The Graves of Saints (27 page)

‘Give me the room, Commander,’ he repeated, glancing up at Song and then Allison. ‘All of you.’

Allison gave him a curious look but then she went to the door, opened it, and held it open for Metzger and Song.

‘You’re not going to tell me what you’ve got in mind?’ Metzger asked.

‘Answers,’ Octavian replied.

Metzger hesitated a moment, then shrugged and walked out. Song followed, keeping his weapon trained on Holzman until he reached the door, then stepping out quickly and closing it behind him.

Holzman uttered a low, sandpaper laugh.

‘You’ve really got them hopping, don’t you?’ the vampire said, his accent clipped and rough with the jagged edges of his Germanic lineage.

Octavian went and perched on the edge of the bureau just where Allison had been sitting moments before.

‘We’re going to make this quick,’ Octavian said.

‘You and I have met before,’ Holzman said. ‘You don’t remember? It was many years ago. You were like me, then. A blood-drinker. A taker of life. Your blood-father, von
Reinman, and I were part of the same coven, once upon a time. That would make me your uncle, in a way.’

Octavian passed his hand through the space between them and the air rippled and flowed, shimmering for just a moment with deep blue light. Holzman frowned at this display, sneered and opened his
mouth to continue, only to find that no words would come out. For the moment, at least, he was mute. His expression contorted into an ugly snarl and he bucked against the chair, pulling at his
cuffs.

‘I’ll make this quick because you’ve wasted enough of my time already,’ Octavian said.

The hatred in Holzman’s eyes warmed his heart.

‘You know who I am and what I’m capable of,’ Octavian went on. ‘Or you think you do.’

He held out his right hand, palm up, drawing the vampire’s attention to the tiny ball of sparking golden light that spun there like a miniature sun. Idly, he let that bit of magic spill
back and forth between his hands as if it were some kind of prop and he a stage magician about to perform a trick.

‘You know you’re going to die in this room, Holzman. They can slice you up, break your bones, do whatever they like, and you’ll keep silent just to spite them because you know
it’s over for you.’

Holzman’s mouth moved, lips curling back in disdain, but still he could make no sound.

‘There’s only one agony I can think of that might make you beg for an ending, make you willing to tell me what I want to know just to hasten the mercy of death. I don’t like to
think of it, honestly. This kind of thing is really distasteful to me. But you haven’t given me any choice.’

With a flourish of his hand, the golden ball vanished. Octavian slid off the bureau, studying Holzman, whose defiant glare had not wavered. The vampire expected him to remove the silencing spell
now, to offer him one last chance to reveal what he knew about Cortez and his coven. But Octavian had no illusion that he could intimidate Holzman into complying with words alone.

While the vampire watched, he closed his eyes, tapping both his own memory and the reservoir of magic that he had nurtured inside himself during his centuries in Hell. There were doors in the
human soul and inside the human heart that had to be unlocked to access the magic in the world. When Shadows shapeshifted, they reduced themselves to their component molecules, but in the space
between molecules there existed a substance – an ether – that made up the texture of magic. It was a part of all things, but not available to all things. To touch it, to manipulate it,
to master it required disciplined study, patience, passion, a natural affinity that existed from birth or the taint left behind by some profound supernatural experience. To know magic the way that
Octavian knew it was to
become
magic, to be the instrument rather than the musician.

Holzman had no idea what he could do.

Octavian exhaled, opening his arms, his fingers dancing in the space between them, sketching at the air. His lips moved silently, forming words in a language so old that even the residents of
Hell had no name for it. When the air began to turn gray around Octavian’s hands, it did not crackle with the static he so often associated with the magical power inside of him. No, it crept.
It seeped. It flowed and thinned and soon it slid like mercury away from his hands and extended a searching tendril toward Holzman’s face. The vampire twisted away, attempting to escape. He
tried to shout but was still mute.

‘Come on, Holzman, don’t squirm. One touch of this and the Medusa toxin will be gone from your system,’ Octavian promised. ‘You’ll be able to shift
again.’

The mage held out his hand as if that gray ooze were his puppet and he held its invisible string. Holzman whipped his head in the other direction, but could not elude the touch of the gray
tendril. Once it made contact with his skin, it was as if a balloon full of water had burst, but instead of splashing to the floor, that gray liquid flowed horizontally, soaking Holzman’s
clothes and spreading across his skin, giving his flesh an ugly gray hue, the color of week-old ashes left behind in the hearth.

The vampire stopped thrashing. Despite the strange coloration on his skin, he smiled, because Octavian had been as good as his word.

Holzman shifted to mist in the blink of an eye.

Octavian put up his left hand, already glowing a bright, fiery green, and an emerald sphere seared the air around the vampire in the very same moment. The cloud of mist drifted and spun and
roiled inside that sphere but the substance of the vampire Holzman could not escape.

‘Don’t be a fool. I told you that you would die in this room,’ Octavian said. ‘Your choice is only in how you die. Shift back. Now.’

Holzman did, reintegrating himself instantly. He was sitting in the chair once more, but no longer restrained. He looked gaunt and wild, his eyes a terrible scarlet, and he roared silently at
Octavian, baring his fangs and lashing out at the magic that caged him with deadly talons.

‘You look hungry, Holzman,’ Octavian said.

The vampire shook with fury and desperation. Saliva dripped from his sneering mouth. He seemed thinner by the moment. As Holzman reached out to claw at his cage again, he faltered and slid from
the chair, finding his limbs too weak to attack. For the first time, the hatred in his eyes gave way to dreadful confusion.

When he looked at Octavian again, the question in his eyes was clear.

‘Now we understand each other,’ Octavian said. ‘I’ve poisoned you with time, Holzman. With entropy. The toxin’s out of your system because it wore off. For me and
the rest of the world around you, only a minute has passed. For you . . .
weeks.
’

Understanding blossomed into fear on the vampire’s face.

‘You can’t possibly understand what I’ve lost,’ Octavian went on, grief stabbing at his heart again. ‘You don’t know what it means to love and cherish
someone. You’ve forgotten, if you ever knew. But it’s your misfortune that those joyful human parts of me have been torn away.

‘Cortez killed the woman I love. You know something, maybe not about her murder or even about his plans, though perhaps you do. But you know something I can use to get to Cortez, to find
him and destroy him and his entire coven. Now, you can play coy the way you were with Commander Metzger and my friend, Allison. But I know what it’s like to need the blood to live, I know
what it’s like when the hunger starts to eat at your insides and you feel yourself begin to wither, and it’s a hell of a lot worse than the cut of any blade or the blow of any fist. A
few minutes from now you will be weeping for death as if it were your mother. You tell me what I want to know, give me something I can use, and I will give you that death. Or you say nothing
useful, and I will leave you here to shrivel in upon yourself until you are little more than parchment and bones, and still you will be alive. I will make sure of it. Only hours will pass for me,
but for you it will be years of hunger gnawing at your soul.’

Holzman’s face had crumbled into despair. Octavian took no pleasure from it, nor did he feel any guilt. This was a monster who had been offered a decade’s worth of opportunities to
become something more and chose to remain a monster. His fate was his own choice.

‘Now,’ Octavian said. ‘One chance and one only.’

He passed his hand in front of him, the air wavered, and he released the vampire from the spell that had silenced him.

‘Speak,’ Octavian said.

‘I know only rumors,’ Holzman said, his voice an ancient rasp. ‘Things I have heard about places where Cortez has made nests.’

‘Tell me,’ Octavian replied. ‘And death is yours.’

Pollepel Island, New York

It started with the whistling of the wind, but it would be inaccurate to suggest that she had really heard the sound. Rather, she became aware of it, just as she became aware
of the swaying of the pine trees and the shafts of sunlight that sliced down through the clouds without truly being able to see them. She sensed them, building a picture in her mind as if she were
painting the world anew, bringing it to life on a blank canvas.

Alive
, she thought.

Yet the moment it crossed her mind she realized that was not likely. She sensed the world around her more as an idea than as anything tangible. Perhaps she was not alive after all. Could it be
that she existed now only as a ghost, haunting the world where others still walked and laughed and made love? Yes, she decided, it might well be that she was a ghost. But if that were true, how to
explain the strange feeling she had of strength? Of invisible muscles with which she felt, oddly, that she could reach out and take hold of the trees and the sun and the wind?

Yet beneath that feeling of strength was another, more disturbing intuition. She felt as if she were diminishing with each moment, as if she had just managed to wake from a deep, dreamless sleep
and if she did not hang on to wakefulness – let herself drift off again – she might vanish into that slumber forever, until nothing remained of her but the absence of dreams.

I feel
. . . she thought, and then faltered. The concept of identity had shocked her, but now that it had occurred to her she knew that it was right and necessary. Who was she? She must
have a name, of course, but she could not recall what it might have been. Though she did not dare to let go of the wind and the sun and the pine trees – or the deep, swift river she now
realized was below her – still she knew that there were other things beyond her present awareness that she needed to discover.

No,
rediscover
. For she sensed that they were things she had lost.

Fearful of that underlying feeling that she was slipping away with every gust of wind, she forced herself to focus inward, to think and examine. Instantly she was rewarded by other flashes of
awareness, and yet these were not visions of her present surroundings. They were memories. Horrible, horrible memories that made her want to scream – though she had no mouth – and
filled her with pain and fury that concentrated in a burning core that might have been her heart.

Images flitted through her consciousness of cruel men grinning as they hurt her, their vacant eyes as they held her down and forced themselves on her. She could feel them still, their fists
striking her ribs and breasts and face, the way the shorter one had choked her while he held her down and the way she had wept as her mind screamed for air. And she remembered the cold, calculating
eyes of the other, the one who had used her and plunged his fangs into her throat and drunk from her again and again. Eyes like a leopard’s. A true predator’s eyes.

Cortez
.

The name came to her like the whisper of the wind, there but not there, as if it were her own personal haunting. Hatred ignited inside her and those invisible muscles constricted, the burning
core of her tightening, solidifying, and more memories began to rush in, along with her own name.

Charlotte knew herself, then, and her rage burned even brighter when she realized that she had remembered Cortez’s name before her own.

Kill him
, she thought.
I’ve got to kill him
.

The need for vengeance erased all other yearnings. She understood what had happened to her, now, remembered coming to Bannerman’s Arsenal with Sergeant Omondi and the rest of the TFV
assault group . . . remembered that chamber beneath the ruins of the castle where corpses and explosives had awaited them. The explosion seared itself upon her consciousness, even as she began to
understand that she was drifting on the razor edge between life and death.

Nothing more than molecules, now, drifting apart, she had been flotsam in the maelstrom of reality since the moment of that explosion. Had she been caught in the same explosion back when she had
been a part of Cortez’s coven she would surely be dead, now. With no faith in their ability to exist in such a state, vampires who embraced the old ways would have drifted into nothingness,
molecules spreading out until they lost all cohesion and thus all awareness. It had, she realized, nearly been her own fate.

In the instant before the explosion she had begun to shift to mist, and perhaps that had helped her. But Charlotte felt certain it was fury that had kept her from being completely obliterated.
Now she stoked the flames of that rage and focused, trying to pull herself back together.

At first she felt no differently. Then, slowly . . . so slowly . . . she could feel herself stop drifting. Those invisible muscles began to knit together, the fabric of her existence rebuilding
itself, using fury as its mortar.

She was Kali, now. She was vengeance.

Charlotte had been following Octavian’s lead, sublimating the horrors that had been inflicted upon her. But being
this
. . . being nothing but thought and molecules . . . had
freed her from the fears and doubts of the flesh, and now she understood that her claim to retribution was just as valid as the mage’s.