In Blood We Trust (35 page)

He ducked just as the lady Shredder turned her sights on me and fired.

I dodged the projectile just as Hana reached Gabriel.

Now that everything had fallen apart, Stamp was on his way to Gabriel, too, using that crutch, making faster headway than anyone might've expected from him while aiming his chest puncher.

Already, I was healing, my chest sucking together so rapidly that it was almost as if my body couldn't stand not to be melded together. It hurt, all right, and from the way Gabriel was bent over, I think he felt it just as much as I did.

The Shredders were already drawing out more weapons—guns that probably had shredding bullets in them. I had just enough presence of mind to spy a flash of movement beyond the brush, near where the oldster's domain door was located.

Was he loose?

I had just enough time to pull Hana by the neck away from Gabriel, and I held her in the air.

Then, with a whoosh, she was taken from me.

I looked to the right, where a blur of preter speed marked a were-creature's progress into the night.

The oldster. He'd saved Hana from me.

I don't know if I would've hurt her—I still had some kind of conscience, even in this body—but thank-all he'd finally come out.

Taraline was running for my door, so I turned my attention to the Shredders, opening my arms, daring them to shoot.

They sure enough did, and I twirled out of range of their ripping bullets before springing down to my enemies. It was easy impaling the woman with my tongue and twisting the one-eyed man like a pretzel with all my arms before they even had a chance to fire again.

I tossed the bodies a decent distance away, and some shades swooped right down. Gargoylesque, they plunged their beaks into the bodies, their pleased cries like nails on metal.

The taste of the Shredders' blood made me roar to the moon, then turn to Gabriel, who was engaged with Stamp as the Shredder screamed holy curses at him. I closed my eyes, using our link to block his hearing.

His body, my body.

It worked, because Gabriel snapped out of his temporary freeze, swiping at Stamp, then grabbing him by his one leg and holding him upside down. Blood was seeping through the Shredder's beige clothing, red gouge marks on his chest.

Gabriel had struck skin, and it looked deep.

“Should I get this over with?” Gabriel said. “Or should I prolong it like you would've?”

“Do it like a man,” Stamp said, snarling.

Gabriel hesitated, and I felt the confusion in him. Without our link, he wouldn't have cared about being a man. But now, with the return of what I gave to him during the full moon, it mattered.

I considered running from him, far enough away so he might lose his connection to me. He needed to be a vampire right now.

But Gabriel had already dropped Stamp to the ground, running a reddened gaze over the Shredder's single leg.

“It'd be like killing a wounded puppy,” he spat out, turning his back on Stamp.

Don't do that!
I thought, readying myself to interfere.

But I didn't have to when a voice rang out over the night.

“Mercy!” it cried. “Please, mercy!”

We looked over to the east, but there was nothing. To the left, though, more shades were flying lower, preparing to challenge those already on the ground for the Shredder carrion.

I screeched at all the shades, and they took off, scared to death of me.

When the voice came again—“Mercy!”—the speaker finally revealed herself over the rise of another small hill.

I recognized her. Mags, Stamp's partner.

At first, Stamp looked as if he'd been given a gift he'd always longed for. His fathomless gaze brightened.

Both my and Gabriel's pulses picked up. We knew that look.

But then Stamp got panicky. “Get out of here, Mags!”

Yet she just kept walking toward us, her hands up. “Please. Don't hurt him.”

Gabriel's vitals reacted to her plea, and it pulled on me, too. But when I tensed up, it caused him to do the same.

Is this one of Stamp's traps?
I thought to Gabriel.

But then he looked at Mags again. They were near enough for eye contact, and when they locked gazes, Gabriel took on a whole new posture: acceptance.

I read what was going on between them in Gabriel's shared thoughts, and I couldn't believe it.

Mags had a secret, and it was only because of this that we let her go to Stamp, kneel next to him, touch his face. She moved with the easiness of someone like Gabriel, graceful in the night, and Stamp was acting as if he didn't know why.

Or didn't want to know why.

Blind,
I thought to Gabriel.
Love can be so blind.

When we looked at each other, we knew it was just as true for us, too, because when the full moon deserted us, we wouldn't connect anymore. We'd be further apart than ever.

Faintly, I thought I heard a barking sound from my quarters below the earth, and I sucked in a heaving breath.

Chaplin.

I thought of blood.

Any blood.

With one more glance at Gabriel, I took to my feet, speeding over the Badlands dirt.

I traveled miles to get away from my dog, and when I finally stopped, I turned to the blood on my hands from the Shredders I'd terminated. I ate it up, trying not to think of any other blood.

Shivering, I stayed away from our hideout until dawn, when I would return to myself.

And my much less disturbing appetites.

T
his time, when Mags touched Stamp, he didn't shy away.

It hurt when she laid her fingers on the gouges that Gabriel had mired into his chest. Funny, but he'd barely known that they were there before Mags had come along.

She glanced up at the shades in the sky, the carrion eaters returning to circle and circle above, but they hadn't attacked again. Stamp was also faintly aware that Gabriel had already sped around outside to bury the dead so deep that the shades couldn't get at them anymore. He'd gone through Mariah's door, leaving them alone.

“We should go inside, too,” Mags said.

“Not with him around.”

She didn't listen, as usual, dragging him quickly to a door that he supposed Gabriel had left open for them before he'd retreated to Mariah's place.

After Mags turned on a solar lantern—she'd found it in the dark—he saw that they were in a room with branches and structures sticking out of the walls. One of the old quarters that the Bloodlanders had lived in and deserted once upon a time.

“The shades can't get at us now,” Mags said.

She bent to him again, looking at the blood on his chest.

He'd lost more than he'd thought, because when he attempted to sit up, he couldn't.

Mags held him, enveloped one of his hands in hers, pressing it to her.

Cool skin,
Stamp thought. He'd never noticed that about Mags before.

He tried not to notice now, just as he'd told himself not to notice a lot of things that'd happened recently.

“You took long enough in getting here,” he said.

“I had to track you.”

“The zoom bike . . .” He took a breath. It wasn't coming so easy ever since Gabriel had cut into him with his lengthened vamp nails. “The bike you took from the shack should've made up for lost time.”

“I didn't take any zoom bike.”

There'd been four bikes at that shack; he and his party had made off with only three of them after they'd heard one roar away.

Stamp turned his face away from Mags. Taraline had gotten to this homestead even before he and the others had.
She'd
taken that bike, not Mags.

As she looked down on him, he saw that her gaze had that red reflection that he'd seen the other night, and it wasn't any projection from his bloodlust.

Mags was scenting the blood on him.

It felt as if something were scooping a hole straight through Stamp, and he grimaced, pushing away from her.

“John—”

“God-all, please tell me you didn't do it.”

She opened her mouth to talk, and he saw the fangs—small, almost ladylike as she put a hand to her mouth, just as if she were surprised they were there.

He'd denied it before, but there it was—evidence of what'd happened when the asylum vampires had taken Mags away to be “questioned.”

I'm tired,
she'd told him one time afterward.
Really . . . tired.

She must've been weary enough to already have given up to them at that point, given in to the monsters without telling her partner, the guy she was supposed to have trusted through thick and thin.

Bile crept up his throat. He was sick all over.

“When?” he asked.

“Not long ago. They were questioning me, wearing me down, and . . . Well, after they turned me, they kept me in the holding area, nursing me until I was fine to go back up and interact with everyone else.”

Stamp worked some saliva up in his mouth, and he spit on the ground.

Mags seemed to pity him. “They wore me down to the point where what they had to offer seemed like the only choice if I wanted to go on. But it was the right choice, John. You'll know it's the same for you, too.”

All those humans who'd been led out of the cells—they were vampires, just like Mags.

The whole world was going to go monster.

Stamp pulled himself as far from her as he could. He was going to get away because he couldn't even look at her now, but he couldn't help glancing back all the same.

Under the faint light, her hair was loose, darker and shinier than he ever remembered. Her eyes, already shaped at an exotic angle, would go red every time she got excited from now on.

Stamp's throat burned, just as it had whenever he remembered his parents, but this was worse. This had turned into a different kind of affection, and he'd never even asked for it.

“You'd better get out of here,” he said.

“Because you're going to kill me now?” Mags smiled sadly. “You wouldn't do that, even if you could in this state.”

“What . . . makes you so sure?” Even harder to breathe now.

Mags looked ready to punch him. “Stubborn ass. Even with you bleeding out, you won't say it.”

Nothing to say.

She reached down and yanked him back to her by the shirt. He sucked in air, agonized.

“Here,” she said, trying to touch his chest again.

“Don't.”

“I can heal it.”

At the venom in his voice, she cowered. For a vampire, she seemed decimated.

Feeling. She was still in the early stages, where she would be clinging to humanity. She'd be like that for a while, but Stamp wouldn't be fooled.

“Do you know what I did for you, John?” she asked. “How I even came to be here?”

“Don't tell me you turned vamp for me,” he spat. It felt as if more blood were leaking out of him, his life going with it.

She was trembling now, and it was because she scented her next meal on him.

“I did what the vampires asked,” she said, “just to save your life. They wanted to kill you, straight out. They weren't going to give you any chance to convert whatsoever because they thought you'd never willfully do it. But I suggested a way.”

As she lavished a look on him, Stamp thought how breathtaking she was, even with those fangs and reddened eyes.

Mags whispered, “I told them I would recruit you.”

“You—”

“You're not the only one who's ever come up with a plan.” She reached out, touched his hair, shrank back before he could protest again. “The vampires need everyone they can get, and they knew that if you could be turned, you'd be a formidable ally, with your Shredder knowledge. They told me not to let you know that I'd been converted—not until I persuaded you to be with me, and I couldn't do it with sway, either. Deep down, you had to
want
to be with me. Otherwise, you'd be a vampire no one would want around GBVille.”

“And that's what you were counting on—that I'd want to be with you so much that I'd give up everything else.”

“Wouldn't you?”

A small, hidden part of him said,
Yes
. But then there was the rest—the boy who'd watched his parents die, the one who'd grown into a slayer who clung to his job—his salvation and sanity—more than anything else.

Mags said, “They let me free you from that cell, knowing that I was going to come back with either a vampire or a dead man. And I wasn't going to allow it to be the latter.”

“You shouldn't have bothered.”

“I suppose I shouldn't have put out the effort to play hide-and-seek with the Witches back at Goodie Jern's shack, either, just so you'd have some time to talk with your Shredders. I knew you'd come up with a scheme. You cared enough about life to do
that
.”

Stamp pressed his lips together. Mags hadn't attacked the Witches because she knew they could easily take on a regular vamp. She'd cared enough to live, too.

His chest was numb, and he pushed his hand to it. Blood soaked his shirt, and Mags groaned, turning her head away.

“Let me give you life,” she said between her teeth.

He heard how much she loved him in her mere voice. But with a vampire, love wouldn't last.

That was what his brain told him, but his heart . . .