The Graves of Saints (17 page)

Charlotte took Velvet’s hand and started through the vault door.

The bouncer reacted instantly, reaching out to grab Velvet by the arm. Charlotte shook her loose and kept going as the bouncer swore and Velvet called her a bitch. The two of them tussled for a
moment, giving her precious seconds to take in the layout of the vault. The small room had been done over in racks of expensive wine and plush burgundy booths and loveseats. A private bar at the
far end served only expensive tastes. There were fewer than thirty people in the space, but the air felt heavy and the music still thumped – though muffled – from small speakers in the
corners. The place smelled of sweat and perfume, of old booze and desire.

Charlotte scanned faces, searching for Rouge. Several guys had their backs to her, but one of them must be him.

A scarred, crushing hand slammed down on her shoulder.

‘Where the fuck do you think you’re—’ the bouncer began.

Charlotte turned, backhanding him hard enough to crack his cheekbone, then took his hand, pivoted and hurled him into a wine rack. Bottles shattered and red wine splashed down on him like a
shower of blood. His nose was bent and she realized she had broken it. That was all right with her. A man who lived so violent a life as to have such hands should not have been left unscarred by
it.

She spun back around, scanning again for Rouge. Velvet came toward her, cautious but smiling with a dark, erotic fervor. Charlotte had just revealed that she herself was the very thing Velvet
desired.

‘Oh, my God,’ the woman said. ‘That was so hot.’

Charlotte searched faces; most were terrified but some were intrigued, and one or two were as openly hungry as Velvet’s. One guy had already turned away.

Danny Rouge.

People shied away as she crossed the vault. The bouncer tried to rise but slipped down again into the wine rack debris, moaning at the new cuts he received from broken bottles. Not all of the
red on him was from wine.

Velvet was talking to her, maybe even flirting with her in the midst of all of this, but Charlotte couldn’t hear her. The song of her own blood was in her ears, the music of violence and
hunger that had only grown louder in the months since she had been turned. She wouldn’t kill humans for their blood – not now – but the thirst for it remained, and it rushed
through her in moments of imminent violence with such force that it made her want to scream, to laugh, to dance . . . to kill.

The good news was that killing didn’t always make her a monster. Sometimes, it could make her a hero.

‘Hello, Rouge,’ she said, standing beside the booth where the vampire sat with a trio of club kids. Charlotte couldn’t have described them later. They were beneath her
notice.

She shifted, making sure she was directly in front of him. He stared at the table, not looking up.

‘Remember me?’ she asked. ‘I need to ask you something.’

The vampire was not an albino, but he might as well have been. His hair was the yellow-white of cornsilk and his eyes were blue-tinted ice. Rouge had alabaster skin, but when he had freshly
drunk of human blood, his cheeks became mottled with patches of pink, as if he were embarrassed. She had seen him like that, in what he called the afterglow.

Rouge lolled his head back and studied her, brow furrowed.

‘If you’d come in here all quiet and meek,’ he said, ‘I’d have figured you wanted back in Cortez’s good graces, maybe hoped I’d put in a good word. But
this . . .’ He gestured at the bouncer: nobody had gone to the bleeding man’s aid, but he had finally managed to get to his feet and begun to stumble toward the door.

‘What are you doing?’
Sergeant Omondi said, his voice fuzzed with static, crackling in her ear.
‘Don’t set him off in there. Get him out of the vault, out in
the open part of the club. If we try coming in through the door, we won’t be able to surround
—
’

‘I’m not good at meek,’ Charlotte said.

‘So what’s your deal? You just want to end it? Suicide by fang?’

‘I told you. I have a question.’

‘Charlotte, listen –’
Omondi said.

She could tell Rouge was curious in spite of himself.

‘You gonna ask it?’

Charlotte nodded. No more banter, now; she let him see the disgust in her face. ‘Where can I find Cortez? I know he’s got a place in New York, that part of the coven is here.
Where’s the nest?’

‘That’s two questions.’

Rouge shot from behind the table, his limbs a blur. His companions barely had time to scream as the two monsters came together in a flurry of blows and slashing talons. Vampire versus Shadow.
Vampire versus vampire. Charlotte felt her throat flayed open as Rouge tore at her, stronger, older, more barbaric. They hit the floor, twisting and tearing, snarling and snapping.

Omondi shouted in Charlotte’s ear; they were coming in. Shots rang out in the club and people screamed, all of it blending into the thumping dance beat. The people in the vault cowered and
wept as Rouge and Charlotte crashed into the bar and then into a wall of wine racks, driving each other into the broken bottle necks over and over, digging at flesh and shedding blood. The pain
seared her but she welcomed it.

‘Stupid move, coming here,’ Rouge snarled.

Stronger. Bigger.

Charlotte laughed and let her flesh shift and flow, let her bones twist and grow. She rose, towering over him, her huge head brushing the ceiling, and then she opened her mouth and let out the
roar of a black bear. Rouge blinked in surprise, hesitating for a second, and she swept one huge paw down and tore off the left side of his face.

Cortez was foolish to stick to the traditions. With a little practice, a little focus, Rouge could have shifted as she did, but what was a wolf or a rat to the thousand beasts and monsters
Charlotte could become?

Reeling, screaming, Rouge threw a punch, driving his talons into Charlotte’s chest. Bone broke and skin tore, and she knew he was going for her heart. His fingers found it, closed over it,
squeezed. Had he done so little homework on the true nature of Shadows that he thought he could kill her?

She tore his arm off and tossed it aside. Onlookers’ screams reverberated around the vault, melding with the music. Omondi’s voice was gone from her ear; the commlink had fallen out
when she shifted. With the speed of thought she shifted back to human again, all of her wounds gone as if they had never been there.

Rouge gaped, fearful and desperate, and she knew the moment had come. Any second, he would turn to mist and slip out through the ducts. It was his only hope of escape.

He didn’t see the dagger coming. She slipped it from a sheath at her back and thrust it into his gut with a wet thunk.

Confused, he stared down at the blade.

Shouts came from behind her. Heavy footfalls. The clatter of weapons being brought to bear. Sergeant Omondi shouted at her to stand aside, to get clear.

‘You think that’s going to . . .’ Rouge began.

His eyes went wide and he took a second look at the blade. He’d been trying to mist, mid-sentence, and discovered that his one chance for escape had been taken away. The dagger had been
coated with the only poison that mattered to vampires.

‘Medusa,’ Rouge said, voice low, eyes burning with hatred as he reached for her. ‘You turncoat bitch.’

Omondi and half a dozen other TFV soldiers, some dressed for the club and others in full gear, moved in to surround him, weapons trained on him. His face and the stump of his arm had sealed up
already, partway healed, but the Medusa had stopped it. Unable to shift or heal further, Rouge could be killed by a single, well-placed bullet.

Charlotte punched him, careful not to break his neck, and then she slid in close, intimate as a lover.

‘Where is Cortez?’

‘You know the places in Cali,’ Rouge snapped. ‘If he’s not there, I have no idea.’

‘We’ll see,’ Charlotte said, sure that the TFV would torture him for the truth and not caring a bit – not after what Cortez’s people had done to her. ‘What
about New York? Where’s the coven’s local nest?’

Rouge hesitated.

Charlotte nodded. He knew.

She stepped back, glanced at the terrified club kids, then turned to Omondi.

‘Fucker’s all yours, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘I figure you’ll get it out of him.’

Rouge snarled, searching for his courage. ‘He’ll kill you for this!’

Charlotte laughed darkly, then spat on him.

‘Cortez killed me a long time ago. ‘

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Just past ten p.m. on the evening of the equinox, the night before Nikki’s funeral, Octavian strode down the corridor of the Loews’ twelfth floor with cold
determination. He was unused to being summoned by anyone, and the idea that Metzger would have sent Song to fetch him instead of just walking down the hall and knocking on the door himself tonight
– of all nights – made him bristle. It wasn’t the sort of thing he would normally have taken as an insult. Truth be told, he didn’t care enough about the opinions of others
to be insulted by much. But tonight, he had too many ghosts in his head and it made him brittle.

Late this afternoon, he had used magic to make the past come alive, so that he and Allison and Kuromaku could bear witness as Cortez murdered Nikki. The vampire had been in shadow and
they’d barely been able to make out his face, so Octavian couldn’t be sure if this was the vampire he had met long ago, the one who claimed to be the historical Cortez. Not that it
mattered. The past had no significance. Only what came next was important.

They had learned nothing of value. Allison thought that Octavian had chosen to torture himself as punishment, that he blamed himself for Nikki’s death. And he would not argue. But at least
they had a vague impression of Cortez’s appearance, and they would know his voice if they heard it again. That was something.

Allison, Octavian, and Kuromaku had remained together for hours, discussing the best uses of their talents and those of the others Octavian believed would be willing to help. Many would be
called to aid them, because the incursion in Saint-Denis would not be the last one. They needed to start considering longer-term solutions, ways to rebuild the dimensional defenses. One of those
options would mean searching for the Gospel of Shadows, but that was something Octavian did not want to think about yet. He hoped there was another way to keep the horrors from slipping back into
the world.

Inhuman horrors, at least. The human ones had never left.

Charlotte had gone off to New York with a TFV strike team led by Sergeant Omondi, trying to get a lead on Cortez’s location. He’d been on the east coast long enough to kill Nikki,
and might still be local. Kuromaku was handling calls from old friends who were arriving for the funeral. Meanwhile, Allison had begun to make arrangements for the three of them to begin their own
hunt for Cortez. Whatever Charlotte learned from the TFV she would bring back to them, and then they would tear apart the loose community of rogue vampires in order to get to Cortez’s coven
and finally to Cortez. The killer knew Octavian would be coming; he’d ensured it by killing Nikki. There would be some kind of trap involved, but that was all right. Octavian could take care
of himself, and when he couldn’t, he had friends.

He arrived at the door to the hotel room that Metgzer had converted into a command center. Octavian rapped on the door and someone called an invitation from within, so he turned the handle and
entered the foyer of the small suite. A Babel of voices and languages greeted him, along with the soft clatter of fingers tapping at computer keyboards.

Galleti sat on the edge of a chair, looking frustrated and displeased, and Octavian assumed she had been the one to call for him to come in. Now she looked as if she might regret it, but she
only nodded in greeting. The transformed hotel room had lost all traces of its former identity. Chairs and phones and a large round table ringed with half a dozen laptops now filled it. The large,
flatscreen television was on. Even with the volume muted there was no escaping the tragedy unfolding onscreen, the horror of Saint-Denis.

Metzger stood over a dark-suited woman who sat at a laptop, both of them clearly alarmed by what they were seeing on the screen.

Octavian paused in the center of the room, awaiting Metzger’s attention, but the commander was engrossed in his conversation with the dark-suited woman, discussing the inability of
ordinary military forces to engage a demonic incursion of this size. One by one, the soldiers and civilian aides in the room fell silent, turning toward Octavian, feeling the quiet weight of his
expectations.

At last Metzger blinked, becoming aware of the strange stillness in the room, and looked up from the woman’s laptop. For a moment he and Octavian only stared grimly at one another.

‘You’ll be happy to know your friend, Charlotte, and my strike team have turned up a location in New York connected to Cortez.’

‘Is Cortez there?’ Octavian asked. ‘In the city?’

‘We’re not talking about the city. It’s upstate. They’re on the way now and will report back. I’ve got State Police tactical units standing by to back them up. If
there’s any sign that Cortez is there—’

‘Wait,’ Octavian said.

Metzger frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Put your team in place to observe. I can be there by noon tomorrow. Tell them to wait. If they go in and Cortez is there, he might get away. I can’t risk that.’

‘That’s not your call,’ Metzger said curtly. ‘I said he was yours and I meant it. But we have no way of knowing if he’s even there, and I’d say it’s
damned unlikely. We’ve got a lot of fires to put out right now. I’m not letting this one burn until you’re ready to do something about it. Besides, Charlotte is with my people.
They’re loaded with Medusa toxin. On the off chance this guy is sitting there waiting for us, do you think she’s going to let him skip? They’ll bag and tag him and hold him for
you. If he’s there. Which logic says he’s not.’

Octavian hesitated, thinking about Nikki’s funeral. Thinking about what Cortez had done to her, and also what he had done to Charlotte. Anything could happen, of course. If Cortez spooked
and ran before they could dose him with toxin . . .