“I spent years doing that as a child, and later as a young man,” Kevin explained. “But first Ronnie, and then Alex, and finally Joe, taught me about love and goodness and what it means to be divine. They’re all dead now, but I’m still here.
“And I have enough faith in God to believe there’s a purpose to that. A lot of the others, even our coven, though they’d deny it, are still spooked by the crucifix. Not me. God has a plan for me. I know it. This war we’re about to have isn’t just about philosophy. It’s another jihad, a holy war. Heaven and hell have chosen their pawns. We’re on God’s side.”
Kevin took a breath, smiled apologetically.
“All of which brings me, in a very roundabout way, back to my pastor, and the whole point of my unloading all this bullshit on you,” he explained. “The priest used to say, ‘God never gives us anything we can’t bear. Instead, he uses the hardships our humanity brings us to teach us love, and the righteous fury of the warriors of heaven.’
“That’s what we are, George,” Kevin insisted. “We’re the warriors of heaven. Heaven just doesn’t know it yet.”
Tsumi had slept, fitfully, for several hours after dawn. Vampires didn’t actually need much sleep, of course, but it was refreshing just the same. Now she stood in the shower in her room at the Monteleone Hotel and let the scalding spray sluice over her body. She shivered with pleasure as the water burned her. She healed right away, of course, but the pain was delicious.
She caressed her breasts, her taut, scalded nipples, and wished she had more time to enjoy herself.
With a sigh, Tsumi turned the shower off. She squeezed the excess water out of her long, silky black hair. As she stepped out, she willed herself to heal more slowly. Then she ran the thick cotton towel over her body, savoring the way it scraped against her scalded flesh. But she didn’t dare linger. It was almost time.
She slid the bathroom door aside and stepped out into the hotel room. Tsumi knew that the windows were covered—she’d hung the bedspread over the regular shades herself—but instinct made her wince.
“You find me so horrifying?” Sima growled, his voice like grinding glass.
Tsumi almost laughed. How could he even think that? After all, it was Tsumi herself who had given Sima the scars on his face, that December night in 1898. She’d been traveling the lands of the midnight sun, enjoying the freedom, the banquet that the men of Finland and Sweden and Norway made during the winter. The sun rarely came out. Tsumi almost never went to bed.
Sima was Norwegian. He’d been a fisherman before Tsumi seduced him. She’d scarred his face just as he reached orgasm that first time they’d fucked, marked him as hers. Then she’d drained his body of blood, swallowed his life in thick, hot spurts down her throat. Turned him.
Now he sat, completely naked, in a wooden chair by the blanketed window, pained by her expression. Sima was still insecure about her feelings for him, even after more than one hundred years. It frustrated Tsumi, but she often found herself feeding off his insecurity. Exacerbating it. It couldn’t hurt, she told herself, to keep Sima off balance.
“Yes, you horrify me,” she said at last.
But her eyes told a different story. And the way she strutted, preening, as she moved across the hotel room toward him. The lights were off, and only a soft glow of sunlight shimmered behind the bedspread covering the windows. Of course, they didn’t really need lights to see.
“Your foolishness horrifies me,” she added.
Grinning, she knelt before him. Her silken hair was still wet but she let it hang down in front of her face as she bent to take him into her mouth. He grew hard instantly. Tsumi moved her whole body as she tasted him, and her hands drifted up to his chest. She traced her nails across his pectorals, then down to his abdomen.
Tsumi loved him, in her way. His long mane of blond hair, the scruff of beard that made him look so much like an ancient Viking warrior. The scar she’d given him, her own brand, which he’d chosen to keep even after he’d realized he could make it go away if he wished. And that voice. Deep and sneeringly arrogant, in spite of his insecurities.
And when he took her, Sima knew just what to do, how to please her. Nothing she wanted was too perverse for him as long as it would fulfill her.
Her throat was open, and Sima thrust into her mouth, straining against the chair. He was close, she knew.
Behind her, the phone rang shrilly.
Tsumi’s nails sliced deeply across Sima’s abdomen, instantly drawing blood. She pulled her mouth back, trailing fangs across the paper-thin skin of his penis, tearing it open. Sima screamed in pain as he came, and Tsumi kept her mouth clamped over him until he was done.
On the fifth ring, she answered the phone, wiping her hand across her chin.
“I’m here,” she said.
“I told you what time to expect my call,” Hannibal reprimanded her. “You know what I expect of my family.”
“I’m sorry, lord,” Tsumi said. “I’d just showered and was drying off when the phone rang. I got to it as fast as I could.”
“Enough. Report,” Hannibal instructed.
Tsumi stared balefully at Sima, watched his pained expression as the wounds she’d just given him began to heal. Hannibal didn’t waste time, but she knew that her transgression had been logged by the vampire lord. Neither forgiven nor forgotten, simply filed away to be used against her in the future.
“The rest of your advance team are still in the cemetery,” she said. “It was as you predicted. Only a matter of time before Octavian sent some people to search the graveyards.”
“Is he going to be a problem for you, Tsumi?” Hannibal asked bluntly. “That you used to fuck, I mean.”
Tsumi went silent. If Hannibal had been there, she might have lunged at him, tried to tear his throat out. She would have died for her efforts, however, so it was best that he was in New York rather than New Orleans.
“Octavian was a long time ago,” she snarled. “If anything, I want to see him dead even more than you do. He hurt me, lord. I want to hurt him back.”
“I’ll see that you have the opportunity,” Hannibal promised. “Now, what of the spies Octavian sent after you?”
“We killed two, and fed off of them,” she reported. “The others were allowed to escape, and the sentries we had set up made it a simple thing to track them back to their headquarters.”
The Monteleone Hotel was not equipped with televideo service, but even without it, Tsumi could easily picture the smile on Hannibal’s face.
“Tell me, then, you silly bitch,” he said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Well, that’s where we hit a bit of a snag,” she said, reluctantly.
“Snag?” Hannibal asked, and that single word held a promise of her death.
“Oh, we know where they are, lord, don’t doubt that for a second,” she said. “It’s only that they’re not as accessible as you might have hoped.”
“What does that mean, Tsumi?” he asked angrily.
“Their headquarters is . . . well, it’s a convent, lord.”
Silence. Tsumi knew what Hannibal was thinking. It had been her first thought as well. The shadows were living on sanctified ground. The vampire clan could easily enter and destroy them with numbers alone. But Hannibal had spent every moment since forming his new clan trying to convince them that the old myths were the only way for vampires to live. That Octavian’s beliefs were humanizing his followers, making them cattle. In essence, he’d preached to them that the church was right.
If they trespassed on sanctified ground, a lot of them now believed, they would be destroyed. And if a shapeshifter believed it would be destroyed, its own mind was enough to do the job. Psychosomatic suicide. It had happened before. Thousands of times. But that was before the church was defeated. Still, Hannibal had been reinforcing the church’s mental programming.
It was a dilemma for him.
“We’re coming tonight,” Hannibal finally said. “And tomorrow night, O
ctavian and the rest of his lost little lambs will be slaughtered.”
Apparently, it wasn’t as much of a dilemma as Tsumi had thought.
“We don’t even have to go in after them,” Hannibal said. “It doesn’t matter, Tsumi darling. All we really need to do is start killing people. When the blood starts to run in streams down the streets of the French Quarter, Octavian and the rest of his coven will come out after us. They’ll have to. It’s the only thing they have that they can hold up and say, here, we’re not like those other vampires, those evil monsters.
“It will be glorious. All across the city, we’ll destroy them. Then New Orleans will be ours. And once Octavian’s brood are all dead, nothing will stand in our way.”
Tsumi felt the bloodlust begin to bloom inside her. It was to be war, then. In less than forty-eight hours, New Orleans would be swallowed whole by a conflict the likes of which it had never seen. Vampire against shadow, in tiny pitched battles on streetcorners and in bars all over the city. Not through some massive battle, but through hundreds of smaller ones, the purification of a race of predators would finally begin.
“We will prepare for your arrival,” Tsumi whispered.
She hung up the phone and turned on the bed to face Sima. Daydreams of slaughter filled her mind, and she opened herself to him.
“Come,” she said. “Hurt me.”
As always, Sima gave Tsumi everything she asked for.
As he walked the corridors of the Ursuline convent, eagerly awaiting the moment when he could sit and rest for an hour or two, George could not stop thinking about Kevin Marcus. An extraordinary man, indeed. An outcast all his life, Kevin had faced the death of his lover, Joe Boudreau, by transforming himself completely. Emotions that had lived within Kevin’s breast for years had suddenly solidified. Overnight he had become a religious zealot and a bloodthirsty soldier.
Yet he wasn’t unique, George thought. War and death had been manufacturing faith and vengeance since the beginning of time.
George shook his head and turned down the hallway that led to Peter’s quarters. He moved slowly. Even more slowly than the day before, he thought wistfully, though he was willing to admit it might be his imagination.
When he finally reached Peter’s door, he rapped on it hard with bony knuckles. He waited a moment and received no response, so he rapped again.
After another moment, he heard a rustling inside.
“You’ve slept late enough, don’t you think?” he said aloud. “Kevin and the others are waiting for you. If you really want to raid that cemetery tonight, you’d better—”
The door opened. Inside, Nikki Wydra leaned against the door, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her auburn hair fell in a wild tumble about her shoulders. She didn’t seem at all self-conscious about how little her nightshirt left to the imagination, so George did his best not to look down.
“Oh,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, Nikki. I thought . . . is Peter. . . ?”
Then he shut up, and began to blush. He had hoped that Peter and Nikki would become involved. After Meaghan’s death, Peter had not so much as glanced at anyone in a romantic way. Love wasn’t part of the game plan anymore. But then when he’d come back night after night talking about Nikki, so excited about her performances, George had been pleased for him.
Circumstances had taken what might have been an awkward courtship and made it, instead, nothing short of lunacy. But it seemed to be happening just the same.
“He isn’t here,” Nikki said, and she seemed a bit hurt by her own words. Irked somewhat.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, then,” George said. “Do you have any idea where he might have slept last night?”
“Not at all,” she said. “We talked until nearly dawn, and then he left so I could go to bed. We were supposed to have lunch in the Quarter today, though.”
Was that before or after the raid on the cemetery, George wanted to ask. But didn’t. Sarcasm was not something most people dealt with well, particularly early in the morning. And he didn’t mean it in any nasty way. He was merely amused that Peter was working a love life into his schedule just as they were preparing for the worst.
“Good for him,” George said and smiled to show Nikki he was serious.
But Nikki didn’t smile back.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Well,” she began, “it’s just that he kept having these headaches. While we were out last night, it was bad enough, but they got worse as the night went on. I’m a little worried about him.”
George nodded absently, beginning to worry as well.
“I’d better look around for him,” George replied. “See how he’s feeling this morning.”
“Give me a minute,” Nikki told him. “I’m coming with you.”
After she’d closed the door and hastily thrown on her clothes from the night before, Nikki joined him in the hallway. Rather than beginning a room to room search, which he was hardly in the mood for since all he wanted to do was sit down, they went downstairs to the first floor. In the living room, they found Kevin Marcus and some of the others waiting for Peter.
“Well?” Kevin said, his anticipation obvious. “What did he say?”
“He wasn’t in,” George replied. “I’m not sure where he slept last night, but he hasn’t been feeling well. I think we should search the convent for him.”
They stared at him.
“What do you mean he hasn’t been feeling well?” Kevin asked.
“What do you think I mean?” George snapped.
He understood their reaction. Shadows did not get sick, unless they were suffering from some ongoing silver poisoning. Illness was something that, by their very nature, they were immune to. But, like it or not, Peter had not been well the entire day before and, according to Nikki, had been growing worse.
“All right,” Kevin stated decisively and stood. “We search the house and grounds, now. I don’t know what’s happened to Rolf, or to Cody, but damn it, nothing’s going to happen to one of us, especially not Peter, right here in our home.”
As George watched with surprise and admiration, the man absolutely took control of the situation. Kevin barked orders and, to George’s additional amazement, nobody questioned them.
But just as the gathered shadows were about to depart to search the convent and grounds, George heard someone calling his name down the hall.
“He’s in here!” Kevin called back, then turned to Caleb Mariotte, a skinny blond kid who’d been not more than eighteen when he died. “Go find out what’s happening.”
A moment later Caleb returned with Denny, the big Cajun who had yet to decide if he was going to be a shadow or not.
“What is it, Denny?” George asked.
The Cajun’s eyes were wild. “Doctor, you gotta come now. In de courtyard. It like nothin’ I ever seen before. Whatever it is, it weren’t there last night, and it ain’t natural, I know dat much for sure.”
Their curiosity piqued, the entire group postponed the search for Peter long enough to troop out to the garden path. It was a bright and beautiful spring day, and the scent of flowers was almost overwhelming. Still, something was missing, and it took George a moment to realize what it was. He didn’t hear any birds.
In the center of the pathway, in front of the wrought iron bench where Peter and George had spoken the day before, was a monstrously large object. It was black, at least ten feet long and half that in width. Fat like a sated slug, but dry as kindling. It was wispy, and layered, as if it had been wrapped in ancient bandages. Papier-mâché was all George could think of as he looked at it. But black, of course.
“Dear God,” George said softly, staring. “What is it?”
“Never mind that, how the hell did it get here?” Kevin demanded. “It’s got to be something of Hannibal’s. Maybe some kind of creature or demon or . . . something. I mean, none of us put it here, that’s for damned sure.”
George stared at it, studying its shape, now that he could se
e that it did have one, albeit warped tremendously. Its location had also not gone unnoticed by him. Still, he could only stare.
It was Nikki who finally said it.
“I think . . . I think it’s a cocoon,” she whispered.
All of them turned to stare at her, in much the same way they had been staring at the . . . thing in the garden.
“What are you talking about?” Kevin asked, incredulous. “What kind of insect could build a cocoon this big?”
“She’s right,” George said. “Look at it. The shape, the texture. It was made, constructed, I don’t know by what. Magic, maybe?”
“If dis t’ing is a cocoon, I don’ think I want to know what’s inside,” Denny said warily.
“I know what’s inside,” Nikki said quietly.
George stared at her, saw the horror on her face, and the way she held a hand near her mouth, as if she might vomit at any moment. It was the look that gave it away, that confirmed his own thoughts. She knew.
“It’s Peter,” she said.
Then she turned to run from the courtyard, stopping after half a dozen steps to throw up on the marigolds.
After she’d gone, all the rest of them could do was stare at it, and wonder if she was right. And if she was right, then what? If Peter had somehow built himself some kind of sorcerous cocoon, what did that mean? What would he be when he emerged?
The strength went out of his legs, and George sat hard on the wrought iron bench.
8
Choose sides, or run for your life.
—TRACY CHAPMAN, “Across the Lines”
IN A DANK CELL IN THE BOWELS OF SING-SING penitentiary, Allison Vigeant woke with a start. Her eyes snapped open and she inhaled quickly, as though she’d forgotten to breathe for a moment. The memory of pain scarred her, her recollections of every perversion Hannibal had inflicted upon her were horribly lucid. Her body was stiff, and sticky with dried and flaking blood where he had cut her. Where he had fucked her. Where he had torn into her with his mouth and hands and cock.
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