Dead Rising (24 page)

I stood. “I’m so sorry for your loss. And thank you for the lunch.”

The relief on his face made me feel even more conflicted. “You’re welcome, Knight Aria. God be with you.”

“And God be with you,” I responded. Little did he know that my blessing held a very different supplication for divine intervention then the one I’m sure he hoped for.

I
AWOKE IN
the dark, the sounds of evening traffic outside my window a soothing hum. My bed felt like a little slice of heaven. Eight hours of glorious sleep. I should have spent that time researching something to help the vampires tonight, but I’d found myself unable to make sense of a street sign, let alone a magical text. Now that I’d finally gotten some solid z’s, I felt like I’d been reborn. Murmuring in contentment, I rolled under my sheets and stretched like a cat.

“I was going to offer you some coffee, but after that display I’ve got a very different offer in mind.”

Dario. I bolted upright, clutching the sheet to my chest. I’d completely forgotten about the vampire in my bathroom. Now that it was dark, he was obviously up and about.

The vampire sat on the edge of my bed and extended a mug filled with the very elixir of life. I took it gratefully, eyeing him over the rim as I drank. He didn’t look too worse for wear, beyond the faint scrapes on his face and arms from last night. I stared at the front of his shirt, wondering if the marks from my chair leg crucifix had healed.

“How’s the burn?” Okay, I’ll admit that my Florence Nightingale routine was more about an excuse to eye up his naked chest and back than any medical urges on my part.

He grimaced, crossing his arms and lifting his shirt up over his head. “Most of your smite-marks seem to be healing, but this one is going to leave a scar.”

I caught my breath, a horrible wash of guilt running through me at the sight of the raised, cross-shaped mark on his chest. With my finger, I traced the mark, feeling the pattern of the wood grain perfectly reproduced in his skin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was that vampire coming back to attack me.”

He shrugged and shifted on the bed, moving away from my touch. “You don’t trust me. You don’t trust any of us. Not that I blame you. We’re vampires. You’re a Templar. The uneasy truce we’ve had for the last century isn’t exactly a good foundation for a working relationship, let alone any other kind of relationship.”

His words stung, but they were true. I hadn’t trusted him, wasn’t completely sure I did now. I’d better decide fast because after my meeting with Russell it was clear that I needed to be on one side of this fight or the other.

“How’s your head?” Dario asked. I noticed he didn’t attempt to examine my wound in the way I’d done his.

“The gash is totally healed, thank you for that. Headache is currently being managed by aspirin and lots of caffeine.”

His mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Guess we vampires are good for something after all. I take it you have no aftereffects from my saliva?”

He made it all sound so clinical. My mind flashed back to me curled up in his lap in the dark as he licked my wound, and everything south of my naval stirred in response. “Not really.” I wasn’t about to admit being more than a little horny. Besides, I wasn’t sure that was due to his saliva or the fact that a gorgeous half-naked guy was sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Good. You asked last night about our next step? Whether we were going to abandon Leonora’s house now that it had been attacked?” He waited until I nodded. “We’ve decided to hold fast and defend the house if it’s attacked again. The gang members we killed the other night were involved with the robbery, and we found they were tangentially involved with the magician who is sending the spirits to attack us, but the rest of the gang is innocent. We’re still trying to track down this magician and kill him, but in the meantime we’re going to present a strong front and gather what information we can. I want you to know so you’ll stay clear. I’ve got to get back there soon and help set up our defense, and I’ll probably be out of contact for a while.” He reached out a hand and ran his fingers through my tangled mess of hair. “I’ll let you know as soon as this is resolved.”

I felt sick. I knew who was doing this, what Russell had planned, and here I sat letting Dario drive away to a possible death. I couldn’t. As much sympathy as I felt for Russell, a fellow human, I just couldn’t.

“How badly did things go last night? I mean, how many died and how many were injured? Is this something you think you can defend against? Do you have any way to effectively fight these spirits?”

He twisted his mouth downward. “It was bad. We lost ten, and at least a dozen more are suffering wounds that will leave them immobile for several weeks. We can’t continue to experience this level of damage every night, and we can’t defend ourselves without upping our consumption levels. And no, we don’t know how to fight these things. They appear to run out of energy after a few hours and leave, but nothing we do seems to hurt them. It’s all a game of who can outlast who at this point.”

I got the unspoken part of his statement. The vampires needed to find who was doing this and stop him, or they’d eventually all die. There was only so much damage a vampire could take before he’d succumb to his injuries, and only so much blood they could consume each night to help them heal. Upping their consumption levels would put them at risk of attracting human attention and jeopardizing their ability to hold this territory.

“I need to help. I’m…I’m worried about you.”

He laughed. Laughed. This was the first time I’d heard that noise from him and it was in response to what I considered a very serious matter. “I’ll be fine. I’m tough. I’ve survived worse than this in the last three and a half centuries. We just need to hold tight for a few days until we find the magic user.”

I knew the truth he was trying to hide from me. I knew how bad this was going to get. I probably knew that more than he did. Russell had the ability to raise murdered humans from centuries ago as well as those outside the territory where the rogue bands of vampires didn’t take such care to preserve human life. All those angry specters wouldn’t care if the vampires they killed were involved in their murder or not. How long could Leonora and her
Balaj
hold tight against dozens? And how long would it take them to find Russell, a forgotten child from a family murdered decades ago?

I scooted closer to him. “Dario, I’m going to take a huge leap of faith here and trust you enough to tell you something. I need you to be absolutely honest with me in return. Do I have your word?”

Ever since the fiasco over Linguini Alfredo, he’d been remarkably open with me when I questioned him about vampire matters, about personal topics. I just needed to make sure he’d continue to be, that I knew the truth before I decided what to do tonight.

“You have my word,” he replied solemnly.

I turned to face him on the bed, folding my legs into a half-lotus position. “Forty years ago a fourteen-year-old girl was preyed upon by a vampire, not once, but multiple times. He eventually took her and made her a blood slave.”

He nodded. “We try to enforce a minimum age of our prey now, but this was not always the way things were. I know it sounds horrible, but many older vampires came from a time when fourteen was considered well into adulthood. Marriage, sexual relations, and pregnancy were common in young teens not too long ago, and some vampires find it difficult to adapt to modern ideas regarding the age of consent.”

I’d read enough history to know he was right, but it still made me rather sick to think about. “We can argue about that later. This particular girl was killed.”

He looked at me blankly. “I would assume so. As much as we try to prolong the life of blood slaves, average life expectancy can be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Only the strongest of us are able to keep our blood slaves alive for over a year.”

And that was the life he’d offered me, admittedly in the heat of the moment and in blood lust. My heart sank.

“She was killed right in front of her father. He didn’t even get to keep her body. Months later the whole family was killed in their home by vampires, their throats slit to cover it up.”

Something flickered in his eyes. Shame? Or perhaps just regret that this dark secret had been discovered. “I’ll be honest with you, Aria. These things happened and more than once. We don’t do that anymore. I know you’re not a fan, but Leonora isn’t the sort of Mistress who would allow that to happen in her
Balaj
.”

His reassurances went right over my head. All I could focus on was that these things happened. And more than once. A child was taken as a blood slave, murdered in front of her family, and this had occurred more than once. An entire family was slaughtered, more than once.

I jumped to my feet. “Did you recognize the spirits that attacked last night? Did their faces mean anything to you, or has every person you’ve killed become blurred together by this point? Are there so many you can’t even count them, or remember who they are?”

I pushed past him and marched into the living room. He followed me; I knew he did, even though his footsteps were silent on the carpet.

“Shay. Does that name ring a bell? The Robertsons?”

I felt his hands on my shoulders as he turned me to face him. “I was
honest
with you. If you really want stories of blood and violence, then I’ll tell you what happened during the centuries we spent making our way north to Baltimore. I’m not proud of the things my
Balaj
has done, but that is the past. We don’t do those things today.”

I thought of babies preyed upon, bodies blood-raped by multiple vampires until there was no liquid left in them to spill. And then I thought of our Order’s past—of babies murdered, of old men, women, non-combatants killed so the Templars could claim their lands and treasures for their own. All in the name of God. We didn’t do that today, and I would hate to be judged for the actions of my ancestors.

But this wasn’t Dario’s ancestors, it was him and his contemporaries. And forty years ago wasn’t the same as nine hundred.

I pulled from his grasp and opened my laptop, clicking on the obituary photos. “The Robertsons. Surely you must remember them. Please tell me you remember them.”

I was practically pleading, because worse than murder was the thought that their deaths had meant nothing, hadn’t even left a lasting impression upon him. I didn’t want the Robertsons to be yet another in a too-many-to-remember string of violence.

He shook his head, swiping through the various photos without recognition until he came to one of Shay—the picture her parents had given the police for the missing persons folder. “Her. She was Jean-Marc’s blood slave.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “I know who is summoning the specters. If I can arrange for Jean-Marc to be handed over to justice, then I may be able to end this now.”

Dario had me against the wall so fast I hardly had time to register he’d even moved. “You lied. You lied to me and to Leonora. I trusted you, told you things no Templar has ever been privy to, slept vulnerable here in your apartment. I trusted you and you lied to me. Did it not bother you that my family
died
Saturday night? Last night?” He pushed me against the wall, his eyes dark with anger. “I’d thought you were different, that maybe you’d actually care about vampire lives.”

“I didn’t know then,” I protested. “I suspected who it might be, but I didn’t know for sure. You were positive Saturday night’s attack was gang related and…”

He was right. I had known, but how could I have told them and stood by as they slaughtered Russell?
Did
I put the necromancer’s life before that of the vampires? If I was totally honest with myself, I had.

Dario’s knuckles whitened as he gripped my shoulders. “How long have you known who this magician is?”

My heart thumped in my chest. “Since last night, right before I went to see Leonora. You killed his elder sister, his entire family. Doesn’t he have a right to justice? If I
had
told Leonora, she would have hunted him down and killed him. You
know
she would have murdered him in cold blood. I couldn’t allow that.”

The vampires would have killed him in cold blood, so instead I kept silent and let Russell kill
them
in cold blood. Suddenly I didn’t feel so righteous.

Dario let me go and took a step back. “But you couldn’t trust
me
? No, of course you couldn’t trust me. Stupid of me to think otherwise.”

I bit my lip. No, I hadn’t trusted him. I’d immediately thought him guilty, and tonight didn’t seem to be proving those initial assumptions wrong. He hadn’t even flinched when I’d shown him the photos of the slain Robertsons, had said murders like these had been common. Didn’t he feel even the slightest bit of guilt over what his family had done?

Dario gave a bitter laugh at my silence and turned away, running a hand over the top of his close-cropped hair. “Brothers and sisters of mine
died
last night. They died Saturday night. You knew who was behind this and you just let my family die.” Walking casually over to my kitchen table, he shut the laptop. “Well, your necromancer friend is thirty years too late. Jean-Marc is already dead.”

Thirty years. That clicked in my brain and spurred a memory from the conversation we’d had at Sesarios. “He died with your previous Master?”

“Yes. Aubin was our master, my sire. He turned me in Haiti. I as well as his other children and several of his blood siblings followed him when we were exiled.”

My mind whirred trying to figure out a way to resolve this thing without being able to deliver his sister’s killer to Russell. “So I can assure the necromancer that all the vampires who participated in the murder of his family are dead?”

“Hell if I know,” Dario huffed. “Jean-Marc is dead. Aubin is dead along with his siblings and eight of his offspring. Still, over two thirds of the current
Balaj
were turned at the time.”

I frowned in confusion. “But did any of them participate in the Robertson murders? If I can turn over those at fault to the necromancer, then I might be able to resolve this without further bloodshed.”