Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  He passed the trip with a short list of who could have done this. It was a very short list.

  At last the truck stopped. The engine grumbled on, overclocked and overused, as they dragged Madoc and the others out of the back. A rough hand on his collar hauled him to his feet and marched him toward a low-slung wood building that proclaimed itself the clubhouse with a carved sign over the door.

  Six steps up onto the veranda and then they threw him through the door. With Madoc’s hands behind him, it was impossible to catch his balance or preserve his dignity. He hit the ground and rolled, half gagged on his own bloody drool.

  It was Lawrence who caught his arms and pulled him into a sitting position. She dodged a backhand to the head and hunched over him protectively as the other hunters filed into the room.

  One of the men, bony and unremarkable in his camo, saw the pale, grubby kids huddled against the wall. Despite everything, he had the gall to sound relieved, a father reunited with his daughter. “Kerry! Thank God.”

  He slung his shotgun over his shoulder and crossed the room to pull her into a hug. That she tried to flinch away from him didn’t seem to matter as he petted her hair and told her how he’d missed her.

  “Leave her alone,” Annabelle Franklin, her face familiar at this point, protested as she lunged forward. “She doesn’t belong to you.”

  It was Took who pulled her back and muttered something in her ear. He gave Madoc a quick, guilty look but stayed where he was until the one-sided reunion was over and the men had dragged in Waring and his hysterical mother. Annabelle tried to run over to him, but one of the guards grabbed her arm and slammed her back into the wall. No sentimental reunions for her, then.

  Once everyone was inside, Took staggered over the room to Madoc. Sympathy made him wince as he saw the hobble bar stretched over his back. Instinct made him reach for it and rip his fingers open on the barbed wire ties, but one of guards grabbed a pale kid and dragged him out of line.

  “Hands off,” he snapped.

  Took glared but did as he was told.

  “I missed something,” Took admitted as he sank down next to Madoc. He brushed his hand carefully over Madoc’s battered cheek. “I don’t even know what. Who.”

  Madoc tilted his face into Took’s hand. “We all did.”

  “Where’s Pally?” Lawrence asked sharply. “Quick?”

  Took shuddered. He nodded out the door into the bright morning light. “They shot Pally in the head,” he said, “and dumped him into a well.”

  “That—” Lawrence blurted. She caught herself before all the words got out. That wouldn’t be enough to kill Pally. He was an old vampire, nearly as old as Tepes himself, and it would take fire to keep him down. But it would be enough to incapacitate him until nightfall, and that would be too late for them. She swallowed hard. “Quick?”

  “Waste not, want not,” Took said as he looked over his shoulder. “They need to build the kids up again. I’m next. They’re going to keep us like cows, milk us until we run dry, and then throw us in the well.”

  There was a touch of panic under his voice at the thought of being a captive again. Madoc turned his head and pressed a bloody kiss against Took’s palm. “No,” he promised.

  Lawrence grimaced at them both and pulled away. She started to scramble to her feet, but a bullet punched into the ground next to her and made her drop reluctantly back onto her knees.

  “How did they even do this?” she demanded in frustration. “I saw Madoc fight these bastards on the road. Even if they are stronger, he could have beat them if he hadn’t lain down and given up. The three of you should have made short work of them. Pally alone—”

  Took grimaced. “We nearly did, but—”

  “Like I told him,” Sheriff Anderson interrupted as he walked into the room, one hand wrapped around the thin arm of a scruffy little girl. From her age and the faded red in her hair, it was Augusta Aron. There was blood on his shirt and lips, a gory tint that he licked eagerly and absently at. “We need the children, but we don’t need all the children. All it took was a demonstration, and your friends saw the error of their ways.”

  He pointed with his gun toward a gory halo of blood and hair painted onto the wall. Something was crumpled at the bottom of the wall, roughly covered by the jackets and shirts of the other children, but Madoc tried not to look at that.

  “Brave man,” Madoc said. “To kill children.”

  “He was a sacrifice,” Anderson said. He shoved the little girl into another guard’s hands and wiped with sudden fastidiousness at the blood on his uniform shirt. “We’ve all sacrificed, cardinal. Every Proverbial family that lost a child. Every parent who took one of these undead cuckoos into the nest to raise. Generations of sacrifice.”

  “Why?” Took asked.

  Anderson glowered him. “I wasn’t talking to you, wetmouth,” he spat as he took a quick step across the floor. There was contempt in his voice, but he couldn’t hide the flash of envious satisfaction as he pistol whipped Took to the ground. “This was a conversation between equals.”

  Was it? Madoc swallowed the gritty blood in his mouth and stared at Anderson. Dhampir darkened in the sun and faded in the dark. If they’d locked Madoc up long enough before they killed him, that first time, he’d have been as pale as the little ghost child under guard back in Charleston. He’d never seen one of them so dark they were weathered. Of course, he’d never seen one of them grow old.

  “Did they steal you from Europe too?” he asked.

  “Rescued,” Anderson corrected him as he turned to look at him. “My parents saved me, raised me in the Church, beat the devil out of me.”

  “Made a Hunter out of you,” Madoc said.

  Anderson smiled like that was a compliment to his parents’ childrearing skills.

  That had happened in the old days. Dhampir were perfect Hunters if you raised them right—strong, dangerous, and most Anakim had an instinctive reluctance to hurt them. VINE never imagined it would be a problem over here. Dhampir were always rare—Anakim reproduced with their bite ten times as often as with childbirth, at least—but even more so in America. It had taken two hundred years for the first dhampir to be born on this continent. Either the long trip over the salt sea had rendered them generationally infertile or it was something in the air of their unfriendly new home. Either way, no one had been likely to lose track of one of their rare children.

  It hadn’t occurred to anyone that Hunters would import them from Europe.

  “That isn’t what you’re doing with these kids, though,” Took said as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. Blood poured from the split in his forehead. “Matthew was practically an adult when you kidnapped him to replace the children Waring rescued—”

  “Stole,” Anderson corrected flatly as he avoided looking at Took.

  Madoc spat out half a tooth—maybe Thomas could make his wife a ring out of it—and looked Anderson over. He remembered the church pew under his ass when he was a child, the preacher’s finger jabbed his way as the mean old bastard held him up as an example of sin, the children who wouldn’t play with him, his lover who never really thought he had a soul and had turned on him all too easily. It had nearly ruined him.

  What would that be like for a whole, long life of drymouthed “sacrifice”?

  “How much did they hate you?” Madoc asked.

  Anderson stared at him for a second and then grimaced and took a step back. “I raised myself above them,” he said. “I took secret pride in how strong I was, how much they needed me. They knew that. That’s when I realized that I had another sacrifice to make.”

  “He killed his son,” Annabelle blurted from where she hunched against the wall. “Fed his grandson nightshade and bloodmeal from vampires, cut his wrists and bled him into buckets that they all drank from. So they’d be strong and fast. Like him. Like us. Over and over again until Garrett couldn’t, didn’t wanna, come back.”

  Anderson turned and pointed his gun at her. “W
e purified him. His soul was finally clean and it went to heaven.”

  The threat of the gun didn’t have any effect on Annabelle. She spat at him, a wet gobbet of defiance that caught on his sleeve. “You raised us like cattle, told us you loved us, and ground our blood in your tea. Called it alchemy. If God hates us so much, why do you all want to be like us?”

  Anderson swung the gun to point at the boy next to Annabelle. He rested his finger on the trigger and hissed, “Shut up.”

  This time the threat worked.

  His deputy stepped forward, her eyes bright with admiration that came close to worship as she looked at the sheriff. “We’ll change everything. The vampires won’t be able to flout their strength, their long lives, over us anymore. We will be equals, and then you’ll all learn your place.”

  Crouched on the floor next to her son, Heather piped up. “And we can leave now?” she said. “We have nothing to do with this. My husband would support you. Our family has always had Hunter sympathies. We’ve donated to the cause.”

  Anderson stared at her. “Money. Words. Sacrifice is blood and bone, Mrs. Waring. Maybe once you understand that, you’ll be glad to give your son to the cause. Bring him. Waring and the vampire. If she objects, send her down with the vampire in the well.”

  WARING GAGGED and choked as Anderson poured a cup of blood down his throat. Black crusted the sides of his mouth and around his nostrils. He’d retched once already and Anderson had held his mouth shut until he swallowed the bile back down again.

  “Dhampir blood is free of the curse,” Anderson said as he dipped the cup back into the bucket at his feet. He drank from it himself this time. “We’re damned for the sin of our birth, but we cannot share that with others.”

  Strung up over a galvanized tub, his arms slashed open from wrist to armpit, Madoc choked on a laugh at how badly wrong Anderson had that. Dhampir blood wasn’t as addictive as a draft of vampire ichor, but the curse would still undermine the will of a human who drank it. They just rotted on the inside instead of the outside.

  “All you need to do is hide this place again,” Anderson said as he pinched Waring’s chin in his fingers. “Annabelle told us you were the sorcerer. We know what you did. Now do it again. Hide us from VINE and everyone else that wants to find us.”

  Waring gaped at him, half drunk on old blood and dizzy with it. He couldn’t explain to Anderson how that wouldn’t work.

  “Tell him,” Madoc said. He craned his neck to catch Waring’s eye. “Tell him what a fool he is. Just like you told Took.”

  Waring shuddered and closed his eyes.

  “How did he get Annabelle to talk, do you think?” Madoc asked.

  Waring opened his eyes and stared into Anderson’s. His mouth twisted in a grim smile as he spat out, “I can’t.”

  Magic bent him like a bow as it arced out of him. Each time he broke his pact, it was worse, the smell of scorched marrow sickly meaty in the air, but Madoc didn’t have time for sympathy. As Anderson sprung back from the sting of magic and his deputy ran to his side, Madoc twisted up to grab the rope they’d strung him from. A hook was caught through his heels, slippery with blood, and rather than waste time, Madoc just tore it free.

  He screamed at the raw flash of pain and dropped in a tangle of limbs into the tepid bath of his own blood. It sloshed over him, stuck to his clothes and hair as he struggled up onto his knees.

  “No!” Anderson yelled in frustration as he snapped his gun up. “You can’t stop me!”

  He pulled the trigger at the same time that Madoc reached out and pulled himself through the shadows—all of himself, even the quarts not currently in his body. His blood, handed up like nonaddictive sacrament to the guards, yanked them all through into the cold, gray other.

  Waring, glutted on Madoc as he was, tripped across for a second. He looked oddly bright in the shadows, as though someone had outlined him in silver, and almost relieved. Then his magic snapped him back to the punishment he’d bargained for.

  Anderson stumbled as the blood in his veins—his own long-stolen heritage and Madoc’s fresh injection—pulled at him. He grabbed at a wall to steady himself and fell through it. His people staggered and blustered as they yelled at him for an explanation.

  The clamor made something move in the forest, with a clatter of dry-wood limbs and the sketchy outline of something darker than the shadows under the trees. Nearby, a giant, its warped bones naked expect for tendons and its bony, antlered skull studded with a hundred different eyes, turned slowly, weightlessly toward them.

  “Watch me,” Madoc told him coldly as he braced himself against the tug toward the sea. “I told you not to cross me, Sheriff.”

  Anderson staggered to his feet and lurched toward Madoc, his hand extended desperately. The cross on his arm blistered and warped as something took exception to the ink.

  “I know things,” he blurted out as he groped at Madoc’s arm with his fingertips. “Secrets. Like your toy, the blond wetmouth. I know who took him. I know why. We all talk, you see, us alchemists. We tell each other things.”

  He managed to get hold of Madoc’s wrist to anchor himself. A laugh twisted his mouth as he thought that was a win.

  “He’s more of a monster than me,” Anderson rasped. “They shouldn’t have turned him. They shouldn’t have been able to turn him. It’s—”

  Madoc snapped Anderson’s neck in a single sharp motion. The plan had been to leave him here to suffer, but Madoc wasn’t the only one who passed through this space. Since he didn’t want to leave the job half done, he twisted again until the skin ripped and he could lob the head, the face still set in an expression of surprise, toward the forest.

  The deputy seemed to realize the gravity of her situation as she started to scream—a ragged, endless howl that clawed out of her. The antlered beast in the sky answered her.

  Madoc left them there.

  He let his bones and the meat of him drag him back into the world. Took caught him as he fell and pulled him close, his mouth soft as he pressed a frantic kiss to Madoc’s temple and made promises he probably didn’t mean. Madoc let himself slump into Took’s embrace. He doubted this was how he’d die, but it wouldn’t be the worst way to go.

  Epilogue

  THE ANAKIM couple cooed over Augusta Aron as she clumsily offered her hand. There had been offers from across the country to foster the rescued children, many desperate enough that they’d had to make sure the children had guards. A few of the older children had balked at the idea, but they needed to find out what it was to be Anakim and to get their strength back. Some of them wanted to find out if their parents back home had ever wanted to find them again.

  Until Nora woke up or died, she stayed in VINE custody with Took’s cat tucked under her chin as it took five breaths for every one she inhaled. Annabelle, though, was the only one who’d outright refused. As a stopgap compromise, she’d moved in with Lawrence, who’d grown up more Anakim than human. Now Annabelle hovered next to Took behind the glass as she watched the two men offer Augusta Aron their dog’s lead to hold.

  “They have pets?” she muttered under her breath.

  “I have a cat,” Took said. Although it might be had, since Snack seemed to have relocated her affections. “Quick has an iguana. Even the Anakim get lonely.”

  Annabelle shrugged. “It doesn’t seem right,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be like… people.”

  “Are you?” Took asked.

  She glanced at him and then down at her hands. The translucency had faded back to ivory, and she’d even gained a few freckles.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody ever thought I was, not really, until Dom. And being my friend nearly destroyed him.”

  “Maybe you should trust him then,” Took said. The advice he wished he’d taken earlier. “He seems a better judge of character than anyone else in your life before now.”

  The children’s families, the only families they’d ever known, at least, had all been arrested.
Before they took her away, Annabelle’s adoptive mother had spat in her face and said it was her fault that her brother—or the boy she always thought was her brother—died. That was the first wave of arrests. They would go on for a while. So far they’d found a few of the other children the cult had taken—both the ones kidnapped from Europe and those that Waring would have died for—but not enough.

  “Maybe,” Annabelle admitted as they turned away from the window. “Will you want to talk to me about it again? What we did, the alchemy?”

  “People will,” Took said. “Not today.”

  She nodded and stuck her hand out. “Thank you,” she said. “I was taught to think vamp…. Anakim… were monsters, but you treated us all fair.”

  He solemnly shook her hand, delivered her back to Lawrence, and then took a car back to VINE. Now that the dhampir children were settled, there was some business he needed to take care of.

  It was full dark by the time he got there, but SSA Crane’s receptionist waved him through without question. He’d been a frequent visitor over the last few years. West was still at work at his desk, bent over files, with only a small desk lamp for light. After so many years working with Anakim, he acted like a need for light was a weakness.

  “Did you tell Anderson we were on the way?” he asked as he closed the door behind him.

  West looked up, his half smile of greeting wilted as his brain caught up with Took’s question. He spluttered out an indignant denial.

  “That’s… how can you even ask me that question?” West demanded. “I’ve stuck by you through thick and thin, supported you, listened to your paranoid suspicions about Agent Madoc.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “No,” West snapped. He made an impatient gesture with one hand and sat back in his chair to compose himself. “No. I see what this is. Now that you’re back on good terms with Madoc, you need someone else to blame for everything. Is that it?”

  Took reached into his jacket and pulled out a DVD. He put it down gently on the table and tapped the plastic case with his finger.