This Side of the Grave nh-5

by Jeaniene Frost

  “And who put him there?” I asked, digging the knife in until it must have been grazing his sinuses, but I didn’t care. Mutilation. Forced changing of a teenager. He might not have done it, but he’d been a part of it.

  “You know who,” the ghoul rasped.

  I didn’t blink. “Say the name. Convince me that I should believe you.”

  My cell vibrated against my hip again, but I ignored it, not wanting to divert even an ounce of my attention away from the ghoul in front of me.

  “Apollyon.” The word was almost sighed. “He has several people like Dermot in his line. He takes kids who are young, not too bright, then mutes them and changes them. They make good muscle. Got nowhere else to go, can’t talk, can’t write real well, so we know they can’t betray us.”

  I thought I’d been furious before, but that didn’t compare to the rage filling me now. My hands trembled, the knife digging even higher into the ghoul’s head. He screamed as much as he could with the blade in the way.

  “Cat.” Vlad’s voice was low but resonant. “Stop. We need him alive.”

  I knew the wisdom in that. Knew that if I killed the ghoul, we wouldn’t find out if he knew where Apollyon was, and that was vitally important information. But my mind felt frozen with the urge to destroy anyone who’d been a part of such a horrible practice, and my knife kept on its upward path into the ghoul’s skull. Dermot couldn’t have been more than seventeen when he was tortured, killed, and then forced into this existence. The ghoul in front of me knew that. Allowed it to continue. He had to pay.

  “Cat!”

  My hand trembled again . . . and then I yanked the knife out, twisting it in the process, savoring the scream the ghoul made. I moved away from him, taking in a deep, long breath to remind myself that I’d made the right decision. Information was more important than revenge. I chanted it in my mind like a litany until I began to feel stable.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be burning him to get more details?” I asked Vlad, my voice almost normal despite the anger still swelling in me.

  Vlad gave me an unfathomable look, the faintest smile hovering on his lips. “If you live long enough, Reaper, one day you might scare even me.”

  “Girl’s gotta have goals,” I replied shortly. “And he’s still not spilling where Apollyon is.”

  “No, he’s not, is he?” Then Vlad made a series of odd motions with his hands, but no fire emanated from them.

  “Are you having performance issues?” I asked in surprise.

  “Bite your tongue,” Vlad said, with a snort. “I was seeing if Dermot understood sign language, but from the look on his face, it seems not.”

  I glanced at the young ghoul, who’d been watching Vlad’s hands with a sort of morbid fascination. He picks kids who are young, not too bright . . . the other ghoul had said about Apollyon. Did Dermot know that there was an entire language he could learn that required no verbal or written words? How trapped he must feel, forced into this life, and denied any real means to even communicate.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I said to Dermot. “We’re not going to hurt you, and you won’t have to live with those other people anymore, I promise.”

  A little voice inside told me that Bones wasn’t going to like what I intended, but I pushed it back. He might not like it, but he’d understand.

  Noise from dozens of cars combined with multiple groans as abruptly, the dialog from the four movies—and the exterior lights—cut off. It didn’t take more than a second of dropping my mental shields to catch the internal grumbling from the moviegoers over the sudden power failure at the drive-in.

  Even if I hadn’t heard that, the loud voice of someone with a bullhorn began apologizing for the inconvenience, promising rain check tickets for the next night. Must be the manager. From how calm he sounded, I guessed that Mencheres had had a little talk with him using the power in his gaze. Otherwise, I’d expect him to be far more glum about all the money driving out of the theater and the promise of refunds later.

  Maybe I’d make an anonymous donation to this theater. The manager shouldn’t have to take a financial hit just because warmongering, murderous ghouls had chosen this place to hold their get-together.

  “Someone’s coming, and it’s not Mencheres,” Vlad said, jerking his head.

  I drew out another knife as I headed in the direction he’d indicated, ducking to use the bushes as camouflage again. But when I was about twenty yards away, I caught familiar scents on the air, and my tenseness eased.

  The sight of the vampires, one with gray streaks in his hair, the other so skinny that the bones of his shoulders all but jutted through his shirt, only confirmed who they were.

  “Ed. Scratch,” I called out, not raising my voice. “Over here.”

  I turned back around without waiting for them, not wanting to leave Vlad alone for long with the ghouls. Granted, the odds of Vlad being overcome were about nil, but the odds that he might decide to torch one—or both—of them in my absence were much higher.

  To my relief, both Dermot and the other ghoul were still alive when I jogged back to Vlad, though in the few minutes that I’d been gone, the scarred ghoul looked like he’d passed through a volcano. Mencheres must have dropped his power from him, because he was on the ground, Vlad’s booted foot over his mouth. Must be why I hadn’t heard any yelling even though he’d obviously been burned.

  “He doesn’t appear to know where Apollyon is,” Vlad stated. “I’m not surprised. Apollyon would have to be an idiot to tell where he was to anyone in a group such as this. They report in and receive instructions by e-mail. I have the address and passwords.”

  Ed and Scratch appeared behind me in the next moment, one of them letting out a slow whistle as they took in the slain bodies that were still held upright, plus the still-alive, burnt ghoul under Vlad’s foot.

  “Looks like we missed the party,” Ed observed.

  Vlad’s smile was arch. “But you’re just in time for the cleanup.”

  “How come I’m not surprised to hear that?” Scratch muttered, shaking his head. “What a mess, but better them than us.”

  “Wise outlook,” Vlad commented.

  The ghoul tapped on Vlad’s foot, blinking repeatedly at him. Vlad moved it aside an inch, which was apparently enough for him to talk.

  “There are more of us here. In this city, I mean. We’re supposed to recruit, add to our numbers, kill some vamps, and then spread out to another city. We’re also supposed to leave if we see the Reaper or Bones. That’s good information. Good enough for my life, like you agreed,” he finished.

  Vlad removed his foot all the way, but fire began to dance down his hands. “We already know most of that, so the information’s not good at all.”

  “Vlad,” I said, and his brows rose at the sharpness to my voice. “He’s done his best to tell you all he knows, so you need to let him go.

  He opened his mouth, about to argue . . . and then smiled. “Of course.”

  The ghoul got up, looking in quick darts between Vlad and the promise of freedom behind him, before he began to back away one step at a time.

  “Not. So. Fast,” I said, drawing out each word with venom.

  “He promised to let me live!” the ghoul sputtered.

  “Vlad promised. I didn’t,” I said, leaping onto his back when he tried to run. Mencheres’s power didn’t attempt to restrain him, so he flipped over and fought me with furious blows, but I was glad. I wanted to beat him into submission. To show him what it was like to be helpless no matter how hard he fought. That was the least I could do for Dermot and all the others like him.

  “A vampire made that same mistake once, forgetting I was there and only getting Bones’s promise not to kill him,” I went on several moments later. Multiple places on my body still stung from the ghoul’s blows, but they were healing with every second. I didn’t pause to talk more, but swiped my knife through the ghoul’s neck with a clean, savage cut, feeling the coldest form of satisfacti
on as his head rolled to the side.

  “He didn’t like how it turned out, either,” I finished, wiping the blade on the ghoul’s shirt. “You know what they say. The devil’s in the details.”

  Chapter Twenty-­five

  We stayed a couple more hours at the drive-in just to make sure no other, tardier ghouls showed up, and that all evidence of what happened was erased from the scene. It wasn’t just out of concern for the police. We didn’t want any ghouls to figure out what happened, if more of them used this as a meet-up spot aside from this departed group.

  Mencheres insisted that Dermot not go back with us to the town house. His point that no matter how he’d been abused by Apollyon and the other ghouls, Dermot still might be a threat, was too logical to ignore. Stockholm syndrome was a definite possibility, and it wouldn’t be right to just assume Mencheres would put the power whammy on Dermot if he wigged out and tried to kill one of us. Plus, we couldn’t take him with us on our stakeouts. So, with assurances I wasn’t even sure Dermot believed, I sent him off with Ed and Scratch, who swore on pain of death to treat him well and take him to a safe place. Once this thing with Apollyon was over, I now had a new item on my To Do list: Find an undead therapist for the traumatized ghoul, and have someone teach Dermot sign language.

  I called Bones back three times, but in each instance, I only got his voice mail. Figures now that I could talk, he wasn’t able to. Worry nagged at me, but I shoved it back with all the other things I wouldn’t allow myself to dwell on. I hadn’t been able to answer Bones’s calls before, but that didn’t mean I was in mortal danger. He was tough. He could take care of himself. I should stop with the paranoid images of his drying corpse running through my mind.

  As an extra precaution in case anyone observed our activities at the drive-in, Mencheres doubled back several times on our way to the town house, then parked a half mile away and carried me as he and Vlad flew the rest of the way. I didn’t bother to tell them that I could fly now, too. One, I was tired. Two, I still couldn’t fly that well, and if I crashed into a telephone pole or something similar in front of Vlad, he’d never let me live it down.

  We landed around back, in the darkest part of the lawn, and then went around to the front of the town house. It was about the same size as the place I’d grown up in, but I bet Mencheres hadn’t stayed anywhere this small in the past thousand years. He slept on the pullout couch while Vlad and I occupied the two upper bedrooms. I’d just taken my boots off on the patio—remnants of my upbringing, when tracking dirt inside a house was akin to a capital crime—when Mencheres suddenly jerked his head up to stare at the sky.

  “Aliens?” I joked, but tensed anyway, reaching for my knives. Ghouls couldn’t fly, but what if someone else menacing had somehow managed to follow us from the drive-in? Our enemies weren’t only of the flesh-eater variety . . .

  My senses began to tingle like they’d been shot with steroids even as Mencheres said, “Bones.”

  Vlad barely had time to mutter, “And this had been such a nice evening,” before the vampire in question dropped out of the sky, landing a few feet away with his black coat swirling around him. Joy and yearning slashed across my subconscious as our eyes met. I went to him, throwing my arms around him, reveling in the strength and vehemence of his answering embrace.

  “I missed you, Kitten,” he growled. Then his mouth crushed over mine, his kiss more filled with raw need than romantic welcome.

  That was fine; I felt the same way. Aside from my compulsive urge to run my hands over him to assure myself that he was really here, relief, happiness, and the most profound feeling of rightness zoomed through me, settling all the way to my core. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d missed Bones until that very moment, hadn’t let myself acknowledge how everything felt off when I was apart from him. On some levels, it was frightening how much a part of me he’d become. It let me know just how much I’d crumble if anything happened to him.

  “Why didn’t you answer your mobile earlier?” Bones murmured once he lifted his head. “I tried you several times. Tried Mencheres, too. Even Tepesh. None of you answered. Scared the wits out of me, so I stowed away on a FedEx plane to make sure you were all right.”

  “You came all the way from Ohio because I didn’t answer the phone?” I was torn between laughter and disbelief. “God, Bones, that’s a little crazy.”

  And it was, except the part of me that had had images of his tombstone dancing in my head because he hadn’t answered his phone earlier was nodding in complete understanding. Despite all our protestations, we were so alike when it came to fear over the other’s safety, and I doubted we’d ever change.

  “Crazy,” I repeated, my voice roughening with the surge of emotion in me. “And have I told you lately that your crazy side . . . is your sexiest side?”

  He chuckled before his mouth swooped back over mine in another dizzying kiss. Then he picked me up, brushing past Vlad and Mencheres without even a hello, though I doubted either of them was surprised.

  We’d made it into the bedroom, already ripping at each other’s clothes, when a discreet cough made my head whip around. Bones instantly had a knife in his hand, my bra dangling from his wrist. I’d gotten my own blade out when I realized the person in the room couldn’t hurt us if he tried.

  “I somehow ended up here, but I can see that this is a bad time, so I’ll just check back with you later,” the unknown ghost said before disappearing into the wall.

  “Not any time soon if you value your afterlife,” Bones called out after him.

  I let out a strangled sound. If this was what I had to look forward to until Marie’s blood was out of my system, I seriously needed to invest in a lot more garlic and pot.

  Then Bones dropped his knife and swept me back into his arms, and I forgot to care about any potential ghostly voyeurs.

  “You have to leave already?” I murmured, blinking at Bones through the bright slants of sunlight that peeked out from the gaps in the drapes. “But you barely slept.”

  The grin Bones flashed me was quintessential cat-that-got-the-cream, though that expression was probably better suited to me at the moment.

  “I know,” he said, the words drawn out with the warmth of remembrance.

  I sat up, dragging the sheet with me. “I’m serious.”

  “Kitten”—Bones paused from pulling on his shirt—“four hours of sleep while holding you is far more beneficial to me than eight hours of endless tossing and turning because you’re not there.”

  I couldn’t say anything for a moment. His tone was utterly matter-of-fact, no hint of romantic exaggeration or playful bantering. After all this time, I should be used to Bones’s unabashed bluntness about his feelings, but it still struck me. He didn’t hesitate to bare the most vulnerable parts of himself without care that I wasn’t the only one who could hear him. Me, I layered up in emotional safety nets most of the time, using humor or irony to conceal how deeply certain things affected me.

  Not Bones. Badass undead killer he might be, but ever since we started dating, he’d never hidden his emotions from me, or did the macho downplaying of what I meant to him in front of others. He wasn’t just stronger than me physically or in power abilities. Bones also left me in the dust when it came to inner strength, daring to show his deepest vulnerabilities without any fear, safety net, or rationalization.

  And it was high time I followed suit. Sure, I’d bared my heart to Bones in the past, but not nearly enough. He knew I loved him, knew I’d fight to the death by his side if need be, but there was more to it than that. Maybe some hidden, fragmented part of me had feared that if I admitted to Bones how much he truly meant to me, then I’d be acknowledging to myself that he had the power to destroy me more thoroughly than anyone, even Apollyon or the vampire council, could. All the rest of the world could only kill or devastate my mind and body. Bones alone held the power to demolish my soul.

  “You once told me you could stand many things.” My voice was raspy from all
the emotions battering against those well-honed inner defenses. “So can I. I can stand whatever Apollyon dishes out, can take the bigotry from others over what I am, the freaky ghost juju from Marie, all the craziness my mother can throw at me, and even the pain of my uncle dying. But the one thing that I would never, ever recover from would be losing you. You made me promise before to go on if that happened, but Bones”—here my words broke and tears spilled down my cheeks—“I wouldn’t want to.”

  He’d been near the side of the bed when I started talking, but was in my arms before the first tear fell. Very softly, his lips brushed over those wet streaks, coming back pink from the drops still shimmering on them.

  “No matter what happens, you will never lose me,” he whispered. “I am forever yours, Kitten, in this life or the next.”

  A poignant sort of pain flowed over me, because I knew what he was promising with that statement, and what he wasn’t. Bones couldn’t swear that we’d never be separated. Being undead didn’t give any of us a claim on immortality; it just made us harder to kill. Unless Bones and I happened to be slain at the exact same time, one day, either he or I would know the grief of being without the other. I meant it when I said I wouldn’t want to go on if Bones were dead, but hard lessons from the past showed that I’d have to. Or Bones would have to go on without me. No matter how many enemies we defeated, or what impassioned promises we made to each other, this was the harsh reality.

  And maybe that reality was what my last few inner shields had been trying to protect me from. Admitting that I’d be irrevocably broken without Bones meant accepting that it would happen. One day, we’d be separated. Not by our will, or even through any potential fault of our own, but through the cold, merciless barrier of death. Unless we died fighting back to back, it would happen. I’d put off being as open as Bones was about how he resided in every crevice of my heart because nothing scared me more than acknowledging that harsh, inevitable reality. Now that I finally had, the strangest kind of relief flowed over me, covering even the pain.