Rebellious Hood

by Kendrai Meeks

  “The process?” Amy asked, clutching his arms for support. “What process?”

  “Becoming a vampire, of course.” He said it like he was telling her water was wet. “Unless that’s what you’re after.”

  Amy shook her head. “I can’t even eat a pink steak, I don’t think I’d have much luck with sucking down human blood.”

  They rushed off to the bathroom, Markus closing the door behind them.

  “You there.” Mother pointed at Caleb. “Have you gone through rites?”

  The slayer’s eyes hadn’t left Inga’s dripping head since it had left its owner’s body. “I have.”

  “Good.” Brünhild tossed the head atop the corpse on the floor. “My sympathies for the loss of one of your own, but now is not the time to grieve. There mustn’t be any evidence of her existence when the authorities get here. Is it true that your dead dissolve in water?”

  “What?” Caleb seemed shocked by the sentiment. “Um, yeah. Yeah, it is.”

  Brünhild jerked her head toward the bathroom. “As soon as they’re out, take that one’s body and wash it away with haste.”

  Cody shifted back to his human. “Oh, come on, Brünhild. You can’t possibly think you’re going to be able to cover all this up in less than ten minutes, do you?”

  The Grand Matron quirked an eyebrow. “How long have you known me, Cody Ryland?”

  The werewolf fidgeted, which paired with the fact that he was naked, upped the awkward level. “Um, all my life, ma’am.”

  “And you doubt my ability to do this?”

  Cody cocked a hip and shied his eyes. He may be an alpha, but he had also lived years under my mother’s direct authority and worse, on numerous school field trips on which she’d chaperoned. “Um, no ma’am, sorry.”

  Brünhild picked up some gauze sitting on a tray at Alex’s bedside and proceeded to wipe off the blood from her short sword. “I won’t ask what’s brought you all the way from Paradise, but we will talk on this, Alpha. Janus?”

  The diminutive vampire promptly appeared at my mother’s side. “Yes, Matron?”

  “Markus will evacuate this lot as soon as he emerges with the huey. You and I will stay behind and handle the fall out. We need everyone to believe this was a gas explosion, a terrible accident that claimed the life of mother and child. Can you handle that?”

  Yan tipped his head. “Of course, Matron. And I should advise you also that I can hear the sirens of the emergency vehicles and authorities approaching. You should probably reclaim and hide your silver.”

  Without arguing, my mother held up her weapon. A solid object one moment, its edges shimmered and turned in on themselves, flooding down her sleeve and under her cloak. A moment later, the flowing garment itself faded from existence, revealing an odd choice for slaying wear: a smart pantsuit. So, she was going to act the role of a huey while Yan mind-wobbled the actual humans to believe every lying word that came from her mouth, huh?

  Part of me actually admired the forethought.

  Markus emerged from the bathroom with Amy, her blond hair still dripping. She wore nothing but a pale pink hospitable gown that clung to her curves at unnatural angles.

  Her words barely managed to sneak past her chattering teeth. “I feel violated. Seriously Markus, you have no idea how to touch a woman.”

  “Gee, let’s wonder about that, shall we?” Markus pushed Amy forward into my arms, then heeded Caleb’s request to help pick up Alex’s body.

  Propping Amy up, I pushed the two of us forward. “Strike first, die last, is that it, Mother? Thanks to you, my one lead on where to hunt for the other asenaics in Spain is gone.”

  Keeping up her “Zero Geri” policy, she continued to ignore me. “Markus, are there enough cars here to transport everyone back to Triberg?”

  “Yes, Matron. We have two SUVs parked outside.”

  “Good. Cody?”

  The werewolf turned. “Yeah?”

  Brünhild’s eyes drifted down. “Clothe yourself.” Then nodding to Markus, she said, “Take the others and go now. Only Janus and the slayer are to stay. I’ll need their assistance to contain this damage.”

  Markus hesitated. “Matron?”

  “Yes, Markus?”

  Just at that second, Mina’s little grunt rose through the silence, as though asking in my cousin’s stead, “What about me?’

  For the briefest second, my mother didn’t have an immediate response. The hesitation was over in two blinks as she steeled herself. “Yes, take the baby too.”

  “Got it.” The brawny hood clapped twice. “Let’s go, crew. We got to move.”

  Cody, who had found a pair of green scrubs in one of the supply doors, pulled a simpering Anya to her feet. The poor dear had become the victim of her own fight-or-flight instincts in which she’d gone the unspoken third route: don’t make a move, shut down completely, and hope it’s all just a bad dream.

  “Come, sweetheart. She’s gone, and that’s terrible, but we need to get out of here.”

  My father assumed Amy as his burden. Perhaps to help me. Perhaps out of concern for her. Perhaps just because it brought him within a few feet of his wife for even the tiniest of moments. Brünhild tracked him, but never once did her resolve crack. As the others started toward the door, following my mother’s orders without question, I lingered. The anger dwelling within me had finally reached critical mass. The barrier would no longer hold.

  “Wait a god damn minute!”

  Stopped in their tracks, everyone swung their head in my direction. Except my mother, of course, who only let her expression fall into one of general annoyance.

  But I was here, and I would be seen and heard. “The last time I saw you, you attacked me, banished me. You made it perfectly clear that I was nothing to you, that I was relinquished, disowned, an outsider to the world in which I’d been reared and raised. And now you’re just going to show up out of nowhere and start commanding around my friends and commandeering my choices?”

  “This is largely the result of your choices.” For the first time since she entered the room, Brünhild squared her gaze on me. “Besides, isn’t this what you wanted? Not to be a hood?”

  “Yes, it was.” My tone leather, my jaw steel, I chewed my words. “Only, I never was a hood, was I? And you knew it. But you still tried to force me into the role, tried to force me to be your little protégé, all the time knowing I was an asenaic.”

  She smirked in annoyance. “Your point being?”

  I held my arms out wide. “How could you do that to me? How could you do it to Papa? How could you torture the people you supposedly loved when their only fault was being who they are? How could you be that much of a... a bitch?”

  That one word, one I’d thought thousands of times, but never had the guts to say, finally cut a lash across her resolve. My mother towered over me, easily five inches my better, and lowered her voice in a way that somehow made it feel louder.

  “How dare you? Everything I have done was to protect my family.” She pointed at the corpse laying prone on the floor. “That woman, the vampire you thought was your friend? She wanted to kill you when you were four years old, but I stopped her. And have you ever asked at what price? No. She knew the Ravens would take you, use you, bleed you. You want to know why I forced you to train harder, to know more, to be tougher than even my own mother, one of those most infamous and cruel matrons ever to wear the red cloak, ever did of me? It’s because making you this tough was the only way to make sure you’d survive.”

  I bit back tears, even though whether they were born of pain or of anger, I didn’t know any more. “But what kind of mother pushes away her own child?”

  “One who knew the cost if she didn’t. Do you think it didn’t hurt me, having to constantly hurt you? I ached with every cruel word and bitter pronouncement, but it had to be done. You had to be self-sufficient, self-reliant. You had to be able to run, as far and alone as necessary, to keep yourself safe. Any attachments I fostered in you would
be to your detriment. If you’re expecting an apology from me, you’re going to be waiting a long time, because it’s not coming. I’m not your friend, Gerwalta. I’m your mother. My job is to provide for your needs, not your desires, and what you need to do right now is haul ass. Now move.”

  Cody’s arms around me reminded me that I still had a body. “Come on, kiddo. We’re keeping the others.”

  Shaking out my confusion, I surveyed the room and found it was only him, my mother, and myself. And just like that, we were moving. At some point, we must have gotten into one of the SUVs. It wasn’t until I was laying in the back on the impromptu cot that had been set up for Alex, the baby placed in my arms and Cody laying across the way from me, that I even became cognizant of the fact that we’d left the parking lot.

  “Like old times, huh?” The werewolf reached out, rubbing my arm. “You and me, laid out in the back of a vehicle after one of your mom’s screeds?”

  The joke brought no joy. My soul was bleeding, and beside me lay an infant who was suddenly... mine. Mina flinched, her arms flailed, her limbs out of control.

  “She’s so...” Helpless? Useful? Doomed? “Orphaned.”

  His comforting smile faltered. “She is.”

  “Inga and Alex are dead.”

  In my mind’s eye, the events of the last twenty minutes replayed in a loop of terror. Inga charging Alex’s bed, the slayer’s attempt to send a solarium at her attacker. The magic somehow robbing her of her energy, turning back on her, and her body falling limp to the cot. Caleb screaming as he dove, getting to the new mother too late. The havoc of all of us trying both to protect Anya, and not hurt Inga, who was, after all, our friend. Or so we’d thought.

  The moment the vampire’s body had fallen away from her head as my mother’s sword cleaved her in two, because she was the only one who understood who Inga really was.

  “She saved us, Cody. She flew us out of Istanbul, she... She supported Caleb, gave Tobias a job, got him fake papers to make it possible for him to stay in the US... She was our friend, and my mother just cut off her head. She’s dead because I’m a... Because...”

  “Because she was trying to kill you.” The voice was my father’s. Based on the way it projected through the car, he was at the wheel. “For the second time in your life, she threatened to destroy you. Your mother took her word once, and Brünhild does not give second chances.”

  Of all the faults I could assign to my mother, this might turn out to be the biggest yet. Brünhild should have let Inga kill me when I was four. I never would have lived my life, my very existence a burden to my family. Cody’s father might still be alive. Tobias never would have been captured by the Ravens. And Alex... She might still be a prisoner in Vlad’s harem, but she wouldn’t be a corpse that my ex-boyfriend had been ordered to dissolve in a hospital shower.

  This child would still have hope.

  “I have no idea how to care for a baby, especially not one like her.”

  Cody’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you need to care for her, Geri? What is she to you?”

  A source of guilt? A debt I owed?

  The truth brought a smidgeon of warmth to my shaken spirit. “She’s pack.”

  The alpha’s mouth quirked. “What do you mean, she’s pack?”

  The last few words I’d exchanged with the slayer before the doctors made the incision replayed in the back of my mind. “Alex asked me to be the baby’s godmother. I said yes. And then... Cody, am I going moonmad? Is this how it starts, with delusions?”

  His voice remained soft, but a lilt suggested suspicion. “Why, did you see something?”

  “I’m not sure. I passed out, and maybe it was a figment of my imagination, or... It’s impossible. I thought I heard Tobias’s voice inside my head, like he was whispering right in my ear.”

  He grinned his relief. “No, Geri, you’re not going moonmad. That was a quickening.”

  “A quickening?” I repeated the term like it came from a foreign lexicon, even though I’d heard the term all my life. “The weird thing that happens when an alpha accepts a new member into their pack? But Tobias is my alpha, and he’s hundreds of miles away.”

  I tried to quell the odd thrill that ran through me when thinking of the roguish and rough Englishman in that way. Genetics and hormones made odd bedfellows.

  Cody placed a finger in Mina’s hand, the tiny creature gripping for dear life. “Might have been a proxy acceptance. I’ve heard of it, but it’s uncommon. The distance doesn’t matter, though. You’ve probably just never heard that because, well, you know, werewolves aren’t exactly globetrotters in general. The quickening happens to the whole pack, not just the alpha.”

  “You’re saying I’m acting as some kind of proxy alpha?” I asked. Cody bobbed his head. “But that can’t be. One, I’m a woman. And two, I’m barely even a wolf.”

  “Being an alpha isn’t all about the bloodline. It’s about attitude. It’s about who’s willing to step up and do what needs to be done to keep the pack safe in a time of crisis. If that doesn’t describe you, Geri, I don’t know what does. Men make kings. Wars make rulers.”

  Even with all the crush of truth and tyranny and trouble, the thought warmed me. “Then I did hear Tobias, because I had a quickening. Because I’m wolf enough.”

  “Tell you a secret, Little Red? The day you stood up to me at the wedding, when I told you to back off of your moping, I felt a.... I don’t know, some kind of snap.”

  “I told you, I’m going to apologize for that.”

  “No, Red, that ain’t what I’m driving at.” He pulled his hand back from the infant’s grasp and wiped it down his face. “I mean, I felt you leave me. Not physically, but like, metaphysically. I’d always joked you were pack, and then you up and proved it by becoming a rogue. And then damned Tobias went right after you, didn’t he?”

  My memories traced back through that night, to the first kiss Tobias and I had shared, a sweet recollection that I didn’t understand until much later had been real and not a dream.

  “I suppose he did.” But any sweet delight I took in the thought of being bound to Tobias that way ceded in the larger bitter implications. “But that means I’m running out of time. I was barely able to save Tobias from lunacity once, and that was when he was with me. I have to find him, and soon. But where?”

  “You said something about Spain.”

  “I was going to try and find the other asenaics,” I said. “Igor said he’d been getting his blood from a special source there. Igor will lead the Ravens to them eventually, sooner rather than later. They’ve already moved as far west as Venice.”

  The werewolf’s forehead wrinkled, but I summed up my explanation by saying only “long story.”

  “The hood archives wouldn’t have that kind of information?” Cody asked.

  I shook my head. “Our history says that Gerwalta and Andrea’s baby died with them.”

  “But you got this inheritance from your father,” Cody said. “Just trace back his bloodline, then wheel it forward.”

  “My dad’s family immigrated to Argentina from Spain three centuries ago. I can go back and find the origins, but moving forward through the generations... The Casa de Amarillo is a few hundred hoods spread out across the western Mediterranean basin.”

  My finger traced down Mina’s cheek. The child, strengthened perhaps by her semi-lupine body, turned her face into my touch.

  “I don’t have time to covertly work my way through that big of a list, and that’s assuming the Yellow Matrons gave any candidates permission to talk to me. I’ll need to figure something else out and quick. I can’t let Tobias go moonmad, and I can’t let Vlad hurt him any longer.”

  “Don’t worry, Little Red, we’re going to find him. And after that... well, I’m not sure what kind of relationship is possible for you two, but at the very least, you’ll have your friend back.”

  I grinned at him as my eyes fell closed. “You mean another friend back.”

  E
IGHTEEN

  Bitter wind bit my skin, jolting me awake. A weapon! I needed a weapon! Instinct beckoned my silver skin to yield to my command, but found it lacking. Didn’t matter. I could kill with my fists. Break bone with my kick. Claw out eyes.

  “Geri!” Cody yelled. “Stop! You’re going to hurt Mina.”

  Mina? Who’s Mina?

  A tiny cough rose from a bundle of warmth beside me, opening the gates of memory that sleep had closed with mercy. Sunlight stung my eyes, pouring in from the open back hatch of the SUV, a sea of bright in which Cody’s face swam. Clarity came in both mind and body as the backdrop of circumstance returned. The last time I had seen the edifice behind the werewolf had been from this same car. Then, however, a dozen hoods bearing guns pointed my direction had stood between it and the outer bailey walls. Now, there was just Cody, Amy, Anya, and my dad, all staring at me with a mix of concern and fear.

  “I’m fine.”

  No one had asked it aloud, but they were all screaming it with their eyes. I sat up, turning to check on the child beside me. In body, Mina was fine. Except that she was hungry. And wet. How did I know? The former by some odd instinct. The latter, because the smell was undeniable.

  “We’re going to need diapers,” I said, even as I worked to undo the bundle of soiled blankets. Would that I could wash her, but that formalities of Schloss Wolfsretter demanded ceremony, procedure. Time. Babies were not unprecedented or even uncommon in the keep. How could they be, when our matriarchal society put women in most the leadership roles, and demanded them to reproduce? It was also true, however, that self-reliance remained a core value. When you came to the compound, other than food and basic toiletries, you were expected to bring what you and yours needed.

  “Come on.” Cody tugged gently on my ankle. “Let’s take her inside and then we can worry about that.”

  I shook my head. “She’ll catch her death in cold. I have to wrap her in something dry. Doesn’t someone have a coat or something?”

  They wore blank expressions. We’d fled the hospital with such haste, none of us had had time to grab anything. I hoped Caleb, Yan, and my mom remembered to clean up the various things we’d left behind.