Summoning Sebastian (22 page)

We had come in on the opposite side of the Lego contraption. This part of the laboratory looked more like a warehouse. The ceilings past the door soared to about three stories. The walls were lined with shelves, the shelves stacked with books, stacks of papers—one set even appeared to hold papyrus rolls and a couple of clay tablets.

“I thought this was the lab, not a library,” I said to Gregor. He was just to my left—I was being careful to keep him in my line of sight, if just barely. I didn't trust him, especially under these circumstances. And his interest in the bottle I carried seemed to have ratcheted up a notch. I wondered if he was trying to figure out how Sebastian was reacting to his current surroundings. I couldn't really tell—the buzzing from the bottle was becoming harder to distinguish from all the other vibrations in the room.

“This part is where we research.” Gregor waved vaguely toward the shelves of books. “It's one of the most complete libraries in the vampire world.” He hesitated, staring at my chest. I wondered momentarily about the strange obsession with my tits. Then I remembered—not my tits. The markings on my chest.

“We even have a copy—a complete copy, we were assured—of the text where you found those symbols. And yet…”

He took a sudden step toward me. Automatically, I stepped back. I bumped something behind me—I didn't know what. Something clicked, glass against glass.

“What do they mean?” he demanded. “How do they work?”

Okay, this had officially morphed from bad idea to abysmally horrible idea. There was something strange in Gregor's eyes. His was more than a casual interest, probably more than just trying to fit research pieces together to please Armand. He took another step closer.

I didn't have enough space behind me to go any farther back, so I held my ground. He hadn't attacked me yet. He wanted information. So I was probably at least somewhat safe for a little while longer.

“I don't really know,” I said honestly. “I was just guessing when I used them.”

Suddenly he was right in front of me, so close I could feel the movement of his chest as he drew air to speak. One fist slammed the shelf behind me. Glass tinkled, the sound of breaking, of destruction.

“If
he
came back, why couldn't anyone?” he demanded. “Why not Pieter?”

To be honest, the thought had occurred to me. Both Sebastian and Pieter had died as the result of contact with the stone. But, to my knowledge, only Sebastian had come back. It could only have some relation to the way they'd died—Pieter to a direct attack, Sebastian through sacrifice. He'd allowed his body to be devoured—Pieter had been consumed by force.

Instinct, though, told me it wouldn't be the best idea to float this theory past Gregor.

“I…I don't know. The stone…really, it has a mind of its own, I think. It does what it wants.”

“It's a
stone
,” Gregor shot back. His teeth were bared, the tips of his fangs pressing against his bottom lip. I wondered why he seemed disinclined to attack me. Not that I wasn't grateful, but there was something there—some piece to the puzzle I hadn't quite sorted out. Something about the Amp Juice, undoubtedly, but what exactly were these rumored side effects? I'd gotten the same strange sense from him in Chelyabinsk—like he wanted to attack me, would have happily ripped me to bits, but that, somehow, he
couldn't
.

“It's magic,” I answered quietly. Weakened or not, I didn't want him mad at me. That would be counterproductive. “It's ancient, and magic, and God only knows how it works.”

He made a scornful sound. “Even God doesn't know. Why do you know?”

“I don't.” And it was the truth. Everything I'd done had been out of sheer instinct, a reaction to stimuli. Guesswork from Roland. Nothing concrete. Gut feelings somewhere deep inside and completely apart from me at the same time. I didn't know how to explain it. The stone communicated with me somehow. Made changes in me. Like a virus, maybe, or… I couldn't think of anything else to compare it to.

He eased back away from me. His expression shifted, and suddenly I understood why he hadn't yet tried to kill me—or at least part of the reason—and it was far more prosaic than side effects from magic vampire juice. He wanted something from me.

“It can't just be magic. There has to be something else.” He sounded defeated. “There has to be more to it than just creating a new stone.”

“I'm not here to create a new stone.” That was the last thing I wanted to happen. The first stone had been enough of a pain in the ass. God knew we didn't need another one. No matter how controlled it was, some asshole motherfucker megalomaniac like Pieter would get his hands on it and we'd be all
stop the zombie vampire apocalypse
again. I'd had quite enough of that, thank you very much. Plus, as best as I could tell, creating a new stone would make it impossible for me to achieve my actual goal. “I'm here to bring Sebastian back. That was our agreement.”

“Sebastian.” Gregor spat. “If it weren't for Sebastian, Pieter would still be here. And why can't we bring Pieter back?”

“Why would we want to?” I hadn't gotten the impression any of the vampire community thought much more highly of Pieter than I did.

It had been the wrong thing to say, though. By several degrees of wrong.

Gregor bared his teeth, his eyes burning with rage. His fangs gleamed with the promise of mayhem. I held still, suppressing a flinch, not wanting to give him any more reason to hit me.

“Pieter,” he ground out, “was my brother.”

Well. That was unexpected. My mouth started running off, brain unattached. “Your brother-brother, or your vampire brother? Like as in you were made by the same dude?”

“Both,” he shot back. “And your
Sebastian
…” His gaze lowered to the bottle at my hip. “Your
Sebastian
killed him. For no reason.”

I shifted, trying to work out an escape route. It wasn't easy, since he'd backed me against the table. I could sidle sideways, though, and hopefully put some distance between us when I reached the end of the table. So I did that.

“Oh, there was a reason.” I was probably pushing him way too hard, but I got the sense he was one of those who didn't function well when they were angry. Pieter had been like that to some extent, but he'd been colder, calmer, more calculating. “He was trying to destroy humanity.”

“And what good is humanity,” Gregor shot back, “except to eat? What have you humans ever done but destroy this planet? You're parasites.”

“And yet you feed off us.” I was still sidling. He was sidling with me, but I wasn't entirely sure he realized he was doing it.

He didn't appear to be listening to me anymore either. “Imagine what this place could be without you. Maybe two thousand humans to feed us. We can live without the fuels, without the farms and the domesticated animals… The planet would be safe from your ravaging. We could preserve what was left into eternity…because we never die.”

I was actually already aware of the fact vampires were immortal, but I opted not to point that out, since he was on a roll. I was also pretty sure an eternal vampire utopia, established to protect planet Earth from eventual destruction, wasn't what Pieter had been planning. Then again, I hadn't stopped to ask him about his motivations. I'd been too busy trying not to die, and trying to keep my boyfriends from dying. I'd only partially succeeded.

He focused on me again, and I didn't like the look in his eyes at all. It was far too aware. He'd come back from his self-absorbed megalomaniacal monologue and was thinking about me directly, and this wasn't a pleasant sensation.

“Imagine what it could have been,” he said again. “And instead you killed him. You and Sebastian.”

I felt empty space behind me; I'd finally reached the end of the table. I ducked back as fast as I could and grabbed at the small vial of holy water I still had in my pocket. And everything happened so fast then—so fast there wasn't anything I could have done to change it.

I tried to open the holy water without looking, but the screw-top lid didn't yield. My attention shifted for a split second to figure out what was wrong, and just as it did, before I even managed to look at the vial, I realized it was upside down.

But the lapse in attention had been just long enough. Gregor moved with snakelike speed—faster than a human, still not as fast as a vampire normally would, but plenty fast enough to get past my human reflexes. His hand closed on the pouch that held the bottle.

There was nothing I could have done to stop him. Not with my attention momentarily diverted. I probably couldn't have done anything even if I hadn't allowed that momentary lapse. That's what I told myself, anyway. Nothing I could have done. Not my fault.

But his hand tore at the pouch and the strap holding it bandolier-style across my shoulder ripped free from its seams. He was still strong. Still fast. Still a fucking vampire.

The strap tore loose, and he tore the bottle away from me. Lifted it in one hand.

“No!” I reached for his raised hand, trying to stop him. The holy water fell from my hand; miraculously, I didn't hear it shatter. But that wasn't what I was focused on right now. Not even close.

Gregor lifted the bottle, still enclosed in the cloth pouch, and brought it down. Slammed it into the concrete floor. And that glass did shatter.

I could hear the sundering as it struck the concrete floor, even muffled as it was by the cloth. More, I
felt
it. Like a knife stabbing into my sternum where ink lay in a carefully drawn pattern on my skin. A pattern that matched the patterns drawn on the bottle.

“No!” I shouted again. “No! You motherfucker! What the fuck have you done?”

“Ended him!” Gregor yelled back at me. His teeth were still bared; I felt his spittle hit my face as he shouted. Gross. “Why should he be alive when Pieter is dead? Why?”

“Because he was good!” I screamed back. I fumbled for the bottle, as if I could press the pieces back together with my bare hands. I grabbed at the cloth, and a sliver of glass knifed through it into my hand. Hot blood poured down my wrist. Bleeding profusely in front of a vampire was never a good idea. Not much I could do to stop it, though.

Then another sensation of heat poured over my hand. Mist drifted from the bottle through the bloodstained cloth. Graying mist and a swirling, strange energy within it. I recognized everything about it—the color, the sense of it, the pulsation, even a vague smell I didn't remember noticing when I'd collected him in the bottle in the first place. Probably because about the only thing anybody could smell on that street corner was weed and doughnuts. The wisps gathered into a more concentrated cloud. Inside it I could almost see Sebastian, or a vague, smoky version of him. Not his face but almost his face, his eyes and a twist of smoke that might have been his mouth. For an instant, it looked like he was smiling.

Then the smoke turned in on itself, a billow of gray and black, and poured toward…

Toward me.

There was no time for me to be afraid. Actually, that wasn't true. I was terrified, but only for a split second—there was no more time than that. I couldn't move fast enough to get away from the smoke, and I wasn't sure if I would have tried if I'd been able to. I couldn't outrun an amorphous mist set on catching me. No one could. It swarmed right at me, as it had that night in Denver, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had no bottle to channel it, no amulet to guide it.

Unlike on that night in Denver, nothing came to my mind, no symbols leaping into my brain, no words to speak to exert control. All I could do was let him have me.

Vaguely, I heard Gregor shouting in the background, his voice roughly shaping words I recognized from the tablets. But Sebastian's smoky remains didn't change course. I flung the open vial of holy water in Gregor's general direction, trying not to pitch it through the smoke.

Gregor swore, screamed more words, then I thought I saw him diminishing, as if he were running away. Not that it mattered. There was nothing I could have done to stop him had he tried to kill me. Which seemed the most logical course; if he killed me, Sebastian would have nowhere to go other than wherever Gregor wanted him to go. But if Gregor had thought to try to bring Sebastian into his own body, or into a container I hadn't seen, it didn't seem to be working.

Shit, I would have high-tailed it out of there too, had it been me.

I stumbled backward, half collapsing against the wall. My knees were bent, my back braced against the concrete, and I lifted an arm to shield my face. The gray smoke spread, then blocked everything around me. If Gregor hadn't run, I would have no way of knowing. I couldn't see a fucking thing. I closed my eyes, which had started to sting.

And then I felt it. My arm felt like it was on fire.
Here it is,
I thought.
He's going to kill me, whether I want him to or not. Whether he wants to or not. Nothing left of me but shit you can stuff in an urn.
I wasn't sure why I was so certain of that, but it seemed inevitable.

Then I realized it wasn't my whole arm that was burning. My skin burned, but the pain was picked out in well-defined patterns. Patterns I recognized.

I opened my eyes automatically, then winced, anticipating pain. There was none—at least not in my eyes. But the markings on my arms had begun to glow. The mist—the visible something that somehow constituted what little was physically left of Sebastian—was moving into the lines of ink. Binding to them. And it hurt. But it didn't hurt like something that was going to kill me.

Still, what the fuck was happening? The misty stuff gathered along the lines of ink, darkening them. It seemed to be sinking into my skin, but not very far. A tingling burn moved over my skin, following the marks up my arms, over my collarbones, down my chest and back.