by Rob Thurman
Not yet.
They didn’t have the spidery motion of the revenants. The vodyanoi flowed like the water that had whelped them. They weren’t fast, but there were enough of them that it didn’t matter. And like their lost and unlamented cousin, they were armed. Some with identical machetes, some swords . . . anything with an edge. Their crudely formed fingers were too large to fit in the trigger guard of a gun.
“What a shame you wasted all your explosive rounds knocking on the door,” Goodfellow gritted at my elbow.
“I didn’t.” I pulled out the gun and shoved it into his hand, and then followed it with a box of ammunition. “It’s sighted for me. Aim a few inches high.” Whirling, I sheathed Niko’s sword in a tiny black eye. The vodyanoi bubbled a cry of agony, a thin, mucous scream. I withdrew the blade and hit the heavy rubber of its chest with my shoulder. It fell onto its back, where it thrashed wildly. Promise followed my example and sent the one behind it down with a quarrel through an inky orb. And then the one to the left and the one to the right. Her face a tight ivory mask, she was a cold wind of destruction sweeping through the place. And when she ran out of quarrels, she used her hands to pierce their eyes, and her teeth to peel their thick flesh down to bone. An enraged vampire isn’t something anyone would want to face, not even a vodyanoi.
I didn’t stick around to see how the rest of the battle went. I didn’t have the time, and Niko and George didn’t have it either. There was no up in the church other than a vaulted ceiling and the jigsaw puzzle of darkened stained-glass windows. That left down. I ran through the milling vodyanoi, dodging and parrying blades. I heard another of the shrill screams in my wake and turned to see one seal-blubber arm sliced off cleanly at the elbow. The stump was pumping blood, but the amputated section was gone. The gateway, it had passed through the vodyanoi and gobbled the creature’s arm as it went.
It was bigger. Almost big enough for what I heard whispering on the other side. Yeah, running out of time—on all fronts.
I found the stairs to the basement and was forced to sacrifice speed for stealth. If he heard me coming, Hob would be sure to rush through whatever twisted ceremony he was conducting. Or he might escape as he had done before. Couldn’t have that, the rage murmured in the back of my thoughts. Couldn’t have that at all. My quiet care was successful. He didn’t hear me.
I spotted George first. Her hands and feet tied, she was propped up against the wall. Her beautiful hair was gone, leaving a close cap of tight red waves. It made her eyes look impossibly large, like those of a child. There was a cut on her upper arm, six inches long and scabbed over. It was where he had cut her. Him or Caleb—they might as well have been the same. While I’d been on the phone, they had cut her to give me a dose of encouragement. God.
She saw me before Hob did. Not because she heard me or glimpsed me in the shadows. She saw me because she knew I would be there. Her eyes were trained on the spot before I appeared. Luminous and calm, waiting and knowing.
Then I saw Niko. I should’ve seen him first. I think . . . I think I didn’t want to. He was in chains, suspended from an overhead beam, half-nude. His skin was more red than olive. The bastard had sliced him up like a Christmas goose. A circle nearly eight inches in diameter had been cut into his chest. A representation of the Calabassa, it ran with blood. My brother ran with blood.
The whispering behind me was louder now. I could feel a numbing cold flowing from behind like an arctic tide. I had minutes, maybe less.
My teeth bit savagely at my lower lip until I could taste the salt. He was bloody, but he wasn’t d—wasn’t gone. The wound, although gory, wasn’t fatal. But from the contemplative expression on Hob’s face, it was only the beginning. He stood before Niko, tapping the point of one of those goddamn poniards against his chin.
“This is the only symbol required by the Calabassa before sacrifice,” he said mockingly, “but I’ve always said going the extra mile never hurts.” He leaned closer and touched a finger to the blood winding its way down Niko’s abdomen. “I misspoke. It doesn’t hurt me. You, my filthy, inbred Rom trash, are a different story.”
If he was standing that close to Niko, there had to be . . . yes, I saw it. My brother’s feet were chained as well, with the chain fastened securely to the floor. It was the only reason the puck’s head was still attached to his shoulders. Nik lifted his head and said flatly, “You breed with yourself, goat. I believe you have the corner on inbreeding.”
“Who else would be worthy?” Hob had plainly learned to keep his temper over the innumerable years. He rubbed the blood between his thumb and forefinger, then touched the circlet of metal resting on his head. The Calabassa pulsed with light, white and hot, once, then subsided. The illumination had passed through Hob as well. He had glowed, as if he were glass and lit from within. “Ah, apparently it likes the way you taste. How fortuitous.” He flipped the blade in his other hand up into the air. “And when it’s had its fill of you, I’ll be ready for the sighted one.” His gaze slid toward George and her eyes were already on his in anticipation. Satisfied, he turned back and flipped the poniard one last time.
I cut him in midspin.
He saw me. Too late for him and too early for me. He slithered to one side and my blade penetrated flesh only to bounce off a collarbone. Hob melted away with a speed that fooled the eye. But I followed with a desperate speed of my own. I couldn’t protect both Niko and George unless I stayed with Hob, on Hob. He ignored the blood that stained an unbuttoned white linen shirt as fine as anything Goodfellow owned, and spread his hands in welcome. The poniard was a glittering punctuation. “Ah, the freak show can commence. The star performer is here. And he’s learned a shiny new trick.”
The gateway was now centered in the room. It no longer trailed after me, but I could feel it turn with my every movement—a sunflower to the sun. Or more aptly a flytrap to meat. “Not so new,” I said with a false stretch of smile. “Not anymore.”
“You won’t swing it wide, that gate,” he countered scornfully. “I hear them, you know, your true family.” He tilted his head as if listening. “They’re waiting and not very patiently. They would destroy everyone in this room. Everyone.”
Like Robin, he was a talker. Talk. Talk. The fury in me didn’t want to talk. It wanted to kill. Luckily enough, that’s what I wanted as well. I lunged at him as he was explaining what I would or wouldn’t do. He was better than I was; I knew that. He’d taken Niko. That made him just about better than anyone on the planet. But there are things that can give you an edge in a fight, things that can at least get you into the game. One of those—the best one, in fact—was no fear of death.
I didn’t want to die, but if I couldn’t save Niko and George, I was dead anyway. If I saved them, I could go without complaint. And pure, unadulterated rage helps in that, blurring the survival instinct. It can make you sloppy, but it can also help in certain situations. The ones where you don’t care if you walk away top the list.
Hob caught the katana on his Spanish blade, twisted his wrist so that I would hit the point of the poniard if I didn’t pull back. I didn’t. The punch of metal tore through my hip, lodging in bone. I think it hurt. It must’ve hurt. I didn’t feel a thing. I did a half turn, ripping the dagger from his hand. I then sliced him across the chest with Niko’s sword. He was still too quick for it to be fatal, but it staggered him enough that he retreated several feet. I used my left hand to yank the poniard from my flesh and bone. “Lose something?” I said with false sympathy.
“I have more, freak,” he hissed, his hand disappearing in his shirt to appear with another. “I always have more.”
The primeval-forest eyes, the tangled brown curls, the pale olive skin—he was a force of nature . . . deadly but stunning. You could see in him that he might well be the first. You could sense the age and the cold-blooded apathy that comes from knowing all things pass. All things but you.
This time he brought the fight to me. I blocked the one aimed at my heart, barely, and
the one at my neck, although I felt the tug of a nasty slice. Still no pain . . . liquid adrenaline had taken the place of blood in my veins and it blocked everything but the burn of single-minded purpose. I pressed in close to him as I blocked the return slash. This close the sword was no good, but I had the dagger in my other hand and I rammed it into his thigh. I received something in return. I knew I would. He was too skilled. . . . It was too bad for him that he valued his life so much. It was really holding him back.
This time I felt the pain as a blade sliced through my side, opening a gaping gash. “I can do this as long as it takes,” he murmured with infinite boredom by my ear. “Piece by piece, strip by strip, I’ll have you down to dripping bones, and when I’m done draining your gifted girl, I’ll beat her to death with what’s left of you.”
Under his detachment, I heard something. A sliver of agony, the smallest taste of fear, it was there. “Before that, I’ll throw it open.” I twisted the knife in his thigh and watched the cords in his neck stand out in pain. “If we’re going to die anyway, I’m taking you with us, you son of a bitch. I’ll even tell them you’re Goodfellow. They really have a hard-on for him.”
Abruptly, he pushed me away hard and I stumbled backward. He followed me and took me to the ground. Pressing the poniard against my neck until my head was hyperextended back, he wiped the blood from my neck and raised his crimson hand high. Nothing happened. The Calabassa remained dull. “See, freak? Do you see? The crown turns away from your polluted blood. How does it feel to have proof you are the monster you always thought you were?”
He’d known Freud too, I guessed. And maybe at any other time it would’ve hit me hard. Right now, it was just more meaningless blather from an asshole that was making himself too damn hard to kill. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t going to do the killing. Not personally. “I lied.” As I grinned with teeth tasting of my own blood, he leaned harder with the blade and I could feel more warmth well across my skin. “You’re right. I wouldn’t let them through.” A faint shimmer of uncertainty crossed a face that had known nothing but triumph its entire long life. “But we can go to them.”
The blade pressed deeper for one brief moment before George’s blow nearly took his head off. He’d underestimated us, the Hob. Underestimated us all. I saw the six-foot-tall candlestick in her hands as she swung. Her wrists were raw and weeping where she’d torn free of the ropes. She must’ve worked for hours upon hours, but why not? She knew we were coming.
The knife had flown from my throat and I was up and moving. Hob was on his knees, already recovering from the shocking wound that soaked his brown hair scarlet. But recovering wasn’t recovered and I took my chance. I hit him, wrapping my arms around him, just as he staggered to his feet. Face-to-face. Old monster to new. Off-balance for that split second, he wavered under me, then fell.
Through the door to hell.
Taking me with him.
I expected it. It was a price, a high one, but it was one I was willing to pay. I imagined they called after me, Niko and George, but I didn’t hear them. It was just as well. I didn’t want them to hear me either. Niko had heard me scream one too many times in his life.
Hob screamed too. In that place of tomb stench, frozen air, and a sky that pulsed like a cancer. Where the whispers punctured eardrums and the molten eyes swallowed you whole. Where talons touched and caressed as intimately as murder. He screamed and screamed. On and on, it seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been. It couldn’t have been more than one scream really or a small part of one. Because then he was there and I was here and the gateway was gone. I was on the floor of the church basement with Promise’s hands locked in my hair and Robin’s clutching my clothes. They’d pulled me back. As I was closing the rip, they yanked me back through.
“You did it on purpose.” Goodfellow’s voice was both awed and horrified. “You opened the door to Tumulus for the sole intention of pushing him through.” He held me up in a sitting position, but his eyes were locked on the empty air where the gateway had hung.
The air here was thicker and it took me a moment to reply. “I’m learning,” I finally said with bone-deep weariness. And I was learning. Fast. Motivation was one hell of a teacher. “Nik?”
“I have him.” Promise’s hands disappeared.
George’s took their place. She tackled me every bit as wildly as I had Hob, but with much kinder intentions. Her hands threaded into my hair, then clasped behind my back as she squeezed me with a strength you would never suspect her small frame held. Robin, who had been supporting me, melted away and she rocked with me. “He was wrong,” she said fiercely, smudged and dirty face determined as I’d ever seen it. And then she kissed me. There were no words for what it was like, the living poetry of it. Time changed with it too, as it had with the gate to Tumulus. But this change was far for the better. When it was done, her hands framed my face and her voice, while soft, was every bit as determined as before. “You’re not a freak, Caliban. You’re a light, do you hear me? A light in the darkness.”
Over two weeks she’d been his prisoner. Over two weeks gone from her family, gone from those who loved her, and this was what she had to say. It was beyond humbling. I buried my face in the silk of her neck and struggled to breathe air suddenly heavy and choking. And for the first time I held her. Arms tight around a warmth I’d thought impossible for me. For the first time . . .
And the last.
21
The cops came.
Considering all the noise we’d made . . . I’d made . . . destroying the church doors, I wasn’t much surprised. They pulled up as we rounded the far corner in the van. Flay had genuinely been prepared to wait his fifteen minutes, but we made it out in just under ten. It had seemed longer . . . hours, weeks, decades. The mind plays strange tricks under that kind of pressure. This time there was no opportunity to burn the building as we had torched the cop car. The revenants had fled, but what the police would make of heaps of dead vodyanoi was anyone’s guess. I had the feeling we wouldn’t see anything about it in the Times. Goodfellow had suggested as we’d run out that we sprinkle them with salt and melt them like garden slugs. If Hob had been the evil twin, Robin definitely didn’t occupy position of the good one in that dynamic. The annoying one would be his highest achievement.
We made it back to the apartment and watched from the curb as Flay and company took off in the van. It was two blocks down and cornering when Robin remembered that it was his van and he’d been screwed yet one more time. LoJacked or not, he was never going to see that van again. He swallowed his cursing, though, and helped us upstairs. By the time we passed through our door, Niko was wavering and I was down. We’d both lost the kind of blood that would have even your most sedate iron-popping vampire weeping at the waste. Unless that vampire was Promise. She hovered over Niko like a moon-drenched guardian angel of the night. Her halo would be the mist-shrouded moon and instead of harps there would be sobbing violins.
Moon-drenched? Yeah, I was out of it all right. Loopy as hell. Sobbing violins . . . Jesus.
As she supported him to his room, George and Robin carried me to mine. It was safe to say that unless you were into the Capone look, our carpet was history, my mattress as well. I still bled, but it was the doorway that had truly sapped me. The one that I had opened in the RV had lasted only seconds and it had knocked me flat. The one I’d tailored for Hob I’d kept open for nearly a half hour. If I’d been alone, I would’ve bled to death. Coma might’ve been too strong a word, but only just barely. There were hazy images of George helping Goodfellow roll me from side to side to tightly wrap my numerous slashes. Her hands were scratched and her nails broken from her captivity, but her touch was soft. Her eyes, warm and wise, held mine as long as I was conscious.
“I knew you’d come,” she’d whispered at my ear. “I didn’t need to look. I knew.”
I only wished I’d been so certain.
She was gone after that, replaced with a dreamless black night that cradle
d me for what seemed like an eternity. Three days . . . an eternity . . . is there any real difference there? When I woke up, I was lying on my side as someone stuffed something behind my back. I blinked in a sleepy daze, but before I could move I was rolled with expert efficiency to my other side. I heard the familiar sound of snapping sheets and I raised heavy lids to find myself in the middle of a bed change. Niko stuffed the bottom sheet under the mattress, then pulled the top one along with a blanket over me. I turned over onto my back with the creak and howl of protesting joints and muttered, “You’re so domestic.”
“When your roommate’s sole hobby is cultivating bathroom fungus, you don’t have much choice.” He sat on the edge of the bed with a stiffness an ordinary eye wouldn’t have picked up on. My thoughts were still slow from sleep, but I snagged at a handful of his shirt and tugged. “Okay?”
His eyebrows lifted. “I’ll have an interesting scar, to say the least, but I’m healing. I do think you edged ahead of me in number of stitches. That’s quite the new fighting technique you demonstrated. What do you call it again? Suicide?”
“Nah.” I shook my head. “Not catchy enough. I’ll think of something.” I ached all over, especially my side and the hip Hob had imbedded with steel. The clock on the bedside table as well as the bright light streaming through the blinds told me only that it was early afternoon, not what day it was. “How long this time?”
“Three days.”
Hell. That explained the sheet change. I felt the flush of heat in my face. “Damn, sorry.”
The corners of his mouth lifted fleetingly. “I wiped the infamous Cal ass when you were an infant. I can survive a repeat performance. Just, please, don’t make a habit of it.”
The heat increased and I scowled. “I’ll try and restrain myself.”