“Master?” One of his hoodsmen stepped in from the hall, red machete in hand. “We’ve got the downstairs.” Below the hood he was wearing a server’s outfit. Duh. Come in as the caterers… Sable and three in here, only two downstairs? They must have enthralled more live minions.
Sable nodded. “Excellent work. Adrian, Gregor, see that everyone is gathered in the receiving room. I need to chat with everyone.”
I giggled. “Everyone’s name is smarter than yours. Did you let them pick their own?” He leaned on his cane and I screamed. His merry little group snickered.
“Why no, I did not. Belladonna had that privilege. But then, I named her and her sister.” So I’d been wrong about Bell, too.
I managed to stop screaming, pulled in another breath. “So. What. Now?”
“Now? Now I decide who dies.” He waved his hand. “They’ll just…disappear. Nobody has seen my face tonight, and nobody will know who has killed our silly Master of Ceremonies. But every vampire that I allow to live will know they have a new master.” He withdrew his cane, swung it to lightly tap my cheek. “A few will resist, of course. My minions will hunt them down in their crypts, make them examples. It will be very tedious, but I’ll have you to entertain me.”
I stared up at him. He honestly had no idea. He thought he could win. I had no breath to laugh.
He took my silence for surrender and his smile grew, his eyes sparkled merrily. “Diego, Leonid, let’s rearrange our darling girl. She looks uncomfortable.” I kicked uselessly as his remaining hoodsmen joined him in leaning over me. They knelt on my legs.
Sable set his cane on a chair and untied his cravat. “If it helps, you may close your eyes and think of England.”
And Paul ripped his head off.
* * *
I felt like Carrie at the prom. You know—when her fun-loving classmates dump pigs’ blood on her? Sable had been busy—I could taste just about every blood type but O-negative—and at two hundred plus pounds, minus a few for the head, he didn’t feel good landing on my shoulder either. I hissed through my teeth when big wolfy Paul threw him off me, screamed again when he wrapped his plate-sized claws around my hand and shoulder and pulled me up from the floor.
I kept screaming, slammed my open hand with its iron spike into number two hoodsman’s head. He staggered and the second one unfroze. Paul casually grabbed his head and used him to beat his buddy. Neither tried to mist as Paul turned them into hamburger.
Pulling out the spike, I found a machete and finished them. They’d thank me someday; I was pretty sure Paul was considering digestion just to make them stay down.
The library looked like a mad artist had expressed himself all over the walls. And the shelves. And the furniture. I pushed a bloody tangle of hair out of my eyes, turned my shoulder to Paul. “Would you mind?” He huffed, got a grip on my shoulder, carefully pinched the spike between thumb and index finger, and yanked it out. I couldn’t keep the scream down—it had gone through bone.
He threw it into the fireplace, where it clattered on the tiles. Then he changed.
“Well that was disappointing,” I said. I hadn’t caught it the first time, and it wasn’t like in the movies. One moment he was a foot taller and really hairy, the next his huge wolfness faded like an afterimage, like a mirage that had been painted in by CGI or not-so-solid spirit. No screaming, no warping of flesh and bone, no ick. At least his clothes were properly shredded, except for the duster and his spandex werewolf pants.
“I could always groan a little and stagger around, chèr. Are you good?”
“Do I look like I’m good?” I pulled at my bloody jacket. “Liz is going to kill both of us.” The hole in my hand had closed before I put the machete down.
“You grandmère isn’t going to be too happy either.”
“How did you—”
“I followed the guy dressed as Baron Samedi out and up the backstairs. He said you’d need help. Showed me the back way in, then he wasn’t there.” And don’t ask, his eyes said. “So now what?”
I’d like to know too. Okay, at least three, maybe four of Sable’s faithful progeny downstairs with the guests. Plus minions, Belladonna? Two of us, plus Dupree, who—not being insane—was probably waiting sensibly with the crowd for the situation to develop. Leroy? Other vamps might join in, but becoming a creature of the night didn’t make someone a fighter; if they were on our side, how useful could they be?
I tried my cellphone. No connection; if they were at all clever, they’d set up a jammer to swamp the tower signal.
We could get out, call reinforcements—but even if they expected their master to take his time with me, eventually somebody was going to come upstairs to see what was taking so long. Then…anybody’s guess. I wanted to try and put MC back together, even the odds a little, but the night I’d been chopped Leroy had spirited me away to a safe place before doing it. Which meant it probably took a little while, and we couldn’t wait for him any more than we could wait for the cops. This bites.
I collected my Desert Eagle and shoulder holster from Paul, found and holstered my Kel-Tec, hefted my machete, gave Sable a good kick. It was time for them to meet Artemis.
“They’re waiting for their fearless leader to come down and talk to them. Let’s go talk.”
* * *
It felt way too familiar: unknown number of bad guys, lots of fragile civilians, no time to bring overwhelming force and squash them like bugs. But my blood rose anyway as I moved down the hallway, listened at the stairs.
Behind me, Paul went back to fur. Downstairs somebody was crying, scared, but not desperate or in pain. I looked back at Paul, pointed left with the machete; they’d have collected everyone in one place, and all their attention would be on their “guests.” When Paul nodded, I turned and walked down the stairs, boots silent on the carpeted steps.
One, two, three, four, five, not-so-silent steps on the tiled floor of the entry hall, slow and not at all alarming like running steps would have been. One hoodsman, one armed minion in the doorway, both starting to turn. Step-step-swing.
Hoodsman’s head came off. Paul took the minion’s gun away by grabbing his gun hand and swinging him into the wall. The screaming started as I went to mist. Paul howled loud enough to shake the paintings on the walls as I swept up to get a ceiling view.
Yes! Dupree ripped his mask off, pulled his .45 full of Church-blessed bullets from beneath his robes, and started banging away while screaming at everyone to Get Down! The hoodsman closest to him practically exploded. An unmasked Leroy sliced into another with his saber—he’d come as a pirate, go figure—moving like he was dancing. Most costumed vamps rose to mist and fled, but not all of them; fastidious Vessy and a white swan turned on the last hoodsman. I went to flesh, landed on another minion and swung. His gun and hand sprang away in a fan of blood. Turning to look for a target, I nearly died again. Belladonna’s machete bit, a passing kiss beneath my ear as I fell back into mist.
“Shit!” she screamed, and followed.
Through the screaming, the shooting, the chaos as civilians tried to flee, we danced in and out of mist, pushing, racing each other to flesh, leaping off again. Mist-flesh-swing-mist-repeat, YES! Sliced her arm, blood running. Dropping her blade, she leaped, grabbed my arm and pulled me into mist. What? Back down, she controlled our landing; my face smacked the tile floor and I lost my borrowed machete.
Then the fire started.
Crepe burns.
The fire raced around the walls, from wreaths of “black roses” to black-draped portraits as exploding panic knocked over more freestanding candelabras. Somebody’s stray rounds hit the bar and the spilled hard liquor and decorations went up like a torch. Belladonna laughed in my face, giggling madly as the room filled with smoke.
I could hear Dupree shouting, one turn in our dance and I saw him standing by an open window, grillwork unlatched, throwing guests out into the street.
I liked that boy.
“Sable’s dead!” I shouted, trying to
shake Belladonna. She laughed again and twisted us to the floor, way stronger than me. How much blood did she have in her?
“He was an idiot! I was going to kill him myself!”
I ducked clawing nails as she went for my eyes. Mist-flesh-mist-flesh, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, screaming in my face. Mist-flesh, she controlled the angle and we bounced off fleeing guests, smacked a burning wall, fell. Mist-flesh-mist-flesh, and my backbone ground loudly as she laughed. If she broke my back, did it count as decapitation?
She pushed my face away and leaned in, binding legs leaving only my right arm free.
“My plan,” she whispered. “His place. I let him have his toys, and nobody will look for me after tonight.” And she bit me.
“No!” I gasped as liquid pleasure exploded from my neck, flooded my brain. I started to sink. No no no no nononono— My flailing hand caught, and I ripped the corset piercings out of her back, popping like a burst zipper all the way down.
She screamed, my stolen blood spattered my face as she arched reflexively away from the agony, and I brought up a knee to break her hold. Mist-flesh, and I held a needle sharp stake in my hand. Mist-flesh and the stake bit into her naked, bloodied back just below the lowest feather of her angel wing tattoo. Her scream rose to a shriek, cut as we hit the floor and my weight drove the stake deeper. She lay still.
I spit, slid off her, took a breath past the half-closed slice in my neck and looked up at the smoke filled air.
Anyone who could get had got; I shared the reception room with shortened vamps, groaning and silent bodies, and a furry and singed Paul. This time I managed to stand before he could help me up.
He looked down at Belladonna. Growled.
“No,” I said, sighed. “Time to clean up.”
Chapter Twenty Six
We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Look. Stuff happens. You do what you do, or you don’t.
Jacky Bouchard, The Artemis Files.
* * *
“You did threaten to burn it to the ground,” MC said. From what I could see of his face in the flashing lights, he didn’t seem too bothered.
Paul had pulled vamp heads and bodies and Belladonna’s staked corpse out of the ground floor. As the one who didn’t need to breathe, I’d gone back upstairs. I’d wrapped MC in the library curtains before tossing him out the window and over the balcony, which was more than I did for the two hoodsmen. They would be picking gravel out of their teeth when they rose in Emerson’s lockup.
I’d left Sable—in fact I’d smashed MC’s liquor cabinet and poured on the hard stuff to help him burn. I wanted to feel bad about that. Maybe later.
I shrugged. “Urban renewal. And it’s not ‘to the ground.’ ” The roof fell in, throwing up a great plume of sparks while firemen yelled. I winced. “Not yet.”
Being busy, I’d used the curtains to keep his head attached to his neck while I did other things, and by my watch it had taken close to two hours for him to rise. “Other things” included calling Gray to suggest he beat feet over to Sable’s before Emerson’s boys did; the DSA would turn a drug-assisted master vampire into a wannabe trying to take over the vampire scene. Move along, nothing to see here… I told him to tell his bosses I was coming for Acacia.
After I took care of a few things.
I glanced at MC. Count Dracula looked more like Renfield now. Darren had gotten out fine; in fact none of the guests had been killed in the fight or the fire. Bullet holes, trampling injuries, smoke inhalation, oh yeah. But no fatalities, a major miracle that had me rethinking who saints listened to. Or Baron Samedi.
He caught me looking. “Yes?”
“It’s your turn.”
A deep laugh. “I suppose it is. I could argue that you didn’t deliver Sable to me, but such tactics are for lawyers. Come. It is not far.”
Fire hoses ran everywhere, misted spray wet the streets while fire and water ate everything MC owned, and only two hours remained of the night, but he turned and walked away. Technically we weren’t free to go. We were witnesses, suspects, whatever (Emerson had been sarcastic), but a blanket of influence pushed us past the police at the perimeter. I didn’t look for Paul or Dupree. Paul was with Emerson doing cop things (actually trying to find the Baron Samedi nobody else had seen, and I wished him luck with that), and Dupree had gone to the hospital to get a bullet out of his thigh.
MC proceeded down Royal Street and turned south. It didn’t take me long to guess where we were going. Darren opened the street door to the Salle D’Armes. He’d cleaned up, and he waved us in with his usual cheerful smile. Leroy stood behind him.
“Jacob,” Leroy said, nodding to MC.
“Marc.” MC nodded back.
“Jacqueline.”
“Really? Do we all know our names now?”
Darren laughed, and I saw a hint of a twist in Leroy’s mouth as he stepped aside.
“Darren? Could you get Jacob something to drink? I’ll show Jacqueline downstairs.” They went one way while we went another. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Leroy led me back to the kitchen I’d woken up in and down to the “guestroom” he’d given me the first time.
He pushed the metal door open with a squeal of heavy hinges, and when he flipped on the light I could see he’d been down here earlier. The bolts holding the steel chest to the concrete floor had been removed.
“Lift your end,” he instructed, taking hold of the other. Together we lifted the chest out of its brackets and set it to the side. It had to weigh at least a ton—five husky living weightlifters probably couldn’t have moved it.
Beneath was a locked panel, which he opened. Beneath that was Sleeping Beauty.
“Her name,” said Leroy, “is Claire. We grew up together in La Tuque—in Quebec.”
No freaking way.
My legs gave out and I sat without thought, leaning closer and blinking as if it would change what I saw. She was a Mina, all dark curls around a pale narrow face. Laid out in a long black gown, hands clasped loosely beneath her breasts, she looked like a wax-museum display of the fairy tale; perfect, but too pale and fragile to be pretty.
Leroy knelt and tucked a fugitive lock behind her ear.
“She was always sick, an underdeveloped heart that made her unwell. I would bring her schoolwork when she couldn’t attend, but when she was thirteen her family moved to Montreal so that she could be near specialists. We continued to call and write, and I’d visit.”
He looked up. “For Claire, life was a fight with her heart, with her blood. Along with everything else, she was anemic. Her medication—” he laughed “—her medication made her skin sensitive to sunlight. Can you wonder why she fell in love with vampires? Romances, thrillers, any vampire story. Every time illness would keep her in her bed, which was more and more often, she’d read a hundred more. She died at twenty-five.”
“And rose?”
“And rose. A breakthrough, of course.”
“But—people dying of illnesses don’t. Have breakthroughs, I mean.” Shockingly, Leroy chuckled.
“How fortunate, then, that a thief shot her. Wouldn’t you agree? Through the heart, proving God has a sense of humor. A black one.”
I couldn’t disagree there. “So what happened?”
“Claire could hardly hide what had happened, and didn’t want to. She became quite the celebrity. By then I was living in Toronto, training for the Olympics, and she came to visit. I took her clubbing. She’d never been able to go. Three men attacked us—hunters, I found out. She killed one, the others ran, but not before they killed me.”
I closed my eyes. I could imagine how an Olympian in training, a champion fencer, had died. It wouldn’t have been standing behind her. “You bled out.”
“In her arms. But not before she gave some
of her own blood to me. She believed the stories, and it was all she could think to do.”
Crap. I looked down at the sleeping master vamp. “So you took her and you ran.”
“She is not a fighter, my Claire. Her story was very public, but I could disappear. She could not hide, even here, but, you know that if we do not drink, we sleep?” I nodded, throat tight. “So she sleeps, and I keep her safe. And what will you do?”
* * *
I didn’t go to the safe house; one call and Gray had a driver pick me up to swing me by Grams so I could change and grab my bag. He delivered me to a private airport as the sky shaded to blue. The armed loadmaster promised me that they would fly me hanger-to-hanger without ever seeing sunlight, and I believed him; I was still useful to them, even if Emerson had sworn not to let me near a police operation again. Gray’s bosses had agreed—I had an appointment at Camp Necessity to take away Acacia’s nightmare.
Then I could go home. Hope would be happy to see me, Gray would be happy not to see me while he cleaned up, and I could forget about an innocently sleeping seed of Vampire Armageddon.
Every window in the small passenger section had been shut and taped over, but I felt the sunrise as the wheels left the runway. I didn’t fight it. They’d provided a thick shipping box and I took one of the seat pillows in with me. Closing the lid, I released my breath and slept the sleep of the dead.
The End.
Author’s Note
For those who discovered Bite Me: Big Easy Nights first, Jacky’s adventures begin (or at least we become aware of them) in Wearing the Cape. Although Jacky only appears there as a secondary—if significant—character, fans who loved her as much as (or even more than) Astra, convinced me that she needed her own story. Chronologically, Bite Me: Big Easy Nights takes place between Wearing the Cape and Villains Inc.
Bite Me: Big Easy Nights Page 17