Blood Oath (26 page)

Several yards went to secure the curtains to the walls, so the sun wouldn’t come in. Then Cade used half a roll to tape Zach’s ribs.

“You’ll be fine,” Cade said, tearing the last strip on Zach’s torso.

Zach felt the wrappings gingerly. Zach wasn’t convinced it would work, but he had to admit the pain subsided and he could breathe again.

“That helps,” he said.

“I’ve done this before,” Cade said.

Zach smirked at him. He couldn’t help it.

It was a lot harder to take Cade seriously as a creature of the night. The drugstore where he’d bought the supplies had a limited clothing selection. As a result, Cade was decked out in drawstring pants and a Lakers jersey, with flip-flops on his feet.

Cade caught the look. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Cade looked down at himself, then back at Zach. “You’re sure this was all they had?”

“You look fine.”

Cade almost said something else. Zach could see it. The big bad vampire cared about his appearance.

Somehow, Zach felt better about that than he did about surviving the explosion.

He checked the time on his spy phone—about the only thing he and Cade both managed to get out of the explosion intact. Almost six hours until sunset.

He stretched out on the other bed. “We’ve got some time,” he said. His eyes fluttered almost immediately. “I think I’m gonna ... catch a few z’s ...”

Cade poked him in the side, not gently. Zach’s eyes flew open and he sat straight up.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“You might be concussed. It’s not advisable to sleep now.”

“Well, it’s not exactly advisable to nap next to a bloodsucking fiend, either, but I’m tired,” Zach said. “Fine. I’m awake. Probably safer that way, anyhow.”

“We’ve been over this before. You have nothing to fear from me,” Cade said.

“Yeah. You keep saying that. Guess I should just take your word.”

Cade was silent for a moment. “Something on your mind, Mr. Barrows?”

Zach shifted uncomfortably.

“How many people have you killed?”

Cade looked away, unwilling to meet Zach’s eyes. “I’ve killed in the line of duty. Some of it is classified.”

“Not what I meant, and you know that,” Zach said. “How many people have you killed?”

“You ask like a man who already knows the answer.”

“That woman told me you’re evil. A murderer,” Zach said. “Griff said you killed those people on a boat.”

Cade nodded.

“They’re both right,” he said simply. “I am a killer. I am evil.”

Zach waited for more, but that was it.

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What else do you want? I am damned. I am a horrific thing that deserves to burn. Nothing else I do will ever change that.”

“So you’re only doing this because you’ve been forced. You’re a slave. If it were up to you, you’d be out drinking blood every night. Is that it?”

“Believe what you want. You couldn’t possibly understand,” Cade said.

“God.” Zach stood up quickly, waving his arms at Cade despite the pain in his side. “You are such a fucking
whiner
. It’s always ‘Oh, poor me, I’m a vampire.’ Well, it doesn’t seem like that bad a deal, Cade. You’re superhumanly strong and fast, you can walk off a fatal injury and you get to live forever. And all you have to do is drink some blood. Sounds pretty fair. You’re going to be around long after I’m six feet under, and, I’m sorry, but skipping a suntan seems like a small price to pay. If I could do what you do ...”

Zach noticed Cade was quiet. Painfully quiet. He stopped ranting.

From the expression on Cade’s face, Zach suddenly believed the vampire couldn’t lay a finger on him. No one looked like that without considering murder.

“You ...” Cade seemed to search for a word large enough to contain his contempt. “You ...
people,”
he finally spat out. “You think you know me. You think you know
anything.
Less than seventy-two hours ago, you didn’t believe I could exist, and now you think you know what I am. But you are right about one thing, Mr. Barrows: you will die long before I do. And if you are lucky, you will never know what a blessing that is.”

A long silence. Behind the taped-down curtains, the sun shifted a little farther west.

“Maybe you’re right,” Zach said. “Maybe I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

“What?”

“Tell me what it’s like.” Zach waved his arms at the hotel room, the cheap furniture. “We’ve got time,” he said. “What else am I going to do?”

Cade turned away again, dismissing him.

“I’m serious, Cade. Tell me about what you are.”

Cade thought about it. Then he nodded and started talking.

“It was 1867,” he said. “I was twenty years old.”

 

 

C
ade was slightly ashamed that, all these years later, he couldn’t really remember much of the voyage, before it went bad.

His mind played tricks on him sometimes.

There were days he thought he recalled William’s face, or the sound of Jonas’s voice. Or the taste of the food slopped out by the cook.

Some days, Cade could remember looking out over the rail, into the painfully blue waters of the Atlantic.

None of it was true. Those were only illusions. When he was honest with himself, Cade had to admit he only really remembered the blood.

Hundreds of gallons of it. Every whale was filled with blood, spilling everywhere from the wounds made by harpoons and lances, raining down on him as they hauled the carcasses onto the deck, pouring out in sheets as they ran blades along the bodies, slicing open great slabs of blubber.

He would, at times, wake from dreams of those days with his mouth full of saliva. Hungry.

Everything else belonged to his human memory, which was as fallible and weak as he had been.

But the vampire in him latched on to the image of all that blood. At times like that, he wondered how much of himself was left—how fully the curse and the old witch’s tricks had wormed their way inside and replaced the boy who was a sailor in Boston more than a hundred and forty years ago. He wondered if that boy wanted anything else in his life, or if he’d even remember.

And always, he decided it didn’t matter. That boy was dead.

 

 

IT WAS ONLY his second whaling trip, he told Zach. He’d been a shipkeeper—basically a deckhand—on his first, which lasted four years.

He was more experienced when he signed on to a new ship, the
Charlotte
, a two-hundred-ninety-ton whaling bark with a crew of thirty men, not counting the captain and the first mate. But he didn’t fool himself. He knew the reason he was hired was because of his friend William.

During the four years that he and Cade and another boy, named Jonas, had served as shipkeepers, William had grown into a massive, heavily muscled young man. Anyone who looked at him could see he’d be useful. Cade was able to go without rest for what seemed like days, and Jonas was smart enough to fix anything that broke on a boat. But these weren’t obvious gifts. It was William who got them on board.

The
Charlotte’s
planned route would take them down around the tip of South America and then out into the Pacific and the whaling grounds there. But the War Between the States interfered. Several whalers had been blown out of the water by Confederate battleships.

The captain decided to head for the whaling grounds in the Indian Ocean. It would take longer, but it was better than being sunk.

From then on, the trip was uneventful—almost pleasant. The weather was calm. The days were filled with the usual mind-numbing routine of hard work and empty hours.

 

 

THEY ROUNDED the Cape of Africa six months after they left Boston, and made their destination three months after that.

Then there was nothing but the urgency of the hunt.

The men had worried that these grounds were done, that the whales had moved on. But they found more whales than they could possibly chase or slaughter. They began the long journey back several weeks ahead of schedule, the ship packed tight with oil and ivory.

They had just made the open Atlantic, still thousands of miles from home. There was no port they could reach. Nothing on any side of them but water. It would be weeks before they saw land again.

That’s when the first man went missing.

Cade later realized this wasn’t a coincidence.

A ship is never quiet, even at night. Cade had learned to sleep despite the sounds of the waves and wind, the creaking of the timbers, the farting and snoring and groaning of every other sailor above and below him in the forecastle.

But he would swear on his life he heard something that night.

A sound like an ax being driven into wood, even through the thickness of the hull. Half asleep, he considered getting out of his bunk to see if something had hit the ship.

Then there was the sound of a splash, like a wave hitting the deck. He decided this was normal. None of the other men were up. He didn’t want to be the one to panic, to mark himself as a fool and a coward at the same time.

Besides, Cade would be out on deck soon enough—his shift was next on the watch. He listened carefully, but he must have dropped off to sleep again.

Because the next thing he knew, Adams, the ship’s first mate, was shaking him violently, yelling questions at him.

He barely had his eyes open when Adams clouted him hard across the face. The words coming from the mate’s mouth finally made sense to Cade.

“Where is he?” Adams demanded. “Damn you, answer me. Where is he?”

Cade managed to stammer out the truth: that he’d never been woken for his shift on the watch; he must have slept through the night.

Adams hit him a few more times and then pushed him out onto the deck. The other sailors followed behind.

The light of day was just breaking the horizon. The captain stood at the rail, his face set like he was trying to keep his food down.

There was no one else on deck. Cade was confused. Then he realized
that
was what they wanted him to see. There was no one else on deck.

The man who stood the night watch was missing. Vanished, as if he’d simply dropped off into the sea.

 

 

CADE TOLD THE CAPTAIN and the mate everything he knew, which wasn’t much. After a few hours of yelling at him—and occasionally beating him again—they decided he was telling the truth.

It didn’t answer the question of where the man—his name was Talbot—had gone, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean.

They called Talbot a suicide. It happened, more often than anyone liked to admit. Drowning was considered a pleasant way to go. Cade heard it was like going to sleep, once the water began to fill your lungs.

So they stopped talking about Talbot, and the crew was down to twenty-nine.

But everyone looked a bit strangely at Cade. Even his two closest friends, Jonas and William.

Whatever had happened to Talbot, it had just missed Cade. No one was sure if that made him lucky or simply next in line.

 

 

THE NEXT FEW DAYS were quiet. The ship continued its slow passage. Within a month, Talbot was forgotten, and everyone began talking again about how he planned to spend his pay when they returned to Boston.

Then it happened again.

Two more crewmen went missing in the night. Long, the man on watch, and Ellery, a cooper who had chosen to sleep on deck.

There was no way to hide it, but for some reason the captain and Adams refused to address it.

Without any more whales to kill, the crew had nothing but time. And they talked. Rumors infected the entire ship.

Some of the men said that the man on watch had been acting strangely around the cooper, that there was a matter of money owed in a card game.

That didn’t satisfy many in the crew for long. Someone else said that maybe the captain and Adams were killing them all, to keep all the profits for themselves. No one laughed at him. The sailors began to take their knives with them into their bunks.

Eventually, Talbot’s name came up again. So did Cade’s. Cade noticed the whispering stopped whenever he got near.

 

 

TWO MORE WEEKS PASSED. The captain stayed in his cabin with the door locked most of the time. Adams carried a club with him wherever he went and used it whenever he heard anyone breathe so much as a word about the disappearances.

The uneasy peace held until they found the body on deck.

Another man on the night watch. Owens this time. But instead of vanishing into thin air or the deep blue sea, whatever had killed him left him out like a trophy.

Cade could remember the scream when another sailor found Owens—a high, almost childlike noise. Then he and the rest of the crew crowded around, despite Adams’s best efforts to push them back.

Owens’s throat had been torn out; his head was attached to his body by a few strings of gristle.

In spite of the massive wound, there wasn’t a single drop of blood on the deck. Not anywhere.

Owens’s corpse was as pale as if he’d spent the last month on the bottom of the sea.

Cade wasn’t sure who said it first. But he heard it as clearly as the other men: “Vampire,” someone whispered.

And within a moment, everyone was repeating it, over and over, in all their different accents and voices. “Vampire. Vampire. Vampire.”

They were looking at Cade when they said it.

It took only half a second for the crowd to become a mob. Cade had been spared that first night, so now he was the only suspect, the only target.

Adams shouted orders, but no one listened. He went scurrying off toward the captain’s cabin, where the only guns were kept.