White Winter (The Black Year Series Book 2) (3 page)

He ran through the anteroom, the labs, and the workshops, breathing steadily. He didn’t need to breathe at all in his current state, but it cut down on his blood consumption if he did. He made it from his room to the morgue in three minutes, only to be stopped by two werewolves guarding the door. They were in human form and looked like professional wrestlers moonlighting in the Secret Service.

“You can’t go in,” the left one said.

“I’m an enforcer. I can—”

“You’re a provisional enforcer,” the one on the right said, his upper lip curling in disgust, “and the Director said not to let anyone in.”

Jonas glared; the right one crossed his arms, but the left one had the decency to look embarrassed. Jonas, Eve, and Kieran had saved the Agency while Fangston had the “real” enforcers out on wild goose chases around the world.

“He’s a clan leader. Get out of his way,” Kieran said, gently pushing past Jonas.

Again, the werewolf with the sneer looked like he was about to speak, but Kieran grabbed the guard by the throat and held him against the wall, making a sound that was half bark and half growl. “Go ahead, Jonas,” Kieran said, his eyes glowing bright blue. “My friend and I need to have a chat about his manners.” The guard had gone limp, barely breathing and eyes wide. All Kieran had to do was change forms to put four-inch, silver claws through the man’s throat.

Slipping past, Jonas opened the white door with “MORGUE” stamped on it in blocky, black letters.

♘

He stumbled onto a windswept, grassy hilltop ringed by gray standing stones that looked sharp-edged and smooth, just starting to show signs of wear. A large, blue full moon hung in the sky, casting deep shadows across his path to the altar, a monolithic block of smooth stone with metal rings at each corner. Marcus Fangston, former Director and friend, now betrayer, was tied to it.

“Cito, antequam redierit, solvat me!” Marcus said, struggling against his bonds, the bloodied, steel cuirass of a legionnaire gleaming in the moonlight where it wasn’t marred.

Jonas didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear. He wanted Jonas to untie him. Jonas felt an almost overwhelming urge to help the vampire who killed several of his friends and put him in a coma, but he willed himself not to move.

“Libera me!” Fangston said. It hit Jonas like a shockwave. He locked eyes with Fangston, muscles straining, and deliberately took a step back.

Jonas’ mother stepped out from behind a standing stone, ink-black hair spilling down the back of a white robe, cinched at the waist with a simple, white cord. She placed a hand on Jonas’ shoulder as she walked past, and whispered, “Well done, Jonas.”

Fangston turned his attention to her, his jaw set, arms and legs taut against the ropes.

Alice walked over to him, drawing an iron sickle from her belt. It was dark-gray and uneven, except for the curved inner edge and sharp tip. She ignored Fangston’s increasingly urgent pleas as she cut the leather ties on the front of his armor, opening it segment by segment like someone unclasping their fingers.

Two months ago, this would have bothered me
, Jonas thought.
This should probably still be bothering me
.

The last steel lame peeled back, Alice covered her captive’s mouth with her hand, muffling his screams as she slid the tip of the sickle between his ribs and into his heart.

♘

Jonas took in the scenery while his mother washed the blood off her hands and forearms in a small pool of water at the base of the hill. Short grass carpeted the undulating terrain for miles in every direction, broken only rarely by small clusters of trees, dark silhouettes on the horizon.

The stone circle itself was ringed by a small berm and a ditch, where they now were. There was a small hill - his mother had called it a barrow - next to him and another on the opposite side. The world was still, devoid of traffic, voices, or even the ubiquitous electrical hum of society, the stars tracing silent arcs through the blackness with a brightness he’d never seen, growing up in New York. There are so many of them, he thought, not sure how to feel about it.

He saw Alice smile as she straightened, wiping her hands on a clean part of her robes.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

“We’re in Marcus’ mind, obviously.”

Jonas nodded. “I’ve seen nothing to indicate the Agency can teleport people to England.”

“You’d need a time machine,” she said. “Marcus was stranded here during Caesar’s first landing, before the Romans razed Jerusalem and well before I was born.”

“He’s that old?”

“Older. Marcus was several centuries old when he crossed the Channel for the first time.” She looked back toward the altar, her expression unreadable. Jonas had trouble understanding his five-century-old mother sometimes. He wondered if she felt the same way about Fangston.

She turned back to him and said, “What are you doing here, Jonas? It’s dangerous to be around him when he’s not sealed in. I posted guards.”

“Kieran and I talked our way past them. He made a strong impression on them.” He grinned.

His mother crossed her arms and waited.

“I was in my room and I felt a compulsion to come help him,” he admitted.

“I thought so. Stand still; let me take a look at you.”

She walked around him, tilting her head and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. In spite of his provisional enforcer status, he still felt like a kid around her. After making it three-quarters of the way around him, she stopped, swiped her hand through the air and something shimmered as if she’d parted a strand of golden silk.

“Empathetic link,” she explained. “Humans do it too, at an unconscious level.”

Jonas felt his face turn red.

Alice laughed. “You didn’t think you’d figured out all there was to being a vampire, did you?”

He clenched his jaw.
I knew enough to rescue you
, he thought, but he knew his plan had relied on Fangston underestimating him. If he hadn’t…

“You’re still young, Jonas, although you’re very powerful for your age. Subtlety will come with time.”

He sighed. “Yes, mother.” Viviane favored technique over strength as well.
Subtlety’s well and good
, he thought,
but I need to survive long enough to get it
.

The left corner of his mother’s mouth quirked upward, as if she’d read his thoughts. He was almost sure that wasn’t possible without him noticing, but he strengthened his mental barrier just in case.

“You’ve been annoying Viviane.”

Jonas crossed his arms. “She won’t train me. I had to do
something
.”

“Well, it’s working; she’s been annoying me. Is it so very important that you have to throw yourself into this right away?”

Jonas shrugged. He wasn’t comfortable, but he wasn’t going to back down either. “You’re the one who told me I needed to be worthy of the people I lead.”

She looked surprised. “So I did.”

You just didn’t expect me to follow through,
Jonas thought. Well, maybe he wouldn’t have, if not for the priest. He tried not to squirm while she examined him like a bug on a pin.

“Since you’re here, you’d might as well learn something. Come with me.” She turned, walking on the berm beside the ditch. Jonas hurried after her and, as he caught up, felt himself get dragged sideways and inward, like being caught in a riptide.

♘

His next step landed on a hardwood floor. He blinked. “Is that our couch?”

Alice sighed. “Why does everyone fixate on the couch?”

They were standing on a triangular chunk of their old living room, on the Upper East Side, complete with their couch and coffee table, and he felt a pang of homesickness. Jonas hadn’t been back to the apartment - back home - since Doris drained the life out of Eugene in front of him. Remembering the policeman and hunter’s death made him feel a little sick.

Alice stood next to him wearing a simple black dress. A fine tracery of light swirled around the black and gold rose pin she wore, like Frank’s ward or the phylactery Jonas kept around his neck. “Look at this, Jonas.” His mom had called over a floating screen that showed Fangston’s body still tied to the altar. She typed on a holographic keyboard, hit the enter key, and waved the screen away.

“You’re pretty high-tech for an old lady.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I read a lot. Look up.”

He saw a lot of dark. It wasn’t so much the absence of light as the absence of anything, except for a few faint glimmers, like feeble stars, that were arranged in a loose sphere around him and Alice.

“What is this?”

“It’s an abstraction of Marcus’ mind; a way of interacting with it at the most basic level. My design, if you were wondering.”

As he stared, three more pinpoints of light flickered into existence. When two of them were close together, a hairline of brightness linked them. There weren’t nearly enough to outshine the darkness, but he pictured what the space would look like with thousands or millions of the sparks circling around them.

“Each point is a part of his mind - a memory, or an experience. The brighter it is, the more he’s using it.”

“He’s waking up,” Jonas said.

Alice nodded. “Slowly. There’s no rule to it, but when a third to half of them are lit up and connected, Marcus will be conscious enough to speak.”

Jonas nodded. He hadn’t suffered as much damage as Fangston, but he remembered how fuzzy things had been for the first day or two. “And that version of him, on the altar, that was a guardian, right? One of these points?”

“A whole cluster of them, actually. Painful memories usually are,” she said.

“Then why did you destroy it? Don’t you want him to wake up?”

“It depends which ‘him’ you’re referring to. The centurion? My mentor? The man who took your father from us? Extinguishing a single point, or even a cluster of points, isn’t enough to stop him from waking,” she said, waving her arm at the sphere around them. “It could be weeks or months with all the damage you and the demon did, but
someone
is going to wake up. My job is to make sure they’re worth talking to.”

He suddenly realized his mother wasn’t treating him like a kid at all. She was sharing information, asking questions and expecting answers, as if he were a colleague. Jonas wasn’t sure if it was his recent battle for the Agency or her new post as Director, but he liked it. It made him feel like he mattered.

“Can’t you just read his mind?” he said, thinking of Fangston laid out on the slab.

She shook her head. “That would take too long, without knowing exactly what I’m looking for. The points are just information. The connections between them are what make up his personality. I can interrogate them, but we’ll only get individual pieces of the puzzle that way.”

He felt himself get pulled sideways again, and they were back in the morgue.

♘

“What are you wearing?” Alice said.

Jonas looked down and saw his worn t-shirt, sweatpants, and bare feet.
Of course they didn’t take me seriously at the door
, he thought. He tried to pretend nothing was wrong and asked, “Has he given you anything useful yet?”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, then she gave him a lopsided grin. It wasn’t comforting; it was more like she’d just remembered he was there against her orders and had stumbled on a way to punish him. “Mostly things I already knew, a few obvious lies and false trails… but there’s one I think I’ll have you look into, since you’ve shown an interest.”

CHAPTER 3

“And that’s how we were assigned this mission,” Jonas finished. Kieran was in the driver’s seat of the hearse, going exactly the speed limit on a two-lane highway. The winter wolf’s eyes constantly shifted between the non-existent traffic ahead, his mirrors, and the speedometer, hands at ten and two, and he did it all while managing to look relaxed.

The inside of the hearse wasn’t what Jonas had expected. There were only two seats, but they were wide and comfortable, as if they’d been designed with werewolves in mind. The dashboard had touch-panel controls, there were more gauges than other cars he’d ridden in, and the current speed was displayed on the windshield in bright red numerals. It was like being in a black, macabre spaceship.

After almost a minute of silence, Kieran said, “So you’re saying he tricked you into letting him live?”

“Maybe?” Jonas answered. Fangston had been unconscious when Kieran moved to finish him off. It would have been murder. “I probably would have made the same decision if he hadn’t.”

Another long silence.

“I can drive for a bit, if you want,” Jonas said.

“No, you can’t.”

Jonas looked at Kieran in surprise. For all his size and speed, Kieran rarely contradicted him. “Why not?”

“You’re too young.”

“I’m sixteen, and you’re not—”

“I’m eighteen, and I have a license if we get pulled over.”