This Side of the Grave (#5 Night Huntress)

by Jeaniene Frost

  I winced. “I’m starting to get little glimpses of what happened—though why’d you chain me to a wall? Don’t tell me that Marie’s blood temporarily turned me into a bondage junkie, too.”

  If so, that begged the question of what exactly the voodoo queen was into for kicks, if I’d absorbed that from her, too . . .

  Bones actually took in a breath before he spoke. “Kitten, let it alone for now. It’ll only upset you, and it wasn’t your fault.”

  “What?” I burst out, dread replacing the lingering warmth those sensual images had evoked.

  He sat down, taking my hand, his fingers stroking over my knuckles. The fact that he was being comforting made me even more nervous about what he was about to say.

  “In the rituals Marie was famous for back in the eighteen hundreds, she’d take her followers into the woods off Lake Pontchartrain,” he said, still sounding like he was cherry-picking his words. “There they’d chant, watch Marie do tricks with a pet snake, and drink from a vat of wine sprinkled with her blood. Due to Marie’s position as priestess of the voodoo god Zombi, her blood was supposed to give the participants some of Zombi’s power over the dead, a side effect being uncontrollable lust, if you consider all the orgies that took place.”

  Relief surged in me. “But that’s great news! Then I don’t have the ability to siphon ghoul powers like I do vampire ones, because Marie’s blood could affect anyone that way—”

  “Those rituals were a sham,” he cut me off. “They gave people the excuse to pretend any depravities they indulged in weren’t their own doing, but none of them ever really received Zombi’s power over the dead from her blood. What happened with you was the real thing, however. Marie said she’d never seen it before, except very rarely with other voodoo priestesses.”

  “Mambos,” I supplied glumly, my relief turning to ashes as I remembered Marie’s earlier words. I am black magic, she’d said about turning from a Mambo into a ghoul, so it stood to reason that her blood was potent magic, too. “So is that why you had to chain me up? Because absorbing Marie’s powers turned me into a violent tramp? No wonder you said you’d earned that smoke.”

  It made even the powers I’d absorbed from Vlad and Mencheres seem like a mild inconvenience by comparison. Shoot a little fire from my hands when I was upset? No big deal, and hey, came in handy at times. Accidentally smash several pieces of furniture in our house through telekinesis? Well, we’d needed a new couch and TV anyway, and that also had helped out against the bad guys at a critical time. But this? Not useful at all, unless Bones had a deep sadomasochist streak.

  “The good news is, she said this sort of blind hunger shouldn’t happen to you again,” Bones responded. “That it was just the initial, overwhelming response to the gate opening between you and the dead. Similar to the blood craze new vampires experience, but that you’d be able to control future twinges once you were yourself, as you clearly are.”

  That was good news, but he’d avoided answering my question, I noticed. “Chains?” I prodded, my voice hardening so he’d know I wasn’t about to drop the subject.

  “All right, luv, if you won’t let it go,” he drew out. “As I said, you were crazed with hunger, and a lot bloody stronger than you normally are. Didn’t seem to recognize anyone, either, which meant you weren’t being particular about who you sought to assuage that hunger with. Had to chain you up because otherwise, you tried to find someone else to ease your needs if I wasn’t servicing you, and I did have to pause to feed a few times.”

  My jaw dropped at “weren’t being particular” and hung lower at each subsequent word, until I was vaguely surprised it wasn’t resting in my lap by the time he finished. I grabbed the sheet, pulling it around myself in a sudden rush of scalding shame.

  “Oh. My. God. Please tell me I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t,” Bones said, with a trace of a grim smile. “Though you did give a lucky bloke in the Quarter quite a thorough fondling by the time I caught up with you after you broke free from me in the cemetery. Still wasn’t a hundred percent at that point, and I hadn’t expected you to be so strong. I was able to fly us back to Tepesh’s after I’d fed, but by then, you were well and truly lost to the hunger. Marie warned me you’d be that way, and I must admit, she didn’t exaggerate.”

  I’d had to be dragged away from sexually assaulting a tourist? Why oh why hadn’t I listened when Bones told me not to pursue this subject? But now that I knew this much, I had to know the rest.

  “So, I attempted to rape a tourist and turned you into a sex slave for two days.” My voice was neutral because the embarrassment was so deep, it transcended reaction. “Anything else I should get a heads-up about? Like, who else to expect a restraining order from? Are we still at Vlad’s? Don’t tell me you had to drag me off of him, too?”

  Bones made a sound like a delicate cough. “No, and we’re not at Tepesh’s anymore. It was a temporary residence, so it didn’t have the means to restrain a vampire in it. Marie offered to take us in, but as you can imagine, I wanted far away from her. Mencheres had a place with a vampire holding cell in West Virginia. He chartered a plane to Louisiana and helped contain you while we traveled here.”

  His voice changed ever so slightly when he said “contain,” making me almost screech as I demanded, “What exactly did Mencheres do?”

  “Held you immobile with his power while I shagged you in the back of the plane,” he replied bluntly, a half shrug seeming to say, You wanted to know. “Couldn’t risk you breaking free and crashing the aircraft, and attempting to drive to West Virginia with you in that condition wouldn’t have been wise.”

  Mencheres. Bones’s co-ruler, grandsire, Master vampire of incredible power, and the ally who unnerved me the most, had telekinetically held me down so Bones could boink me into submission en route to a vampire holding cell? Sweet holy Jesus, let me have hallucinated hearing that!

  “Get me some silver,” I managed to croak. “I’m going to kill myself.”

  “Don’t fret, he faced the other way the whole time,” Bones said unperturbedly. “Aside from knowing it would’ve bothered you to have him watch, Kira also wouldn’t have fancied that.”

  “Kira was there, too?” Good God, I barely knew her! And she’d been just a row or two away while all this was going on? If I still had the ability, I would’ve passed out from humiliation.

  “Told you you’d feel better if you didn’t know the details,” Bones replied with a pointed look.

  “I’ll never doubt your word again.” Or set foot out of this room, if Mencheres and Kira were still here.

  He dragged me into his arms even though I was stiff from mortification.

  “You needn’t be so ashamed. All you did was shag your husband; who’s to be shocked by that? Can’t say it’s an experience I’d care to repeat, but that’s only because you weren’t really yourself.” His lips brushed my ear. “Otherwise, chaining you up for over a day and a half of uninhibited rogering sounds terribly appealing.”

  I knew he was trying to cheer me up, but I was still staggered over hearing I’d assaulted a tourist, gotten crazy every time Bones wasn’t plowing away at me, and as the coup de grвce, Mencheres had—in a manner of speaking—participated in Bones and me having sex. And here I swore I’d never have a threesome, the thought occurred to me amidst my lingering incredulity.

  “Thought you said it was two days,” I muttered, finally registering the last part of what he’d said.

  “You’ve been asleep for round nine hours now. Wasn’t sure if you’d still be caught up in the same hunger when you woke, so I didn’t take your restraints off.”

  I didn’t blame him. God, I wouldn’t have blamed Bones if he’d duct-taped a vibrator to me and just took care of the whole sordid nightmare that way.

  “You know what they say about being careful what you wish for? I used to wish there was something we could do, you know, intimately together that you hadn’t already done before, but I didn’t think it would
ever happen.” I gave him a limp smile. “Though I doubt you’ve ever been forced to nonstop bang a woman hyped up on the undead voodoo version of Spanish fly, have you?”

  His chuckle was soft. “Can’t say that I have, Kitten.”

  “Yeah, well, consider me an original.”

  This time, when his lips brushed across my skin, it lasted more than a moment.

  “I always have.”

  How he could be affectionate with me right after this latest cluster fuck—literally!—was beyond my comprehension. I should thank my lucky stars that while this scenario was an eleven out of ten on my perversity scale, Bones’s former human life as a gigolo combined with his promiscuous past as a vampire meant this probably only rated a three for him. Thank God he’d been there, too. I would have been horrified to cheat on Bones if I’d been hit with Marie’s blood-induced slut whammy when he wasn’t around.

  The idea made me shudder. I was already fuming at Marie over letting those Remnants loose on Bones; if she’d have damaged our marriage as well—and though Bones would understand given the circumstances, it wouldn’t be something he’d ever forget—then I’d truly despise her.

  The question that overshadowed even my searing embarrassment over my actions the past two days was why Marie had forced me to drink her blood. If not to use it as fuel for Apollyon’s warmongering, why would she want to see if I could absorb her powers? Marie was too calculating to have forced me into doing that just to satisfy her curiosity over whether ghoul blood would affect me the same way vampire blood did. She could have made me drink from another ghoul aside from herself to get the same proof.

  What was she up to? And should that be of greater concern than what Apollyon was doing?

  “If you’ve, ah, been occupied dealing with me for most of the past two days, there might have been some developments,” I said, swinging my legs off the bed. “Let’s hope there has been, and that it’s good news.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  To my dismay, the first two people I saw when I came upstairs later were Mencheres and Kira. They sat next to each other in what I guessed was the living room, my cat sedately curled in Kira’s lap.

  Both of them looked up, so it was too late for me to run. For once, I was grateful for Mencheres’s trademark stoicism as I met his impenetrable expression. If he’d waggled his eyebrows knowingly, or crossed his wrists in a mime of bondage, I might have jumped right out the nearest window.

  “Let me say right off that if I could avoid you two for the next decade, I would,” I got out in a rush. “But since I can’t indulge in a little modesty-salvaging me time right now, I’ll just offer my sincerest apologies and hope we never mention what happened again. In fact, you know that amnesia spell you put on me when I was sixteen, Mencheres? I’d love another one.”

  “You erased her memory when she was a teenager?” Kira asked in surprise.

  “That’s a story for another time,” he smoothly answered her before turning that charcoal gaze back to me. “Unfortunately, Cat, my ability to erase your memory was predicated on your half-human status. Vampire memories can’t be altered. At least, not that I’m aware of.”

  “Just my luck,” I muttered. “Well, then let’s go with Plan A: Pretend it never happened.”

  “Pretend what never happened?” Kira replied with deliberate emphasis even as she gave me a purposefully blank look.

  I flashed her a grateful smile. “Exactly.”

  Something hazy caught the corner of my eye. I turned to see Fabian floating in the doorway, watching me with a mixture of happiness and wariness.

  “Hey,” I said in surprise. “Aren’t you supposed to be with Dave? He’s not here, too, is he?”

  “He’s still in Ohio.” Fabian came nearer, almost twitching in either excitement or agitation. “Are you well, Cat? Can I . . . do anything for you?”

  There went that tingling in my cheeks again before I reminded myself that Fabian couldn’t mean anything suggestive by his question. He wasn’t solid, which was a definite requirement for what I’d needed before, my smutty lack of preference as to who provided it notwithstanding.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to cover my lingering embarrassment with a businesslike mentality. “But why’d you leave Dave? Did something happen?” Maybe Dave had to stop trying to infiltrate Apollyon’s ghouls because of something going on with Don or the team?

  Fabian seemed to shift uncomfortably even though his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I thought you needed me,” he mumbled. “So I found you. Dave still hadn’t come across the ghouls and it seemed okay to leave him—”

  “What do you mean, you found me?” I interrupted, trying to make my voice calm instead of accusing. Fabian already looked like he might burst into tears, if that was even possible for a ghost. Still, if anything had happened to Dave because he hadn’t been able to send Fabian for help . . .

  “He means you seem to be a spook magnet now,” Bones supplied, coming into the room. “Dozens of ghosts followed you from New Orleans to Tepesh’s and then even here. I suspect Mencheres has been sending them away lately, or you’d have woken up with some perched next to you in the cell below.”

  Mencheres gave a concurring shrug even as Fabian looked more miserable. “So you just . . . found your way to me with no one telling you where I was?” I asked the ghost in disbelief.

  He nodded, almost boyish in his dejection despite the fact that Fabian had been forty-five when he died. “Don’t be angry. Dave tried to call you but it went to voice mail, and I just felt like you were reaching out to me. I rode a few ley lines, not sure where I was going, but somehow I ended up here.”

  Ley lines. Spook highways, Bones had called them once. I still didn’t fully understand how they worked, but I knew ghosts used them to get places very fast because they contained some sort of magnetic energy they could ride on. Like bullet trains for the dead, but invisible.

  And these ley lines had led Fabian to me because he felt like I was “reaching out” to him. Him, and a bunch of other ghosts, from what Bones had said. Marie’s blood was the gift that kept on giving, it seemed, and each new revelation about its effects only mired me deeper into trouble.

  If I’m a ghost magnet, it won’t take long before more than ghosts find me, I thought with dismay. Aside from how I didn’t like that some of them might be Marie’s spies, this presented another problem, too. For the lethal cadre of ghouls out to stop Apollyon by killing me before tensions reached a boiling point, I’d just made myself a much easier target. Nothing said, “She’s over here!” quite like a line of ghosts following after me wherever I went.

  “Fabian, I’m not mad at you,” I said in a soothing way, because he was flitting around in obvious agitation and it hadn’t been his fault. How could he know I now had the ghostly version of a dog whistle going off in my veins? “But I’m going to need your help. Are those other ghosts still nearby now?”

  He glanced at the windows, which, due to the glare from the lights inside and the darkness outside, were harder for me to see through. Especially since I was looking for people who were transparent, anyway.

  “Yes.”

  And being so close, they could hear everything I said. No point in having Fabian relay a message for me.

  “Alrighty, then . . .” I sighed, leaving the room to look for the front door. After living with Fabian for almost a year, I knew that showing ghosts the same respect I’d show a living—or undead—person went a long way toward winning brownie points with a species that was routinely ignored.

  Bones followed me, pointing to the left with a resigned look on his face. At least he didn’t argue about what he’d obviously guessed I was about to do. I went out the front door and saw the many diaphanous forms twirling around the trees at the end of the driveway. I couldn’t see any other houses nearby, but having been in several of Mencheres’s homes, I recognized this as one of his typical, large, off-the-beaten-path locations. In fact, with the steep hills, occasional rocks jutting t
hrough the landscape, and woods nearby, it reminded me of my home in the Blue Ridge. Like Bones and I, Mencheres didn’t want to increase his chances of having nosy neighbors get in on his business.

  “Hi,” I said to the group. A flurry of activity commenced as at least two dozen hazy apparitions stopped what they were doing and zoomed over to the front porch, hovering around it like the coolest Halloween decorations ever. I was amazed at the range of eras the ghosts represented, like a snapshot of history in a glance. Out of outfits I could recognize, I saw one had on what looked like a Union army uniform while another wore Confederate gray and saffron. One was shirtless with buckskin leggings, another was a woman in full Victorian gear, two wore sailors’ gear, another was in a twenties flapper dress, a few looked straight out of a fifties movie, and a few more might have been cowboys. Only two looked like they were from my time, judging from the cut and style of their clothes.

  All we need is some spooky music, a full moon, and a few bats for this to be perfect, I thought irreverently.

  “Hi,” I repeated, trying to meet each ghostly gaze at least once so they’d all feel included in my speech. “My friend Fabian tells me that some of you might have just . . . ended up here even though you’re not sure why or how,” I went on. “Normally I’d say that’s fine. The more the merrier, but I’ve got some stuff going on that makes you guys hanging out, um, potentially problematic for me.”

  I was starting to doubt the wisdom behind this idea, seeing some of the ghosts exchange confused glances with each other. Fabian rested his hand over mine, the outline of his nonexistent flesh merging with my skin in the closest he could come to an encouraging pat. I squared my shoulders. I’d come this far, might as well plunge ahead and see if the power I hadn’t wanted to absorb from Marie could be used to help me now.

  “So while I’d love to see you all again in the future, right now, I need you guys to go,” I said, putting force into the words to make them more than a request. “Please don’t follow me, even if you feel like you should. I also need you not to repeat anything I just said, or anything that you might have overheard before. I know you’ll do this for me, because ghosts are an honorable species, and—” Oh crap, I was just babbling now, and this wasn’t working. None of them even moved. “—and it would really help me out,” I finished lamely.