This Side of the Grave

  “Go back to your graves right now,” I tried again, this time desperation edging my tone. Still, they didn’t even slow in their movements, or seem to hear me at all. I’d pulled them from the other side, but just as I feared, I now had no control over them. My worst-case scenario was playing out right in front of me as I saw Vlad twist in a futile effort to get away from the Remnants that just kept right on devouring him, growing stronger from his pain and energy while he grew weaker.

  Then an idea seized me as I watched the flames on his hands. They did nothing to harm the Remnants, but they would sure as hell hurt me.

  “Vlad, hit me with a fireball,” I breathed. “Passing out last time was what severed my connection with the Remnants, I think.”

  It was worth a shot. If I was no longer connected to them, maybe they’d automatically go back to where they came from. I had to try something new. My commands were useless and Vlad couldn’t last much longer like this.

  “No.” The single word was filled with pain, but no less emphatic. “You’ll learn . . . to control them . . . if it kills me.”

  “It will kill you, dammit,” I snapped in growing panic.

  “Less bitching . . . more learning,” Vlad grated. Then he closed his eyes, as if dismissing me. “I know, I’m delicious. Nummy . . . nummy,” he muttered to the Remnants feasting on him. Fire continued to drip from his hands, but he didn’t send any of those flames my way. Terror and anger rose in me at the sight of the Remnants moving even faster through his body. They were growing stronger, gaining the energy they’d need to kill him, and he was letting them.

  “You’re going to die if you don’t flame me out of commission! Think of your people!” I yelled, growing desperate as nothing I did, even pulling on the Remnants with my hands, seemed to make them leave Vlad alone.

  At that, his eyes snapped open, emerald green and sizzling with both agony and resolve. “I am . . . so learn,” he rasped.

  I let out a scream of pure frustration. Nothing I said would convince Vlad to harm me. Not if he thought he was protecting his people by sacrificing himself.

  Fine. If Vlad wouldn’t deliver the blow that would take me out of commission, I’d do it myself.

  I curled my fist and rammed it as hard as I could into the side of my head. Grass met my vision as I knocked myself over, but one glance at Vlad revealed the Remnants still hadn’t budged from him. Son of a bitch. I needed something harder than my hands.

  A wide headstone caught my eye, an angel carved into the surface. I sent a mental apology to whoever’s grave it covered even as I also cast a fast prayer upward to please let this work.

  Then I ran toward the tombstone as fast as I could, my body bent, leading with my head like it was a red flag and I was a bull.

  Pain exploded in my mind. That wasn’t the only thing that shattered, judging from the shards of granite I saw when my eyes opened. I’d plowed right through the grave marker to land in the grass beyond. I shook my head to clear it, feeling blood running in a few thin lines down from my crown, and swung around to look for Vlad again.

  A sharp cry of relief escaped me when I saw all the Remnants had picked their heads up from him. They were looking at me, their deadly assault on him suspended. Vlad began to back away and they didn’t move to jump on him again, but kept staring at me in frozen expectation. For a stunned moment, I wasn’t sure what had done the trick. It wasn’t passing out; they were all still here. Was destroying a tombstone with my head somehow the magic word to them? But then, as I felt those wet trails edging further down my face, it hit me.

  Blood. That was their remote control. The Remnants had only appeared after Vlad bloodied my lip, just like they’d only appeared after Marie sliced her wrist with that little mini dagger in her ring. She must have cut herself with it again to draw them off when I wasn’t looking. That would have been easy; I’d been staring in horror at Bones more than focusing on her. The fresh blood from my head was enough to get them to stop chewing on Vlad, but it would soon heal like my lip had. I couldn’t let them turn on Vlad again. He couldn’t take much more.

  I didn’t bother taking the time to pull out one of my knives, but slammed my hand onto the jagged, sharp remains of the headstone, inflicting another deep laceration.

  “All right, you deadly little ghostlings,” I muttered. “Mama says go back to bed!”

  Chapter Twenty-­nine

  I shut the car door, leaning against it for a second, thinking that if life were fair, I could go upstairs and take the longest, hottest shower on record to help chase away the chill that still permeated every cell of me. Instead, we were back at the town house just so I could quickly change clothes. Couldn’t quite pull off my happy bar hopper disguise if I went out covered in my own blood.

  “You two are back early,” a dry voice stated.

  I glanced up to see Mencheres framed in the doorway of the town house. Vlad got out, shut his door a little harder than was necessary, and threw the Egyptian vampire a jaded look.

  “Car trouble,” he said, in a voice that dared Mencheres to inquire further.

  “You’re back a bit early yourself. Did you find anything interesting?” I asked, trying to divert his attention from the obvious fact that I was splattered in blood while the car looked and sounded fine.

  “Nothing Dave had not already confirmed,” Mencheres replied, with a slight shrug.

  I didn’t sigh, but I felt like it. Guess it was too much to hope that Apollyon’s address would be spray painted graffiti-style on one of the walls as an appeasement gesture from Fate after the night we had—and it was still early, by vampire standards.

  “Don’t be disappointed, Cat. I didn’t expect to find anything. That’s not why I went,” Mencheres said, opening the front door for us.

  My brows rose, but I went inside, figuring this conversation was best held somewhere other than on the small lawn. Vlad glanced at Mencheres with equal curiosity but also followed me inside. Once the door was shut, I gave a longing glance at the couch but stayed standing.

  “Are you going to tell us why you went, then?” I asked.

  “Because even if I didn’t expect to find anything new, it would be foolish not to make certain,” Mencheres said. He leaned against the door frame, the picture of nonchalance. “Besides, if I hadn’t left, then you wouldn’t have attempted to exercise your new powers, would you?” he added.

  “You knew?” I blurted, not sure which stunned me more; the fact that Mencheres was obviously aware that I had the ability, or that he’d let me try using it without telling Bones on me. “Did you, um, know because you saw it?” It would be great if his visions were back up to full strength again . . .

  The look Mencheres gave me—and Vlad, too, I noticed—was pointed. “No. But I, too, heard you this morning, so I didn’t need a vision to predict what Vlad would do if the two of you were left alone long enough. People’s natures can be far more telling than even visions at times.”

  Vlad let out a chuckle. “You sly dog, you set me up! Here I thought I was pulling one over on you, but in reality, you were playing me like a chess piece.”

  Mencheres flashed him a grin that was full of mischief. I stared, never having seen the normally reserved mega-Master vampire with such a wicked, teasing expression.

  “You forget, Vlad, I’m the one who trained you in deviousness. Maybe in a few more centuries, you’ll be able to outwit me, but not yet.”

  Then he focused his attention on me and his expression returned to its normal seriousness. “You were obviously injured trying, but did it work?”

  I glanced at Vlad before speaking, noting the curl of his lip that said he’d rather not dwell on how well it had worked.

  “Oh yeah. Blood is the key. I should have known, right? It’s always blood with the undead. Vampires need it to feed, and it’s instrumental with ghouls, because a transplanted ghoul heart might be step two in making them, but it’s vampire blood before and after death that’s step one and three.”

/>   And blood was how Marie had gotten her powers in the first place, as a Mambo whose powers became permanent when she was turned into a ghoul. Looking back, it seems obvious that blood should have been the first thing I tried.

  Then again, my logic pointed out, Vlad hadn’t thought of it, either, and he has quite a lot more experience with blood than you. Maybe I should quit giving myself a hard time and just accept that only hindsight was twenty-twenty, not foresight.

  “We now know I can do it, but I feel like hell,” I went on. “I’m so cold my teeth would chatter if they still could. And I’m hungry enough that both of you are starting to look really, really good.”

  Vlad’s lips curled. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to remind you that this is just the leftover power talking and you don’t really want to cheat on Bones?”

  “Not that kind of hungry!” I gasped, eyes bulging that Vlad thought I’d just casually thrown out that I wanted him and Mencheres to double-team me. “I meant hungry like drinking you guys’ blood. Not hungry for . . . you know.”

  Without thought, my gaze flew to the areas in question before skipping away once I realized what I was doing. Then my cheeks actually tingled with mortification as Vlad let out a long, hearty laugh. Mencheres, more courteous, pretended to suddenly find something fascinating in the door frame, but I saw his lips twitch.

  “My dear Reaper,” Vlad said, still laughing. “Did you just check out our—”

  “No!” I interrupted at once, almost lunging toward the staircase. “I’m tired and still dazed from the Remnants and . . . fuck it, I’m taking a shower. I mean, not a cold shower, because I don’t need that”—oh Jesus, I was only making this worse—“because I am cold already, and I need to get hot. I mean, warmer. Oh, just shut up!”

  This as Vlad continued to laugh the whole time I went up the stairs. At least he seemed in a better mood after his near-death experience, even if his new cheer was at my expense. Arrogant Romanian. But considering I’d been responsible for Vlad’s recent brush with death, maybe he was owed a little masculine mockery. All things considered, his teasing was the least I could bear to make it up to him.

  As for Mencheres, well, here’s hoping he chalked that up to equality. He’d seen me in less than my underwear before, so if all things were fair, I was owed that glance.

  Besides, it had to be nothing more than a manifestation of the “future twinges” from her power that Marie had warned Bones about. In my right mind, I would never check out Vlad or—God help me!—Mencheres’s packages.

  And neither of them was wearing tight pants, so it’s not like I could discern anything specific, anyway.

  Once I was in my room, however, I didn’t jump right in to the shower. I pulled out my cell phone, pinpricks of conscience still needling me.

  “Bones,” I said as soon as he answered. “I know I just saw you this morning, but wow, do I miss you!”

  Three days later, I was on the couch, scratching my cat in his favorite spot behind the ears, when a faint tingle in the air made me look up. I’d gotten better at recognizing the telltale signs that said a ghost who was strong enough to get through my stinky force field of weed and garlic was about to pop up nearby.

  “Visitor,” I announced, my new way for giving Vlad and Mencheres a heads-up to stop saying anything possibly incriminating. To my knowledge, my order for silence to other ghosts had worked before, but no need to tempt fate by blathering about which bar we were headed to tonight.

  Not that it probably mattered. We hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any zealot ghouls since the night at the drive-in. Maybe having some of their group go missing spooked the other ghouls into avoiding popular hangouts. Or maybe the reason we hadn’t seen any of them lately was much simpler. All of Apollyon’s minions were being supplied with food, so they didn’t need to go out hunting for it. Still, we kept going out night after night. Dave said Scythe and the pack of ghouls who drew him into their group were still here. They had to pop up sometime.

  A shadowy form passed through the door moments later, still too hazy for me to make out any specific features. Then that outline of fogginess settled into a slim man with brown hair and early twentieth-century sideburns.

  “Fabian!” I said, my initial happiness replaced by fear when I saw the grimness in his expression. “Is Dave okay?” I asked immediately.

  “For the moment,” the ghost almost sighed. “But he’s thinking of doing something very foolish.”

  I stood up, my cat hissing at being jostled from my lap. “What?”

  “Letting himself get caught spying,” Fabian replied.

  Mencheres and Vlad came downstairs. I shot them a bleak look, already starting to pull on my boots. “We need to go get Dave, now,” I told them.

  “Is he intending to do this in the next hour?” Mencheres asked, putting a calming hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t believe so.” Fabian gave me a helpless look. “Dave doesn’t know I’m telling you. He made me promise not to, until he was caught. But I swore to you that I’d protect him, and I couldn’t betray that vow, even though I’m now betraying him by telling you.”

  “You’re not betraying him, you’re saving him,” I replied with all the emphasis of countless past bad decisions. “Sometimes, people think there’s no other option aside from sacrificing themselves, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Now, why does Dave all of a sudden think he needs to jump on a grenade for us? What happened?”

  “He was taken to an unscheduled rally last night where Scythe told everyone he was leaving Memphis because his work here was done. He urged his followers to remain here, staying true to their beliefs, because soon, their movement would spread enough that they could openly act against vampires.”

  “Fuck,” I moaned, to Vlad’s grumbled agreement. With every new city these ghouls went to, they continued to infect others with their hatred. Scythe might be higher up in Apollyon’s organization, but he wasn’t alone in his efforts to spread his leader’s paranoia. Worse, we didn’t know which area these groups picked to settle in next until vampire bodies piling up pointed the way, and by then, it was already too late. The old saying that the best offense was a good defense didn’t do much to soothe me when it came to a game with stakes this high.

  I didn’t know what Scythe’s definition of “soon” was as far as an open uprising. To the undead, “soon” could be weeks, or a few years to a decade. But whatever the time frame, I couldn’t allow him and Apollyon to meet that goal. Dave knew how dangerous that would be, too, which was why he was considering something as risky as deliberately getting caught.

  “Dave’s banking on being brought to an interrogator who might know where Apollyon is. So when you tell me, Mencheres, and Vlad where he is, we arrive in time to save him and nab the bad guys, right?” I asked.

  The ghost nodded miserably. “Yes.”

  Vlad’s brows drew together in contemplation even as I snapped, “No way.”

  “It’s an acceptable risk,” he insisted quietly.

  “No, it’s not, because they’d probably just cut off Dave’s head and run before asking him even one thing,” I shot back. “Apollyon’s people don’t need answers from Dave. What don’t they already know? They know we’re after them, they think they know where Bones and I are . . . they have no reason to keep Dave alive long enough for us to rescue him. If Dave weren’t being so idiotically noble, he’d realize that.”

  Vlad shrugged. “Then Fabian should return and tell Dave to start his confession with the fact that it’s not really you with Bones in Ohio. That should pique their interest enough to want to know more.”

  “It’s still too dangerous,” I gritted out.

  Vlad’s gaze turned hard. “One life risked to save thousands is not too dangerous. If you’re too weak to see that, then you have no business being responsible for any of the lives beneath you in Bones and Mencheres’s line.”

  “Really?” I swept out my hand, indicating the room at large. “Then why
aren’t you with those ghouls who wanted to blow my head off as a preemptive strike to end the war before it started? I’m only one life, after all. Wouldn’t my death take a lot of steam out of Apollyon’s war machine?”

  Vlad strode forward, green light spilling from his eyes as he grabbed me. “You are my friend,” he said through clenched teeth. “I haven’t many of those, yet don’t presume for a moment that I wouldn’t sacrifice you if I truly felt it was the best way to stop this war from happening.”

  He let me go just as abruptly, my shoulders still stinging from his biting grip. “But I believe Apollyon would move forward regardless,” he went on, spinning around to walk away from me. “He’d only claim you weren’t really dead, that it was a trick. And besides, now you’re of far more use to the vampire nation alive with your latest . . . ability.”

  I stared at Vlad. His back was to me, long dark hair still rustling from his rapid movements. It wasn’t his stated coldness about my life, or Dave’s, that made me sad as I looked at him. It was because, even hundreds of years after the loss of one life had admittedly devastated him, Vlad still couldn’t bring himself to admit that sacrificing a life should always be the last resort. Not the first, easiest option.

  “If there was no other way, I’d agree this thing with Dave was worth the risk. But we haven’t looked at all our options yet, so I say no. And if you still can’t see the value of a life, then maybe you should rethink being responsible for all the lives underneath you in your line,” I replied, calmly but with an undercurrent of steel.

  Vlad turned around, nailing me with a stare that should have backed me up several steps. It didn’t. I met his gaze with an equally hard one of my own. Hell no would I flinch or apologize when I knew I was right.

  “You will understand sacrifice much better when you’re older” was what Vlad muttered after several loaded moments of silence.