Beyond the Night (23 page)

Charles lay in a grave-size pile of dirt, half of his hairless head, one eye, his nose, and part of his mouth the only part of him visible.

Lay? Or had become, his body swallowed by and rooted in the dirt?

So . . .
Charles's voice in Rob's head again.
This is what that son of a bitch Dominick did to me. Hell. Utter, reeking, incomprehensible hell. Do you wonder I want to kill everyone in sight? But—Rula will do for the moment. It will give me monstrous relief to cause someone else to suffer.

Rob swallowed his hate, his nausea. “Can you move at all?”

Not at all. Can you?

A blast of sound rocketed through Rob's head and rooted him to the spot.

If I could, I'd be smiling. I haven't had a chance to practice all my skills yet. It was enough to take down half of London the other day.

Rob felt Charles releasing him.

Where's Rula?

“No Rula.”

I must have Rula.

Rob heard a thud, and then Rula's voice: “I'm here.”

“You're crazy,” he whispered. “You didn't need the ax. He can't hurt you. Look at him.”

She looked and nearly gagged. A distended, wild-eyed, and hairless head buried in the ground almost like a head of lettuce in a garden.

Rula, my dear.

She made a move to go to him, but Rob caught her arm. “Don't.”

I'm so lonely.

So plaintive, it disconcerted her. This wasn't Charles. It was and always had been a homicidal maniac who subsisted on blood and guts and the love of killing.

Only now, he had someone else to do the dirty work. Renk. Poor stupid, mindless Renk.

She felt the whisk of a bat wing against her cheek.

Ash on his shirt.

This was where, this was why, this was meant to lead her to both Renk and Charles. She felt paralyzed, not knowing what to do.

The stench was nearly killing. So was seeing Charles brought to this, and she fought feeling any sympathy for him when he was surrounded by death dirt and human bones.

Nothing had changed except the type and depth of his powers. And his taunting. He loved his words, his nearly supernatural power. He had an audience now, but that didn't mean he wouldn't kill Rula and present her to Dominick just as he'd always vowed to do.

His yellowed eye fixed on Rob.
You don't have the guts to kill me.

Instantly Rob swung the ax and embedded it in the dirt not three inches from Charles's head. “You
are
going to die.”

Impressive.

“And again—” Rob swung again and clipped Charles's forehead. Charles howled, as blood flowed from the nick, in tandem with an unearthly shriek coming from above the nightmare lair.

And then, a heavy thud.

Rob and Rula whirled—and there was Renk, a body in his arms, already torn to shreds because he'd fed first. But now he was bringing it to his master to suck what remained of the blood and guts from its shell.

It was another woman, her heart torn open, bite marks all over her naked body, one of hundreds of women, hundreds of bodies, that Renk, her twin, her other half, her brother, her blood—hundreds of bodies as evidenced by the pile of bones, by Charles's very existence—her
brother,
brain-dead and used and abused by this ghoul-head of a creature who was no longer human—

All those women, she thought, her blood rage building as she watched Renk drop the body right on Charles's head, where he could begin his monstrous biting and sucking to feed his worthless brain.

And he watched, her brother. Just sat on the pile of dirt that had been Charles's body and watched, and guided, and took—

The horror consumed her, nearly killed her.
Never again. Never ever again,
she thought wildly, as she swung the ax without conscious effort; she swung and caught Renk in his ribs, and she swung again and hit his shoulders. And again, and she sliced his neck. Blood flowed copiously as she swung one more time and she cut off his head.

His lifeless body listed; his head, streaming blood, rolled; Charles howled; Rob bashed aside the body Charles was feeding on and swung to kill—cleaving Charles's head in two, not caring that blood spewed everywhere; he kept swinging and swinging until he finally chopped it off altogether.

The death sound echoed throughout the whole of London—a deep yawling that ricocheted off buildings, Big Ben, Parliament, the Palace. It sounded like the devil dying. All the devils under Charles's psychic command. It sounded like the end of all things.

And it sounded like a blood-drenched Rula sobbing as she dropped her ax and dropped to her knees.

Rob grabbed her. “Don't.” He looked at Deklan and Naik, who were still in shock at such close-range, vicious violence.

“We have to get her out of here.”

“We have ropes,” Deklan said, gathering his wits. He called to Zekka to toss one down, then he and Naik climbed up, then pulled Rula first and Rob after, out of death's hole.

“Done,” Rob said as they shifted the cover over the hole. “Let's shovel all the dirt we can over that cover. No one else will ever come now.”

He turned to find Rula staring above them as they worked.

Senna and Dominick floated there, watching impassively.

“They're going,” she murmured, her voice hoarse with emotion.

“They're leaving me. They saw, they know. They want us to take Lady Augustine's house. They—”

She broke off as they heard a ruffling sound, like an umbrella being opened, and Senna and Dominick suddenly both disappeared.

A moment later, Rula felt the brush of a bat wing against her cheek.

No, two bat wings touched her, one on either cheek.

She reached up to touch them, but they were gone, vanished forever somewhere beyond the night.

She would never get the gruesome picture of both Charles and her beheaded brother out of her mind. She had done that—she'd killed Renk, she was a murderer, a monster.

The thing she'd sworn never to be—a killer.

She rocked back and forth in anguish. How did you wash that out of your soul? How did Rob do it? Rob, who was equally culpable of murder, and who seemed to slough it off like dead skin.

Maybe it was just like that for him.

“I'm a murderer,” she moaned.

“You're a savior,” Rob contradicted her. “Or do we need to count the bodies in the servants' quarters to justify what you did? That's probably only a portion of the women Renk murdered week to week merely to sustain himself. Rather, let's count how many lives you've saved now that Renk is dead.”

“Even my brother?”

“Hardly a brother. And Senna and Dominick? You said they saw, so they knew. They came to you. They were tacitly saying you did the right thing.”

“They're gone forever. They stroked my cheeks.” Tears again, so hard to control. Her whole family gone forever, one way or another.

Rob nodded. “They did care about you. Hold that to your heart, Rula. Because it was inevitable they would succumb to their nature. And now they'll walk through eternity together.”

He waited a moment before he added comfortingly, “And while we won't have eternity, we'll have each other.”

Her Vraq family cleared out Lady Augustine's town house, but Rula was adamant that she would not live there. She still had nightmares of swinging the ax, breaking her brother's skull, chopping off his head, blood everywhere . . . how did the Vraq live with themselves? How, how, how? And how could she even have feelings for the man who'd disposed of Charles with such impassive violence?

The problem was, she didn't want to admit she had those feelings for Rob. They were there, separate and apart from anything else. And they were overwhelming.

She pushed them away and hunkered down with Mirya.

She refused to see him, but she kept remembering what he said:

We'll have each other.

“What could you have done otherwise?” Mirya kept asking her.

“Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing.
My brother, my
twin,
killed that woman, he gave her to Charles. And all those others—all the bodies, the bones—and he wouldn't ever stop—I had to . . . I
had
to . . .”

But in the aftermath, nothing seemed to justify something as savage and reprehensible as beheading her twin brother.

It was like beheading herself.

“Our Vraq family will live at Lady Augustine's town house,” Mirya told her a couple of days later. “Everything is cleared out and away. Nothing remains of what was, even to the furniture.”

“I can't live there,” Rula said. “I've seen too much. I can't go there.”

“Then you stay here until you're ready.”

She'd never be ready, Rula thought. Killing their enemies had solved nothing. Vampires still roamed. The Vraq still killed. People still died. Nothing had changed with Charles's death, except the minions of the Keepers had all died when Charles's brain ceased functioning.

She still didn't know how she could ever lead a normal life.

“No life is normal,” Mirya said. “Every life has troubles, death, and sorrow. Every life has good and bad. The obstacles may be different, but humanity suffers in its own way just the same. So someone might be poor. Someone might be the victim of an accident. Someone might be a vampire hunter. There is no difference.”

Rula still couldn't see it. She went out every day to work her magic with her fortune-telling and palm reading, making up positive futures, making people happy.

This was no life either. She felt restless and fretful. She missed Rob. But his life was centered around killing, and she didn't want to kill ever again.

“You will be in a situation sometime again where you will have to make that choice,” Mirya told her.

“Not if I stay away from the Vraq.”

“How can you?” Mirya asked gently.

Rula didn't know. Every day, among the crowds, she searched for Rob, she tried to discern who might be a vampire.

But neither Senna or Dominick had had any telltale signs that they were vampires. They'd led a double life, simply and easily, until she and Renk were born.

How many others were living like that?

She grappled with that question every day. The Vraq were self-appointed vampire hunters. They had no constraints, they operated outside the law; they were guardians of the people, fighting a supernatural enemy who had the ability to hide in plain sight.

Somebody had to.

Did it have to be Rob? Or her?

“I am going to live with the Vraq at the town house,” Mirya announced several days later. “Surely that can't be a surprise,” she added, seeing Rula's shocked expression.

“I never thought . . .”

“This is my family now.”

“Not me?” Rula asked in a small voice.

“I'm not needed now. You're ready to make your own way. So, here—” Mirya dug into the pocket of her dress and produced a huge wad of pound notes. “The money Dominick gave me all those years. I saved it for you.”

Mirya set it on the table. “For you. For a different life, if you so desire. It is a lot of money.”

Rula could see that. All that money could buy her clothes, a better place to live, a life with no vampires.

No Rob.

Would there be a life if she wasn't constantly looking for vampires?

She blinked back her tears. “I think I'll stay here.”

“So you see—it
is
time for me to leave.”

“Right this minute?”

“Right this minute.” Mirya had beside her a drawstring bag, which contained what there was of her possessions. She opened that up and removed something and handed it to Rula.

“A dagger?”

“A silver dagger. Silver traditionally kills vampires.” Mirya tied up her bag again. “Or, more practically, for protection while you're alone. And now, I must go. They are expecting me.”