Bitten to Death

by Jennifer Rardin

  I went on. “He can camouflage his own psychic scent. Apparently he can do it for others too. He didn’t claim it as his cantrantia, but as masterfully as he fooled me, I think that’s his main ability. He’s the cause of this mess.”

  “I thought he was dead,” Admes said unbelievingly. “You’re saying he invited this attack?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I kind of admire his tenacity. You’d think losing half your face would quench pretty much any ambitions you had left. But he keeps on trucking. I suppose he figures Samos is his best bet to dethrone Disa.”

  “I should be Deyrar, not that mutation they’ve all bowed down to.”

  I was so startled by the voice of Blas, coming from every direction but seemingly disconnected from any physical form, that my entire body came off the ground. Ziel, who’d been lying quietly beside me, began to growl.

  I baited the vampire, trying to make him reveal his position. “And here you had me thinking you were the poor, pitiful victim.”

  “I am the one who called the Raptor from the skies. Hamon’s leadership had already begun to crumble. Beneath Samos’s attack it would have fallen, and Aine would have found no support for her succession, she was such a sycophant of his. The rule of the Trust would have fallen peacefully to me if Hamon hadn’t phoned Vayl.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?” I demanded, staring into the night, trying to track Blas by the sound of his omnipresent voice.

  “I overheard them speaking of a contract. I could hardly let Hamon live once I knew Vayl was coming to shore up his position, now, could I? So I killed Hamon and made my play.”

  “But it didn’t work out the way you’d planned, did it?”

  “How were we to know about the Preserve?” he shrieked. “Hamon kept everything such a secret! Hoarding all his power like a damned . . . power hoarder!”

  I almost had him pinpointed now. Out of Grief’s range. But Dave should be able to reach him. I whispered, “He’s standing between your ten and twelve o’clock.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?” Dave replied quietly. “That still leaves a whole lot of black between the trees.”

  Admes traded another few rounds with our human ambushers. I waited for the firing to pause before I yelled, “We found the Preserve, Blas. Lovely little spot right off of Octavia’s dressing room. You should see all the relics Hamon’s collected in there. Oh wait. That’s right. You can’t.”

  His scream raised the hairs on the back of my neck. In the extremity of his emotion he allowed his guard to slip. I saw movement. And so did Ziel. He didn’t bark. Just shot straight toward the faceless vampire like a furry torpedo, leaped, caught him just below the jaw, and tumbled him backward into the grass.

  Blas squealed like a little girl as Ziel tightened his hold.

  “Can’t get a shot without hitting the dog,” Dave said, so calmly he might’ve been discussing lunch plans as Admes fired off another burst and one of the humans screamed his death cry into the night.

  “Leave him to me,” I replied.

  “Fine. I’ll take care of the vamps at our six o’clock,” Dave said. As he readjusted I realized there were at least two more heading our way. Easier to sense now that Blas was down, they must’ve left the woods after we’d passed them and snuck up behind us. Dave would have his hands full.

  I snaked my way forward, pulling my knife as I moved. Ziel, making growly sounds deep in his chest, was chewing Blas up pretty good.

  “Don’t hurt the dog!” screamed Samos as he came charging out of the forest, both arms raised as if Blas could see him waving them in a desperate negative. But somewhere in his panic, Blas had realized he was stronger than the enormous canine and had managed not only to pry himself free but to throw him forcibly into one of the dead trees. Ziel hit it with a yelp that went straight through my gut. He landed on his feet, staggered a few steps, sat down, and shook his head as if to say, That’s going to smart in the morning. At which point I realized he was the toughest four-legger on the face of the earth.

  But my focus, every atom of my being, pointed toward the vampire I’d been sent to kill. I took careful aim.

  “You imbecile!” Samos grabbed Blas at the precise spot where Ziel had let go and lifted him just as I pulled the trigger. The bolt that should’ve taken Samos down smoked Blas instead. One moment the Raptor was shaking him like a piñata. The next he held two fistfuls of air.

  “Goddammit!” I had a second to note the blotch of blood on Samos’s thigh while I waited for Grief to reload. So he was the one I’d hit with my blind shot into the woods earlier. Nice. Then Dave said, “A little help here,” and I turned to find him barely holding his own against Samos’s two assistants.

  Dave’s bolt had just missed the sweet spot and jutted from the gut of a tall, lanky woman who came at him with a pair of escrima sticks, wielding them with such speed they were a bone-breaking blur.

  “Tarasios!” I yelled. “Get your head out of your ass and fight!” I shot at the second assistant, who was swinging some sort of net as if he was a Roman gladiator who’d lost his trident in a game of poker. The Gladiator pitched forward, only temporarily sidelined. But it gave Dave the breathing room he needed to roll out of Stick Lady’s path and empty his Beretta into her chest.

  Tarasios’s scream brought my attention back to Samos, who’d advanced so far that his bright brown eyes shone like the headlights of a train on whose tracks our vehicle had stalled. I recognized his expression. Crazed, baby. So far past reason, in fact, that the crossbow in my hand counted as nothing to him. I brought my right hand up to steady it. Nothing was going to screw this up for me. Not this time.

  “You stole my dog,” Samos growled. “You killed my avhar. I would tear you into tiny pieces and make you watch me eat them if I could. But the witches say if I am to gain the power I need to overtake this Trust I need a burning—the more bodies the better. I was going to wait until I had the Vitem together in the Odeum. But you forced my hand taking Ziel as you did. Of course, listening to your screams for mercy will be so much more satisfying.”

  “I don’t think we’re up for any more fires, Eddie,” I said as I sighted him in. One shot, that’s all I was going to get. I had to hit the sweet spot the first time. “Although, for what it’s worth, I didn’t smoke Shunyuan Fa. I just thought he was a colossal pain in the ass.”

  Samos’s avhar had been killed as he tried to protect the last vampire I’d been assigned to terminate, an ancient Chinese dragon named Chien-Lung. Hell, I hadn’t even been on the yacht when Shunyuan Fa lost his head. But Samos would never believe that one.

  I took a breath and held it. My finger crooked. I swear, I was so close to that final triumph I was actually grinning. And then Cirilai shot me. Pain lanced up my arm straight to my heart. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t see.

  Vayl?

  Yeah, said another part of my mind. Where is he? He would’ve been here by now if it had been at all possible.

  Cirilai struck again. My left arm curled into my body, cramping so badly I couldn’t have stretched it out to save myself from drowning. My eyes were open, but all I could see were black dots flying in a red haze.

  I heard Tarasios scream again, couldn’t make myself care. Vayl was in more trouble than I could imagine. The kind that meant I might never see him again.

  “Jasmine!” Dave yelled. I identified the ripped-air sound of those escrima sticks right before something smashed into my head and everything that mattered faded to black.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I woke with the taste of puke in my mouth and the swaying sense of vertigo accompanied by stretched muscles that told me I was being carried hand and foot.

  “Are you sure she’ll be awake for this?” I heard Samos ask. “I want her to be conscious when she burns. I don’t care about the others. But she must be aware of the pain.”

  “Absolutely,” someone assured him. It took me a second to identify the voice as Mohawk’s.
“Listen, she’s moaning again.”

  Well, I wouldn’t sound so pathetic if you’d stop swinging me like a hammock in a hurricane! I could feel the bile rising and tried to turn my head, which made pretty lights go off behind my closed eyes. Too bad they were accompanied by thick shafts of shooting pain that buried themselves in my brain and then beat time with my pulse as they sent out little metal stingers to remind me that I, a trained assassin, had been bested by my target.

  But Vayl!

  Shut up. No excuses. And no panicking. You can’t rescue him until you save yourself. Nimrod. You make me want to puke. Which I did. This time I leaned sideways as far as I could so that the next round of barf landed at least partially on somebody’s shoes.

  “Aw, would you . . . That’s just disgusting!” Sounded like Overbite to me. Good. Served him right for walking around like nothing had happened when his head should’ve blown off hours ago. At least that meant Admes had taken out the Old-Timer during the battle.

  I felt myself deposited on soft grass. Mmm, nice. No, wait, this wasn’t the time to get comfy. Somebody was planning something nefarious. What a Vayl word. I liked it. So old-fashioned and descriptive. Nefarious. Play it again, Sam. Nefarious, nefarious, ne—

  “Yes, that will do nicely.” Samos sounded happy. Now, that couldn’t be good. I felt a rough tongue lick my sore cheek. Ouch! Freaking mutt!

  “Ziel! Get away from her!” Okay, now he was pissed. The dog had ticked him off. Good for you, ya jacket-humper, you. That’s what I’d call him if he was my dog. Jacket-humper. Kinda had a ring to it. Although it seemed a little long for vet visits and intros to lady dogs. Jack. Yeah, that’s better.

  I felt my arms jerked behind me so painfully I moaned. And then the tying began. Ziel—no, Jack—barked. Only it didn’t sound like woo-hoo, let’s party this time. I’d put it more in the range of you-fulla-doo-doo. I was so touched, actual tears gathered inside my eyelids. I realized the blow to my skull might’ve caused some damage that had led to me thinking—and emoting—in spirals. Still, how cool was that Jacket-humper?

  Should I open my eyes? Nope. That’ll just make me puke again. Which’ll hurt like hell and do nothing to clear my mind. I decided to study the inside of my eyelids instead. It struck me that this must be what Vayl saw every morning when he zipped himself inside his tent. And then died for the day. Which he might have done again—for good this time.

  Shaft of pain. Not up my arm. More centralized, and so massive it would paralyze me if I let it. I knew how to do pain though. How to cordon it off like a nosy crowd at a murder scene and say, Step back, you callous, cold-blooded gorgons, and let me get to work.

  Problem was, when I finally did open the old peepers, I realized it wasn’t going to be that easy to finish the mission I’d started. Dave, Tarasios, and Admes had been arranged in a circle, which I closed, my head and feet to theirs. We were all trussed like pot roasts. And we lay inside a carefully arranged pentagon of wood that was already smoldering.

  At each point of the star Samos and his men stood like the executioners they were, waiting for the fun to begin. He wore an ivory leisure suit and matching fedora, both slightly stained from the recent ruckus. His blue silk shirt and white tie gave him the air of a porn star going for the look of an international playboy. It wasn’t a style I’d seen on him before, but that time he’d been in his office, doing a deal with the devil.

  Mohawk held Jack tightly, otherwise the straining malamute would’ve jumped the smoking barrier and come to me. Overbite stood with his head in his hand, doing a continuous rubdown. Hey, maybe those robots were causing some damage after all.

  Samos’s vamp-groupies looked even more wrecked than his humans. Stick Lady slumped badly, the holes in her chest only now beginning to close. And the Gladiator kept alternately spitting blood and glaring at me, like burning alive was too good a punishment for someone who didn’t mind shooting him in the back.

  They were all chanting. At first my battered brain interpreted it as heckling. Then I imagined them doing a really lame rap, their black stiff-brimmed hats cocked to the side, their arrhythmic hips missing the beat as they droned, “We are da baddest, ’cause we kicked your assest.”

  “Assest?” I giggled. “That’s not even a word.”

  Samos gave me a dirty look. Apparently the doomed weren’t supposed to do any hallucinating as they fried. Then his phone rang. That did piss him off. But he answered it. “What do you mean Disa left? I can’t finish this tonight if the Deyrar is absent! Where did she go?”

  As he listened, he kept looking around, like he’d gladly punch somebody if they’d give him a reason. “Why should I ask the town psychic when you’re already costing me so much, Koren?” His phone hand dropped as he stared at first Tarasios and then me. “Disa has absconded with your sverhamin. Where do you suppose they went?”

  “Depends on what happened at the wagon house,” I said.

  He shrugged, like it didn’t matter if I found out now. “A minor distraction that would keep them busy while I crossed their borders. Blas said they had been battling unexplained fires, so that seemed the most logical choice.”

  “If that’s all it turned out to be, they probably went to town to celebrate. They’re übertight, you know. Maker and mate. Even if you do burn us, it’s going to be impossible to bring the Trust down now that they’ve been reunited.”

  When Samos’s lips pinched I thought, Take that, you sack of crap. But my inner celebration quickly fizzled. So Koren was Samos’s inside guy. Girl. Meaning all that rage at my unintended insult to her former sverhamin was just overdone fakery. Shoulda seen through that, Jaz.

  Samos shoved the phone back to his ear. “You listen to me, you little bitch! I didn’t put my blood to paper just to see this deal crumble because you can’t figure out where some puta took the object of her obsession! Find them!” He snapped the phone closed, jammed it back in his pocket, and began chanting again. More logs flared, along with a new understanding that sent a shaft of pain spiking through my brain. Samos had made another deal with one of Satan’s minions.

  “What did you do, Edward?” I asked. Both because I wanted to know, and because interrupting him slowed the spell and the fire. “What did the devil make you give up to pull off this deal?”

  “This was a special one,” Samos said. “It had to be this Trust, because your sweetheart once dwelt here. And, as I well knew, Trust roots grow deep. So he would come running if his old homestead was threatened. Which meant he would bring you.” He spat at me, missing by a mile. But hell, if it got any hotter in this circle I’d be grateful for any form of liquid that came flying my way.

  The hatred in Samos’s eyes felt like sulfur in the air, maggots on the skin. Until I reminded myself why it was there. Because Vayl and I had beat him. Repeatedly. And I wasn’t dead yet, dammit. Which meant—

  “You didn’t answer my question, Eddie. Demons demand more than blood for their dirty deals. What did you have to give up to get to me?”

  Though he turned his face from Jack, Samos’s eyes betrayed him. For just a moment they filled with anguish as they fell to the animal, still prancing restlessly at his henchman’s feet.

  Ahhh . . . now I understood why the dog had transferred its loyalty over the course of a few hours. What irony. I’d relinquished my precious cards in order to find out what Samos loved most. And now he’d sacrificed what he loved most, his beloved Ziel, in order to kill me. And it looked like we’d both succeeded. Already the interior of the pentagram had become unbearably hot. We were beginning to sweat and writhe.

  “Gotta do something,” said Dave. I wished I could see his face. No, on second thought, it was probably better that we lay back-to-back. It would make the end slightly easier to bear.

  “Like what?” I asked as I struggled with my bonds. It was no good. They’d tied them too well for me to release myself before the fire did its work.

  Tarasios began to cry. “I don’t want to die like this.”


  “Should have thought of that when we were fighting,” Admes growled.

  Despite our situation, I had to smile. No wonder Niall loved him.

  “Jaz!” Dave suddenly hissed in our language, the one we’d made up before we learned to speak English. “Get mad!”

  “I already am! What, do you think I’m lying over here wishing I could bake these suckers a loaf of bread?”

  “No!” Despite the fact that they couldn’t understand us, he’d dropped his voice even more. I turned my head, digging my brow into the ground so one ear, at least, was directed toward him. “Remember what happens now when you get pissed? Sometimes alarms go off. And people have to, you know, come running.”

  I closed my eyes. He wanted me to start a fire? When we were about to burn? How would that . . . oh. Okay. Because wildfire fighters did that sometimes. They’d set a fire to stop the killer flames.

  But he was asking me to control something I didn’t understand. Well, you’d better figure it out, said Granny May. Now why, facing death as I was, would I imagine her and Jimmy Durante playing croquet? Hush up and concentrate! she snapped. Because all of us imaginary characters in here don’t relish the idea of roasting! This comment was followed by a chorus of hell yeahs from the rest of the cast, who’d gathered in lawn chairs at the edge of the yard. They seemed to be slugging beers and vodka tonics in equal doses in preparation for the big finale.

  Great. I can’t even experience a moment of sanity at my death.

  By now the four of us sacrificial lambs had scooted as close to the center of Samos’s pentagram as we could. Our hands were touching, tearing at each other’s bonds though so far our efforts had gotten us bupkes. Tarasios was crying so hard I could hear snot shoot in and out his nose. Admes had begun to swear between bouts of coughing. Only Dave was still talking.

  “It came to you, when? What had you done before the fires started?”