Crossed (4 page)

The crown chakra is called
Sahasrara;
it controls everything else. It’s basically the doorway to consciousness. I took it last, stealing her mind. Normally when I do that to people I give them the most mind-blowing orgasm they’ll ever experience in exchange, but not Tabitha. She didn’t deserve it, so she got all the buildup without the release.
Nice.

“Put on the panties,” I told her. “It’ll turn him on. Best not to think about why. He’s a man. They get off on weird stuff.”

“Okay,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Why not?”

“I mean, if he can’t get kinky with his wife”—I straightened
her dress, began to repair the damage I’d done to her makeup—”then he might want to stray.”

“You’re such a good sister,” she said. One bloody tear welled within her eye and I dabbed it away with the paper towels I’d used to dry myself. She was still seeming human, so the tear should have been a normal tear, not a vampire’s. I leaned in close, watched her eyes. I still had her in my power, and it wasn’t like she was strong enough to put up any real resistance . . . or I didn’t think she was, but it was almost as if I’d underestimated her, like she had hidden depths and was fighting my power. . . .
Odd.

“No one else in the world has a sister like you,”
she said with a smile.

“You have no idea.”

    3    

ERIC:

THE HAIRY BIKER REVIVAL

This isn’t going exactly as I’d planned,” I coughed between gouts of flame. Note to self: next time you wind up fighting one of the increasing number of werewolf zealots in the United States, and an ally of yours is nice enough to summon up a storm so you won’t spend the whole melee on fire, don’t let the werewolves bless the rain and force your mouth open. It sucks.

Not that the fight itself was going well. Based on the combat chatter, the lead werewolf’s name seemed to be Deacon. He perched on my chest, hind claws cutting into my stomach, actively trying to rip my head from my shoulders. At least I could close my mouth.

“I’m coming to help you, Dad!” Greta’s scream bit through the rain and storm.

“No!” I shouted back. “Even the rain is blessed. You’ll be destroyed!” Greta’s tough, but any holy wounds she receives don’t heal unless I bleed on them. Of course, the way things were going, she’d be able to find my blood just about anywhere on the street.

My vampire speed just wouldn’t kick back in, and strength
alone wasn’t cutting it. In short, my powers had picked a bad time to act finicky. Between the time I died and came back as a vampire, I’d been embalmed. Usually, that stops the turning process and you die for real, but not for me. I’d always thought that surviving my burial prep is what had screwed up my powers. Turns out I’d only been half right. Like everything with me, it was complicated.

The embalming didn’t kill me because I didn’t become a vampire in the traditional way at all. Like any other member of the Courtney family line who dies and is found “unworthy” of the big happily ever afterlife, I came back. Gotta love those family curses! As if that wasn’t enough, I’d also been enchanted by Lord Phillip—magic elixir in the embalming fluid or something—supposedly to slow the development of my powers and to hide me from my sire, who apparently would eventually show up to kill me, not just for shits and giggles, but because I turned out to be an Emperor-level vamp, like her, and Phil didn’t want that to happen too early for his Machiavellian plans, whatever they might actually be, to come to fruition.

Crazy, huh? Things got a little better recently, though. An Emperor’s powers don’t function properly until they create a
memento mori
: a repository for the more id-based portion of their power. Of course they can’t die until they create one either, so if something happens which might normally kill the vampire portion of an Emperor (in my case, getting explodicated with shaped charges of blessed C-4), you create one when your body reforms. My abilities had become more reliable since then, but the further I am from my
memento mori,
the screwier they get. And they’re screwy in the falling-out-of-the-sky
Greatest American Hero
sort of way.

Most Emperors use something small for a
memento mori,
the repository of their darkness—a ring or a necklace, something they can keep with them, something intensely personal—but since I’d created mine without knowing what I was doing and
since it happened to be the closest of my personal effects that hadn’t joined me in reduced-to-less-than-ashes land, I’d used my 1964 ½ Mustang convertible. It answers to “Fang.” It feeds on roadkill. And since it is now, in effect, vampiric (with a few zombie-like tendencies), I try to keep it out of the sun—which is why I’d parked it a few blocks away on a covered deck. Parking closer might have been a good idea.

Ligaments in my neck started to pop. Skin sizzled with each drop of rain.

Then I heard it, the roar of one angry Mustang. I love my car, even more now that he’s a twisted evil undead machine. My skin turned gray, then black, and I started to grow. Finally, I was about to get my uber vamp on! Holy stuff doesn’t sting my Emperor form as badly as it does my normal vampire self. Even sunlight takes longer to kick in.

Behind me, in the church, I heard Winter say something about winning a bet and several vampires sighed while others applauded. Eight feet tall in my Emperor form, I flexed my leathery wings and clicked my claws.

“That damn vampire bets on everything,” I growled.

“It’s true,” Deacon spat, which could have been an acceptable response to my statement, but the way his eyes widened as he said it made me think we were talking about two different subjects altogether.

“What is?” Was he talking about me being an Emperor? My uber vamp form? What? I threw him off me like a rag doll, but he didn’t land like one. Spry and nimble, Deacon crouched on all fours, growling the opening of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.

“Form up, Apostles!” he shouted.

I hazarded a glance at the door of the church and the vampires crowding in under the awning to watch the show. Phillip held up a charred bit of metal, as if that would explain something to me about why he’d stopped tossing lightning bolts. More cautious vamps watched through the eyes of their
human thralls. It’s a trick that I don’t know, but then again I prefer things up close and personal. Not one of them looked like they had any intention of helping me out.

Werewolves are good pack hunters. Vampires do well in ones and twos, but large-scale organization isn’t our thing.

“Looks like you’ve got your hands full, boss,” Talbot’s voice caught my ear. He wouldn’t help me either. Talbot only fights in self-defense or when he’s hunting or when he damn well feels like it. There was no way he was risking that tux. Mousers are like that.

Twelve werewolves charged as one, wet fur glistening as they came. Time slowed for everything except me and Fang, raindrops slowing in the air, then freezing, motionless, like a wire-fu bullet-time moment from a huge effects movie, plus fur and fangs.

Two and a half tons of zealotry and claw looks dangerous no matter how fast it is or isn’t moving, but the pause in battle gave me time to think. I wasn’t facing just one Alpha wolf. This was a pack of Alphas. The other eleven didn’t look like Alphas at first, because next to Deacon any other werewolf looked like a runt. Time returned to normal before it occurred to me that I ought to be hitting things, so I stupidly met the pack head-on.

Fang charged into the mass from the side, scattering them between us. One Apostle found himself being drawn slowly and inexorably beneath Fang’s undercarriage, screaming as he went. Getting eaten by Fang is not a pleasant way to go, and the werewolf fought it, claws scoring the asphalt as he struggled. Everywhere I touched the wolves, their holiness stung. The blessed rain was taking its toll too, and I actually began to wonder whether I was going to make it without a little help. Covered in a mass of werewolves, I stumbled back against Fang, and then I felt them. The rats.

Once before, I’d summoned a cloud of bats to block out the sun. I had no idea how I’d done it then, but I’d seen the
same sort of thing depicted in stained glass back at the Highland Towers. This time, it was rats, a plague of them. They crawled out of the sewer like they’d been massing underground waiting for my call. Surging out of storm grates, more rats than I would have thought could possibly have been infesting the area swarmed to my rescue, gnashing, biting, and paying no attention to the holy water.

Deacon grabbed the werewolf Fang was eating and hauled him out from under the Mustang with a horrendous rip like a cow tearing in half. That I know what that sounds like frightens me a little. Either way, the lycanthrope came free, though he was legless below the knees.

“Enough!” A voice like a nun’s ruler on your knuckles cut through everything. I didn’t see the speaker right off, but I knew his identity. Father Ike doesn’t yell very often, but when he does, it demands attention. I’d ask him if he had a little touch of vampirism, but I know that’s not where he gets the juice. He gets it from belief. The Apostles jerked up short, and a Semitic man wearing a priest’s alb and preaching scarf over his single-breasted cassock stared at us all in a combination of disapproval and bemusement.

“Sorry, Ike,” Deacon and I said together, surprising each other as well as our accomplices with our familiarity.

“Eric,” he said, pointing at the rats. His gaze told me he wanted them gone. I transformed back to normal, wearing my standard “Welcome to the Void” T-shirt and jeans, the warmth of the newly formed clothes sinking into my skin despite the rain. With the uber vamp gone, the rats scurried like, well, like rats, back into the nooks, crannies, and drains from which they had emerged.

Pleased with my contrition, Ike and his glare moved on to Deacon. The sable fur vanished as Alpha werewolf was replaced by a tall blond man in his early thirties, heavily muscled, but proportioned evenly like a martial artist. I noticed the
tattoos and other artwork weren’t present in his human form and both eyes were brown. He had a chin you could crash a bus into, and the bus might come away with the worst of it.

Fang backed timidly into the shadow of the church, the ghost of John Paul Courtney (my great-great-grandfather—yet another recipient of the Courtney family curse that had caused my vampirism) appearing in the passenger’s seat once the darkness covered the car. In life, he’d failed to do whatever it is the curse actually wants us Courtneys to do, but it turned him into a ghost and tied him to his magic revolver in kind of a Jiminy Cricket role to other cursed Courtneys instead of vamping him, which I guess is like being second runner-up or something when compared to the grand prize of being found worthy and actually being allowed to die.

What can I say? I’ve led an interesting death. So had John Paul Courtney. In his day, he’d been almost single-handedly responsible for scaring religion into the lycanthrope community. All the good little werewolves, the ones that said their prayers to God, Buddha, or the deity of their choice at night—he left them alone. All the bad little werewolves got a bullet from
El Alma Perdida
(the aforementioned magic gun) right between the eyes and had their furry little souls trapped inside. I don’t think JPC realized that when he died, his spirit would be tied to the gun, too. Seeing him jogged my memory.
El Alma Perdida
was in Fang’s glove box. I had a gun specifically for killing werewolves, a magic gun with fucking magic bullets, in my magic car and I’d forgotten all about the damn thing until the fight was over.

“Typical.” It’s no use being exasperated with my memory. As far as I know it’s exasperated with me too and doesn’t work correctly out of spite. I walked under the awning, glad to see I wasn’t the only one who felt like a teenager caught fighting on the playground.

Heavy rain became drizzle as the wet werewolf in human
form stood drenched and downcast before Father Ike. The Apostles shuffled clear, eyes averted, tails tucked between their legs. Sharp soft whimpers escaped their throats as Ike spoke.