“The more you die, the more hold Valerius will have on your body. And the less human you will become. It has not even fully manifested and you are already changed.”
The pieces slotted into place at last. Valerius. The creature that they’d told me was a parasite. The one in Cat. It must be central to whatever plot they’d hatched. This was worse than a little bit of vampire blood in my veins. They’d bound a demon to my soul. I wasn’t sure how it tied to Eleanor Dawson or what purpose deceiving me had served, if this was what they were planning all along. But if the demon was responsible for my rebirth, then that meant…
“Cat,” I breathed. “Oh my God. Cat.”
Lamonia’s grin widened. “Bring her in, won’t you Arabella?”
If my heart had been beating, it would have leaped into my mouth. As it was, my chest felt clammy and my eyes brimmed with tears. Cat had been in nearly as bad a shape as me when I’d found her two years ago. Blood loss could be a real bitch. If the demon had been the thing sustaining her all that time, what shape would she be in?
Arabella sashayed her way over to the door, smirking at me over her shoulder, clearly enjoying my distress. She propped the door open and called down the hall in a language I recognized by sound but couldn’t distinguish more than that. Damn the French and their non phonetic language. I’d given up after one semester. I was regretting it now.
Agonizing moments slid by like years as I waited.
And then Arabella reappeared, leading someone in by the elbow. She was nearly as pale as me. Her hair hadn’t seen a comb in days. She seemed as unsure on her legs as a newborn colt, but she was standing. Her eyes wheeled around the room in panic, finally landing on mine with awareness that was keen and familiar.
Cat was here. She was alive. She was aware.
I threw myself across the room at her, knocking us both to the ground. Cat let out a muffled swear word and tried to bat my arms away, demanding oxygen. I didn’t release her. I wasn’t sure I physically could allow her out of my grip at the moment.
It didn’t matter that I was still sitting in a nest of vipers, beholden to their wishes for the time being. Cat was alive. And that was good enough for me.
chapter
17
TRUST A FILTHY BLOODSUCKER TO ruin the moment.
Ashby stepped seemingly out of nowhere and clamped my upper arm in a vice-like grip. I clutched at Cat probably harder than I should have. So hard, in fact, she cried out. That little cry made me loosen my grip on her and I channeled the guilt and frustration into a slap meant for Ashby’s too-perfect face.
I only meant to strike him with an open palm, but the anger burst through the haze of distant emotion and surged to the fore. And it brought with it that hot, wild, uncontrollable magic with it.
I made contact and Ashby’s face, rather than be a solid weight against my hand, gave way like butter beneath a hot knife.
The vampire yowled and drew back faster than even my new eyes could track, finally coming to a standstill against the opposite wall. His face was a ruin of melted flesh. And for a moment the smell brought me back to that horrible moment when I’d woken to find Phyllis’ living room on fire.
Unlike my fragile neighbor, Ashby’s face mended. Within seconds the skin began to twist and crawl, like maggots moving beneath the skin. It was sickening to watch a vampire heal. It always revealed them for what they were. Corpses that should have been moldering beneath the ground long ago. The older a vampire was, the worse it would be. Ashby had to have been at least two hundred. Possibly more.
Muscle formed a thick slab over his exposed cheekbone and then skin, pink and shiny, stretched over that. It only took about a minute for the damage to be repaired. But the shocked expression hadn’t left his face.
I, too, stared at my hands in awe. Gods, what was happening to me? The closest comparison that I could draw was Ewan’s pyromancy, and even that wasn’t exactly like what I’d done. I hadn’t summoned flame. The bare skin of my hand had burned Ashby down to the bone. That had never been an ability I’d possessed. I wasn’t an elemental manipulator. Fire wasn’t a power that was innate to me. I could enchant metal and I could even create incendiary bullets if I was pushed. And even enchanting the bullets with a spell like that wiped me out. If anything, I felt recharged.
Except that I’d somehow managed to heat my hand enough to melt layers off a vampire’s face with no conscious effort on my part. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d found a live tarantula on the end of my wrist.
“No,” Cat moaned. “Nat, no. You didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” What did she know about what had happened that I didn’t? How could she possibly be aware of what was going on? She’d been comatose for two years. And it wasn’t like I’d been sitting at her bedside, filling her in on every detail of my day to day life. After pulling myself up by the bootstraps, I’d pretty much stayed out of the country as long as the Trust and my funds would allow, searching for a cure.
Catalina tugged at the bodice of my ridiculous gown and revealed something I hadn’t noticed before.
There was a shape slowly painting itself onto my skin, right where Dominic’s bullet had blown through my heart. It wasn’t in a language that I recognized, but given the running theme that I’d gathered from this mission, I was betting it was an ideogram from the Nahuatl language. It seeped through my pores and sank in like a glittering tattoo, shimmering like black opal in the dim lamplight in Algerone’s den.
A quick glance up at the vampire sent the anger spiking through me all over again. He was staring at my bared flesh like a man admiring fine art. And normally it might have made me feel a little proud to have elicited a reaction from a man. But not this man. And I highly doubted he was appreciating the canvas. It was the sigil that he was focused on.
I jabbed a finger at my own chest. “What the hell is this, Lamonia? And what does this have to do with the mission? With Cat?”
“As I told you. Your body has been made a temple to the demon Valerius. We had tried to use your sister for this particular plan. She had the access we needed and the political clout to see our wishes carried out. But she had the gall to wrestle it into submission.”
My eyes cut to my sister’s face, searching for any truth to back that claim. I found it in her earnest, wide-eyed concern. She nodded once.
“I tried so hard, Nat. I really did.”
I smoothed a hand over her hair, a gesture born of years of habit. After our dad had been murdered by a bunch of thugs on his way home from work, our family had never been the same. Cat suffered night terrors for years. And we’d both sought justice for it, in our own way. Cat was a strict believer in the power of reform. I was pretty sure the only justice that could be found in the world came from the end of a semi-automatic.
Catalina leaned her head into my palm and sighed. “It’s pure, primal destruction, Nat,” she whispered. “It’s full of rage. It can’t be killed. The best I could hope to do was keep it stationary. That’s why I didn’t answer. I’m so, so sorry but...”
I listened to her story in mute horror. So she hadn’t been unaware at all. She’d been trapped in limbo, wrestling a demon into submission, trying, as always, to save the world.
And I’d been trying to cast it out to do who knew what. Gods, I felt stupid.
I’d gotten a taste of its rage, and I knew Ashby had experienced just a fraction of its destructive potential. The hot, surging power in me was amorphous and I couldn’t get a sense of what it might be capable of.
And now an unkillable, pissed off, primordial demon had been summoned and bound by House Lamonia. To me. I had no inkling why, but I was absolutely certain that it was nothing wholesome.
Algerone reached out a hand and snatched Cat up by the hair, dragging her away from me. Not even my newly enhanced reflexes were fast enough to seize her from him. I staggered forward, missing her by inches.
“Let her go, Lamonia,” I snarled.
“Or I swear to God I’ll–”
“You will do only what we command you to do,” he said in a tone of deadly calm. “And you will start by completing your mission.”
I glared at him, squeezing my fingers into fists. Stewing in my own ignorance and impotence was only going to piss me off, and that was clearly something I needed to avoid, as smoke was actually curling off of my skin.
“Why?” I snapped. “Why have me kill this girl? She’s not a murderer. I could glean at least that much from the brief time I spent with her. How the hell did she get a reputation as a bioterrorist? I bet you a thousand dollars she’ll cure cancer someday. So why lie about her?”
Ashby’s tone was meeker than I’d ever heard it when he spoke. Apparently, the smug demeanor could be slapped out of him, if you backed it up with a little primordial fire.
“It wasn’t a lie. She was hand-selected by members of House Avington. A hostage was kept to ensure her cooperation as she engineered the plague. It was the first step in wiping those mutts out.”
And here I’d thought that the queasy feeling in my gut couldn’t get any worse. Now I had to add guilt to the mix for badly misjudging Elle. Whomever they held against her was dead if she’d escaped or fled. And she’d had the stones to keep going anyway, righting the wrong she’d been forced to commit.
Damn. Someone give that girl a cookie.
“I still don’t see how I play into this. If you were planning to wipe them out with a disease, why all of this?”
Algerone shoved my sister away suddenly and she staggered across the room, landing in the arms of Geoffrey, who tucked her casually beneath his arm. If she hadn’t been stiff with terror, she might have looked like his girlfriend, posed like that.
“Disease is never one hundred percent effective,” Algerone said, examining his long fingers, as though he couldn’t be bothered to look at me. “Just look at history. Even the most devastating of the plagues never completely wiped humanity from the face of the planet. The body is adaptable. There will always be those with resistance. Disease was never going to be the answer.”
Algerone strode over to the nearest oil lamp and lifted the glass off of it. He held his hand a few inches above the flame, staring at it, entranced.
“Do you know the only thing that can purge completely, Iron heart?”
I had enough of the puzzle pieces to take a wild stab at the picture.
“Fire.”
“Precisely.”
“I can’t just set all of the wolves on fire, you know. I don’t think even Valerius is that good.”
“Ah, but that’s the beauty of it. They’ll all be in one place by the end of the year. House Avington outdid themselves when they drafted that piece of legislation. All of our hated enemies gathered so conveniently on that little isle.” He pressed a hand to his face and pulled a would-be innocent expression that fooled absolutely no one. “For their own safety, of course. It will be a terrible tragedy when the atoll reignites, will it not? Who could have foreseen a sudden eruption from a dormant volcano?”
The throng of vampires laughed, as though he’d said something outrageously funny. I was fighting not to be sick. I’d known better than to trust the vampires. I should have shoved their proposition back in their faces and used what little I’d learned to help Cat.
As quickly as flicking a switch, Algerone changed tack, turning on his heel to leave the room.
“Send dearest Catalina down to be prepared by the Harling twins, Ashby. I will personally oversee her stay here. Geoffrey, assemble a fighting force of about ten men. Take care of our loose end, won’t you? Clearly, Iron Heart cannot be trusted to act without supervision. Keep a tight leash on her.”
Geoffrey inclined his head in a respectful nod. “Yes, master. Of course. It will be done.”
There was a three-second stretch when the flood of the demon’s power rose in tandem with my fury, and I was absolutely certain that I was going to set the whole house ablaze, just so I could take Algerone Lamonia straight to hell with me.
And then I felt it. Geoffrey’s aura was a siren call. I didn’t like it. I knew it was deadly. But I still couldn’t ignore it. It gave me just enough concentration to pull myself back from the precipice and understand why blowing the building sky high was a bad idea.
I shuddered, despite the heat running through me. This demon was dangerous. Not just because of its immense power but because it was unthinking. Brutal and terrible as a storm, and with all of the emotional intelligence of a sea slug. It destroyed because that was what it was designed to do, and for no other reason that I could easily discern.
Ashby led my sister from the room. Cat gave me one, last helpless look over her shoulder before she was led back the way she’d come. Only the weight of Geoffrey’s arm and the press of his will against mine kept me from sprinting after her.
“Come on, Iron Heart. Time to suit up for battle. We have a girl to kill.”
I nodded absently, though my mind was a million miles away. I’d play along for now. I didn’t have much choice.
But the vampires had made a mistake by shoving the thing into me. Being dead might have allowed it to overcome my will and roost inside of me. But that didn’t mean that this demon was going to run the ship. This was my fucking body. No demon was going to take that away from me. One sister had already managed to wrestle it into submission with her will alone, even though it had left her unconscious.
I was fairly confident with enough time and applied effort, I could also make this thing my bitch. Time was the commodity I didn’t have. So I’d have to find whatever weasel was working for the vamps and shove his teeth down his throat one by one until he removed the timer. The rest I could figure out another day.
Seemed like a solid plan to me.
chapter
18
ALGERONE LAMONIA MUST HAVE CALLED ahead and contacted Landon’s office because there was someone set to meet us in Central Park for transport. It must have cost a fortune to procure, because the firm’s only specialist, Declan, wouldn’t transport vampires as a general rule, let alone the entourage that I was sporting.
I was flanked by eight vampires on either side and was literally being dragged along by the seventeenth.
“Have you ever heard of the term, ‘overkill?’” I muttered.
“Hm. Don’t humans say it is always better to have more than you need than less?”
“I don’t think they’re usually referring to accomplices, Geoffrey.”
He chuckled and yanked me forward by the harness he’d secured to me. I glared down at the thing on my chest. A stuffed monkey face smiled up at me, infuriatingly smug about my predicament. I was being treated like an errant toddler, literally.
“Stop tugging me around, Geoffrey. I’m right behind you.”
“Keep up then.”
We trudged in silence up a hill and came to a stop about five minutes later. To the merely human eye, Declan would have been invisible, his inked skin blending in with the shadow that loomed beneath the trees. Even with my newly enhanced senses, I could only make him out if he moved.
His eyes flashed an inhuman, phosphorous green for just a second as he took me in. I rocked back on my heels in surprise. I’d never actually known what Declan was. It had been something of a game between us, years ago, to see how close I could get to the truth. He’d never admitted to anything. I hadn’t ever come close to guessing. I couldn’t possibly have guessed. Because what he was just too damned rare.
He was a Clurichaun or, at the very least, the changeling offspring of one. They were regarded as tricksters. No wonder he could drink us all under the table during a pub crawl. Once upon a time you could find them in almost every bar or sleeping off a binge in a brewery. Between the Trust and the hunts carried out by House Grieves, there were hardly any left. Those that still lived had retreated to the stronghold of the faerie mounds for safety.
His eyes went wide as we approached. Was t
he look of fear that darted across his face because he sensed the demon inside of me, or because I was essentially a walking corpse? Perhaps it was a combination of both.
I’d been allowed to change out of the ridiculous gown, thank Christ. But the v-neck sweater I’d been given to wear exposed the shimmering sigil on my chest. He took an unconscious step back from me, making a cross. Interesting. Not fully fae then, if he could cross himself.
“God’s blood,” he muttered. “What the hell did they do to you, Valdez?”
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?”
He shook his head slowly. “Forgive me for saying it, but I think you’d be better off dead.”
I was beginning to agree with him.
“We need to get to the Everglades. That’s where Dawson is. Can you get us there?”
Declan nodded absently, eyes sweeping over the group of dead men around me. I was going to track Dom down and shake him until he elaborated on what he’d meant earlier, when he’d said that I’d been made a scapegoat. If he’d been looking into Cat’s accident, maybe he already suspected who was behind the ritual. And then, when I had the answer I needed, I was going to knock his teeth in for shooting me.
Declan muttered beneath his breath, the Gaelic almost sounding like music in the still night air. Slowly, a golden speck formed in the air in front of the tree trunk, widening by degrees every second. Soon enough, there was an archway leading through the giant oak. A gush of brown water ran out onto the ground at his feet, sloshing over his Oxford Leather shoes. He didn’t seem to care. His eyes were still fixed on my face, an expression of deep disquiet plain there.
“Excellent,” Geoffrey enthused. “We’ll see that the amount is wired to the account you specified, McCarty.”
“Go through now, fecker. Before I change my mind.”
Geoffrey’s laugh was wicked and unrepentant, even as we stepped through. The portal closed behind us as soon as the last vampire set foot on the marshy ground of the Everglades. The moon was out tonight and reflected in the rippling brown water. A few yards away a scaly tail disappeared beneath the water, sending waves crashing toward shore. I recoiled. Gators.
Infernal Assassin- Vampire Killer Page 16