Blessed (31 page)

“Exploit to our advantage?” Kieren slowly blinked at me. “You used to have business strategies, not battle strategies.”

Neither of which sounded especially feminine. “I don’t mean to —”

“Please don’t stop on my account.” He brushed a curl from my forehead. “It’s very sexy. Very animal, as the Wolves around here say.”

“Be that as it may,” I replied, blushing, “I don’t want to waste tonight talking about Brad.” I reached to touch Kieren’s shoulder, and he winced again. “Oh, I —”

“How about I take the lead?” he suggested. “It’s my turn and then some.”

“About damn time,” I replied, and we both grinned.

There were no Jacuzzi bubble baths or burning eucalyptus candles or, for a long while after that, words. There didn’t need to be. It was a celebration of what should’ve been. We didn’t need to do anything in particular, let alone everything.

Just kissing,
kissing,
was so new to us. He tasted sweet and bitter. Like orange juice and beer. My touches were tentative, aware of his injuries. His were more assertive, mindful of me. We whispered things we’d never said before.

We didn’t hurry, and then we did. When I reached to guide his hand, he threw his arm across his face, rolled onto his back, and asked if we could just talk awhile.

I felt a flutter of rejection before realizing Kieren was simply trying to rein himself (or maybe his Wolf) in a little. If he wanted to talk, we could talk. “Clyde spent most of the trip to Chicago with a cricket leg stuck between his two front teeth. He wouldn’t take it out, even after Aimee offered him two bucks.”

Kieren glanced over. “Then what happened?”

“Freddy offered him five.”

I’d missed his laugh.

After a while, I began tracing circles on Kieren’s forearm and he kissed me again.

I arched against him, resenting the cotton between us, until he brushed the tiny twin scars beneath my breast.

I jerked back, sat straight up on the bed. “What if . . . what if Brad’s watching us?”

Kieren blew out a long breath. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

He frowned. “Do you want to stop? Because we don’t have to —”

“Hell, no. I really don’t want to stop.”

Kieren opened his arms. “Then let the jealous SOB look.”

He kissed my smile, my earlobe, my fingertips . . .

Hours passed, the sun rose, and we burned hotter.

Again, kissing, just
kissing,
was so new to us. So heavenly.

By early the next afternoon, Ivo had miraculously recovered enough to summon us to the
biergarten.
He offered everyone a Bavarian lager.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I never drink . . . beer.”

While Zachary, Freddy, and I joined Ivo at the table, Kieren kept his distance. He made himself comfortable on the concrete steps leading to the adjacent kitchen.

When I glanced over, he offered me a slight smile.

Because we “visitors” were presumed to be human or non-Wolf shifter, it was considered acceptable for us to deal more directly with the professor than Kieren could, as a lower-ranked Wolf. The whole thing made me appreciate Mrs. Levy and Mr. Wu.

Ivo speared a chicken-apple sausage from a platter on the table. He reached for the horseradish and hollered to the kitchen for sauerkraut. “You tell me what you know.”

It was mostly Freddy, with Zachary’s help, who explained about Bradley, the knives, and Dracula Prime’s powers — minimizing my role in the story.

Leaving out the baby-squirrel eaters altogether.

While the others talked and I took notes in Frank, I could feel Kieren staring at me. Harrison had questioned my coming. But I was our link to Kieren, and Kieren to the Wolves, and the Wolves, hopefully, to — if not a solution, at least a way to fight back.

“It is as I feared,” Ivo declared. “You say your Bradley extracted the abilities from Morris’s knife, likely in Texas, and then those from Harker’s knife in Chicago.

“I am sorry to tell you . . . at the lakefront, when he completed the blood rite, he did not only permanently transfer the knives’ combined powers to himself. He also unleashed something unexpected and far worse.”

Not what we’d been hoping to hear.

“The Wolf pack was attacked
not only
by your Bradley, using the Carpathian might of the Abomination,” Ivo explained, “but also by the
essence
of the Abomination himself.”

I scribbled that in my planner. “Essence?”

“The personality,” explained Freddy, adjusting his glasses. “The will.”

Zachary set down his stein. “It’s what continues to animate the undead. What, after a soul has been eaten away, can still be banished to hell.”

That
essence. “So you’re saying that, inside the knives, Dracula could think?”

“No!” Ivo barked, loud for an old Wolf on the mend. “I am saying that the Abomination’s essence could have remained intact, if long ago he had been felled by one weapon. However, in the two-fronted attack by Morris and Harker, his consciousness — like his powers — was split between the weapons and thereby rendered dormant.

“I am saying that, with your Bradley’s blood-sacrifice spell, he not only unleashed all of the Abomination’s supernatural skills into his own form. He also reunited and took in the actual essence of the Abomination.

“I am saying that the Abomination
thrives again
within your Bradley.”

Damn it. “He’s not
my
—”

“Drac is back?” Zachary and Freddy exclaimed.

“Brad must be losing ground already,” Kieren observed. “That explains why he didn’t recognize me yesterday or, at first, even Quincie.”

“Ultimately,” Ivo said, “there is no halfway. The count will triumph in any contest of wills, utterly vanquishing the foolish younger Nosferatu who resurrected him and fully adopting the body for his own use.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “No more Brad?” Was
that
why I hadn’t heard from him — no thought whispers, no dream visits, no delusions — since the showdown on Main Street?

“As you knew him, no,” Ivo confirmed, “though the struggle may take some time. I suspect that, after so long dormant, the Abomination will be disoriented, confused by changing times and by the mental influence of your Bradley, as long as he lasts.”

This time I restrained myself from arguing that Brad wasn’t mine.

It was ironic. My soul was being eaten away by the vampirism that Brad had cursed me with while his essence was being overtaken by an even stronger variety.

Bradley was smart, ambitious, and successful — what with his mass-infection scheme, acquiring the Carpathian magic, and crippling the Wolves.

But he hadn’t counted on the count. Dracula Prime was more monster than . . . what the hell . . .
my
Bradley could chew.

“In life,” Ivo continued, “the Abomination was a soldier, a statesman, an alchemist. Who knows how much of that existence he remembers now.”

I recalled Van Helsing saying something along those lines.

“But in death,
in death,
his power is godlike. We speak of affecting the forces of nature, of affecting animal, human, and inhuman minds.

“The Abomination is not like any other Nosferatu, not even like other Carpathians. He sets his sights beyond his own borders. And yet, when cornered, he flees. He is patient, immortal. He can afford to wait. It makes catching him more difficult.”

The conversation cycled for a while.

Finally, we stood to leave, thanking Ivo for his information and hospitality.

“Be swift,” the professor urged. “‘For the dead travel fast.’”

Outside the
biergarten,
as Freddy and Zachary went ahead to the library to check on the Possum, I lingered on the sidewalk with my Wolf man.

“I should see about Clyde, too,” I said.

Kieren gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “And I have to go back and talk to Ivo. I’ll meet you at the library, you know . . .” To say good-bye.

It didn’t make it any easier that this time he was the one staying behind.

“Your friend Clyde has slipped into a coma,” Graciella announced at the makeshift clinic. “Our professor of healing is dead. As students, we don’t have the level of expertise necessary to treat him. We have called for assistance and supplies from the nearest affiliated pack, but it will be another two days before they arrive.”

I fisted my scarred hand. “I know someone who may be able to help.”

Meara. I had to get the Possum home to Austin. Now.

Aimee sported her sling and a royal-blue, long-sleeved shirt with a short vertical collar, purchased that morning at a local shop. Not her usual style, and she’d blown off the heavy eyeliner today too. The way I figured it, Aimee felt self-conscious about the fang marks on her neck, even if the crosses tattoo had prevented Bradley from really sinking his teeth in. Then again, it was cloudy, chilly. Maybe she was just cold.

I joined her on the bench in front of the library while Freddy and Zachary loaded Clyde into the back of the SUV.

“Where’s Kieren?” Aimee asked. “We’re about ready to go.”

The plan was to wait in the car until Kieren came out of the
biergarten.
As the SUV slowly rolled past the Sausage Haus, Harrison mentioned something about the private jet — Sabine’s — that would meet us in Detroit.

“Excuse me,” said Aimee from beside me. “I’ve never been on a plane before, and you want me to take one owned and operated by the forces of darkness?”

“For Clyde,” I reminded her. “We don’t have a choice.”

Harrison, on my right, ignored us. He told Zachary, “If you want to fly down with Freddy and the kids, I can drive the car to Austin.”

Zachary glanced over his shoulder. “It’s not that I don’t trust you —”

“You don’t trust me.”

“True,” the angel agreed. “But it’s not that. It’s — whoa! Holy crap!” He swerved the SUV hard to the right, hitting the brakes.

“Everyone okay?” Freddy called from the front.

Through a window, I saw Kieren stagger to his feet. The car had barely missed him. Then a Wolf jogged up and kicked him in the gut.

I pushed Harrison aside, opened the door, and leaped out.

“Stupid!” one of a dozen or so Wolves shouted at Kieren.

Though they had been spared Brad-Dracula’s worst, the group still looked scabbed and beaten. Two limped. The nearest bitch had a patch over her right eye. No one had fully shifted yet, but their beards — both boys’ and girls’ — had thickened. Their eyebrows had become bushier, and their claws long and sharp.

“I told you,” Kieren said as I stopped only steps behind him, “I take full responsibility for Quincie and the rest.”

“Selfish!” yelled another. “Traitor!”

“But I have
no
idea,” he went on, “how the vampire found us.”

I’d never said in so many words that Bradley had extracted the pack’s location from my mind, but I was sure Kieren had already figured that out.

“Leave him alone!” I shouted.

Zachary and Freddy — yelling at Aimee to stay in the car — moved to flank me, Harrison right after them.

“Vampire!” exclaimed the bitch with the eye patch.

Baffled, I checked my incisors with my tongue. They weren’t especially pointy. Then I glanced back at Harrison. His control had slipped.

“Traitor!” Wolves pointed at Kieren. “Traitor!”

Now they’d
never
believe that he hadn’t led Brad-Dracula here. I didn’t want to do it, but the situation had gone nuclear. I showed my fangs, too.

“Traitor!” the shifters chanted at Kieren. “Traitor, traitor, traitor!”

It was thirteen against five, the odds in their favor. Growls deepened, grew fiercer, and I braced for an attack.

From behind me, the SUV’s engine revved. Aimee leaned out of the open driver’s window. “Back off, you losers! Back
way
off!”

Then, from the sidewalk in front of the
biergarten,
Ivo barked at his Wolves to stand down. He ambled over, with the aid of crutches, to what had almost been the middle of a bloody fray.

“Kieren,” the professor began, “as you know, there are those who have questioned your fitness for pack life, for advanced studies. They pointed to your upbringing, to your hybrid DNA.