“Looks like we found some of our missing people,” Jolene muttered.
Douglas stormed forward with long strides, too nimble to be caught by the hands desperately grasping for him despite his size. “I smell the Monette girl.”
The farther in we went, the more human the prisoners appeared. Save for a few at the end of the row, each one had been turned into a vampire. The Sanguine Court would have their work cut out for them sorting through the whole mess. Lots of reparations to pay. Lots of punishments to mete out. A shitload of executions since nosferatu nobodies didn’t get the same chances the nobility did back in the day.
“Help us,” a dirty woman in the last cage called. She rattled her bars and reached out for Skylar. “Please help us.”
“We will,” Sky assured her. “Is there anyone else down here?”
The woman broke into uncontrollable sobs, blubbering about a monster and how she needed to get away. As much as I hated to leave anyone caged, those bars were as much for their safety as our own right now.
An archway led to a larger, wider room where dark stains discolored the stone floor, most concentrated around a thick post standing in the center of the space. Two sets of chains ending in shackles hung from an iron ring mounted at the top. I didn’t see any meat hooks, but the atmosphere was on point for a slasher flick, down to the creeping sensation tickling up and down the back of my neck.
Rebecca Monette sprawled on the floor several feet away. The moment Sky moved toward her, Aya grabbed her by the arm and tugged her back, nearly pulling her off balance.
“She could be hurt,” Sky said.
“Or this could be a trap,” Aya replied. “She’s not locked up like the others. She isn’t a nos yet, but she still isn’t safe. You must always remember that your blood is more potent, more enticing than ours. A newly turned vampire, especially a hungry one, will struggle to resist it.”
“Listen to Aya, Sky,” I confirmed.
“Oh.” Sky’s cheeks flushed beneath the single dim, flickering light bulb in the ancient fixture above us.
Jolene and Douglas took the lead, moving together toward the prone figure. The moment Jolene set her fingers against the girl’s throat, Rebecca bolted upright and hissed. Then she immediately shrank away, scrambling backwards in terror.
Fuck. They’d turned her, and judging by her reaction and hungry gaze, they’d starved her as well.
“Rebecca, we’re here to help,” Jolene said in a soothing voice, the sort a mom uses when her child is hurt or afraid.
“I’m so hungry,” Rebecca whined.
“I know, sweetie, and we can help you with that. But first, I need to get you out of here. Will you come with me?”
“So hungry.”
“We’re going to have to restrain her,” Aya said in a low voice, moving up closer to Sky and me. “She’s close to the point where her hunger will overcome her good sense.”
And there was no coming back from that. The Sanguine Court would put her to death even though none of this was her fault.
Our mage pulled a sealed vial from her inside her coat. While the rest of us stood alert, waiting to see what Rebecca would do, Jolene unstoppered the cork and held it out to the girl. It must have been blood, because Rebecca made a small growling noise and lurched forward, only to grow uncertain and freeze mid-step. Jolene bravely closed the distance between them.
“Drink this. It will help. Go on.”
Rebecca snatched the vial and tipped the contents into her mouth. One moment she was wiping her mouth, and the next Jolene was catching her limp body. Douglas took the girl and scooped her up in his arms.
“Added a few drops of a sleeping draught,” Jolene said when she glanced at me.
“Nice work.”
“Yes, nicely done.” A deep male voice spoke from the archway behind us. I spun around, raising my gun in the same movement, and trained the weapon on the man standing there. He hadn’t made a sound until speaking. He hadn’t even riled up the starving nos and crying humans as he passed by them.
“You’d be Francois Beaumont, I presume,” Thib drawled.
“You’d be right.”
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Baroness Aguillard, abduction, and unlawful turning.”
As her partner notified the vampire lord of his rights, Aya pulled rune-engraved cuffs from the leather holster on her belt. “Face the wall and put your hands up.”
Off to the side, Douglas set Rebecca’s body down against the wall and Skylar backed up to take a protective position above her. A sparkle of color glittered on her fingertips. I shifted to my left, aware of where everyone else on the team stood. We all had clear shots.
“Apologies, my dear, but no,” Beaumont said. “I’m sorry you had to involve yourselves, but I’m afraid this is the end. For all of you.”
Dark shapes moved behind him, two stooped figures slinking past into the room with us. I recognized them both from the cages and the hairs on my neck rose.
Aya squeezed off two shots before anyone else reacted. The closest nossie wailed a screech worse than nails on a chalkboard, the sound of it ripping through my ear drums and bouncing around in my skull. Douglas and the other two ravens grimaced. Sometimes, one of our greatest strengths became a weakness.
More vampires flooded into the room. I counted five—no, six. Everything went to hell. While we weren’t vastly outnumbered, the nosferatu had the advantage in strength and ferocity. Starving vamps had no conscience. No reservations. They attacked like wild beasts.
Sweat broke out on my brow, fear and adrenaline pumping through my veins. This is what I had trained for, and it wasn’t my first nos fight. Guns were useless in close quarters brawls, so I traded mine for my stake and joined the fray. The first nos to leap at me did so without any finesse or self-preservation. The man left his chest wide open and I struck without hesitation. My back hit the floor, and his claws rent my jacket sleeves, but my stake found his heart. I rolled back to my feet and rejoined the fight.
A hulking man with clumps of hair missing charged toward Sky, only to fall back when her wings brightened to solar flare level and filled the room with a triumphant deluge of colorful light.
My instincts knew what was coming before my body could follow commands from my brain. Beaumont was moving, blurring, a sort of shadow silhouette zipping across the room. He became incorporeal mist—another vampire lord trick—to evade Douglas’s jaws but solidified again when he crashed into Aya and Thib, scattering them like a 7-10 split in a bowling lane. Aya shifted midair, turned, and flipped back onto her feet, but the vampire lord was beyond her reach, already grabbing Sky by the throat and thrusting her up against the wall.
Her light gleamed nuclear bright. If it hurt him, he didn’t show it, didn’t even flinch.
“One move and I snap her neck. Her death can be on your conscience.”
Panic sledgehammered into my chest and stopped my heart. I hadn’t been fast enough to stop him, too slow to protect her. I leaned forward, shifting weight to move, but too petrified by the thought of losing Sky.
“Good. Good. Now make your beast release my pet.” Douglas’s brown eyes glinted in the light, but he raised his massive paw from the nos trapped beneath it. “You don’t know how long it took to raise the perfect hunters. See how obedient they are?”
The nos snapped its fangs at Douglas but didn’t lunge as expected. Instead, the wretched creature crossed toward Rebecca.
“Good. Now, you all won’t mind if I take my prize and walk away. Well, both of my prizes.” He grinned and flexed his fingers around Sky’s throat. She made a gurgling sound and kicked her feet to no avail, which only made the bastard laugh.
Left with few options, the rest of us stepped back. His remaining pets remained between us and their master. I had no doubts the moment he was out of the room he’d set them on us again.
Before he took more than three steps, Skylar faded into smoke and dew and mist, becoming as insubstantial as Beaumont had be
en moments before. He blinked and swiped at her with his hands, but she floated away in a shimmering silhouette, the wind stirring around her.
“You aren’t the only one with special tricks, asshole.”
And then Douglas pounced. Eight hundred pounds of bear dove onto the vampire lord before he could recuperate from losing his ace in the hole, splashing like a wrestler who’d jumped from the top rope. Aya spun into action and took down the vampire carrying Rebecca. The unconscious girl hit the floor with a thud.
We cleaned up the remaining nos a lot easier with their master on the ground, unable to direct them. Sky’s solar light and Jolene’s fire magic made quick work of them.
“Like I said, you’re under arrest,” Thib said as he crouched and pulled Beaumont’s hands behind his back none too gently, much to my satisfaction.
I kicked him in the head for good measure, rocking it so hard I hoped the steel-toe of my boot left a permanent dent.
Thib nodded in approval and I drew my foot back, ready to deliver a second. Maybe this time I’d break his nose.
“Gabriel.” Aya spoke only the one word.
“What?” I hissed.
“Don’t stoop to his level. You’re better than that.”
“Better than what?” Douglas asked, human again. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“Neither did I,” Thib said, a big grin on his face. “Stress of all this vampire bullshit must be tiring you, Aya.”
Aya sighed. She glanced at Jolene for backup, but the sorceress cleared her throat and looked away. We weren’t supposed to rough up suspects, and I knew that, but it also wasn’t uncommon for assholes like Beaumont to receive a little justice prior to getting a cot at the station.
Sky came up beside me and laid her hand on my arm. “We’re better than him.”
No judgement shaded her hoarse voice, but the words snapped me to my senses all the same. Rather than break Beaumont’s face, I turned to my girlfriend and inspected her throat. Bruises smudged her golden skin. That alone made me want to give the bastard another kick for good measure, but I didn’t. I also didn’t coddle her on-scene. That bit of attention could wait until we returned to our room.
While Douglas pinned him from one side, Thib and I held the other. Jolene applied a set of enchanted silver restraints to his wrists. Magical symbols burned across the metal like Sauron’s One Ring, creating an unbreakable trap the vampire lord couldn’t shatter. Silver was to a master vampire as lead was to Superman, an object they couldn’t affect with their gifts. Sometimes people guarded locations against vampire intrusion by lacing walls with silver dust and salt. It wouldn’t affect his strength, but it would prevent him from turning into mist again.
“You want the honor of leading the suspect upstairs, rookies?” Thib asked.
“Hell yeah,” Sky replied.
We each took him by one arm for the escort down the narrow hall. With Sky’s wings illuminating the path, the remaining caged vampires recoiled the moment she neared.
“What about these guys?” she asked, pausing by a cage where a man, all skin and bones and barely clothed, huddled on the floor. They couldn’t be saved.
Jolene’s shoulders dropped an inch. She sighed. “We’ll have to return with a team to assess the humans and put the others out of their misery unless you want to do the honors for us and spare some manpower.”
“If I burn them…how will we identify them for their relatives?”
“Dental records,” Thib said. “Only the cuspid and first biscuspid teeth of each quadrant change. It’ll give our lab people some work to do. Teeth are the only thing that remain after a burning.”
Some work to do. Guys like Thib were seriously desensitized to the job. I wondered if I’d be like him one day, shrugging off the deaths of a dozen unfortunate souls who had the bad luck of becoming nosferatu playthings.
“What about the vampires who haven’t turned nos?”
“The sunlight test is part of the assessment,” I said in a low voice. “It won’t kill them unless they’re a full-blown nosferatu, but they’ll be in mild discomfort and have a few sunburns.”
“Allow me to provide another angle,” Aya said in a gentle voice, placing her hand on Sky’s back. “Don’t think of it as saving the SBA time, but that these people will be out of pain.”
“Out of pain,” Sky echoed, the phrase carving indecisive worry lines between her brows.
“Definitely,” Jolene agreed.
They’d said the magic words. I knew what to expect long before Skylar’s gift surged behind us down the corridor in a wave of inescapable, molten sunlight.
12
Annalise
Unlike Charles, Beaumont didn’t crack under the pressure Uncle Hiroto and Thib applied in the interrogation room. Minutes ticked by, stretching over an hour, and he hadn’t given them a single lead. Then Aya peeked in and informed them that Count Pichot had arrived.
“You hear that?” Thib said, leaning forward. “Once the count has been briefed, you’re fucked. We’ll be sending you to Russia on a one-way teleport, straight to the Sanguine Court. Your one surviving lackey already told us everything we needed to know about your operation.”
“You think you frighten me? You don’t know fear, not like Annalise. She frightens me, and you should be scared of her too.”
“You should be scared of the sentence that’s waiting for you with your monarchs,” Thib said in a hard voice. “They’ll burn you for what you’ve done. But if you cooperate, tell us about this Annalise, maybe the king and queen will show you some mercy. A century or so locked away in a tower, maybe.”
“No. I’d sooner take death at the hands of the court than whatever she’ll do to me. I know the fate awaiting me with King Konstantin; he’ll make it quick. She won’t.”
My uncle stood with his back to the observation window, but I could picture the tension lines creasing his forehead. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said, contrasting Thib’s hardass persona. “We can protect you. Something tells me you’re a small fry compared to the puppet master every field office across the States has sought. Give us something, Beaumont. You must know you’re not the one we want. We want your leader, and if you give her to us, we’ll do whatever we can to keep you safe.”
Beaumont snorted and shook his head. “You can’t protect me. She’s everywhere.”
Then the vamp clammed up and didn’t utter another word, no matter how much Thib and my uncle pried. They changed interrogators, but he didn’t budge for anyone, not even when Count Pichot himself entered the room and sat opposite him, grim and terrifying in his own way.
Vamps didn’t scare me, not anymore, even after fighting Beaumont in the cellar, but this dude made the fine hairs on my nape rise. Sky shivered beside me. I slid an arm around her waist and held her closer.
“Think he’s exaggerating for some sympathy? He makes his boss sound like a horror movie villain. Nobody can be that scary.”
Sky glanced at me sidelong. “Gabe, whoever she is, she’s managed to undo bindings. I’d say that’s pretty damn scary.”
She made a point. Binding was supposed to be a permanent, humane way to preserve life while taking gifts from shifters, mages, and fae deemed too irresponsible to keep their powers. Strip a fae or a mage of his magic, and you have a mundane mortal left. Same for a shifter, though most of my kind fell prey to intense, lasting depression once we lost our gifts. Suicide rates of bound shifters had reached an all-time high a few years back.
Compared to us, vamps got the raw end of the deal. At least my kind walked away from a trial with our lives, even if we lost our animals, our sense of smell, and our taste for hunting, but a vampire received a stake in the chest and a burning for failure to follow society’s rules. Their vampirism was too much an intrinsic part of their existence to be separated from their body.
And when Bindings were attempted in the past, textbooks on the subject claimed the victims had died in excruciating ways during the ritual, a death so b
ad staking was considered a compassionate resolution.
But last year, several former PNRU students who had been bound and exiled from our community showed up with their powers intact. They had gone evil, becoming the darkling counterpart of their particular types.
“You’re right,” I said quietly. “At least now we have a name.”
“A lot of good that’ll do us.”
“It’s more than we knew before.”
She sighed and dipped her head. “I guess. What happens to him now?”
“Exactly what Thib said. I imagine the count will accompany him to Russia once they round up enough mages to activate the teleport.”
When the senior sentinels escorted Beaumont from the interrogation room, Sky and I followed them down the corridor toward holding. Moonlight shone through the picture windows overlooking the city.
Something smelled rank. Not like a skunk, but like that time a mouse had died between the walls in our house, creating an intolerable odor for days. If it had lasted any longer, Mom would have had Dad and me tear them down to remove the decomposing rodent.
Aya paused. “You smell that?”
Uncle Hiroto cocked his head. “Smells like—”
A black, hulking shape smashed through the reinforced windows, a bird-shaped wrecking ball sending glass shards and broken bricks flying across the room. Before I really had a chance to make sense of the chaos, a wet, ripping sound and an agonized scream filled the air.
Then Skylar screamed, “Jolene!”
An enormous scaled foot pinned Jolene to the floor. My pulse drummed in my ears for the split second it took to realize the mage was already dead. A beak longer than my arm drilled through her torso, penetrating the center of her rib cage. It yanked out, rending bones, leaving a wet, grisly hole behind and taking her heart with it.
Birds of a Feather: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 2, Summer Page 11