Crimson Death (80 page)

Rodina didn't question it, just fished it out of her backpack. I heard a noise at the wall. “Do magic, Anita. Do it for the man beside you.” Then she ran for the wall and the quiet sounds of struggle.

I stood in that peaceful green space and realized it wasn't dark yet; almost no one could perform necromancy before dark. Necromancers were like vampires; we didn't function well in daylight. It was dark on
the streets, but there was still light up there in the sky. I could feel it. I reached into the ground underneath our feet and searched for the dead. It was dirt, living earth.

“I can't feel the dead, Nathaniel.”

He used the clean knife to slice across his palm and offered it to me. “Help me walk the circle with you.” I saw Rodrigo or Ru throw someone back over the wall.

Nathaniel touched my face. “Anita, I need you.”

I looked up into his eyes and thought about what would happen if they captured us again. I sliced my hand open, which startled him, but I clasped our hands together, blood to blood, and said, “We walk the circle together.”

I visualized it like a line of white light shining down as we walked. I ignored the sounds of fighting, because I had to trust the three Harlequin to protect us long enough for me to do this. The dead would not rise here, but there was power here that I could use all the same. I prayed for protection and guidance. Nathaniel was an extra kick of energy, but I was already heavy with energy from having drained the Roane in the castle. I heard the circle close with an almost audible pop and felt a pressure change that made us both have to swallow as if we'd changed elevations. I took the knife with the Roane blood still on it, not even dried completely, and I pushed it into the ground. I hoped it would do what we needed.

The three Harlequin were backing toward us with a crowd three deep surrounding us. How many seal guards did Moroven have? Shit. They rushed us, and the triplets did their best. Rodina threw one over her shoulder and it fell through the circle. That could have been accidental, but then he stood up and stepped back through the circle to draw a sword almost as tall as I was, but half his body went through the circle.

“It'll keep out vampires, but not these guys,” I said. Then full dark came. I felt it in my bones like an echo. The triplets all backed up through the circle and to us so that we were standing almost back to back. There was a solid wall of the Roane in human form waiting outside the circle, which I knew they could cross.

“Not that I'm complaining, but what are they waiting for?” I asked.

“The vampires to arrive,” Rodrigo said. “She's told them to wait.”

“I won't be captured,” Rodina said.

“Nor I,” Ru said.

“Crap,” I said, and looked around for something, anything to help us. I saw something not that far away that gleamed in the dark. When I looked at it straight on, it wasn't there, but out of the corner of my eye, it was like a white phosphorous glow, a ghostly glow.

“The prophecy says that to guarantee our dark mistress will be lost and the Master of Tigers triumphant, they must marry one of the clan tigers,” Rodrigo said.

“Is this really the time for a history lesson, Roddy?” Rodina said.

“If I die here, I need someone else to understand what's happened.”

“What are you babbling about now?” she asked.

“What's in that direction that would be really haunted?” I asked, motioning.

There was a moment where the three of them sort of shifted and thought, and then Ru said, “Wicklow Gaol.”

“It's just a historic site now,” Rodina said.

A wind blew high and shivering through the trees overhead. It didn't smell of rain, but it felt like a storm was coming. There was a black cloud boiling in the sky toward the sea. “What is that?” Nathaniel asked.

“It's her,” Rodina said, “her and all her dark court.”

“We will give our lives for you,” Ru said.

The black “cloud” began to separate into individual shapes. It was vampires flying in a mass like some Halloween witch poster. I leaned into Rodina. “Can you fight your way free to the gaol?”

“I cannot promise.”

“Is it important enough for us to die for?” Rodrigo asked.

“There are dead there that will rise,” I said.

“You won't have to kill me for what I did to your lover, Anita. The sea folk will do it for you.” He gave a battle cry, which was the only term I had for the sound, and leapt into the mass of enemies.

I
T WAS SUDDENLY
a hand-to-hand fight, and we were outnumbered. It was Nathaniel who used a gun first, the sound thunderous even outside. It startled the man in front of me so that I stabbed him through the heart and was able to throw him back into the mass of his friends. And then suddenly, they stopped fighting. They cried out in confusion, almost in pain. I had no idea what had happened. I knew it wasn't any magic of mine.

Rodrigo and Rodina grabbed us and started running while Ru guarded our backs, but none of the others chased us. We ran. I tapped that part of me that was my beasts, that part that helped me work out with real lycanthropes in the gym, and I ran so that the streets were a black blur. I ran until the evil wind at our backs wasn't fast enough to keep up. Nathaniel stayed at my side easily, and so did Rodina and Rodrigo, but Ru stumbled and his sister had to grab him to keep him with us. I raced toward the white light shining as if the full moon had fallen to earth. I could see it more in front of my eyes the closer we got to it.

The triplets were actually behind us as we ran through the entrance to the huge stone building. If we survived, I'd make them do more cardio. A white-haired woman dressed in a long skirt and what was supposed to be authentic clothing but wasn't quite said, “We're closing for the day.”

Rodrigo pulled a gun and showed it to her. “Run away now. Bad things are coming.”

She ran away, yelling for help. She went through a side door into a café that was apparently still open. I hoped no one got brave. I wanted to use the ghosts, not make new ones.

Damian was suddenly loud in our heads again. He wanted to know
where we were, and we thought it at him. He was above us in the night sky, and he thought of the gaol as old hunting grounds.

Two dark shapes appeared in the doorway. They were dark-haired, pale-skinned, dressed in black as if they'd come from central casting for vampires, one male, one female, but they were the real deal. They stalked in through the doors because they didn't need anyone's permission to get inside a public building. They looked at the people huddling in the café. They grinned wide enough to flash fangs.

“We will feast tonight, as of old,” the man said.

The woman said, “They've seen us. We have to kill them now.”

“No,” I said, “you will not harm these people.”

“You have no power over the dead in Ireland, necromancer,” the woman said.

“You will not harm anyone in this building tonight,” I said. I heard a whisper in the hallway and felt a cold wind down my spine. It wasn't vampires. I closed my eyes briefly and the whole building burned with ghosts like white phosphorus, thick with the moving pulse of hundreds, maybe thousands of restless spirits. They were angry. I'd never felt so much anger from ghosts before, and then I realized why. They were angry at the vampires.

“How many people did you kill in here over the centuries?” I asked.

They smirked at each other. “Enough,” she said, and he nodded.

I pressed my still bleeding hand against the stone wall and felt the power shivering through the building, just waiting. Nathaniel put his hand over mine, and you could feel the building's bones shift and surge.

“What was that?” the male vampire asked.

Damian ran through the doorway, shoving past the two vampires. He joined us, breathing as if he'd run a race. He held his hand out to me. I cut his hand, and he reached out toward ours as we touched the stones.

“What is it?” he asked, as he placed his bleeding hand over ours against the stones.

“Vengeance.”

The building shuddered around us, and a wind started down the hallway at our backs, not from the outside, but from inside the building. The two vampires went for the door, but a new vampire was there
to stop them. He was huge by any standard, a giant of a man who had to stoop through the door and straighten up carefully.

“Damian, you shit bag. You killed Roarke!”

“Bachman, I see she called you back from Dublin.”

“It served its purpose, for there stands the power that will make M'Lady into the new Queen of All Darkness.”

“This is the one who's been tearing people apart in Dublin,” Damian said.

“And now that you've let all these people see us, I'll get to slaughter them all,” he growled at us.

“He's always been more beast than vampire,” Damian said.

The Harlequin brought up their guns and Bachman did rush into battle, but not with us. He dived through the doorway into the café and screams followed.

“Save them!” I said.

“We can't leave you alone,” Rodina said.

The wind spilled our hair around our faces. I could see the light like white fire burning through the building. It shuddered above us, like a giant waking.

“We aren't alone,” I said. “Go and save them. That's an order!”

“No more people die here because of us,” Damian said. Somewhere in all of it, the two vampires had vanished outside again. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought they were more afraid of Bachman than us.

The triplets went through the door and toward the sound of screams. We walked forward and the ghosts came with us. The light was so bright that I could see the individual shapes of the vampires in the blackness as they swept toward us. I'd never seen so many that could fly like that. It was a rare gift and I remembered that Damian was amazing at it, too. It was her bloodline; they could all fly.

A vampire had a man in its grasp, feeding at his throat as it rose into the air. A gun exploded near us; the vampire wavered and dropped the man, who fell heavily to the parking lot. A second shot, a heavier boom of a sound, and the vampire exploded in a fine red mist. I knew who it was before I saw Edward step out of cover and say, “Did you forget to invite me to the party?”

“Never. Keep them off of the civilians.”

“Who keeps them off of you?”

“They do,” I said, motioning at the ghosts.

“You told me ghosts can't hurt people.”

“They can't on their own,” I said.

The ghosts swarmed around us, formed a pulsing, throbbing cloud as white and shining as Moroven's was black and dark. She stepped out of that cloud of shadows and illusion and called out, “Ghosts cannot harm us!”

“We harmed them!” Damian yelled, and he shared memories of walking into cells where people who could not afford to pay the gaoler starved to death, so the bite was a mercy in the end. Skin fever hot to the touch, vampires feasting on them like vultures at a corpse, draining them dry. The new prisoners, still healthy and beautiful, but Moroven liked beauty and collected them for herself. The victims that were tortured as part of their sentence, and pleased her because of new scars. Children weeping in the dark held, comforted, and killed. So many dead, so much murder. Moroven's kiss of vampires had treated the gaol as their personal grocery store for centuries. It was as if Damian's memories joined with the ghosts, made their stories, their lives, real again. The power of it roared upward like a thunderous waterfall of ghosts. They wailed and began to talk, and a lot them remembered exactly which vampire had killed them.

The townsfolk were screaming and pointing now; even they could see it. The ghosts cried out for vengeance the way a murdered zombie will go after its murderer above all else. Ghosts don't have a physical form that can harm anyone, but I'd given them blood and I was holding the hand of my vampire servant and my
moitié bête
. We touched our bleeding hands together the way I'd combined power with another necromancer to raise a bigger, older zombie, and the ghosts became a roaring storm of wind and rage that attacked the vampires.

The white-and-black storm rose into the air. Edward, Nolan and his people, Dev, Magda, Socrates, all of my people except for Domino and Ethan, one dead, one injured—so many warriors on our side, but there was nothing to fight on the ground. The battle was in the air, and the only one of us who could fly was holding my hand, mingling his blood with mine.

The window in the side of the café exploded into the street. It was Bachman with the triplets chasing him away from the people inside just like I'd told them to do. They climbed out after him, but the big vampire charged us, grabbing Donnie before she could bring her gun up, and then Giacomo was there as big as Bachman, and the fight was on. Donnie fell free of it, and Dev pulled her to safety. More of the vampires were on the ground and I saw Hamish. The rest of the Harlequin had joined the fight. I saw Nicky wade into him and marveled again at the blur of speed that was my Bride.

“You will not kill us!” Keegan yelled, and he was just there with a shotgun aimed at the three of us. No one was close enough to help us. They were all fighting, as Nathaniel and I tried to get our guns up in time, but I'd been too deep in the magic and neglected the rest. Edward was moving, but he wasn't going to be in time, and suddenly the triplets were there. Rodrigo stepped in front of Keegan and they fired at the same time.

It sounded like thunder as Keegan fell backward and Rodrigo dropped to his knees. Nolan, Donnie, and Brennan surrounded Keegan, but he didn't get back up. Rodrigo had finished him. Moroven screamed out and fell to earth in a shining white light of ghosts, because now with both her servants dead, she didn't have the power to fight the vengeful spirits. I didn't know that ghosts, even ones full of magical blood, could drain the life from a vampire. Maybe I'd shared Obsidian Butterfly's gift with them. Rodina and Ru were still guarding me, so I was the one that knelt beside Rodrigo, along with Nathaniel and Damian.

The shotgun had opened Rodrigo's chest up. His heart was trying to beat in an open wound. “I have been what a Bride is meant to be for their Groom, Anita Blake: cannon fodder.” He laughed and spat blood.

“Don't try and talk,” I said.

He choked, spat more blood, and said, “The oldest translations of the prophecy talk about joining life forces, mingling souls. They didn't mean marriage.” He coughed so much blood, I wanted to tell him to stop talking, but I wasn't sure he could hear me anymore. “It says for life . . . part . . . why some tiger clans are so serious about their monogamy.”

There were sirens in the distance; they'd try to save him. Rodina and
Ru were kneeling beside their brother now. The fighting was mostly over. Moroven's death had literally killed some of her supporters as she tried to reach out and save herself by stealing from them.

“I killed her clan tiger in front of her. She watched the light go from his eyes and then she drank his blood. Don't you see?” Rodrigo said.

“The King of Tigers wasn't supposed to marry a tiger. He was supposed to sacrifice it and drink its blood,” Rodina said.

“Yes,” her brother said.

Ru asked, “Would you ever have agreed to a human sacrifice where you drank blood?”

“Never!” I said.

“You certainly wouldn't have agreed to one of your own lovers and
moitié bêtes
being sacrificed so you could watch them die and drink their blood,” Ru said, staring down at his brother, whose face looked like a mirror image of his own.

“No,” I said, but with less force.

Rodrigo said in a voice that was too thick with wet things that should never have been in a living throat, “I felt the power shift as soon as you swallowed the blood, and then you said, ‘All the Harlequin belong to me,' and I knew it was true.” He coughed up dark blood in a wave down his face and upper chest. The ambulance came, but there was no one to
save.