The Damned (30 page)

“No one in my family knows about me,” Aurora murmured as she sat at the master’s feet. They were in his vast library. Many of the books he had collected had been destined for burning by the Catholic Church. He also had a round globe and a telescope—marvelous things.

She and he had been playing various card games with the
baraja española
, the traditional Spanish deck. Then the message from Paris had arrived, and Aurora had grown too melancholy to concentrate. The French were cutting off the heads of the nobility, and an Abregón had died. But who had mourned for Aurora?

“No one remembers me,” she went on.

“Your name is cherished by those who matter,” Aurora’s master replied. “Like . . .
him.”

He beckoned to the figure paused at the threshold, and Sergio Almodóvar strolled into the room. Aurora brightened, glad to see him, and he bowed over his leg to her, a courtly gentleman.

The three of them were wearing the latest in fashions. Aurora was in a simple white gown adorned with a red collar and a wide red sash. Sergio wore tight breeches, leather boots that came up to his knees, and a long, slashed coat over a simple, high-necked shirt. Their master wore a monkish robe, as he always did, this one black velvet embellished with tiny bats of scarlet satin. His hood threw his features into shadow, but Aurora had memorized them. She imagined herself his adoring mirror; he had but to look at her to see how beautiful and perfect he was.

It was October 15, 1793, and just the day before, the French revolutionaries had beheaded their queen, Marie Antoinette. People were terrified—righdy so, as France had become gripped in what they called the Reign of Terror. Alas for the Abregón family: One of the French queen’s maids had been an Abregón, and she had died along with her mistress. But she had not been beheaded with the guillotine. Her instrument of death had been a rusty ax.

“I’m
glad
everyone has forgotten me,” Sergio declared, bowing deeply to their master and planting a kiss on Aurora’s mouth. Sergio’s lips felt warm, although of course that couldn’t be so. Sergio was a vampire, as she was. Yet she could not deny the heat. The passion.

“Being forgotten is like being dead,” Aurora said.

“No,
mi amor
, it’s not,” Sergio insisted. “I owed thousands in gambling debts. If anyone knew where to look for me, I’d be in debtors’ prison.” He pulled a face. “For
eternity.”

Aurora laughed. Tonight she loved Sergio. A week ago she could have driven a stake through Sergio’s heart for the way he’d treated her at the master’s annual masked ball. But Sergio had wooed her—again; serenaded her at her balcony—again; brought her handsome men to drain—again.

“So. Today my two favorite children are not quarreling?” the master asked. “Today they are happy with each other?”

“Ecstatic,” Sergio declared, lifting Aurora up in his arms. “As happy now as we were furious with each other.”

“Ah, you’re such Spaniards,” the master said.

“A Spaniard knows the ways of love,” Sergio whispered into Aurora’s ear, and Aurora smiled brilliantly at Sergio.
“¿Con permiso, Maestro?”

Their master chuckled.

“One moment,” the master said.

Sergio and Aurora both looked at him.

“There is a thing called a Hunter,” the master informed them. “One who goes up against such as we, for the purpose of murdering us.”

The two lovers stared at him. “One who
knows
?
”

“Sí.
There is one here in Madrid.” He made a show of gath ering up the playing cards. “Whoever brought this Hunter to me would receive a great reward.”

“Then put me down, Sergio,” Aurora declared. “I have work to do.”

They chased each other out of the library, laughing.

L
AS
V
EGAS
A
NTONIO,
A
URORA, AND
E
STEFAN

It was time. Aurora could feel it. She looked at Estefan, who had been enjoying Antonio’s suffering almost as much as she had. While she had been working on Antonio, Estefan had been weaving spells to break the vampire’s spirit, to increase his bloodlust, to help him forget who he was and why he had chosen the path he had.

And they were on the cusp of victory. Antonio was starving, half mad with hunger, and he was exhausted and delirious. Estefan helped along the rage that she engendered in Antonio, with more spells. And now, now for the finishing touch.

“Is she ready?” Aurora asked, looking at the back of the girl Estefan had lured into the hotel suite. He had bewitched her, in every sense of the word.

“See for yourself,” Estefan said smugly, spinning the girl around so Aurora could see her. The glamour was perfect.

“I think it’s time,” Aurora purred. “Antonio’s going to get exactly what he wants.”

Antonio existed in a haze of cutting and healing. And blood, always the blood. He wasn’t certain of his name, or where he was. He’d lost track, and he wanted only to die. But somehow he knew that wasn’t an option.

“Antonio,” a voice whispered, and he jerked hard on his chains at the sound of it. It was
her
voice.

He blinked, looked.

It was Jenn. Her dark auburn hair curled around her face—dark eyes, small mouth, lips parted. Her breath wafted against his lips, and he smelled the vanilla-scented soap she used, the lemons in her hair. Fresh blood.

Her heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s.

“Oh, Antonio,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. But we got you out. You’re safe.”

“Ay, amor,”
he said through cracked lips. Then the beating of her heart washed over him like a tsunami, and he was drowning in the scent of her blood. A tantalizing fragrance that raised such a need in him that it was like holding a drowning man six inches beneath the surface of the water. He was helpless against it.

“No,” he muttered.

“It’s all right.” She placed her fingers over his mouth. “Father Juan is working magicks to heal you. So is Skye.”

“No time,” he said. “Kingdom.”

“What?” She cocked her ear close to his mouth. Her aroma was a storm on the waves.

He couldn’t fight it. He didn’t want to.

“Jenn, get away from me,” he whispered, the words spilling out in Spanish.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?” she asked in a small voice.

He jerked, suddenly aware that he was sitting in a darkened room and that she crouched beside him, his vampiric eyesight tracing the gauzy white nightgown she wore. There was a red satin ribbon at her throat, and she wore a scarlet sash. She reminded him of the runners at Pamplona, the poor humans fleeing from the Cursed Ones. From his kind.

“You can’t believe what I’ve gone through to get to you,” she said. “But we’re together now. You’re safe.” She reached out her arms to him, the sleeves of the nightgown pulling back from her wrists. Her delicate blue veins pulsed just beneath the skin.

“No. Run,” he said. “Get away from me.”

Her eyes glittered; her lower lip trembled. “Are you glad to see me?”

“Por supuesto.
Do you need to ask?” he whispered. His fangs lengthened. He reached his hands toward her, wishing for his chains.

Smiling, she slid into his embrace. He turned his head away from her, trying to shut his jaw. His fangs pierced his lower lip, and he began to bleed. Shaking, he licked at the dead blood, but it was like saltwater to a man who was dying of thirst.

Unaware of his desperation, Jenn lay her head on his chest. He kept licking the blood off his lips, ordering himself to be satisfied with it. To let it be enough.

But it wasn’t.

“Get away from me!” he shouted.

Still she clung to him. With a roar of anguish he pushed her away. She sprawled backward, onto the floor. Antonio cried out, realizing what he’d done, falling to his knees beside her.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked brokenly, but before he knew what he was doing, he had grabbed her shoulders, pinned her beneath his weight, and sunk his fangs into her neck.

Ecstasy blazed through him. More. He had to stop. More.

A joy he had never known before filled his veins; rapture squeezed his heart, released it; squeezed, released. He soared, alive, nineteen years old and dreaming of the future. He drank. It was sweet, wonderful. He clung to Jenn, feeling as if she were being poured into him like water even as he was pouring into her like communion wine. United, in the way of vampires.

Grateful, he drank deeply, lustily.

Then, as her heart slowed, he realized what he was doing. What he had done. And he pulled away.

Or that was what he would have told himself later, if the girl beneath his fangs had not died. But the truth was that he kept drinking. He drank her dry. And when her heart stopped, he sank his fangs into the throat of another girl, who appeared beside the dead one.

He couldn’t stop himself from killing that one, either. By the arrival of the third girl he didn’t care; by the fourth he was glad.

He had never felt so liberated in his life. So free, so new. He threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t remember his own name, how he’d gotten into the room of dead girls. What did it matter? All that mattered was blood. And there was a world of it for the taking.

“I’m going to hunt,” he told the vampire with the black hair. “I’m going to
kill
.”

“Good,” the vampire told him, as she led him to the window of her palatial suite. With the click of a remote the glass slid away, and the fresh air of the desert night washed across his skin.

“My city is your city, Antonio,” she urged him.

So that was his name? He liked it.

“Before you go,” said a voice behind him, “can you tell me, how is Skye?”

Antonio turned. A tall Spaniard faced him. He had a beating heart, and yet he wasn’t exactly human. Almost a vampire, but somehow not.

“Skye?” the man prompted.

“Don’t know her,” Antonio replied.

Then he left to hunt.

L
AS
V
EGAS
T
EAM
S
ALAMANCA
M
INUS
A
NTONIO;
T
AAMIR AND
N
OAH

Jamie gaped at Eriko as she stood in the hotel room she shared with Jenn and Skye. She looked amazing and ridiculous all at the same time. Three days had passed since she’d run into Shell Ghost Shogun at the magick show and he had insisted on a private concert. He’d made it clear that no was not an option. He’d been cheated out of enjoying some time with the Vampire Three before. He would not be denied the company of the “Vampire One.”

After conferring with Jenn, Eriko had set a date—that Friday—and she, Jenn, and Skye had shopped for the proper clothes. If proper they could be called. She looked like a cartoon character, coating her face with white makeup, her lips drawn into a tiny cupid bow and her eyes outlined in shiny black eyeliner, with glittery red hearts dotting the corners. Stiff black petticoats stuck out from under a red satin miniskirt. White thigh-highs and black patent-leather heels completed her outfit.

“Are you having us on?” Jamie blurted. “What, were they all out of French-maid costumes?”

“Crikey, Jamie, where’ve you been?” Skye asked him.

“Fightin’ for a free Ireland, and then a free human race,” he shot back. “You?”

“Let me see your safe passage again,” Jenn said, crossing to Eriko.

Eriko reached in her bodice and pulled out a folded document stating that the human bearing this document was a VIP guest of Shell Ghost Shogun and must be shown every courtesy.

Skye joined them, moving her hands over her scrying stone, probably giving the juice a boost. Jamie glowered. Eriko had to go, but did she have to go looking like
that
?

“This is a good thing. He might know Aurora,” Eriko reminded Jamie. “He’s staying at Aurora’s Palace.”

“He might know you’re the Hunter.” He pressed his knuckles against his forehead and exhaled slowly. Then he lowered his hands to his sides and shook his head, his eyes closed. “It’s too risky.”

“Jamie, we’re hunters. Everything is risky.” Eriko slipped on short white gloves trimmed in red lace. “Everything.”

Jenn watched as Eriko stepped into the limo Shell Ghost Shogun had sent for her. Eriko had met the car in the turnaround of a different hotel about a mile from the Desert Blossom. Jamie followed on a motorcycle. Jenn, Holgar, and Skye were in a taxi; Taamir and Noah had rented a black van. The split-up had been Noah’s idea. If something happened to one group following Eriko, she’d still have multiple backups looking out for her.

They had stakes and crosses—easily made from items at hand. They’d hoped to buy some weapons, but humans weren’t allowed to carry firearms in Las Vegas, and no one was willing to sell anything illegally to a pack of strangers. Requests to Father Juan to locate a resistance cell had gone unfilled. People were too afraid to resist, or so it seemed.

All six of them kept Eriko’s vehicle in their sights. Jenn stared into the scrying stone. Skye had done well; she could see Eriko inside the limo. Behind the white geishalike makeup Eriko looked tired.

Then the limo pulled up to Aurora’s Palace, and a Cursed One in a black suit helped her out. He was joined by another. They flanked Eriko as she went inside and entered a special elevator.

“Where are we going?” Eriko asked one of the vampires.

“We have sound?” Jenn asked, surprised.

Skye nodded. “I combined two enhancement spells. It worked.”

“Nice,” Jenn said appreciatively.

“Penthouse,” the vampire said to Eriko. “Miss Aurora’s suite.”

Jenn caught her breath. Holgar reached over and squeezed her hand.

“We knew that Shell Ghost Shogun might know Aurora,” Holgar said.