“Oh, man,” she whispered, overwhelmed by the transformation. “That’s . . . incredible. Where does the mass go? The rest of the matter? I mean, I was a bluejay! Where did the rest of me go?”
“Nobody’s ever answered that one, far as I know,” Will replied.
He glanced over his shoulder, remaining constantly aware of Erika and Sebastiano’s location. It wouldn’t do to lose track of them.
“That was . . .” she said, and then her smile went away. She was remembering, he knew. Remembering how she got this way. No matter how incredible or even wonderful she might consider the power of the shadows, that wonder would always be tainted by the memory of the suffering and indignity it had cost her.
Will’s smile disappeared as well. He allowed his true feelings to appear for the first time since they’d been reunited. After his initial reaction, he’d done his best to stay “up.” To comfort her without allowing his own fury to surface. More than fury—his own despair.
Now he let her see. Almost showed it to her, as if he wanted her to know, though he was aware it would only upset Allison more. But Will couldn’t help it. She’d been his joy, his hope for the future and for his own tenuous grasp on humanity; now she was his greatest wound, the source of damning hatred and crippling despair.
If he didn’t fight it. If he let it happen.
Will promised himself he was going to fight. Not against his rage, but against making what had happened to Allison more important to him than she was herself, than their relationship was.
With the moonlight slipping through the trees above, Allison reached out for his hand. At first, Will couldn’t go to her. He was still trying to push himself away from the emotional abyss that had so tempted him. But if he went over the edge, he wouldn’t be there for Allison, and she sorely needed him. This had happened to her, not to him.
“At least now we’ll never be apart,” she said softly. “I don’t have to be paranoid about you leaving me for a younger woman when I get old.”
He stared at her, stunned that she could laugh about it. Then he saw her eyes, saw behind her words, and realized that she might joke, but she wouldn’t laugh. And he knew, from the way she gazed at him, that Allison understood exactly what was going through his mind. His fury and his fear.
Will pulled her close and held her tight and wept into her hair. “Oh, Alli,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
She kissed his tears, tasting the blood there, and held him away from her.
“We’ve got forever to be sorry,” she said. “For now, let’s just find the son of a bitch and make him pay.”
Will wanted to smile, but Allison didn’t and so he only looked away. He knew he was thinking too much about his own vengeance and not enough about hers. If anything, it should be hers, or even theirs. He would try to remind himself of that often.
“Cody, over here,” Sebastiano whispered, but did not turn. Instead, he continued to stare out across the runways toward the airport.
Will and Allison joined Erika and Sebastiano at the fence a moment later. She squeezed his hand, and he took a breath and held it to keep back the tide of emotion that threatened to flow over him again.
“You’ve found something?” he asked.
“There,” Erika said, her finger pointing through an opening in the chain link fence.
Will looked in the direction Erika indicated, and saw a DC-10 parked at one of the long gangways that extended from the small airport terminal. There were vehicles surrounding it, one obviously a tanker from which the airplane’s fuel was being replenished. Others were baggage carriers, being loaded even as they watched with suitcases from the plane’s most recent journey.
“It taxied in just now,” Erika explained. “The passengers are probably still getting off, but they’re refueling in a hurry. They’ll probably start boarding for their next trip in five or ten minutes.”
“That’s it, then,” Will said. “Let’s move.”
One by one, the four shadows misted through the chain link fence, re-forming on the other side. Swift as night falling, they swept across the tarmac and descended upon the ground crew like wolves. This was the part of the plan that Will had hated, but he couldn’t see any alternative.
“Just don’t kill anyone,” he snarled, and grabbed the hair and shirtfront of a baggage handler.
The man screamed an alarm, and Will slapped him hard on the side of the head—hard enough to disorient him momentarily. Then his fangs sank into the soft flesh of the man’s throat, the stubble under his lips unfamiliar and faintly repulsive. It had been a long time since he’d taken the blood of an unwilling donor, even longer since he’d drunk the blood of a man.
The others were doing the same. Drinking, not killing. Feeding, for none of them knew when they would have a moment’s respite again. But even now the screams of their victims were bringing others. Footsteps pounded down the metal stairs that extended from the airport gate. In a moment, more humans would arrive.
“Enough!” Will shouted.
Whatever their true loyalties, the others obeyed. They misted at once, their unfortunate victims crumpling to the tarmac weak or unconscious, throats bloodied, but alive. They ought to be grateful for that, Will thought. But the fact that the man with the beard stubble would live didn’t make what Will had done any less wrong.
As he floated in a small, thin fog up and through the door of the plane, Will Cody couldn’t help but wonder how much further he would have to fall, how many things he had come to believe sacred he would have to abandon, in order to destroy Hannibal.
Returning to his own, familiar human body on board the airplane, he watched Allison take flesh once more and decided he didn’t care. Whatever it took to take Hannibal down, it would be worth it.
Once aboard the plane, Sebastiano closed the door and locked it down. Outside, people screamed in horror and alarm. Will ignored it all. He strode into the cockpit and startled a uniformed man who had been making notations on a clipboard.
“Hey!” the man said, standing suddenly and dropping his clipboard and pen in the process. “You can’t come in—”
Will snarled at him, lips drawn back in a savage snarl, fangs dripping with saliva. The man shouted and stumbled back against the plane’s instrument panel.
“Oh, Jesus, don’t kill me!” the man begged, not daring to look at Will’s face again.
“Can you fly this plane?” Will asked in a growl.
The man glanced up, then shook his head, opened his mouth to deny it. Will’s fingers lengthened into claws and he reached out and lifted the man’s chin, staring into his eyes.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said, the sharp point of a claw on the man’s throat warning enough.
“Yeah . . . yes, I’m the copilot,” the man admitted, a tear slipping down his face.
Will almost softened for a moment, seeing that tear. He felt badly for this man. But they needed him. The plane would get them to Atlanta far faster than they might under their own power.
“Fly,” he ordered and pointed at the pilot’s seat.
“We—we don’t have clearance,” the man said and cringed as he awaited retaliation.
“They’ll give you clearance,” Will snarled. “Tell them we’ll be taking off immediately. If they argue, we’ll kill everyone in the airport.”
Fear was replaced by horror in the copilot’s eyes. He nodded and slid into the pilot’s seat, and Will felt suddenly sick. This was it. The end. Once they had delivered the serum to Jimenez, once Hannibal was dead, that was the end. He would take Allison and disappear from the world. No more war or death or even fear.
Together, they would leave the shadows behind. Out of the darkness and into the light.
“Will?” Allison asked from behind him.
He turned to face her and she had her hand out. He twined his fingers within hers and nodded, unable to manage a smile. Out of the darkness and into the light, he reminded himself, as he saw the disturbing cast of her face. The scars
there, beneath the skin.
Nice fantasy, he thought.
Then he turned away, trying to preserve the fantasy a little while longer.
On the second-story balcony overlooking the courtyard of the Ursuline convent, Kuromaku breathed in the night air and closed his eyes. The aromas of the French Quarter tantalized his enhanced senses—the sharp smell of coffee, the spicy tang of Creole and Cajun cooking, beignets baking at Café du Monde—but there were other odors as well, some not nearly as pleasant.
Human sweat. Decay. And death. Kuromaku had the scent of blood. It permeated the air and wafted on the breeze to him. There was death in the city tonight, more than ever before. Hannibal’s vampires had infiltrated the home of Peter Octavian’s coven, and they were hunting humans under Peter’s protection.
But there was nothing to be done for it now. A greater danger loomed close on the horizon. The final confrontation between the two sides of this war of philosophy and blood was imminent. Kuromaku could sense the other vampires, out in the dark, prowling the French Quarter, but also hunting the dark, filthy streets of the warehouse district and the waterfront. And somewhere out there, he could sense his sister.
Tsumi.
It had pained him greatly to learn that his sister was allied with Hannibal, that she had tried to murder Peter, whom she had once loved dearly. Pained him. But not surprised him. Kuromaku was a warrior, as was Peter, though from an entirely different culture. Though Kuromaku had been trained his entire life to believe that honor was more important than victory, he had come to realize over the centuries that in war, honor was secondary. The life of a warrior was expendable if it meant the triumph over the enemy, the preservation of not only thousands of other lives, but the culture of a city, or a nation, or a world.
Tsumi understood none of this. She made no distinctions between honor and duty, only pursued her own pleasure, only cared for her own survival. She was nothing more than a predator. Cunning, and all the more dangerous because, other than Kuromaku himself, Tsumi cared for nothing.
And in his secret heart, where he held close all the emotions that had once made him human, Kuromaku wondered if Tsumi’s heart was cold and dead even to him.
He didn’t want to have to kill her. But he would do so without hesitation if she stood against him.
Voices carried up to Kuromaku from the courtyard, and he opened his eyes. Several of the shadows he’d met earlier had gathered there, including the one called Kevin, who seemed to have rallied the others around him with little more than his own pain and grief at the death of his lover. The black chrysalis inside which they all believed Octavian had retreated remained unchanged. Nothing moved within. And yet their expectations hung in the air like the threat of rain in a thunderhead. They all sensed the other vampires in the city, the blood being shed, the lives being extinguished.
Destiny was rocketing them toward that final, explosive conflict. They could all feel it. Kuromaku shivered in anticipation. He had fought in hundreds of wars, several of which had, quite literally, changed the world. But he had never fought a battle whose outcome would determine the fate of the entire human race.
He relished its coming.
“Hello?”
Kuromaku had heard the woman’s soft footsteps the moment she’d come onto the balcony. Even in the question of her greeting, her voice was lightly touched by a sultry rasp, feminine yet confident. He turned to face her, nodded and offered her a smile, which she returned. She was beautiful in a way modern men could rarely appreciate. Her eyes shone with life, her reddish hair fell in a tumble around her face, her lips and cheeks were bright with an ethereal lustre. The angles of her face might have been carved by a master.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.
“Are you Kuromaku?”
“I am. And you?”
“I’m Nikki Wydra,” she declared. “George tells me you may know something about . . . what’s happened to Peter.”
Her eyes flicked toward the courtyard, then back to focus on Kuromaku’s face. He knew her now. George had told him of this woman, and the nascent feelings she and Peter had begun to develop toward one another. She had been there the other night, almost been killed when . . .
“I’m sorry,” Kuromaku said.
Nikki tilted her head slightly. “What for?”
“My sister nearly killed you, I’m told,” he replied, then dipped his head in a small nod. “For her, I apologize.”
It seemed to take a moment before Nikki realized what he was referring to. Then surprise lit her face.
“Tsumi?” she asked. “That’s your sister?”
“Regrettably,” he admitted. “But please don’t hold it against me.”
Nikki blinked, apparently surprised by his humor, then smiled pleasantly.
“As far as what’s happened to Peter,” he said, “your guess, as they say, is as good as mine. However, if that thing down there isn’t a cocoon, I don’t know what it is.”
She flinched, then turned and went to the railing to look down at the courtyard. Nikki frowned, then hung her head slightly and her hair draped across her eyes, hiding her face from him.
“I’m having kind of a hard time with all this,” she said, but he still could not see her face through the curtain of her hair. “I mean, you all seem so . . . human. But you’re not human at all, are you? I mean, really, you’re scary bedtime stories come to life. It’s—shit, it’s almost funny.”
She snorted then, but he could tell that the laughter was only to cover her own despair.
“You’re right to think that we’re not entirely human,” Kuromaku admitted. “It would be dangerous to think otherwise. But neither are we, as a race, monsters. We are simply different. Alien, in a way that has nothing to do with space travel.”
She chuckled at that. Kuromaku went on.
“We have souls, Nikki,” he said. “I can promise you that. And hearts as well.”
Nikki lifted her chin, pushed her hair back from her eyes and met his gaze. There were tears on her face, and she wiped them away, embarrassed.
“I feel so stupid.”
“You care for Peter,” Kuromaku said simply. “What is stupid in that? He is an easy man to care for. One of the noblest, most passionate men I have ever encountered.”
“He’s a vampire!” she protested.
“Who has not at all forgotten what it means to be a man. To be human,” Kuromaku added.
There was a silence between them and. almost simultaneously, they looked down at the courtyard, at the shadows that milled around the chrysalis.
“You love him,” Kuromaku said. It was not a question.
“I haven’t known him long enough to love him,” Nikki snapped angrily, though she did not look up.
“No,” Kuromaku agreed. “But you do.”
She said nothing after that.
10
We wander ’round this desert,
and wind up following the wrong gods home.
—THE EAGLES, “Learn to Be Still”
THOUGH ONLY THE CHAPEL HAD STAINED glass windows, nearly every room in the convent retained some symbol of its former use. Crucifixes hung on many walls, along with icons and images of the Sacred Heart or praying hands. In the huge dining room, one entire wall was filled with calligraphy-etched passages from the Bible.
It would be virtually impossible for a member of Hannibal’s clan to infiltrate their headquarters. Certainly not if they followed Hannibal’s return to the old ways, the old faith. If it weren’t for that fact, Kevin might have been suspicious of the sudden appearance of this Kuromaku. A warrior, once allied with Peter, he claimed. And yet, he had arrived just at the moment when Peter would not be able to identify him.
Curious, most definitely, but not damning. Not yet.
He watched as the Japanese entered the dining room with Nikki, whom Kevin had taken an instant liking to. He’d picked this room simply because it was the largest, and it would allow him to address everyone si
multaneously. Everyone, of course, except for those shadows out in the city, trying to find vampires to kill.
And maybe one to bring back alive, if they followed Kevin’s instructions. It would help to know what Hannibal had planned. Even if they didn’t seem to have a chance in hell of doing anything about it. At least, not with any real success. Fortunately the odds stacked against them had apparently been lessened a bit, according to news reports CNN had been running out of its New York studio, now that its Atlanta headquarters had been destroyed along with the rest of the city. Hannibal wouldn’t be able to add that part of his clan to any attack plan. That was something, anyway.
Kuromaku had stopped on the other side of the room to read some of the scripture on the wall. Nikki stood with him, and George entered behind her. Kevin nodded to him. George knitted his brows, obviously wondering exactly what was going on here, but Kevin ignored him for the moment.
Kevin tried to remember what biblical passage was on the wall where Kuromaku was staring. Something from Exodus, he thought. Then Kuromaku seemed to sense his attention and turned to regard Kevin where he stood at the front of the room. After a moment he nodded and led Nikki and George to the long center table, where all three of them sat facing Kevin.
A few moments later, the room was full. George had asked the coven to spread the word, and they clearly had. There were more than fifty shadows in the room, not to mention the dozens out in the city already. And there were even more volunteers. Faces Kevin had never even seen before.
He sighed.
“Thanks for coming,” Kevin began. “All of you. I . . . as I look out there and see the faces of friends, and especially a lot of new faces, I realize that we really have made our home here. There are a lot of people in this city who know about our little family, and have made us welcome. Some of you are here tonight.
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