“But I can’t fit through that window,” Shane said.
“I can.” I hurried over to the wall beneath the opening. “Boost me.”
Reluctantly, Shane knelt and held out his hand for me to step into. With his help, I shimmied up the smooth painted concrete wall, then swept aside the curtain, unlocked the window and slid it ajar, silently thanking the church’s maintenance folks for keeping the hinges lubricated and quiet.
Shane pushed me higher, and I slid through the window onto the sidewalk, into the snow.
Wait. Snow? It hadn’t been cold when we left the cemetery.
A breeze came up, twirling the flakes into the air. I realized they were cherry blossoms, prematurely torn from the tree limbs by last night’s storm. The sight made me sad, as if spring itself had been dismembered by a jealous, violent summer.
I stuck my hand through the open window. “Sword,” I whispered. “Just in case.”
“Be careful.” Shane handed me the katana, then gave me a penetrating gaze. “Promise?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll text you with whatever I see. Turn your phone on and make sure it’s set to vibrate.”
“It’s already on, and yes, on vibrate.”
“I’m so proud of you.” I blew him a kiss, then stood up, brushing the cherry blossom snow off my butt. I crept up the front stairs and peered through the smoky glass window. As I’d hoped, the sanctuary doors on the other side of the vestibule were closed. I opened the well-oiled exterior door and slid inside.
On one side of the vestibule, the side without the confessional booths, a small diamond-shaped window opened onto the sanctuary. I crept beneath it and listened.
Colonel Petrea’s voice, clear and cold as a starry winter’s night, rang out over the insidious organ chords. He chanted in a foreign language, maybe Romanian. I thought of Aaron and felt a rush of vengeful rage.
When Petrea paused at the end of each line, other voices echoed his. If they were his Immanence Corps henchmen I’d seen two nights ago, they were human.
I opened up a new text message to Shane:
PETREA + HUMANS? I struggled so hard against the new compulsion to text in complete sentences, my thumbs cramped.
I sent the message, then started a new one:
# CAS =
I slowly stood to bring my eyes level with the lowest tip of the diamond-shaped window.
Oh my.
Zombies filled the front church pews, facing Petrea as he chanted at the top of the stairs in front of the altar, gloved hands held palm up toward the ceiling. I almost expected them to pick up the hymnals and join him in song. I quickly scanned the rest of the personnel, confirming the identity of the IC agents, then ducked down and filled in the numbers before sending my text message to Shane:
24 + 4 HUMAN IC, 1 @ ORGAN & 3 @ ALTAR NEAR PETREA. HUMANS ALL ARMED.
I watched the mailbox icon appear on my phone and wondered if twenty-four had a special significance. Then Petrea’s voice boomed out in his faintly accented English, stopping my heart.
“Come forward, Monroe Jefferson!”
My head jerked up, too fast and too far. I slid back against the wall to hide. A few moments later, my phone vibrated in my hand. Shane’s hastily typed message appeared:
TJEY HVE MONRPE.
So Shane could hear what was happening in the sanctuary from the basement. Maybe he and Elijah and the rest had moved part way up the stairs.
I dared to put an eye to the window. In the choir box, Monroe slowly sat up. Then he shuffled out to stand beside the altar, head bowed. His signature white hat, usually immaculate, was crumpled in his hands. He clutched and grasped at it like a dog gnawing a bone.
I wrote back to Shane:
THEY THREATEN HIM WE MOVE OK?
OK, he replied.
Petrea was speaking in that language again, and as my brain tried to discern a pattern, it seemed to get sticky, like each thought was a step through deep mud.
I shook my head hard, wanting to plug my ears but knowing that would be dumb. With what felt like my last rational thought, I forwarded to Colonel Lanham all the text messages I’d just sent Shane. Elijah would be pissed, but I knew we couldn’t handle this alone, especially with my mind feeling so… um… where was I?
I straightened up, examining my surroundings, wondering how I got there. Fear pulsed through me, alternating with serenity. Not real serenity but rather the kind that comes from nitrous oxide or codeine. Dental visit serenity.
The sanctuary fell silent. My phone vibrated again, but when I looked down it wasn’t a text message. Shane was calling me. How sweet. Maybe he knew how I’d gotten here.
I tapped the green Answer box on the screen and put it to my ear.
“Don’t talk,” Shane whispered. “Petrea got quiet all of a sudden. Can he see you?”
My buzz vanished, as if my head had been doused in ice water. I realized that in my stupor I had moved in front of the window. Petrea was staring straight at me.
All my muscles froze, like those of a deer waiting to see if the wolf will give chase.
He shifted his focus to the front pew of zombies. With a curve of his gloved forefinger, he beckoned the closest one on his left, opposite Monroe. It shambled forward, a hulking brute of a corpse, a head taller than Monroe and twice as wide.
Petrea looked straight at me as he placed his hand on the zombie’s shoulder and said, “Kill this man.”
“NO!” I slammed open the sanctuary doors and hurtled down the aisle, unsheathing my sword as I ran.
The zombie reached for Monroe’s neck. I shrieked again and launched myself through the air.
As I fell, my sword came down, slicing through the zombie’s porous skull. Most of my body landed on the guck-spewing corpse, but my elbows bashed the floor, jarring the sword from my hands.
Petrea laughed, even as feet pounded up the basement stairs—feet belonging to my fanged cavalry. I scrambled to my hands and knees, slipping in what was left of the zombie.
Two shots rang out from the top of the basement steps, the distinctive pap! pap! of a Glock. Then four more. Shrieks of human pain cut the air. I resisted the instinct to take cover, trusting Elijah not to shoot me in the melee as I…
Petrea clapped his hands twice.
As I… what? What was I doing?
He clapped again, in a continuous rhythm that slowed with each beat. My brain felt like it was being wrapped in cotton candy.
His ethereal voice came from behind me. “Stand up.”
I obeyed, turning to face the sanctuary (not a very apt name at the moment, I thought). Elijah and the vampire DJs stood near the basement stairs, frozen but looking pissed about it, unlike Monroe, who looked as scared and stoned as I felt.
On the floor beside me, one Immanence Corps agent lay motionless, a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Beyond him, two more writhed on the carpet, trying to staunch the flow of blood from the multiple wounds in their torsos.
At the organ, a fourth Immanence agent lay slumped against the keyboard, producing a sustained dissonant chord that scraped my spine. Blood dripped in a puddle at his feet.
The zombies stood in the pews facing the center aisle, as if ready to line up for Communion.
Petrea began to chant, low in his chest, somehow in tune with that chord of death coming from the organ. The zombies shuffled toward the aisle, marching in time. I tried to move, but my muscles felt cold and sticky, like my blood had turned to maple syrup.
I heard everyone’s voice at once, swirling in an incoherent cloud inside my head, but the only sound that broke through was Petrea’s chant.
I looked at Shane. He and the other vampires were shouting and advancing, but an inch at a time, caught in the same slow-mo syncopation as me and Monroe, while the rest of the world moved at regular speed. Like The Matrix, only the opposite.
As I was congratulating myself on the analogy, Shane’s voice broke through the storm.
“Ciara, wake up!”
At least, that’s what I thought he said. His words were broken and staticky, like when he calls me on his cell from the mountains of western Maryland, where one of his donors lives.
My mouth wouldn’t move to answer him, so I just thought, Why is he in Cumberland? Didn’t he visit Greg last week?
“Ciara, he’s going to kill us all!”
His sound came clearer, but his meaning did not. Why would Greg want to kill us? I’d never met that donor, but he seemed nice enough on the phone.
“Ciara, you’re the only one who can stop Petrea. I know you can do it, so wake the fuck up!”
This time Shane’s voice cut through my brain haze. I couldn’t turn my head, but my eyes darted to the side to meet his.
“That’s my girl,” he gasped, his neck muscles straining with every word. “Show him what Gypsy scum can do.”
I remembered who I was. Not a zombie, not any kind of monster with strings to pull. Petrea had called me a metaphysical bucket of bleach. He said lies made up the fiber of my mind.
But his was the biggest lie of all.
I lifted my thirteen-ton hand and slapped myself across the face. “Ow.” I staggered back a step.
Petrea glared at me and kept chanting.
“You have no—” I stopped, my mind grasping for the words “—power over…” Over what? “… Me.”
Petrea didn’t break the rhythm of his chant, but his eyebrows twitched, showing a break in concentration.
The dead IC agent at the organ slumped to the floor, leaving Petrea chanting a cappella. The silence only increased his voice’s power.
“You’re full of shhhhhhit.” I sounded like I was underwater.
Colonel Petrea blinked rapidly, then backed up to the altar behind me, brushing past the paralyzed Monroe. I turned to face him, but my movements were stiff and slow, like an arthritic dog’s.
From behind the altar, Petrea brought out a long black gun with a convoluted shape and a clear cylindrical bottle attached in front of the stock. A holy water pistol.
“No.” My tone was no-nonsense, as if chiding a little kid.
“I’ll show you what I’m full of,” he said softly, and held the barrel to Monroe’s temple.
“No.” This time I was the little kid, whimpering.
Petrea pulled the trigger. Water spouted out of the barrel, splashing against Monroe’s head.
My maker shrieked and fell to his knees, clawing at his smoldering scalp. The skin peeled back, falling in tatters, revealing the chalk-white bone of his skull, and underneath, the gray-brown folds of his brain. Petrea pumped the gun to refill the chamber.
That’s when I caught up to time.
I lunged for Petrea, rage freeing me from the spell he had over all of us.
He intercepted me, curling his arm around my neck, then spinning me to press my back against his chest.
“Let her go!” shouted Shane as he flew forward to defend me. The spell was shattering in all directions.
Petrea shoved the pistol in my mouth. I struggled, gagging, but his strength overcame mine as easily as I could immobilize a mouse.
“Not one more step,” Petrea said. “Now that she’s a vampire, this holy water will burn through her sinuses and turn her brain to mush.”
My eyes pleaded with Shane, begging him to trust what I was, no matter how little he understood it.
It’s only water. It’s only water. But when I looked at Monroe, flailing and frying on the floor, doubt stormed the door of my psyche like a battering ram.
Petrea tilted back my head, almost snapping my neck. My gaze shot to the stained glass window above the altar. I shoved my imagination beyond the golden-winged angel and the beaten, bleeding dragon, to the sky beyond, where nothing lay but the stars. Millions of spheres of burning gas.
That’s all they are, I told myself. Whatever force created them, whatever name It went by on each continent of each planet, It did not hate vampires. It did not hate me.
I closed my eyes and prayed for lack of faith.
A sharp crack snapped the air. Petrea jerked. Holy water coated my mouth, throat, and lungs—hot, searing liquid flame.
I choked and heaved, grasping for stolen breath. Petrea released me, and I dropped to the floor. The carpet smashed my face. I tasted my own blood as I bit my tongue.
Then… nothing. No sight, no sound, no feeling. No pain. The holy water had burned it all away.
Petrea was right. I was a vampire vegetable.
But I was not alone. Something cradled my soul, long enough to calm me, long enough for me to remember where I belonged. And this time, It didn’t ask me to stay. It let me go, in a release as loving as any embrace.
Only water.
And then, it was only water. Water that burned not with holy fire, but from the way it made my chest spasm in a desperate reflex to breath.
On my hands and knees beside the altar, I gagged and retched, bringing up the liquid that had no power over me.
Through the tears blurring my eyes, I saw the zombies charge.
Elijah and the vampire DJs lunged to meet them, swords flashing in the candlelight. Beside me, Petrea’s feet twitched.
I turned to see him sit up, the bullet hole in his left eye healing with each blink. He reached for the holy water pistol, his focus on Monroe.
No. I fumbled for my sword, but it had landed out of reach, behind the altar.
“Griffin!” shouted a familiar human voice from the rear of the sanctuary.
I looked toward the sound but saw nothing but a trio of badly outmanned vampires. Fighting back to back, Shane and Spencer were surrounded by ten zombies, whose outstretched arms were almost around their necks.
A small pointy object flew toward me over the crowd of undead. I snatched it from the air.
I’d seen this polished ebony stake before, its needle-sharp tip pressed to my chest, the letter L carved on the bottom.
Behind me, Petrea pumped the holy water pistol furiously, reloading.
With my thumb on the end, and my fingers wrapped around the shaft in the textbook Control grasp, I slammed the wooden stake into Petrea’s heart. Without pausing to admire my work or let the shock sink in, I yanked it out.
His eyes met mine as he began to die.
Instead of collapsing, he stayed sitting upright and merely lowered his chin to his chest. “Smecher,” he gasped with his last breath.
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
A chorus of dull thumps came from the sanctuary. I turned to see the zombies falling, even the uncut ones. The vampires lowered their swords, and beyond them all, Colonel Lanham stood at the end of the aisle, a female Control sharpshooter at his side holding a long, scoped rifle.
“I… saw… you.”
At the sound of Monroe’s voice, I crawled to him and clutched his outstretched hand. He touched my mouth, his eyes full of pain and bewilderment.
“You… burned,” he gasped.
“Not for long.” I laid my hand below the smoldering place on his scalp. How could he survive this? “You can stop, too.”
“No…”
“Yes.” I dug my nails into the back of his hand. “I’m part of you now. You can stop believing long enough to heal.” I leaned close to his ear. “Monroe, it’s only water. Say it.”
“I can’t.”
“Say it!” I clutched his shoulder. I had no idea if he could live long enough for us to fetch my human blood to heal him. “Repeat after me: It’s.”
His breath heaved in and out. “It’s.”
“Only.”
“Only.”
“Water.”
He licked his dry, cracked lips. “It’s only water.”
“Again.”
We said it together, five, ten, twenty times, in a quickening rhythm. The others joined in, covering the sound of Petrea’s body sucking into itself, folding into the hole in his heart, tendons stretching, bones snapping. I shifted so I wouldn’t have to see.
“It’sonlywaterit’sonlyw
aterit’sonlywater.…”
Monroe’s head stopped smoking. His skull re-formed to cover his brain. New skin swept across his scalp like an ocean wave over sand, a wave that never receded. Even his earlobe returned in a complex series of curves.
We kept up our chant until he was whole again. Everyone fell silent, and the only sound was that of the last bits of Petrea disappearing through his wound. His hair, his toes, his fingertips.
There was a soft crack, like the flap of a flag in a strong breeze, and Petrea was gone.
I sat back, my hands barely catching me in time. Shane moved forward.
“Don’t touch her.” Lanham strode down the aisle. “Her clothes are covered in holy water.”
“I can’t believe you shot him,” Spencer said to Lanham. “He could’ve killed her.”
Lanham reached out a hand to help me up. “Let’s just say I had faith in her lack of faith.”
I gave him a grim smile as I rose to stand on unsteady feet, then turned to Shane. He’d called out to me with that same faith, and it had saved me. Saved us all.
Regina gestured to the corpses strewn around the sanctuary. “What happened to them?”
“When the master dies,” Elijah said, “the cadaveris are released from the blood magic.”
I walked down the stairs away from the altar. The other vampires gave me and my dripping clothes a wide berth.
I stopped beside the body of a young woman clad in what must have once been a colorful dress. Now it was nothing but a patchwork of gray, mud-caked rags.
I tugged the skirt down over the woman’s knees and gazed at what was left of her face. “Rest in peace,” I whispered.
Silently I added, enough for both of us.
34
Heroes
The sky decided to piss all over Friday night’s funeral service for the fallen Control agents. Walking in high heels through the mud of the IACMUCE headquarters’ memorial garden, I didn’t stumble or stagger. Human gracelessness was a problem of my past. I had plenty of future problems to replace it.
The stone markers for the six dead-undead vampires bore the Control logo, a sun with curved, flaring rays. Each was marked with a brass plaque with their original and assumed names, along with the dates of their turnings and final deaths.
Bring On the Night Page 31