by Amy Lane
“Stop!” he cried out, revolted by the sticky mess as it glommed onto his clothes. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you had some brave sons of bitches out there tonight, dying for you. Being all honorable and shit and not wanting to turn over a family member to a stranger—and what have you done for them?”
He looked away, leaving my own handprint facing me.
“What have you done for them!” I shouted, thinking of Teague falling to the ground and what I would and almost had given up to know that my friends wouldn’t have to die for me.
“I….” He looked at me helplessly. “I never asked them to,” he whispered, and I fought against screaming pain and anger in an emotional vomit of sound.
“You didn’t step forward either.” My voice was choked. I wanted to kill him—badly—but I needed to do this right. “Now you need to pay.”
“So kill me already!” he gritted.
I could have wept all over again. He wanted to die—I could tell by his voice that he was aching for death. He was just too afraid to step up.
“No. Too easy.” I used my hopped-up elf blood to hoist him up, sitting in a power sling, over the heads of the assembly, as easy as Brack putting a kid on his shoulders. He hovered there for a minute, and I shouted at him, “Now tell them what this is about!”
“I said kill me, bitch!” he cried back. I turned to Bracken, who growled and held out his hand and apparently pulled—gently—at his skin until he screamed.
“Now tell them!”
“Fine! Fine!” He started to weep, the blood of his tears pattering down on the faces of the people in the room. “The little ones, they’re… they’re so beautiful…,” he moaned. “So pure, and they smile at me, and… and I have to, I just have to… and their flesh is so sweet….” He sniffled, and it was awful. “But I’m a vampire. I—I can’t control it—and I feed… but I just feel so bad. I think, you know, if they rise again in the dark, they’ll be okay….”
“Be okay?” I said through a raspy throat. “Be okay? Do you know what happens to them? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“No….” His entire ordinary man’s face crumpled, and he began to mewl like an infant. “No… no, no, no no no no….”
He was lying.
“Where are they?” I asked, my voice breaking, and I was aware that the eyes of all my people were suddenly bulging with horror.
“Oh Goddess…,” Rafael rasped beside me. “Lady, are you sure?”
I whirled our monster around toward me, still levitating, and brought him down to eye level with me. “Where are they?” I asked, my voice pitching dangerously up, and he raised his hands to his bleeding eyes and sobbed some more.
Jesus.
“Bracken, I need to blood him.”
Bracken looked at me in horror. “No.”
“I need to find out where they are.”
“No.”
I looked at him in appeal. “This needs to end, and it needs to end tonight, beloved. I won’t lose myself in this guy’s mind—you know I won’t. I’ve proved that.”
I flinched from the hard anger in Bracken’s face. “No.” His shaking hand came out and jerked my chin back so I had to look at him. “You will not do this. You think you have to tell me what drives you, but you’re wrong. I know exactly what drives you. But you can only sacrifice so much of yourself before there’s not enough to lead.”
“We have to know,” I said, my voice shaking.
I had turned away from our monster, my power fluctuations making his power sling bob lightly with my emotions, and I turned suddenly when Rafael stepped between us with a bleeding wrist.
“Dwight,” he said softly.
“I can’t let you do it, Rafael,” he moaned.
“You have to, Dwight. You’re done for. I’d kill you myself, brother—you should have told me the urges were back.”
Dwight moaned again. “I didn’t want to let you down, Rafael.”
“Well, look at us, brother,” Rafael said sadly. “Our people are dead because you wouldn’t step up, because I had to call you in. Look at them, Dwight.” He grasped the man’s chin, much like Bracken had grasped mine, and made him look at the lot of us—the blood-dripping, snarling, feral lot of us.
“They came here in peace—they came here looking to protect people—and look what you made them do. That girl, she’s planning to blood with you and then kill you.” Rafael’s voice shook. “She knows how it feels, brother. She knows the hole it’s going to leave in her soul, and all because you won’t do what you need to do—what you needed to do since the very beginning.”
“I had to,” Dwight sobbed. “I had to go back and get them, Rafael. Once I knew they weren’t dead….”
Oh Jesus… sweet Goddess. I shook again, caught in the throes of both horror and the elf-blood, and I wanted mightily to fall to my knees and sick up everything I’d eaten all week. He knew they weren’t dead, because their families were. I didn’t even want to think about where he’d been keeping them.
“Well, then,” Rafael said softly, holding his wrist in front of what appeared to be a beloved friend, a confidant, “it’s time you let us bring them to the light, isn’t it?”
“Not from me, you won’t,” Dwight snarled, unreasonable and feral in his final moments. Rafael thrust his blood into his enemy’s mouth and sank his fangs into the upper part of Dwight’s arm, which was closest, and after a suck and a swallow, he fell to his knees and groaned.
“Do you know where they are?” I rasped, choking back my own nausea, and Rafael nodded.
“He’s got helpers,” he rasped. “People who didn’t fight, but who helped him keep the secret.”
“Don’t you hurt them!” Dwight screamed—finally, finally showing some loyalty to people who had put themselves out for him.
“Dwight, my friend, this is no longer your concern,” Rafael said formally. And then, nodding to me, “Little Goddess, would you please?”
Awesome. All my battle rage had faded in the wake of my horror and nausea. We were doing this cold-blooded style, with a formal execution.
I swung Dwight around to look at me. “Any last words, sir?” I asked, not being ironic at all.
“I’m not a monster,” he said, his voice cracking, breaking, putting a lie to the last thing he’d ever believe.
“Tell your victims that in hell.”
I stepped back and let loose, the flame as erratic with him as it had been with the other vampires, burning hot and clean one minute and crackling weakly the next. Fucking elf blood, playing havoc with my wiring, my emotions, my equilibrium. I grunted in the midst of his screams and concentrated hard, and he was suddenly ash—no more suffering, no more debate, just one dead pedophile and a whole big blood-sodden mess to clean up.
“Rafael,” I said clearly, wondering how long my knees were going to last. “We need to know.”
Rafael nodded and looked at me sorrowfully, the shock of the whole evening written on his face. But he was a master vampire. His love for his people might have blinded him, but he hadn’t been made a leader for his weakness.
“Here, little Goddess,” he offered, holding out his wrist. “Let’s find them together.”
It was sort of like a medieval social pyramid—the king ruled the vassals, who ruled their own vassals, who ruled their serfs, but the king ruled them all. Vampires tended to sex and blood with the other people they dealt with—other vampires, shape-shifters, whatever. I was the king, Rafael was my vassal, and he had control over his vassal’s vassals. We just had to follow the blood down the pyramid.
I could do that.
“Accomplices first,” I said, looking up and nodding to Lambent as he walked in. He nodded back, and I knew that Teague would be all right and that we still had work to do.
“Right, little Goddess,” Rafael said grimly. He offered me his bleeding wrist. I offered him my wrist in return—it was covered with other people’s blood, which he licked off grimly befor
e we each settled to our task.
It would be comforting to say it was as clean as one of those movies where computer files and images whisked and whooshed their way in front of my eyes and then were picked or discarded by Rafael’s sense of who his people were, but it was more complicated than that. It was taking over two hundred blood trails and following them all simultaneously, abandoning the ones that came to dead ends. When we were done, we were left with a scant handful of young vampires—young when they were made, and not long since the making—who had been beguiled into helping a monster hide his face from a world of monsters.
With a careful flexing of my erratic, hopped-up will, I pulled at the marks of the four people who had been most complicit. I could tell by their gasps and whimpers that, as careful as I was being, the cutting of the marks through their flesh was still painful.
“Front and center,” I barked, suppressing another shiver. Goddess, I felt like I had when Arturo first touched me—like my flesh was clawing and crawling to escape my skin. I managed to bottle it, though, to shove it into a shivering, roiling, screaming boil in my chest, and I looked out at the frightened vampire young—the true innocents—who were looking at me with helpless eyes.
Oh, Goddess. I knew one of them.
“Hey, Walter,” I said a little sadly.
The small vampire gave me a tired smile. “Bet you want that rum now, huh, Lady Cory.”
I swallowed hard and graced him with a laugh. “Maybe later. You wouldn’t believe what’s thumping through my veins right now.” I sighed and realized that Rafael was looking at me without expression. Oh Goddess, he expected me to kill them. I looked at them again, and then at Walter.
“Why?” I asked simply. Walter looked away and shrugged.
“I… I thought they were like me,” he whispered. “I got hit in a hunting accident. My dad knew about Rafael, and he brought me here. Dwight, he just said that they were young. I….” He looked at the two young men and the young woman standing up with him in front of us. Young—they’d been in their teens when they’d been brought over—and I guessed Walter was the oldest of them in vampire years. “We… we thought they were accidents. We didn’t—I don’t understand what happened to them. We gave them blood, we treated them decent, but they just… just….”
I had seen them in the pit of Rafael’s mind, locked in iron cages somewhere in the bottom of the cave network that housed Rafe’s Place.
“Disintegrated,” I said softly, picturing Gretchen prowling in her shredded pink room like a rabid bobcat.
“Yeah,” Walter said softly. “Until you came asking for Dwight, I didn’t know… and then all the others got mad….”
He looked me in the eyes then, his solid brown gaze as clear and open as Sam’s had been, expecting me to condemn him for being human.
Even the son of chaos, even vampires, were still human.
“What happened to them?” he asked quietly. I looked at him and the others, figuring that no matter how this came about, they had the right to know.
“You guys remember when you were turned?” They nodded. “You remember what you wanted?”
If it had been possible, they would have blushed. “Sex and blood,” Walter said directly, and I nodded.
“Sex and blood—except their bodies aren’t wired for sex yet, so all they want… all they crave….”
Walter closed his eyes. “Is blood.”
“Yeah.” I shivered—hard, and harder—and then Bracken came near enough to put his hand on my shoulder, and I managed to get my treacherous body under control.
“They’re all hunger,” I said at last through chattering teeth. “No love, no comfort. Their hunger just eats the person they didn’t even have a chance to become.”
Walter’s jaw clenched, and he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lady.” He turned. “Rafael, I—” He looked over at his accomplices. “We didn’t know.”
I closed my eyes, anchoring my shaking with Bracken’s warm hand, pressing angry comfort through my skin. “Lord Vampire,” I said formally, “these are your people. I think you would know best how to deal with their crimes.”
Rafael’s eyes flashed with something like hope. “I think,” he said slowly, watching my eyes and keeping our link active so we could behave in accord, “that they will suffer when the children they’ve blooded with die.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. “They will,” I said neutrally. Goddess, this had to be his decision or I would never get out of this fucking town.
“And I also think,” Rafael continued, “that I have felt enough of my people die tonight.”
Oh, thank you, sweet Goddess, thank you, thank you, thank you. “I would imagine you’re right,” I told him softly, and another tremor hit me hard enough to knock me into Bracken. His hand moved from my shoulder to around my waist.
“Lambent?” The fire elf was right there, looking at me and shaking his head.
“You need food and water,” he diagnosed softly, “to replace the blood you lost, so you can start burning Bracken’s.”
Oh. Good. Necessary to know that my body wasn’t being taken over by supernatural glow-in-the-dark mutant nuclear-magic cockroaches, which is pretty much what it felt like. But if I knew it would end, I had hope.
“If I eat right now, I’ll puke on your shoes,” I told him truthfully, “and there’s a job to do first. Walter, could you lead the way?”
Rafael nodded, and our sober eyes met. He looked out at the assembly and at the remainder of my people, who were standing at the doorway like blood-dripping, ass-kicking angels of death. “I think we should show our guests and rescuers some hospitality, people, you think?”
“How ’bout a garden hose!” Max asked loudly, picking at a crust of blood on his face with his fingernails, and there was an uneasy ripple of laughter.
“I think we can get you some showers in the employee locker room,” Rafael replied, grateful, I think, for something to do.
I turned to Nicky, and he nodded. “I’ll get us all some spare clothes,” he told me, moving toward the door to get our shit from the car. I didn’t even have to call Kyle to walk him out—we weren’t that relaxed. Then Bracken, Lambent, and I caught up with young Walter.
The hallway behind the room wound steeply down as soon as it cleared the building part of the club. It was close and claustrophobic, and as my body kept up an almost rhythmic shuddering, I couldn’t help wishing it was large enough for Bracken to do his he-man thing and just take me in his arms. Weakness, I thought on a tremor. I needed to pull up my big-girl panties and get this done.
My vision had started to go dark before we got to the bottom, dimly lit with electric caged lights and tucked behind what looked to be a wine cellar. Rafael shook his head and laughed bitterly.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “We send our youngest workers down here—it’s the shit job, the cutting-your-teeth task. Who else would come down here to help him but his easiest targets?”
“Now you tell me.” Walter laughed bitterly, and I managed to spare him a sympathetic look before I had to wrap my hands around my arms and shake hard in my own embrace.
Bracken swore and went to lift me up, but I held out my hand. I used it to grab hold of his arm and stand swaying on my feet, but I needed to be standing for this.
We rounded a corner, and there they were.
There were four of them. They’d been children once, and human.
Now they were crouched in their own filth, snarling at us through lank, snarled hair. I couldn’t tell their genders, and their ages could have been anywhere from six to twelve. Their ribs were their most pronounced features, their eyes were red permanently, and their bodies appeared to be set on perpetual “feed.” Two of them were trying to chew through the bars of their iron cages with broken teeth, and the other two were shredding the flesh on their wrists with their teeth, gnashing and rending it and screaming in pain even as it healed again. There was a healthy scattering of bones and animal corpses on the f
loor, but they obviously hadn’t been enough.
“Sweet Goddess….”
I wasn’t sure which one of us said it, but I looked at Walter, and his eyes were closed in pain. “I think Dwight had the only control on them—they must have felt him die.”
I started to call for Lambent, but I heard a suspicious noise and saw bloody tears dripping from Walter’s eyes.
“I used to come down and play with them,” he told me. “They had names.” He swallowed, one of those supremely human gestures that made me think of Adrian. Then he crouched down and looked into the cages, but not close enough for the creatures inside to get him. He wasn’t foolish, only brokenhearted.
“Hey, Steven,” he said. “Hey, Trisha. Austen. Cathy.” He turned to each child, knowing them. The whispered sound of his voice calmed them down.
“These nice people are here to make it better, okay?” There was some grunting, and I bit back an unqueenly moan. Ouch. Just fucking ouch.
Walter looked up at us, pretending he wasn’t weeping blood. “It’s not going to hurt, right?”
Bracken’s arm clamped me to his side, and I clung to him like the child I wasn’t. “That’s why Lambent’s here,” I told Walter honestly and then looked at the fire elf with considerable pleading in my eyes.
Lambent nodded his head gravely, and I reached out to touch his hand.
“I’m not… stable,” I told him, although any idiot could figure that out. “It needs to be fast and clean, Master Elf. I’m trusting you with everything.”
Lambent nodded again and then bowed. “I’m honored, my lady,” he said with complete sincerity. And then he nodded us all out of the room.
I watched as long as I could from far up in the confines of that awful hallway, while Walter and Rafael blurred away at hyperspeed at my urging. Lambent stood in the middle of the room and mustered his will. Then he began to glow, so white-blue hot that we had to cover our eyes. The poor creatures that had once been human children shrieked in fear, but only once—and in less than a heartbeat, the room was a nova sun.