Dead Matter (34 page)

I nodded. “Much.”

I hurried along to my storage unit, thankful for the noise. When I reached the rolled-down metal gate, I punched my code in and the lock on it clicked open. I pulled up the rolling garage-door front of it. “Inside.”

“You want to tell us why we’re here?” Aidan asked.

I pulled the gate down behind us and clicked on the single overhead light in the unit. One wall was covered with shelves, but only a few cardboard boxes were on them. Off to the other side were several garment bags hanging from a pipe.

“I set this place up for just such an emergency,” I said. I pulled a towel down from the shelves and threw it down onto the single table in the center of the room. I pointed to another shelf with gallon camping containers of water.

“Could one of you bring me one of those? I think I’m a little too beaten up to lift it.”

Aidan grabbed it and brought it to the table for me. “So you planned for getting all busted up like this?” He looked a bit skeptical.

I nodded and pulled off my prison clothes, wincing as the pain throughout my body cried out. Using the towel, I soaked up some of the water and began to wash the blood off of me.

“More or less,” I said. “I was a bit of a miscreant a few years back, got into a lot of trouble, and when you do that, it usually comes back to bite you in the ass. My particular trauma showed up a few months ago, under the name of Mina Saria. My dealings with her taught me a harsh lesson about always being prepared. So yeah, nowadays I have a bit of a contingency plan set up for a rainy day. I think this definitely counts as one of those.”

“I see,” Aidan said and went back to standing there in silence.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I can clean up. I’ve got clothes, some money. You can go now.”

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

“No, really,” I said. “You can.”

“I have my orders,” he said, “and they weren’t just to break you out. I’m supposed to watch over you and bring you back to the Gibson-Case Center.”

I dried myself and fished a shirt out of one of the garment bags, slipping it on gingerly. “I’ll be fine. I’m not even sure I want to head back there anyway. I’ve got to deal with Allorah and the Department. I just need to figure out what to do next. Besides, in a few hours when the sun comes up, there’s not going to be all that much watching over me that you can do.”

Aidan grabbed me by the arm, stopping me. He looked pissed. “Haven’t you been listening to Brandon? You don’t seem to realize the importance you hold for me and my kind. We need to take you back to the castle, both for your sake and ours.”

“Bringing you back there is like granting you sanctuary,” Beatriz added. “The center is like its own sovereign nation. You saw what happened when you and your girlfriend tried to get in there the other night. Your department won’t be able to touch you.”

“But Jane and I
did
eventually get in, though.”

“Yes,” Aidan said, giving a grin far from saintly, “but I defy them to get through an army of vampires sworn to protect you.”

“Fair point,” I said, then realized what was missing from all this. “Shit … my bat. Jane had that custom-crafted for me.”

Aidan gave a laugh. “You mean the one you gave to Connor when you let him and me escape?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I went to the boxes and started looking though them. “I think I have some other stuff in here …”

Aidan cleared his throat, the kind of human gesture that just didn’t fit on him. I turned to see him holding my custom-made bat retracted down in one of his hands. “Connor thought you might be wanting this back.”

I walked over and reached for it, but Aidan pulled it just out of reach. “So you’ll come back to the Gibson-Case Center with us?”

I nodded and he handed me my bat. It felt good in my hands, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed its presence until just that moment. Even some of my pain seemed to fade away.

“Excellent,” he said. “It will be much easier to keep an eye on you that way as well.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything tonight.”

“Don’t thank me,” Aidan said. “All in a night’s work.”

“You can thank me,” Beatriz said, chiming in. “I busted my ass getting you out of that floating prison thing tonight.”

“Thank you,” I said, this time to her.

“That’s better,” she said, then looked around. “Do you mind if we get out of here? This place makes me claustrophobic.”

“Don’t you sleep in coffins?”

Beatriz shook her head. “Only the real divas among us. I haven’t been in one since the 1800s.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get to the castle, then. The sooner I talk to your boss, the sooner I can deal with the D.E.A.”

I reached into one of the other garment bags and pulled out one of my older, more beaten-up jackets. The leather was soft like butter and fit like a second skin, which, given the amount of damage I had taken lately, was a welcome sensation. I slid my bat inside it and walked over to the gate, lifting it. The harsh fluorescents of the outer hallway poured in.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually missing the artificial daylight back at the castle.”

When we arrived back at the castle, Aidan and Beatriz shoved the door to Brandon’s chamber open for me and I limped in as best I could. Many members of the vampire council were gathered around the room and so were Connor and Jane.

When my girlfriend saw me, one look at the shape I was in made her burst into tears. She ran over to me before I could reach the gathered crowd and wrapped her arms around me in a hug so tight that many of my recent injuries flared up. I wanted to scream in pain, but the way I hissed out an exhale of breath must have been enough for her to realize she was hurting me. She let go of me and wrapped her arms under mine to support me.

“My God,” she said. “I was so worried. When the Shadower team escorted you out of that Departmental witch trial, I was beside myself. I made Brandon send them after you.”

“Thanks for sending in the V-Team,” I said.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” I whispered before kissing her. The sweet taste of her lips mixed with the salt of her tears.

“My spine can heal later. I missed you.”

Jane put her arm around my waist and brought me over to the rest of the assembled crowd. Connor gave me a smile, albeit a pained one.

“Hey, kid,” Connor said. “Welcome back.”

“I see you made it out of the Gauntlet’s creepy catacombs all right,” I said to him.

“More or less,” he said. “Aidan and I ran into something down there, but I don’t really want to talk about it. It was … disturbing.”

Aidan tensed next to me and I felt his discomfort radiating from him. “I don’t want to talk about it, either,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Then I don’t have to share my story about the awesome beating I took in prison before Team Undead came to my rescue.”

Brandon stepped forward, addressing Aidan. “I trust there were minimal casualties … ?”

Aidan paused, no doubt not wanting to rat out Beatriz for getting a little enthusiastic with her fighting. I looked over at her, but she was already turning away.

I stepped forward. “Other than the large hole they tore in the side of the prison?” I said. “No. Although I kind of consider myself a kind of walking casualty, but that’s not their fault.”

Connor came over and grabbed my face in his hands, checking me over. Although I had cleaned up most of the blood back at the storage unit, I was still a mess of bruises and cuts. “You okay, kid?”

“It only hurts when I blink,” I said. “Or breathe. Although, truth be told, I think I was doing pretty well against Faisal and his crew for not having preternatural strength at my disposal. It took all five of them to take me down.”

“Impressive,” Connor said, slapping his brother on the arm. “Right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Aidan said, rather flatly. “By the time I got there, Simon here was lying on the floor in the fetal position.”

“Yeah, well, it was a pretty ferocious fetal position, let me tell you.”

“Forgive me if I seem a bit solipsistic,” Brandon said, “but what now? It seems your attempts at negotiation using Aidan have met with failure.”

“Your concern is touching,” I said, feeling a swell of bitterness. “No, I’m fine, really.”

“I am of course concerned for your well-being,” Brandon said. “You are an important part of all this.”

I looked around the room at all the faces there. Some of them I knew and trusted; the rest were trusted by Brandon.

“I was doing a little thinking,” I said, “what with my time in the joint …”

Connor laughed. “All, what? Three hours of it?”

I glared at him. “Well, I didn’t
know
it was going to be that short, now, did I?”

Connor nodded. “Point to you, kid.”

“Thank you,” I continued. “So when I was getting my ass handed to my by one of my old nemeses, I got to thinking. Dude had a
lot
of anger in him toward me. Why was he so angry with me? Because he had a cause he believed in. He had a way of life he wanted to promote and I denied him that. Mostly because he was big on evil and human sacrifice, which I think we all can agree is a bad thing. So I wondered the same about this situation … Is someone among you feeling denied here? I put myself into the mind-set of someone who would go to all this trouble just to see a war between the humans and the vampires. Why would they go forward with sabotage? Because they were unhappy with the way things are. And who here is unhappy? After getting to know some of you, it sounds like it could be half the population of this place who aren’t thrilled about one thing or another.”

I walked through the sea of faces, addressing people as I passed them. “Aidan’s spent years wanting his memories back and I imagine there’s been a lot of anger built up over that loss, especially with Connor back in his life. And what about the members of your council? Sure, you can trust them, the way the gang at the Peach Pit trusted each other on
90210
, but you see how that turned out every week. Not everyone sees eye to eye here.”

“Impossible,” the tall blond named Gerard said, stepping forward. “You know nothing of our kind. Brandon’s word is law.”

“But I
do
know your kind,” I said. “Despite what I hear you people claim over and over, you’re
still
human. You come from us. You can’t help it. It’s not a virus you can work out of your system, and even if you could, what do I see you people do with your downtime? You absorb human culture—with the movies you watch, the building you construct to hide yourselves. And you, Gerard, you’re as hotheaded as this
human
vampire hunter I know … Remember how you broke my bat?”

I moved on. When I came to Nicholas he couldn’t bear to make eye contact with me, looking away. “And Nicholas, well, let’s just say he’s got some relationship issues a century or two of analysis might cure …”

Aidan sighed. “Is there a point to all this?”

“The point is this,” I said. “Somewhere in your ranks, there has to be someone who is terribly unhappy with their lot in the vampiric life.”

Beatriz laughed and sidled over to Aidan, throwing her arm around him. “Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

I gave her a placating smile. “I did.”

“Forgive me,” Brandon said, “but I fail to see how that is supposed to help us. Other than taking my ego down a notch to hear about some of the unrest of my people.”

“You’re right,” I said. “That alone really doesn’t amount to anything. There’s been all the problems trying to help you out with achieving the peace you want, the right to be left alone. Hell, I’ve risked my entire career trying to do the right thing by you … by Connor and Aidan, by Jane … only to be constantly stumped by someone covering their tracks all too well.”

Jane walked over to me. “Brandon was filling me in on the prophecy,” she said. “I’ve had a little experience from reading up on them in my dealing with the Black Stacks at Tome, Sweet Tome. Like most prophecies, this one is as cryptic as the next, but to overcompensate for that, someone still tried to cover all the bases. They went out of their way to try and take care of anyone who might remotely be involved in it.”

“Like who?” Brandon asked.

“Me, for one,” Jane said. “Your building ate me. That wasn’t by accident. When I was trapped in there, I found traces of traps laid for me. Whoever did it covered it up well, but the building was waiting to contend with a technomancer.”

Nicholas stepped forward. “Just to be clear, I never programmed something like that.”

“And don’t forget when Simon and I were attacked by those ferals,” Jane said. “Not only did it try to ruin Taco Night, but someone set that thing loose on us.”

“And then they used them a second time en masse to try and get rid of me right here on the castle grounds,” I said. “They even tried to dissuade Connor months ago from seeking out Aidan by sending that threatening letter to him.”

“Were they trying to draw me out?” Connor asked. “Or were they hoping to start the war early between our two worlds?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but again, they’ve covered their tracks well. My power can’t break through any of it.”

Brandon stood in silence, the lack of human traits such as respiration making him seem statuelike. “So it is to be war, then, between our two sides.”

I held my hands up. “I don’t think we have to jump straight on the blood-running-in-the-streets bandwagon just yet.”

“Then what would you have?” Brandon said, a snarl in his words.

“Frankly, I’d like some answers,” I said, “and I think I know how to get them.”

Everyone in the room fell silent and still, not just the ones who were already dead. I walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the painting above it, Brandon’s lost Damaris. “I got the idea thinking about you, actually.”