Crossed (36 page)

“Because they have souls too, most of them.” If he’d had intact eyeballs, they’d have looked up at the ceiling. As it was, the eye ridges carried off the gesture pretty well. “And like all demons, I do have a weakness for the ensouled.”

“So you’re saying that you’re the one who—”

“Helped Dumbass the First?” He smiled, showing both rows of teeth. “Yes. But in my own defense, they were keeping me in the chapel at the time, under the altar, and he was praying so fervently. The priest didn’t seem to know what to do. All those heartfelt prayers and confessions. And it had been so long since I’d pretended to be a god . . . I couldn’t help myself.”

“So why the strings, then?” I walked toward him again. “Why fuck over the next seven generations?”

“Because I’m a demon, Eric . . . Mr. Courtney, and no matter how powerful we are, in order to accomplish good with our powers, there must be a price. We all must answer to Fair Practices and Equitability.” His eyelids lowered, a centimeter or so from closing, then sprang wide. “An unpleasant prospect, even for me.”

“So what about your eye?” I tapped my chest.

“Oh, it will do everything Lord Phillip said it would. Find a way to cure yourself and my eye will make you a True Immortal as surely as it could allow Phillip to become an Emperor were he to have an Emperor to sacrifice in his stead . . . as surely as my other eye allows its possessor to peer into possible futures.” He sounded wistful. “Though I might have preferred you remain unadulterated by it. I have no doubt you’d have found a way to become human again eventually, and humans, once touched by magic as powerful as you’ve been touched by, rarely die properly . . . so I fancy you’d have become immortal in the end. Just like Dumbass the First.”

“He’s still around?”

The horns tapped out unnerving patterns on the stone, and Scrythax spun his head around to face the stairs, where Luc lay unconscious.

“You Courtneys are always so splendidly dense. Did you fail to notice the family resemblance?”

I looked at Luc and I saw it all at once. He looked a lot like my uncle Robert.

“Shit.” Light from the demon glittered off the blackness of my claws. I extended a hand to Beatrice. I kept my gaze on the head, then shifted my focus to the ladies. Beatrice had gotten up and was craning her neck to get a better view at Luc. “We’re going.”

“Don’t leave on my account,” Scrythax purred. “It’s been lovely chatting.”

Then the immortals were moving again, and Scrythax wasn’t.

    34    

ERIC:

GANG BANG

What’s wrong with this picture? A group of really old immortals swear an oath on a demon’s head to work together with vampires and other paranormal whatnots to hide from, and in some ways protect, humans. A vampire shows up and the head starts talking to him, so they attack the vampire, not the head. On second thought: What’s right with this picture? If your answer is “nothing,” then we’re on the same damn page.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” I didn’t see which one of them produced the bow, but the arrow hit my chest with the solid thunk of metal on stone.

“He’s unstakable,” one of them said.

“He is?” I spotted the bow. Fat Boy had it. About the time I finished focusing on him, he loosed a second shot, hitting me in the left eye and robbing me of my depth perception. “Now there’s a new pain.” Nothing feels quite like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Despite being all uber vamped, my speed wouldn’t crank up. None of the immortals appeared to be as quick as a vampire, but with me not being as quick as most vampires either,
the fight wasn’t as much fun as it ought to have been. Killing things makes me feel better, and I’d been cutting back, feeding mostly on my thralls.

I held up one hand to protect my remaining eye and someone chopped into it with an axe, cutting through the muscle and lodging the weapon deep into the bone. A sword pierced my stomach. Something long and thin (a spear maybe?) went in through my shoulder. Gunshots exploded around me, sending bursts of agony through my chest and wings.

I ghosted to break free. The weapons stayed where they were, but in the light of my ghostly senses, they blazed with energy and I took it in, throwing open the gates of hunger. The immortals screamed. A Ray Parker Jr. song ran through my head. Weapons were pulled away, but I wouldn’t let them go. Tunnels of spirit ran through them and I sucked the energy down. Anime Boy’s foot hit me square in the chest, knocking me away from the group of immortals centered on me.

He swatted the weapons clear with lightning-quick blows, never making contact long enough for me to try to feed on him.

“A revenant,” Anime Boy observed. “That makes you the second or third most powerful Emperor I know.”

“That means a lot coming from a Final Fantasy reject.”

He set his feet and thrust his hands against my chest as I spoke. I felt my strength ebb, the power flowing out of me into his hands. Pulling back seemed like the best option.

“Final Fantasy is a good game.” He gritted his teeth. “I prefer Three.” The ebb flowed then stopped.

“I prefer Seven.” It was a standstill.

“Stop, or we end your wife. She’ll never get to undergo her three-day trial—never be pronounced free by the Council. Think about it—such a poor end to your trip abroad.” Luc’s words had the wrong effect.

Ji knew it was a bad plan, the thought “Idiot!” showed
clearly in his eyes, but it was too late. I hadn’t seen how Luc got over there, but there he stood, stake ready to plunge into Tabitha’s heart. James held that big damn sword of his to Tabitha’s throat, and the blue glow of my spectral form went purple.

Without Rachel to help me control them, without Talbot to intervene, and without Marilyn to calm me down, my rage blackouts were back. Akira Ifukube’s
Godzilla
score might as well have been playing in the background. The air around me crackled. My surroundings, already blurred by the ghost vision, twisted. Walls and tables became smears of color, like staring into a twirling fun house mirror. Words faded in the dull rush of a deep sustained roar. Icy waves of cold flowed out of me. My vision faded. Sound fell away. And then there was nothing.

    35    

TABITHA:

HOSTILE HOSTAGE SITUATION

A line of frost hit the blade at my throat, the chill burning my neck and shocking me awake as the blade froze. Luc muttered a curse, and I knew he felt it, too. Corpses don’t shiver, but I did. Across the room, Master Ji’s hands were locked against Eric’s chest while Eric clawed at the immortal’s throat, leaving angry welts that went from purple to black, spreading across his skin an inch at a time.

Normally I couldn’t see Eric in his ghost form, but now he was clearly visible, surrounded by a road-flare corona. I tried to pull away from Luc, but his fingers locked down, digging hard into my skin. Was this guy using me as a hostage?

Seeming human helps me stay awake, but it saps my vampiric abilities. A little anger helps me overcome that so I can be awake and vampire-strong. Eric’s voice played in my head. He’d once called me a moist warm tightness, but now that I’d won and he’d married me, the memory wasn’t as effective. He’d said it to push me away, because being with him is dangerous. In a sad, twisted way, his resorting to comments like that had been a sign of how much he’d let himself come to care for
me—a sign of affection. I thought of Rachel instead, searching for a memory that would make me angry enough to push past the seeming-human power dampening and get my vampiric abilities going. I closed my eyes, picturing her with Eric, hearing her voice in my head. “Hi, slut! Where ya been?”

My abilities came back so quickly I felt like a revved engine. My body shook, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or the rush of power.

“Waking up?” The condensation from Luc’s breath blew past my face, a white cloud. “I don’t want to have to kill you just to make a point.”

He
was
using me as a hostage!

“You bastard!”

I grabbed the sword, half expecting the frost to peel the skin from my fingers, surprised when shards of brittle frozen metal clung to my skin as the sword came apart in my hand. Bits of it clung to my neck, my dress, even my arms as the metal fell. Luc began to shift his grip (reaching for another weapon, maybe?), but I was close to full speed and he let the spectacle of Eric’s glowing purple fury distract him. I grabbed his throat with both hands. My claws extended directly into the muscle as I lifted and pulled, thrusting my butt backward into him to shift his balance and leverage. My fangs pierced his jugular while he was still in the air and I followed him down, drinking long droughts of warmth so hot and strange it sent tingles through my tongue.

“Christian!” the fat immortal bellowed, calling the name of the guard outside. “Apply the wards to the vampires!”

My skin tingled and I squinted my eyes against the pain I felt sure was on the way, but the tingle faded with a hideously shrill shriek from outside. Several of the immortals moved toward the gate, suddenly ignoring me, Eric, and Beatrice completely.

Aarika didn’t.

Beatrice shouted a warning, and I twisted Luc’s head from his body. That probably wouldn’t kill him, but I hoped it would put him out of the fight. Without Luc to worry about, I saw Aarika lunge; she had abandoned her blade and was wielding wooden stakes in either hand.

“We should have done this at the beginning.” Aarika was fast. One stake rammed home just above my right breast, punching through my sternum and into my lung. The other would have been on target, but I smacked her arm away, the bones in her forearm giving way with a definite snap.

We winced together. Even though it had been brief, the pain in my chest was enough to rip a howl of pain from my throat. The urge to scream generated a desire to breathe, forcing my lung to collapse and summoning more agony. She twisted the stake in my wound and I tried to bite her neck. Aarika slung her left arm (the broken one) out hard as if she were slinging mud from her fingers. A low sound like the crack of two billiard balls against one another, combined with the smile on her face, informed me that the arm was no longer broken.