Suck It Up and Die (30 page)

As the crowd hooted with laughter, Bosky glowered.
“Besides parading around in daylight like a damn fool, you have broken the third commandment: Thou shalt not leave a mortal with memory of thy darkest powers.”

DeThanatos feigned innocence. “I did that?”

“You thralled a young couple in a bloodlust club, and you shape-shifted not once but twice in front of mortals outside the club.”

DeThanatos acknowledged the charges with a nod. “You’ve had someone watching me.”

“Ever since you started your absurd masquerade as a Leaguer,” Bosky fired back.

DeThanatos was tired of being lectured, especially by a Centurion. “Is that all I’m accused of?”

“On top of conspiring with a Lifer, Becky-Dell Wallace, I’d say that’s more than enough.”

DeThanatos shrugged apathetically. “Guilty as charged, on all counts.”

“So you admit it!” Bosky roared.

DeThanatos did a mocking fist pump. “And proud of it.”

Bosky pronounced the sentence. “Then there’s nothing left to do but shun you and declare you fair game for any Loner. The one who hunts you down and slays you will join the Centurion Council.”

Even though it wasn’t the public execution they had hoped for, the Loners let out a raucous cheer.

DeThanatos didn’t flinch. He waited for quiet, or for some fool to rush forward and try to dispatch him. No one did. He turned back to Bosky and the council. “You’re correct on that part of the law. There’s just one problem. I’m a Millennial. Do you know what that means?”

Bosky’s nostrils flared with anger. The rest of the Centurion Council stared at DeThanatos with blank expressions. “Millennial” echoed through the throng. The Loners had no idea what he was talking about.

DeThanatos took in the council with a sneer. “Your ignorance isn’t surprising. You’re the
Centurion
Council; you don’t know about the privileges and powers that come with surviving more than a thousand years.”

“You’re bluffing!” one of the council members shouted.

Turning to the crowd, DeThanatos asked, “Would another Millennial step forward?” A little girl edged out of the crowd. She looked about seven years old. “Explain the situation to your younger brothers and sisters.”

The little girl spoke in a piping voice. “A Millennial is immune to all laws: of man, nature,
and
his fellow vampires.”

DeThanatos opened his hands in thanks. “From the mouths of babes.”

Bosky flushed with anger. “You mean, from the mouths of little sycophants. We don’t know if either of you are one of these ‘Millennials.’ You’re both lying.”

“You will know them by three powers,” the little girl monotoned.

“Would you like to see ’em?” DeThanatos asked.

One of the council members addressed the little girl with a worried expression. “Do we want to see ’em?”

She broke into a puckish smile. “They’re pretty cool.”

“All right, prove it,” Bosky ordered DeThanatos. “Or, I swear on the Matriarch, I’ll annihilate you here and now.”

DeThanatos beckoned to the girl. “Will you assist me?”

Her smile turned devilish. She climbed partway up the slope and faced the crowd. “Beyond a Centurion’s powers, Millennials acquire three special powers. One, to replace the Matriarch should she ever be destroyed.”

DeThanatos exploded into a giant tree, an exact replica of the Matriarch. His roots bursting through the ground caused a small earthquake. The council’s trunk-table started to roll away before they caught it. The crowd jumped back in fear. A second later, the great tree imploded back to DeThanatos.

“Two,” the girl announced, “to sustain himself in times of need.”

DeThanatos held up his left arm; from the elbow down, it shape-shifted into a bleating lamb.

The crowd gasped at a power they had never witnessed, not even in the crazy things Lifers put in vampire movies.

“And three,” the girl continued over the lamb’s bleating, “to celebrate his first thousand years with a special set of fangs.”

The Millennial bared his fangs: not the customary
long knives of white porcelain, but shimmering gold ones. The throng applauded as if he had been awarded a gold watch at a retirement party. DeThanatos raised the lamb in acknowledgment and buried his golden fangs in its neck.

The Loners roared their approval.

When he was done feeding, he shook the lamb’s lifeless body; it imploded back to his forearm. As he spun around, his other hand swept toward the council’s trunk-table. The trunk bowed upward and snapped in two with a great
crack
as the seven Centurions went flying to the side. The trunk halves flipped in the air and knifed into the rocky slope, forming a high double pedestal.

DeThanatos shot in the air, landed on top of the pedestal, and glowered down at the stunned Loners. “I’ve listened to your petty accusations; now it’s my turn. Yes, I am conspiring with a Lifer. I am the wolf lying down with the lamb. And yes, the lamb will eventually be devoured. But before then, I plan to gather these American Leaguers in one place and give all Loners the weapons and logistics to exterminate them.”

Bosky, unbowed by DeThanatos’s display of Millennial prowess, stood on the slope. “And how are you going to accomplish this incredible trick?”

“None of you can be trusted with my plan,” DeThanatos answered. “But know this: when I call the next Grand Rendezvous it will be for the Leaguer apocalypse.”

The throng bellowed with bloodthirsty glee.

Bosky frowned. “Before he whips you into a Leaguer-slaying mob, remember our treaty. We signed a blood and fire oath with Luther Birnam. Loners will let Leaguers be
Leaguers as long as Leaguers let Loners be Loners. If we break that oath, Leaguers have every right to reveal the exact requirements for slaying a vampire.”

“They’ll never do it,” DeThanatos insisted. “It would be suicide.”

The crowd voiced its agreement.

“Would it?” Bosky asked. “Or would Leaguers see it as the ultimate peace offering to Lifers? The Leaguer way of saying, ‘See, now we are even more like mortals. We, too, are vulnerable to destruction.’ ”

The Loners, ceding the point, murmured in confusion.

Bosky turned to DeThanatos. “This plan of yours, if it fails, could backfire. It could not only turn Leaguers back into vampire slayers but also reinforce them with an entire new army of Lifers.”

The crowd rumbled in agreement and began to boo DeThanatos.

He answered by raising his arms and thrall-locking the entire mass of them. The Mother Forest went silent except for the rustle of pine needles. “You began by accusing me of breaking the third commandment. But I accuse you of crimes against our
inhumanity
. You’ve forgotten what it is to be a vampire, and it is this: to shred every rule, to break every oath, to obey no law but the two-pronged law of bloodlust and death!” His fiery eyes blazed down on the sea of traitors. “Who ends this Grand Rendezvous? I do!” He leaped off the pedestal as he flicked his hands.

The mass of Loners snapped into flying forms and rose off the ground like a dust-raising cloud of startled birds.

One flier, a black condor, banked out of the launching flock, circled back, and dropped onto the slope. The condor shape-shifted back to Bosky. He gave his nemesis
a tight smile. “These Millennial powers you’ve displayed tonight—I look forward to acquiring them soon.”

DeThanatos nodded knowingly. “You already have. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to resist the ultimate thrall: ‘Be gone.’ ”

“Yes,” the thickset vampire conceded. “And each being Millennials, we were never to reveal ourselves to lesser vampires. You and the kid blew that one.”

DeThanatos answered with cocky disdain. “An educated vampire is a more evil vampire, don’t you think?”

Bosky ignored the games and cut to the chase. “As a Millennial, I am required to ask you, why didn’t you destroy Birnam and Morning as soon as you knew they had become re-morts?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“They’re not in my jurisdiction,” Bosky retorted. “They’re in yours. Do I have to refresh your memory on the protocol for the eradication of re-mortals?”

“Age is destroying Birnam, if it hasn’t already. I wanted his death to be long and slow. As for Morning, he’s my blood child. I can’t destroy him until he’s made the complete transition to re-mort.”

Bosky stared with wide eyes. “You created that pathetic excuse of a vampire?”

DeThanatos scowled. “Regretfully, yes.”

“That’s rich!” Bosky bellowed with a hardy laugh. “So call me in as your proxy and I’ll destroy him.”

“No. I made the monster; no one touches him but me.”

“Have it your way.” Bosky gestured to the Matriarch at the bottom of the slope. “But you must swear on the Sacred Mother, on the cradle and grave of the Old Ones, that you will fulfill the sixth and unspoken commandment.”

DeThanatos’s gray eyes fell on the great tree. “I did that once; she didn’t deliver on her side of the bargain. This time, I do what Loners do best: fly solo.” He leaped in the air, snapped into a falcon, and flew over the Matriarch.

As Bosky watched, his night vision picked up a white drop falling from the falcon. It splattered in the top branches of the Matriarch. Bosky felt a subsonic groan snake up from the earth. It was no tremor or call to another Rendezvous, it was the roots of the bristlecone pines in the Mother Forest, filled with the spirits of the Old Ones, shuddering in their graves.

Morning and his crew ate lunch in the academy mess hall but paid little attention to their food. Some focused on notebooks; others peppered each other with questions. “What are the elements of the fire tetrahedron?” Armando asked Morning. “Take one away and you put out the fire.”

“Oxygen, fuel, heat, chemical reaction,” he recited.

Over the next few days the probies would be taking their written finals and field qualification tests. If they passed, they would no longer be probationary firefighters. They would be members of New York’s bravest.

“Sully,” Armando continued as he hefted a thick sandwich loaded with rare roast beef, “if Clancy throws an acronym test at us, what’s BOHICA stand for?”

Sully shot back, “Bend over, here it comes again.”

During the laughter, Armando took a megabite of his sandwich. Morning had barely heard the joke. He was
transfixed by the trail of odors coming from the sandwich: a braid of meat, bread, and horseradish. What Morning had lost in a vampire’s hyper sense of smell, he had gained in the smell of mortal food reawakening his appetite.

“Yo, McCobb!” Sully yelled, bursting Morning’s bubble of olfactory sensation. “If you got such moose eyes for Armando and his sandwich, why don’t you both gnaw on it till your luscious lips meet?”

As the crew laughed, Morning snapped to. He needed to answer trash talk with trash talk to cover his sandwich lusting. “It’s not the Tex-Mex gorilla or his sandwich,” he complained, “it’s the damn roast beef.”

Armando eyeballed his sandwich. “What’s wrong with my roast beef?”

“Look at it,” Morning replied. “It’s so rare and bloody it’s still pawing the ground.” To further banish suspicion, he picked up his can of Blood Lite and took a big swig. Then came the hardest part. The taste of Blood Lite began to make him gag. He repressed the urge but couldn’t hide the grimace as he swallowed. “Oh, man,” he said, “I hate it when it coagulates at the bottom of the can. Anyone got some blood thinners?”

The laugh he got made him think he’d covered his ass, but Sully was still staring at him.

In the past weeks, Morning had been careful not to go too crazy in the weight room or pass people on training runs. He had to uphold his reputation as one of the most squirrelly guys in the class. He didn’t let anyone see his new muscle definition. When it came to locker room showers, he had already set a precedent that he wasn’t big on showers. Vampires never were. They were better than
cats when it came to hygiene: they rarely broke a sweat and didn’t smell. Morning dealt with the slight body odor he had begun to acquire by taking showers at home. The toughest thing was masking the occasional pimple with makeup. He had a particularly gnarly one starting on his chin. But even if makeup didn’t cover it and he was busted by a fellow probie, he had a ready defense: finals can make even a vampire break out in stress pimples.