Crossed (50 page)

The wards held for an hour. Fang played “Toy Soldiers” by Martika as the two of us watched from the top of the neighboring parking deck. Sparks of prismatic energy arced between the sagging frame of the Highland Towers and the concrete
around us as the wards lost their game of inches. And when they failed, it was with a whimper, not a bang. The wards winked out. All went still. Then the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, straight for us. Fang kicked into reverse and hauled ass through the far wall of the deck, off and over.

Concrete crumbled as the Highland Towers broke and twisted near the middle, a jagged crack spreading out along the points of structural failure. The fifteen-story building struck the eight-level parking deck we’d just vacated and continued through the deck, crushing it almost to ground level. Joined together in catastrophic architectural union, the two buildings became one, the Highland Towers semi-intact and at a steep angle, supported by the collapsed bulk of the parking deck and the overpriced cars within.

I became the revenant and ghosted through the wreckage—an angry, vengeance-seeking ghost with hell in my step and damnation in my gaze.

    50    

ERIC:

DEATH TO MING

There was no need for words. Not for me. No explanation, no story could have averted my wrath, but that didn’t stop Phillip from trying. At the new intersection between the parking deck and Phil’s penthouse, I was met by a wavering blue ward, Phillip’s secondary backup. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as the main system. Overtaxed by holding the room together as best it could, the ward granted me a view of Phillip’s ruined lair.

With the floor at an angle of over forty-five degrees, all the knickknacks had fallen from their shelves and many of them lay broken on the floor, collecting at the lowest point of the room, past curtains askew and partially detached from the rods upon which they’d once regally hung. Roger’s soul spiraled up from the broken soul warden—the overgrown marble that had imprisoned him. He passed through the barrier, recognizing me too late.

“Eric, enough—”

I had no words for him either, only death more final than he might have deserved. He sank into my ghostly body and if he screamed, I didn’t notice because my eyes were on the
corpse of a fortysomething woman with blond hair, lying on the ground. When most Vlads die, those few whose kill requirements don’t result in a destruction of the body, they rapidly age toward their true span of years upon the earth. I’d turned Greta when she was twenty-one. I’d often wondered what she might have looked like as she aged. Now I knew.

“Eric.” Phillip scrambled about the wreckage, fumbling for something amid the debris. “Look.” He gestured toward a vampire who was staked and bound. I recognized her from a distantly remembered dream—Lisette. “We found Lisette for you. See? You went to Paris to find her and she came here.”

He’d killed her. He’d killed Greta. No one had to tell me. I knew.

Percy sat in the remains of an easy chair.

“Percy.” Phillip’s voice cracked, panic reined in but not conquered as he continued to search. “Tell him, Percy. You saw everything.”

“Yes,” Percy agreed. “I saw everything. I’m seeing everything now. It’s what I do.”

Phillip sobbed, eyes lighting from within as he found what he’d been searching for and attempted to conceal it within the sleeve of his Victorian jacket.

I flicked the ward with my thumb and middle finger. Bright blue sparks flew like mutant fireflies as the energy field collapsed. A groan announced the absence of the structural reinforcement it had been providing, and dust fell from the ceiling as everything shifted a bit more.

Methane rose from the gas fireplace in a steady stream, tainting the air. Lord Phillip gestured at me with a piece of copper in the shape of a rod, and lightning rushed along its length, striking me and igniting the methane in one big kaboom. I ghosted as it happened and when the smoke cleared, Phillip gasped at the sight of me, standing exactly where I had been before the explosion.

A single step brought me inside his lair. When the second lightning strike came, I mistimed my shift to revenant form and took the full brunt of the blast. It cooked my clothes and fried my synapses, but it couldn’t kill me. It was only lightning. My foot struck the frame of an ornate mirror wrought with dragons and I picked it up. My reflection looked up at me, out of synch with reality, and I gave it a head butt, shattering the glass. A small demon trilled its freedom to the universe as the fly-sized being rose from the mirror, but I caught it in my fist and crushed it until it popped, a tiny jelly-bean of ichor.

Then, I threw the mirror at Phillip. It shattered all over the floor and the wall behind him. He’d turned to mist.

“Come now, Eric,” he said. “I’m sure we can . . .”

But I wasn’t hearing Phillip any longer, I was hearing the voice of Sydney Greenstreet in the movies behind my eyes, the good ones in black and white where this kind of thing turns out right at the end and the bad guys go to jail and the hero . . . the hero . . .

But I’m not a hero.

If I was, he wouldn’t have beaten me. If I was, I wouldn’t have been having three-ways in Paris while my daughter was being captured and tortured to death in Void City. If I was a hero, none of this would have happened.

But monsters can win too. Just watch a slasher film or, worse yet, pick up a newspaper.

Phillip’s words went by unnoticed. It was a grand speech, peppered with quotes from famous men in languages long dead or rarely used. It was witty and irreverent, clever and charming. I probably would have laughed if I’d been paying any attention to it. Perhaps I did laugh. I don’t remember.

I inhaled, my mouth gaping open in defiance of its natural boundaries. Percy drew a small golden ankh from beneath his shirt, but remained otherwise motionless. His ankh blazed
brightly, a flickering candle against the hurricane, but a candle that did not go out.

“Eric! No!” Phillip screamed. “Please. We’ll—”

Light, all of it save the light from Percy’s ankh, bent as if my inhalation was sucking it in. Phillip came with it, his spirit torn free of a long dead body, transmuted to water vapor, which, absent his spirit to bind it together, fell apart and rained down upon the rubble like a brief summer storm.

I devoured Lisette next, ignoring the few French words her spirit muttered as her body turned to dust and even the dust was drawn into my vortex of anger, hate, sorrow, and desire. It was a desire for a better time, a wish for things to work like they did in the movies, a crushed hope that just once, just this one time . . .

Unlike Phillip, she tried to fight me. We merged together with the same unholy intimacy I’d shared with the girl whose name I no longer remembered, the one from my honeymoon night, the one who’d wanted to see the Eiffel Tower.

“This can’t happen,” Lisette screeched as she tried to push free of me, arm against my shoulders, only to scream again as her spirit sank back within mine. And it was done. I killed Lisette and I killed Phil.

“I got them for you, Greta.” I reached for her corpse. “I’m sorry I was late, but—”

“You can get her back.” Percy spoke the words, and they knocked me down as surely as
la Bête
’s mighty paws had done in our first encounter.

“Don’t fuck with me, Percy.”

“Like you, I am an Emperor.” Percy stood, and as he did the room seemed to right itself, the walls changing to sandstone, like you’d see in an old mummy movie. “Like you, I am two different types of undead. And like my offspring, Lisette, and my would-be captor, Phillip, I arrived at my state by magical means.”

“Get to the part where I can get Greta back.”

“Lisette was an experiment in creating an Emperor purposefully. It worked, though perhaps making her a zombie and a vampire was a bit cruel, but I certainly couldn’t have her awaken to be as powerful as I am, now could I?”

Sirens blared in the distance.

“Look, I—”

“Without a brief explanation, you will not understand my offer.” He interrupted. “I—unlike Phillip, who fancied himself a worker of magic—am an extremely talented practitioner, which opened a unique pathway to me. I discovered two paths to immortality with which I became enamored. The first was vampirism; the second, the rituals of ancient Egypt.”

“What, you’re a fucking mummy?”

Percy removed his glasses and cleaned them.

This isn’t a good idea,
Scrythax said in my brain.

“I am a mummy and a vampire and like yourself. I am indeed fully functional, though my interests tend toward voyeurism rather than actual participatory bliss.”

“So . . . you’re a mummy. So what?”

He handed me his glasses. “An Emperor forged of the unique combination of mummy and vampire. You now hold my
memento mori.
Use your
memento mori
to destroy it, and you will halve my power.”

“What?” I looked at the glasses. They seemed normal, but . . . “Why?”

“I want to make amends. I feel responsible, and I have no desire to go to war with you. I’d prefer to watch you from afar or via my thralls.” He rolled up his sleeves and aimed his ankh at the wall, where cuneiform images manifested in eerie silver hues. “With that in mind, I’m willing to open a gateway to the Paths of the Dead. As a revenant, an angry ghost, you can set foot on them and go after your daughter.” Greta’s body lifted up into the air, surrounded by matching silver light.

“Find her spirit before it reaches a final destination and bring her back. While her body exists, it’s still possible she could be reunited with it.”

“Would she be human or vampire?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Percy asked, his expression curious.

“It should.” I eyed the gateway.

“But does it?”

“No.” I hung my head.

“Either is possible.” He clucked his tongue. “The choice will ultimately be made by chance, but may be influenced by her wishes.”

He said words in a language I guessed was Egyptian, and a dark doorway opened in the wall, sending sand to swirl about my feet.

“What’s the catch?”

“It’s never been done before,” Percy quipped. “Not by one such as you. In theory, it should work, but in practice either one of you could be changed substantially, particularly now that you have undone Lisette, effectively ending the Courtney curse.”

“That’s all I had to do to end the curse?”

“You act like it was easy, and I suppose it was, given that Greta did all the heavy lifting for you, but you struck the final blow and destroyed her. Now, the Courtneys are free and—”

“So why am I still a vampire?”

“Because you haven’t cured yourself, but if you were to find such a cure, the curse would no longer undo it.”

I stared at the doorway. Hard.

Eric,
Scrythax said to me,
don’t risk it. She’s not—

I poked my right hand through the doorway and offered Percy’s glasses back to him with my left.

“Take them with you,” Percy said. “I want to see what happens if you go. Will you?”

Greta was probably better off dead. She was a monster, in
so many ways worse than I was. She killed recklessly, and her appetite for slaughter could be endless. Going could destroy me. Coming back could make her worse. What if she came back human and wanted me to turn her again? What if she was stuck in the body of a fortysomething woman, forever unhappy at the youthful appearance she’d lost?

Would I go? Good damn question.

    51