Vamped Up (25 page)

Truth be told, she could’ve informed Slade over the phone, but there was no way he was putting another life in jeopardy. Ruan was planning on going down in flames and he sure as hell wasn’t taking Dylan with him. Besides, the Crimson Council was the safest place for her to be right now—surrounded by Primuses and guards and the entire haven army at the ready.

“What about Dante?” Dylan asked, shooting a glance at the clock that Ruan matched.
Two a.m.
“You said someone needed to wait for him here.”

Ruan pulled his cell out of his pocket as he pushed through the swinging double doors into the lobby. “I’ll text him. He’ll probably get to the fort before I do.”

Nothing was going to stand in Ruan’s way now. Not even Death.

Chapter Thirty

“Hell is empty and the devils are here.”

William Shakespeare

D
YLAN ADJUSTED
M
ATHILDA
on her belt for what felt like the hundredth time as she stepped into the Crimson Council chamber. She wasn’t exactly dressed for a council meeting—jeans and a cardigan and a droopy ponytail hardly screamed elegance and respect—but now was hardly the time for formalities.

The place was erupting. Primuses were gathered around the center table, all standing, yelling at one another at the top of their lungs. They debated the true meaning of the scrolls, whether the source that deciphered them was, in fact, credible, and what means should be taken to safeguard their race. Guards sat rigid-backed, poised and proper, at their Primuses’ sides, hands folded over the table before them. General khiss members stared on, breathless, from the rows of seats lining the edges of the room. The large meeting space was softly lit by red and yellow bulbs hanging from wrought-iron sconces in the corners. Usually, the aura was warm and comforting. Now, though, the dim glow was ominous and gloomy.

A draft swept through the room as the cherrywood doors cinched behind her, sending chills scattering beneath her cardigan.

She caught Slade’s eye. He was standing stoic at the front of the room, arms folded across his chest, his massive frame dominating the space between two wide cathedral columns. His lips quirked into a tiny smile that he squelched down when the volume in the room rose. Dylan slid into a vacant seat in the back, watching the action unfold. She’d already called Slade on the way, filled him in on Ruan’s plans and the new information found in the scrolls. Now, she waited to be called to testify what she knew. What she saw Ruan decipher with her own eyes. If she’d be called at all. From the loud nature of things, the Primuses already had plenty to discuss.

Hiram double-fisted the table, leaned far over, and glowered at the other Primuses. “This unruliness will no longer be tolerated in my house!” He searched the fuming, pinched faces of the fellow leaders. “We must come to a consensus to move forward and that is the end of it. Like it or not. Slade has informed us, through his own reliable source . . .” His appreciative gaze slanted to Dylan, then back again. “ . . . what Savage plans to do to bring the End of Days upon us. We’ve heard the rumors. We’ve seen the encrypted scrolls. Now, thanks to Ruan’s memory returning, we know the facts. How can we stand by and do nothing when our elders are faced with extinction in the face of the greatest evil we’ve ever known?”

Justus, a Primus wearing a smoked red gown with sleek midnight-black hair and overly tanned skin, stood from the table, glaring at Hiram through narrow eyes. “Since when is word-of-mouth accepted as fact?” he growled. “You cannot expect me to mobilize my haven army at the whim of one of your amnesiac guards.”

Hiram’s eyes glowed silver. “Do you expect my haven army to be as useless when Savage and his death shades come for you and yours?”

Justus hissed, baring long, thick fangs. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s reality.” Hiram swept his white hair behind his ears and met the eyes of each Primus around the table. “Remember your votes tonight. It may seal the fate of the khiss you represent. We need a consensus and we haven’t the time to wage war amongst ourselves.”

Silence met him head-on.

“Yet I implore you, fellow Primuses,” Justus began, “to remember that Savage is only targeting elders and a very specific mundane who means nothing to us. He has not threatened a single vamp from our khisses. If we engage him in whatever battle he has planned,
we
become the targets.” He paused, and as Hiram started to refute him, Justus roared, “I vote we extinguish the bond that links our havens to Hiram’s. If he wants to kill innocent members of his khiss in the name of some encoded prophesy, so be it. But he shouldn’t be able to call an emergency meeting and ask us to ride the speedway to hell with him.”

“Let us vote on the matters at hand,” Hiram said, and they all rose on cue. One by one, they filed out of the room into an antechamber on the far left, their dark robes skimming the hardwood floor. The Primuses’ voting chamber had always been a mystery. Only accessible through one heavy-duty and very soundproof door. And only standing Primuses could enter—an ancient maware ensured that. But that’s not what made the antechamber mysterious. It was the fact that even though Hiram informed Dylan time and time again that the council debated in the antechamber for far longer—and much more candidly—than they did on the floor, they only ever seemed to be gone a few seconds. It was almost as if the moment the last Primus clicked the door shut, it opened again and they filed out—a difficult consensus forged.

This time was no different.

They were in and out of the antechamber in seconds. Dylan remembered Meridian’s maware of time warping, of being lost in the vortex of her apartment, and wondered if Meridian had played a part in the mystery behind the impossibly quick vote. The last elder in—the first elder out—held his balding head high, his worn and crooked hands clasped in front of him.

Dylan focused on Hiram. On the long sag of his chin. On the disappointed pallor of his face. She didn’t need to hear the consensus to know he’d lost. There’d be no meeting of the minds. At least not tonight. Which meant Ruan was on his own against Savage with God-knew-how-many death shades in that fort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hiram began, all anger and impatience lost as if he’d had a lifetime behind the antechamber doors to come to terms with the vote. “Our haven armies will remain in place until further notice.” Turning, he aimed his words at Slade. “Our havens remain joined, requiring all votes for one haven to proceed into war, but what one man does of his own accord will be his foolish fortune alone.”

Slade nodded ever so slightly. If Dylan hadn’t spent the last few months memorizing every move her lover made, she might’ve missed it. He looked in her direction, his coal-black eyes searching hers, winked—the cue to bail—and slipped out the narrow door to the right of the great room. He got the message Hiram was subtly relaying. And now he was going to fight beside Ruan and bring Eve home. Dylan rose, crouching so as not to garner attention, and slipped out the back door.

There was something she had to tell him and it couldn’t wait another minute.

G
RIMACING, HOPING HE’D
learned enough about death shades to possess one, Savage peeled open his eyelids.

He was no longer in the fort, focusing hard-core on seeing through the “eyes” of the death shades he’d sent out into the city; well, his body was still in the fort, of course, but his mind was far from it. With a single, slow blink of his eyes, Savage was huddled in the air vents at San Francisco’s haven, waiting to descend into the Crimson Council’s chamber . . . or rather, Savage corrected, the death shade he was possessing at the moment was in the vent.

He’d done it! He could sense the raw, pulsing energy of the death shades. And make them bend to his will.

From behind the blurring veil of a death shade’s shadow, Savage made out the faint outline of vamps sitting around a large table in the center of a great, and very gray, room. When the blurred shapes finally settled into one distinct image of what could only have been the Crimson Council meeting at his former haven, Savage realized one death shade must’ve been more dominant than the others.

And now he was looking down on the council meeting from up above, from the scope of a single death shade.

He could feel the deep vibrating energy of the death shades around him. Knew they were slinking down different air vents that all led to the same place. Making their way to the council’s chamber to solidify the attack. Drafts of cold air settled on the back of his neck as a massive clump of death shades slithered behind him, ready to drip through the slats in the vent and ghost around the room.

From below, Hiram pounded on the council chamber. It sounded like angry thunder to his death shade’s senses. Two Primuses who gave off greedy, sulfuric scents rose to their feet, yelling in rich octaves too deep and muffled for Savage to decipher. They had no idea what was hanging above their heads, clinging to the vaulted ceiling like thick black swags.

His new army.

Savage urged his death shade forward, oozing through the vent slats, then reforming into a darker, more concentrated form than it was before. It hung to a wide, wooden beam overhead, awaiting the perfect moment to make the Primuses eat their own words.

And to think . . . they’d determined he wasn’t a threat!

With bat-like squeals of attack, mobs of death shades flooded the chamber. They circled the walls, sinking deeper into the pit of the room, hissing from within.

Khiss members watching the council meeting scattered. Death shades swooped in from all directions. Circled their feet. Spiraled up their bodies. Wiggled smoky fingers of death into their lungs. Screams for help only fueled the death shades’ enthusiasm. They spiraled faster and faster around the room like supernatural vultures picking off dying prey. They dipped low, swooped over covered heads. Wisps of their shades thinned, reaching low into the chamber like fingers of rain separating from clouds, tickling the earth. Primus guards screeched in defeat as their souls dusted to the Ever After.

Savage’s death shade hissed in early victory.

The Primuses had huddled protectively in the center of the room, their backs to one another, their mouths agape in horror. Savage’s death shade gurgled as it oozed from the overhead beam and floated over the ground before them. It circled the Primuses, pushing them tighter together. Corralling them for slaughter.

Savage set his fogged sights on Hiram. Beneath the death shade’s veil, Hiram looked proud. Fearless. Strong. As Savage fought the urge to laugh, his death shade hiccupped. The death shades swarming the chamber blurped in unison. Did they just react to his emotion or was he imaging the connection, making it more intense than it was?

His death shade thickened, began to harden on its edges, and bubbled to an almost solid form. Savage urged the mob of death shades forward to stifle the souls of every Primus in the room. In unison. Warm fingers of death reached out at once to claim the greatest prize of all . . . vengeance.

“W
HAT DO YOU
need me to do?” Dylan asked, as she leaned against her Jetta’s driver’s-side door. She fumbled through her purse for a Bloodblaster. Damn her diet all to hell. She needed chocolate on her tongue like she needed air in her lungs.

Slade stood back, crossing his arms over his chest, the leather of his coat gleaming in the moonlight. “I won’t leave Ruan out there fighting this fight alone. If the council won’t step in, we’ll get Eve ourselves.”

“Right.” She tossed a mini-morsel into her cheeks, then fumbled through her purse for her keys. Slade silenced her hands by cupping his over them.

“You’re not coming—it’s not safe. I don’t want Savage within a hundred yards of you.”

“But you said—”

“I was just making sure you made it to your car all right. I have to stop by the khiss artillery room and check out some heavier ammo before joining Ruan.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He kissed her quick, then strode to the haven’s back door. Before Dylan could argue, Slade swung the heavy door open. Sky-opening, toe-curling screams escaped into the chilly night air.

“The council,” Slade breathed.

He stormed back into the haven and jetted down the hall, leaving Dylan struggling to catch up. When she weaved around the last corner and stood before the entry to the council’s chamber, she was slammed back by khiss members fighting to see into the room. It was total chaos. They looked more like salmon swimming upstream, slapping against one another to reach the doors first, rather than friendly khissmates.

Slade weaved through the mosh-pit-like crowd, yelling at them to get back and give him some room. When he finally disappeared inside the great room and the crowd peeled back, Dylan stared into the wide open space of chamber. Slade stood in the center near the circular table reserved for Primuses, his gaze dragging along the floor . . . but no Primuses were in sight. Dylan walked hesitantly inside, not sure what would have the entire khiss struggling to catch a glimpse of the inner chamber floor. A chill settled in her bones as she descended past row after row of chairs. She gasped as she stole her first good look at the chamber’s center.

A sea of brightly-colored robes swathed the hardwood—green, blue, smoked red, and black. They were everywhere. They flared out in odd patterns, one robe touching the next, covering the floor until barely a wood plank could be seen between the fabrics. Dylan crouched down . . .

“Dylan, don’t,” she heard Slade say from a distance.

But she lifted the closest robe anyway—a black cloak woven with heavy fabric—and stared right into Hiram’s blank and lifeless eyes.

No . .
 .

Hands trembling, realization setting in, Dylan jerked her hand reflexively to her mouth. She scanned the room. They were dead. They were all dead. How was it possible for every Primus and royal guard to drop dead without so much as . . .

There was only one way. “Death shades,” Dylan gasped. “Savage.”

Slade stepped over and between bodies. “Every Primus within a hundred-mile radius was here tonight. He’s trying to create total anarchy in the havens. Stay here and run damage control with the khissmates. Calm them down. Gather everyone in the great room. Find out who’s unaccounted for.”

“Where are you going?”

“To track down the death shades. They’re still in the haven somewhere.” He stormed into the hall, scanning right and left, trying to decide which way to charge first.

“But we don’t even know what stops them,” she snapped, ready to follow his every step. He couldn’t leave her alone. Not anymore.

“I’m the only member of the Crimson Council left. Keeping our khiss running strong is now my responsibility.” He cradled her hands in his. “
My
responsibility, Dylan. Not yours.”