Chaplin!” Mariah started over to where sand still dribbled, landing on Gabriel’s blankets.
He darted over to grab her arm and stop her from doing something impulsive.
But, curse it all, he’d moved too vampire-fast out of concern, and she jerked back from him, her eyes widened.
Oddly, he didn’t so much care what she thought about him right now.
“Stamp’s coming,” he repeated, as if she hadn’t heard the first time. “You want to be out there, too?”
Something flickered in her gaze, and her voice turned cold, even rougher than it’d been before. “No one should be out there.”
“Then cut it out, Mariah. Chaplin’s gonna be back soon. He’ll be okay.”
She took in a long, tremulous breath, her gaze changing once again, allowing him to see for the first time the complete terror in her green eyes. It’d taken over any bluster or bravado, and she seemed just as bare as she’d been last night, when her skin had called to him.
Her vulnerability struck Gabriel so hard that his instincts got the best of him. Fear. Invigorating, inviting fear. His fangs nudged, his gaze heated, his voice twisted as he spoke.
“D alt be afraid.” He realized too late that his words were coated in hypnotic sway. It’d just . . . happened, and he couldn’t take it back.
In spite of all the fight she’d put up before, she was in a perfect state of openness now, with her best friend outside and in possible danger. Her defenses were already so wilted that her gaze went soft at the sound of his words, her head tilting back slightly while she got tangled in them.
Falling, he thought. He’d been successful enough to finally make her fall under his power, and he was here to catch her. He liked being the one to do it.
But though she’d lowered her guard, there was still an inner wall holding her up, one last mental barrier, and it blocked him from reading her beyond the surface.
“Mariah,” he said again, and that wall wavered, as if it might not actually exist.
Her heartbeat resembled low, raging chords, strings taut and played by his voice until something dark and rough-edged ran through him, too. The blend of her vital signs drew him even closer, and aside from Mariah’s angrier disposition, the sounds reminded him of the night he’d gone to Abby when she’d been lying on her bed, so near to giving up on everything.
He pulled Mariah closer to him. “Just trust me. . . .”
Need kicked at him, and he imagined piercing her, brutally sucking and taking.
Mariah’s eyes drifted closed, but remained halfway open, her mouth parting on a mellowed exhalation.
And with that breath, he could feel her letting go of the hurt, but not anything else. Not her guard.
Even so, her pulse became his—strong, livid—and he leaned toward her, attracted to the rage, pressing his face to her neck, his lips on her jugular. Each beat rammed into him, and he tasted her skin: salty, sweet, hot. Saliva pooled in his mouth, stinging his jaws, making the emergence of his fangs smooth.
His vision pounded hot, keeping time with her, with them. He wanted to bite but was somehow able to hold back, reveling in how this particular hunt had differed from the ones he practiced so often. It had more clarity. It existed on a different tier of violence, more personal, that made him want to rip into her before the inevitable blackout came on him. It conjured a shaking urge that made him want to feel every moment of blood washing through him until he came out feeling as he had whenever he’d been around Abby.
But Mariah wasn’t the same as Abby. Would never be. Abby had never made him this ready to brutalize.
Resting one hand at the back of Mariah’s head, Gabriel grabbed her hair, easing her back so that her neck arched. He wanted more of her. More of an expanse of flesh, more area for him to explore and sniff and agonize over before he drove into her.
Beneath his lips, he could feel the vibration of a groan in her throat, and her last sign of resistance traveled in him, too. Her sounds, his sounds. Her blood, his, just as Abby’s blood should’ve been his . . .
When Mariah groaned again, louder, he heard her body rhythms change—from slow to fast, from smooth to restless. All her chords sawed through him.
He lifted his head, separating himself from the fantasy he’d fallen into. He looked at her face through his warped sight. Really looked.
Mariah’s face.
Ten the lust kicked back in. Not just any lust. Bloodlust—hot, pulsing, needful. The type of crazy he’d been able to endure up until now because of the promise of someday finding redemption with a woman who made it seem so possible.
But he knew that this wasn’t the way he’d get redemption—the validation that he could exist outside a hideout, among others, passing for anything but a bad guy.
He covered Mariah’s neck with his free hand, as if to block it off from his senses, and then he let go of her hair.
“Don’t remember,” he whispered, swaying her with as much power as he could, hoping it’d work a second time and she’d come out of this with a blank slate.
Then he lowered her to the floor and began to count down. The closer he got to zero, the readier he got to defend himself from any explosive waking reaction.
“Three,” he said, backing off and holding up his hands to show his innocuous intentions, though appetite kept snapping at him.
But he continued the countdown, knowing it wasn’t just about allowing her to gain consciousness again. He was doing it so he would come back to himself, too, and with every passing moment, his body cooled.
“Two.” He was five steps away from her now, and he needed all the distance he could get.
When he arrived near the common-area visz, where Zel and two other people Gabriel had never seen had joined the oldster and Sammy, he ended the countdown.
But instead of saying, “One,” he said, “Stamp.” He was banking on the hope that the enemy’s name would divert Mariah’s attention when she regained consciousness.
Gabriel still had his hands up when Mariah blinked, frowned, then straightened up from where she was lying on the floor. She glanced around her, discombobulated.
Unmoving, he waited to see if she would recall anything.
Waited.
And waited.
He let his hands fall back to his sides, and Mariah stood, as if she were taking right up where they’d left off, with Chaplin jumping out the trapdoor.
She glanced at the visz and, for a second, it seemed that she was wondering what she’d been doing sitting on the ground. Then, just as quickly, she hurried back to her weapons wall, where she took down an old-fashioned double-barreled shotgun with night-vision modifications.
Gabriel’s strategy of putting Stamp uppermost in her mind seemed to have worked. He’d gotten away with losing control because of pure, dumb luck, hadn’t he?
Mariah loaded the shotgun with ammunition from a sack hooked to the wall.
“What’re you doing?” he asked evenly.
“Getting ready for Stamp. Chaplin should be back soon with a report.”
She didn’t say anything about going outside. Would she end up gathering her courage to face Stamp out there? And how far from her home would she go to defend it?
She went to stand below the trapdoor. There, she could still watch the viszes, one of which even now showed the neighbors having words with each other in the common area.
And while she watched, she absently laid her fingers against her neck, like she was feeling a latent tingle.
Shit, Gabriel thought. Shit. Shit.
Maybe he wasn’t so great at swaying, after all.
But when she took her fingers away and adjusted the shotgun in her grip, Gabriel realized she probably hadn’t recalled anything. That as far as she knew, there was only a tickle on her skin.
The close call chipped away at him. He’d vowed to protect her and Chaplin from Stamp, but funnily enough, Gabriel himself seemed to be the one she needed protecting from more than anything.
They waited for Chaplin for what seemed like hours, though Gabriel knew mere seconds had ticked by. Proof of that was in the way the Badlanders in the common area hadn’t moved around much, their visz monitor still silent because Mariah had turned up the outside viewer instead.
Were the neighbors monitoring what was happening outside from a viewer in the common room? Gabriel didn’t recall seeing any screens down there, so they couldn’t be watching, though he did notice that Sammy Ramos was staring at something in his hand.
A portable visz?
It would make sense that he’d possess such a device out of everyone—though the New Badlanders had mostly rejected the more intrusive technology, Sammy had a background in it. He’d probably welcome simpler devices.
Gabriel turned back to the monitor that showed the outside, where there was nothing but near silence, too. Sounds of the wind raking the dirt. The hum of nothing . . .
. . . until a dog barked in the near distance.
Mariah stared harder at the visz. “Chaplin,” she said. “He found something.”
But when they didn’t hear more, he saw her knuckles whiten as she throttled her shotgun.
The desire to go outside pulled at him, but he wasn’t about to leave Mariah alone, whether he’d seen her take care of herself in the past or not.
When she fixed her tortured gaze on the ladder, as if getting ready to head toward it, he saved her by saying, “Just wait a little longer—”
That was when they heard it on the outside visz. A whimper.
Then they saw it.
Chaplin’s face, shoved front and full on the screen, blocking almost everything except for the night-vision glare of metal cords that bound his muzzle. The dog’s glowing eyes were at half-mast, and he was weaving back and forth on his feet, unbalanced.
Something like anger whipped through Gabriel, but he recovered to read the dog easily enough.
Stay inside. The canine’s thoughts were slurred, as if he’d been shot up with a drug.
“Chaplin,” Mariah whispered, dropping to her knees, one hand wrapped over her midsection as she lowered her head. Her next words were a sobbed plea. “Please, no.”
On the visz, Chaplin was trying to talk through his muzzle bonds, but, simultaneously, he sent more thoughts to Gabriel.
Six, he relayed. Chompers, plus five. They got me instead of one of you. . . .
So this was Stamp’s revenge.
Gabriel’s blood popped inside him. He was tired of lying down. Tired of the good always suffering.
How long could beings like him and the people in this community take it? When should they stand up and make it stop?
Though Chaplin had warned Gabriel to stay inside, he went toward the ladder, anyway. He even grabbed a weapon from the wall—a revolver. It’d take away the need for fangs. The last thing he wanted to do was expose his vampire and get himself and the community in bigger trouble.
“Gabriel!”
At the almost unrecognizable, torn fervor of her voice, Gabriel trained his gaze on Mariah. Her fingers clutched his bed blankets, her chopped hair covering most of her face and making her look wrathful enough to take on Stamp’s whole crew herself.
Their body rhythms beat in time to each other’s, her anger his anger. It was even as if they were one of a kind.
“I know this is a trap,” Gabriel said, “but Stamp’s gone too far.”
He glanced at the common-area visz to see if the others were there, and they were, still talking, still huddling together.
Maybe Sammy didn’t have a portable visz with him. Maybe they didn’t know what was happening outside. Shit, Gabriel wished he and Mariah had been audibly tuned in to the common area to know for sure what their neighbors were planning . . . if anything.
On the outside visz, someone pulled Chaplin away from the lens, leaving the screen empty again, except for a voice.
“We b at Stamp’s!”
No more time to waste.
“You coming?” he asked Mariah.
He thought he saw her mouth curl downward in a grimace, but she lowered her head, pulling at the blankets harder.
“Chaplin’s your best friend,” he said, disbelief coloring his question. Didn’t saving Chaplin trump her fear of straying too far? Wouldn’t this be worth going all the way to Stamp’s place?
Slowly, she raised her head, her eyes still covered by hair. But he saw something in the silent cry of her mouth.
A reckoning. Her own desire for revenge, and it was making her limbs quake as they struggled to hold her up.
His own body responded, leading him to his inner vampire again. But he wasn’t going to fight that way. Wasn’t going to give in to it . . . or them. He was going to do this on his own terms, as Abby had made him want to do.
Mariah only pointed to the workroom door, and he caught her meaning. When he’d farmed water down there, he’d seen a trapdoor in the big cavern, and using it might offer an element of surprise if Stamp’s men were nearby expecting an exit out of Mariah’s primary doors.
“So you’re not coming,” he said.
A second passed, and he thought she just might pull through. But then she shook her head: harder, then faster, as if trying to jar something awful out of her.
Then, with a dry sob, she started to move toward the common-area tunnel. Was she going there for safety, to be with the others in case the voice on the visz had been lying about taking Chaplin to Stamp’s and the thugs were actually going to infiltrate the homes below instead?
Now he understood why she might stay, though if it’d been him, he’d have gone after Chaplin for miles and miles.
But that was why she had Gabriel her/font>
“Gabriel,” she said, her voice low and ragged as she neared the tunnel door. “Go.”
Her eyes, which he could barely see shining through her hair with tears and grief and rage, made him realize that he’d do anything she needed him to do.
With one last look, he opened the door to the workroom, taking the stairs, blanking his mind, not dwelling on Mariah. He couldn’t. She had her wall of weapons plus the other Badlanders to back her up if she needed it. Chaplin had nothing.
After he’d made his way through the workroom, then crept out the trapdoor, which was hidden among a hill of rocks, he tracked Chaplin by scent, going farther and farther away from the sanctuary.
Tracking made for slow going, yet he did it, inch by inch, foot by foot, as fast as he could.
When he heard the gunshot from back in the direction of Mariah’s place, he was too mired in Chaplin’s trail to go back there to see who’d fired.
Or why.
13
Cedric Orville had thought that the silver-capped teeth he wore around his boots would be too loud for a cat-and-mouse exercise like tonight’s, so at dusk, he’d taken the baubles off and carefully stowed them in his pocket.
He’d gotten them from a stay in an East Coast sanctuary, sneaking around when the others had been snoozing, targeting his marks and then giving them a drop of lazy-donna, a black-market drug that would ensure unconsciousness while Cedric used his pliers to extract the teeth. Precious metals weren’t as useful as they once were—water was king—but they sounded pretty when he put them on his boots and walked.
When Johnson Stamp had discovered Cedric one morning, ditched in a gutter where some vigilante sanctifiers had thrown him after catching him red-handed during a silver extraction, the boy had found Cedric’s jewelry interesting. That had led to their conversing about how Cedric had been tossed out and left for garbage, and how no one in society should suffer that.
Stamp had offered him a second chance. Said that everyone deserved one, although if the recipient spit it right back at you, the slight should be accounted for. Cedric had agreed, knowing he wouldn’t be doing any spitting. The boy was big on giving people new opportunities, and Cedric had heard once that it was because Stamp was looking for some himself, so he could distance himself from the things he’d done that no one
dared talk about now. Stamp seemed to have some sort of moral code that Cedric found quaint—it’d kept the kid from outright killing the Badlanders until there was good proof of guilt.
As Cedric saw it, Stamp’s whole second-chance attitude was probably the reason he’d been so downright disappointed when the scrubs over at the nearby community had seen fit to throw Stamp’s graciousness right back in his face; who was to say that they weren’t guilty of killing another one of the crew? Cedric was all for hanging them high and getting done with it.
Thinking about Teddy and his half-buried remains was all the reason Cedric needed for action. They’d found him under the beaks of those shades—the black-winged crow ancestors who’d grown in size and appetite since Before, just as things like scorpions and lizards and all manner of mutants had so rapidly done out here.
Thinking of Teddy made Cedric mad.
As a gunshot rang out from the west, back at the scrub compound, he stood up from the ground where he’d been resting, ready for any come-what-may.
He’d been tasked with transporting the dog to Stamp’s place, but shooting the critter with the drug gun and capturing it had been the simple part. It sounded like Cedric’s comrades were currently experiencing worse times back with the rest of the scrubs at the community.
Damn, he hoped his partners had gotten one of those Homo sapiens and not another dog to drag back as a captive. The crew hadn’t gone over there tonight to wrangle dogs.
In a bid to see if his buddies were okay, Cedric quickly shoved up his shirtsleeve, then tugged down the long, protective glove over his left arm so he could access the small personal computer embedded in his inner forearm. It was wired to the chip in him, but then he remembered that they were too far from even the nearest server, and reception out here stunk. Communication wasn’t an option. He yanked the glove back up and the shirtsleeve back down, shifting from foot to foot.
Bloodlands Page 13