Demon Driven (32 page)

“Tanya, he’s a keeper!” Nika said quietly,
her grin fully evident.

I’ve known Nika almost as long as I’ve known
Tanya. But I never got to know her, not really. She is one of
Tanya’s closest friends, placed with the pure bred vampire to help
monitor her condition during the long years when Tanya refused to
speak.

The Coven considered her worth a thousand
times her own weight in any precious metal you care to name. True
mind readers are rare. Ones with Nika’s ability are almost unheard
of.

But I never spent much time around her, too
nervous of her abilities to feel comfortable. Now she was picking
on me
almost
like Lydia.

“Oh, he’s a
prize
, alright!” Lydia
said, in a sardonic tone.

Okay, so the blonde has a long way to go to
get to Lydia’s level.

“Is that a challenge?” Nika responded to my
thought.

I held one shaky hand up in submission while
I shoveled eggs into my mouth with my other, not bothering with a
fork.

“Holy shit Chris! Slow down! They aren’t
gonna outrun you, ya know,” Lydia said, taking in my
performance.

“He’s hungrier than he has ever been,” Nika
explained for me.

“Ah, Doc? Could you come in here, please?”
Lydia asked in a normal speaking voice.

Nonetheless, the door opened and the dark,
lean doctor glided into the room.

“Ah, Chris, how are you doing?” he asked
calmly.

I nodded around the mouthful of sausage (they
had been in a little covered dish) then swallowed.

“I’m starving! But other than that I feel
pretty good. Maybe a little tired, but overall, just really
hungry,” I said, then wrapped a pancake around a wad of bacon and
stuffed the whole thing in my mouth.

Lydia looked half fascinated, half disgusted.
It had been a long time since she had ingested normal food and the
whole thing seemed to make her queasy. I swallowed half my food,
opened my mouth and pointed at the chewed mess inside, before
swallowing again.

“Look, Lyd! SEE FOOD!” I said.

“Never mind, Doc. He’s fine…as big an asshole
as ever!” the green-eyed little vamp said.

Doctor Singh ignored our attempt at banter,
instead giving me a professional once over, then checking on Tanya.
I got serious.

“How is she, Doc?” I asked, food forgotten
for the moment.

“She’s doing great, Chris! It’ll be some time
before she’s back to full specs so to speak, but she’s healing at
her normal phenomenal rate,” the vampire physician said. “The
surface damage has mostly healed, it’s the silver poisoning that is
taking some time. But your application of your own potent blood
helped immensely!”

“So what happened? I don’t remember a lot,
just seeing Tanya get bit by a bear with silver teeth. The rest is
blurry or just plain gone.”

“Hmm, well, it’ll probably come back to you
at some point, but I’ll leave it to the Elders to fill you in,” he
said. “I will say that fighting weres with teeth and claws painted
with silver nitrate is nasty business. They would have eventually
died from the very stuff they painted on their own teeth!”

He left with a wave, leaving me to look a
question at Lydia while I polished off the last of the food. She
didn’t need to read my mind to know what I wanted.

“Senka and Tzao want to…discuss things with
you. When you’re ready and
dressed
I’ll take you to them. We
don’t want to
expose
you to anyone else!”

“Alright, but I need more breakfast first,” I
said, popping up to grab a pair of jeans that were stacked near the
bed. Tanya always makes sure I have a supply of clothes handy.

“Jeeze, Chris! Warn us next time, we could go
blind!” Lydia protested at my nakedness.

“Yeah, like I don’t know it was you two who
undressed me in the first place!”

Nika and Lydia exchanged glances with each
other and Tanya who shrugged, still too weak to say much.

“Oh come on! You two are the least afraid of
me and the only ones Tanya would trust!”

“I’m not afraid of you! Who are you calling
afraid?” Lydia said.

“I saw your face in the tunnel, Lyd! You were
scared of me. Why”

She started to protest, then stopped herself.
After a moment, she went ahead.

“Listen, I couldn’t tell if you even knew who
I was let alone what you would do next!” she said.

“What I would do
next
? What does that
mean? What did I do in the first place?”

She looked uncertain. Just then, Tanya’s cool
hand touched my arm and I snapped around to look at her. She took a
breath, then spoke, softly, with effort.

“You killed them, all of them…the other
weres,” she said.

“
I
killed
all
of the Spawn?
How?”

Nika spoke up.

“We’re not sure. The ceiling exploded and you
came in like a bolt of lightning, ripping through the weres like
rag dolls, then Tanya went down under a bunch and you freaked.
There was this flash…like a burst of purple light. It came from
you. We couldn’t see for a moment…when our vision cleared, there
you were. Holding Tanya on your lap…growling,” she said, a puzzled
look on her face. “All the weres had disappeared – gone like smoke.
At first we couldn’t figure it out, but then we realized there was
dust covering our clothes, hair, everything and it wasn’t dust…it
was ash!”

It was by far the longest speech I had ever
heard her make. And I didn’t know what to make of it. I could
almost remember a flash, but not much else.

“The growling would have been Okwari. I seem
to remember him standing over us,” I said, to clear up that
part.

Lydia shook her spikey haired head. “No,
Chris. He was at the other end of the tunnel where he had been
tearing apart Spawn. He only came over when you growled.”

“I growled?” I asked. All three nodded.
“Weird! So you thought I might go…what? Nuts on you or something?”
I looked at Lydia as I said this.

“Chris, you had just wiped almost two hundred
weres off the planet like so much mold and you were growling and
not responding…so yeah, I was a little concerned!”

I thought about that and then nodded, before
turning my head to look at Nika.

“I wasn’t scared. I could read your thoughts.
You were only interested in protecting Tanya and to a degree the
rest of us. Your blast or flash or whatever didn’t harm any of the
Coven
or
the Pack weres!” she said.

“How the hell did I manage that?

They couldn’t answer.

“Come on, the Elders would like to speak with
you,” Lydia said.

As I pulled on my shirt, Tanya started to
swing her legs off her bed. Her Hello Kitty pajamas were fairly
incongruous.

‘Whoa! Where do you think you’re going?”
Lydia asked.

“With him,” Tanya replied through gritted
teeth.

“You’re not supposed to be going anywhere,”
Lydia said.

Tanya gave her a level look and her sister in
essence sighed, acknowledging the inevitable.

I swooped in and scooped my little vampire
princess up in my arms. She started to protest, then suddenly
changed her mind and snuggled into my chest. Nika grabbed the bag
of blood off the IV rack and handed it to Tanya, who simply held it
in her hand.

The four of us traversed the underground
fortress in this manner, with Lydia leading, me carrying Tanya in
the middle and Nika following close behind. The vampires we met in
the corridors, moved quickly out of the way, most craning to
glimpse the young full-blood, but quick to avoid my gaze.

Finally Lydia opened a steel door that
wouldn’t have looked out of place on a battleship and led us into a
well appointed sitting room, where Tzao and Senka sat
motionless.

Senka raised one eyebrow in Tanya’s
direction, but said nothing as I settled her into a loveseat, with
me next to her. The other two found seats and sat quietly while I
bore the silent inspection of the two ancient vampires. I seem to
know
a vampires age at a glance, and my eyes told me that
Senka was over twelve hundred years old with Tzao around thirteen
hundred. Yet they appeared to be in their thirties.

“Chris, we wanted to have a word with you,”
Senka began in her crisp British accent, but stopping when I held
up my hand.

“Elders, if I may. I need to express
something first,” I said, touching the Tear to fuel my
determination. “I belong to Tanya and she belongs to me! I will not
allow anyone to separate us again.” I said evenly, then waited for
the shitstorm to hit.

Neither of the Elders reacted, then Senka
continued.

“We agree,” was all she said.

“You do?”

Both nodded once in unison, like eerie twins
that looked nothing alike.

“We do. Chris, I’ve told you how the Darkkin
feel about Tatiana. How every member of the Coven has felt she was
destined for important things?”

I nodded and she continued.

“When you came into the picture, waking her
and claiming her heart, I felt you might be the key. The individual
who would ground her and keep her stable,” she said. “But Lydia
felt differently. Lydia felt that Tanya was here to ground
you
…to keep you from, what’s the phrase? Going off?”

“More like going Postal,” Lydia supplied from
her spot.

Senka gave her a look, then turned back to
me.

“I couldn’t begin to understand her point of
view. That you would somehow be a force to contend with,” the
blonde Elder said. “Oh, I held you in high regard. Your abilities
were amazing. But I never grasped what you would become.”

I was following her but their rapid change of
heart from our last meeting had my head reeling.

“Chris, there were over two hundred Spawn in
that tunnel. When you screamed and …..flashed..or whatever it was,
you flash fried everyone of them, including their dead into
ash.

There has never been any vampire or being,
that we” she looked at Tzao, who nodded, “have any knowledge of,
either directly or in our rather extensive archives, that could do
that.”

Tzao spoke in a crystal toned voice. “The
ones attacking Tatiana were destroyed first and fastest, the rest
from there.”

“How do you know that? Which died first?” I
asked.

“We found two self-contained cameras, set by
the Spawn, likely to provide proof of our demise,” Senka said.
“Fairly sophisticated units, I’m given to understand, with a
relatively high rate of recording. Our technicians have processed
the information. Let me show you.”

She picked up a remote and pressed several
buttons, which caused a large high-def LCD flatscreen to rise up
from an unassuming chest. Another click of a button and two images
were displayed side by side. Taken from each end of the tunnel, the
videos displayed all the events before I got there right up till
the vamps found the cameras after my ‘flash’ or whatever it
was.

They were right, the weres on Tanya simply
exploded into ash, then a concentric circle of violet fire flared
through the rest of the Spawn, sparing any Pack or Coven members
that were around them. In one case, a Pack were was on top of a
Spawn and ended up falling when the Spawn vaporized underneath
him.

“Wow…that’s pretty freaky!” I said, feeling a
bit surreal.

“Ya think?” Lydia said absently, still
staring at the screen.

Senka gave her a glance, then looked back at
me. “You don’t remember how you accomplished that?”

I shook my head. “I remember seeing Tanya go
down under a wave of weres, and no matter how many I killed, I
knew
I wasn’t gonna get there in time. I can also remember
thinking ‘No! Not gonna happen!’ with incredible determination and
rage. Then, nothing…till Lydia was calling my name.”

Everyone was silent, each processing the
videos and my words internally.

“Okay, so that will remain a mystery for
now,” Senka said. “What’s your next step, Chris?”

I looked at five expectant faces, took a deep
breath and told them.

Chapter 35

I entered Washington Square Park from the
Southwest corner, off West Fourth Street, as it was closest to my
destination. The sun was not quite directly overhead. It’s not a
big park, only about six or seven acres tucked in lower Manhattan,
a block or so from the Avenue of the Americas. General Creek had
chosen this location for our meeting.

After my conversation with the Coven leaders,
we had agreed on this course of action. We had planned madly,
drawing the Pack into it as well. Once we had the framework, I had
called General Creek and asked to meet, letting him pick the time
and place. That was important, because the only way the government
would get my message would be if they controlled the details of the
meeting as much as possible. The impact would be that much greater
when I took away their advantages, one by one.

* * *

To the casual observer, the lower corner of
the park appeared to be closed for renovations, yellow ‘DO NOT
CROSS’ tape cordoning off the area. I ducked under the tape, my
internal fighter noting the dark blue van on McDougal Street and
the two black Chevy Suburbans parked on Fourth, engines running.
This part of the park was famous for its built-in chess tables.
Ahead of me, at the furthest chess table sat two figures. I had
expected one, but wasn’t all together surprised to find the
other.

General Creek rose from his seat at the table
and crossed to shake my hand, his posture stiff, his face
expressionless. He was wearing khakis and a dark green commando
sweater. He looked military even in casual clothes, contrasting
with my jeans and blue runners jacket. The other man stood more
slowly, his movements managing to convey a sense of self
importance. Black suit, a lean five feet, eleven inches or so, with
dark hair and black eyes. His ethnicity was difficult to pin down.
A slight tilt in his eye structure spoke of Asia, his olive toned
skin—the Mediterranean.