Patrick stabbed the puny stake into the teen, driving it well past the end of the small wooden ash. Gordon burst through the door, his gun out.
“We need your stakes!” I yelled.
Gordon ignored me. He shot the new vampire, cutting off the beastly screaming. I could have called back the silver slugs and thus shot it twice, but Gordon emptied his entire clip, pummeling the chest and head into bloody splinters. Then, he staked it.
By the time I turned back around, White Feather had beheaded what was left of the younger vampire, and the hag construct had melted into a puddle of ink and blood.
Chapter 36
I collapsed where I stood. “Did it bite you?” Vamps had superior hearing or Patrick would never have comprehended the puff of air that was my question.
His answer was bellowed loud enough for patients upstairs to hear. “In twenty years of life and two hundred after, I’ve never known anyone who can draft intelligent spells the way you do. And this, this is the best stake you could envision? What kind of fairy vampire did you intend to kill with that thing? Can there even be an explanation?”
I blinked. “It did the trick, didn’t it?”
Patrick was so angry both of his fangs were in evidence. “You were planning on standing that close to a vampire to use it?” He held his hand out. “A real stake, if you please.” His request was for Gordon, his disgust for me.
Gordon took his time about it, not trusting Patrick.
“Give him the stake, already,” I snapped. “And then some blood if you found any.”
Mat stood in the doorway holding two bags. She tossed one to Patrick. He caught it in one hand and the stake in the other. He finished off the headless vampire before guzzling the bag. Given the complete lack of civilization around us, at this point, polite sipping would be egregious pretense.
“Will Joe return here when the construct with him dissolves?” I asked.
“It’s too damn late. I was too weak. I didn’t know it was so close to nightfall.” Patrick limped to the door, pausing and visibly restraining himself to allow Mat time to step aside. She offered the other bag of O-positive, which he accepted.
“Where are you going?” Gordon demanded.
“Out.”
“What do you mean it’s too late?” I called after him.
“He vamped.” His response was nothing more than a low growl.
Gordon stepped in front of Mat and raised his gun. Unless he had put another clip in it, the bullets were spent.
“Dammit all to hell!” Patrick howled. He fell to his knees. He wasn’t panting; he didn’t need to breathe, but he clutched his head as if it hurt. His skin rippled, the gargoyle winning out. “We needed more time. Even a minute would have sufficed!”
My heart hammered in my chest. I hoped he had consumed enough blood that he wouldn’t lose control because my nerves were a beacon for a predator. White Feather’s wind swirled around me, hard to distinguish from the man who was just as suddenly by my side.
“Pa...trick, we’re going to walk around you and leave,” I stuttered.
He shook his head, leaning it back against the wall. “Too damned late.” He still held the blood Mat had given him. Would it be enough?
Mat and Gordon scuttled past first. Gordon must have put another clip in because he kept his gun out and aimed. When they were safely past Patrick, Gordon nudged Mat towards the stairs. She put up zero argument.
Gordon covered us while we edged around Patrick.
The vamp sat motionless the entire time, his hand clutching the blood, but not drinking it. He was weak and ugly.
Running might make things worse, so we faced the vampire and walked backwards.
White Feather checked outside, a wise move, one that wasn’t instinctive for me yet. I felt for Mat’s silver and found it waiting outside the door.
We stepped through the door, and the first thing I did was ground. I needed Mother Earth and her deepest strength and direct comfort. It wasn’t the same as linking in the desert where her scent drifted in the air and fed my soul. It wasn’t even close to being in the mountains where the earth was fresh and in a constant state of renewal. All of that was a distant echo here; packed dirt that had a history of human footsteps from eons ago through the present.
I’d have been fine except Patrick called out from within the tomb.
“Wait.”
We all backed up as one, our attention rooted on the door.
Gordon unlatched a stake and tossed it to White Feather.
For once, I heard Patrick approach. He was still limping. One booted foot rested heavier on the steps than the other. There were funny pauses between each step too.
After about a decade, he reached the top. The blood bag was gone. The gargoyle was pushed back again, but my witch sight still saw it. The gargoyle was gray. The white glow that was Patrick’s normal skin color was reduced to the same dull gray as that of the gargoyle.
“I cannot fathom how you can survive without knowing. Be it forbidden or not.” He leaned against the door frame. “When a vampire is used to power a construct—” One hand covered his eyes, while his other flexed its talons. “It is forbidden. We do not create constructs from our own kind. We do not even do it to living humans, but from what I gleaned in the last forty-eight hours, Joe believed he could eventually power his own little army of constructs and become the greatest vampire that...never lived. The idiot had been hunting a way to riches while he was alive and when he became—”
When Patrick floundered, I supplied, “A not-vamp.”
“He was just another patient who wanted to be a vampire. I had no idea he was running black magic before he was infected with sepsis.”
“We need to stop him,” I said.
“You have no idea.”
We waited. What choice did we have?
Finally Patrick said, “When a vampire is used to create a construct that construct becomes a ghoul. Ghouls devour vampires and use the energy to become stronger. They savor living humans as well. The ghoul obtains power from a human’s soul.”
Mat shifted beside me. The ground under our feet rumbled, and I hoped if she went for a water attack, it wouldn’t include rupturing pipes under our feet. Gordon kept his gun level. White Feather said nothing, but his breezy power was the silent type.
“You’re saying that vamp powered a construct that turned into a ghoul?”
He nodded. “The vampire fully turned at dusk. Joe created the construct days ago, and the construct has been powered by the almost-vampire’s energy even as it turned. It reached full vampire stage tonight. The vampire’s energy was immediately drained to the construct turning it into a ghoul. Could you not feel it, witch?”
My mouth was too dry to speak. I hadn’t felt it. My molecules had been too busy screaming at me to run. “A ghoul takes on the appearance of whatever it last ate.” Ghoul research was not at the top of my studies. I hadn’t known how one was created, but apparently Patrick did. Vampires and their damned secrets.
Patrick’s beast growled low, unsettling the hair from my arms to my neck. “I’ll arrange what help I can,” he said. “But we vampires are solitary creatures.”
“Despite rumors of hives and clans?” White Feather asked.
Patrick’s talons spasmed. “Through the ages, we have been many things. Today, here and now, we are mostly solitary. We are territorial creatures, and there is no benefit to large numbers of us cooperating. The fewer of us in an area, the better for us.”
“How do we kill the ghoul?” I asked.
Now he did bring his gaze level with mine. “Destroy it and its maker. Although in all honesty, you may only need to find Joe. It’s quite possible that the ghoul has already devoured him and taken his guise. One of the many reasons ghouls and their lore is forbidden knowledge is because their nature leaves room for no one but the ghoul.”
“Did you tell Joe this?”
A smile with fangs. “No. If you had not come to my rescue, I’d have g
one to dust knowing Joe was destroyed by the creature of his own making.”
“Well, I guess this means I can quit worrying about whether Joe the vampire can enter my home without an invitation the way the rogue vamp did. Ghouls don’t have the vamp limitation of waiting for an invite, do they?”
“No. No, they don’t.”
See. No point in worrying over the little things.
Chapter 37
Ghouls were nasty, soulless, haunted creatures at night. They fed most often then, although the grimoire didn’t say they didn’t feed in the light of day. The book also said nothing about ghouls being created from the essence of a vampire, but it did say they were soulless twice over. Of course. A vamp was soulless and a ghoul created from one made it soulless twice.
When ghouls fed, for some unspecified time, they could take on the appearance of whichever soul they ate. I was willing to bet that unspecified time was about three days. Another vampire hint once you knew the end answer. “Joe didn’t have a soul. He was a vampire. So will it take on his appearance or not?”
“A half vampire,” said White Feather, not even glancing up from the grimoire he was scanning. We stood shoulder to shoulder in Granny Ruth’s grimoire library. She hadn’t hesitated to let us in, even though visits to her special room were generally not allowed at night.
We had ten minutes to find what lore we could. Or given the magical nature of the room, it had ten minutes to present itself or hide from us, depending on the mood of the magic.
“I don’t care what he looks like,” I grumbled. “He needs to die. Go away, be obliterated, gone. But if by chance Joe wasn’t eaten by the ghoul, how do you kill a vampire that isn’t a vampire? Joe is already dead, but he wasn’t properly undead. A vampire is a cursed being. But Joe was somehow too blessed to be cursed to full vampire, so a blessing probably won’t work on him.”
White Feather muttered, “Ghouls can’t be undone. They are created from energy that isn’t of the earth.”
“That’s for certain. And undoing this one would bring back an idiot and a half-vamp. Not much of an improvement.”
“Can’t be starved either. A lack of souls only makes them desperate.” He flipped a page. I hated the sound of parchment. It reminded me of my last visit here, and that had almost been my last visit anywhere. Shivers overtook my spine. I was positive that at least one of the spiders that protected this God-forsaken place had just crawled up my leg.
The light by the door flashed in warning.
Granny Ruth opened the door. “Time is up.”
I slammed the book shut. Let it put itself away. Things in this room, guarded by lethal spiders or not, tended to rearrange themselves as they saw fit. The spiders might prevent ill magic from escaping, but they didn’t prevent it from wandering around the enclave.
I scurried out, running my hand down my pant leg. Oh, right. I had tucked my jeans inside my socks. There was no way a spider had crawled up my leg. Right???
White Feather peeled off his set of borrowed gloves as he stepped out. The door was short, forcing him to bend at the waist. That put him about eye level with the weaver on the plant stand that stood guard in front of the secret door leading to the grimoires.
White Feather paused to examine the colorful spider. It stared back with all eight of its spooky eyeballs.
“Ick.” I didn’t share his fascination with the idea that poisonous spiders were immune to magic and therefore served as the best guardians in the universe for dangerous grimoires.
I removed my gloves and breathed in the humid, warm greenhouse air. Granny Ruth had dressed in the ten minutes we had been studying ghoul lore. She led the way to her kitchen where she had prepared a midnight snack. There was hot mint tea and warmed blueberry oat muffins.
Despite their huge size, I crammed half of a muffin in my mouth.
Granny patiently pushed a platter of butter my way. Her white curls were smashed on one side from recent sleeping, but her eyes were as bright as ever. If any of us had come out unscathed from the disaster at Tent Rock, it was she. If anything, she was more vibrant. “Did the grimoires reveal important secrets?”
I nodded and then shook my head. White Feather managed to clear his throat before I did. “We know what ghouls are, but not precisely how to kill one. From what I read, a nuclear explosion might be our best bet.”
“It wants souls,” I reported. “Lots of them. I might be able to convince Martin to tell me where it will feed, assuming it doesn’t come out in the open and head straight for live humans. There must be others like Martin with their souls still attached on this side. Martin should know where those souls are waiting.” I told her about seeing Martin.
Granny chuckled. “You’re tired. You don’t need Martin to tell you where to find souls that haven’t crossed. They’d be right where his is—wherever their bodies were last.”
Her point was lost on me either because it was past midnight and I was barely functioning, or because I had not bothered to educate myself enough on the subject of death. “You know where there are wandering souls?”
“Any graveyard is full of them. Lots of people aren’t ready when they die. They tend to stay partially tied to their old bodies while they wait to cross. Now why Martin hasn’t gone over is another story entirely. Knowing Martin, he hasn’t finished exploring whatever it is that has caught his interest.”
“I can believe that.” I ate the second half of my second muffin. I managed to delay long enough to slather butter on this one. The tea was almost cool enough to gulp.
Granny said, “A ghoul is not a power to be shoved back to its own realm. It has to be destroyed. The longer we wait, the more it eats, the stronger it will be.”
The thought of souls, even a single one, being devoured was anathema. Maybe all the vampire souls that never went to heaven or hell were out there about to be gobbled. Maybe the lost souls who had never found their way were at risk. “Our best chance is now, tonight, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “If you can find it. If you can’t and that thing is smart enough to figure out how to survive among us, a lot of lives and souls will be lost.”
I reached for another muffin. “I have the tat ink. Not the exact same ink that was used in the construct that became the ghoul, but applied to a witching fork, it might track the thing.”
Granny stood. “What I want to know is whether Joe discovered the tattoo construct spells in the church archives or the Library of Congress. Either place might have a cache of dangerous manuscripts, especially the church. If he removed a grimoire where did he hide it? Did he share the knowledge with anyone?”
I shook my head. “Maybe Zandy, but he’s dead. You can quiz Lee; he’s in the slammer.”
She sighed. “It’s impossible to keep those manuscripts locked up. The magic can wait dormant for years, but it always seems to find a way to a greedy fool. I’ll make some calls. If I can recover whatever text he used, my spiders will guard it.”
In case something bad happened to White Feather and myself, I told Granny where to find the tat ink we had buried. “I’ll ask Mat to hunt Martin at Tent Rock while White Feather and I search graveyards. If the ghoul stops long enough to eat in one area, I bet Martin will know.”
Granny waved, but she was already halfway to her lab. With all the spiders she kept as pets, she never had to worry about locking her doors.
Chapter 38
I found Lynx where I least expected him: hiding in my new lab. Lynx was often silent, moody or feral, but I’d only seen him run mindlessly scared once. By the time he’d stopped running that time, there had been no inclination to gibber on about packets, fireballs and tattoo monsters.
This time he babbled as if he only had moments to tell us the facts. “I couldn’t find Patrick, but I backtracked places Zandy had been. Figured if there was a problem with Patrick, Zandy might have had a hand in it. Started at Mat’s place and first thing, there was this guy, he smelled like blood, like the guy at Tam’s place—he was scoutin
g Mat’s store from the alleyway.”
“Joe. You never met Joe. He’s a half vamp.”
“Not anymore, he ain’t. He had a tat slinking along with him like some kind of dog, only it looked more like a snake.”
“Thank God Mat was with us,” I muttered.
“That thing wasn’t fooled by your invisibility spell. It could see me, smell me and damn near ate me!”
“The construct?” I asked.
Lynx’s head jerked and had he been cat, he’d have done nothing but hiss. “It was a tat but then dusk hit. I thought it was safe to get closer.”
“Moonlight madness!”
He did hiss then. “Joe got eaten! Right there in front of me! If I hadn’t thrown your fireball, I’d have never made it, but I gotta tell you, your firepower needs work. Barely slowed that thing down.”
“Dusk was a bad time,” I explained. “Before sundown the tat was a powerful construct controlled by Joe. It was sucking energy from a not-yet-a-vamp, but at first dark, the construct spell harvested the power of the undead. As soon as the construct linked to vamp power, it morphed into a ghoul.”
Lynx gulped and his eyes flashed between cat and human.
White Feather appeared, eating a bean burrito. He handed a second one over to Lynx.
Around his first bite Lynx said, “The tat had been sitting there next to Joe watching the alley. It smelled just like the others; ink and blood and magic. But all of a sudden it started growing. And sniffing. It got wind of me, and I promise you I was downwind. Looked right at me as if your hiding spell was a beacon. I tossed the fireball, and it barely paused to snap down the flames like they were the crisp edges of a burger!”
“What about Joe?”
“The dude started squealing, ‘At last! Live!’ like a deranged hyena. That was all the head start I got. The mouth, shit, the mouth on that tat grew bigger than my entire head. Joe’s head too, because instead of coming after me, it finished off Joe. Opened those teeth and swallowed Joe’s head and shoulders like a giant snake. I never ran so fast in my life.”
Under Witch Curse (Moon Shadow Series) Page 22