Up From the Grave

  Once, not too long ago, I’d felt the same way about vampires. Despite the fact that each of them would murder me given the chance, I went over to Bones and touched his arm.

  “Don’t,” I said very softly.

  His mouth twisted, not the cruel smile he’d flashed when he took out the guards in the ceiling, but something wry.

  “As if you needed to say it, Kitten.”

  Then his gaze flashed bright green as he turned his attention to the terrified onlookers.

  “Unlike the bastards you work for, I don’t murder innocents, so if you weren’t directly involved in kidnapping or experimenting on my people, you won’t be harmed. Until then, don’t move or speak. Kitten?”

  I went over to them, glad to hear their heart rates return to a normal rhythm as his power convinced them they wouldn’t be murdered on the spot. Then I searched through the standing and the wounded. The man we sought wasn’t among them, but he was here. I could hear his thoughts, not to mention his heavy breathing.

  “There,” I said, pointing at the closed entrance to the elevation platform.

  Bones shut his eyes. Moments later, the steel door swished open, revealing the stained circular pad that, a mile or so up, led to the concrete igloo and freedom.

  Thanks to Bones’s power, the platform wasn’t operational at the moment. No human could climb those slick steel walls, either, so I wasn’t surprised to see Madigan pressed as far away from the door as he could manage, trying to hide but unable to escape.

  What I didn’t expect was the Desert Eagle handgun he had pressed to his temple.

  “Come one step closer, and I’ll shoot,” he warned.

  Caught off guard, I laughed. I’d imagined him saying lots of things when we found him, but that hadn’t been anywhere on my list.

  “Is that supposed to be a threat? Did you miss the part where we wanted you dead?”

  Madigan’s lips stretched in something too ugly to be called a smile. “Yes, but you want information more. Let me go, and you have a chance of getting it one day. Move another inch, and I’ll splatter what I know all over this wall instead.”

  For once, he didn’t sing anything in his mind, so I heard him loud and clear when he thought, Try me and see, Crawfield.

  He’d never get my last name right.

  I stared into his light blue eyes and knew he wasn’t bluffing. If we so much as twitched, he’d pull the trigger, and the power of that handgun would blow his skull to kingdom come. Did he know anything that I couldn’t find out by hacking into the computers here? Maybe, and that wouldn’t do.

  “Oh, Bones,” I said sweetly.

  Madigan’s eyes bugged as Bones said, “Already done, Kitten.”

  Then Bones walked forward with deliberate, taunting slowness. Madigan’s hand lowered from his head even though his thoughts screamed in protest. His frustration was a symphony to listen to as he realized he didn’t have control of his own body. I came forward, too. Smiling.

  Without a single advance thought to warn us, his jaw snapped. Bones lunged, digging his fingers inside Madigan’s mouth, but it was too late. Foam bubbled past Madigan’s lips, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then his whole body began to convulse.

  “No!” I gasped, recognizing the signs of cyanide poisoning. Seeing the half-dissolved capsule encased in a fake tooth that Bones swept out of his mouth was almost redundant. It must have contained a massive dose—Madigan’s pulse skyrocketed, then abruptly stopped.

  “No you don’t,” Bones snarled.

  He slashed his wrist with a fang and held it to Madigan’s mouth, working the other man’s throat to force him to swallow. Then he pounded on Madigan’s chest, trying to manually circulate the healing powers of his blood through him.

  It wasn’t enough. Crimson bubbled past Madigan’s lips, and his eyes became fixed and dilated. It happened so fast, he didn’t have time for a final thought. If he had, it would have probably been Fuck You.

  And he had fucked us. Frustration and denied rage frothed up in me. After all he’d done, Madigan had managed to escape even when we had him trapped and cornered. Anything about his backers and the results of his twisted experiments that weren’t saved in the computers were now out of reach forever.

  “Damn you,” I said in a voice choked from fury.

  Bones dropped Madigan and leaned back, giving the dead man a coldly calculated look.

  “He thinks he’s escaped us, but perhaps not.”

  Twenty

  Once they’d gotten the liquid silver out of Tate, he, Juan, and Cooper did a sweep of the facility, making sure more guards weren’t holed up somewhere waiting for their chance to attack. Denise still hadn’t returned with the missing child, but I wasn’t worried. Only demon bone stabbed through her eyes could kill Denise, and Madigan didn’t have any. Almost no one did. Demon bone was harder to come by than astatine.

  Dave, however, was with Bones and me. He stared down at Madigan’s corpse, his mouth compressed into a thin, tight line.

  “Normally, I’d enjoy carving up the bastard’s chest, but right now, the thought doesn’t appeal.”

  Bones tapped the large knife he’d confiscated from the compound’s operating room against his thigh.

  “Can’t afford to wait. With each day, the blood loses power.”

  Dave’s brow went up. “You raised me after I was in the ground for over three months.”

  “She forced a lot of vampire blood into you as you were dying,” Bones said, with an approving glance at me. Then he kicked Madigan’s prone form. “This sod barely drank a drop.”

  Dave let out a sigh of concession before pulling off his shirt and handing it to me with a sardonic smile.

  “You were there to watch this put into my chest. Guess it’s fitting that you’re here to watch it cut out, too.”

  “It was Rodney’s, then yours, so it’s a good heart,” I replied, preparing myself for what was to come. “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  Dave grunted. “And I don’t want his, but here we are anyway.”

  So saying, he accepted the knife from Bones and knelt next to Madigan. Instead of undoing buttons, he sliced through Madigan’s shirt, exposing the older man’s pale, gray-furred torso.

  “Any trick to this?” Dave asked, resting the sharp tip over Madigan’s chest.

  Bones let out a slight snort. “No, this is the easy part. Putting it back properly is where you need delicacy and precision.”

  Dave drove the blade through the center of Madigan’s chest. Then he hacked away a section of rib cage, exposing the former operative’s heart. A few slices later, and Dave was holding it up like a grim trophy.

  “Would’ve sworn it would be black,” he muttered.

  If evil left a stain, it would have been, but Madigan’s heart looked like everyone else’s. That didn’t mean I wanted closer contact with it, yet when Dave extended it to me, I took it. As unsettling as this was, it didn’t compare with what was coming.

  Dave handed the bloody knife to Bones and visibly braced.

  Bones didn’t hesitate. He shoved it to the hilt under Dave’s rib cage. Then, just as quick and brutal, he cut a space wide enough for his hand and plunged that in next. Harsh noises escaped Dave’s tightly closed lips, but he didn’t scream. I would have, if it were my heart being cut out of my chest. Repeatedly, yet those ragged sounds were the only indication Dave gave of how much it hurt, let alone the mental trauma of seeing Bones withdraw his heart from his chest.

  “Now, Kitten,” Bones said in a clipped tone.

  I handed him Madigan’s heart and took Dave’s, placing it in Madigan’s open chest cavity. Then I wiped my hands on my borrowed lab coat, which was now more red than white. In the short time it took to do that, Bones finished with Dave, who staggered as he backed away.

  “You need to eat,” Bones told him. “Ther
e’s plenty here, so have at it, and remember—raw will mend you faster.”

  He wasn’t referring to a ghoul’s usual meal of uncooked butcher cuts. I chided myself for my instant flash of nausea as Dave left to follow those instructions. He couldn’t help what he needed to survive, and as Bones had pointed out, there were lots of dead soldiers to choose from. Besides, Dave’s part in this might be finished, but ours wasn’t.

  “Bring me two,” Bones said. He knelt next to Madigan’s body, arranging the parts inside with skill born of practice.

  I left the elevation shaft and went to the other room, where the compound’s employees waited with obedient silence. Then I selected two of the healthiest-looking and led them from the group. Before they saw the interior of the elevation shaft, I stared into their eyes with my gaze lit up.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I told them in a resonant voice. “You won’t be harmed.”

  If I hadn’t done that before I led them inside the circular room, they would have been pants-pissing terrified at seeing a body with its chest carved open and a vampire leaning over it while cutting his own throat. Hell, it made me antsy, and I’d seen the same years ago when Bones raised Dave as a ghoul. Changing someone into a vampire was downright prissy-looking by comparison.

  Once Bones had drained a couple pints of his blood into Madigan’s chest cavity, he sat back. Quickly, I led the man and woman over. He drank from each of them and returned to his grisly task of forcing more blood out of him and into Madigan’s gaping chest. Since he didn’t need my help for this, I led the two donors back to their group. They’d be a little woozy, but otherwise fine.

  Before I could return to the elevation platform, I ran into Tate.

  “We have a problem,” he stated.

  I glanced around warily. “More guards?”

  “No, we took care of the stragglers,” he said in a dismissive way. Then his tone hardened. “I’m talking about software. Turns out the Dante machine wasn’t the only self-destruct mechanism.”

  I groaned. “You don’t mean . . .”

  “That Madigan had an emergency kill switch that flash-fried every memory stick and hard drive in here?” Tate supplied darkly. “Yeah, I do. Not even cell phones and tablets escaped. Everything’s toast.”

  I fought the urge to bang my head against the nearest wall. No wonder the smug bastard had said that if he killed himself, we’d never discover his secrets! Incineration machines. Laser nets. Software self-destruct devices. Madigan had been paranoid to a fantastic degree to install all of these safety measures in this facility. Who, or what, had he been trying to protect?

  At least we might still be able to find out.

  “All isn’t necessarily lost,” I said, nodding at the open elevation platform behind Tate.

  He turned, watching as Bones flooded Madigan’s replacement heart with vampire blood in an attempt to bring him back as a ghoul. If he’d drunk more of it before he died, his transformation would be inevitable after switching his heart with a ghoul’s and reactivating it with vampire blood. But Madigan had swallowed only a few drops of Bones’s blood at most. Would it be enough?

  I hoped so.

  Finally, after Bones refitted Madigan’s ribs over his heart and covered that area with more blood, he stood up, running a weary hand through his snow-white hair.

  “How long before we know if it works?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “He’ll rise within a few hours or stay dead forever. Either way, we need to leave. A distress signal could have been sent when our attack began, so we’ve stayed too long as it is.”

  True, and we didn’t need the added complication of dealing with reinforcements while waiting to see if Madigan came back from the grave. But before we went anywhere . . .

  “Has Denise found the child yet?” I asked Tate.

  Before he could respond, a feminine voice beat him to it.

  “She found me,” Denise said, sounding shell-shocked.

  I turned, my eyes widening when I saw her. She’d shifted back to her own appearance, and her neck and mahogany-colored hair were drenched with fresh blood. The medical scrubs she wore were bloodier, too, and she had a large new hole in them right around her heart.

  “I tried to warn you,” Dave called out from farther behind her.

  “You should’ve been more specific!” she shot back, annoyance replacing her shock.

  Tate shook his head. “This is my fault. A couple weeks ago, I told Katie that if she ever got the chance, she needed to escape and kill anyone who tried to stop her.”

  “Kill?” I repeated in disbelief. “She’s a child, Tate.”

  The look he gave me was pitying. “In age only. I told you that you didn’t know the half of what Madigan had done. Well, she’s the half.”

  “She’s more than half,” Denise replied dourly. “That little girl snapped my neck as soon as she saw me, then cut my throat when I got up after that, and then impaled me with a pipe she ripped off the wall when I got up after that! Needless to say, after that last one, I stayed down until Homicidal Goldilocks left.”

  I stared, my mind refusing to accept what Denise said even though I knew she wouldn’t lie. The auburn-haired child I’d glimpsed couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She also looked to be less than half of Denise’s weight. How could she have the strength to do all that, let alone the resolve to be that merciless?

  “Bloody hell.” Bones sighed. “She’s it, isn’t she?”

  “She’s what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the idea that a fifth grader had whipped my supernaturally unkillable friend’s ass in three different, lethal ways.

  “The culmination of all of Madigan’s work,” Tate said in a steady voice. “Katie’s human, but she’s also part vampire and part ghoul, and Madigan raised her to be a killing machine.”

  Twenty-one

  Katie wasn’t in the underground facility anymore. Tate followed her scent and discovered a secret shaft between the walls that led straight up to the surface. The thick metal plug over it had been kicked off. It was too narrow for an adult to fit through, so it might have been a ventilation shaft, once upon a time when this facility was a bomb shelter. But to a slender child with a double dose of inhuman genetics, it would have been a relatively easy climb to freedom.

  Once topside, the ponds, lakes, and surrounding wetlands dissipated her scent enough to make it untraceable. Then the only footprints Katie left ended in a shallow canal, so we couldn’t find her that way. It was still daylight, too, which meant we couldn’t risk doing an aerial sweep. Something man-sized flying above the McClintic Wildlife area would fuel Mothman rumors for decades, and we couldn’t risk hanging around until after dark to do it then.

  We’d have to come back another time to search for her. Superhuman or not, Katie was still only a child. She shouldn’t be too hard to find.

  Once back in the compound, we determined that the surviving employees weren’t directly involved in Madigan’s cross-species experiments and replaced their memories of the day’s events with a new version. Then we left them topside in a concrete igloo with instructions not to leave it until dawn. If a distress signal hadn’t been sent, we wanted the extra time to get away.

  Then we went back underground and torched the rest of the facility. My DNA was on file with these people, and I didn’t want to leave more of it as proof that I’d been involved in the destruction even though I’d be the first, second, and third guess for Madigan’s shadowy backers. That’s why I was calling my mother as soon as I had a working cell phone. Madigan might have been bluffing about her being at our old house in Ohio, but if he wasn’t, I wasn’t about to test his drone strike threat. If we were ridiculously lucky, Madigan’s backers would believe the cover story we implanted in the survivors’ minds: an internal malfunction triggered the Dante machine’s explosion, which ignited other flammable gases in
the compound and resulted in a fiery chain reaction.

  It was a plausible theory unless someone bothered to autopsy all the bodies.

  Madigan still hadn’t woken up yet. The delay wasn’t unheard of, Bones told me, but it didn’t bode well for his chances of rising as a ghoul. Most did within minutes, as Dave had. Maybe Madigan had managed to escape us after all. If so, I could only console myself that he wouldn’t escape God.

  So, blood-spattered and weary, the seven of us emerged from the igloo that contained the secret elevation shaft. Spade was waiting nearby since Fabian gave him the all clear to enter the wildlife area. The ghost had been overjoyed to see we were all alive and well since, like me, he hadn’t known that my arrival with my husband’s corpse had been a setup.

  That was something I intended to address as soon as I was alone with Bones. Right now, we had to walk out of here without getting stopped by reinforcements, then we had to search for a pint-sized, multi-species pre-tween who might be the deadliest thing on two legs.

  What we didn’t need was to encounter a group of young, wannabe cryptozoologists who were wandering around the preserve swapping Mothman stories.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, right there I saw something,” a freckled boy wearing an “I want to believe” tee shirt was saying as he pointed at a sealed igloo.

  He stopped talking when he saw us. The three girls and two boys he was with at first stared, then giggled nervously.

  What happened to them? Is that blood? raced through their thoughts.

  I was about to start mesmerizing the group when Denise spoke.

  “You’ve got to try zombie larping,” she said to them. “It’s the only way to live-action role-play.”

  “Ah.”

  The freckled boy nodded approvingly as he took in my blood-soaked lab coat, Bones’s ripped, bullet-riddled clothes, Denise’s bloody medical scrubs, and the guys’ equally red-smeared outfits. The fact that Tate had Madigan’s body flung over his shoulder probably added to his air of authenticity. Then the boy frowned when he saw Spade’s immaculate white shirt and pressed, tailored pants.