by TA Moore
He swung overhand, and the metal glittered in the moonlight as it descended toward Took’s head. Took swayed to the side and easily grabbed the thick muscled wrist. The guy might be one of Gabriel’s dogs, but he wasn’t a wolf. Took twisted the wrist until the arm cocked awkwardly, and then threw a punch up into the exposed armpit. The shoulder popped audibly out of the socket, and the bouncer foundered at the knees with a shrill whine.
“Stay down,” Took told him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet to flash the VINE ID in front of the man’s nose. “Or where you go next, everyone’s got bigger teeth than you.”
The man tried to snarl through a pain-twisted face. “Gabriel will fuck up your life.”
Took gave the man’s arm another twist. The dislocated joint made a strange noise as it turned.
“He already tried,” Took said as the bouncer writhed on the ground at his feet. “Someone else did it better.”
The door to the bar finally opened and Gabriel looked out. He glanced down at the bouncer on the ground and grimaced in disappointment.
“You’re a shit guard dog, Harry,” he said.
Harry whined and kicked at the ground with his boots, his face red with pain. He didn’t seem to care too much about Gabriel’s judgment.
“Are we going to talk?” Took asked. “Or should I just rip off his arm and hit you with the bloody end?”
Harry tried to scream his objection, but all that came out was a strangled squeal. It made Gabriel crack that crooked grin of his, a flash of stubbled dimple and white, white teeth.
“It’d be rude not to at least hear you out after you came so far,” Gabriel said as he stepped back and waved his hand in exaggerated invitation. For a second, Took wondered if he should just skip to the fight, but he needed answers. He let go of Harry’s arm—the big man went limp on the ground in relief, his breathing ragged and the faint smell of piss in the air—and stepped over him. As he crossed the threshold, Gabriel leaned in to growl in his ear. “Then once we’re done, I’ll put you in the ground where you belong.”
Took didn’t even flinch. It wasn’t the first time his father had threatened to kill him.
Chapter Sixteen
SHE’D BEEN beautiful once—more than beautiful. When her beauty palled on her admirers—like rich food you’d overindulged in—she’d spent her fortune to reclaim their admiration. When it wasn’t enough, she sold her soul.
Elizabeth Bathory, one of only two vampires in the USA who didn’t trace their stunted family tree back to Tepes himself, the boyar who claimed the lion’s share of this new land when they arrived, before the terms of the Accord whittled it down to an advisory role and a throne room carved from salt.
“Countess,” Madoc said as he knelt in front of her.
The woman who inspired the Wicked Queen in every human fairy tale was a salt-wrapped husk. Stiff white armor plate creased and folded around her, the salt caked over silks and velvets long since rotted away. She was a shriveled brown thing with dry, white eyes in the heart of it.
Her voice rattled in her throat as stick-like tendons rubbed together like cricket legs to make a sound.
“A sor… cer… er killed the… children?” she murmured. “Put to it… by the… humans?”
Even in that ruin of a voice, Madoc could sense her weigh the idea. She had to decide if she wanted to believe it or not.
“Probably not,” he said.
“If I… say… they did,” Elizabeth ground out coldly, “they did.”
“But you don’t have to decide yet,” Madoc said. “Reopen the case. Give me Waring. The children who disappeared might still be alive.”
She didn’t need to speak. He knew that wasn’t motivation enough for her. Of all the boyars, she was the only one who hadn’t given the Kiss to her own children, who never wanted a dhampir to quick her womb. Daughters grew too beautiful, she always said as she watched them age and sicken, and sons too ambitious.
“Or dead,” he admitted. “Either way the Proverbial Church and their missions are implicated somehow. Even if we don’t want war—”
He didn’t. Peace, however full of compromise, had proved to his taste. And if there had to be war… not yet, not while Took’s traumatic rebirth was so fresh in his mind, when his loyalties still leaned toward the breathing.
“—we’ll have leverage,” he finished.
That made Elizabeth stir herself enough to nod in approval, and her dry ball of a head wobbled on her stalk of a neck inside the cowl of salt. She had no fear of war. Blood delighted her and death aroused her, but politics were her one true love.
“You think this… boy… of yours,” she ground out, “can be… trusted?”
Madoc felt his back tighten. He didn’t like the thought of Took in Elizabeth’s mind, didn’t want her to dwell on him.
“He’s mine,” he said, confidence layered over his words. “I won’t let him do anything to endanger us.”
A sigh like a man’s last breath rattled out of her. “Do as you think best, then,” she said. “I will… grease the wheels of the other boyars.”
The salt cracked and crumbled. Madoc set his jaw and watched it season the ground. A cured hand on a stick-thin arm, fat rendered down greasy and white, reached out toward him. Jewels still glittered cold on her fingers.
“You owe… a tithe,” she said.
Madoc did. He took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. Even in her desiccation, she was stronger than him. No one would call her beautiful now. Her hair had rotted and turned brittle, her face was a skull loosely covered with cheap leather, and her mouth was a slash of vanity red around a snaggle of rot-browned teeth. But her fangs were still sharp and white—sickles jabbed out of receded gums, as though she chewed on the salt to keep them sharp.
He obediently tilted his head to give her his throat and set his teeth to endure it. Her bone-hard fingers twisted his head and yanked it farther down, nails dug down into his scalp. Excitement rattled in her chest as she licked his throat with a dry strap of a tongue. Then she ripped into him. Pain was the point, not pleasure. Her fangs tore his skin and scraped over the bones of his neck like a peasant who sucked the meat off a goose’s bones. His blood spilled down her throat and seeped out of her rotted guts, the wet, black stain of it soaked into her thighs. She ripped at the edges of the wound with her fingers to tear it open, fresh gouts of slow, cold blood left to drip over the dried up sacks of her tits.
Madoc gripped the arm of her salt throne until it cracked and crumbled under his fingers. The pain took his legs from under him, and he slumped into her lap, cradled like a child as she tore his throat open from one side to the other.
It would end. He’d always been her favorite, the one servant who didn’t lust after her like a dog, and he was still useful. She wouldn’t kill him.
As she sucked at his throat, supped him like she’d starved, Madoc slid down into the dark. He didn’t think she’d kill him.
BACK AT the jet, Madoc slouched in the leather seats with a pint of cold blood curdled in his gut and another mixed into a bottle of whiskey at his elbow. It would do, but there was little pleasure in it.
“Did Took try to call you?” he pressed Lawrence on the other side of the computer screen. “He should have been in touch to update you about Waring.”
She hunched over on her desk, her face too close to the screen. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe he stopped to feed.”
Jealousy scratched at the inside of Madoc’s throat. Or maybe that was just the scars healing. He took a swig of tainted whiskey. It was petty, worse it was selfish. He’d wanted Took there to swear over his injuries and bare his throat for comfort, the cradle of a lover’s hand against his torn scalp as Madoc gave pleasure instead of pain.
He shifted as his cock thickened at the idea, his fantasy eager to expand further to Took naked under him and the low, hungry noises he made as Madoc fucked him.
“Maybe,” he said. His voice caught and he took another drink to
moisten it. “The boyars agreed to release Waring to our custody. The case is ours. So if West obstructs any of you, if he even drags his feet, remind him exactly who he works for.”
Lawrence raised her eyebrows. “My mother?”
Madoc tilted his glass toward the screen in acknowledgment. “And those whom she answers to.”
“The boyars,” Lawrence said. Her voice trembled with something too close to awe for Madoc’s liking. “Did you really speak to them?”
“To one,” Madoc said. “Elizabeth.”
Lawrence sighed and absently brushed a hand over her hair. “Is she still as beautiful as ever? Of them all, she gave up the most when they agreed to confine themselves for the Accord.”
Not how Madoc remembered it. Not quite.
He set the whiskey down. It didn’t have much effect on him, but most of a bottle was still enough to loosen his tongue more than he should allow, if only from the old habits of company.
“She hasn’t changed,” he said. It wasn’t much of a lie. The withered raisin thing in the shroud of salt had already plumped back up to simply raddled from her feast of Madoc’s blood. She could be beautiful again if she wished, and the person under the salt was the same monstrous bitch she’d always been.
Madoc had given her his loyalty, but it had never blinded him.
“Why bring him back?” Lawrence asked. “I thought you were going to just interview him there.”
“There were developments,” Madoc said. “Is Pally there?”
Lawrence scowled but turned the laptop around to aim it at the other side of the desk. The sight of his face caught on camera made Pally scowl, as if that would make it less pretty. His beauty had never pleased him, not when he was a Knight who viewed his own comely face as an invitation to sin or as a new vampire whose beauty had become a commodity. Behind him Quick looked up from something that flashed on his laptop. He gave Madoc a quick nod.
“What could develop under The Salt?” Pally asked.
Madoc grabbed the tablet and got up. He walked up to the front of the plane, where he’d left Waring cuffed to the steel rings sunk into the structure of the jet.
“Don’t look into his eyes,” he warned as he turned the tablet around. It was likely that Waring had ruined his spell when he spoke, and it would take a full year to cast another. And unlikely that he could do… that jump… through a computer screen. That wasn’t a risk Madoc was willing to take, however, when it would end with Waring in Pally’s body. Once upon a time, under another name, Pally had been the closest thing Madoc had to a peer in slaughter. “Our young murderer has more… esoteric talents.”
Waring looked more the sorcerer now. Char marks fluttered under his skin where the magic had turned on him, flecks of ash caught in his eyes and inked over his lips. He’d been bridled with a nail, a leather strap twisted around the back of his head to hold it in place, and the other nails were driven through his hands and feet.
Barbaric, but Madoc had done his best to minimize the damage. The nails were laced between the bones, not through them, and by rights, he should have put one of the nails through Waring’s tongue.
Despite his situation, Waring looked aggressively placid and had remained silent even when they pierced his hands. Now he just stared blankly to the left of the screen. His eyes only flickered slightly when Pally snarled at him.
“Sorcerer,” he spat. “What else can you expect of Hunters? First they lie down with dogs, now they get up with demons.”
Madoc could have pointed out that Tepes was a sorcerer himself, or had been before he was bitten. It was Tepes’s sorcery that let him bind his boyars to him, seal the blood-hungry greed that always destroyed Anakim alliances, and rise up to rule the Empire. He didn’t.
Pally’s prejudices might not make any sense, but they were his.
“Took thinks….”
Madoc paused as he considered how to shorthand the possession and eviction and then how to convince Pally and Lawrence that Took’s story of those “tufts” of memory caught in his mind wasn’t just the rags of old trauma.
“Took managed to get him to talk,” he said. It wasn’t even a lie. “That’s why his magic backfired on him—it had its pound of flesh.”
Waring groaned out something like a bitter laugh and leaned his head back against the headrest. It mustn’t have counted as communication by magic’s rules, for his skin didn’t darken any further.
“And learned what?”
“That some of the kidnapped children are still alive,” he said. “Somewhere. And that he doesn’t trust VINE to be the good guys.”
“We did imprison him,” Lawrence pointed out in the background, guilt in her voice. “Brutalize him, just by sending him to The Salt. I can’t blame him for holding a grudge.”
Madoc took a second to make a note to deal with that. It was good for Lawrence to acknowledge her mistakes—God knew, it wasn’t something Madoc could model for her—but not to wallow in regret. If this was enough to wipe the stain from her file and she was turned, she’d live too long and have too many mistakes on her ledger to dwell on every one.
If not, well, Madoc still expected her to be a functional agent and trust her own judgment.
Lawrence’s self-worth could wait, as harsh as that sounded. The case couldn’t. They didn’t have to worry about Waring’s death anymore, but the fate of the dhampir children was a deadline that Madoc actually cared about.
“No,” Madoc told her as he studied Waring’s face. The magic might have bridled Waring’s tongue, but it didn’t seem interested in a block on simple understanding. “Waring sold his tongue for this secret, stayed in The Salt for two years rather than let someone down. This isn’t about him. He doesn’t trust VINE for the same reason I don’t.”
In the background he heard Lawrence splutter, but he ignored her. She hadn’t been there when Took disappeared, she hadn’t been part of the investigation. Madoc leaned over and braced his hands on the armrests as he stared into Waring’s scared eyes. It was a risk, but even witch-hobbled as he was, Madoc thought it was worth it.
“Someone at VINE, or connected to them, hurt someone he loves,” Madoc said. “Didn’t they?”
It was the slightest nod, but it still filled the recycled air of the plane with the smell of charred meat. Waring twitched in the chair and clenched his jaw against the pain, but it wasn’t as violent as before. The attack left him shaken, and smoke exhaled around the nail that muzzled him, but he was still conscious.
Madoc made a disgusted sound and pushed himself back from the seat.
“So now we have a witness who won’t talk,” he groused, “and even if they change their mind, can’t talk. ”
“I don’t think so,” Quick corrected him.
Madoc glanced down at the tablet and into the old vampire’s narrowed eyes. “What?”
“I don’t think it’s silence,” Quick said but then corrected himself. “I don’t think so, anyhow. It’s like computer code. You have to be precise. He can’t excuse himself, he can’t say, gesture, or I don’t know, tap out in code anything that would justify what he did. It probably seemed a good deal when he made it, but now he can’t even ask to go to the toilet. Since the minute he speaks, people start to ask why he won’t talk about something else. Right?”
Madoc turned to look at Waring, who stared back through tangled, singe-ended hair. The only expression on his face was desperation and maybe frustration.
“He couldn’t risk it when the spell, whatever it was, still protected… whoever he’s protected,” Madoc said. He flipped his hand to dismiss the details for later. “Especially not when he didn’t trust anyone.”
That was a familiar feeling.
“Not even the people he should,” Pally muttered. He looked sour when Madoc glanced at him. “I… need to tell you something. When you get back.”
It wasn’t a question that Pally had secrets. He’d been a cardinal too. All of them held close some of their boyar’s secrets, bloody tinged a
nd weighted. Then they had their own, the only things they could really claim as their own possessions during their long service.
That he wanted to spend one on Madoc was the unusual element.
“Now,” Madoc corrected him sharply.
Pally reluctantly tightened his mouth. “Privately,” he bargained down.
“Hold on,” Lawrence said as she grabbed her laptop back again. “If this is about who we should trust, we should all hear it. What happened to Biters don’t have secrets?”
“That’s a lie,” Quick told her. “We all have secrets, like you sending reports to your mother.”
Shock made Lawrence gape, and she tried to stammer out what couldn’t decide whether to be a confession or a denial. As she tried to navigate her way through a bit of both, Quick grabbed her arm and pulled her up and away.
Madoc waited until the door slammed. Then he flicked his attention back to Pally.
“If you have done something dire,” he said. “I’ve done worse.”
Pally rubbed his hand over his face. “I would rather do this face to face,” he told his palm. “When Took… when Luke was kidnapped—”
The low, scraped noise caught in Madoc’s ears a second after he realized it had come out of his throat. He could taste smoke on the back of his tongue, and he nearly choked as he swallowed it back down.
“Or perhaps not,” Pally said warily. He held up both hands. “Not that. There’s not much I can deny I would do—my history always makes a liar—but that, I didn’t do.”
“Talk.” Madoc walked away from Waring. Anger could make him cruel, and he needed Waring to trust them enough for the gauntlet of speech at some point. He made himself inhale, his lungs ached as they expanded, and let it out again. “Quickly, Solomon.”
Maybe Pally had forgotten that Madoc was one of the few who still remembered that name. He flinched as though it had stung him and clenched his jaw. They glared at each other as they remembered who they had both been, once.
It was Pally who backed down first, or at least, unclenched his jaw.