pocket of his worn leather coat.
“Good. I trust you both know the way out.” Breton handed the pictures to Max, but I took them.
We were nearly at the door when the general spoke again. “And, Harrison, if you fail to do your duty by the Movement, I’ll send someone who won’t.”
Numb, I followed Max to the hallway. “Don’t do it,” I said flatly, once the door had closed behind us.
Max gripped my shoulders and twisted me to face him. His fingers dug painfully into my flesh, and I protested with a loud, “Ow!”
“This is not a game, Carrie.” He held his face inches from mine. “I’m going to have to kill Nathan. I don’t know what you were thinking in there, but I still have a job to do.”
He released me and turned to walk away. I rubbed one sore shoulder. “Yeah, but you don’t know where he is yet. You can stall for time while I figure out what’s going on.”
He laughed, the way someone would laugh at a child’s overly simple solution to a serious problem. “And how do you plan on doing that? You’ve got no resources, no one willing to help you. Even if you can magically cure Nathan of whatever has a hold on him, I’m still under orders to kill on sight. You’re on your own here. Nathan is as good as dead, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.”
“So that’s it then?” I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re just giving up?”
“I’m watching my own back!”
I closed my eyes. This was not the Max I knew. This was a complete stranger standing before me. “Max, please trust me. Trust that I’m not going to do anything that would put you in harm’s way.”
“You’re going to do what you need to do for yourself, Carrie.” He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “It’s what survivors do.”
I looked at the pictures he held. Breton hadn’t bothered to put them in an envelope. The cadaver’s empty stare bore into me from the glossy surface of the photo.
“I’m not interested in helping myself,” I said, choking back tears. “I just want to save Nathan.”
“It’s too late for that,” Max said softly. “The Movement has made their decision, and no matter what happens, they’ll just keep coming.”
I shook my head. “Not from the Movement. I want to save him from himself.”
Chapter 6
Oracle
Max needed to gather some supplies before we headed out. I had no idea what kind of equipment he needed to kill my sire, but I refused to help him retrieve it. He headed to the armory after giving me strict orders to go directly to the reception area.
Not that I had a choice. As soon as he walked away, a guard came from seemingly nowhere and steered me toward the lobby.
“Nothing personal,” he said as he guided me through the doors. “Just can’t have non-Movement vampires roaming the halls.”
Anne had returned to her post at the desk, and she looked up when the doors closed. Her face brightened. “So, how’d it go with the general?”
“Not well.” Normally, I would have resented having to spill to a total stranger, but she wasn’t exactly wheedling me for information. In fact, her casual interest made me want her to wheedle. I’d never realized I was such an attention whore. “He basically shot me down.”
“What a prick.” She sounded genuinely sorry. “That’s too bad.”
I scuffed my toes on the carpet as I went to one of the plush chairs. “He’s a very stubborn man, isn’t he?”
Anne stood and came around the front of the desk, where she dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. The shiny buckles on her knee-high combat boots caught the light as she made herself comfortable. “Well, you don’t get far in this organization if you’re not stubborn.”
“I don’t know.” I watched her toy with the black rubber bracelets that looped her wrist. “You seem to do okay.”
With a crooked smile, she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m a great receptionist. Where’s Max?”
“Loading up on gadgets and supplies with which to kill my sire.” I slumped down in the chair. “I’m insane, to be waiting for him. I should be tearing off to the States.”
“Yeah, on a commercial airliner? Good luck.” She shook her head. “Max has to look tough and serious about the job. I doubt he’ll actually kill him.”
“Won’t he be penalized?” The Movement seemed to dole out “probation” like candy on Halloween.
“Nah.” She made a face to accompany the guttural sound. “Max has shirked assignments before. He’ll never come out and actually say, ‘No, I’m not going to kill this vampire,’ but I can tell when it’s going to happen. He’ll call to check in and say things like, ‘No luck yet, but I’ll find the bastard.’ You know, things like John Wayne might say in a movie.”
“That’s how Max usually talks,” I reminded her.
She rolled her eyes. “I know, right? But this is different. He puts up a much tougher front if he’s reluctant to do the job.”
Her assurances made me feel a little better. As much as Max and Nathan bickered, neither of them truly wanted the other dead. Maybe once we were away from the eyes and ears of the Movement, Max would change his mind.
“So,” Anne said brightly, grasping the toes of her boots and leaning forward. “What did you think of the place?”
“I thought it was…nice,” I offered lamely. “Not at all what I was expecting.”
“I know, right? Most people think it’s going to be stone walls and torchlight and guys with long beards, in scary robes. I mean, we have the guys with long beards, but they only wear their robes during a ritual.” She said this with a shrug, as if it was completely normal to deal with occult forces in the workplace. “Aside from them, there’s really nothing that weird here.”
“Well, except the Oracle,” I began casually. “But I guess I won’t be seeing her anytime soon. What’s she like?”
“She’s like…” Anne pursed her lips as she thought. “She’s like a magic eight ball, only she can kill you.”
I straightened a little at that. “Like, she can answer your questions?” The “like” popped from my mouth naturally. I could see how Anne had easily adopted modern teenspeak.
“Like, with her mouth? No. But she talks through telepathy all the time.” Anne shrugged again. “But she doesn’t usually say anything that makes sense. Why, did you have a question?”
I wasn’t sure if I should admit it or not. The notion of “personal boundaries” seemed to have escaped this eternal teenager, and while she was nice, I didn’t feel like examining my deepest fears with her. I settled on a diplomatic, “Yes.”
“That’s cool
. I’ve asked her all sorts of questions, but she’s never answered. I mean, one time she did give me a freaky vision of my spine snapping in, like, four places, but she never actually did it so I’m not worried.” After considering a moment, Anne looked up from her bracelets. “And the general wouldn’t clear you to see her?”
“I got the distinct impression the general doesn’t care much for the Oracle’s knowledge.” I picked at the arm of the chair, though there weren’t any loose threads or pilled fabric to prompt me to do so.
Anne sighed. “A lot of people here are that way. But you know, any information you could get would probably be helpful, considering your situation. Right?”
“Well, it’s not like it matters now. From the way Max made it sound, you need special permission to see her.” I sighed loudly in frustration.
There was a long pause. I’d expected an immediate response from Anne, and when I didn’t hear one, I looked up. She dangled a key card on a black cord from her fingers, smiling. “Or friends with security clearance.”
I hesitated. “You mean, you?”
“Uh-huh. I have clearance to every place in this building. Due to my excellent years of service. And the fact I have to sometimes escort guests around the building.” Her naughty grin reached the corners of her eyes now. “So, you wanna?”
I had the uncomfortable feeling I’d gotten in high school when someone would offer me a joint or ask me to skip school. I was pretty good at resisting peer pressure, but she was persuasive, and the situation was certainly different. “Won’t you get into trouble?”
She made a plosive sound of denial, as if the answer was obvious. “Only if we get caught. Besides, it’s not like they’re gonna get rid of me.”
She made a compelling argument. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been if our meeting with the general hadn’t been so disastrous.
Anne seemed to take the reason for my hesitation as fear. “She hasn’t hurt anyone lately. They changed her diet. She was getting too much male blood and the testosterone made her crabby. Now she’s pretty mellow.”
I felt a fleeting moment of sanity, and seized it. “Max told me to stay here.”
“So?” Anne got to her feet and went behind the desk, where she grabbed a pad of sticky notes. “We’ll leave him a message. Besides, he’s in the armory. He’ll be there awhile.”
“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”
“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me. “It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”
I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”
“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”
The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”
“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”
A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.
“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.
“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.
“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”
She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”
“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”
“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”
We ventured farther into the building than she’d taken us on our previous tour. This area, I noticed, had fewer safe rooms and more security labels. We reached a large set of double doors with a thick, black-and-yellow-striped line around them. Huge red warning signs, printed in several different languages, plastered the doors. In addition to a key card reader, I noticed there was a palm scan device and a keypad on the wall.
“This is the most secure section of headquarters,” Anne explained. “Only high level administrators and security have access. Oh, and the scientists who monitor the Oracle.”
“Scientists?” I chewed my lip nervously as I watched her key in the codes. The English language sticker on the door warned an improper access sequence would result in a security breach alert, and I didn’t remember where I’d seen the last safe room.
“Yeah. She’s got a whole team of doctors and chemists and pharmacists keeping her medicated and fed well and under control.” The same computerized voice from the elevator informed us that the access sequence was accepted, and Anne pushed open the door with a flourish.
“If she’s drugged up, why is Max so afraid of her?” He’s not the kind of guy to be blindly afraid of anything.
Anne made another “pff” sound of dismissal. “He was on the team that moved her to the new facility back in the eighties. Really, he shouldn’t have been assigned, he was too young. He’s too young now. Anyway, her meds didn’t hold, and she twisted one of the team members’ heads off.”
“Twisted?” My guts mimicked the motion implied by my word. “She’s got that kind of power?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s got mad telekinesis. It would be cool, if she didn’t use it so destructively. But that’s why she’s constantly doped up. Ah, here we are!”
We turned left and went through thoroughly unintimidating swinging doors, into a room with black walls like an exhibit in a museum. A dark window the size of a movie screen dominated one wall, separated from us by a brass railing.
“Stand there,” Anne instructed, moving toward the window, where she turned a dial. The lights dimmed slowly on our side of the glass as the other side illuminated.
“This is like the penguin house at Sea World,” I said, my voice sounding way too loud in the quiet room, and Anne snorted in laughter.
Behind the glass, a void of still redness surrounded a murky, suspended shape. It took me a moment to realize what the redness was.
“Is that blood?”
Anne joined me at the rail. “Yup. The Oracle can’t feed in the traditional sense anymore. She requires much more blood to support her tissues. Total immersion allows her to draw the blood in through her lungs and pores as well as her digestive system. The blood cycles through purifying and oxygenating filters continually, to provide optimal nourishment for her.”
“So, you’ve got a giant heart-lung machine back there, pumping blood?” I squinted at the tank.
Anne nodded and shrugged. “Pretty much.”
As the lights grew brighter, the shape came into focus. A figure, nude and obviously female, floated in the blood. What appeared to be intravenous lines and electrode wires connected to her slender limbs and bald head. Her face was relaxed, eyes closed as if in sleep. She was perfect, except for the three pointed horns protruding from her skull.
I thought back to Cyrus’s New Year’s party, and the creatures I’d
seen there. “Is she part demon?”
“No. The Oracle is pretty old, one of the oldest we know about. The horns are a natural consequence of the aging process. We get twisted when we age.” Anne held out her arm and pushed her plastic bracelets aside, revealing the faint beginning of what could only be described as a dew claw. She covered it again with a shrug. “She’s also the most psychically gifted vampire we know of.”
“You’ve got that memorized like you work at the Smithsonian,” I said, leaning over the rail. “So, she’s sealed up in there, or what?”
“Yup. She’s been held in various methods of containment since her capture in 1079, Common Era, and was given to the Movement in its first year of inception by King George the II in 1765.”
“The Movement is that old?” I asked, my awe diverted for an instant from the Oracle. “I thought back then it was the Order of the Brethren?”
Before Anne could answer, the blood in the tank surged, pounding the glass with a wave that created a thunderous echo.
“Don’t worry about that,” Anne assured me. “She’s responding to your voice because you’re new.”
Much in the way a big, scary dog is “just playing.”
“She has a staff of round-the-clock caregivers who administer sedatives. That’s why she’s not all vamped out in the face area. The drugs they give her keep her in a light coma. It’s safer, and more conducive to her visions. And her specialists monitor her psychic readouts. We can accurately monitor major world events days in advance with the information she supplies us. You know, if she chooses to supply it.”
It might have been a trick of the changing light, but I could have sworn the Oracle’s eyes opened.
“Weird,” Anne whispered. “I’m gonna page them, let them know she’s awake.”
So, it wasn’t just an eerie illusion. Neither, apparently, was the voice in my head. Carrie, it called softly. The chill tone paralyzed me. Carrie, he has come back.
“Who has?” I asked out loud. But I knew. I knew in my heart who she meant. Two months of horrible nightmares flashed through my mind. No! I shouted back at the Oracle through my mind. Cyrus is dead. No matter what bizarre scenario you try and come up with, nothing can bring him back!
The Possession Page 8