Night Huntress 07 - This Side of the Grave (6 page)

He gave me a faint smile. “I was always going to die, Cat. Whether in a few months or a few years, it’s inevitable. You should have already accepted that, but you haven’t. You’ve thought with the mind of a vampire since the day we met. Your fangs are new, but that’s the only difference I see since you changed over.”

I bit my lip, refusing to acknowledge that he might be right. “I’ll go get Dave.”

I walked out of Don’s room with Bones
following me, trying to concentrate on anything but my uncle’s sad, stubborn gaze. Click-click-click went my shoes on the tile.
Lung cancer.
Click-click-click, bringing me closer to the elevator.
Past the point of surgery, chemotherapy, or vampire blood.
Click-click-click.
Known for seven years.

Once inside the elevator, however, my control cracked and tears blurred my vision. Aside from my mother, Don was the only real family I had left. My grandparents had been murdered several years ago and my father was serving a whole new definition of “hard time” for repeatedly trying to kill me. Even though our relationship was nowhere near normal, over the past few years, Don had become the closest thing to a father I’d ever had.

And soon he’d be gone.
Forever.

Bones folded me into his arms. With his height, my face was pressed to his collarbone, his leather jacket cool against my cheek while his hand smoothed over my hair. I held on to him, sinking into the oasis of his embrace, feeling his strength not just in the muscled wall of his body, but also in the power that enveloped me like a thick cloud as he dropped the shields from his aura.

Then I pushed him away, clearing the pink from my vision with several blinks. If I let myself dwell on this now, I wouldn’t be able to handle the very important tasks ahead of us. I wasn’t giving up on Don, but I had to pull myself together and concentrate on what needed to be done. This wasn’t the time for me to fall all to pieces.

“I’m okay,” I said to Bones, holding out a hand when he would have spoken. “Let’s just get Dave.
One crisis at a time, right?”

The elevator doors opened to reveal a darkly handsome vampire on the other side, black hair in a loose ponytail and normally playful expression subdued.

“Hey, Juan,” I said, managing a limp smile.

“
Querida
,” he murmured, opening his arms. Even though I was upset with him, I went into them, giving him a brief hug.

“
Lo
siento
,” he whispered when I let him go.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, too,” I replied bleakly. “You, Tate, Dave—
all
of you should have told me.”

“Don made us promise not to. He didn’t want to worry you.”

I was too upset to laugh at the irony of that.
“Too late now.”

“Bones,
mi amigo,
cómo
es
usted
?”
Juan said next. Bones answered in the same language, but I was too distracted to bother translating their Spanish as I headed for the Wreck Room. Despite my vow not to think about Don’s condition, a part of me was still busy plotting ways to save him.
Maybe the vampire blood Don used to treat his cancer just wasn’t strong enough. If he started ingesting a
Master
vampire’s blood—like
Bones’s
or Mencheres’s—maybe his results would be different.

Farther down the hall, the double doors to the training area opened and Tate walked out. He headed straight for me, but I didn’t even look at him as I strode down the hall toward the same room he’d just left.

Tate caught my arm when we drew level with each other. “Cat, there’s something I need to—”

“Save it,” I replied, shoving his hand off. “You couldn’t run fast enough to tell me when you thought Bones was cheating on me last year, but when it came to Don and something that was actually
true
, then you’re all about respectful silence.”

“That’s not—” he began, reaching out once more.

Bones grabbed Tate before his hand could brush my
skin,
appearing faster than if he’d materialized from the air around us.

“If you fancy keeping this,” he said in a growl while his fingers tightened on Tate’s arm, “don’t try touching her again.”

Any other time I would’ve objected, knowing Bones never bluffed and he
would
rip Tate’s arm off, but today I didn’t care. Out of everyone’s silence about my uncle’s health, Tate’s hurt the most. Yes, things had been strained between us ever since Bones came back into my life, but for a long time before that, Tate had been my closest friend. Facing death together on countless missions had forged strong bonds between us, but this was the last straw for me.

“Better yet, try touching me again and
I’ll
rip your arm off,” I snapped, stepping around him to continue down the hall. “I’ve put up with a lot from you despite your animosity to Bones and refusal to accept that you and I will never
be
more than friends. But after this, we’re done, so stay away from me.”

Behind me, Juan cleared his throat. “Ah,
querida
…”

“Don’t bother defending him,” I replied, yanking open the heavy doors of the area we’d dubbed the Wreck Room due to how intense training got. “I’m not—”

My voice trailed off while my eyes bugged. There, in the middle of the room, was a brunette vampire running through what looked to be a new obstacle course, easily dodging the cement blocks that swung at her.

“What?” I gasped.

The vampire didn’t hear me. Tate muttered something that sounded like “I tried to warn you,” but I didn’t turn around.
She’s wearing a uniform
, my mind hazily noted, immediately followed by
Why
the HELL is she wearing a
uniform
?

“Mom!”
I shouted at her. “What are you
doing
here?”

Her head whipped around—and then she was knocked off her feet by the next swinging cement boulder. Even from the distance, I caught the aggravated look my mother threw me as she jumped back up.

“Sloppy,
Crawfield
!”
Cooper barked at her from his position overseeing the obstacle course.

“Catherine’s here,” she replied, pointing.

He swung around, a guilty look crossing his mocha features. My shock dissolved enough for me to march inside, barely noticing Bones mutter under his breath that they were bloody lucky my temper no longer manifested itself in fire.

He was right. If it had been just six months before, fire would be shooting from my hands from this new shock to my already volatile emotions. Three months before and I would’ve ground all the activity in the Wreck Room to a halt with a furious squeeze of my mind. But with those borrowed abilities now gone, all I could do was lash out with my voice.

“You have got to be
kidding
me,” I snapped to the room at large. “I thought it was crappy no one told me about Don’s condition, but who knew you guys had even
more
secrets up your sleeve!”

“Everyone, take ten,” Dave called out. The dozens of team members stopped whatever grueling activity they’d been involved in to file out of the room—taking the door opposite the one I was closest to, I noticed.

In minutes, the training room was empty of everyone but Cooper, Dave, Tate, Bones, Juan, and my mother, who was the only one aside from Bones who didn’t have a shamefaced expression.

“Catherine, stop overreacting,” she said in a chiding way as she walked over to me. “After all, I’m not doing anything you haven’t done for over a decade.”

“And I’ve almost gotten killed more times than I can count,” I shot back, resisting the urge to shake her.

Her blue stare hardened. “I did get killed,” she replied flatly. “Hiding from the evil in this world did nothing to protect me. Not then and not the other times before it, either.”

Guilt stabbed through me at her words, taking the edge off my anger. Aside from the night she met my father, every other time she’d been abused by vampires or ghouls had been because of me. Monsters didn’t fight fair, and when they came after me, they’d also come after those closest to me. The last vampire I’d tangled with thought forcibly changing my mother over would be just the thing to teach me a lesson. I was only sorry I couldn’t kill him more than once.

“Quite a difference between hiding from danger and dashing headlong into its arms,” Bones noted in a more reasonable tone than I’d used.
“Can’t undo the wrong that was done to you by getting in over your head, Justina.”

“You’re right, I’m beyond fixing,” she said, bleakness flashing across features that looked like she was in her thirties instead of forty-six. “But other people aren’t,” she went on. “I can’t change what I am, but killing that vampire months ago showed me I can at least use it to make sure others don’t end up this way.”

It’s like listening to me when I was younger
, I thought in disbelief. For so long, I’d hated what I was and took out my ignorance and loathing on other vampires, thinking it would balance the scales against my father. If not for Bones showing me that evil was a decision, not a species, I might still be trapped in that vicious cycle of self-destruction.

And this was twice in one day that I’d been on the receiving end of the same stubborn arguments I’d once used myself. I cast a quick, pleading glance upward.
Any time you want to lay off the paybacks, God, that’d be great.

“You could kill hundreds of rogue vampires and ghouls, but it still won’t make the pain go away,” I finally said, my sense of déjà vu growing as I repeated some of the same things Bones told me back then. “Believe me, I know. Only accepting yourself will make the hurt diminish, and that means accepting even the parts you don’t like or didn’t choose.”

My mother looked away, blinking back a sudden pink shine in her eyes.
“Really?
Rodney accepted me. Look where that got him.”

“Rodney didn’t just accept you, he loved you,” Bones said quietly. “Else he wouldn’t have died trying to save you.”

She whirled until her back was to us, but even though her spine was straight, I saw her shoulders tremble. I wanted to hug her, but I knew sympathy would only be salt in the wound. A hug wouldn’t bring back the only man she’d had a real relationship with.

“I’m going after every filthy bloodsucker I can,” she said after a long moment, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she’d insulted herself by the “filthy bloodsucker” comment. When she turned around, her gaze was devoid of pink and lit up with vampiric green instead. “You have no control over that. The only thing you
can
control is whether I do it with the support of your old team, if I make it through their version of basic training, or on my own.”

“Even with their support, you’ll still probably get killed. You don’t know how dangerous it is.” I let out a sigh of sheer frustration. “Please, don’t
do
this.”

Her jaw tightened until it creaked. “I’m doing it.”

“God, you’re just as stubborn as Don!” I said, fed up.

“Just as stubborn as someone else I know, too,” Tate muttered under his breath.

“Stuff it, Tate,” I snapped.

“Kitten.”
Bones placed a hand on my arm. Waves of calm seemed to wash over my subconscious, soothing my twisted emotions like salve applied to a burn. “Some things can’t be taught, only learned. But there is a matter we
can
change; stopping these ghoul radicals. If their numbers grow, every vampire will be in danger, including your mum.”

Right.
That problem wouldn’t wait for me to try to talk sense into my senselessly obstinate family. I had to focus on priorities. First: Stop the lethal, fascist propaganda in the ghoul community that had already left a trail of
Masterless
vampire bodies. Then I could move on to trying to talk my mother and uncle out of their newfound death wishes.

Something cynical in me wondered if the ghoul zealots might turn out to be easier.

I stared at my former team members. “You guys are
so on
my shit list, both for hiding this and for concealing Don’s condition from me, but we’ve got bigger problems. Come with me so I can bring you up to speed.
Mom.”
I shook my head. “We’ll talk later.”

She redid her dark hair into a tighter ponytail as she walked away.
“Much later.
I have training for the next several hours.”

Don sat on the bed, an oxygen mask
lying on the table next to him. From the faint lines around his face, he’d had it on before we came in. I would’ve told him to keep using it, but of course, that logic would only fall on deaf ears. I shut the door behind the six of us and then proceeded to outline the situation with the ghouls as we knew it.

“As I told Cat, we need a person on the inside,” Don stated once I was finished. “It’s important enough that I’m asking you, Dave, to take an extended leave from the team to infiltrate these zealots. Our country has enough problems as it is with human terrorists. We can’t afford to let undead ones grow in power. The results could be catastrophic.”