Crossed (16 page)

“Oh, great! Somebody roofied me.” It probably wasn’t Kansas, but the surrounding area definitely looked like farmland. It wasn’t modern farmland, with tractors and computerized irrigation, either. I couldn’t put my finger on why, maybe it was the smell of French “fertilizer” or the too-clean country air, but the whole place seemed positively medieval, especially in the dark. “I’m probably being assfucked by some freako security kink and I’m not even getting any damn energy out of it.”

A woman’s laughter pierced the silence. In the starlight, I could see that her hair had been dyed candy apple red streaked with cotton candy pink and cut in a stylish pixie-cut with long bangs hanging down in a ragged edge over her left eye. Physically, she couldn’t have been older than early twenties, but she had the washed-out irises of a vampire and hadn’t bothered to hide them with contacts. Eyes once brown were now a faded
gold. She wore blue lipstick and a mismatched ensemble of outerwear that meshed together perfectly. She’d abandoned modern trends, but she hadn’t kept with the old styles either. Instead, she’d created a style of her own and it suited her.

“It’s a cliché,” she said as she extended needle-sharp fangs that appeared far more delicate than Eric’s, “but you look good enough to eat.”

“I am.”

“I’ll bet.” Watching her move was hypnotic, each gesture out of time with her surroundings, too slow, then too fast. One instant she’d be looking straight at me, the next straight up at the sky, the next to the right or bent over, all with no intervening movements I could detect. In an eyeblink she was behind me and in another she was still walking toward me, until I felt dizzy as if she was approaching me from both directions at once.

Hands rested on my shoulders, caressed my cheeks . . . She was still walking toward me, but the touches were hers. Brief phantom whispers of touch cupped my breasts, curved along my pelvis, my lips.

“I can see why Eric finds you so tempting,” she said when she finally reached me. Her hands were clasped before her, but they were in my hair, too, running through it.

“Your speed is impressive.”

“May I taste you?” Cold breath carried the words into my ears. The scent of old blood mingled with wine in my nostrils.

“A little,” I said.

Her bite was slow and lingering, the fangs pushing against my skin and sliding through painlessly. She went for the throat like most vampires do, but her tongue rasped against my neck, warm with my own heat, the suction of her mouth gentle yet insistent. I touched her chakras with my energy and gave her taste. I expected an increase in the urgency of her feeding, but it didn’t come. She kissed me then and suddenly, inexplicably, my mind put a name to her face. She was Irene, Eric’s Irene, the
Irene of El Segundo. If I hadn’t known before why Eric once loved her, I knew then. Her kiss was wild and unrestrained. Her fangs nicked me, but I didn’t care. I’m not into girls really, but it was nice.

“You taste like cinnamon,” she said. Her lips were slick with red, and I recognized the color. There’s a peculiar thrill when you see your own blood on someone else’s lips, and Irene knew it.

“I could drink you all myself.” She stretched absently. The visual, like a movie with too many cuts made in it to repair the film, hurt my eyes.

“Then there wouldn’t be anything left for later.”

Her feral grin faded. “Just because you like candy doesn’t mean you should always save a piece for later.” She was behind me. “There
is
a certain joy in gobbling down the box of chocolates all in one go, to sit, greedy and full”—her hands, now warm, slid along my stomach—”and sick, with nothing but the memory to sustain you and the wrappers with which to play.”

“Is that what humans are to you?”

She nodded. “When I was alive they had these little wax bottles, tiny things, with flavored liquid inside. You could pop the whole thing in your mouth.” She mimed tossing a bottle into her mouth and chewing it up. “Or you could just bite the top off and,” she mimed that too, biting the top off of an imaginary bottle and spitting it on the ground. A red trail of blood hit the ground. “Spit it out. That’s all humans are: funny little blood containers. You walk and talk. You’re fun to hold, fun to play with, but you’re so close to fungible that one dead human hardly matters. There are billions more.”

“Yeah, okay. You’re all spooky or whatever.” I opened myself to the magic and really looked at my surroundings. Was this an illusion? Glowing dots of demonic magic slowly separated themselves from the background. Pinpricks of power, combined and shifted, creating a bubble of reality? No. I studied the hue of the magic. At first it appeared red, but if I caught
it at the right angle, a blue sheen came through. Memory? If Magbidion hadn’t just worked with me on how memory magic worked, it might have been too subtle for me to notice. I opened
Ajna,
the chakra that controls magic, my third eye, and my view of the magic came into better focus.

“Where the hell are we?” Ice formed in my belly. “We’re not in one of the hells, are we?” My voice cracked on the second sentence. I suppressed a shiver. This was Infernatti magic. Lady Scrytha! I knelt down, touching the field. Hot and cold at the same time. Very powerful. Extremely old. “No. Not a hell.” I let out a long breath without realizing I’d been holding it.

“You’re cute when you’re freaking out. We need to get you some bad acid.” Irene waggled her eyebrows, but the gesture was odd. “I’d like to watch that.”

Thin lines of power thrummed beneath the palm of her right hand. It matched the power signature of the field around us, as recognizable as the brushstrokes of a master painter.

“You’ve taken an oath.”

Irene followed my gaze and rubbed her palm selfconsciously. “You can see that?”

“Who are you working for?”

“Oh, chill out, would you?” Her eyes were closed, then open again. Cords of magic unraveled, twisting and flailing as they receded back through her palm like one of those retractable leashes. “Every supernatural citizen in Europe has taken
that
oath. You can’t use Vales of Scrythax without joining the Treaty of Secrets.”

Old France faded and new modern wonderful France returned, the whole airport and all the beautiful city lights, along with my cell phone’s power. Back in the real world, Irene forced herself to move at normal speed. Waves of irritation radiated from her. We took an escalator down to a well-lit open parking level in the iris framed by Terminals 2A and 2B.

“Tell me about this treaty.”

“No. You tell me what we’re going to be doing to Eric to keep him in Paris for seven days and why it’s so important to Winter.” A thin sheen of blood sweat began to form on her skin, and she jumped like another bad movie cut and was clean again. “You noticed?”

I nodded.

“I was tripping on X when Eric turned me.” She paused, a bittersweet smile on her face. “The way I feel isn’t the way I felt then. It isn’t the same kind of trip, but in a way it’s like I never came all the way down.”

“You still remember what it was like?”

“Yes. Good times.”

“Then you may like what I have in mind for Eric.” I explained the details and Irene broke down into fits of hysterical laughter. She ran the plan back to make sure she’d understood and I assured her that she did.

“That’s perfect.” Her breath came in unusual spurts, not quite the way a human catches her breath. Vampires don’t need to breathe, so I guessed she was actually trying to talk around the convulsions of laughter. Getting the air in to get the words out was the issue. “Winter used up a favor to get me to do that? Honey, I’d do that to Eric as a wedding present!”

Another round of laughter took her as we neared a yellow sports car. She gestured for me to get in. “Eric gave it to me back when we first got together. It’s an Alpine A110. Roger made him buy it because he wanted Eric to get used to trading in cars.”

“It’s nice.”

She shrugged. “I’m used to it. Now you have to tell me, before we get all this started. How did Eric finally get Marilyn to marry him? How tacky do they look together? She’s what, eighty-something now?”

I climbed into the car which sped out of the parking space even as I buckled my seat belt. “Yeah, about Marilyn . . .”

    16    

ERIC:

DÉJÀ VU

I would never have seen this if I hadn’t become your thrall.” Beatrice kissed me on the cheek. “This kind of thing is exactly why I chose you over Gabriella.” She kissed me again. “I just—”

“Yeah, all right.” I held up my hand, blocking the next outpouring of affection and gratitude. A quickly masked smile flickered across Tabitha’s lips. She might be less jealous of Bea than any of my other thralls, but she pays attention to stuff like kissing. Still, I guess this counted as a special occasion.

We stood before a castle. A fortress. We stood within the walls of history.

“The
donjon
is beautiful!” Beatrice pointed at a stone keep that towered above the courtyard a good hundred and fifty feet or more. I wondered if the stone was naturally that pale or if it had been whitewashed. From where I stood the
donjon
seemed to consist of two circular towers connected by a wall the same length as if one of the towers were unrolled, but that wasn’t the whole of it. A hint of another tower peeked over the rear, and the whole structure was surrounded by a wide wall, a moat, and other medieval castle-y shit.

“Dungeon?” Tabitha looked stricken. “I thought dungeons were underground.”

“It’s French for ‘keep.’”

“We have no time for you to see sights.” Aarika was getting on my damn nerves. “You are expected before the Council.”

“In a minute.”

The keep was set off center into the four walls protecting the courtyard, yet it was also held apart, separated from the courtyard by the same moat that surrounded the structure, a single bridge from the interior courtyard granting access. Smallish buildings were clustered around the base of the keep. Nine stone towers lined the walls and I only saw two entrances into the courtyard. We’d come in from the south and had a good view of a palace within the enclosure and a large chapel beyond it.

Bea was like a schoolgirl on a field trip overseas. She and Tabitha ran hand in hand about the enclosure, studying the façades, the gargoyles, the crenellations, all that architectural ostentatious crap. Luc put a hand on my shoulder and I shook free of him.

“Fuck off a second.” Behind me, I heard James attempting to appease the other two immortals as I walked toward the chapel.

It was huge, like one of those gigantic Catholic churches back home. Children played tag atop my grave as I drew closer to the western façade. Windows ran along the sides of the chapel, broken up by little flat-sided pillars. I hadn’t recognized anything else, but that chapel . . . it looked . . . so familiar. I stopped in front of it to examine the steps, the archway, and the patterned window over the archway, a
rosace.
Aarika pulled free of the other two immortals, crossed the courtyard, and spun me around to face her.

“You are wasting our time, vampire.”

I turned into a revenant, my body going cold as the details
washed out of everything but the people around me, rendering the world in impression very much like watercolor or . . .

“Stained glass.” My memory works better in my spirit form. I’m not using my physical brain to think, and whatever’s wrong with my underwhelming powers of recall is tied to the meat body. “It happened here.”

In Void City there is an apartment building for vampires called the Highland Towers. Only the richest and most powerful bloodsuckers in the city can live there. I have some suites there I don’t use, largely because the whole thing belongs to Lord Phillip. Among his possessions there, he has a magic stained-glass window, one of his many
objets d’art.
The story it tells is a piece of my family history.

It goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a dumbass among dumbasses, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather or something like that. Dumbass the First was a moron from way back. He and the other heroic morons of his age were members of some stupid secret order that had nothing better to do than hunt supernatural what’s-its . . . or that’s what I assume they did. I know for sure that they wanted one particular vampire bad, and I mean write-her-name-on-a-bullet bad. They wanted this one vamp so bad they named their order after her. She called herself Lisette,
le Coeur-Démone,
the Demon Heart, so they called themselves
le Coeur de la Demone,
the Heart of the Demon.