Darkest Hour (16 page)

Lockman opened his mouth to say something, but Adam beat him to it, with a voice that boomed so loud it sounded like it could crack the walls. “Bickering isn’t going to stop him.”

Teresa jerked back. Her angry gaze turned a shade fearful.

“Sending a team out there isn’t going to accomplish anything,” Lockman said in the following silence. “If Gabriel has full grasp of Jessie’s power, one team won’t do a damn thing. And that’s assuming they can track him in the first place.”

Teresa’s nostrils flared, but she said nothing.

“I recognize the danger,” Adam said. “Even if I haven’t seen it firsthand. But I’m afraid you are not looking at the larger picture.”

“So you’re on his side,” she said, lifting an eyebrow and crossing her arms.

“We are all on the same side.” Adam had to push the words through his clenched teeth. “Everyone in this room wants Gabriel Dolan stopped. Everyone here signed up for the fight against the vampires. Everyone here wants to see the Chosen One achieve her destiny.”

Both of Teresa’s eyebrows lifted. She looked at Adam as if he had accused her of indulging in ogre porn. “You had me up until the Chosen One crap.”

“You wish harm on Jessie?”

The corners of her eyes tightened. “I didn’t say that.”

Lockman stepped forward. “You don’t have to. We all know you’ve wanted her dead from the start. Now you think you’ve got your go-ahead.”

“She’s not Jessie anymore, she’s Gabriel. Thanks to you. And he’s a target we need to take out as quickly as possible.”

Adam shifted so he stood between Lockman and Teresa like a barricade. He put his back to Lockman and addressed Teresa. “Jessie is still with him. Inside.”

“How can you be sure of that? How do you know the priest didn’t exorcise the wrong soul?”

A slimy chill rolled down Lockman’s back. That had never occurred to him. He felt shaky. The fresh plastic smell of the unused furniture in the conference room turned his stomach. Could he have had Jess banished into nothingness like he had hoped to do to Gabriel?

“That is extremely unlikely,” Adam said. He sounded confident enough, but it didn’t comfort Lockman much. “The ritual the father was attempting was archaic and inappropriate. An exorcism was no more useful in that situation than pouring fruit juice into your car’s gas tank.”

“Trick like that could do a lot of damage to an engine, though.”

Adam sighed. “An inapt analogy, then.”

Lockman caught the loophole in Adam’s reasoning before Teresa. “If it were that harmless, then how did Gabriel get control? The ritual did
something
.”

“I never said it was harmless. I said
inappropriate
.”

“You’re splitting hairs.”

“What I’m saying is that you cannot exorcise a mortal soul. And as demonic as Gabriel might be, his is still a mortal soul.”

Teresa paced around the far end of the conference table, kicked the chair at the head, and sent it rolling until it bumped into the wall. “We’re wasting time talking about this. He is getting further away.”

“We are not wasting time,” Adam said. “We are clarifying our mission. We’ve let this issue fester too long, and now, faced with this situation, we can’t afford to let it go any longer. Because we will face Gabriel, and when that time comes, we will have to decide how to handle him.”

“Simple,” Teresa said. “We kill him.”

“And sacrifice Jessie,” Lockman said. Jesus, the woman would never change her mind. He hoped Adam’s idea went further than trapping her in a conference room and talking her to death.

Teresa stood straight, chin up. “For the greater good.”

“There,” Adam shouted, cutting Lockman off from telling Teresa just how pious she sounded. “That is what you are missing, Teresa.”

She gave him that look again that said
What did you just call me?

“The greater good,” Adam repeated. “Sacrificing Jessie does not serve the greater good. Losing the Chosen One
threatens
the greater good.”

“Only if we buy she’s been
chosen
for anything.”

Adam hung his head. Then he looked back at Lockman. “You see? There remains common ground between you after all.”

Teresa came around the table to Adam and rested a hand on his arm. Her voice softened for the first time in...over a year it seemed to Lockman.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to insult your people. I certainly don’t want to sully Marty’s memory. But no one can even say what Jessie’s exact role is in your prophecy.”

“She is to bring an end to the vampire reign.”

“Yes, but how? One little girl, even a vampire girl with all the mojo in the world can’t stop a vampire army alone.”

“Not alone. No. But she’s only alone if we abandon her.” He leaned down, bringing his eye-level closer to Teresa’s. “Or turn against her.”

For an instant, Teresa almost looked convinced. Those mean lines around her eyes smoothed out. Lockman thought he recognized his former lover come back from the bitterness that had warped her. As if catching herself, she turned her face away for a moment. When she turned back, the lines had returned, deeper even. “I’m not turning against anyone. I’m doing what I was trained to do. What I joined you to do. What we assembled our own forces to do.”

Lockman dropped his shoulders. He knew this wouldn’t work. The Teresa from before her sister was turned into a vampire then killed was long gone. And the grudge she held against Jessie for not suffering the same—and in Teresa’s eyes, appropriate—fate would stick to her like an inoperable tumor.

Only Adam had one last trick up his sleeve—or in his back pocket, since the ogre never wore shirts with sleeves.

“If you can’t swear an oath to protect the Chosen One, you can no longer serve this mission.”

Lockman’s and Teresa’s eyes went wide in unison. Judging from how much of the plastic air touched his tongue, his jaw probably had dropped as wide as well.

Her brow creased. “What are you talking about? You can’t...you
can’t
.”

Adam stepped back, aligning himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Lockman. “We started this with an alliance of four. Only three remain here to vote. If you cannot swear an oath to protect the Chosen One, I vote for your expulsion from this alliance.”

The ogre turned to Lockman. “How do you vote?”

Lockman closed his gaping mouth. He wished Adam had filled him in on this part of his plan. A little warning would have been nice. He looked at Adam. He looked at Teresa. “Can you swear an oath?”

Her lip curled. Her eyes bulged as she glared at Adam. “This is ridiculous. Fine. I swear.”

Adam shook his head. “We demand the most binding of oaths.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A sacred blood oath,” Adam said. “One that will bind you to your promise until death.”

“You mean some kind of mojo. Something that will keep me from being able to hurt her even against my will.”

Lockman felt as blown away by all this as Teresa sounded. The seriousness in Adam’s tone gave him chills.

“No,” Adam said. “When you make a blood oath in the tradition of the Gulogich, the oath becomes your will.”

“So then it’s magical brainwashing?”

“Call it what you like, I can see no other way. Your rage will not let you see the Chosen One’s importance—”

“My rage?”

“—so you must leave or take the oath.”

“This isn’t rage.” Teresa pounded a fist against her chest. Her eyes glistened in the light from the bare fluorescent bulbs mounted to the ceiling. “This is passion for doing what’s right. Everyone here’s become so wrapped up in their personal agendas, they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.”

Lockman snorted. “We could say the same about you.”

“So you’ll force me to agree with you,” she said to Adam. “Make me suffer some ritual to work as your puppet? Fuck that. You don’t have to vote. I’m out of here.” She shoved her way between Lockman and Adam, but Adam grabbed her by the arm.

“Wait,” he said. “The oath does not change you. It only forces you to commit.”

“It doesn’t matter. I will not swear to protect what I think needs to be destroyed.” She yanked her arm free. “Good luck, guys. I’m sure we’ll all meet again in hell.”

She flung open the door and slammed it behind her, shaking the flimsy walls.

A moment of silence passed as Lockman and Adam both stared at the door.

“Did we really just kick Teresa off the team?”

Adam dragged his massive hands down his face and groaned as if sick to his stomach. “I thought I could convince her.”

“With or without us, she isn’t going to let this go. You know that, right?” Lockman turned to the ogre. “Knowing Teresa, she’s going to go after Jessie on her own.”

Chapter Twenty

The feel of silk against her naked skin drew a memory across Kate’s half-sleeping mind of Craig on the night he had proposed to her. She had put a new set of silk sheets on her bed. She hadn’t known he was going to ask her to marry him, but she sensed something special about that night. It would have been the same night Jessie was conceived. And the last time she would see Craig for fifteen years.

Special
wasn’t the right word at all.

She opened her eyes and found herself in yet another room, though she had little doubt it belonged to the same building she’d spent most of her day in. This room actually had a window, and sunlight filtered in through a sheer set of peach curtains, and lay across the bed in soft, bright bars. Dust motes swirled in the shaft of light. A quaint antique dresser that could have come out of the Victorian era sat against the wall opposite the window. On the dresser, and reflected in its mirror, stood a music box with a ballerina posed in a frozen pirouette.

Kate sat up. Her head swirled. Pain lanced her right arm. Blood had begun to seep through the bandages. They would need changing soon. Gritting her teeth, Kate snarled internally. Whenever she’d seen magic done with blood before, the blood disappeared and the wounds closed. Did these people even know what they were doing?

Her cheeks burned.

She tossed the sheet off and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her head throbbed and spun. She did her best to ignore it. But when she tried to stand and her vision grew hazy, she knew she could only push herself so far and eased back to the mattress. She hung her head and took deep, steady breaths.

First things first. Get some damn clothes on. The obsession with these folks keeping her naked drove her nuts. Not that she didn’t understand the strategy behind it. Especially the time with the ghost. Keep her feeling vulnerable. Make her easy to manipulate, intimidate.

No more.

She wanted out of this house of a thousand rooms. Nothing they had done so far had brought her any closer to finding Jessie. That was the only reason she had cooperated with them on any level. Screw this. She had to find a way to escape.

She laughed at herself.

She couldn’t even stand up to get dressed and already she’s making plans to escape. They had her in some massive castle or something, who knew where? She didn’t stand a chance. She wasn’t leaving until they wanted her to—if they ever wanted her to.

If Craig had been here, he would have figured out a way.

But she wasn’t Craig. She was a nobody, powerless, caught in a world beyond her comprehension no matter how many times someone tried to explain it to her.

The spinning in her head had eased off. She could lift her chin and look around a little more without feeling on the verge of passing out. She chuckled to herself again. Unless they kept the dresser stocked, Kate didn’t have any clothes to get into. She made a fist and thumped the mattress. The frustrated gesture cost her some pain, since she had used her cut arm to do it. The bandages felt wet against her skin. The stinging brought water to her eyes.

“Let me out of here you bastards,” she shouted. She knew they could hear her. Probably see her too. If they didn’t have surveillance cameras installed in the room, they were using some kind of magic to observe her. She felt like a guest on some obscure reality show. “I’m done. I want out.”

Silence.

What had she expected? A voice over an intercom?

She peered along the edge of the ceiling looking for cameras. Didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She wanted to face off with someone, even if only through the lens of a camera. Tell them what she thought about their “team” and how she refused to be a part of it. She was tired of their hollow promises couched in their doom-and-gloom predictions of the world’s end.

“Did you hear me?” Her voice buzzed in the corners of the room. “I want out.”

She tried standing again, slowly this time, and got to her feet without too much wooziness. Once she felt steady enough, she shuffled to the dresser. She slid open the top drawer and huffed. About a week’s worth of bras and underwear lay neatly in the drawer.

Since no one seemed interested in her tirade, she might as well get dressed.

She helped herself to a matching set of undergarments and checked the second drawer, apparently the pants drawer. Seven pairs, from jeans, to khakis, to what looked like leather, sat folded and stacked inside. She checked a few tags—all her size. Even the leather. They knew her size. They did not know her style. She settled on a pair of khaki cargo pants.

Drawer number three was full of basic t-shirts, a different color for each day of the week. Kate took a black t-shirt off the top.

She wanted to yank on the clothes as quickly as possible, but she forced herself to take her time and avoid any more lightheadedness than necessary. The act of getting dressed made her feel more herself and a little stronger. When she had finished, she sat at the foot of the bed and looked around her again.

The window, you fool.

They had her so used to rooms without windows she had missed the significance of finally having one now. She wanted to leave. Climb out the window.

Before she got her hopes too high, she stood and crossed over to take a look out. For all she knew, this room sat on the hundredth floor of this seemingly endless building. She pushed aside the curtains and peered through the glass. The view was astonishing. Kate had never seen such a wide open and unbroken expanse of land. Grassy plains seemed to stretch to infinity, the sky the only thing keeping it from going any further. Not even a mountain range blocked the horizon. Just a flat, straight line where grass met sky.