Possession-Blood Ties 2 (11 page)

She made a plosive sound of denial, as if the answer was obvious. “Only if we get caught. Besides, it’s not like they’re gonna get rid of me.”

She made a compelling argument. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been if our meeting with the general hadn’t been so disastrous. Anne seemed to take the reason for my hesitation as fear. “She hasn’t hurt anyone lately. They changed her diet. She was getting too much male blood and the testosterone made her crabby. Now she’s pretty mellow.”

I felt a fleeting moment of sanity, and seized it. “Max told me to stay here.”

“So?” Anne got to her feet and went behind the desk, where she grabbed a pad of sticky notes. “We’ll leave him a message. Besides, he’s in the armory. He’ll be there awhile.”

“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me.

“It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”

I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”

“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”

The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”

“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”

A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.

“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my

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fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.

“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.

“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”

She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”

“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”

“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”

We ventured farther into the building than she’d taken us on our previous tour. This area, I noticed, had fewer safe rooms and more security labels. We reached a large set of double doors with a thick, black-and-yellow-striped line around them. Huge red warning signs, printed in several different languages, plastered the doors. In addition to a key card reader, I noticed there was a palm scan device and a keypad on the wall.

“This is the most secure section of headquarters,” Anne explained. “Only high level administrators and security have access. Oh, and the scientists who monitor the Oracle.”

“Scientists?” I chewed my lip nervously as I watched her key in the codes. The English language sticker on the door warned an improper access sequence would result in a security breach alert, and I didn’t remember where I’d seen the last safe room.

“Yeah. She’s got a whole team of doctors and chemists and pharmacists keeping her medicated and fed well and under control.” The same computerized voice from the elevator informed us that the access sequence was accepted, and Anne pushed open the door with a flourish.

“If she’s drugged up, why is Max so afraid of her?” He’s not the kind of guy to be blindly afraid of anything.

Anne made another “pff” sound of dismissal. “He was on the team that moved her to the new facility back in the eighties. Really, he shouldn’t have been assigned, he was too young. He’s too young now. Anyway, her meds didn’t hold, and she twisted one of the team members’ heads off.”

“Twisted?” My guts mimicked the motion implied by my word. “She’s got that kind of power?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s got mad telekinesis. It would be cool, if she didn’t use it so destructively. But that’s why she’s constantly doped up. Ah, here we are!”

We turned left and went through thoroughly unintimidating swinging doors, into a room with black walls like an exhibit in a museum. A dark window the size of a movie screen dominated one wall, separated from us by a brass railing.

“Stand there,” Anne instructed, moving toward the window, where she turned a dial. The lights dimmed slowly on our side of the glass as the other side illuminated.

“This is like the penguin house at Sea World,” I said, my voice sounding way too loud in the quiet room, and Anne snorted in laughter.

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Behind the glass, a void of still redness surrounded a murky, suspended shape. It took me a moment to realize what the redness was.

“Is that blood?”

Anne joined me at the rail. “Yup. The Oracle can’t feed in the traditional sense anymore. She requires much more blood to support her tissues. Total immersion allows her to draw the blood in through her lungs and pores as well as her digestive system. The blood cycles through purifying and oxygenating filters continually, to provide optimal nourishment for her.”

“So, you’ve got a giant heart-lung machine back there, pumping blood?” I squinted at the tank.

Anne nodded and shrugged. “Pretty much.”

As the lights grew brighter, the shape came into focus. A figure, nude and obviously female, floated in the blood. What appeared to be intravenous lines and electrode wires connected to her slender limbs and bald head. Her face was relaxed, eyes closed as if in sleep. She was perfect, except for the three pointed horns protruding from her skull. I thought back to Cyrus’s New Year’s party, and the creatures I’d seen there. “Is she part demon?”

“No. The Oracle is pretty old, one of the oldest we know about. The horns are a natural consequence of the aging process. We get twisted when we age.” Anne held out her arm and pushed her plastic bracelets aside, revealing the faint beginning of what could only be described as a dew claw. She covered it again with a shrug. “She’s also the most psychically gifted vampire we know of.”

“You’ve got that memorized like you work at the Smithsonian,” I said, leaning over the rail. “So, she’s sealed up in there, or what?”

“Yup. She’s been held in various methods of containment since her capture in 1079, Common Era, and was given to the Movement in its first year of inception by King George the II in 1765.”

“The Movement is that old?” I asked, my awe diverted for an instant from the Oracle. “I thought back then it was the Order of the Brethren?”

Before Anne could answer, the blood in the tank surged, pounding the glass with a wave that created a thunderous echo.

“Don’t worry about that,” Anne assured me. “She’s responding to your voice because you’re new.”

Much in the way a big, scary dog is “just playing.”

“She has a staff of round-the-clock caregivers who administer sedatives. That’s why she’s not all vamped out in the face area. The drugs they give her keep her in a light coma. It’s safer, and more conducive to her visions. And her specialists monitor her psychic readouts. We can accurately monitor major world events days in advance with the information she supplies us. You know, if she chooses to supply it.”

It might have been a trick of the changing light, but I could have sworn the Oracle’s eyes opened.

“Weird,” Anne whispered. “I’m gonna page them, let them know she’s awake.”

So, it wasn’t just an eerie illusion. Neither, apparently, was the voice in my head. Carrie, it called softly. The chill tone paralyzed me. Carrie, he has come back.

“Who has?” I asked out loud. But I knew. I knew in my heart who she meant. Two

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months of horrible nightmares flashed through my mind. No! I shouted back at the Oracle through my mind. Cyrus is dead. No matter what bizarre scenario you try and come up with, nothing can bring him back!

You doubt me, vampire?

I’m fairly sure that’s exactly when things started to go wrong. The Oracle’s voice filled my head, and she was angry. What do you want, vampire? Why do you come to me?

You told me he’s come back, I pressed. I need to know who you’re talking about. You’re afraid I speak of the one called Simon. But I do not. Another wave of blood rocked the tank and pounded against the glass. Anne, who’d run to the intercom, shrank against the wall. I don’t know if she’d called for help or not.

“Simon?” I asked aloud. My thoughts were so scrambled, it took me a moment to remember Cyrus’s real name. “I’m not afraid of Cyrus.”

You shouldn’t be. Though he lives again, he lives. I speak of the one who devours the essence of my blood kin. Another wave rocked the tank.

“The Soul Eater?” But another part of her statement demanded my attention. “What do you mean, Cyrus lives?”

Raised by the toothsome ones in the land of the dead. As the first rises, the second falls. Both will be devoured.

Anne edged closer, keeping to the wall. “We need to go. She’s not safe when she’s agitated like this.”

I couldn’t leave yet. Not when I was getting the first real answers I’d received since we’d arrived. “The Soul Eater possessed Nathan?”

The waves of blood came faster and faster now. I felt like a fish in an aquarium someone kept tapping on, and I struggled to keep my mind focused. From the corner of my eye, I saw Anne cover her ears.

You have your answer. Seek the toothsome ones in the land of the dead. The flesh and blood of the destroyer.

Cold fear gripped me. “What if I can’t find him? I don’t understand!”

The Oracle’s eyes snapped open again. In the same instant, Movement guards charged into the room, followed by Max. “Carrie, get away from her!”

The Oracle opened her mouth. Waves of sound rippled through the blood around her as her scream filled the air and my head. “He will become a god!”

“No, no, no!” Anne cried, clawing at the wall as if seeking a handhold. A second later, I knew why. As if she were nothing more than a feather in a breeze, her small body flew across the room. Feathers rarely make such a sickening crunch when they collide with walls, though. She crumpled to the floor in a deathly still heap. I tried to run to her, but my feet were immobilized.

“Anne!” Before Max could move, an invisible force pinned him to the wall. Oddly, my fear fled. The Oracle’s voice blocked out the sound of Max’s frantic urging for me to run. She insisted I come closer, and I couldn’t find a good enough reason not to. I slid under the brass rail and crossed the space to the tank. Each step reverberated through me like a thunderclap. As I drew nearer to the glass, the Oracle began to move, taking long, lazy steps through the blood. Suspended, she looked as though she walked through air.

The Oracle reached for me. I pressed my palms flat against the tank, expecting the glass to

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be cool and feeling slightly sickened when I realized the blood behind it was body temperature. I thought she would bring her hands to meet mine on the glass. Instead, she twisted them into claws. At the same time, my throat crushed closed. I wouldn’t die from not breathing, but I was fairly certain I’d die from having my head twisted off my neck.

No! I pleaded in my mind. I’m not going to die like this. Why would you give me this information only to let it die with me?

Her hold was broken. The lights flared up in the room and darkened in the tank. Max’s arms were suddenly around me, pulling me from the room. Vampires in white coats rushed in to tend Anne.

“What the hell was that?” Max repeated over and over at my side as we raced down the hallway.

I couldn’t answer him. The voice of the Oracle echoed in my memory. He will become a god.

Cyrus jerked awake screaming.

The Mouse sat up beside him and put her arm around his bare shoulders. Her skin felt too hot and dry, magnifying the slick, cold sweat coating his body.

“You had a nightmare,” she said. There was no emotion, just a matter-of-fact statement. His first instinct was to slap her, but the now-familiar shame washed through him, and he restrained himself. He rose from the narrow bed they’d shared. He’d reveled in the feeling of holding her as she’d slept. It was a sensation he couldn’t compare to anything in his vast, lurid experience. Now, in the harsh light of day that streamed weakly through the small basement windows, the night seemed dirty somehow. He’d been a centuries-old vampire with unlimited financial resources and powerful charm at his disposal. There had never been a time when he could not have what he wanted, and he’d certainly never wanted to comfort a sobbing woman through the dark hours of the night.

You would have for Carrie.

He grabbed his—no, the dead priest’s—shirt from the end of the bed and pulled it on, reminding himself to be annoyed with the cheap fabric. He didn’t remember taking it off, had only a dim recollection of shrugging out of it and turning over to enfold Mouse in his arms. She called after him as he stalked into the bathroom, but he ignored her and slammed the door, needing space and peace and a way to block the horrible dream from his mind.