Undead for a Day (27 page)

The vampire beast was waiting for Izzy.

Le Stryge’s
features were highlighted by the moon’s blue-white sheen. It had a wide forehead, hollow cheeks, and a bearded chin. Two pointed horns crested its head. Above its shoulders rose the ridges of a pair of motionless wings.

Le Stryge
’s muscled arms and misshapen body would have been daunting to anyone. As a recruiter of souls, she was a level above a lot of Underworld citizens, but Izzy had never witnessed anything like Notre Dame’s vampire up close, and with energy animating it.

What did it want, exactly? What had brought the creature to life?

Without Tristan, the light of angelic presence had faded, as though the angels had gone after Tris to keep him in sight. Without the cloud team, anything was possible on the gallery, even monsters hunting other monsters for recreation. Add All Hallow’s Eve into the mix, when nearly every indiscretion was excused, and there was no way to predict what this night would bring.

She couldn’t go back inside the cathedral. The building was already shaking out that warning. The only way left to her was forward, into the open air and into the presence of that
thing.

Closing the door behind her, Izzy set her stance as wide as her skirt would allow, and stared at Notre Dame’s notorious bad boy.

“What brings you here?” she said, meeting its eyeless gaze. She knew souls, and this guy didn’t have one. A hollow black hole took up its insides. No heart. No beat. Not so much as a single pulse gave it the impetus to move. Yet it did move, taking a step toward her.

Izzy held up a hand in warning. “He gets a free pass. You’re in violation of the agreement if you think you can muscle in. Someone will slap you down for that if they notice.”

The horned beast didn’t speak, and took another step. Before she could register what was happening, or swerve to avoid what was coming, the malignant creature struck her, knocking her off balance with a heavy hand.

Izzy hit the wall behind her hard with one hip, and winced. Though she wasn’t completely human anymore, she still felt pain.

And didn’t like it.

“You’ll pay for that, too.” Her voice was dangerously low as she wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth and stared at the stain on her hand.

Le Stryge
made a strangled sound that was more like a rattle echoing in a bottomless well. Its sockets trained on her.

“That just makes no sense at all,” Izzy said, her insides beginning to writhe.

The wings on the monster’s back separated with a horrible crackling sound that made Izzy’s heart skip several beats.

“It’s too late,” she warned, watching those wings shudder. “Tristan says he will find his replacement tonight. It’s time for his game to end. He knows this. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it if he is right. You’re tied here, to this roof, as I am.”

Another slight movement from the area of the monster’s back drew her attention.
Le Stryge
turned its head to gaze at the wall overlooking the square beneath the front of the cathedral.

“You’d break like glass if you attempted a jump,” she said. “Besides, even I am forbidden to follow him tonight, and I’m a legitimate part of this.”

The cathedral’s vampire wasn’t deterred by her warning. It seemed to pay no attention to her at all as it trudged toward the wall with awkward, lumbering steps.

Izzy experienced a moment of real fear. She had never seen
Le Stryge
move. Had he been awakened tonight in order to ensure Tristan’s failure? If so, it meant that the Underworld was well aware of what might be about to go down, and attempting to hedge its bets.

Izzy’s mind began to race. Breathing became more difficult.

What made tonight different from all the rest?

She couldn’t see around this question, and wanted desperately to look for Tristan over that wall. Seeing him wouldn’t produce an answer, though. And the ugly vampire beast was in her way, searching the night as if it had X-ray vision.

With trepidation, she watched the monster throw open its arms and leap to the top of the wall, crushing the network of iron chain links meant to keep people from falling over, its weight causing the wall to crack.
Le Stryge
seemed to suspend in the night for several moments, as though the laws of gravity somehow had failed to include a giant lump of chiseled rock. And then it was gone.

Horrified, Izzy waited for the beings in the sky to offer up a protest. Thunder? Lightning? Those celestial search lights?

Nothing happened.

She squeezed her forehead with both hands to control the ache behind her eyes, and grew angrier by the second.

She took one more deep breath. Her sweater tore apart at the seams. The fabric of her skirt exploded in a flurry of orange flames that fell away in wisps of floating ash. Her skin began to glisten with a reddish tint, as if lit from within. Her blonde hair lengthened, darkening as it grew to a deep midnight black. Each shiny, silken strand curled around her body as if it were alive and breathing.

Gritting her teeth, Izzy muttered an incantation that made the sigils carved into her skin that covered her body from neck to knees start to dance. She rolled her shoulders. Her back muscles stretched as she hopped onto the wall in the awful monster’s wake.

She raised her arms. Her wings unfurled. Eight feet from tip to tip, and as black as the night, the great ebony wings flapped once, moving the air with a sound that mocked the angels.

Izzy took one more look at the sky, and then at the blood staining her hand. Beneath her breath, she said to the horned beast that had struck her, “You’ll be sorry for that, you bastard.”

Then she jumped.

*

Tristan didn’t run. Not yet.

There were people strolling along the Seine, enough of them in costume on All Hallow’s Eve to discount attention to his monkish attire. Lovers walked hand in hand and kissed on street corners. He thought of Izzy, regretting what he had left behind, hurting on a level he didn’t dare acknowledge.

They had been denied the chance to simply
be
in love. They had reversed the order of relationships by indulging first in a few rounds of incredible sex, without much of an introduction, instigated by the powerful attraction that had brought them together on a platform high above the Paris streets.

He had stumbled upon her on that damn gallery on a night like this one, and would never get the picture out of his mind. Izzy was on her hands and knees, naked, and gasping for breath. He had been carried away by the sight of her, almost knocked senseless. He hadn’t heard the door closing that left them together on the gallery.

He knew now that she had just been cut loose from her spelled stone existence in order to, like the rest of the Underworld, have a night of freedom on their horrid holiday. What had transpired after that had set into motion the beginning of this vicious game.

In that first moment, though, and as startled as he had been to find Izzy there with no clothes, so beautiful and sad and seemingly vulnerable, his heart had quickly been affected. She had looked up at him with luminous, pleading eyes. He would have done anything to help her. So he did.

Those images of the past stayed with him as Tristan walked toward the bridge spanning the Seine. He strode ahead, not feeling completely alone. His nerves were firing in a strange way. His spine tingled with unusual apprehension. A glance up at the sky showed nothing, no cause for concern, but he stopped walking when he felt the brush of a feather on his face.

The touch was as startling as it was sensual, bringing with it the erotic fragrance of Izzy’s scent when she wasn’t allowed to follow him or leave the gallery. Was this Izzy, though, or someone else trying to mess with him? Some
thing
else?

“I know you’re here,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

No reply came, but he hadn’t really expected one. The shadow world was seldom direct. Though the game had rules neither side could openly break, secretively breaking them was another matter.

“Let me get on with it,” he said. “There’s no reason to void the whole challenge when it’s tough enough already.”

Still no reply. No further touch on his face.

“All right, then.” He moved on to the street bordering the water, keeping a watchful eye on the cathedral across from him which, supported by its flying buttresses, looked like a ribcage of rearranged whale bones.

The sight chilled him after all this time.

Around him, things had changed in the past year. Energy flowed through this section of Paris with notable vigor. New smells wafted in the air. He would have liked the time to explore, and always thought that same thing. People came from all over the world to sample what Paris had to offer. For him, though, random moments and brief glimpses, just hours at a time, made the changes seem radical and extreme. There was never time to assimilate what he saw.

He had until dawn to find a replacement for his position on the gallery. It had to be a willing replacement. The odds of this were never good, not even decent. Without an Izzy, naked and on her knees, who would agree to living between dimensions, separated from time and the rest of the world?

Yet he had this feeling. A feeling that tonight was the night that special someone would step up to release his soul from its stone purgatory.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about this.

Tristan fielded another sensation as well. Something that shouldn’t have followed him was following. Maybe more than one. If he slowed down, or stopped long enough to actually catch his breath, deviating in any way from the direction of the challenge, would the night’s razor-sharp talons tear him to pieces? If he failed to return to the gallery, and continued to run, would Izzy be the one sucked back into stone?

Unacceptable.

He kept putting one foot in front of the other. Nevertheless, he knew this night was different from the others. Shadows were all around, and he was getting better at recognizing them. He had to keep moving whether someone turned up in his path, or not. Slowing is what hurt most. Thinking about how long he had been on that gallery and what would happen next didn’t do anyone any good.

“I have no real regrets about saving her and stepping in,” he said to the invisible entities stalking him. “I would do it again.”

As if on cue, a figure stepped out from beneath the darkened overhang of a building, slowing Tristan’s progress toward the cafés where the people of Paris gathered. A wave of fetid air reached Tristan that made his muscles clench. He whirled in time to see a blur of black on black speed past him, nearly too fast to catch by sight.

The air grew tighter, seeming to close in on him from all sides. Though Tristan could see the street, it had gone fuzzy. The edges of the buildings ahead grew vague. When he looked more closely, the figure had disappeared.

He was breathing harshly. His chest felt tight. A great weight was descending, landing on his shoulders like a leaden blanket to beat him down. The air began to pulse and withdraw, as if he stood inside the world’s massive, working lungs. He wasn’t sure what was going on, or what to do.

“Come out,” he finally said. “Now.”

Another blur moved past him, leaving in its wake the smell of wet fur and malevolence. He couldn’t follow the motion. There was no way to see where the blur had gone.

It came again. Tristan felt a warm breeze, then the impact of something sharp hitting him. He made a surprised sound. An ooze of liquid trickled down his right arm that carried with it the odor of fresh blood.

Damn if skin hadn’t been slashed open.

Hand on the wound, he said, “You always win, so what’s with the massacre?”

“Tris.”

The word was just inside his hearing range. He glanced up, his pulse already responding to Izzy’s voice with a sharp rise in tempo.

“Run, Tris. Run now,” she said.

Tristan felt more pressure building around him as he looked for Izzy, expecting her to appear, seeing nothing. He wondered if the angels she said hovered around him tonight would snatch him up because of the illegal attack, and if the contest would finally end on a technicality.

“Tris!”

“Okay, Izzy,” he said.

He took off, pushing through the thick, stagnant air by pumping his arms. He felt Izzy nearby. Not only was she with him, she had spoken to him, breaking a whole bunch of rules. Why? In order to counter the mistakes of the others?

She whispered to him in a tone that sent live sparks through his body with the molten force of a prolonged sexual climax.

“Run, Tris.”

Tristan did as Izzy suggested, knowing she wouldn’t have interfered if she hadn’t believed it necessary, and that because she had, the threat to him had to be great.

But as he ran, he suddenly, perplexingly, wondered if he really was the object of this challenge, after all, or if there might be something else going on that he would never be able to understand. Something involving Izzy herself, maybe?

He didn’t recall pursuing this line of reasoning before, and wondered about that, too.

“Don’t look back, Tris.”

Izzy’s voice was no more than a sigh in his ear. Trusting her, he headed for the closest side street, wanting to get as far away from the cathedral as possible, if only for awhile, and sensing that the shadows were hot on his heels.

In a flurry of layered ebony feathers, Izzy swooped down to the level of the street, searching the darkest spots for hidden eyes. Dirt and debris swirled in her wake.

If
Le Stryge
was here, she couldn’t see the creep. She was aware of other creatures darting in and out of the moon’s shadows that were more or less usual fare for All Hallow’s Eve, when they were free to frolic openly, according to some ancient treaty between the higher and lower realms.

Maybe, she had recently supposed, that was why mortals dressed up in costumes on this night–in hopes of fooling Hell’s creatures into leaving them alone.