Crossed (49 page)

I held my hand out toward John Paul Courtney, and he pressed
El Alma Perdida
into it.

“One shot, maybe two before he reacts,” John Paul whispered. “It might not be enough.”

“Good. It’s more sporting if you have a chance, however remote.”
La Bête
raised the knife and I focused on the blade, on the idea of my sister being skinned alive, on what she’d done to my honeymoon, on Eric leaving me here, abandoning me to go save Greta, and, though dawn was now long past, the anger turned my powers back on. My eyes flickered red, casting hints of crimson on
El Alma Perdida,
and that was my cue. Six shots rang out, so close together it sounded like a short burst of machine-gun fire.

The werewolf seemed to teleport. He’d been standing over Rachel, but when my final shot rang out and he stopped, he was in front of me on his knees. I dodged the knife as he flailed at me like a drunken man, blood covering his chest.
El Alma Perdida
tumbled from my hands as I tore the knife from his. Kicking
la Bête
backward with my booted heel, I drove the blade of his own knife through his stomach and out his back, where it bit into the stone.

He laughed—a wheezing gasping sound. Blue beams shone from his bullet wounds.
El Alma Perdida
singed my palm when I stooped to scoop it up.

“John Paul?” I prompted.

JPC knelt over the gun and tried to pick it up as well, drawing back sharply as if it burned him, too. He took off his coat and wrapped it around the Colt.

“Git yore sister if’n you want her, and let’s skedaddle!” the ghost shouted. “I ain’t never seen
Perdy
do this afore. I ain’t shore whut’s goin’ ter happen, but it might not be pretty.”

I lifted Rachel off the pile of broken bottles and she winced, shards of glass poking out of her back. She sagged back to human as if she’d barely managed the uber vamp energy she’d used.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

“I’ll walk away from him,” Rachel answered. She tried to stand and leaned against me hard. “My healing’s not as spiffy when Eric’s this far away. Shit. Transforming saved my life, but it used up all my uber juice.”

La Bête
’s laughter grew, and so did the light show. When I looked back, it reminded me of the scene in
Predator
(one of the many sci-fi movies I’d sat through just to spend time with my dad) where the Governator realizes the alien is going to nuke itself.

“Run! Dang it all! Run!” John Paul shouted, clutching the smoldering bundle he’d made from
El Alma Perdida
to his chest. “He may be dying. He may not be, but whatever he’s doing, I think it’s going be about as fun for onlookers as a front row seat at a volcanic eruption.”

“But it’s sunlight outside!”

“Turn into something portable,” Rachel said. “But not a cat.”

“I’ll probably pass out when I do.”

“I’ll get you out of here, Tabitha.”

“You need to go to Orly,” I told her. “It’s where Phillip’s private plane is waiting for us. Can you find it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Can I trust you?” I asked.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Rachel said, venom creeping into her voice. “Eric ordered me to help you. It’s a command and he’s my master. I can’t go against him when he’s made it an order. Trying to defy orders will just make me age.”

“I can do a sparrow,” I offered.

“Take off your coat first,” Rachel instructed.

“Why?”

“Because blood-covered women attract the wrong sort of attention!”

I gave her the coat and transformed into a bird. She stuffed me into a coat pocket and ran. As we took the elevator up and the doors opened, I heard the crash of thunder under a cloudless sky. The ground shook. I had just enough time to wonder if John Paul Courtney was okay—if a ghost could even be hurt—before the sleep of the dead claimed me. Whether
la Bête
was coming after us or I’d heard the sound of his explosive demise, I wouldn’t know till nightfall. By then, we’d either have made it or not.

    49    

ERIC:

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS

You’re too late.
Words. That’s all they were: words in my head. And whether they were mine or Scrythax’s or even Rachel’s, I’ll never know.
Too late.
A litany of failure hammered nails in through my skull.

Too late.

Too slow.

Too stupid.

And you deserve it. So did she. That one was definitely not mine.

“I’m not done yet.” My voice echoed, a stereophonic halo of sound leaving my lips and Fang’s speakers. I climbed out from behind the wheel and stepped over the windshield and out onto the hood. Akira Ifukube music blared,
Godzilla vs. Mothra,
and we rolled back from the front doors of the Highland Towers.

A scream of rage. The roar of a V-8 engine. Two bodies—one metal and one organic—charged forward as one. All of the magic in the area winked into view, revealing the soul-spangled web of protection surrounding the building: werewolf souls and a tiny piece of Scrythax all tied together and put to ill use. We clashed against it, Fang and I. There was no need
for the uber vamp, not yet. My eyes burned violet, infecting the shield with incandescent fury.

Phillip popped into my mind, clinging to the legs of another vampire, Percy, the one I’d always seen in the glass case.

“Help me,” Phillip begged Percy.

“Nomen est omen,”
Percy whispered. “Names are destiny. Yours means ‘lover of horses,’ and his”—the bespectacled vampire looked at me—“his means ‘all powerful.’”

A sense of Percy bounced against the wave of my psyche. He was powerful, an Emperor like me, and old—from an age of chamber music I didn’t recognize. Percy’d been around for centuries . . . at least. One more Emperor to add to my hit parade.

“Sorry about all this,” Percy thought at me. “He’s controlling the wards, and I fear he’s gone and activated his failsafe. No one can get in or out.” He faded before I got out a reply.

The wards will tear you apart!
That time it was definitely Scrythax.

“So what?” Fang and I rolled backward once more, the magic shield sliding with us, drawn by the purple fire in my eyes. “It doesn’t take all that much to put my dead ass back together again.”

On our next charge, the shield cracked and so did my jaw. Shards of magic sliced me to ribbons like paper through a shredder, but Fang kept rolling until his front end knocked the front doors down. I slid off the hood in a mass, re-forming legs first as he stopped. Almost formless, I kept moving, a mass of writhing reincorporating flesh, all sliding back together into the shape of one very angry vampire.

Thralls, some belonging to Phillip, others not, rushed out to meet me, weapons in hand. A man thrust a stake into my chest and the stake exploded, taking his hand off and splintering him with slivers. Spirals of blue protective magic formed around me as the wards thrust me back out into the street, still crackling with bursts of electricity.

Wings of tenebrous leather tore through my T-shirt, and my fangs and claws became disproportionate to my size as I turned into the uber vamp. My claws, normally black like my uber-vamp skin, were edged in gold, my body larger than before, a good eleven feet, maybe twelve.

“Little pig, little pig,” I roared.

“We defend the masters,” a young man with dark hair shouted. The flamethrower in his hand shook, the fear-tremble uncontrollable.

He cut loose with the flames, but I didn’t move. Fire lit my skin, tracing my muscles like red orange highlighter, and didn’t burn me so much as illuminate me—more Balrog in appearance than vampire.

“Let me in!”

The thralls faltered as one. Retreated. Bats covered the moon. Rats poured out of the sewers. But when they touched the protective ward, they burned.

Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in . . .

“Hmmm.”

Buildings like the Highland Towers, built between the turn of the century and the start of World War II, were already using steel construction. Before steel they’d been using massive iron columns with load-bearing walls. The Highland Towers’ more modern construction was problematic. Modern buildings are sturdier, the weight well distributed . . . but maybe . . .

Anticipating my command, Fang zoomed off, looped the block, and came back at top speed, plowing into the northeast corner at more than a hundred miles an hour. Shards of stone facing filled the air, and when the wards bounced him back, Fang was already regenerating. I’d seen him do it before, but he did it faster now, healing as quickly as me.

The exterior facing broke free, but the concrete underneath it was only cracked. Fang revved his engine and began to make another pass, but I shook my head. I needed something
bigger than my car to break these wards, something so epic that they couldn’t just hurl it back out . . .

“Something”—my eyes raked the building—“really”—I looked at a manhole cover in the middle of the street—“massive.”

I wonder . . .

What are you doing, Eric?
Scrythax asked, his voice high-pitched and singsongy.

Tearing the cover off a manhole is easy. Fitting an uber vamp–sized body down one isn’t. Void City’s sewer system is huge—not Paris huge, but still big. Punching an uber vamp–sized hole through the street isn’t easy, but if you have a sturdy metal tool, say a manhole cover, and you have a tremendous amount of supernatural brawn, you can get the job done.

I kept waiting to hear sirens, to have Captain Stacey and his goons from the VCPD show up to mess with my day, but they didn’t. Hacking and chopping, I broke through the road, turning the sewage tunnel into an open trench. Once inside the trench, the going wasn’t any easier, but determination, rage, and the need to kill kept me focused. Pain from the bones of my hands breaking and reknitting with each blow gave me something to keep me company while I worked and waited.

Eric? What are you doing, Eric?

Character,
I quoted,
is like the foundation of a house—it’s below the surface.

Excuse me?

“You’re being dense, Horn Head.” I stopped working and closed my eyes, trying to reach for the power I needed. “Try this one by Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and . . .’” I couldn’t think of the rest of the quote. “And I am going to knock this goddamn building down and see what Phil’s motherfucking wards have to say about it!”

The speed came. It came in a steady flood from Fang to me and, through me, to all the creepy-crawly things I could hurl at
the ground and at the concrete, at the brick, and at the stone. The power came too. Power like I’d felt a week ago when I played “Star Dust” and almost lost my mind.

The story of John Henry battling the steam engine flashed through my thoughts and I felt I understood what that was like, just a little, but the machines I fought were political and magical. Despite my abilities, I could never take them all on. Success was flat-out impossible to achieve, but I was going to do it anyway.

Even if I had to work through the night into the day with fire leaping up from my back, even if I was reduced to ash and re-formed again, I was going to do it anyway, because Greta had called my name, had screamed for her daddy, and nothing was going to keep me from her, too late or not too late, even if it was just to stand over her body and hold the head of her killer next to her still, unmoving corpse and say, “I got him for you, Greta. I killed him.”

I didn’t notice when the building began to tilt, its foundation utterly destroyed. I was trapped in a loop of pity, hate, loss, and vengeance, because I hadn’t just lost Greta, I’d lost Marilyn all over again, and now possibly Tabitha, too, and a man like me doesn’t know what to do with those emotions except to lash out at something.

A car horn—Fang’s horn—cut through my reverie.

“Who the hell is honking my horn?” The words passed my lips and then I heard it, a steadily increasing groan of shifting concrete and steel. It didn’t happen fast, but once it started, there was no stopping it. My animals, the survivors, scattered—fully aware, as animals often are, that it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.