At Grave's End (6 page)

“I love you, Catherine,” she whispered.

I had to look away, because I didn’t want to give Max the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d said that to me. She must believe we were both doomed to die.

“I’m sick of holding her, I’m putting her under,” Calibos said, turning green eyes to my mother.

“Stop it.” Max’s voice was a whip. “She’s going to see this. She’s going to
know
.”

Calibos made an exasperated noise, then dragged my mother over to the drapes by the window. He yanked one off, ripped it down the center, and then tied the end of it around her neck.

“Max,” I said warningly.

He swatted me in the head, hard. “Shh, I want to see what he’s got in mind.”

Calibos threw the other end over one of the railings in the banister on the second floor. My mother was struggling, but she was no match for the vampire. I
began to strain against the knives pinning me down. Max shoved another one through my wrist almost like it was an afterthought, then punched me in the gut where I’d been shot.

The blast of agony must have knocked me out for a minute, because when my eyes focused again, my mother was standing on a chair, one end of the drapes wrapped around her neck, and the other tied to the banister upstairs. There was hardly any slack in the line, and one of the chair’s legs was missing.

“Now she can watch, and I can join the fun,” Calibos smirked.

Max gave him an approving grin, then turned his attention to me.

“Do you want to know what I’m going to do to you, little girl?” he asked in a conversational tone. “After I torture the hell out of you, I’m going to chop you into pieces. Can’t risk Bones getting someone to raise you into a ghoul, now can I?”

Vicious prick wasn’t stupid. With my half-vampire bloodline, it was entirely possible I could be raised as a ghoul, if Max were just to murder me. But if I was dismembered, that option was out.

“Same rules apply. Let’s see how long you last before you scream and I get to cut something off Justina,” he taunted.

Max’s fist began knocking my head back and forth like a toy on a spring. Blood filled my mouth and my lip split, but I bit my tongue and didn’t make a noise. After a few minutes, the ringing in my ears dulled the thwacking sounds of him beating me. Then he stopped.

“Stubborn bitch. Hmm, let’s see if you can keep quiet through this…”

He pulled a lighter out of his pocket, flicked it, dialed the flame up as high as it could go, then held it to my arm. My whole body shuddered and I twisted futilely, gasps and grunts coming from me. After a few minutes of unimaginable agony, I couldn’t hold back my scream any longer.

Max laughed, delighted. Vaguely I was aware of throwing up.

“I think that’s going to cost Justina a finger,” he remarked. “What else will you make her lose?”

“Even if you kill me, Bones will find you,” I panted. Sweat was pouring off me and my arm hurt in ways I didn’t know were possible. “Believe me, you’ll be sorry when he does.”

Calibos and Max chuckled like I’d told a joke. “That vampire won’t start a war over you.” Max grinned. “Hell, the only reason Bones married you was to spite our sire.”

That’s why Max felt secure enough to risk pulling this? Because he thought he had enough protection from his new “friends” and Bones had only married me to piss off Ian?

“Oh, Bones
will
find you. Count on it.”

They glanced around, uneasy at the vehemence of my tone.

“Pathetic,” Max said at last. “You’re trying to scare me into letting you live, but it won’t work. Still, Calibos, go outside and keep watch. Just in case her playboy decides to drop by early.”

“But I haven’t gotten to play with her yet,” Calibos protested, with a look my way that made me recoil.

“You’ll get your chance,” Max snapped. “But I set this up, so I go first.”

Calibos smirked at me as he headed out the door. “I’ll see you soon, sweetie.”

Max got up and sauntered over to my mother next. She was almost on her tiptoes to keep the drape around her neck slack enough to breathe. Underneath her, the chair wobbled ominously on its three legs. Her hands were tied together with another piece of drapery, and Max grinned as he contemplated her fingers.

“Which one will you lose, Justina? Let’s see, this little finger went to market,” he started to singsong, tapping one of them. “This little finger stayed home. This little finger had roast beef…”

I tried to mentally prepare myself for my chance. Now that one of them was outside, this was my best opportunity. It was hard for me to focus, however. I’d had years of experience getting knocked around, but with all of my injuries, I kept feeling myself wandering closer to unconsciousness.

My mother met my eyes…and then kicked the chair out from under her.

“Goddammit,” Max snapped, holding her up with one hand. “Why’d you do that?”

In the second that he was distracted, I yanked against the knives on my wrists with all my strength, feeling my flesh shred. I’d gotten one of my hands free when Max turned around.

“What the hell?”

He let my mother go. She dangled by the neck, her feet well above the floor, while I wrenched my other arm free, ignoring the white-hot burst of pain that caused. I tried to grab one of the knives, but my wrists were too damaged for me to hold anything. I kicked them away and then lunged at Max instead, head-butting him hard enough to knock him over.
All
I need is a little of your blood
, I thought, biting at him savagely,
and I’ll be healed enough to fight.

A burst of noise jerked my head toward the window. The last thing I saw was glass smashing—and then there was a burning in my neck and my vision went black. I thought I heard screams, but all at once, everything seemed farther away. I couldn’t feel anything, either. It was a relief to be free from the pain.

Awareness came back with something wet being poured down my throat. I tried to cough it out but couldn’t. The flow wouldn’t stop, forcing me to swallow. Again. And again.

“…don’t you let her die!” I thought I heard my mother scream, then there was Bones’s voice, very close.

“…come on, luv, drink! No, you have to have more…”

I gagged, the liquid overflowing my mouth, when shapes around me formed into clarity. I had my mouth plastered to a blood-slicked neck, and I pushed away even as I coughed and swallowed once more.

“Stop it,” I managed to say.

Hands set me back. It was Bones’s throat I’d been pressed against. His neck wasn’t the only thing smeared red, either. So was the entire front of him.

“Christ Almighty, Kitten,” Bones breathed, stroking my throat.

“Catherine,” my mother cried. I jerked my head around in time to see her slip in something as she staggered toward me. That drape was still tied around her neck, but the other end was no longer attached to the banister. In the far corner of the room, I heard Max’s muttered cursing and a feminine English reply.

“Don’t you move, you little shite.”

“You’ve got him?” Bones asked in a truly chilling voice.

Annette sounded as fierce as I’d ever heard her. “I’ve got him, Crispin.”

My mother reached me. She was hugging me and trying to pull me from Bones’s arms even as she kept feeling my neck.

“Did he fix it? Are you all right, Catherine?”

That’s when I noticed the rest of the blood. It wasn’t only splattered on Bones, but all over me, around me, even on the nearby wall.

“What happened?” I asked, torn between dizziness, numbing gratitude that we were alive, and being aghast at all the blood surrounding us.

“Max ripped your throat out,” Bones replied. There was the weirdest mixture of relief and rage in his blazing green gaze. “And he’s going to dearly wish I’d kill him before I’m through with him.”

D
ON ARRIVED AT MY MOTHER’S WITH THE
full team less than fifteen minutes after I called him. They must have broken every traffic law known to man, not that any local cops could give them speeding tickets.

Bones and Annette strapped Max into the capsule. Don was taking him—for now. Bones curtly said he’d send someone by later to collect Max, and the tone he used made me glad my uncle didn’t argue. Of course, I didn’t think Don wanted Max on his hands very long. The look the brothers had exchanged while Max was being strapped into that capsule was filled with so much history, Don glanced away even before Max started to curse him.

I had to be given several pints of blood to replace what I’d lost. Bones’s blood had healed my multiple injuries, but my pulse had been dangerously weak.

“That was close,” I said to Bones with a shaky smile after my final transfusion. I was sitting in his car. He’d
used a towel to wipe off as much blood from me as possible. We were leaving soon. Bones didn’t want to stay longer than necessary here, since we couldn’t be sure who else Max and Calibos might have told about their ambush plans.

Bones met my eyes with an unfathomable look. “I’d have brought you back one way or another, Kitten. Either as a vampire or a ghoul, even if you hated me for it afterward.”

“Not if Max had his way,” I muttered. “He was going to cut me into pieces.”

Bones let out a hiss that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Then he seemed to get himself under control.

“I’ll remember that,” he said, each word bitten off.

So many emotions were surging in me. Relief, delayed panic, anger, exhilaration, and the urge to clutch Bones and babble about how thrilled I was to even
see
him again. But there wasn’t time for a meltdown, so I stuffed those feelings back.
Get it together, Cat. Can’t have you turn into a mass of psychological goo, there’s too much to do.

My mother was in the backseat. She’d refused to go to the compound, even though she wouldn’t have been there long. Don was moving everyone out. Max had found my mother’s house, so it was an easy guess to make that he knew where the compound was, too. Don wasn’t taking any chances that Max had told other vampires where to find it. Don’s operation had killed enough of them that some might decide to pay it a visit.

So my mother was leaving with Bones and me now, and Don would get her set up with another place to live later. Once he finished relocating our entire team.

“I’m sorry, Catherine,” she mumbled, not meeting my eyes. “I didn’t want to call you. I heard myself saying the words, but I couldn’t seem to stop.”

I sighed. “It’s not your fault. Max used mind control. You couldn’t help what you were saying.”

“Demon power,” she whispered.

“No,” Bones said firmly. “Max is the one who told you all vampires were demons, right? You think he’s capable of telling the truth, even after this?”

“Whatever Max told you back then,” I added, “you would have been compelled to believe, just like you were compelled to call me before. Vampires are another species, Mom, but they’re not demons. If they are, why are you still alive? You’ve tried twice to get Bones killed, but today he saved you instead of letting you hang.”

Her face was twisted with emotion. Being confronted with the reality that what she’d fervently believed for twenty-eight years might be wrong was a hard thing for anyone to swallow.

“I lied to you about your father,” she said at last, so soft I could barely hear her. “That night, he didn’t…but I didn’t want to believe I
could
have let him, not after I saw he wasn’t human…”

My eyes closed for a moment at her admittance. I’d suspected that the night I was conceived wasn’t rape, but here was confirmation at last. Then I met her gaze.

“You were eighteen. Max had you believing you were giving birth to a modern-day version of Rosemary’s baby, just because he thought it was funny to tell you all vampires were demons. Doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Speaking of that…” I pulled the IV out of my arm, then put on the jacket Cooper
had kindly left for me, since my own shirt had been cut open and was sopping with blood. When I was covered, I hopped out of the car. No more horizon-tilting dizziness. It was amazing the difference vampire blood and three bags of plasma could make. I didn’t even have a mark on me anymore, whereas by rights, I should be in a body bag.

“What are you doing?” Bones asked, lightly holding my arm.

“Saying goodbye to my father,” I replied, walking over to where the capsule sat like a huge silver egg in the driveway.

“Open it,” I said to Cooper, who was standing guard until it could be loaded into our specialized van.

Cooper unsealed the outer locks. He didn’t look away when the capsule’s door slid open and Max was revealed, so I figured he’d swigged some vampire blood on the way here. That was the only thing that could inoculate a human from falling victim to nosferatu mind control, even if it did have other side effects.

My father was pronged in several places with silver. The hooked end of those spikes made it impossible for him to pull himself free without shredding his heart, not to mention several other choice pieces of him. Once the door closed, he couldn’t even wiggle, because the inner structure prevented movement while the spikes continued to drain the blood and strength out of him. I knew all this, because I designed it.

Bones’s gaze sizzled into Max. “Go on, mate, say one word, see what it gets you,” he urged him in a voice smooth as silk—and frightening as the grave.

“Right now, Daddy dearest, ‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I said grimly to Max. “So I’ll
repeat what you said to me earlier: You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

Then I turned to Bones. “Why are we taking him anywhere? I’d just as soon kill him now and not have to worry about him again.”

“You
don’t
need to fret about him,” Bones said in that same icy, neck-ruffling tone. “Ever. But he doesn’t get off that easily.”

Bones reached out and touched Max’s face. It was a light stroke, but Max flinched as if Bones had sliced his cheek open with a knife.

“I’ll be seeing you soon, mate. I can’t wait.”

Annette came over. Her champagne-colored eyes considered Max from a face lightly lined with age. Annette had been thirty-six when Bones changed her. Times were different in the seventeen hundreds, so she looked around forty-five, but she made it look good. Unlike her normal impeccable appearance, her strawberry-blond hair had half-fallen out of her chignon, and her navy tailored suit looked a lot worse for wear.

“I say, it’s been quite the day already,” she remarked.

I stifled a snort. How like Annette to describe an afternoon of torture as calmly as “quite the day.”

“Seal him back up,” I said to Cooper, not wanting to look at my father anymore. Or ever again.

Cooper complied, and the capsule’s door slid into place with a series of locks clicking back together. Even as it did, a frightening thought occurred to me.

“What happened to Calibos? There was another vampire here besides Max.”

“His head’s over there,” Bones said, nodding by the trees, “but the rest of him’s farther back.”

I felt a cold satisfaction at that. “How’d you know to come here?”

“The airline lost Annette’s luggage.” Bones sounded almost bemused. “I rang you twice to tell you we’d be late, that we were stopping off to fetch her some new togs. You didn’t answer. You always answer, so I drove straight here. About a mile away, I heard you scream. I pulled off, and Annette and I circled round the house on foot. We found the one bloke. Didn’t know how many more might be inside, so we smashed through the windows at the same time.”

A bark of laughter escaped me. My mother and I owed our lives to Annette’s
luggage
being lost? How ironic.

“Bet you wish you’d carried on,” I couldn’t help but quip to Annette.

A ghost of a smile flitted across her lips. “Not quite, darling. I just rang Ian,” she continued, more to Bones than me now. “He was furious to hear what Max did. He’s formally cutting Max off from his line.”

That was the worst punishment a vampire could inflict on a member of their line. It meant no vampire would challenge whatever happened to Max in the future, and right now, my father’s future looked pretty grim.

“Max said Ian didn’t know about this,” I added, even though I was no fan of Ian’s. “He said he had new friends who wanted me dead as much as he did.”

Bones gave a short nod. “We’re going home, luv. To find out who helped Max orchestrate this, so we can kill every last one of them.”

Our house was a large cabin at the top of a hill, with sweeping views of the Blue Ridge Mountains out of
bulletproof-glass windows. It was remote enough that we’d never met our neighbors, so the helicopter pad and hangar on the side of our house hadn’t been cause for any awkward conversations.

Annette went back with Don to help with Tate, as was the original plan, although Bones refused to go with her. He told my uncle his priorities had changed, not that Don had any trouble understanding why. Tate would be okay with two undead people taking care of him. It was my safety that seemed to be in a more tenuous position than Tate’s, according to what Max had said.

When I walked into my house, my cat jumped out to twine around my legs. We hadn’t figured on being back for a week, so I’d set up the automatic feeder and litter-box cleaner. Now my kitty would get some of my leftovers instead of just his dry food. No wonder he was glad to see me.

My mother had never been to Bones’s and my house, but I was too anxious to wash the blood off me to give her a proper tour.

“Here’s the guest room,” I said, directing her to the downstairs bedroom. “I’ve got some clothes in it, too, so help yourself to whatever’s there. I’m taking a shower.”

Bones followed me upstairs. I stripped off the jacket Cooper had given me, plus my bloodied bra and pants. If I never saw those clothes again, it would be too soon. Bones also peeled off his crimson-spattered shirt and pants, kicking them into a corner before joining me in the shower.

At first, the water was icy. It took a couple minutes to heat up this time of year. I shivered as the frigid spray landed on me. Bones folded me in his arms
and moved to where the majority of it splashed on him. Even when it turned warm, however, and Bones turned to let the heated water rinse my blood away, I was still shivering.

“I didn’t think I’d make it today.”

My voice was low. Bones’s arms tightened around me.

“You’re safe now, Kitten. And nothing like this shall ever happen again, I promise you.”

I didn’t reply, but I was thinking this was one promise Bones might not be able to keep. Who knew what could happen in the future? This wasn’t just about the revenge my father had wanted on me—and my mother—for my existence. Max had done this with promises of rewards and help. Now the question was, from whom?

But I didn’t say any of that. Bones was correct—I was safe now. And he was here. Right now was all I’d concentrate on.

For the moment, anyway.

We weren’t home for more than an hour before people started showing up. First it was Juan and Cooper, who Don sent as added protection for me. Both of them were carrying enough silver knives and guns with silver bullet clips to take on a dozen vampires.

Then Bones’s brand of added security arrived in the form of three vampires I hadn’t met before. The one named Rattler reminded me of a young Samuel Elliott, Zero looked albino with his long blond hair and glacier eyes, and Tick Tock was pitch dark with black skin, black hair, and black eyes. Mentally I referred to them as Cowboy, Salt, and Pepper.

Then came Spade, or Charles, as Bones called him.
Spade preferred everyone else to call him by the tool he was assigned when he was a lowly penal colonies convict. Something about never forgetting how helpless he’d once been. Bones had picked his name after rising as a vampire in Aborigine burial grounds. Vampires sure made it complicated to remember what name to call them by.

Rodney the ghoul was next. He endeared himself to Juan on the spot by starting to cook up a storm. I didn’t eat, I went to bed, but to no one’s surprise, I didn’t get a very restful sleep. My dreams were filled with seeing my mother dangle by the neck from a banister and my father’s sneering face as he shot me.

Don showed up a little after noon. I was seated at the kitchen table with Juan, Cooper, my mother, and Bones. We’d been talking about anything but the obvious when my uncle came in. I was surprised to see him, actually. I thought he’d be busy directing the transfer from one base to another.

“Does your boss know you’re playing hooky?” I asked.

Don gave me a dry smile. “I can’t stay long, but I wanted to go over a few things and…just see how you were doing.”

He could have gone over any pertinent work-related items on the phone, so I was guessing his presence had more to do with the latter part of his statement.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, meaning it. We might have had a rough start—okay, a
very
rough start—but aside from my mother, Don was the only family I had.

“Have some breakfast,” I offered, gesturing to the multiple covered dishes near the stove. “Rodney’s cooked more food than I even knew I had.”

Don gave the items a wary flick of his eyes that made Rodney laugh.

“It’s a ghoul’s version of vegetarian,” he assured Don. “Nothing in there you wouldn’t find in a grocery store.”

Don, still looking hesitant, filled a plate and sat down. I watched him take a tiny bite, swallow…and then spear a bigger portion. Yeah, Rodney was a superb cook.

Bones’s cell rang. He excused himself to answer it, speaking in a low tone. I could only make out a few words, since Juan and Cooper began talking to Don about the new compound we were moving to. Getting everything up and running on no notice was going to be challenging.

Bones came back in the room and snapped his cell shut. There was something tense in his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.