Another One Bites the Dust (12 page)

Vayl and I stood quietly for a couple of seconds while I tried to decide how much I was about to upset him. In the end, it didn’t matter. We were on the job, which meant the team came before everything. Even our personal feelings.

I decided to be blunt. “What did you do to piss her off?”

“Nothing I know of.” I felt a surge in his power and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees.

“Don’t you pull that vamp crap on me,” I told him. “If you don’t feel like talking about something, just say so.”

“I do not feel like discussing it.” He gave me that raised eyebrow that I’d come to learn was a challenge.
Go ahead,
it said,
just try and go there. We’ll just see who’s more stubborn
.

“Fine,” I said. “But you and I both know that allowing your search for your boys to come between you and the people who are helping you complete this mission is not only wrong, it’s stupid. And I am not losing another team to one member’s idiocy.” Vayl believed Cassandra might be able to connect him with the men who had, in another life, been his sons. A long succession of Seers had led him to believe they were Americans. But he’d had no luck finding them.

“I am not some amateur slayer who is going to call doom upon the heads of another group of your companions,” Vayl said, his voice deepening, as it usually did when he was seriously disturbed. “I simply want what is mine.”

Here we go again, tromping into no-reasoning-with-the-man territory
. If his boys had lived out their natural lives they’d have still died over two hundred years ago. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t let them go. And who was I to judge, when the pain of my own losses still had the power to bring me to my knees? I wouldn’t have said another word if the job had only involved the two of us. But we’d attracted a crowd that I felt a deep need to protect, the way I hadn’t been able to protect my first crew.

“You’re just going to have to be patient—”

“I am tired of being patient!” Vayl blasted the words toward the water, as if to challenge some unseen god who’d been playing hide-and-seek with his boys all these years. He looked down at me. “I want to know where they are. I want to see them. Speak to them. Tell them everything I have been holding in my heart since the day they died. Cassandra can do that for me. She can connect me to them if she would just try! So stop coddling her and let her do her job!” Desperate tone in his voice now. Raw and angry. Patently unfair.

“Cassandra’s not going to pull a vision out of her ass just to appease you. But she is going to tell you where to shove it if you keep pushing her. And we need her if we’re going to do this job right. So knock it off!”

I tried to make a graceful exit, but apparently Cassandra had the market cornered on that one. I tripped over a bunch of electric cords Bergman had run from the RV to the closest outlet and nearly fell on my face.

“Fuck!”
Funny how sometimes that one word says it all. And how, having said it all, I felt much better. Maybe I’d even sleep right through the next eight hours.

I didn’t. Awake and restless after only forty-five minutes on a couch that felt more like a pile of rocks covered by a thin layer of batting, I wandered around the empty RV. Figuring everybody had gone outside to investigate the mouthwatering aromas coming from our neighbors’ grills, I followed suit.

Bergman, Cole, and Cassandra had made themselves scarce, but I found my brother sitting at a picnic table, stirring a bowl of glop that might have once been ice cream. It broke my heart to see him so sad. And it didn’t help that we were surrounded by families who were having a blast eating greasy food and riding in various spinning, rolling, teeter-tottering contraptions that looked like they could fly apart at any moment.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Dave said as I sat down beside him. I waited for him to jump down my throat, accuse me of destroying the only woman he’d ever loved. In some twisted way I wanted his rage, knowing it would make me feel better if he couldn’t stand me. I could hardly bear the look in his eyes as they met mine.

“Is there a way to bring her back?”

“I don’t . . . no, Dave, there’s no way.”

“Why did she go?”

“I don’t think she had a choice.” But we both knew better. Unwilling people cannot be turned. I looked down at my hands as they rested on the table, watched them curl into fists. I felt a strange sense of detachment as I realized I had never hated Jesse more than I did at this moment.

When I looked up it was dark. Dave was gone and Matt sat in his place. He looked hungry. And not for ice cream.

“Wanna tango?” he asked, giving me his lazy, come-get-me smile. But the fangs ruined the effect.

“You’re not a vampire,” I said, digging my fingernails into my palms to keep myself from punching that look off his face. It mocked everything we’d been, everything we might have become. “Aidyn Strait killed you. I saw your soul . . . fly away. Remember?”

“Can I help it if this is how you dream of me?”

“Yes!” I yelled, though I knew I was lying. “You have all kinds of choices, you son of a bitch, and they all affect me! Did you think of that even once before you turned?”
What?
Now I was confusing myself. Was he a vampire or not?

I looked at him and felt something inside me shatter. “I hate you.”

He grinned. “You love me.”

“You left me.”

He held out his arms, looked down at himself as if to say, “What the hell am I doing here then?”

“You know what I mean! This isn’t really you!”

“Come on, baby. If I’d needed a transfusion you’d have given it to me, no question. This way we can be together forever.”

I started to shudder from the effort it took to hold back a torrent of sobs. “My Matt would never ask that of me.”

He lunged over the table, but I’d known he was coming. I was already up and running, threading through the jostling crowd, which now ran heavily toward gangs of loudly laughing teenagers and young couples in the sizzling stage of romance. Bad place for a showdown.

I darted off the main walk, between food booths, through the parking lot of a Christi’s Crab Shack, deeper into the city. Matt’s vampiric scent dogged me, reminding me that I could only outrun him as long as he allowed me to. And then what?

You know what I want,
his voice whispered in my head.

I stopped. I stood on the sidewalk of a busy street, surrounded by office buildings whose windows glared at me between evenly spaced streetlights as if through the reflective sunglasses of a hard-ass cop.
Of course. I get it now. Matt wants to drive me crazy.
It was the price he’d set for allowing him, Jesse, and the rest of our crew to die. Because he knew me so well, he understood that for me, insanity equaled hell.

Burn, baby, burn,
came his voice, laughing uproariously inside my pounding head.

“No. Not like that.” I looked down the street. Vehicles sped past, probably fifteen miles over the forty-mile-per-hour speed limit. I stepped forward.

“Jasmine!” I looked back. Cole was three steps behind me, reaching desperately for my arm. Oh God, was Matt after him too?

I teetered on the curb, one foot floating in the roadway, the other leg shaking with the effort of holding my unbalanced body weight. I reached back and Cole grabbed my hand, yanking me toward him so hard I stumbled and fell. When my knees hit the concrete I came fully awake.

Cole lifted me to my feet. Traffic roared behind me. The sun beat down on my head, which I promptly dropped to Cole’s shoulder.
Oh please, no, not again
.

“I’m so sorry, Jasmine,” Cole said, stroking my hair. “I just left the RV for a second. Chinese Mom came by to exchange tickets, our show for theirs—remember the deal? And I got distracted by the baby.”

I would too. He was almost as cute as E.J. “What time is it?” I asked. Though I still wore the watch Bergman had made for me, my arm felt heavier than a cannon.

“It’s almost two o’clock.”

“So tired.”

“Come on.” He put his arm around me and began leading me back to the bay. “I’ll find you something criminally caffeinated.”

My head ached. And my heart . . . wiser not to go there. “I think I’m going to need something stronger than coffee.”

“Yeah? What would that be?”

“Chocolate.”

Cole gave me a brotherly kiss on the cheek that nearly did me in. “You got it, chief.”

Chief. He called me chief. Oh, Jesus, how am I going to keep this crew safe when they can barely prevent me from killing myself?
No answer. Not from Jesus, anyway. I had another open line, of course.

Raoul.

But when I thought of him, I experienced a sort of full-spirit cringe. Raoul dwelt among my most inapproachable memories. He’d brought me back from death. Twice. His guidance, while it had been vital, nearly overwhelmed the senses. I wasn’t sure what kind of being he was. Only that he’d been a warrior in life, and his ability to command had followed him into the afterlife, where he conducted his activities from a place that looked a lot like a suite at the Mirage. But I couldn’t go there. Because I suspected that whatever I discovered would be more devastating than anything I’d experienced so far.

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

Cole stepped into the RV first. As soon as he turned to me with that aw-crap look on his face, I knew all was not right in Castle Kick-Ass. Then I heard the sobbing, not quite muffled by a pillow we would all want dry-cleaned very, very, very—I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the inner chant—soon.

I walked all the way in and closed the door. Cassandra sat on Ashley, swiftly drying her eyes, refusing to meet mine.

“I’m fine,” I ventured. “No need to worry. Cole caught me in time.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” she replied. As soon as she heard herself she looked at me apologetically. “I didn’t mean—of course I was worried—”

“Don’t sweat it.” I faked a smile, sinking into Mary-Kate. “I know you don’t cry that easily.”

“No, I can’t remember the last time . . .” She wiped more tears off her clear, dark skin, then wiped her damp fingers on her lacy orange skirt. She wore matching orange suede boots and had topped it all off with a fluffy white short-sleeved sweater that would’ve made anyone else resemble a poodle. Not Cassandra. Even in the midst of emotional turmoil she maintained this incredible grace of motion, this self-assured
I am
, that let you know she would never waste your time or steer you wrong.

Cole had headed straight for the fridge, rummaged around inside, and come back with a Hershey bar the size of my forearm. He brought it to me with such a look of triumph I had to laugh. I motioned for him to sit beside me, then shared it out among the three of us. Bergman still slept on the converted banquette, so we saved a square for him.

After a moment of munching that bordered near to holy, I said to Cassandra, “Can you talk about this?”

She shrugged. “It would do no good.”

“How do you figure?”

“It never does.”

“You know what my Granny May used to tell me?” I asked, taking another luscious bite.

“What?”

“‘Never’ is a dirty word.”

“No wonder you swear so much,” said Cole. He spun on his butt, flopping his jeans-clad legs into my lap, laying his head back on the arm of the couch. His army surplus jacket fell open to reveal a white T-shirt peppered with realistic red spatters, I’d guess from a .22, along with the sloganPAINTBALL IS FOR SISSIES . “You’re obviously very confused about the English language.”

I did a number on the sides of his knee that made him yelp and he settled right down. “Come on,” I said, waving my hand at Cassandra as if I was moving her through a construction zone. “You know I’m going to weasel this information out of you sooner or later, so you might as well cough it up right now.”

She sighed, her shoulders slumping as she surrendered to my well-developed powers of persistence. Laying her hands on her legs so all twelve of her rings showed clearly, she worried at her skirt as she spoke. “I have had a vision”—she swallowed—“of my own death.”

Wow. No matter how you look at it, that just sucks
.

“Are, uh”—Cole rose to his elbows—“are your visions always right?”

“Very nearly.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

Cassandra began chipping away at the red polish on her fingernails. “I was in the show tent, alone, with the dragon.”

“With Lung?” I clarified.

Her shrug said,
either way
. “I had just given him a reading that put him into a murderous rage. He . . .” She shook her head, trying to dispel the vision, but it wouldn’t go. “I could feel the fire of his breath shriveling my skin.” The tears welled up and spilled over. The pillow went back to her face, muffling her next words. “I can feel it even now.”

Aw, man, Jaz, you gotta fix this. And I mean now!
Poor Cassandra was just about to go out of her mind. Without even thinking, I said, “Not gonna happen.”

“Wh-what?”

“I won’t allow it. It’s that simple. I will not let Lung kill you.”

“How are you going to prevent it?” she cried.