by Nancy Holder
He must not know about the virus, Holgar thought. Or maybe he’s stalling us while he sends his guys into Dr. Sherman’s lab.
“And if I say that I don’t believe you?” Jenn asked.
Good, Jenn, Holgar thought.
“I’d say that I don’t blame you after everything you’ve been through,” Solomon said, daring to sound sympathetic. “But I have a gift for you, a gesture of my good faith.”
He raised his hand, and the side door of the helicopter opened. A lone figure stepped out on shaky legs. Holgar blinked in shock as he recognized Jenn’s father from TV, sitting beside Solomon, imploring Jenn to come to him. The bastard who had betrayed her to Aurora and gotten Heather converted.
Jenn sucked in her breath. Holgar heard her nearly soundless hiss of anger and hatred—almost vampirelike. Fury rolled off her.
“He’s been through a lot,” Solomon observed, as Paul Leitner staggered toward them. “But I saved him from Aurora. Don’t be too hard on him. After all, in the end all we have is family,” Solomon said, sounding sad and wise.
Her father lurched forward a few more steps, and Father Juan broke from his position to intercept him. Leitner was human. Holgar could smell him. But Jenn’s father was still a traitor.
Holgar clawed at the ground reflexively.
“Jenn?” Leitner said, voice quavering.
Solomon gave a short dip of his head. “Please, think over my offer. You have everything to gain.” His face darkened. “But with Lucifer still alive, you have everything to lose.” He glanced at Father Juan, then changed his line of vision to where Noah waited in the darkness.
“Okay. I’ll think about it,” Jenn said.
“Don’t think long,” Solomon said. “We’re the last, best hope for both our peoples. Your priest has my phone number,” Solomon said.
The vampire got into the helicopter, and it flew away, plunging them all back into darkness. Holgar looked down and realized with shock that the fingers he had dug into the earth were no longer human, but wolf pads and claws instead.
* * *
Jenn was reeling. There was too much to take in: Solomon’s offer, the unknown status of Project Crusade, and not least of all her father standing in front of her, tears streaming down his face. He looked old, and small, and helpless.
And she hated him.
“He’s human,” Father Juan confirmed.
“Ja,” Holgar added, his voice deeper and more gravelly than Jenn had ever heard it. She turned to glance at him and saw him straightening slowly, hands clenched at his side, and his eyes . . .
She blinked in surprise. They were glowing wolf-yellow, reflecting the light from the moon.
Noah placed a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back to the moment. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She shrugged his hand off. She needed space, needed to breathe. “Fine,” she said, more tersely than she’d meant to.
As if she were in a movie, she saw her father reaching out a hand toward her. She couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t deal with him. A week before, a day, an hour, she knew in her heart she would have killed him for what he’d done to her family, to his family.
Now everything was so complicated.
“We need to get back to home base,” she said. “Let’s move out.”
THE MONASTERY OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF ST. ANDREW
ANTONIO AND ESTHER
In the cell bristling with stakes, Antonio spent every moment hating himself. The thought that he had bitten Jenn still made him shudder, but with a terrible mixture of remorse and longing, regret and desire. He wanted more of her blood. He wanted it the way a drowning man wanted air.
The monks of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew had told him they could help. They came to pray and chant, but he felt no different. They were wrong. Just as Father Juan had been, and Jenn. They should never have trusted me. But then again, if what he had heard about the virus was true, it would all soon be over.
The tumblers of a lock clicked in the distance, and, moments later, footsteps echoed against the stone floor. One of the monks coming to check on him, no doubt. He didn’t even raise his head.
“You’re a sorry excuse for a man, vampire or not.”
He jerked his head up in surprise and saw Jenn’s grandmother, Esther, standing and staring at him, arms folded across her chest, eyes critical.
“Excuse me?” he asked, so shocked to see her there that he could barely process what she’d said.
“You heard me. Sorry excuse for a living creature.”
He felt his lips twist in a snarl. “You don’t understand.”
“Then enlighten me,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“You should back away from the bars,” he warned her. “You’re standing too close. I might . . .”
“What? Bite me? Kill me? Bore me to death with your sad tale about how you just wish you could be good?”
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, wondering, just for a moment, if the woman had lost her mind. Grief could do crazy things to people.
“That’s what I want to know about you,” she said with a snort.
He stood, slowly, and wrapped his hands around the bars of his cage. “I’m a vampire,” he said, pulling back his lips to reveal his fangs.
She shrugged. “So what?”
He felt as though she had just slapped him. He shook his head. “I don’t understand your attitude.”
“And I don’t understand yours.” She frowned at him. “You love my granddaughter, right?”
“With all my heart,” he admitted, though the words tore at him.
“Love’s stronger than hate, or fear, or anything. Except maybe faith. And from what I hear, you’ve got plenty of that.” She cocked her head. “At least, you say you do.”
“I have faith,” he insisted. “I do.”
“Prove it,” she said, not even flinching.
Without hesitating, he placed his hand against a cross tacked on the wall of his cell. After a moment he showed her the skin, unburned.
“I’m not talking about parlor tricks or magick or superstition,” she said, shaking her head at him. “I’m talking about real faith. And real love. Either you have them or you don’t.”
He stared at her. No one had challenged him like this in a very long time.
“Last time I read the Bible, it said that if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains,” she continued.
Antonio nodded. “I know the passage.”
She looked at him full on, challenging. “So if you have faith, you can overcome the evil urges in your heart.”
He lowered his head.
“And Antonio? Mustard seeds grow in the dark.”
“I want to believe that you’re right,” he whispered.
Esther exhaled, exasperated. She looked as if she wanted to strangle him.
“Then do it. Don’t want to believe—believe. Or maybe that’s your problem. You just don’t have the will.”
“I do, señora,” he insisted, but he couldn’t look at her. He wondered what she saw. A monster that had attacked her granddaughter?
A silence fell between them. He heard her sigh.
“When it all comes right down to it, what a man has is his will,” she said. “If his will is weak, so is the man. If it’s strong, the same applies.”
He thought of the scriptures—not my will, but Thy will. But that spoke of freely handing over his will to God. He had spent his lifetime trying to understand the will of God.
But there are some things about His will that I do know. He wants me to be good, and moral, and decent.
“Antonio,” Esther Leitner continued, “the history books are filled with stories of men with iron will who have done great or terrible things. Look at Churchill. Look at Hitler. Two men from your youth on opposite sides of a war. Two men with iron will. When things seemed bleakest, one of them took his own life. Hitler. In the end, his will was weaker.”
“That’s one way of looking at i
t,” he said.
“His cause was also evil. It’s harder to maintain that.”
“Why are you here?” he asked, raising his head to meet her gaze, desperately trying to make sense of everything she was saying.
She looked at him for a long minute without speaking, and he began to wonder if she was ever going to again, or if she would just stare at him as if she could read his very soul.
“I’m sure Jenn’s told you all about her grandfather and me. Well, I was never a revolutionary, not at heart.”
“But—”
She held up a hand to silence him. “What I was was a woman in love with a revolutionary. And because I loved Charles, I stood by him through thick and thin, through years of running and hiding and everything else.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. Then she smiled faintly and directed her attention back to him.
“Now, this might surprise you, but my dad didn’t exactly approve of Charles. In fact Papa disapproved with everything he had in him. Two men couldn’t have been less alike. But in the end he saw how much I loved Charles, and how Charles looked after me the best he could.”
The conversation had taken a more comfortable turn. Antonio was from a time when the approval of fathers mattered in the affairs of the heart. “Then he changed his mind?”
“We earned his approval, and kept earning it day after day.” She looked misty again, and Antonio thought of the countless widows who had attended the masses at the chapel in Madrid, when he was preparing to take his vows. The grief. The desolation. Esther Leitner’s happy memories made her burden lighter.
“I’m happy that you were able to make a life with the man you loved, but I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” he said.
“Before Jenn came here, she never had a real boyfriend, so she never knew what it was like to have her heart broken.”
He bowed his head again, shame filling him.
“Now, a grandmother doesn’t want to see some guy rip her granddaughter’s heart out of her chest and stomp it into little pieces. Problem with you is that’s a figurative danger and a literal one.”
“I know,” he whispered.
“In case you haven’t noticed, Jenn’s father isn’t exactly around to object to you. So the burden falls on me.”
“To object to me,” he said. Of course she did; she must. He objected to himself. Why, then, did it hurt?
“Yes. Deeply.”
They stared at each other for a moment. He heard the beating of her heart, sure and steady.
“But I’m going to give you a chance,” she said.
He blinked, surprise mingling with something else—elation? Fear? He wasn’t sure.
She reached out and flicked her wrist. There was the sound of metal grating on metal, and then suddenly she swung the cage door open. Reflexively, he sucked in a breath.
“Now be a man. Prove to me that you deserve her.”
Esther moved back, and Antonio took a hesitant step forward. Her words had cut him deep, stinging, burning, shaming. Could it really be as easy as she made it seem? Was it just a matter of faith and love and will? He squeezed his eyes shut and felt blood tears seeping from them. There was an ache in his heart that was lifting, twisting.
Had he imposed this prison, this hell upon himself? Upon both of them? He wanted to tell Esther that he would try to be the man she was asking him to be. But he knew that trying wasn’t enough. He couldn’t try any longer.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “I will,” he vowed.
She nodded, and then turned and walked toward the door of the cold, dark room. He hesitated for a moment.
“Are you coming, then?” she asked without looking back.
“Yes,” he said, marveling at the strength, the resolve in his own voice. God help me to be the man I need to be and not the vampire I fear that I am, he prayed.
They climbed the stairs and eventually came out into the passageway near the chapel.
Antonio heard Esther swear soft and low.
“What is it?” he asked, for her ears alone.
“Looks like I was wrong about one thing.”
Fear gripped him tight. “What?” he asked, moving to see around her.
“Jenn’s father is here.”
DOVER, ENGLAND
SKYE AND JAMIE
Running and hiding, running and hiding. It had become like a sick little game Skye and Jamie were playing. Hide-and-go-seek and Estefan was the seeker. Come out, come out, wherever you are, she could hear him in her mind, though there were times she thought she might just be imagining it.
That would be a relief, to only have imaginary voices in her head instead of real ones.
She shook her head, tired of running, tired of the games. But what else was there? She glanced uneasily at Jamie as she set up wards around the room. They were in the tiny attic of an ancient inn. It was dangerous to rest where other people were, but neither of them could spend another night half-asleep on the freezing ground.
As soon as they got upstairs, Jamie fell headlong on the bed and passed out. No one could fake those snores.
She wrinkled her nose, tempted for a moment to do a spell to mute the sound, but she surrendered the idea with a sigh. It was dangerous to cast unnecessary magick. Anytime she conjured anything other than a protective ward, she suspected it served as a beacon drawing Estefan right to her. She wasn’t sure how he was managing to see it, but then there was a lot about his magick and what he had become that she didn’t comprehend.
She shuddered at the thought of it.
How had Estefan become so evil? Or had he always been that way, and she, being so young and so love-struck, had never seen it?
She finished her wards and winced at the burning sensation in her left shoulder as she lowered her arm. During the fray in the cave, one of Estefan’s lightning bolts had singed her, and she hadn’t dared to use magick to speed the healing.
She hated Estefan for that and for so much, much more. She shoved Jamie over slightly, and he flipped onto his side but didn’t wake up. She eased herself down onto the mattress beside him, being careful of her injured shoulder. Jamie’s bag of weapons was on the other side of him. It made her nervous knowing that there was a gun within such easy reach.
Especially since it fired silver bullets.
She took a deep, steadying breath. After leaving the Circuit, they had doubled back to the cave and retrieved Jamie’s weapons. They hadn’t found the scrying stone, but regrettably, they had found the gun with the silver bullets. She had watched with intense interest, though, when Jamie had worked on the gun that would fire wooden bullets and explained how it worked.
It was almost perfected.
And she hoped and prayed that vampires couldn’t outrun bullets like they did everything else. She and Jamie needed an edge, and as much as she disliked the gun meant for werewolves, she couldn’t help but be very, very excited about this gun.
Jamie was still snoring as she struggled to clear her mind so she could go to sleep. Somewhere, out there in the night, Estefan was still coming after them. It was ironic—she was running from the guy who had spent years chasing her, with the guy whom she had spent years chasing.
And she didn’t want either of them anymore.
She wasn’t sure when or how it had happened, but her heart had set itself on Holgar. Funny Holgar, loyal Holgar, good Holgar. She’d always been drawn to the bad boys, but it was the best and noblest man she’d ever met that she had fallen truly in love with. It had happened so gradually she hadn’t even realized it—until that moment when Estefan had been torturing her and she’d been trying to take back her mind with thoughts of Holgar.
She was in love with a werewolf. If her family had still been speaking to her, she was sure they’d be shocked. There was probably something in their code that forbade such a love.
It didn’t matter. She’d turned her back on them and now on the Circuit as well. She knew she should feel guilty about it, but she just couldn’t bring he
rself to.
She squeezed her eyes shut and saw Holgar in her mind. What would he say when they saw each other again? What would she say? Would she have the courage to tell him how she felt?
She hoped so, but she worried she’d never get the chance to make that decision.
She drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Holgar, of staring into his eyes as she told him she loved him. And then the scene changed and she felt as if she were watching from afar as Holgar charged across a silvery landscape, leading a pack of werewolves. Or was he running from them?
She couldn’t tell, but in front of Holgar there was a line of monsters, hybrids like from Russia, and vampires. Oh, Goddess, there were so many!
Holgar crashed into them, bowling several over. Then Skye lost him, couldn’t see him for the thrashing bodies. And then, finally, he appeared again. But her relief turned to horror as she watched a tall vampire who seemed to blaze like the sun rip out Holgar’s throat.
“No!” she screamed, waking and sitting up. Her heart was pounding, and she felt dizzy and somewhat disembodied. Her cheeks were flushed, and she felt as if her entire body were on fire.
Cursing, Jamie leaped out of bed and landed in the middle of the floor, eyes wild, a gun in one hand and a stake in the other. “What?”
And in that moment Skye knew two things for certain. What she had just seen in her dream was a glimpse of the future—Holgar dying at Lucifer’s hands.
And Estefan had arrived at the inn.
They had run out of time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Predator, prey, the oldest game
Somehow it always ends the same
Prey a tangled mass of legs and head
The predator’s fangs shining red
You’d do well to know your place
You can not change name or face
For real hunters always thrive
And the hunted ne’er survive