A Beautiful Evil (12 page)

We veered off the sidewalk and around a mountain of trash and debris, and walked down the middle of the street.

“It’s just a matter of being aware and knowing his intent. Gabriel’s influence works because he waits until you’re distracted or your guard is down. All it takes is a second. You always have to have that block in place because as soon as you don’t, that’s when he’ll use it.”

“He’s such a jerk,” I said, wanting to rant. “If I’m going to go all gaga for a guy, it’ll be because I want to, not because some asshat is helping me along.”

God, how lame was that?
Just shut up, Ari. Before you embarrass yourself even more.

“Well, just for the record . . . forcing a girl to go
all gaga
for me isn’t my style.” He paused, his tone doing nothing to hide his amusement. “I like the
gaga
to be natural.”

I rolled my eyes and took off at a jog before he could see that my face had gone straight past hot to volcanic.

M
IDTOWN LOOKED LIKE AN OLD WAR ZONE.

And thirteen years ago I suppose war
had
come. In the form of wind-driven floods that used Dumpsters, vehicles, and a million other things as frontline soldiers. Some of the debris had been strong enough to take out supports and corners, collapsing parts of office buildings and high-rises. High winds had blown out windows, driving inside structures and pushing out debris.

We were entering a no-man’s-land. A place Sebastian had warned me about the very first day I spent in New 2. A place you never wanted to be once the sun went down.

Yet here we were walking down the middle of South Rampart Street at night. I seriously hoped Sebastian had a plan.

“Where are we going?” I asked in a low voice, pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“Biggest part of the ruins.” He nodded toward the high-rises. “We call it Center City.”

“You sure that’s a good idea, going into the center of the ruins?”

“We’re safer in numbers. If we stay together, we should be okay. The things here are solitary hunters, and they like solitary prey. So one trying to take down two . . . it’d have to be . . .”

“What? It’d have to be what?”

“Starving.”

“Oh, great. Perfect,” I muttered in a slightly demented voice, eyeing the dark, vacant buildings. A shiver went down my back. “I know I’m going to regret asking, but what’s out here, exactly?”

“Loups-garous, turnskins, revenants . . . Lots of things.”

“I don’t know what any of those things are.”

He tossed me a half smile. “Loups-garous and turnskins are shape-shifters who’ve gone wild. Feral. They no longer recognize anything from their human life. They’d hunt their own family if they could. ‘Revenant’ is a French word. It means returning, like returning from the dead—”

I grabbed Sebastian’s arm and stopped dead in the street. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about corpses walking around undead, like zombies?”

“Yes and no.” He seemed very quiet and completely in tune with everything around us. “Call it whatever you want, I guess. Revenants are more than undead humans. They’re soulless vampires. And before you say vampires don’t have souls, that’s a myth. Me, my mother, my grandmother, Gabriel . . . we all have souls. We were all born into this world just like humans. And the humans who are Turned, they keep their souls too; they just awake changed as a Dayborn vampire.”

“So how does a vampire lose its soul and become a revenant?”

“It happens when a vampire Turning a human screws up. If the person dies during the blood exchange, they end up reviving without a soul, and without it, they aren’t . . . right, you know? That’s why the Novem has strict rules about Turning humans. Taking a person to the brink of death, doing the blood exchange
before
their soul leaves their body, is an exact science. Revenants are usually a result of amateurs.”

“So why not kill them right away, when they realize?”

He was quiet for a moment as we turned onto Girod Street. Ahead, tall gray skyscrapers rose into the night sky, windows blown out, skeletons of their former selves. Our footsteps were loud, crunching over layers of debris and passing rotted-out vehicles and things that didn’t belong—a bathtub, a lone carousel horse lying on its side, a pontoon boat. . . .

“Imagine wanting to save someone you love,” he said. “Or Turning someone you love so they won’t grow old, so you won’t lose them. And it comes out wrong. How can you kill them? How can you douse them with gasoline and light them on fire? Because that’s the only way to completely kill them once they’ve risen. So their makers let them go. But like I said, the Novem is pretty strict, so there aren’t too many of them around.”

The area was so still that any noise, any occasional shuffle or metallic creak, was like thunder. Sebastian’s words were oddly depressing. There was humanity even in the creation of the walking dead. Loss. Regret. Love.

“When is the Novem going to clean up this place?”

“Who knows. Maybe never. They’ll restore the GD before they’ll ever get to this place. They send out executioners every once in a while to keep the ruins from becoming overrun, but other than that, they leave it alone.”

The street up ahead was blocked with a huge rubble pile. One side of a building had collapsed in the street, making a barrier of rebar, concrete, and glass.

“Be careful of glass and metal,” Sebastian said as we climbed over the pile at the lowest point. Everything in the ruins smelled like concrete dust and damp rot. The scent was thick and it stuck in the back of my throat. No matter how many times I swallowed, it wouldn’t go away.

The cry of the hawk echoed suddenly. “This way,” Sebastian said.

Once we made it over the debris, we crossed into the intersection with Loyola.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

From the blackness of the ruins we were being watched. Out in the open we were moving targets. Everywhere, on either side of us and above us in the tall buildings, it felt like a thousand eyes were upon us.

I turned slowly in a circle, gazing up the tall buildings of Entergy Tower and the Hyatt Regency, behind which was the Superdome.

My hand fell back onto the grip of my 9mm; curling my fingers around the cool material gave me a sense of calm. Every once in a while we heard noises, scrapes of metal, thuds, and scramblings.

“They’re following us,” I whispered, knocking shoulders with Sebastian as we crossed the street. “Why aren’t they attacking? And why the hell didn’t you bring a flamethrower?”

I wasn’t being funny—I was being desperate. How were we supposed to fight something that didn’t die until it was burned to ashes? We headed for Entergy Tower. It rose up from a base of debris, and most of the twenty-eight floors were open to the elements.

“Don’t run yet,” Sebastian said. “Just keep walking like you are. They might hesitate long enough for us to make it inside. If they attack, though, we run like hell.”

My skin was crawling. I didn’t like this, didn’t like being out in the open. My heart was pounding. I was sweating even though it wasn’t warm.

As we approached the tower, the hawk swooped down and materialized into Henri. He hadn’t even broken his movement, just fell into step next to Sebastian and immediately began giving us the stats. “Doorway is inside Entergy Tower. Eighteenth floor. East face. I was able to barricade the thing in a closet before he could disappear. It won’t hold him for long.” Our pace had picked up. “There are two turnskins, one near the Hyatt, the other near the rubble pile.” Okay, that wasn’t too bad, we could—“Three revenants. One in the parking deck, another on the roof of the tower, and the third one is coming up behind us!”

Henri turned just as the creature collided with him. He rolled onto his back, using the momentum to flip the revenant over him, sending it flying.

The brief flash I got of the thing—ragged clothes; sallow, sunken skin; matted hair; sharp teeth—was terrifying.

“Shit,” Sebastian cursed.

“Hurry!” Henri ran toward the tower.

I pulled my gun, cradling it in my hand. A wolf dropped down in front of me, a snarling, rangy thing. I fired. It yelped and went back a few steps as I tossed the gun to my left hand and pulled the
blade out with my right, swinging it in an arc as the wolf charged again.

The wolf came so close I could smell its rotten breath. The blade cut through skin and muscle. It all happened so fast. I didn’t think, just reacted.

We moved in a pack of three, constantly turning and watching. The entrance to the tower was only steps away. “I thought you said the Novem keeps the numbers down and these things hunt alone,” I whispered fiercely to Sebastian.

“They do. Normally. They must be hungry.” A large black panther darted from the rubble pile, bounded across the street, leaped onto the top of a hollowed-out car, and pushed off toward us.

“Got it!” Sebastian lifted his hands and made a big sweeping motion, turning his body in a circle. Wind picked up. Nearby, a car without doors or windows lifted as if caught in the swirl of Sebastian’s movement. The car spun toward the cat, enveloping the animal inside the frame, and then crashed into the side of a nearby building.

“Inside!” Henri held the door open and we raced into the building and up the stairwell. By the fourth floor we heard a bang from below as something or some
things
gave chase.

Great. Just fourteen more floors to go.

By the time we hit the tenth, my legs and my lungs were burning and I was using the railing to pull some of my weight. Still we pushed on. From the sounds below us I knew the creatures were closing in, and I had no idea what would happen when we made it to the eighteenth floor. All I cared about was beating them to the doorway.

We finally made it. Sebastian ushered us through and then grabbed an old metal chair and stuck one of its legs through the door handle. It wouldn’t hold them for long, but maybe long enough. . . .

“Where’s the doorway?” I asked Henri.

“This way.”

We ran down the hallway to the sound of the wind moaning through the building. Fear slid into my psyche. I was not a fan of heights. The idea that we were in a structure this high and the outer walls were completely gone . . . I shuddered just thinking about it.

After a few turns down a hallway, we came into a large office. Wind blew in hard—easy since the entire far wall was
gone
. In the distance the lights of the French Quarter shone and sparkled with life. A piece of rebar was shoved between the metal handles of a closet that was currently taking a massive pounding. The hinges on one door were separating from the wall. Athena’s minion would be out soon.

“It’s in this wall, I think, the gateway. See the four symbols?” Henri said, out of breath.

I edged closer to the wall on my left to see four symbols marked in dried blood, which if connected made a large rectangle.

I turned my attention back to the closet. I needed that creature in order to find out where the doorway led and what awaited us on the other side. “Once we let it out, can you guys hold it?”

Blue light appeared over Sebastian’s hands as he and Henri faced the closet. They both nodded. At least they appeared confident. I, on the other hand, not so much. Hell, the thing might not even be able to communicate with us.

“Shit,” Henri said suddenly, turning around to face the missing wall.

A head, upside down, looked in with feverish eyes. The revenant from the roof had scurried down the side of the tower. It crawled inside and across the ceiling before dropping down in front of us.

We backed up, moving slowly toward the wall with the symbols. The minion continued to pound on the closet door, about to blow it clean off the wall. Another revenant burst into the room, and even though I knew my weapon wouldn’t stop it, I pulled my gun and fired on instinct.

The revenants rushed us just as Athena’s minion broke through the closet door, charged behind us, and disappeared into the wall with the symbols.

Henri jumped in front of us, throwing his arms wide and running right at the revenants. “I got this!” he shouted. He slammed into the creatures, digging in his heels and pushing them back.

Oh God, they were headed toward the missing wall! I screamed as Henri shoved them, himself included, out of the office and into midair.

“Henri!” I ran forward, my fear of heights dropping me to my belly. I shimmied toward the edge.
Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .

Wind roared and blasted against me, sending my loose hair flying straight up. I watched them fall in a tumble of limbs, grappling each other, trying to hold on and take Henri down with them. My fingers curled around the edges of the floor. Glass punctured my palms.

End over end they tumbled. The momentum finally broke one of the revenants off, but the other one held on to Henri like glue.

C’mon, Henri . . .

Henri shifted from human to hawk, slipping from the revenant’s flailing grasp. His wings shot out, caught air, and he banked right, soaring out over the city below and leaving the revenant with a tail feather clutched between two outstretched fingers.