The Vampire's Revenge (10 page)

Renee shook her head. “I forgot you had a father besides William.”

“I almost forgot it, too, it was so long ago.”

“Why did he leave Ireland?”

“There wasn’t much food to eat over there at the time, so he emigrated to Georgia. He always missed Ireland, though.”

She looked up at me with her old-soul eyes. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you.”

That nearly did me in. I paused to get myself under control before I spoke. “Your mom wants you to be part of a real family with your dad. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I’ve already got a real family.”

I looked at the floor for a moment, her words like a balm to my heart. When I looked up at her, I tried my best to smile. Leaning forward, I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Something tells me that none of your school friends have a vampire for a godfather and shape shifters for a brother and sister.”

My joke failed to get a smile out of her. She only shrugged. I reached out and took her little hand. “I would love for you to stay, sweetheart. But this place is a lot more dangerous without William. Your mom’s right. It’ll be better for the both of you if you go with your dad.”

“But that’s why you need me,” she insisted. “I can help protect you. I can protect all of us.”

I noticed with interest that she said
I
and not
we,
as in both she and her mother. William had lately become convinced that Renee’s power would eventually eclipse that of any of her forbears, even Melaphia. Maybe one day she
could
protect us all. That is, if she ever decided to come back once she’d seen the Emerald Isle.

“I know you would, and I appreciate that. But I think you should at least give this family thing a try. Who knows? You might like it.”

“I’ll come back,” she stated flatly.

“Sure. You can come back and visit anytime.”

“No. I mean, I’m going to come back to stay. As soon as I’m old enough to leave.”

“You know you’ll always have a home here if you want it. But you have to promise me something.”

“Sure. What?”

“If you do decide to come back, whether it’s just for a visit or for good, come back because you really want to, not because you feel obliged to.”

Renee looked at me like she thought I’d just fed on a crack addict. “You’re silly, Uncle Jack. Of course I’ll really want to. I haven’t even left and I want to already.”

I brought her little hand to my lips and kissed it. “Promise anyway, okay,” I managed to say through my constricted throat.

Renee crossed her heart with her other hand. “Promise.”

I used Olivia and Deylaud’s research as an excuse to beat it upstairs before the moisture escaped my eyes. Wiping my tears with the back of my sleeve, I walked into the den where they were working and went straight to the wet bar to pour myself some breakfast.

Olivia looked up. “You slept in a bit. Did you get that hangover you were anticipating?”

“Yeah. You might say that. You want anything?”

“Thank you, no. I’ve fed already.”

There was no telling if Olivia meant that she’d polished off a bag from the blood bank, or if she’d gone out and fed on some passing young stud and left him in the shrubbery sleeping off the blood loss and her considerable glamour. As long as she didn’t do any permanent harm, and she wouldn’t, it was none of my business.

“What are you guys studying?” I asked, and poured myself another round of O positive.

Deylaud looked up from the book open on the coffee table and said, “We’re assessing the feasibility of leveraging a specific divinity source to stanch the spirit dislocations.”

“What would that be in English?”

Deylaud blushed. “We’re trying to figure out if the old Celtic gods can help us get people back into their own bodies and send the double-deads to hell.”

Deylaud was what William called
erudite.
He had a photographic memory and could recite reams of old literature, chapter and verse. He seemed to know everything, and what he didn’t know, he had a thirst to find out about so he could add it to the vast encyclopedia in his head.

At first glance he looked to be a boy of twenty or so. He shared his blond, wholesome good looks with his sister. You’d never guess these Bobbsey Twins were actually mystical shape-shifting dogs who used to guard the pharaohs. It always amazed me to think that creatures as gentle and harmless-looking as the twins were so potentially deadly.

“Do you think it’s going to work?”

Olivia said, “I think it’s worth a try.”

“Some of Olivia’s contacts are neopagan priestesses,” Deylaud explained. “They’re really high on this ancestral god named Bilé. He’s associated with trees and virility.”

“No wonder they’re high on him.” I winked at Olivia, who gave me a smirk. “So you’re going to get him over here and have him threaten the double-deads with his big . . . tree until they behave themselves?”

“It’s not just virility. He’s also considered to be the god of death,” Deylaud continued. “It’s his job to escort the dead to the underworld.”

“Now I’m starting to follow,” I said. “So how are we going to get this god to appear to us on this continent? Do we have to do a bunch of pagan spells? Dance naked around a maypole in the moonlight or something?”

“That rather sounds like fun,” Olivia said, “but I think we’ll just use Delta.”

I knocked back the last of my blood cocktail. “All righty then. Make sure you get him a first-class ticket, since he’s a god and all. We don’t want to look chintzy.”

“I’ll go to my desk and make the arrangements,” Deylaud said.

“Get him on the next plane smokin’,” I said.

“Will do.”

When Deylaud had gone I settled myself on the sofa next to Olivia. “How’re you feeling?”

“You mean, am I feeling any ill effects from last night?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Olivia smiled seductively. “None whatsoever. How about you? Are you feeling anything bad except for that hangover?”

I figured I’d better not tell her the truth—that I was suffering from a major-league case of guilt because of Connie. I had learned a thing or two about women over my extra-long life span, so I decided to keep my mouth shut on that score. Instead, I said, “Oh, no. I feel fine. Just dandy.”

“Excellent.” Olivia put her arms around me and I could feel a kiss coming on, but I was saved by the bell when her tiny cell phone rang. “Olivia,” she said tersely and listened a long time. “Brilliant! Get in touch with him and get back to me. I’ll make all the arrangements from over here.” She flipped the phone closed. “Hurrah!”

“Good news?”

“Yes. The other piece of the puzzle just fell into place. We have Bilé to get rid of the double-deads. Now we have Gwydion on board to get all the spirits back into their bodies.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a Welsh god who’s a trickster—a magician if you will.”

“Your witchy friends feel like he can trick the spirits out of the bodies they were forced into and back into their own?”

“Exactly. He’s so powerful he once animated an army of trees to fight a battle against the god of the underworld.”

“Hmmm. There was a battle with trees in
Lord of the Rings,
” I said.

“Where do you think Tolkien got the idea? It’s been part of Celtic lore forever.”

“Here’s what I want to know. What’s with all the trees?”

Olivia nudged me in the side. “You know us pagans, Jack. We’re always interested in nature. Besides, trees have wonderful symbolism. They’re big, hard, upright—”

“I get it, I get it. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a cedar’s just a cedar.”

Olivia laughed. “I hear you. However, we have a consensus among the practitioners that because of his power, Gwydion’s the man for the job.”

I laid my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes for a moment. “Liv, do you really think all these pagan god shenanigans are going to work?”

I opened my eyes again and Olivia was staring at me earnestly. “Unless we want to live in a mad, mad, world forever . . . they have to.” She patted my knee. “Now I’m going upstairs to help Deylaud with the arrangements to get both of those gods here.”

She stood to leave and then stopped. “My, I forgot to tell you about a very interesting phone conversation I had before you got up.”

“Lay it on me. Who was it?”

“Remember the spy I told you about? He called one of my associates in London and said he’d figured out what those plans are that Diana and Ulrich had for you.”

“Do I really want to hear this?”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Olivia said practically. “They know about your powers with the dead.”

I thought about the time I raised a whole cemetery of angry wraiths to keep Diana and Hugo under temporary guard. “Yeah, Diana saw it firsthand. So what?”

“They promised the old lords that they’d force you to raise any of Savannah’s dead that would threaten the humans.”

“How do they aim to make me do that?”

“Probably just the usual—promise you political clout within the Council and then double-cross you. Since they don’t know you like I do, they wouldn’t guess that you can’t be swayed by such things. They think every vampire is as ruthless and power hungry as they are.”

“Raising a few bad guys seems like small potatoes after that earthquake stunt. Why even bother?”

“The spy said he thought Diana and Ulrich were grasping at straws. They’ll do anything to curry favor with the Council, and I imagine they didn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver again.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’m surprised they didn’t get drawn and quartered—or whatever those devils do to punish their own—for failing to deliver Renee and her blood to the Council. I’m still surprised at their limited plan.”

“It was probably the only scheme they could think of on short notice.”

“If that’s all they’ve got for me, I can handle it. I’m just worried what they might cook up for a plan B. Who were they going to force me to reanimate exactly?”

“All my spy said was it involved serial killers, terrorists, that sort of thing.”

I jumped straight up onto my feet. “Wait a minute! There was a creepy little vampire named Velki over at Werm’s club the other night questioning us about serial killers and terrorists from Savannah’s history.”

Olivia’s eyes went wide. “I’ve never heard of anyone called Velki, but I’ll wager he’s an advance man for Diana and Ulrich.”

“Yeah. He said he was researching a book, but it sounds like the research was for those two infernal bloodsuckers. I’ve got to get over to Werm’s club right away and see if he’s been back there. If I can find him, I’ll wring out of him everything he knows about Diana, Ulrich, the Council—everything.”

“Do you need my help?” Olivia wanted to know.

“No, I can handle him. You just get those pagan gods over here.” I started for the door.

“Call me on my cell if you need me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll head over to the garage after this to talk to Otis and see if he can contact his Sidhe supervisors. They might have some input that would be helpful in getting the body-swapping problem fixed.”

“Good idea.” I bounded out of the house and hopped in my Stingray. I’d felt so powerless the last couple of days. At least now I had something concrete to focus on.

There was nothing like a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking to make old Smilin’ Jack feel alive again.

Seven

I was glad Velki was a petite little man. He fit easily into the trunk of the ’Vette, which was handy. Most grown men didn’t, unless you flattened them like a fritter, and I hated to ask Huey to clean up that kind of mess. Not that he would have minded. He once was a dead body stuffed into my trunk as well, but that’s ancient history.

Presently I was dangling Velki by the ankles over the Bull River Bridge out toward Fort Pulaski.

“The fall won’t hurt you,” I told him, “but it’ll be unpleasant. So will slogging yourself out of the river and finding your way back to town before sunup. Or you could burrow into the mud like a frog and wait for the next sunset.”

“Noooo,” Velki wailed. “I don’t know anything about any Diana and Ulrich. And I don’t want to have to burrow like an amphibian!”

I shook him until change fell out of his pockets. “You’re strange-looking enough when you aren’t dripping with mud and marsh grass. The folks at the Bull River Yacht Club back yonder will probably call the police and have you locked up in a nice, sunny cell.”

“Pleeease! Nooo!”

About that time, I saw Olivia running toward us. “Hey, Jack! How could you go a’torturing and not take me along?”

“Be my guest,” I offered as I prepared to transfer Velki’s ankles into Olivia’s fiendishly capable hands.

She reached out eagerly and then got a good look at the blood drinker in my grip. “Oh, my goddess! It’s Mole!”

“Miss Olivia! Praise Brigid you’re here!”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This guy’s the one who’s been helping Diana and Ulrich.”

“I’ve been
pretending
to help Diana and Ulrich while I’ve been spying for Olivia,” Mole finally ’fessed up, now that he had an advocate on the scene.

“It’s true, Jack,” Olivia said. “I know him as Mole. I had no idea he was the Velki you spoke of.”

“Velki’s my real name,” he said. “Mole is the code name I gave myself so your London associates would have some way to refer to me without knowing my real name.”

“Why ‘Mole’?” I asked.

“I’ve been underground for so long, serving the Council without going to the surface of the earth, that’s what I feel like, really.”

Now that was just sad, but the time he’d spent with the Council accounted for his sometimes odd, old-fashioned way of speaking. I raised him back up and over the side of the bridge, letting him drop gently onto the pavement. “Sorry, man,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

“I didn’t know if I could trust you,” he said, sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles. “I’d rather fall from this bridge into the river than be revealed as a spy to someone who might tell those bloodthirsty blood drinkers about my treachery.”

“Let’s get off this bridge before a car comes along,” Olivia said.

Once Mole was on his feet I marched him back to the Savannah side of the bridge where I’d parked the car. Olivia had borrowed William’s Escalade and parked it beside my convertible.