Blood of the Dead, page 12
“I tried to tell you, Luna—but you wouldn’t let me!” Nilesh called after me.
I couldn’t even be bothered to shout a “Fuck you” back as I reached where Paco was—I just held the umbrella over his head. He looked up at me, panicked and lost, with all-too-human eyes. “What have I done?”
“Shh,” I soothed him, putting a cold hand on his cheek. “I don’t know, baby. But we need to leave here, all right? It’s not safe for us.” He clapped his hand against mine to keep it there and nodded. “Come on,” I said, urging him up. I wrapped his fingers with my own and pulled him up to standing. “Do you still have your phone?” I asked, in my most sympathetic tone, and when he nodded, I said, “Yeah? Good. Call us up a ride, will you? We need to get home.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jack
I woke up very hungry to someone softly calling my name.
Jack.
Jack.
“Jack?”
I blinked, trying to figure out what was and wasn’t real. It was still dark even though my eyes were open—but I moved around, successfully.
At least I wasn’t buried or chained.
“Jack?” a voice said again, slightly more panic-tinged.
A real voice, not the one I was sure I’d heard echoing inside my own head prior.
“Yeah?” I whispered, because quietness seemed appropriate, and then I realized I could smell who it was. On top of her own unique scent, my one Faithful friend seemed to prefer a particular kind of dryer sheet. “Sam?”
“Jack,” she repeated, sounding relieved. “I knew you were alive, since you didn’t dust, but I wasn’t sure about much else.”
I sat up slowly. She was about twenty feet away from me.
I could tell because in addition to her dryer sheet, I could smell her blood, inside her.
Smelling was the wrong verb for it—it was something akin to sense-feeling her edible presence, but it was close—and disconcerting—enough.
A soft blue light began glowing, illuminating her face and reminding me that her blood was attached to the rest of her. She had her back to a roughly carved wall on the other side of a small cavern, and we were separated from each other by cage bars and a door, like animals at a zoo, and once again I cursed the gods that saw me spending so much of my time in danger in assorted holes underground. “Fuck.”
“Pretty much,” she agreed, eyeing me warily. “How . . . do you feel?”
“Unhappy?” I guessed, looking around—and then I realized why she was asking, because I was now who knew how long out since my last feeding, and a couple pints low. “I’m still me.”
“And you’ll be sure to tell me when that changes, will you?” she said. People in space probably could’ve heard her sarcasm.
“Yeah. I’ll do an interpretive dance or something,” I said, standing up to look around. “Where the hell are we?”
“Some kind of magical cage.”
I grunted. “Can you make that brighter for me?”
“It won’t help,” she said, but she did it anyhow, and it showed me the rough stone edges of the rooms we were both in. I still made a show of running my fingers against the stone behind me though, and tapped it, trying to see if I could find anywhere that it was weak, not that I was hiding a jack-hammer on me.
“It’s the same over here,” she added, when I was finished.
“How’d we even get down here?” I wondered.
“Magic. The super-bad-not-good kind,” she said with a sigh. “Near as I can figure, everything with Luna and the Rojo was a trap.”
“Towards what end?”
“I have a lot of unfortunate guesses.”
I circled around and came to the bars to check them out—and I saw her flinch on the other side. Half of me was ashamed of her fear, and the other half thrilled at her weakness.
I backed away more to make me comfortable than her.
“Want to share?” I asked, because things were easier on me when we were talking.
There was a long pause. “Once upon a time, I lied to you.”
I sat back down, against the far wall. “Isn’t that illegal for you or something?”
“It was for the cause,” she said with a snort. “Remember when I told you we didn’t find the Sleeper?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we did. We backhoed that lot of land down to practically magma, we found its coffin, and inside, its corpse—which we were excited by at the time. We spent about twenty-four hours being thrilled that an evil entity had been wiped off the map, as our scientists carefully transported it back to our labs, where we realized the truth—what we’d found was just its shell. An empty chrysalis.”
“Do I want to know what it looked like?”
“You ever see those cicada shells, out in the Midwest? The ones that get left clinging to trees and screens?”
I could remember them clearly from my youth in Texas. Us boys would carefully pry them off of things and then run around chasing girls with them. “Yeah.”
“It was like that, only human sized, with a lot more legs and mouthparts.”
“And . . . where did the rest of it go?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. We were working on it.”
“Do I want to know what that has to do with us?”
She looked between us, despondent. “Have you ever heard of parasitic wasps?”
One of my eyebrows crawled high on my forehead. “No, and I don’t think I want to.”
That didn’t stop her though. “I think we were put down here as food. Or—at least I was.”
It took a long while for what she’d told me to sink in, and then I made an irritated sound. “Sam, if I’ve tried to live by one motto as a vampire, it’s that friends don’t eat friends.”
“Yeah, well, sentiments from Finding Nemo aside, the next time you wake up, I don’t think I’d trust you as far as I could throw you—without magic, that is.” Sam quenched the light in her hand, leaving us both in the dark.
I looked in the last direction I’d seen her, with a slight afterimage of the door in my mind. “Can you turn that back on a second?”
“Sure,” she said, and did so.
“Do you see, uh, any latch-looking things on your side of the door?”
Her gaze scanned it quickly. “No,” she said, then frowned. “Do you?”
I moved to standing, and she did the same, mirroring me quickly, and pulling her hands up into what I thought of as “battle-mode.”
“Yeah—Sam—you’re really not going to like this much, but you need to trade sides with me. Now,” I said, walking over to flip the latch on my side of the gate and draw it through its rusty slot.
It creaked and groaned and I could hear her cursing, then see her sweat as she tried not to do as she was told, and when she finally took a step forward, she glared daggers. “You swore not to order me! Under penalty of death!”
“It wasn’t that long ago. I remember,” I said, stepping away from the doorway.
She kept fighting. I tried to give her space, but my hunger found the herky-jerky way her stubbornness was making her move enticing. She looked wounded and weak—like something I could readily put down. My stomach twisted with a pang.
She smelled so good and she didn’t even know it.
“Jack!” she shouted at me, now firmly ensconced on my side.
I focused up again. “Thank you,” I said, and ducked past her, so we’d switched. “Lock me in.” She muttered, but then did as she was told, and stepped sideways to frown at me through the bars. “See? Now you’re safe,” I told her.
The bright light of her anger still lit up her face. “Until you order me back through to feed you.”
I moved as far away from her as I could, putting my back against the wall. “That’s not happening.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, not taking her eyes off of me as she made a quick tour of her new environs, before looking over. “Did you see any water in here?”
I shook my head, then looked behind me, where I could see a thin trickle of moisture trailing down one wall.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Indeed,” I agreed.
She sat down to put her head in her hands, letting the light go out, and I didn’t ask her to turn it back on.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Luna
We waited outside the construction site for our ride for a good ten minutes, and when they got there, Paco whammied them to ignore our appearances without a second thought. I was proud of him and was going to tell him that, then thought better of it as we sat in the back of the car together in silence.
I didn’t ask where Paco’s ride was taking us, but I knew I’d assumed right when we got off the interchange, and it pulled into Jack’s apartment complex’s lot.
“He gave me keys. He just never wanted me over,” Paco said after we got out, pausing to rate and tip the driver like any other human, then he looked at me and made a sound, like something was in him that he needed to throw up.
I grabbed his hand again. “You know why, right?” I asked, pulling him along. “Because he loved you.”
“That’s true—but it’s not helping,” he said, squeezing my hand like it was attached to a life preserver.
“I know. Come on.”
He let us in, and I fed Sugar, while Paco just stood three steps past the doorway, stunned.
“I can’t do this,” he said, when I’d circled back to him.
I caught his face between my hands. “Yeah, you can. And you will. He’d have wanted that for you. And despite your recent behavior, I don’t think that you’d turn your back on him, even if he’s gone.”
I watched fifty different emotions ride the man’s face, one by one by one. “How come you’re so good at this?” he asked as tears started to fill his eyes again.
“Because while Jack was my friend, we weren’t in love, like you were. And because I’ve done this before.” I let go of him and then stepped back. “Go shower, Paco. Everything’s better after a shower—and—when’s the last time you ate?”
I watched him run his hands through his hair, looking so much like Jack in that one moment that it hurt me. “The prior night.”
“Okay. You’ve got a little bit of time then. I’ll line someone up for you this evening while you’re down—you don’t want to go through all this on an empty stomach.” I went around behind him and softly pushed him toward the hall. He took the hint, and walked that way mechanically, before looking back.
“Why’re you being nice to me?”
“Why’re you still here?” I teased, but when he didn’t smile I told him the truth. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Me either,” he agreed, then ducked into the bathroom, and a minute later I heard the water running.
I went into Jack’s room and stole sweatpants and a T-shirt from him, then cranked up the heat. The bills here weren’t in my name, and after standing in a thin dress in the rain for so long, I was cold down to my bones.
It was obvious that my next ploy was going to have to be to somehow make Paco change me, but I found the thought of negotiating that exhausting as I began to make myself a PB&J. I grabbed a beer from Jack’s fridge to take with me back to the couch.
So what if I did die?
Like . . . what the hell had I been fighting so hard to stay alive for?
I felt like I’d come to some strange moment of peace with my fate—right before I learned I’d been fucked by a fallen angel—and I wanted to reside there. To try on being comfortable with inevitability for a change.
I leaned over, popped the top off the beer with the edge of the coffee table like I was very sure Jack, were he here, would never let me do, and rocked back to put my feet up, still thinking about how nice it would be to just stop fucking fighting for an hour.
Sugar jumped up and ran her face against my knuckles, daring to get cold beer sweat on her whiskers for pets.
“You’re a good kitty,” I told her, stroking her awkwardly, listening to her throaty purr.
Cats didn’t really live for that long, did they?
And they still seemed happy.
By the time I was almost done with the beer, Paco emerged. He was wearing one of Jack’s robes, which I hoped he found comforting, and sometime during his shower he’d taken himself down a notch.
“I was such an asshole to him, Luna,” he said, circling through the kitchen to get a beer of his own, before joining me on the couch.
“Yeah, I know, I was there.” I reached mine over and toasted his, making the bottle necks clink.
“No, you don’t understand,” he went on. “It was like—ever since I woke up—I was just . . . discontent.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “It was unexpected. You hadn’t had a chance to process yet.”
He grunted. “Not really. When I was at that witch’s strip club—I knew I was going to die.”
I sucked my lower lip thoughtfully. “So . . . maybe you died angry and woke up angry. The circumstances of your death were certainly less than ideal.”
He frowned and shook his head, unable to let the matter go. “It’s just so strange,” he said, talking to himself as he rocked back too. “For the past week, like, practically since the moment I woke and after I fed, it’s felt like there’s just been this other voice inside me. Telling me things—and making me think that they were true.” Sugar came over to him for love next, and he scratched her gently behind an ear. “Like that Jack took me for granted, or reminding me of everything I’ve lost, or asking me how it would even be possible for one guy to love another for eternity, and to just bail already, before I got hurt.”
I leaned forward a little, suddenly curious. “And now?”
“Now . . . it’s just gone, and I’m left here,” he said, and then gave me a hurt look. “I didn’t even tell him I loved him, Luna. And I should have—I could have—he was shouting his love at me.”
I watched his fingers around the beer bottle turn white.
“Don’t break that,” I said, reaching out for him. “I don’t want to clean up glass.”
He set the bottle down and placed his head in his hands. “I don’t know what’s left for me now,” he said quietly, and I patted his back as stiffly as I’d petted Sugar.
“I won’t lie to you and tell you everything’s going to be okay. Shit’s fucked, no doubt. But there’ll be a tomorrow. And a day after that, and a day after that one, and you’ll figure out something.”
“How do you know?” he asked, looking over at me.
“Because you don’t really get a choice.” I finished off my beer. “So—no voices anymore?”
“No, but that could be because they’re drowned out by my terror of living for centuries solo,” he said with a snort. “Why?”
“I’m just wondering some things,” I said, playing the edge of the bottle against my lips like a lipstick. I hadn’t heard from my Master since I’d been kidnapped, and whispering into confused vampire’s ears seemed entirely like him. And if I hadn’t been blindsided by finding out what Nilesh was, and dealing with Paco, I might’ve already realized that.
“Like?” Paco pressed.
“Nothing you need to worry your pretty little head about.” I shook my head at him and made a show of stretching out on the couch. “Surely it’s almost dawn. Go curl up in Jack’s coffin, Paco. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Promise?” he asked, and any night prior to tonight I would’ve thirsted for a vampire to look at me like he was currently, all fragile and malleable, but right now all it did was smart.
“Yeah,” I swore, feigning exhaustion.
I waited ’til the sun was good and bright and Paco was very dead before I took my shower—then after that I raided Jack’s closet again, for shirts and a hoodie to go over my last clean black miniskirt, then rifled through Paco’s wallet, which he’d set out on Jack’s nightstand. I liberated a credit card and all of his cash before cabbing back to the construction site.
There was a line of Faithful malingering at the perimeter, wearing construction worker vests, but I still recognized them—none of them had stooped backs from carrying shingles for a living.
So I walked over, and as two of them came to intercept me, I held up a hand. “Nuh-uh, do not try that shit with me. You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” I said, ducking myself under their tape line, to some flustered confusion.
And then Nilesh saw me. He was in the same clothing he’d had on a few hours ago, sans the suit jacket I’d stolen, and as he moved to standing, I strode right on up.
“I’ve decided to forgive you for some things—assuming you’re willing to tell me everything you know.”
The corners of his lips lifted up. “How generous of you.”
“Quite!” I agreed, and gave him a winning smile. “So what the fuck are you all still doing here, and do you have any leads?”
“To?” he asked me.
“Wherever Jack is right now. Because it’s clear to me that I was bait—the Rojo told me they were doing a ritual—and when I went through my stuff at Jack’s apartment, I found out my nightblade was gone, so I’m pretty sure you assholes have it.”
“How perceptive of you,” he said, and he actually did seem amused—with me or at me, I couldn’t quite tell. “Did you want to go get breakfast?” he asked, and when I didn’t respond quickly enough, added, “It’d be just as easy to tell you things over coffee.”
I put my hands into the hoodie’s central pouch. “Only if it’s someplace we can walk to. I don’t want anyone seeing me in one of your cars, ruining all my cred.”
“All our cars have tinted windows,” he countered, then made a show of looking at a watch. “And it’s nine in the morning. None of your kind is awake, usually.”
I frowned, then relented. “Fine,” I huffed, and he went back into a zipped-up tent to get himself keys.
