The Deadliest Bite (11 page)

Vayl sat down beside me to shuck off his shoes. “Have your researchers had any luck deciphering the clues?” he asked as he nodded to the map in my hand.

“Nothing new,” I told him. “You know, when Cassandra cal ed and said she’d found a reference to the triple-locked door I thought my hair was actual y standing on end. But it’s been a whole week and I stil can’t figure out what it means.”

“Wel , at least you know that the triple-locked door is, literal y, the Rocenz. That is progress,” Vayl said comfortingly. He bal ed up his socks and threw them in the corner right next to a rattan hamper.

Sometimes he was such a guy.

I hid a smile and said, “Yeah, Bergman should probably get a medal for discovering that little nugget in the archives. But it’s what Cassandra dug up, you know? What am I supposed to make of the phrase ‘Cryrise cries bane’? Okay, I know Cryrise was a dragon. And the hammer was forged from his leg bone. But I’ve been running that info around in my head every waking moment and the only conclusion I come to is that Cryrise is a pussy.”

Vayl laughed.

“I’m not kidding!” I insisted. “What kind of respectable dragon goes and gets himself kil ed by a demon in the first place?”

“Perhaps it was not that simple,” Vayl suggested as he undid his shirt, slow, the way he knew I liked it.

“Jasmine?” he murmured as he leaned forward to slip his shirt off, his shoulder muscles and biceps bunching and releasing with fascinating results.

“Uh?”

“Are you panting?”

I licked my lips. Realized my breath had started coming a lot quicker. I put my hand to his chest, sliding my fingers into the thick curls that covered it as I threw my leg over his hips and sat facing him. “I like this couch,” I told him.

“You do?” His fingers, free of the responsibility of his own buttons, had begun toying with mine.

“Yeah.” I brushed my cheek against his as I leaned forward to nibble on his earlobe and say, “It’s got great handgrips.” I reached past his arms and buried my fingers in the soft leather cushions of the back.

And then neither of us talked anymore for a long, long time.

Wednesday, June 13, 8:00 p.m
.

I woke up beside Vayl in his huge, comfy bed the night after Aaron’s attempted assassination, amazed I’d slept the day through as I picked up the curtain to wish him a good evening.

“What’s up?” I asked. “You look like somebody just cal ed off your birthday.”

“The Rogue has left our territory,” he said. “Now we have no evidence to plant on Aaron.” He held up a hand. “And before you try to comfort me, just imagine if we sent him in with faked remains. His description last night was not far off. Roldan could injure or even kil him before we were able to intervene. We must save him. You know he cannot do it himself.”

“He’s a dead man and you know it,” I said bluntly. “That Were never had any intention of leaving either boy alive once he figured out they were connected to you. Not after they’d served his purpose anyway. Now quit being so emotional—” I stopped. What a weird thing to have to say to the man whose expressions had to be read with a magnifying glass. But by now I knew that under that tightly wired exterior boiled passions that could leap out and destroy whole cities. I said, “Okay, that’s not fair. Just, you know, try to back off and think. That’s what’s going to help the most here, and you know it.”

He took a deep breath. “Al right. We can eliminate a Rogue vampire after we make the flight. It would have been difficult to explain a bag ful of remains to airport security at any rate.” I nodded. Not impossible, because we stil carried our department IDs, but since our status was official y inactive it could’ve stil been problematic. So we spent the rest of the night trying to get more information from Aaron about his contacts, shuttling Cassandra, Dave, and later on Bergman from the airport to Vayl’s house and preparing for our psychic’s reading. Which failed on nearly every front.

Al she got from Junior was more of his dad’s tortured pleas. And when she touched Vayl she couldn’t see the other son. Not his face. Not his location. Al she sensed was audio. A revving engine and the horrifying sound of crumpling metal. Afterward she sat back in her chair, swept her long black braids from her regal face, her big brown eyes so ful of sympathy I nearly cried myself as she embraced Vayl with her gaze. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “Definitely Hanzi is here, I can feel that. But the sense of violence and impending death is so strong it interferes with every other image.” She smoothed the skirt of her bright orange sundress, her elegant black hands hesitating at her stomach a moment longer than was necessary, making me wonder if the reading had left her nauseous.

Then Dave stepped up with his amazing admission.

“I think I can find him.”

We were sitting in the coziest room in the house. Tucked at the back behind the bil iard room within easy reach of the kitchen, it seemed to reflect more of the Vayl-who-was than the ass-kicking Vampere he’d become. I’d seen his den before we’d become a couple, but then I hadn’t been in the mood to take in much more than the country-gentleman squares of gleaming brown paneling that gave the area a warmth that was backed up by the chocolaty leather couch, matching love seat, and two burgundy wing chairs with matching footstools. They huddled around a sturdy square coffee table that looked like it had been crafted from railroad ties and ceramic tile painted with the most colorful horse-drawn wagon I’d ever seen. Usual y books covered the design, but since I’d come Vayl had gotten better about putting them back onto one of the three black floor-to-ceiling shelves against the wal s.

Most of Vayl’s rugs had been imported from the Middle East. Beautiful Persian designs that seemed to reveal a new picture every time your eye fel on a different section. Underneath the rugs the floors were wel -maintained, deeply stained pine. But in the den he’d chosen a hand-woven rag rug in al the colors of the rainbow that stretched nearly the length and width of the room. The colors were muted just enough that they lifted the spirit when you walked in, rather than making you want to bang your head against the wal .

The rug stopped at the black marble fireplace. Covering the opening was an iron grate in the shape of a dancing woman, her skirt twirling and her hair flying as she spun in front of the flames.

One night he’d confessed that she reminded him of his mother. Not that he’d ever seen her. Just the picture he’d built in his mind, gathered from watching his grandma and his aunts working through the day. But at night they always seemed to have the energy for at least one dance. That was when I’d asked him about the wagon on his table.

“I painted it,” he’d told me. “It was my first home.” And that was al he’d say. But I spent every moment I could spare staring at it, memorizing the red mini-caboose shape of it that was highlighted by gold-painted slats, a four-square window, and a green roof, al of which rode on ridiculously spindly tires with red spokes. Every time I saw it I thought I understood a little better the motherless boy who’d traveled so far inside that tiny, beautiful rig.

I’d been gazing at that wagon when my twin had said, “I think I can find him,” had risen from the love seat, and left his fiancé’s side to stand beside the mantel. He’d real y caught my attention when he grabbed the mantel with both hands, like he needed the help to keep from fal ing.

“Dave?” I asked.

He stared at the single white earthenware pitcher Vayl had set above his fireplace, like if he eyebal ed the wedding party marching across it long enough he might be able to make the flower girls dance right off the container. When he turned around everyone in the room went stil .

My brother is a commander. That alone causes people to sit straight and shut up. But as I looked around the room, at Vayl and Cole on the couch beside me, at Bergman and Raoul in the wing chairs and Cassandra on the love seat, at Aaron uneasy in a chair brought in from the dining room, even at the animals curled up beside the cold fireplace, I knew they shared my dread. It wasn’t just the fading scar on Dave’s throat, an unwelcome reminder of the fact that he’d spent time in the service of a necromancer. It wasn’t only the no-bul shit gleam in his piercing green eyes, or the fact that his time in the desert had hardened him into a lean, muscular warrior worthy of the utmost respect. It was also the haunted look in his eyes, and the way his lips pul ed against his teeth, like he could barely stand the taste of his thoughts.

Cassandra stretched her arm over the back of the love seat, her gold bracelets clinking musical y as she reached for him. He nodded to her.
I’m okay
. Then he said, “If I have to talk about this I only want to say it once. So listen up.” I watched his broad chest rise with the breath he scooped into his lungs. “Ever since I was a zombie—”

Cassandra jerked toward him, every one of her ten pairs of earrings shivering in alarm, but he held up his hand. “No. I’m not gonna put pretty words on it. My soul might not’ve been al owed to move on, and that’s why Jaz and Raoul could ultimately save me”—he stopped and bored his eyes into each of us, like he could bury his gratitude so deep we’d feel it every time we woke up—“but basical y I was just a slave with skil s. Anyway, ever since then, some weird things have been happening.”

Suddenly he couldn’t look at any of us. His eyes skirted the room and final y landed on the window, where Vayl had used a couple of bright red shawls in place of curtains. He went on. “I talked to Raoul about it, and he told me it’s a function of my Sensitivity. How, when people agree to serve the Eldhayr, the circumstances of their deaths burn themselves into their psyches. And that they often develop special talents related to that.”

I thought about some of my own abilities—to sense violent emotion, to cause sudden and deadly fires—and immediately understood his point.

He went on. “During my last mission we were tracking an imam who’d reemerged from hiding after fifteen years and was, yet again, recruiting suicide bombers. We had a pretty good source in the area, but when we went to him he told us the guy was dead. We said that was impossible. Our psychics insisted that he’d been active as recently as the previous month. So he showed us a picture of the body. He even said he could take us to where it was buried, because it had become a local shrine. So we went.”

Dave realized his hands had started to shake, so he clasped them behind his back. At that moment I realized how much he resembled our father, Colonel Albert Parks, the ultimate marine.

Strong. Determined. And wounded. Why is it you never recognize the pain in your parents until it’s too late?

I wanted to cal my dad. And, more urgently, go to my brother. Lend him a shoulder. But I knew he needed to stand on his own. Just speaking, knowing I heard without judging, would push him closer to healing than anything else I could do at this moment. So I sat without blinking as he said, “The grave had the right name, and the date of death lined up with when we’d last lost contact. But our psychics are the best in the country. So we dug for proof. Halfway to the body I started to feel sick.

Because the corpse was
talking
to me. Whispering foul suggestions from inside its rotting skul . It patted my head and kissed my cheeks like a loving father, and then told me how if I kil ed al the men in my unit I’d live forever in heaven with seventy virgins at my service. At the same time I felt like the sound was coming from outside the corpse. So I fol owed it, you know, mental y. I traveled through every dead donkey and half-eaten carcass I could find along the path it took until I saw a fifteen-year-old boy preaching in this imam’s name.”

“Instant reintegration of the soul into a new body,” Raoul murmured. “That never happens. Unless the dying imam cal ed upon some powerful y foul magicks.”

“I have no doubt about it,” Dave replied. “This kid
knew
he was the reincarnation of the old imam.

He was able to access this guy’s wisdom and direct his evil plans without admitting it to anyone. You wouldn’t think older guys would listen to him, but his charisma was already off the charts.” Dave nodded. “I’ve convinced my superiors to let us go after him next.” Cassandra’s hand clenched into a fist. An instant of intense worry aged her face by twenty years.

Then it passed and she smiled up at him proudly as he said, “I think I can do the same sort of thing for you, Vayl. If we visit your son’s grave and I can reach down to his body, I’l be able to communicate with what’s left there. It should be able to lead me to its new form.” Bergman spoke up. He’d maintained a stoic silence since arriving to find Astral displaying a new symptom at the edge of the front lawn. He’d given her the ability to transform so that she looked like a little black blob. That way she could slide under doors and into air vents when the situation cal ed for extreme secrecy. Except now she’d begun morphing randomly, sliding into molehil s and snake holes, kil ing the inhabitants and piling up her prizes at the front door like UPS packages from Stephen King’s nightmares.

Now he said, “I’m not sure it’l be that easy, Dave. I mean, I’m sorry to bring up a painful subject, Vayl, but when were your sons kil ed?”

“Seventeen fifty-one,” he said shortly.

“Nearly two hundred and sixty years ago,” Bergman said, doing the mental calculations so quickly I’d have wondered if he’d inserted a computer chip in his brain if I hadn’t heard him whine about wanting one on a regular basis since col ege. “Plus we aren’t general y aware of our connections to our past lives. That would make Dave’s search even harder.”

“Dude, you have a way of crushing a whole room and then promising us Disney World,” said Cole.