At Grave s End

by Jeaniene Frost

  He went on, and every new name slammed into me. Some of them I knew, some of them I didn’t. Still, they were each an irreplaceable loss. By the time Dave was finished, more than eighteen vampires and ghouls had been listed, a staggering loss. Four more humans had also been killed, in addition to Randy. Bones must be devastated.

  “Where’s Bones?” I asked, swinging my legs out of bed.

  “Downstairs. But first, you might want to put on a pair of pants.”

  I looked down, seeing what I hadn’t noticed while under the covers. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t realize…”

  He smiled faintly. “You’re like my sister, don’t worry about it. And because I’m your friend, I don’t mind telling you…brush your teeth. Your breath is scary.”

  Taking Dave’s advice, I’d brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on more clothes. My feet were bare, since I didn’t bother looking for shoes. Dave escorted me to the closed doors of the drawing room and then left.

  Bones came to me and I held him for a long time. Saying “I’m sorry” was so useless a comfort that I didn’t even bother.

  Ian was there, too. He hadn’t showered or changed clothes since the battle, and he was shirtless with dirt and other things smeared over him.

  “Would have been good of you to figure out the puzzle earlier, Reaper,” he bitterly stated. “Not much help getting a bright idea after half our numbers are cut down.”

  I blinked, unprepared for his hostility. Bones didn’t have any hesitation, and he had Ian by the throat before I could even formulate a response.

  “Don’t you say another accusing word to her or I’ll lose the very thin hold I have on my temper,” he growled. “If not for her, we’d all be dead right now, or did you forget that?”

  Ian’s turquoise gaze was blazing emerald.

  “What I haven’t forgotten is why we were all dragged into this war in the first place. It was all because of her! Her injury was repairable, Crispin, but you can’t do anything about our friends lying in the other room, can you? How many more lives will be needed to avenge one woman’s injured pride—”

  “Bones, no!”

  Mencheres appeared out of nowhere, and not a moment too soon. There was a wrenching sound, a blur, and then Bones was thrown backward missing an arm. The scream I made drowned out Spade’s shout as he arrived just in time to witness it.

  Ian stared with stupefied amazement at the hand still clutched to his throat, the limb beginning to wither. I went to Bones, but he sidestepped me and strode right to Mencheres.

  “Did you have a reason for preventing me from silencing that insult, Grandsire?”

  Now my whole body tensed. If Bones and Mencheres went at it, all hell would break loose.

  “You were going to tear Ian’s head off,” Mencheres answered. “You would have regretted it afterward, for many reasons, and I think we have already given Patra enough cause to celebrate without further reducing our numbers.”

  Ian appeared mildly dazed by recent events. He shook his head as if to clear it, then stared at me and Bones with a look of vague disbelief.

  “By Christ, Crispin, I don’t know what got into me,” he breathed. “I had no cause to rail at you like that. Forgive me, both of you.”

  Bones started to run a hand through his hair, stopped when he saw his limb was only half grown back, and snorted incredulously.

  “Two hundred and forty-seven years I’ve had that arm. Didn’t think to lose it while trying to rip your head off. Bugger, I have to pull myself together.”

  “Now more than ever we all have to pull ourselves together,” Mencheres agreed.

  “Yes,” Bones said, eyeing him in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Especially you, Grandsire, because this must end.”

  Vlad entered the room. He looked around, saw the staring contest between Bones and Mencheres, and took a seat.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Mencheres said with bleakness. “And I tell you, I cannot do it.”

  Bones was next to him in a flash. “The reality is that either you or she will be dead very soon. Whatever Patra meant to you, whatever secret dreams you’ve harbored of fate intervening at the last moment to make things right—you of all people know better. You told me never to doubt your visions, yet here you’ve lingered with the hope that you could be wrong. But you’re not, so you must end this, because that is the responsibility you have to the people under your line and now also under mine.”

  I was confused. Mencheres didn’t have Patra stuffed in a back room, to my knowledge, so how could he have the power to end this, as Bones was implying? Vlad leaned forward, picking up on my thought. “Don’t you see, Cat? When Patra had you trapped in a lethal nightmare, who knew how to break it? Last night when the zombies attacked, who knew the only way to destroy them was to destroy their homing beacon? Mencheres. So if he knows these spells well enough to know what counters them…then he also has the knowledge to cast one himself.”

  One look at Mencheres’s ashen face confirmed it, and then I was right in front of him as well.

  “You have to. She’s not going to stop! Do you want to see everyone around you dead? Because that’s what will happen if you don’t do something.”

  “And could you?” Mencheres flung at me. “If this were Bones we were talking about, could you mete out death to him? Could you sentence him so easily to the grave?”

  He stopped, showing more naked feeling than I’d ever seen from him, and it hit me. He’s still in love with her, even after everything she’s done. Poor bastard.

  I chose my words with care. “I don’t pretend to know how hard this is on you, Mencheres, and if this were Bones, it would rip me apart inside, too. But”—I paused to look straight at the man I loved—“if you ever went so far off the deep end that you’d try—and succeed—in killing those I loved, and you made it very clear through countless examples that you wouldn’t stop until I and everyone I cared about were dead, then yes. I’d kill you.”

  Bones stared back at me and a small smile touched his mouth. “That’s my girl.”

  Then he fixed his gaze back on Mencheres. “I can’t offer you any comfort in this but one, single thing: a quick death for Patra. She doesn’t deserve it, and I’d promised to treat whoever plotted against my wife to a much more prolonged, gruesome experience, but for your sake I’ll amend that. If you do what you must now.”

  Green blazed from Mencheres’s eyes, and so much power crackled off him that I flinched. “Are you threatening me?”

  Bones didn’t even twitch. “I’m the co-ruler of your line and I’m stating my intentions toward an enemy who has butchered our people. You need to remember whose side you’re on. Can’t you see Patra has been betting her life on the notion that you’re incapable of that?”

  Mencheres didn’t say anything. Every set of eyes in the room were trained on him. Then at last he stood, reining in that angry flash of power like a bird folding up its wings.

  “So be it. Last night Patra unleashed the contents of the grave on us. Tonight, we will give her back its vengeance.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  T HE STARS WERE WINKING FROM THEIR NEW backdrop of ever-deepening navy. Mencheres was in the center of the lawn. We’d cleared the snow off the ground so the large tablecloth placed on it didn’t get wet. Mencheres sat cross-legged in front of it, and I couldn’t help but think that with his center positioning, the dozen or so vampires in the background behind him…and the bones lined up on the white linen, this looked like hell’s version of the Last Supper.

  None of us knew what was about to happen. After making that cryptic statement, Mencheres had simply said to be dressed for battle at sunset and then he went up to his room. I half wondered if he’d make a break for it via an upstairs window, but Bones seemed satisfied that Mencheres would keep to his promise, and here he was.

  Earlier I made a call to Don to tell him something was going down tonight. Maybe with a heads-up, he’d be able to come up with a
better cover story than avalanches and mini-earthquakes. Problem was, I couldn’t tell him where this event would take place. Or what time. Or what it would consist of. Or any other helpful details that would allow him to minimize human interaction and prevent a full-scale media fallout, he scathingly told me.

  Well, I didn’t have those details, so I could only relay what I knew. Don’s frustration was understandable. Here I’d warned him that for the second night in a row, the undead were going all-out with a black magic attack, but I didn’t know if bodies would be crawling from their graves—or raining from the sky. Don had cause to freak, sure. Me, I had other concerns aside from keeping the existence of vampires a secret. I had to stay alive. So I was dressed for battle, wearing over my traditional black spandex various knives, a sword, several silver bullet–filled guns, and even some grenades.

  “I don’t want any of you to speak,” Mencheres said in the first words he spoke himself since sitting down in front of the bones. “Not until I am finished.”

  And how are we supposed to know that? I thought. When you take a bow? When the ground opens up and things crawl out from it? A memory of those horrible rotting creatures flashed in my mind and I shuddered. Ugh, if I never saw one of them again, it would be too soon.

  Something prickled in the air, centering my attention back on the Egyptian vampire. His head was bent, long hair hiding his expression, but through gaps in the black strands I saw his eyes were glowing green. Next to me, Bones shivered, and I darted a glance at him. He seemed fixated by Mencheres. I took his hand—and almost dropped it from the electric sizzle that met my flesh. Whatever Mencheres was doing, it was also affecting Bones. Apparently that exchange of power between the two of them still had a thread of connection left. That disturbed me, though I couldn’t say why.

  All at once, the bones of the people who’d been killed last night rose from the tablecloth. They hovered in the air, forming a circle around Mencheres, and the bones began swirling around him.

  At first they rotated slowly, hanging as if by invisible strings, but then their speed began to pick up. They circled Mencheres, moving faster and faster, until soon it was hard to distinguish any of their pieces except the skulls, grinning morbidly with their jaws swinging in the tornadolike wind. Mencheres’s hair blew all around him, and my flesh crawled with a sensation of a million invisible ants. The power pouring off him intensified to incredible degrees, until I wouldn’t have been surprised to see lightning strike where he sat.

  With a crack, the whirling bones imploded around him, showering Mencheres in a fine cloud of white. I gripped Bones’s hand, not caring about the sear of voltage that seemed to shoot up my arm, and stared in disbelief at the powdery remains of his friends. Dust to dust, I thought numbly. Mencheres just blasted away all that was left of those brave men. Why? Why would he do that?

  Without raising his head, Mencheres pulled a knife from his lap. Then he stabbed it straight into his heart.

  I did gasp then, in openmouthed incredulity as he twisted the blade. Must be steel, not silver, I found myself thinking. Or he’d be as dead as the grainy remains of those men spackling him like grayish snow.

  Dark blood poured from the wound, flowing as steadily as if his heart still beat. It covered the knife, his hands, and his clothes with a murky crimson liquid. Soon I wasn’t even staring at that, however. I was staring with growing incomprehension as the red-smeared powdery substance that was the bones of the men who’d died began to separate, expand…and then form into figures.

  “Madre de Dios,” I heard Juan mutter, breaking Mencheres’s edict of silence.

  My own thought was less religiously charitable: What the hell is going on?

  Before my gaze, it looked like ghosts formed, shrouding Mencheres. He was muttering something in a language I couldn’t even begin to recognize, and those hazy forms kept increasing. They grew until they looked like shadows come to life, because I could still see through them, but they were three-dimensional, all right. Three-dimensional figures of opaque, naked men. One of them turned, and Bones let out a soft groan. Randy, I thought in shock. That’s Randy!

  More of them formed from the bone dust that coated Mencheres. He kept the knife in his chest, the wound continuing to bleed, until I wondered how he still had any juice left in him. But the more he bled, the less hazy the figures looked, until I could pick out every wraithlike person. There was Tick Tock, just a little to the side of Zero, oh God, Randy…

  Only when all twenty-three people who’d been killed the night before stood around him did Mencheres pull the knife out and speak.

  “These are not our friends. They don’t recognize any of you, and they have no memory of their former lives. They are the mindless rage that lingers in the remains of all murdered people, and I have yanked that rage from their bones and given it form. They will be drawn to their murderer with the single-minded purpose of revenge. All we have to do once I release them…is follow them. They will lead us right to Patra no matter where she hides.”

  I’d barely wrapped my mind around that before Mencheres said an unknown word and the wraiths shot up into the night like they’d been fired from ghostly cannons. Wow, were they fast. How were we supposed to follow them?

  Mencheres stood, raising his arms—and I screamed. The ground was twenty feet away…thirty…fifty…more…

  “We need to hurry,” I heard him say amid my whipping my head around to see that every person who’d been standing on the lawn was now airborne and being hurtled through the night as if by invisible jet streams. “They will find her soon.”

  Patra was holed up in an abandoned hotel about eighty miles away as the crow flies. Or in this case, the undead. Bones had me grasped to him, but it wasn’t out of need, since Mencheres was still pushing all of us along with an amount of power that was truly mind-boggling. In my wildest imaginings, I hadn’t known it was possible for a vampire to do these things, but here we were, following on the magic carpet of Mencheres’s power behind the vengeance-filled wraiths he’d raised. Later I’d ponder the significance of that. Like when I wrote my report to Don and watched him faint while reading it.

  The hotel was in the middle of a city slum. From the sounds, not many people lived here. In fact, this area was probably going to be razed for new construction soon, because I caught glimpses of bulldozers and other such equipment scattered around. Mencheres brought us down about a hundred yards from the hotel. How did he know it was where Patra was? Because the wraiths flew right into it, moving through the walls like they weren’t even there. Neat trick. Sure beat taking the stairs.

  “You must cut through her people,” he rasped to Bones, gesturing to the building. “I can’t go with you. If I am killed, the wraiths will fade, and they are the only things stopping Patra from fighting against you.”

  They were sure doing something, I knew that. Moments after they’d disappeared into the hotel, there were the most horrible ear-splitting screams.

  “Why don’t you just kill her yourself?” I blurted. “If you can raise vengeful spirits and levitate two dozen people almost eighty miles, she should be a piece of cake.”

  Mencheres seemed to fall onto the sidewalk. “I can’t,” he whispered. “Even now, I can’t.”

  A brief surge of pity filled me before I squelched it. He might still love Patra, but she didn’t return the sentiment, and we’d all be dead unless that woman was in the ground.

  Bones gave him a cold, quick glance. “I’ll keep my promise. We’ll get you when it’s over. Juan, Dave, you stay with him. Make sure no one comes near.”

  Juan started to protest being left behind, but a warning glare cut him off. Then Bones cracked his knuckles and faced the hotel.

  “All right, mates. Let’s end this.”

  Patra might have had several guards around the perimeter of the hotel. She might have had some in windows, on the roof, in the basement, and manning the entrance. But if nothing else, having twenty-three pissed-off wraiths suddenly swarm the
hotel made for a hell of a distraction. In addition to Patra’s ceaseless screaming—what were they doing to her?—there were the scrambling sounds of multiple people running up the stairs, new shouts, an eruption of gunfire, and several odd popping noises. I cast a look at Bones and thought, Huh? The rage-wrought specters weren’t even solid, what could they be doing that would make it sound like World War Three in there?

  Bones shrugged. “One way to find out.”

  Once we reached the building’s entrance, whatever guards had been stationed there were gone. Spade frowned, shaking his head. Trap, he was saying. I took four grenades from my belt, pulled the pins, and then chucked them inside. Second later, glass shattered and the building shook as they detonated. Whoever might have been waiting for us wasn’t there now.

  We rushed in, the vampires fanning out to the sides. Bones and I kept low but raced forward. Those screams and awful noises from several floors up got louder. Finally we saw about a dozen vampires burst through an entryway under what I supposed was the grand staircase. They went down in a hail of silver before they even had a chance to back up.

  “Where is everyone?” I said low to Bones. Aside from that paltry dozen, the downstairs seemed shockingly vacant.

  Bones cocked his head. “There are more upstairs that I can hear. Something’s got them in shambles. It must be the wraiths, but I can’t imagine how.”

  I agreed it sounded like a Chinese fire drill upstairs. People were screaming, footsteps were thundering up and back, and there were more of those popping noises that were like nothing I’d heard before them. Whatever was going on, Patra was still alive. She was the one screaming the loudest.

  Bones held out three fingers, indicating the group was to split up. Eight of us would take the stairs, another eight would climb the exterior of the building, and the remaining eight would go up the elevator shafts. It sounded like the most activity was about nine floors up, near the top of the building, so that’s where we were headed.