In the Garden of Sin (39 page)

She shrieked as he splattered her with gasoline, standing just far enough from the passenger side of the car so she couldn’t reach him. He stumbled back anyway, when she lunged for him.

“Lili said something really interesting to me today,” he said. “She asked me if I wasn’t worried that you’d double-cross me someday. Like, try to get rid of me. And I realized what a fucking
asshole
I’ve been, thinking you would ever let me live after—”

“She’s manipulating you, you fucking—” Galiana bit off the rest of that. “Don’t you see? I get it now. Think about it.
Somehow, they figured out who we are and what we’re up to. And… and that I can transfuse blood from one Follet to another. We were talking about it in the subs’ dressing room yesterday, remember? Someone must have overheard us and told Elic and Lili.”

“There was no one there.”

“There could have been,” she said, cringing at the desperation in her voice. “Hiding behind the racks of clothes, or those chairs, those recliners—”

“You would have smelled him.”

“Not over all that perfume. Anton, think about it…”

“Nein!”
he screamed, shaking another stream of gasoline onto her.
“Erzaehle mir nicht so einen mist!”
Another splash.
“Blöde Fotze!”
And another.

Choking and sputtering, Galiana said, “Elic played me. Lili played you. All Follets are fucking awesome actors, you know that. She has no intention of going anywhere with you, Anton. She poisoned your mind against me so you’d do this—or something like it. Neutralize me, take me out of the equation.”

“This was
my
idea!” he yelled as he hurled the half-empty can onto the front seat.
“Mine!”
He kicked the passenger door shut. “You don’t think I can think for myself? You don’t think I can scheme like you?”

Anton reached into his back pocket, produced his gold lighter, flipped it open, and thumbed the flame to life. He crept toward her, arm outstretched. Galiana’s deeply ingrained instinct was to cower from the flame, but that was suicide. The only way she could keep him back long enough to talk some sense into him was to go on the offense.

She made a grab at him. He dropped the lighter, cursing, but picked it right up again and lit it, glowering at her.

“Anton,” Galiana said in a tight, quivering voice, her hands raised placatingly. “Please just stop and think. You’re setting
yourself up for another long imprisonment. This”—she gestured to the handcuff, the car, the gasoline can—“isn’t going to look like any accident. It’ll be a murder scene, plain and simple.”

“I’ll be gone—with Lili—by the time the sun comes up tomorrow. I’m going to keep her at Gebirgshaus till she lets me turn her. No one knows where that is. You’re the only one who even knows it exists, and you’ll be dead.”

“No, Anton. No. Just stop and think—”

“Stop telling me to think!”

“Elic and Lili set this up so I’d transfuse him, then disappear from the picture. When you get back to the castle, they’re going to be waiting for you—guards or cops, or whatever. They’re going take you into custody and—”

“Liar! Bitch!
Halst maul!”

“Anton, just think—”

He struck in a blur, flames blossoming with a
whump
all around her.

Howling in pain and rage, she seized his arm as he started to retreat.

“Nein!”
he cried as she grabbed the second handcuff and locked it around his wrist, tethering them both to the car. He looked toward the gas can, opened his mouth.

A white-hot concussion roared through her world.

Darius, perched on the wall of rock above the black sports car, having followed it to the Puy-de-Dôme from Grotte Cachée, shot into the air on a bloom of heat when the gas can exploded. Flames boiled high into the night sky, along with billows of soot-black smoke.

Gaining his bearings, he flew in a circle over the burning automobile, his gaze on the two charred, twisted, roughly
human-shaped figures chained to it. Neither one moved— which didn’t mean they were dead. Follets clung tenaciously to life, and vampires especially.

Within seconds, there came a second, larger explosion as the fumes in the car’s gas tank ignited. The fireball came close to singeing him because his lousy avian depth perception had him flying closer than he thought. He flew as hard as he could to the safety of a nearby walnut tree.

Darius found himself captivated by the liquid-gold flames dancing in and around the distorted exoskeleton of something that had been, until moments before, a machine of great beauty and elegance. It was a cleansing fire, steadily devouring the blackened figures as sirens began to whine somewhere out there in the darkness.

It’s done
, Darius thought as he flew back to Grotte Cachée,
or it will be soon
. The fire would be extinguished, the scene photographed, investigated, and pondered over. The vampires’ remains, carbonized fragments by the time they were cool enough to extract from their chains, would end up in a morgue drawer pending identification, which would likely never occur. The mystery of their presumed murder would go unsolved, and eventually what was left of them would be disposed of and forgotten. They were gone from this world, and more important, from Lili and Elic’s world, these beasts of the night.

Darius had suspected what they were the moment he awoke in the chapel withdrawing room yesterday, ears flattened and lips drawn back, tasting a whiff of raw meat beneath the lemony perfume filling the room. He remembered Anton Turek from the first time he’d set his sights on Lili two and a half centuries ago, loathed him and feared him for her sake. Then there was the older, stronger female, and her tantalizing reference to transfusion. It tickled his memory; he’d read of
this, but where? It had taken hours of research among his ancient demonological texts, but he had found it, a reference to vampiric blood exchange dating back to ancient Etruria, translated by a monk laboring in a Dark Ages scriptorium.

As Darius flew over the castle courtyard, he saw eight of their guards, good men and worthy successors to the Swiss Guards who had served the seigneurs of Grotte Cachée for centuries, awaiting the return of one or both vampires. They were armed not just with handguns and rifles, which would only slow a vampire down a little, but with flamethrowers, as well as piles of chains. As soon as Darius reverted to human form, he would call them on his cell phone—one of the few modern conveniences he embraced, since it helped him to avoid personal contact with humans—and let them know there would be no bloodsuckers to capture tonight.

Darius flew past the castle toward the bathhouse at the entrance to the cave in which he lived, slowing down when he saw a faint glow from within the white marble structure. He lit upon the edge of the big skylight over the pool and dipped his head, taking in everything at once with his panoramic vision. A handful of candles burned at the lip of the pool, their flames twitching on its glassy surface. There was no one in the water, but between the pool and the mouth of the cave, among a heap of silken pillows, two naked bodies lay with arms and legs and hair all entwined: Lili and Elic.

Darius was about to give them his “hello” chirp when he noticed the slow, sinuous movements of their hips and grasped the magnitude of this long-awaited moment. He could hear Elic speaking softly into her ear, his voice hoarse and damp, but he couldn’t make out the words. Lili nodded, a droplet glimmering on her cheek.

Darius pumped his wings and spun away, soaring off into the starry night.