There wasn’t much left, and I’m being generous. A low border of earthworks a few feet in height was all that greeted us. It was surrounded by a fairly well maintained field of grass and sparse trees standing in stark contrast to the raging red sunset.
A shiver tore down my spine as something smashed into my aura. I flicked my gaze across the field, and the fort, but could see no one.
“Something’s here, Zola.”
“Come boy, it was below the thirteenth cannon.” She glanced at me before she crossed the earthworks in a few easy strides, belying her age. I turned to check behind us but my eyes still found nothing. By the time I turned back to Zola, she was on the ground digging through the grass with a small spade she must have had tucked into the folds of her gray cloak.
“That’s where it is?”
She nodded.
My mind wandered, leaving my immediate concerns behind as I tried to imagine what she saw there so long ago. The walls of the fort, the gunfire, the terror. “What was it like? During the battle?”
She paused and wiped a large clump of mud off on the grass beside her hole. “It was horrible Damian. Like any battle, it was horrible.” She rubbed the back of her neck and started digging again. “Ah want to leave this place. The ghosts … they are too much.”
I started to help her dig. “That’s what I’m feeling, isn’t it?”
Zola nodded. “Look, if you want.”
There was no delay, almost no effort needed to focus my vision so I could truly see. Death was strong around us, and the hidden scene tearing into our reality was a distressing panorama of gray and black. I saw the soldiers. They stood laden with arms and uniforms soiled by dirt and grime. I stumbled backwards as the shock of the vision buckled my leg and dropped me to a knee. The walls of the fort rose around us but stayed translucent enough to see the soldiers outside.
“Zola, what the hell’s going on, I can see the fort and the cannons and the people … the
people.”
My voice fell to a whisper. “There’s so many.”
Zola laughed without humor and continued digging, her body invading the barrel of a ghost cannon. “Ah’ll have to take you to Gettysburg, boy.”
The mere thought forced the air out of my lungs in a sharp exhale. I sank my hand into a small clump of grass and dirt as I pushed myself back up to my feet and raised my eyes to find a ghost staring at me. He was young. He was so young. A Springfield rifle was slung over his shoulder and his eyes didn’t leave mine. I took a step to the right and his eyes followed me. There was an intelligence to his ghost I’d never seen before. As my focus moved over his shoulder I noticed the soldiers on the wall were staring at me and the soldiers on the ground and even those beyond the wall. They were all inhumanly still.
I shivered and knelt beside Zola, admiring the massive hole she’d dug in such a short period of time. I could easily fit my entire forearm down it. Zola’s fingers clenched in the dirt. Between her hands lay a small rusty box, its lid teetering on the edge of the hole. “It’s gone, Damian.”
“Gone?” A few clumps of dirt and deeply yellowed paper were all I could see inside the box. “No guardian here?”
She shook her head. “No, unused talismans and lesser demons were not placed with guardians. Only a soulstone would warrant such protection.” She sighed and sat back on her heels. “Or so we thought.”
I tried to picture her there, hundreds of years past. What would she and Philip have looked like? I crouched beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. What would Philip have said to her, what had they hoped to accomplish? I voiced one of the other questions I’d been pondering, “How have you lived so long, Zola?”
Her body sagged and she released a long, shaky breath. Her body trembled slightly and she looked away from me. Her head rocked back and forth as she wiped her eyes. “No …”
I stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, and then put my arm around her and waited. She eventually leaned back with a sniffle under the watchful gaze of a thousand ghosts. We shifted up against the earthworks. I pushed my Sight away to bring a false security to my eyes. The walls of the fort faded with the men and cannons. I laid myself down, and locked my gaze on the sky.
“Damn, lot more stars out here than Saint Louis.”
Zola laughed and sniffed. It made me shiver. I’d never seen tears on her face before.
“Ah’m sorry Damian. And thank you.”
I glanced at my master in the moonlight and nodded.
She sighed and stared into the sky with me, the only sounds a distant car on the highway and a handful of chirps from the crickets. “There was a time.” She took a deep breath. “There was a time, child, when necromancers deserved their reputation.”
My mouth curled into a smile. She hadn’t called me child in years. In fact, I don’t think she’d used it since I actually was a child. “You’ve told me that before.” I waited, but she didn’t continue. I asked a question, a question I never thought I would utter in her presence. “How long will you live?”
She laughed, and it was a hollow, lifeless thing. “You are perceptive, boy.” She hung her head. “Ah will live at least eight lifetimes.”
“Eight lifeti-” I scrambled onto one knee and stared at her. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Oh god no, Zola.”
She nodded as a single tear slid down her cheek.
“Who?” I waited, and when she didn’t look at me my temper flared.
“Who did you kill?”
She raised her eyes and met my gaze, the hollowness replaced by stone and fire. “Slavers. Every one of them. Philip and I …” She took a deep breath. “Philip was a stable boy. They beat him almost as badly as they beat us. We …” her voice lowered to a vicious whisper “should we have been denied our vengeance?”
“No.” I said without inflection.
Zola looked away and put her hands over her eyes. “God help me.”
“Would that be the God that drowned the world, or the mass of rocks we just talked to?” I smiled and let out a humorless laugh as I stood up. “I don't think either one cares much about a few humans that could pass for demons.”
She picked up her cane and laid it across her lap, slowly running fingers over the knobs. “We killed so many, Damian.”
“Fuck that, Zola.” I shook my head and my voice rose.
“Fuck
that. You killed the bastards that hurt you. I don’t know the whole story, but Sam told me enough.”
Zola looked up with wide eyes. “She wasn’t supposed to-”
“I know. You only told her to help her cope with the turn, but she told me what they did to you. They beat the shit out of you, and that was only a warm up. The scars on your back are from flails and whips, not from a bloody sledding accident.”
“Damian …”
I held my hand up. “Master, I know I was just a kid, but you didn’t have to lie to me …” I stared at her forearms, “and these …” I grabbed her wrists and locked onto her eyes, so dark in the dim light. The scars were thick and hard beneath my fingers where shackles had torn her skin away so many times. “You were only sixteen years old. They deserved
worse.”
Zola pulled her arms away, crossed them, and turned her head to the stars. “Did they?”
“What, you think vengeance can’t be justified? You think vengeance can’t
be
justice?” I blew a breath out through my nose and stepped away. “Kill a child in front of its mother.”
Zola’s head snapped back toward me and anger creased her forehead.
“Give the child's mother a gun and turn your back. I don't care what religion she is, what color her skin is, what shape her eyes are. You will die before you reach the door and you’ll deserve it. And you know what? She will bloody well be justified!” I took a deep breath before I sat back down, leaned on the earthworks beside Zola, and crossed my hands over my stomach.
She snorted. I watched her uncurl and lean back against the earthworks again. Her lips were struggling not to smile. “Weren’t your folks Catholic?”
“Meh,” I shrugged, “What can you do? No one’s perfect. Sam’s still Catholic.”
Zola laughed outright. “What? A Catholic vampire?” Her face lit up with laughter and tears came again, but tears I was comfortable with.
“She still goes to church, you know that?”
Zola’s face sobered and she gawked open-mouthed at me. “How can she enter a church?” She paused and closed her eyes slowly. “Dale?”
I laughed deep and loud. “Yeah, that’s my best guess.”
“Perhaps, but Ah have a different guess.” She placed her hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Child, you did right in saving Sam.”
I nodded and thought back to one of the most frightening nights of my life …
“You’re going to get someone killed.” Zola’s words echoed in my mind. She’d warned me I was in too deep. I was going to get someone hurt. And now the bastard held Sam by the neck in front of a marble crypt. Just seeing the terror on her face was enough to make me lose it. “She’s a commoner, Dale. Keep the manuscripts you stole. Just leave her out of this!” My mouth was dry and my voice cracked with a surge of adrenaline.
The vampire laughed. His hair was matted in the rain and water formed runnels down the front of his suit. “Necromancer, you need to learn your place. I’ll give the little whore some fangs.” He stabbed himself in the neck with a razor-sharp fingernail and I flinched. Blood sprayed from Dale’s neck wound and covered my sister’s face. “Swallow or I break your neck.” I saw her throat move as she swallowed, firmly clamped in his right hand. Despair sank into the deepest pit of my stomach. If she wouldn’t have swallowed, he would have killed her faster than I could move, but this? He glanced up and grinned at me. Before I could even form another thought, he turned back to Sam and tore her throat out with his fangs and teeth. “Or not.” He laughed, but I was so far gone it didn’t register for days.
I cried out Sam’s name. Rage, a cold, fearsome thing I’d never felt before, rose like a gorge from my soul as Sam hit the ground. The world went red and black as the vampire licked his lips and struck. He closed the distance so fast I should have been dead before I blinked.
My cry to Sam folded in on itself and broke into a primal scream. It was a dark sound no human throat should weather. My hands flew toward the vampire as he came within inches of me. My power pulsed outward in waves. He stopped dead in the air as wave after wave throttled his aura and his body. I could feel every fiber of his being beneath the invisible threads, a macabre marionette come to dance. In a flash I
knew
Dale, every facet of his life, his world, every good deed, every happy moment, every failure, his worthless parents, worthless friends, his robbery turned to murder, a murderer turned to maniac before, he himself, was turned to a vampire. He became a horror, a murderer without equal. But knowing him made him more like a lifelong friend than a man who had killed my sister.
A spasm shook Sam’s body on the ground and her shudders were joined by a horrible gurgling sound as she went limp. It didn’t matter who he was at that point. He was simply going to die.
I channeled it all. My fist whitened as it clenched and poured the rage and despair into the vampire’s aura and saturated his body. He stiffened like he’d been skewered. His face twitched once and I tore him apart. I unleashed everything I’d flooded his being with in a continuous torrent of power. My scream dropped in pitch as blue and gray and white power flickered around my body, drowning my senses. His aura flared from him like a supernova. The power receded into his body and flared again and again. His skin flaked away as his eyes widened and his back arched in pain. I threw back my head and my arms with my fingers splayed as wide as they could be, and let everything go at once. There was a crack like thunder and when my eyes adjusted I saw the crypt coated in blood and viscera. Dale’s skeleton was torn from his body like shrapnel.
Something hit my hand with a wet slap and my fingers wrapped around it out of pure instinct. I glanced down to find a wet chunk of the devil’s throat clutched in my fingers. I looked at Sam, gurgling now the only sound she made as her eyes dimmed. There wasn’t a decision to be made.
I took two quick steps through the blood and slid up to my sister on my knees, tears half blinding me. I screamed through the lightning and rain as thunder beat against the earth. “Sam, I hope you can forgive me for this!”
I placed that shred of Dale over the hole in her throat and began to mutter the incantation, knowing full well I was breaking the cardinal rule of necromancy. Never use the power of the soul. Never use a soulart. It is a forbidden practice, destroying the user’s soul bit by bit with each use. Death is a necromancer’s domain, not life.
But she’s going to die anyway, even if I save her now, she will only become a vampire.
But she’d still be my sister, and I let the words ring out,
“Mores interdicaddo, salutarison per meus animus!”
It hurt. Gods did it hurt. I screamed as pieces of my aura were torn away and bound to Sam’s. Skin sucked and popped into place as bits of my own soul were ripped away to bind flesh to flesh on my sister’s neck. The wounds closed in seconds, seconds that were so very long, before Sam went limp on the ground. I gathered her in my arms and ran from that hell. A hell I knew I’d never really escape. It was my fault. All my fault.
She woke in a motel with me a day later. I knew what would happen. I cut my wrist, not deep enough to do any permanent damage, and she fed. It was the last day I spent with Sam before she joined a Pit.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and stared at Zola. My fingers rubbed at the two ragged puncture wound scars on my left wrist. I nodded. “Master, I would not trade my sister for anything.”
She patted my arm and we stood to start the trek home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Anything sound good for dinner?” I said.
The rhythm of the road was all I heard for ten minutes before Zola finally said, “Barbeque.”
I grinned. “I know just the place, and I think they’ll still be open.”
A few minutes later, off Highway 67 on a little road called Sunset Drive, we were camped out in Warehouse Barbeque. The coals were cold in the fireplace, waiting in shadows for the pall of winter to return. Black steel chairs with vinyl cushions swarmed around four-footed tables stocked with sauce bottles and paper towel racks. Each wall was covered in eight-foot sections of rustic wood paneling broken only by a few tasteful pieces of art and windows. I stared across the table in disbelief.