Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (44 page)

“Well done,” Annelise said to Erika behind him. “Now Hannibal will be prepared for us.”

“So sue me,” she answered.

“Hannibal shall do more than that if . . .,” Carlos began, and Erika shot him the finger as Sebastiano shushed them all. But Jared had stopped again.

“Hannibal shall do nothing but die,” he said. “Our people have suffered enough this morning. I lost my brother and my father’s sister to this battle with Mulkerrin, and I
might not have if Hannibal had fought for his people instead of against us.”

Jared turned back and continued to descend the slippery ice path. The incline became more and more steep, and soon the six of them were laying their hands palms open on the walls in order to
stay on their feet. It worked for a while, and then, looking down, Jared saw that, though the path cut away until it was nearly impossible to keep from sliding down, it also ended about twenty-five
feet ahead.

He turned to look at Rolf, who understood the unspoken question immediately, and nodded. Jared took his hands off the wall and surrendered his balance, sitting down hard on the ice and sliding
down into the passage. At the bottom, he looked around, then motioned for the rest of them to come down. Which they did, sliding one by one. All but Erika, who transformed, instead, to mist and
floated down. Rolf was certain she would have claimed it had something to do with her integrity.

At the bottom, they discovered the source of the light that had filtered weakly through the caves and that now lit the cavern in which they stood fairly well. It was a round opening, high above
their heads, about five feet in diameter.

“That’s not natural,” Jared said quietly, still nervously scanning the room for Hannibal’s followers.

“It’s also brand new,” Erika said, and motioned toward a pile of ice and earth that was directly beneath the opening in the roof of the cave.

“Well, he’s gone then,” Annelise said, looking to Rolf for support.

“It looks like the showdown is cancelled,” Carlos agreed.

“Time for us to go, then?” Sebastiano asked Rolf, who was looking only at Jared, and who now shook his head no, slowly, his mind occupied. Finally, Jared turned to face them.

“He’s not gone,” Jared said. “He knows now that I can sense him, and he’s trying to block me out. But that, his shielding himself, is like a beacon to me.
He’s close. Very close.”

“Oh, yes!” A familiar voice rang through the cavern. “Very close!”

Rolf and his comrades looked up, following the voice and saw a crowd of heads surrounding the hole above them. One leaned farther over into the hole, and the sunlight streaming down into the
cave became a halo around his winter-white hair. At Rolf’s side, Carlos tensed as if he were about to change, and the mute turned quickly toward him, slapping his hands together with a loud
crack to get the other vampire’s attention. Carlos looked at him, frustration coloring his face, but Rolf held up one hand as if to say,
Be patient
.

“Where is Commander Thomas?” Jared called up to the vampires clustered around the hole. Their forms blocked much of the sun from the cavern, and it had become significantly
darker.

Hannibal did not answer, but Rolf sensed movement in the darkness around them and, glancing around, saw that his meager band of shadows was not alone in the cavern. Hannibal had escaped with a
handful of his vampiric followers, and only now did Rolf realize that there were more heads outside the cavern than there ought to have been. Now, more of them slid wraithlike into the cavern from
several openings, which must have led into other caves other icy tunnels. In moments, perhaps a dozen vampires Rolf had never seen before stood in a rough circle around the perimeter of the room.
His own soldiers, the very few that were left, were on guard, ready to do battle though defeat was almost certain.

And Hannibal still had Elissa.

“
Rolf
!” she screamed, and then was cut off as the wind was knocked out of her. He looked up, ignoring the vampires in the cavern with them, as they didn’t seem to be
moving in, and saw that his lover was alive. For the moment. Elissa Thomas grappled at air as her arms and upper torso hung down into the cavern, her lower half held tight by Hannibal’s
followers.

Even with his enhanced senses, Rolf could not see Elissa’s face past the sunlight on her hair, just as he knew she could not see the fear, the concern, in his features, or that his brow
was furrowed with frustration, or his hatred for Hannibal. But he could smell her terror. He knew that Elissa was not afraid of falling, of the drop into the cavern that awaited her if they let her
go. Rolf knew that his lover feared precisely what he did: that she would not be dropped.

He glanced around, meeting the eyes of each of his people in turn: Carlos, angry and anxious to begin the battle, regardless of its outcome; Annelise, quietly resigned to their predicament;
Jared, looking to Rolf for their next move, though Rolf was sure the much older vampire was more than capable of escaping the cavern himself; Sebastiano, looking old because he allowed it and
terrified because he could not help it; and Erika, whose face was a mask of grim determination, confidence and faith in her leader, her friend—him.

Rolf looked once more at Jared, motioning for the other vampire to act in his place, to do what he could not, to speak.

“Hannibal!” Jared called loudly, his voice echoing off the icy walls of the cavern. “You know me now, boy. You know I am responsible for your creation. Release the human and do
honorable battle alone against your accuser, as your ancestors did.”

There was a stunned pause, as all present took in a breath, with the exception of Elissa Thomas, whose hitched breathing became even louder. The sun had moved slightly, nearly overhead now, and
its glare made the figures outside the hole more difficult to distinguish. It was clearer, though, how the hole had been made, torn through several feet of ice, dirt and snow by supernatural
strength. The ice around its inner edge was sweating, melting, and Rolf took a moment to realize how long the arms must be that suspended Elissa so low through that hole.

And then Hannibal responded, not with a laugh, but with a horrible braying, which Rolf had never heard from him before. He’d expected a similar reaction, yet his last hopes crumbled as the
butcher’s laughter slowed to snuffling giggles, then an amused dry chuckle, and finally, nothing.

And then: “Oh, please, dearest ancestor,” Hannibal sneered, “do not attack my nobility, for surely you must see that it is far more profound than your own, or that of any of
these, hmm, vegetarians? You seek to draw me out by invoking our ancestors, and yet you are obviously the weak link in my bloodline, the skeleton in the family closet.

“How dare you?!” Hannibal raged. “How dare you question my loyalty to our ancestry! I am the true heir to all that we are, all that we were and can be again. Why do I not meet
Rolf Sechs in personal battle? Because I am not certain of victory, and in the unlikely event of my defeat my plans would be crushed. I would deliver to our kind their birthright: the blood of
humans running like beer from the tap, the thrill of the hunt and the power of fear. I will not gamble that future merely because you taunt me.”

“I do not taunt, child,” Jared said grimly. “The ancestors I refer to are those who existed in the beginning, before our legacy was perverted by those who instilled such
repulsive traits in our kind. Come, now, and fight your speechless foe. Kill him if you can, or die with honor if that is your fate.”

“For the sake of our people,” Hannibal declared, “I cannot allow that to happen, just as I cannot suffer any vampire who stands against me to live. Any of you who wish to join
me may do so now, may return to the glory of our kind and bathe in the blood of humanity.

“Come,” he urged Rolf’s comrades, “join me and be worshipped as a part of the new shadow kingdom. Or stay and die, as an act of mercy. For if I allow you to live, you
will only be hunted down, alone and afraid, by humans without the courage to race the
real
vampires.”

Rolf’s mouth dropped open as he sensed the movement at his side, and as Sebastiano stepped slowly forward, he wished for the first time in decades that he had the power of speech. The
Sicilian, his wrinkled face grave and white as his hair, refused to return the stares of his friends.

“A kingdom, you say?” Sebastiano asked. “Are you, then, the king of shadows, Hannibal?”

Hannibal leaned impossibly far into the hole above them, his white hair hanging straight down. He was face-to-face with Elissa now, but Rolf knew she dare not attempt anything, just as he would
not make a move as long as she was Hannibal’s prisoner.

“Oh,” Hannibal hissed with a smile, “that I am. That, I most certainly am.”

“Then I kneel to you, shadow king,” Sebastiano began, but Erika rushed toward him, screaming as he knelt.

“Yano, no!” she cried and reached for his arm. “How can you do this?”

And Sebastiano, his apparent weakness as deceiving as her own, used his vampiric strength and Erika’s own momentum and hurled her toward the far wall, where her head met the ice with a
terrible crack. Rolf spun toward him, and Hannibal’s shadows tightened their circle around the cavern, but did not attack. Rolf did not approach Sebastiano, who yet refused to meet his eyes,
but instead went to Erika’s side. She was, of course, alive, but would take a few minutes of healing. He looked up into Hannibal’s smiling face, hanging there next to Elissa’s
blood-streaked neck, but when he saw that her eyes were closed tightly, as if awaiting a blow, he simply moved back to where he had been standing, holding Erika up at his side.

“You followed me once before, Sebastiano,” Hannibal was saying. “You may follow me again. Come.”

And Sebastiano shifted his form into that of a bat,
clearly an appeal to Hannibal’s sense of tradition
, Rolf thought, and flew up and through the hole in the cavern’s ceiling,
to disappear beyond the heads of the gathered shadows. Then, one by one, Hannibal’s other followers, who had remained in the cavern, transformed and followed him.

“Do something, Rolf,” Carlos hissed at him. “He’s going to kill that damn human anyway. My blood, she’s only human. Just because you fucked her, doesn’t
mean—”

And then Rolf was standing over him, Carlos sprawled on the ice floor of the cavern wiping his fist across his mouth as bats escaped the chamber. Rolf wanted to hurt Carlos for his words, but
knew that that would be playing by Hannibal’s rules. Erika was next to him then, and Annelise on the other side.

“Asshole,” Erika said to Carlos.

“If that’s how you feel,” Annelise added, “you ought to follow Sebastiano.”

Rolf merely shook his head, then turned his attention back to the ceiling of the cavern, where Hannibal hung side by side with Elissa, and the last of the white-haired vampire’s followers
flew up and past them, out into the sunshine.

“Blasphemer,” Jared said suddenly beside him, and Rolf turned to see the hatred on his face, as if the words had been building within him and were only now bursting forth. Jared
stepped forward, and Rolf tensed, prepared to stop him from going after Hannibal, but he needn’t have worried. Jared knew Elissa’s life was at stake—though Rolf had begun to
realize that the stakes were much higher than one woman’s life.

“You are no king!” Jared barked at Hannibal, and his white-haired descendant merely smiled. “There is only one king of shadows, and even now he fights to protect all the people
of this world from a terrible danger, not merely to further his own lustful ends. Only one king, and you will bow before him, or you will die!”

What? Was he speaking of Charlemagne?

He must be
, Rolf told himself. The former emperor now returned to life, to leadership, Charlemagne must have been the king of shadows to whom Jared referred. But Rolf wasn’t certain
he would bow to anyone.

“What are you going to do now?” Carlos called up to Hannibal.

“You’ve obviously got us outnumbered,” Annelise said, “but you don’t need the woman.”

“Let her go, Hannibal!” Erika demanded. “Whatever you have planned for us, she’s not part of it.”

“Planned for you?” Hannibal smiled down at them, and the sun had moved farther across the sly above, so that the glare no longer clouded their enhanced vision. Though shadowed,
Hannibal’s face made his intentions quite clear, though his words told another story.

“I have nothing planned for you,” Hannibal insisted. “In fact, I intend to leave you all right here.”

“This is far from over, blood-child!” Jared yelled, his patience long since disappeared, and Hannibal’s placating tone only making him angrier.

The smile disappeared from Hannibal’s lips.

“
Au contraire, mon père
,” he breathed, “for all of you, it is, most certainly, over.”

His right hand, elongated into a terrible razor-sharp claw, flashed out faster even than the other vampires’ eyes could truly follow, and Elissa Thomas’s scream had just begun when
it lost its vigor. Her uniform, and her flesh beneath, was torn open from crotch to collarbone, and in the stunned half second before Rolf and the others could react, they were showered by her
blood, pelted by wet, pink flesh and what had once been the vital organs of a woman.

With a wordless roar, Rolf was off the ground, transforming mid-leap into a blood-smeared eagle, speeding for the opening in the cavern. His senses were focused on Hannibal’s withdrawing
face, on Elissa’s dangling corpse, dead before her viscera hit the ice below, yet he knew without seeing or hearing them that Jared, Erika and the others were right behind him.

Beyond Hannibal, Rolf could see a line of bats across the sunny sky, a picture that nature should never have allowed as the self-proclaimed vampire king’s followers escaped . . . And then
Elissa’s corpse was falling, and he was hurtling straight toward her, and though he knew in his mind she was dead, his heart screamed at him to catch her, and the frightened, pleading stare
of her dead eyes nearly stopped him cold.