In Blood We Trust (28 page)

Now the air was mostly dead, the aroma of dirt dominating, with just a hint of salt.

When we went inside, there was no need for the vampires to be invited. First, it'd been a public place, but more important, it didn't belong to anyone now.

It was as if we'd stepped back decades and decades, to a time when the hotel had been in use. A material I'd never felt before—Liam called it
velvet
—decorated the furniture, and the tables were made of that fancy mahogany wood, which was all glossy, even now. Dust caked everything, though—even the old pictures of stiff men with cowboy hats at their sides—but it was as if we could've settled here with a little cleanup, if we'd had a mind to.

A tiny flail-salamander hopped from underneath a table to a chair, where it stood on its hind legs and thrashed its front ones about. I didn't mind the creature. Actually, it only reminded me that we were genuinely back in the nowheres.

Close to the best home I'd ever had, for a time.

Kerr had opened a hidden door in a velvet-covered wall, and he waved us over. “This way.”

We all followed him down the steps, to where those tunnels fingered off to different holed-out rooms, supported by iron beams and stocked with super old firearms, like the ones me and my dad had collected, plus canned foodstuffs. Both would be pretty incidental to vampires.

When we passed a closed room that me and the twins had already checked out, Gabriel decided to backtrack and open it. The floor was piled with bones and bullets.

I shut the door again. “Whoever decided to hide away here probably didn't last all that long.”

“A suicide pact,” Gabriel said, his voice emotionless.

I wanted to touch him, just to see if he would react—if I could
lend
some response to him, just as I always had been able to do with our tempestuous link—but I didn't want to see myself fail in that. It would be more than I could take. I mean, I'd barely recovered from the news of what Gabriel had done to Pucci, as well as his being the Civil killer, even though I accepted those qualities in my Gabriel.

We moved on from the suicide room, going as far back in the tunnels as we could, to a space that seemed to have once acted as a meeting spot. There was even what looked to be an altar of sorts at the rear of it.

I was concerned that the vampires and 562—and maybe even I, with my 562 blood—wouldn't be able to enter, but it was no problem.

Liam said, “This is where they lost their faith, whatever it was.”

Sure enough, you could feel despair in the very air.

“I'm not sure if they held to an organized religion”—like the kind that had fallen out of favor once people had turned their fervor to cultural and popular idols—“but, no matter what, the faith didn't work for them as the days got harder to live through.”

“Same old story,” Gabriel said, sitting on a big rock that acted as a chair. “What they used to believe in turned out to be empty. I wonder if death became their only hope.”

I wished I could tell him that not everything ended up that way, empty.

I stood aside as Liam brought in 562, putting her/him on that altar. She/he looked right at home, sitting in lotus position, presiding over the room.

Liam crossed his arms over his chest. “Unlike whatever was worshipped here, 562 will always live. We'll see to that.”

The twins took off their sword sheaths and sat on the ground, comfortable as they gazed upon the origin.

Liam doffed the strap that was holding a canteen at his hip, just over his sword sheath. I'd found out recently that it didn't merely hold blood. It was filled with
Civil
blood, just in case 562 came out of this vegetative state.

I never asked how the vampires had gotten it or when.

“So,” I said, “this is it? You're going to stay here?”

“It's a good location.” Liam took a seat on a rock opposite Gabriel. They were different in every way—one fair and dressed in white, the other brooding, with off-kilter features, put through the wringer of life. It was just that I couldn't take my eyes off Gabriel.

Liam added, “We'll do some work on fortifying this place in the coming nights, before you and Gabriel leave.”

Kemp said, “Before others come.”

“Like the vampires who'll spell you?” I asked.

“No,” Liam said. “Others. Soon, more of our kind will know that the origin is here. They'll come to her/him, just like they started doing back in GBVille, and they'll keep it a secret. That's what you get with vampires who can communicate mind to mind—news that travels silently.”

“They'll want to be a part of 562,” Kerr said. “They'll want to just touch or look at her/him.”

Gabriel said, “They think it'll empower them, just like any relic.”

The vampires were all looking at me now, and I got the feeling I inspired the same notion. That night of the blood and dancing back in GBVille, when I'd felt other Reds touching me, lent some weight to their theory.

Did Gabriel feel that way about me, too? Or did I have the opposite effect on him, degrading instead of empowering?

The vampires must've been right about 562 luring others, because I still didn't want to go.

I wandered nearer to the origin. “What about during the days? Who's going to watch over her/him?”

“We'll construct some traps to keep anyone but vampires out,” Liam said. “Maybe one day, there'll even be a vampire who finds a Red sympathizer who's willing to come here and take the day shifts.”

“What if I stayed here to—”

“No, Mariah.” Gabriel had come by my side without my even knowing it. He had no body heat, but I could feel every inch of him in me.

He still had the power to make me crazed, to raise my temperature and steal my control. Funny, because I left him cold now, literally.

Had this become a one-sided love affair after his gloaming had passed?

“We've got to go,” he said.

“But the full moon,” I said. “Since there hasn't been one since 562 went under, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow night. What if she/he alters and goes on another rampage?”

“There aren't any Civils here to tempt 562,” Gabriel said. “And the vamps have Civil blood handy. They'll be fine. 562 won't want its descendant's blood—not with the parental attitude it had about its Reds.”

“What if 562 goes wild and tries to run off, then? We can't afford for that to happen. Remember how you and I controlled the origin last time?”

The vampires exchanged glances, leaving Gabriel out of their communication. But he was busy watching me with a baffled expression, as if he were trying to figure out how to connect to my thoughts again, connect to me.

Then Liam smiled patiently. “Maybe you could stay for the first night of the full moon.”

It was a good enough compromise, and we all arranged the bunker to our satisfaction that night, stringing together bladed traps at entrances and exits for anyone who happened to stumble upon this shelter, fat chance though it was.

Gabriel kept back from me the entire time, but that didn't stop my desires from rising whenever I merely glanced at him across a room or thought about what we'd had together just a short time ago.

I was losing him, wasn't I?

The next day, the hours slouched by until they got to the deepest darkness, which would combine with the full moon's apex and make me go into my own turbo form.

I was happy when Gabriel sat with me in an empty room down the hall, not abandoning me. He hadn't bothered to bind me, since I'd been a force of good the last full moon . . . at least compared to 562.

When I told him that he might want to have one of the vampires' silver swords on him, just in case, he wouldn't hear of it.

“I'd never put an end to you,” he said.

See—it was times like this when I thought that there had to be something left in him, that I was wrong about him reaching full maturation. But then he'd go back to being still and remote.

The minutes ticked past, each of them offering a new crack to my heart. But then I started to feel the moon swelling in the sky outside, then sensation chipping away at all of me, taking me apart so it could build itself back up again as a different being.

As Gabriel came to a stand across the room, I had to wonder if, down the hall, 562 had awakened with the moon yet, her/his gaze snapping to consciousness, body swelling into something far more dangerous. . . .

My hunger grew along with the expanding force in my body, and as each second jarred by, the image of that canteen, filled with Civil blood, consumed me.

I realized that I didn't want just
any
blood this time.

A sob stuck in my throat. This couldn't be happening. I didn't want my origin's appetites, and last time, I'd been so sure that I'd avoided them.

Still, I couldn't deny it now as I thought of all the Civils back at the asylum: Sasquatches, chimeras, animal-type mutants . . . all so appealing.

All so easy to catch.

And there was another burn of need emerging in me—one I'd believed to be assuaged. The thirst for bad blood, the kind I
had
to chase down.

Bad guys. Anger. I wanted to tear, be mean, kill kill kill—

As the night's darkness grew, surrounding the full moon, my body seemed to explode, my eyes rotating into vertical diamond shapes, my sight going quickly to crimson, my hair sprouting long and red from my skin, my mouth yawing open to accommodate teeth so much bigger than my non-moon form. Then . . .

Then came my extra set of arms.

They blasted out of my sides while my tongue shot out, long and grotesque, split down the middle.

Thing was, every bit of this was marked in my mind. It was a cruel joke when, for so long, I'd been able to go blank during the worst parts of my werewolf change. I didn't want to know this kind of hunger when I'd always managed to blank it out before, didn't want to know what it felt like in its most extreme—

I sprang to my feet, roaring at Gabriel, my tongue waving out.

But he didn't run.

He didn't hide from me.

Just when I thought he was going to stay emotionless, shutting me out because he was trying to adjust to what I'd be for the rest of my life, I felt it.

A jerking sensation between us.

Our link?

As he took a step toward me, I shook my head, trying to access his mind so I could tell him to stay away. He should just go, even if all I wanted to do was bring him closer.

Then I saw the shine in his eyes. Tears?

Had seeing me like this again gotten through his growing layers of vampire?

“It's back,” he said.

He reached up, and
I
was the one who flinched away from him.

Blood,
I thought desperately, getting through to his mind.
So hungry. Civil blood. Any blood. Help me.

I will,
he thought, our link singing into me, because for some reason, it
was
here again, as strong as ever, during the full moon.

I held to the dirt walls, my claws digging in as Gabriel left me, opening the door, then speeding back within a second.

He handed the Civil-blood-filled canteen to me, and I drank long gulps. And as I did, I saw what 562 must've felt every time she/he assuaged those hunger pangs: Red domination. Ridding the world of anything but her/his own progeny. The continued survival of her/his children throughout the ages . . .

I let the emptied canteen drop to the floor, all my arms grasping air, not knowing what else to do until Gabriel clasped one of my hands in his. They were so ugly, those clawed hands, so many of them, but somehow, he was enjoying the feel of them.

“Come here,” he said, pulling me outside.

He brought me down the hall to 562's chamber—to where the vampire guardians were circled round our origin.

She/he sat on that altar, silver hair still covering a serene face.

The moon hadn't taken over 562 after all, as we'd hoped and feared.
I
was the only one left moving.

The true daughter of 562.

When the guardian vampires finally glanced at me, I could see they wanted to touch me, to be a part of whatever made me so powerful, but they didn't dare.

They were devoted to me, yet they feared me now, too, in this form. As what I sincerely was.

Gabriel seemed to be the only one who didn't.

 

 

He took me away from 562's shelter as the moon stayed powerful, leading me over the miles as we sped far, far away to a destination he wouldn't even tell me about. I didn't know if I was ever going to see Liam or the twins again, but I sensed that the idea of me and 562 was very different from the reality for them, and they were relieved when I got going.

Imagine, vampires wary of something.

Me.

Near dawn, we slowed down in a desolate, sand-stretched place that I recognized. A rise of hill near a diner where we'd stopped during our journey to GBVille back when I'd set out to find a were-cure. Now, we were going in the opposite direction.

Toward
the Badlands.

“I can't think of a better place to rest for the night than up ahead,” he said. “We know there'll be food and especially water here for you when the day starts, and in your human form, you'll want both, badly.”

I sank low to the dirt, all my hands brushing against it. It felt like a souvenir from a better time.

I'm glad we're going back,
I thought, although I already missed 562.