Blood of the Dead, page 7
I smiled back, recognizing our current truce, and wasn’t even bothered when he whistled for me because he could. “L—we going?”
“Yeah,” I told him. while looking at Nilesh and wincing apologetically.
Because it was better that he think me a lying bitch than finding out the truth.
Chapter Eleven
Jack
“You look like a sugar plum fairy,” I told Luna the second she sat down in my car. She glared at me, and I laughed. “That’s literally the only ballet thing I know.”
“I’m not surprised.” She tsked.
“Are you saying I’m uncultured?” I teased her, because if she was, well, she was right. I cared deeply about certain kinds of art, tattooing people for a living, but most museums weren’t open at night.
“Possibly? But you did get these tickets, so . . .”
“They were given to me, actually.”
Luna blinked. “Who, and why?”
“Would you believe the Faithful wanted us to take a night out together?”
“Jack, no,” she gasped in horror. “What, just because you and Paco have hit a rough patch, you’ve got a death wish?”
“Nah.” I shrugged and downshifted. “Not for myself at least.”
“Jack!”
The truth was that while I’d woken up earlier in the evening with concerns, if Sam knew I was moonlighting at Fran’s, she surely knew where my apartment was, and who knew what else. I wasn’t under any delusions about how safe my apartment was for me during the day, when I was dead as a doornail and vulnerable as hell. So the tickets seemed safe enough, because there were a ton of easier ways to kill me than taking me out to ballet.
Luna groaned but she didn’t make me turn the car around, and it turned out Sam had given us amazingly good seats, fifth row. By the time we were that close to the stage, she was beaming, and all was forgiven.
And that was the real reason we were here. Not because I was wanted to do a single thing Sam wanted me to, or because I needed distractions from Paco—well, maybe—but mostly because I wanted to see Luna smile.
Anything I could do to convince her she belonged among humans was good for her.
“This close!” Luna hissed in excitement. “For Mayerling!” Her eyes bugged out of her head a little, like I should know what that meant.
I gave her a companionable shrug. “Okay?”
“Ugh,” she said, then stuck the tip of her tongue out at me. “You’ll see.”
I’d resisted the temptation to google anything ahead of time, more willing instead to let the experience wash over me. “Does that mean it’s good?” I asked, sounding droll.
She glared at me, then realized I was teasing, and laughed.
I found it easy enough to follow along—there was a prince of some sort who was deeply unhappy, until he found a woman who wanted to be unhappy with him, and I could all too readily sympathize with his plight. It didn’t hurt that every single person on the stage was gorgeous and talented, and from our seats it was easy to appreciate both of those facts.
And then the prince finally had a dance with her and it was maybe one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Both of the dancers were of course incredibly athletic, but their movements were evocative. I could practically feel the emotions coming off of them, almost thick enough to feed from. I was both stunned and rapt.
“See?” Luna said quietly. I took a quick glance at her, but she was still staring at the stage.
“Yeah,” I whispered back.
It had a tragic ending, like good art often did, but there was a satisfaction in having been taken to another place. Even with the heavy sorrow, it was still a respite to be transported to a world where nothing that happened in this one mattered, no matter how briefly.
“That was amazing,” I said, after the final encore.
“Totally,” she said, after releasing a long sigh. “They’re not all like that, but this one is so good.”
“I’m not in any danger of becoming a ballet snob, never fear.” I was standing behind her as we waited for our turn to go, and I saw her scanning the room, looking for danger, finding her exits. “Feels weird, doesn’t it,” I said, and when she turned back to give me a puzzled look I went on. “The freedom.”
She licked her lips. “Yeah. It does.”
I’d been living with the stormfront of Rosalie on the edge of my horizon for so long, I didn’t know how to feel when I looked up and saw clear sky. “I’m not used to it either,” I confessed. “You don’t want that back though, do you?”
Luna frowned instantly. “Are you retracting your offer?”
“No. I’m a man of my word. I just keep hoping you’ll make better decisions is all.” I shrugged as we finally walked for the stairs. “Most ballet performances start during daylight hours at this latitude, you know.” I heard her snort one step ahead of me. “Also, if this is really what you’re into, why don’t you do this now? What’s stopping you?” I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask her how she’d gotten trapped with Rosalie to begin with, although I assumed it was something gory and sad like me. “You could open up a dance studio. Teach kids how to dance. I could shake Maya down for some cash to start it.”
She turned as we reached the top of the stairs and gave me a complicated look. “Don’t, Jack,” she pleaded, and as I inhaled to argue she said, “Just stop pushing. Please.”
Chapter Twelve
Luna
Once again, Jack had no idea what he was asking—and I had no idea if my Master was listening in. I really wanted to tell him—or, hell, just someone—but not if it meant my Master would kill them a second later, or choke me out to stop me from talking.
And if what Jack didn’t know about ballet could fill a book, chances were he hadn’t heard about progressive chromosomal brain disorders.
I could still try, though. “Ballet’s a living art form,” I told him carefully, on our way back out to his vintage muscle car. “If people stop performing a dance, it can become lost to time. And even when dances are being performed, no two of them can ever be fully the same. Sometimes the performers are different, sometimes the crowd watching is different, sometimes you’re a different person watching, you know?”
And Jack was now watching me across Betty’s roof, in that quiet way that hungry vampires had—only when he was doing it, I didn’t have to be afraid.
Not tonight at least.
“Like snowflakes?” he offered at long last.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and getting into the car. Snowflakes weren’t alive. “More like mayflies. They’re meant to be appreciated in the moment—but not worth giving up my whole future for.”
“If you say so, Luna.” He got into the car beside me, and we both put our lap belts on. “There’s a beauty in mortality, you know.”
“Says the man who’s trapped in time,” I scoffed, and he chuckled.
“So Nilesh, eh?” he asked, putting his car into gear.
I blushed furiously, grateful for the darkness inside his vehicle. “And back to ballet,” I said sternly, and he laughed outright.
Chapter Thirteen
Jack
It actually was nice driving along with Luna sitting beside me—maybe Sam was right, and I did deserve a break once in a while. And even though Luna and I were not, and would never be, a thing, having someone around who understood my lifestyle . . . I’d missed that.
It was so nice not to have to lie.
And then I watched Luna take off her heels to put her feet up on Betty’s dash. “What the—did Rosalie let you do that?”
“Rosalie didn’t have a car, silly.” Luna rolled her eyes at me. “She didn’t know how to drive. She was way too old to learn.” She gave me a defiant look as she settled in.
I looked between her painted toes and her. “So, what . . . you just miss being whammied?”
“We both know you’re not going to whammy me, Jack. Not over this.” Her nose wrinkled in thought in the rear view as I merged onto the highway. “Why do you call it that anyways?”
I inhaled to tell her, then glanced in her side view mirror, where a semi without running lights was bearing down on us at speed.
“Hang on!” I shouted as I flung an arm across her to keep her from taking a nosedive into the very same dashboard, at the same time as I yanked the wheel left while gunning the engine.
Betty was too big a car to clear the lane quickly, and the truck clipped the back corner on Luna’s side. She screamed as we began to spin, and I tried to control the car with one hand, while stopping her from getting shaken like a rag doll by a dog.
And then something else hit us. Betty was shoved into the empty space above an overpass, right before the barrier wall began. I used the last chance I had to steer us away from the wall, which meant going down into the desert landscaping below. Betty bounced, hit something wrong, and then twisted in midair like a dolphin flipping back into the sea. Shrubbery and rock made metal shriek as it scraped against us, glass was everywhere. Luna was screaming—until she wasn’t—and then I heard things crunch and there was only black.
Chapter Fourteen
Luna
I woke up hanging in the dark upside down.
Like a vampire bat.
Only I still wasn’t a vampire.
“Jack?” I whispered. Everything hurt. I put a hand to my chest where I was sure ribs were broken. There wasn’t much light, but I could smell blood.
Was it mine?
I reached out carefully and found Jack there, dangling same as I was. He was intact, so he was alive. If he was dead, he would’ve dusted. But he didn’t move when I shoved him and he felt sticky. “Jack?” I asked, panicking. We had to get out—could we get out? When was sunrise? What would happen if people came for us?
What would happen if they didn’t?
I heard the sound of someone moving around outside. I saw a shadow cast by two legs, coming near. “Help!” I shouted. A flashlight shone in, illuminating both Jack and I briefly—he was covered in blood, his nose looked broken, his jaw misaligned. Then the light became brighter, and I couldn’t see who held it as they knelt down, I only heard what they said next.
“Sleep.”
Chapter Fifteen
Jack
I woke up in Betty’s wreckage not that long before dawn, remembering the last thing I’d been worried about.
“Luna?” I asked aloud.
I could scent her here—she’d been bleeding—and so had I. I braced a hand off of Betty’s ceiling, which was now the floor and uncomfortably close, and undid my lap belt, letting myself drop half a foot down onto my shoulder. I groaned and reached for my face first. It was covered in dried blood, my jaw ached, and what the fuck . . .
We’d been hit hard.
Had it been on purpose?
Where was Luna?
I wheeled myself around on my back enough to kick the remaining glass in the driver’s side window out and wriggled myself free to stand up and look at Betty’s carnage. “Fuck,” I growled. I loved that car—but I could get another one, in the fullness of time, which I had a lot of . . . but as far as I knew, Luna was one of a kind.
“Luna!” I shouted out in case she’d woken up earlier and climbed up to the highway to flag down help. Then I circled the car, and saw the drag marks in the dirt outside the passenger side window, where she had been pulled through the scree. I could see small drops of her blood on the rocks, black in the moonlight, that went out for a trail of six feet and then stopped.
“FUCK!” I shouted a whole hell of a lot louder, and then started climbing up the hillside for the road.
I made the driver of the first car I commandeered take me to Vermillion, my old Mistress’s strip club, and banged on the door so that my blood-sister Maya’s new muscle would come and let me in.
“We’re closed,” a large strange man growled before seeing me fully and recoiling.
“Let me in,” I snarled, and his fingers fumbled for the lock. “Get Maya.”
He disappeared to do as he was told and I waited, waving at the nearest camera in the ceiling.
The club felt like a ghost town without patrons and scantily clad women, but I knew I wasn’t alone. There were a fleet of people who lived here to service Maya’s needs, in a warren of tunnels and rooms full of bunk beds below Vermillion’s shiny, cherry-scented surface.
“Jack, what the hell,” Maya muttered, strolling into the lobby barefoot, wearing a gauzy white robe with a fur trimmed edge.
Her flaming red hair and pale skin made her look otherworldly, though she was less imposing than usual out of her spiked high heels. She took in my current state and actually looked concerned for me, a rarity, quickly pulling me toward the nearest table to sit across from her.
“What happened to you?” she asked, then looked behind me at the door. “Do we need to go to arms? Is whatever attacked you coming here?”
“Luna’s been kidnapped,” I growled. “I need your help to find her.”
Maya blinked, and then looked bemused. “I keep forgetting Rosalie never trained you, Jack—but this is trivially easy. Tell me how you’ve made Luna yours, and I can show you the spell.” I inhaled, and Maya read me before I could say anything. “You . . . haven’t?” she asked, incredulously.
Luna had offered me blood and sex multiple times before, and I’d never once taken her up on it.
“How do you . . . what . . . why?” Words continued to spill out of Maya’s mouth in disbelief. “You do realize, according to the old rules, I could take her back from you because you’re wasting her, right?”
And Luna had told me as much, when she’d tried to foist herself on me as a bloodslave after Rosalie’s demise. “You said you didn’t want her back,” I said in a threatening tone.
“Yes, but this is foolish, even for you, Jack.” Maya tilted her head, not understanding me in the least.
“I want her human,” I snarled. “Feeding from her isn’t part of that plan—but keeping her alive is. If you can’t help, then tell me where I can find a Faithful,” I said, starting to stand. My runner up plan was to go find Sam and shake her ’til answers fell out. I didn’t know why I’d wanted to believe she was “good” when I should’ve known there was no such thing.
Maya waved me back down. “Why?”
“Because I got us set up.” The words tasted like bile on my tongue. I’d been beating myself up for the entire ride here, wondering why the fuck I’d taken Luna out, thinking that somehow Sam and I might be what . . . friends? It’d be one thing for them to attack me, but—
“Doubtful,” Maya said, interrupting my train of thought. “Think again. If Rosalie’s dead, and you haven’t fed from Luna, she’s an unclaimed human—the exact kind of person the Faithful are sworn to protect. They have their stupid code, remember? And kidnapping’s very much not their style,” she said, shaking her head. “So what other enemies do you have?”
I considered this and sat back down. “None, that I know of.”
She squinted at me. “Really?” I nodded. “Well. That must be nice.”
I looked around at Vermillion’s walls, remembering what’d happened the last time I was here. “With the exception of the Sangre Rojo we murdered here last week, that is.”
Maya stiffened slightly. “They had it coming.”
“Definitely—but I can see why they might be pissed.” I tried to rake a hand through my hair but found it clotted with dried blood. I’d skipped feeding tonight to make the show, and now I wouldn’t get the chance. After as much blood as I’d lost, I’d wake up tomorrow starving. “Why would they take her, though?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Maya said, spreading her hands wide.
“And you would help me if you could?” I asked her quickly, bringing the full force of my whammy to bear.
“Reluctantly,” she admitted, but I knew she was telling the truth. “Although you using your powers on me is the height of gauche.” She glanced behind me like she was waiting for someone. “Jack, it’s almost dawn. I don’t have room for you here. Especially not if you’re in trouble right now.”
Was I? I wasn’t even sure. I’d been right there—anyone who’d taken Luna could’ve easily killed me, if they’d wanted to.
But if Sam wasn’t responsible for Luna being kidnapped, she’d still told me to stay topped-up, and meant it—so maybe she knew that danger was a possibility.
“I still need to know how to find the Faithful,” I told Maya.
“Not in this state, you don’t. It’s too close to dawn; they’d let you dust on their doorstep.” She gave me a complicated look then, and put a hand out on top of mine. “Much like our not-so-dearly departed Mistress, I find I enjoy having you owe me, Jack. I’ll send you home with one for the road,” she said, and snapped her fingers lightly. “Sleep and come back tomorrow night.”
I leaned against the table Maya and I had been talking at, waiting for whoever she was sending me.
“Jack?” A woman came into the room, wiping a tired hand across her face, and it was the first time I’d seen her with clothes on.
“Zevvi?” I remembered her from the night fighting Rojo.
“Yeah,” she said. She was curvy, with shoulder-length wavy brown hair to match, and green eyes that were currently surrounded by smudged eyeliner. Her jeans clung to her readily, while the rest of her was clearly braless under a baggy T-shirt.
