Cheating Death (Wraith's Rebellion Book 2)

by Aya DeAniege

  A mortal would make a little, “eep,” sound and jump in place, then look around for a way to escape, or anyone nearby.

  Which is exactly what I did a second later.

  “You mortals are so easy to fool,” he growled.

  “But Quin called me,” I said in confusion.

  My being baffled was very genuine. I didn’t understand how Quin would have called me, especially if he allied with Lu.

  Had he decided to jump ship, Lu would have known that I was no longer mortal. If they had allied, I’d just be dead, plain and simple.

  Don’t give him a reason to suspect otherwise.

  “A twist of the voice and you come running like the little whore you are.”

  No.

  Quin on the phone would not have invited mortal me out to witness his violence. Lu would have known that, because a mortal witnessing that was against Council law and ethics. There would be too much to clean up if I saw Quin rip apart someone else, mortal or not.

  Which meant that whoever made that phone call had known that I was a fledgling.

  “Margaret,” I said out loud.

  That two-faced bitch. Perhaps that was why I had wanted to punch, kick, and bite her, because she had been working with Lu.

  That one from the day before who called early in the night, he hadn’t been made to record a message, Margaret had done it for him.

  Which also explained how Lu had gotten his hands on the tool so easily. Margaret had been in the area for the commencement of the last interview. She had been at all the interviews.

  Getting in and out of the Archives was surely easy for the Younger Council. On her last days as Younger Council too, which meant that the other vampires wouldn’t look too closely at her because they had seen her come and go hundreds of times. If they had seen her in the tool room, they were probably so brainwashed into ignoring that kind of behaviour that they wouldn’t bring it up again.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell, that’s their policy.

  “In exchange for a little favour,” Lu said with a grin.

  “Do you even know who her Maker is?” I asked. “That is what it’s about, isn’t it? She’s tired of serving and wants you to kill her Maker.”

  “Yes, and?” he demanded.

  “Her Maker is Sasha!” I all but shouted at him. “How—” I almost asked him how he planned to kill her. “How? How is dear brother Death going to kill her when he’s already failed once before?”

  “He’s stronger now,” Lu hissed out through gritted teeth. “I could no longer control him, couldn’t keep him at bay. It’s help and become a god, or stay out of it and become a blood bag. I’d rather be a god once more. As would Margaret.”

  Blood bag means feeding on vampires.

  I almost snorted, then I realized that Lu was some kind of cliché villain and he had information I needed. Monologuing and revealing plans was what villains did with the ‘heroes’ they were about to kill.

  And I was definitely about to be killed.

  Just don’t piss him off enough to rip me to shreds.

  “You can’t disappear my body,” I said with a shake of my head.

  “Oh, I know,” he responded. “I’m not going to enjoy killing you as much as I’d like to, but it’s best not to let mortals know what happened. Now give me that.”

  Confused garble then nothing.

  “Oh, thank God. This will have to do,” I said, clutching the phone of a dead man in my hands as I stared at Quin.

  “Now explain what in the fuck is going on!” he shouted at me.

  “It’s kind of a blur,” I said. “Last thing I remember, you called me. And then…”

  “You died,” Quin muttered. “That’s what it’s like the first couple times.”

  “Okay, but you called me.”

  “Clearly I didn’t.”

  “I’m at the park on Gage!” I said loudly. “I went there, and, uh...shit, I know this.”

  “You’re dead but not completely dead, so obviously, Lu laid a trap for you. Probably made a voice recording last night and played it for you over the phone.”

  “No, Margaret did it,” I said, though I couldn’t recall why I thought that. After a long moment of staring down at my bare feet, it occurred to me. “Oh, because Lu didn’t try to rip off my head, but you clearly knew I was a fledgling on the phone.”

  “Margaret baited you? I’m going to have to kill her now. Not that I care, but Sasha might.”

  “She’s working with Death and Lu,” I said. “I think he strangled me.”

  “Lu strangled you? That’s not like him.”

  “No, Death did.”

  “They’re the same person!”

  “Tell them that!” I shouted back. “They aren’t in the same body! Death was younger and taller. I can’t... I don’t know his face.”

  “The car at the house. Great,” Quin muttered.

  “What were you doing here, before I interrupted?”

  “I was questioning this mortal. He has ties to Lu and may be a sex trafficker. You startled me so much I accidentally put pressure on the blade. I was only supposed to beat him up.”

  “He’ll be fine,” I said with a dismissive wave.

  “He’s mortal,” Quin repeated.

  I looked around the kitchen area, then motioned to the door that read ‘office’ off in the corner.

  “Stage a break in?”

  “Obviously,” he grumbled in annoyance. “But I wasn’t done with him.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I died at an inopportune time,” I snapped. “I was going to try and get him to monologue the plan to me.”

  “He’s read too many books for that,” Quin said.

  “Then he knows I’m a vampire?” I asked.

  “If he did, he wouldn’t have wasted his time strangling you. Which means Margaret didn’t tell him. She takes her role as Younger Council very seriously. My bigger concern isn’t that you’re dead, it’s that I haven’t received a phone call to bait me to your body.”

  “Because you’re an idiot and left your phone at Sasha’s, so I’ve got it in the park,” I said sternly.

  “Huh, interesting turn of events,” Quin said. “I wonder how they’ll handle that. Can I see the phone please?”

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “God, even his damn sounds are annoying,” Quin muttered.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed at him.

  “Calling Sasha,” he said.

  “On a dead man’s phone!”

  “It’s a burner, looks like he just got it too.”

  “Hello?”

  “Sasha? You sound odd.”

  “Must have a cold.”

  “Uh huh, did you know Margaret can work her stuff through phones? Helen is currently dead in a park.”

  “What kind of dead?”

  “Uh…” Quin looked me over. “The kind of dead where you and I need to have a talk because I’m really confused right now. But she should be alive again soon. They think she’s mortal.”

  “They?”

  “Long story, anyhow, I’m going to need you to abandon the safe house. Burn it like we do.”

  “Er…”

  “Did you already do it?”

  “Maybe?”

  “That’s an odd choice. Go to one of the places that Margaret doesn’t know about. I’m going to kill the little bitch.”

  “She’s on the Council, Quin.”

  “And? Why do I care? She did something wrong. Now she’s going to learn the consequences of being bad. I’ve tried putting her over my knee, draining her, torture, now she’s gone too far. I’m not waiting eighty more years for her to phase out. Come to terms with it, or come and try to stop me.”

  Quin handed the phone back to me as I gawked at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You can’t talk to her like that!” I shouted. “She could eat you!”

  “Might be awkward, might be fun. I’m going to go trash the place, don’t try to feed on anyone. It
won’t work. You technically don’t have a stomach right now.”

  As if to prove him wrong, my stomach growled loudly.

  “Tell it that,” I said, pointing to my stomach.

  “Hungry vampires growl with their mouths, not their stomachs,” he said as he strode off. “Might want to set that phone on the counter. You may fade in and out.”

  I immediately did what he said and continued to poke at the screen.

  The scene around me probably should have insulted my mortal sensibilities.

  After being killed, I had appeared beside Quin in the kitchen of a restaurant. Two men were down and dead with bullets in them. They had left blood smears as they went down. Bullets had hit items and dinged them, ricocheting off to someplace else. I couldn’t trace the path or how the bullets moved, but I saw five indentations in various metal surfaces around the room.

  As I had appeared, Quin had had a third man pressed against the hot grill. He had brought the man up, demanding to know where ‘he’ was before he turned and slammed the man into the prepping station and picked up a big chef’s knife.

  The man must have seen me appear because his eyes went wide and Quin stiffened and turned towards me. Whatever his thought or reaction to my presence, Quin’s hand slipped, and the knife went into the other man’s throat. The man had been sputtering and choking on his blood as I focused on what was important.

  Getting a goddamn recording device.

  Quin had found the phone in the man’s pocket and tossed it to me. So new that there were no contacts and not even a lock on the phone. It had taken me until the man’s last choking sound to find the recorder and turn it on.

  That should have phased me, right? I had been mortal until just a few hours before. That caring for life didn’t just switch off when one became immortal. It was supposed to be worn away over the centuries as I watched loved ones die, replaced them with new loved ones, then watched them die as well.

  Quin walked back out of the office as I was monologuing into the recording device. I blushed and lowered the phone.

  “Chastising yourself for not feeling won’t turn the emotion back on any faster,” he said as he slowly approached me. “Baby vampires need to feed. The hungrier you are, the more—how would a mortal put it?—psycho killer you become. Once we get blood into your belly, you’ll start to feel again.”

  “You’re sure I can’t lick it off the walls?” I asked.

  “You should want to bite them,” he said sternly, shaking a finger right at my nose. “No Progeny of mine is going to be a scavenger.”

  I tried to bite his finger but went right through it. Grumbling, I folded my arms and glared at him.

  “And that tells us that it’s your power that projected you. Well, this is all kinds of more fucked up than I thought,” Quin muttered.

  “Why?”

  “Lu can project mortals to other places as long as he balances them on the point of death.”

  “Except I’m not a mortal,” I said.

  “But you’re still close enough that it could count, was my point,” he responded. “You aren’t allowed to use your powers on me, so you went through my finger instead of touching me. I, on the other hand, can use my powers on you.”

  “Is that a threat?” I asked.

  Quin stiffened. He looked me over, then seemed to force himself to relax.

  “I forgot that I told you my actual power. It, or something else, also manifested the ability to move things,” he said, lifting his hand.

  A gun raised in the air and moved around us, emptying the clip into the dead man on the prep table. I jumped at the sound of the gun, then put myself between Quin and the gun as I cringed.

  I had never been so close to a gunshot before. The sound of it echoed off the metal appliances in the kitchen. Something ricocheted, and I dove for the floor, putting my face dangerously close do another body and the blood that was pooling around him.

  The sound stopped, and the gun dropped to the floor.

  “Can’t leave finger prints if I don’t touch the—what are you doing?” he asked. “You’re a projection of an immortal body. Bullets don’t hurt you.”

  “You’re the one who pointed out I’m near to mortal,” I snapped back in a terrified tone.

  “Get up, you fool,” he said, pulling me up by my arm. “Do not drop to the floor. A bullet is about the fastest death you could hope for, if it even hurts you at all. You don’t dive to the side unless you’re trying to pass for mortal. Understand me?”

  “I understand the words you’re saying but not the why. Shouldn’t I try to preserve myself?”

  “No, not until you’ve experienced enough things to know what your body will take. Once you’re weaned, you can make decisions. Not before. And this is not a negotiation, so don’t bring up whatever you were about to ask.”

  I bit back the comment about sex as a cold dread went through me. It was slowly dawning on me that I was now the chew toy of a man who had been tortured and raped for centuries.

  And he might be more than eager to victimize someone else to feel like he was in control of his life.

  “Fine, just could you hurry up? If my heart starts beating again, they’ll know and kill me for good.”

  “Just go back then. Wait, no, that’s a terrible idea.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to go back,” I grumbled, kicking at the dead man for something to do.

  Just like poking a dead body, except while I saw my foot touch him, saw him move, I didn’t quite feel the experience. There was a disembodied sort of reaction to the man.

  He had been food, and then he had become spilt milk. I couldn’t eat him because he was already dead.

  “What’s a scavenger?” I asked.

  “Vampires who eat dead bodies. Humans have come to call them ghouls. Eat in the cannibalistic sense, not the vampiric. It seems we can subsist off cooked human flesh. Which I’ve got to say is the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. You have to be weaned into it just like onto blood, most who fall into it find themselves taking after the dead early on.”

  “What if you weaned me onto solid food?” I asked. “Instead of blood.”

  “You would vomit up your stomach. Cooked human flesh, or raw, or blood. Nothing else has worked. We’ve had centuries to dabble.”

  “Damn, I want a burger.”

  “You are not going to be a scavenger,” he said sternly.

  “I want a beef burger,” I said. “With mushrooms and bacon and cheddar cheese. Oh, there’s a place that will put the cheese inside the burger too!”

  “You’re craving protein,” he rumbled. “She was right. I should have made you consume regular blood. A lot of it. But I just put the order in to my stock. They’re good, but they’re also hours away.”

  “She gave me like a bottle this size,” I said, motioning with my hands. “Oh, and then another juice box.”

  “I’d have to check, but I’d guess due to the amount of power you’re using, it’s consuming the blood before it hits your system.”

  “So, stop using power.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said sternly. “Look, my ability to move things and kill vampires somehow are linked. Whatever weirdness is going on with you, you will figure it out. If you try to clamp down on it you’ll either succeed and never have power again, or you’ll fail and never have full control. Just let the power flow.”

  “You aren’t concerned?” I asked.

  “About the mind reading, memory fishing, and now astral projection? Little bit. But I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “I seem to be using the power of the last vampire to be near me,” I muttered.

  “Imitation typically presents the way Margaret did, vocal only. Sometimes body movements come with it. You'd be a good actor. This would be a whole new branch of imitation I haven’t seen before.”

  “Ohhhh, Quin!”

  He frowned at me.

  “Find me, touch me, I use your power for two seconds and just make b
oth their heads explode!”

  He seemed to consider a moment. “Neither of us risks using the blade. They wouldn’t see it coming. This could work in our favour. Although possibly not on Lu, you need to be able to make another before you can do that. Box though, a box for five hundred years would work.”

  “Lu doesn’t know you can kill people with your mind?” I asked.

  “I think you being dead might have broken your brain or something. We talked about that. He knows about moving objects, while I’ve killed vampires before, he never sent me after a vampire to do more than bring them back.”

  “So, your Maker doesn’t know what your power is?” I demanded.

  “No, I told you that. Being harmed probably muddled your memories some. I couldn’t use my power on him, he told me the night he made me. By the time it settled down, I was still with him. I wasn’t even around another vampire for nearly a hundred years.”

  “Right,” I said, looking around us.

  I stiffened at the sight of the dead bodies and looked up ever so slowly.

  “Uh, Quin, oh Maker of mine?”

  “Yes, child?”

  “We’re standing in a restaurant with dead bodies and this is the twenty-first century. There have got to be police officers headed this way, and you’re already kind of on their bad list for being present last night at my place.”

  “Good point. Follow me out the back. My car is there. We’ll slip away and find you in the park, put you to rights and go from there.”

  “Yay,” I said weakly.

  “Don’t be whiney about it. You knew what you were getting into.”

  “I did not know I would be astral projected across the city!”

  “Okay, so you kind of knew. Same thing. Let’s go.”

  Power fires off for the first couple of weeks, then tends to fade away until you learn to control it. It can be very unpredictable, and there have been some cases of a vampire seemingly possessing two or more powers during this period. Near as we can tell, it’s sort of like your body is preparing itself to use a power and is testing the physiological response to that power.

  I hope I don’t get stuck with astral projection. It’s kind of a lame power.

  Especially in this age. I’m surprised you managed that. Isn’t there free Wi-Fi in the city parks? That alone should have stopped you. It’s enough to stop Lu.