Staked Read online

  “Tell him I know who killed the werewolves out at the lake and it wasn’t me or any of my people. I’ll admit to having killed his son, but he killed my son, not to mention my car, so I’m willing to call it even and let things blow over. If Willy Boy won’t go for that, then I’m even willing to find the ones responsible for what happened out at the lake and gift wrap them for your boss. You got all that?”

  Reverend nodded.

  “One more thing. Tell him I’ll need an answer by tomorrow night.” I pulled Greta back to the sidewalk, trying not to pay attention to how badly burned her neck had gotten.

  I shouldn’t have spent so much time talking. Reverend pulled his hands away from freshly healed peepers, a bit bloodshot but clearly functional. This time my speed didn’t kick in. Damn it. Before I could react, the two werewolves next to him grabbed me, one furry bastard on each arm. Reverend reached up and put the paw with the rosary over my eyes. An eye for an eye. It was even less fun than El Segundo, but this time I had Greta at my side. I heard the slight jingle of werewolf collars as they ran for her, but she was already in motion.

  I heard the swoosh of Pug Nose’s big hammer-cross thing, and felt the displacement of air brush past my face as it just missed me, connecting with Reverend instead. His skull caved in with the sound of a smashing watermelon, music to my ears.

  “You missed,” Greta taunted.

  Two sets of claws I couldn’t see tore into my belly, spilling my guts onto the concrete about the same time I heard the sickening tear of a werewolf’s head being torn from his neck.

  “Grow that back, Rev.” Greta laughed again, but the laugh turned into a shriek and a sizzle. Damn it. Not sure of what to do, I jumped backward, carrying my two captors with me, shattering the glass doors at the front of the Pollux and landing with a crash in what used to be the ticket booth.

  The werewolf on my left arm relaxed his grip and I used the moment to tear free of him; then I pulled in the one on my right and sank my fangs into his throat. Werewolf blood doesn’t taste much different than human blood. The tricky part is not getting any fur stuck in your teeth.

  I didn’t have time for a prolonged snack, just enough to speed my healing. Blood is both food and medicine for us. I tore out enough of his throat to put him out of the fight, and rubbed my eyes against the wound. Gross, but effective. My vision returned, but it was still cloudy, like viewing the world through a sheet of wax paper. Lucky for me, werewolf silhouettes are easy to recognize.

  I turned on the second werewolf just in time to get a claw slash to the chest as he extricated himself from the ruined ticket booth. Cuts and scrapes from the glass dotted his hide. Behind him, I could see Greta going toe to toe with pug-face and the others in the middle of the street.

  A minivan sped by, swerving to avoid the melee, and I could only imagine what the driver would remember. Greta used the distraction to snatch the railroad-tie cross away from Bulldog and concuss him with it, her hands igniting even as she touched the wood. She sank her flaming claws into Bulldog, using his blood to extinguish the flames, and then latched onto his neck with her fangs.

  I pulled myself upright and boxed my opponent’s ears. He howled in pain and I did it again. The second time, I heard the pops I was waiting for and he dropped to his knees.

  I saw that Greta was now on her own against the collared werewolves that had been helping Bulldog, so I simply wrenched my opponent’s jaws apart, taking the top half of his skull with me as I turned away, hastily stuffing guts into my rapidly healing torso.

  I charged toward Greta only to get pulled off my feet by Jim, the werewolf with the no-longer-broken neck. He had the same fighting style as the wolf from the alleyway, and I had terrible déjà vu as he battered my head first into the concrete, then the brick, then the bench in front of the Pollux.

  I caught a fwoosh of flame out of the corner of my eye as Wolfboy kept swinging, applying the tiger by the tail principle. One of the werewolves had removed his collar and strapped it around Greta’s neck. He and his companions were holding her down as she burned.

  So much for keeping my temper. My vision blurred, and then everything went dark, but I could still hear the screaming. Usually, a rage blackout was a hole in time that I could never get back, but this time was different. I heard flesh rending and tearing. I heard bones break and smelled fur charring. Underneath it all, there was another noise, like wings flapping in the night. Finally, when everything was silent, I could see again. Greta was in my arms and the fuzzies were scattered in piles across the street. One of them was impaled on the massive railroad-tie cross, his ribs splayed open by the massive wooden center beam protruding from his chest. The rosary beads and cross-studded collars were nowhere to be seen. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what had happened to them.

  I took Greta inside the Pollux and called Tiko. He’s an oni—sort of a Japanese ogre. His kind are body-disposal specialists. They eat them. Sometimes they play with them first. I don’t ask any questions as long as the corpses go away and don’t show up again.

  “I need you to get out here,” I said when he answered. “I’ve got a bunch of dead werewolves for you…and the good news is that some of them had shiny new trucks.”

  Tiko said he’d get there as quickly as he could, but that he was going to have to charge extra. “I have a few cousins over in Georgia who could help,” he offered, “if you’re going to keep killing off werewolves left and right. We can only eat so much.”

  “Yeah. Call ‘em,” I said, sighing. “There may be seventy more where those came from and who knows what else.”

  I hung up before he said anything else and carried Greta up to my office. She was pretty badly burned. There would be no talking to William now. Son for son, I was willing to accept. I was even close to overlooking the Mustang. But now he’d fucked with my little girl and there was going to be hell to pay.

  20

  ERIC:

  EYE OF THE…?

  One of the things Roger taught me was that a sire, if he or she is powerful enough, can heal their offspring with their blood. Not that he’d meant to teach me on purpose, but near the end of the whole El Segundo thing, the only way we found to heal the cross-shaped burns Roger received was to take him home to mommy. He, like Greta, had difficulty healing wounds inflicted with holy implements. I’d thought the burns were pretty darn funny, myself. Anyway, we’d looked up Roger’s sire in Atlanta and she had taken care of his wounds.

  I didn’t get to meet her; Roger made me wait outside. For weeks afterward, I had to hear how she’d had this whole ritual that I thought was her way of making sure Roger knew what a pain in the ass it was to do the healing for him. Roger had been impressed, but I was pretty sure that it was little more than the strategically placed flour women get on their faces in the movies. You know, so the audience can tell they’ve been toiling for hours to bake those instant cookies?

  As far as I could tell, the ritual was like that, all pomp and circumstance, and highly unnecessary. Fortunately for Greta, she had me for a sire; trust me, I’m powerful enough, and I have no use for ritualistic ass kissing.

  I tore my wrist open with my fangs and bled directly onto her ruined face, working the blood into the remaining skin, smearing it across bare bone where necessary. Skin bubbled back into place, like burning in reverse. Greta’s hair grew back long and blonde, the same as when I had embraced her. My blood bubbled like thick red hydrogen peroxide over the marks on her neck, only when the bubbling was over, the wounds weren’t just disinfected, they were gone.

  I moved on to her injured hands, withered stick fingers crackling as I doused them liberally with blood. It started to work immediately. The claw marks on her side and a nasty bite she had taken to the left calf healed just as quickly after a similar treatment.

  When I was done with the front, I rolled her over and checked her back. There were a few claw marks, but they had already started healing, so I left them alone. My own wounds were gone by the time I
finished with hers, but I didn’t feel the hunger I thought I should. Between my own healing and bleeding all over Greta, I should have been ravenous. Instead, I felt nothing.

  I washed myself off using the sink in my Pollux bedroom and changed into jeans, tennis shoes, and a fresh Welcome to the Void T-shirt. By the time I was done Greta was waking up. The clock in my office read four o’clock. That meant I’d slept for a good hour before the fight, maybe more. I should have been feeling the daily hunger as well, but I wasn’t. True, I’d ingested a little werewolf blood, but that didn’t account for everything.

  “Dad?”

  Greta stood up, covered in blood, and looked down at what was left of her clothes. The running shoes were okay and her panties had survived (they were soaked with blood, but technically intact); the rest was in a desperate state. “Okay, either you healed me or you thought it would be fun to blood wrestle your unconscious naked daughter.”

  I averted my eyes. My first thought was to send her down to the dressing room Rachel had appropriated, but Greta was taller than Rachel and more endowed. “You can probably find some clothes across the street in the club, but if Tiko is out there, I’m going to want to walk over with you. Oni have two favorite pastimes: eating people and raping them. Tiko is a good guy as far as oni go, but—”

  “Seeing me naked and covered in blood might stretch his self-control a little?”

  “Yeah, something like that. And you can’t kill him…. I need him right now.”

  She walked out and I waited, listening. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, the door opening and closing, but I didn’t hear her go outside. I couldn’t hear Tiko working, but I assumed that was why she had stopped. Finally her footsteps echoed on the stairs again, then down the hall to my office door.

  “Is he out there?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you came back to get me.” She nodded and I headed out with her. “Good girl.”

  “Dad?” she asked on the stairs.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there something wrong?” She bit her lip nervously. “Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?”

  “What? Where the hell did that come from?” We stopped midway down the stairs and she put a hand on my shoulder. She looked genuinely concerned.

  “No, nothing, it’s okay, it’s just, you know, your eyes…”

  I didn’t know. “No. What about my eyes?”

  “They’re still…doing the thing.”

  The thing? I held a hand up in front of my eyes, but there was no red light shining on them. “What thing?”

  She exhaled and I was a little taken back. Greta never breathed unless she was talking; even then, she took only the necessary breaths. Breathing was like pacing for her; she only did it when she got nervous. “You know…your angry eyes.”

  “My angry eyes? Am I supposed to be Mr. Potato Head all of a sudden? They aren’t glowing red. I just checked.”

  She looked away and removed her hand from my shoulder. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “It’s okay; I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Seems like everyone mentions it but no one will talk about it. You act like I’m going to chomp you or something. Can we please talk about it?”

  “Okay,” she said, “but let me shower and dress first. This blood is starting to congeal on me.”

  I took off my shirt, right there on the stairs and slipped it over her head. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? The hem of the T-shirt only came down to mid-hip on her, but it concealed most of her nudity. We crossed the street to the club uneventfully. Tiko stared at her, hunger in his eye, but looked away when he realized I was with her.

  Greta showered and dressed quickly. The clothes came from a stash Marilyn had been keeping for her, but hiding from me. She walked straight to Marilyn’s office and pulled them out of a small travel bag stored in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I wondered absently what other secrets Marilyn was keeping from me.

  When she was finished, Greta met me back in Marilyn’s office. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt that read Welcome to the Void. It was similar to mine, only hers showed a fair amount of midriff and had pink lettering.

  “Are they still doing it?” I asked.

  “Your eyes?”

  “Yes, my eyes.”

  She sighed. “Yes, Dad, they’re still doing it.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  She got up and crossed the room, knelt in front of me and rested her arms across my lap as she stared into my face. One thing that I find unnerving about other vamps is the lack of heartbeat. If she had been human, there would have been all sorts of signs to give me insight into what she was feeling, whether she was scared and trying to look calm, or vice versa.

  “I’ve never gotten a good close look like this before,” she said, sounding fascinated, “but it’s actually kind of cool. The whites have turned black and the veins in your eyes…from a distance I couldn’t see it, but up close they’re dark, dark purple. Your irises are purple too, but sort of crimson at the same time. They’re shifting back and forth slowly from one color to the other, with a kind of subtle glow. When you get totally furious they glow more and more brightly until there are actual beams of light shining out of them. I’ve only seen that once, but I didn’t stick around. I’ve never been too sure about how safe you are when you’re like that.”

  “Like what? Angry?” I asked. Greta scooted back away from me across the floor and climbed backward up into her chair.

  “No, Dad,” she said quietly. “I mean when you go all uber vamp, with the wings and all.”

  I stood up so quickly my feet nearly left the floor. “What do you mean ‘wings’?”

  21

  TABITHA:

  WAYS AND MEANS

  Phillip’s violin was made of a beautiful dark-colored wood and so was his bow. I could tell it was old and probably expensive. The light dimmed as he began to play, and underneath the music, outside the range of human hearing, disembodied voices moaned along with the song. I didn’t like classical music; pissed-off girl rock was more my style. But Phillip’s music, indescribably beautiful and sad, captured even my attention, although it was still a little too loud for my enhanced hearing.

  Talbot listened with rapt attention. His eyes were half lidded and subtle movements of his chest and head suggested that he was in full-blown musical bliss. Finally, Phillip put down his bow and bowed to us. Talbot and I clapped with an appreciation that wasn’t feigned on my part. I was glad that Phillip wanted to spend time with me. It was very flattering, and I had to admit that the whole violin playing deal was pretty romantic.

  “That was beautiful,” I told him.

  “Too shrill for your ears, though, I fear,” Phillip said sadly. “I forget how sound-sensitive newborns can be.”

  I blushed again. “I’m sorry, Phillip. It truly was beautiful, my ears just aren’t”—I struggled to find the right word—“refined enough to really appreciate it yet.”

  “The fault is mine,” he said as he put his instrument away. Even the case was lovely. It also looked expensive. Everything around Phillip looked expensive.

  Phillip glanced at the wall clock and frowned. “It’s after four and I promised to tell you about El Alma Perdida.” The fire in the fireplace turned blue, then green, and the lights dimmed even further. Phillip either had the coolest dynamic lighting setup I’d ever heard of, or he was using magic.

  “The Lost Soul is the Colt Peacemaker used by John Paul Courtney in his misguided quest not only to kill werewolves, but to save their souls. Oh, it’s such a remarkable story. No one knows how Courtney came by the weapon, but many know its description. El Alma Perdida is a pearl-handled six-shooter with silver crosses worked into the grip to help ensure that his enemies, vampires and werewolves, could not use it against him.”

  Phillip flicked his wrist and a translucent image of the gun appeared in front of him. It just
looked like any old gun to me, but Talbot leaned in closely. Must be a guy thing. “Made in 1873, it was lost when Courtney died in 1925 at the ripe old age of one hundred and two. Few knew he was that old. You wouldn’t have suspected that he was a day over fifty.” Phillip’s expression became dark and mysterious. “Some say his soul was bound to his weapon and resides there to this day.” He smiled. “If one is inclined to believe in ghost stories.”

  Another gesture from Phillip caused the gun to transform into the shape of a man. He wasn’t handsome, but something about his eyes, the confidence there, reminded me of a lion. They were a startling shade of blue. “He looks familiar.”

  “You might find he resembles your sire. I tried to turn Courtney,” Phillip mentioned casually. “Do you know his blood actually burned my mouth? I had to snap his neck—twice. Such a waste. He would have made a most interesting foil for those long boring nights. I had such hopes….” Phillip must have noticed my confusion, because he smiled sweetly. “You’re so young, Lady Tabitha, but trust this wizened old vampire when I tell you that eternity, after a time, begins to wear on one’s nerves.”

  “What would a vampire want with his gun, though?” I asked.

  “Guns are generally used for two purposes: one is display, the other killing. It’s the motive that always interests me. How did you come by the bullet?”

  “It was found.”

  “By whom?”

  “Eric.”

  “Eric. Hmmm. Scandinavian, I think, meaning kingly, honorable ruler, or even ever-powerful. How interesting. Did you know that in the hands of Eric, your sire, this gun could be used to kill nearly any werewolf?”

  “Because its bullets are blessed—” I started.

  “Magical, silver, and, in his case, inherited,” Phillip completed. “It’s made for lycanthropes, but it will work on any type of therianthrope that walks this mortal earth excepting one.”

  “Which one?”