Dreams for the Dead (17 page)

“Maybe because it’s happened about fifteen times already.”

“I thought you said you lost count. Besides, it’s only
twelve
.”

“Look what I have,” Augusta said slyly. She withdrew a small black book from behind her back and flourished it.

Jared lunged. “
Give me that!
”

“No! I’m going to do a poetry reading!”

Augusta skipped out of Jared’s reach and jumped up to stand on the couch. Branek, laughing, leapt up to hold Jared back. Clearing her throat, Augusta began to read in a theatrical voice.

“There wasn’t any use denying

that it was me you yearned to touch,

but now your day is slowly dying

so you may never feel that much.

“And shadows dance upon the wind

to torture you till your last breath.

If you should think about me then,

I wish you all the world’s regret.

“The blood I’ve shed will bring your death;

the right was mine because I knew

that you would say with your last breath,

‘Forgiv
e me if I would not love you.’

“I must say, Jared, that’s quite dramatic. Love and death. Such eternal themes!”

“You fucking pussy,” Branek put in gleefully.

“Which one is that about, anyway?” Augusta wanted to know. She looked back at the journal for an answer.

Jared worked himself free of Branek’s hold and snatched the book from Augusta’s hands. He laid the ribbon carefully between two pages and closed it. Holding it over his heart, he proclaimed, “I am a
romantic
. Laugh all you want,” he added as they did, “but I have been preparing myself for years. I’ve chosen the girl to be my vampire bride, and she will not be able to resist my charms.”

“Oh, Jared,” Augusta sighed. “You’re just too much.”

When Loftus entered the room, the air turned icy. Everyone stilled and turned to face him, awaiting his instruction. Fallon stood beside him, haughty as ever, giving nothing away except his innate sense of superiority.

“I want to take you to the caverns tonight,” Loftus said solemnly. “All of you.”

“What for?” Jared asked, sullen.

Branek popped him on the back of the head. “No questions.”

Only Nola stayed behind. She was close to them, but had not been with them long enough to be considered family. After they’d already gone, Tristan realized he’d forgotten to kiss her goodbye. He hoped he didn’t hear about it the next time they met.

They took two cars. Jared drove Branek and Loftus in his Corvette, while Tristan had Fallon and Augusta. Nobody spoke.

He remembered the way exactly. It was burned in his memory, even though he’d tried to forget the single night he’d been there. He took the obscure roads mapping the dry, mountainous landscape, unpaved roads he barely knew existed. They dipped and rose sharply beneath the Nova, rocking the silent passengers uncomfortably. When they reached the flat expanse of the dry lake bed outside the caverns, Tristan’s skin hummed in memory of the rough ride.

There were so few defining features in the vast desert night. Dark mountains hulked in the near distance. The vague smolder of light pollution bled into the sky above them. The glowing white moon was bright, emitting too much light for many stars to be visible.

One by one, they entered the yawning break in the mountain. It was almost too dark for even a vampire to see anything. The passages were so narrow in some places that Tristan had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The ground was smooth but uneven, angled slightly downward. Every now and then a draft of cold air shot through the tunnels.

That is where Loftus keeps his secrets. That is where he keeps my mother.

After several minutes of walking, the uneven sheared rock walls widened into an echo-y space with an unseeable ceiling. Dark tunnel openings led off from the room.

“Some legends say the vampire must return to his grave by day to regain the strength he spends at night,” Loftus intoned. “I don’t have a grave—and neither do any of you—but I believe there must be some truth to this particular bit of folklore, some significance.”

As he spoke, Fallon murmured softly and executed a subtle dance with his hands. The cavern began to glow with an eerie alchemical light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The rock walls were becoming faintly green with some otherworldly quintessence.

“That is why I chose this as her resting place,” Loftus continued. “The earth would heal her, and hold her in time, and her own son would bring her back to me with the magic I taught to him.”

Loftus stood inside a small circle—for protection? Tristan couldn’t remember having seen anyone draw it on the ground. He, Branek, Jared, and Augusta stood in a loose line beside Loftus. None of them knew what he was talking about.

“What
is
this?” Augusta demanded.

“Earth magic,” Fallon said quietly. “Blood magic.”

“That makes no fucking sense.”

What did you see in there?

Tristan, disturbed by his own obscure glimpse of the future in the darkness of the caverns, had asked the question of Augusta and Jared. He knew they’d seen something the night Loftus had shoved each of them down the passage, the night Tristan had run away and found the canyon. Even Branek must have, at some point. But they wouldn’t speak of it, and neither did he. He imagined they’d all seen a variation of the same violent things.

To say he’d
seen
something wasn’t really accurate. The cavern had not shown him an actual vision, but flooded him with knowledge somehow, pure and presumably changeable. Secretly he knew there’d never been a choice, really, between bloodthirstiness and abstinence, between violence and peace. What he’d done, what they’d all done, had always been inevitable. Loftus had finely molded their natures until nothing good remained.

In that moment, standing there in the glowing cavern, Tristan could not summon any hatred for his adoptive father, though there’d been plenty over the years. Tristan was wreathed in power and he understood, for a moment, all the secrets of the universe. He had tasted blood, and so he knew what it was to hold dominion. In this moment he was lord and defender. He was part of the foundation of their family, a unif
ying element, an intensifier. And Loftus, their creator, their master, wielded the greatest power of all.

Fallon murmured in undulating tones, in a language that made no sense to Tristan’s ears. The pale-haired young man was the only one in the cavern ever to have prayed at an altar. But God couldn’t help him here. Here, they were all fo
rsaken.

“Your blood is more powerful than human blood,” Loftus said softly. “Combined, it forms a si
ngle, powerful substance. It was the only way she would come back to me.” It seemed he addressed his four children, though he didn’t look at them. He stared with wide eyes down into a dark opening on the far side of the cavern, an expectant smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

In the tunnel, where Loftus stared, was nothing but darkness that even the alchemical light couldn’t penetrate. The day-to-day beat of Tristan’s heart was so slow as to seem nonexistent, but now he could almost feel it poun
ding. There was a sour, singed quality to the air.

Loftus made a quick, excited sound. For a second it seemed like Tristan’s eyes were playing tricks on him, but no, there was movement far in the back of the tunnel, where the dark was thickest. Something long and white was worming its way forward from an underground lair. A pale moon of a face dipped down toward the ground with each wormy shuffle. Stringy black hair trailed behind the thing, along with the tatters of a white dress.

“Delphine,” Loftus exhaled.

Tristan looked again, and it
was
a woman, not a worm with hands that clawed at the ground in order to move forward. Her eyes were large dark holes, like the empty sockets of a skull. In them he could see a river. A field. At the edge, trees beginning to bare themselves to the fall. Big blue mountains in the distance. A bigger, bluer sky. There should have been sound—the river rushing, birds singing, maybe the wind—but there was nothing. Just silence. So much silence, so complete it felt like pressure on his eardrums.

He was at the orphanage. He’d played by this river. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so much grass.
Yes.
It was so beautiful.

And then he thought,
No
.

The second he stopped believing in the scene before his eyes, he stopped seeing it. Blood pooled at his feet, spreading so fast and far he couldn’t step out of it. It overflowed from the river. He could feel the blood leaking thickly from his own sharp grin. A wave of fear rolled through him and rushed out of his mouth in a silent scream.

Suddenly he was back in the cavern. “Gus,” he choked out.

Augusta had collapsed to the floor beside him, her blue hair fanning prettily. Jared lay on his other side. And there was Branek, his aggressive features startlingly peaceful and childlike. Tristan lay on his back, stunned. His mouth was sticky. Somehow they were all bleeding from the mouth, the four trails of their blood forming a single narrow river that the worm lapped up along its slow pr
ogress.

Anger, white and righteous, flared inside Tristan. It was for Loftus ruining the lives of four chi
ldren. It was for him killing those children after letting them grow, for changing them into vampires. It was for him doing all this to reach this selfish, sinister moment. It was for reducing Tristan to this weakened state when
he
, not Loftus, was meant for immeasurable power. Loftus did not have the right to such power, and he was going to pay for the wrong he’d done.

Fallon was still chanting whatever ceremonial words he’d learned for this night. He appeared to be in a trance. The same words sounded from his lips over and over. Evocations. The names of d
emons.

Tristan rolled over onto his stomach, not knowing why he was the only one able to move. Wea
kened from the inexplicable blood loss, he pulled himself toward Loftus, who awaited the worm in nearly frantic excitement.

The worm writhed forward and made a barely audible moaning sound that made Tristan’s neck prickle. He wasn’t afraid. Or if he was, the fear was buried deep beneath this hot blazing anger. This hatred. He wasn’t going to let Loftus throw their fucking
prima materia
blood away so easily. They’d lived through too much to die so stupidly, and on someone else’s terms. For all he’d done, there was still so much in Tristan’s life left undone.

When he was close enough, Tristan threw his arms around Loftus’ knees and pulled him off ba
lance. He grabbed a handful of Loftus’s clothes and dragged him back. Tristan maneuvered himself into the right position and snagged his teeth in Loftus’s skin, releasing small spurts of blood. He’d only swallowed a little when Loftus reared up and flipped him. Tristan was on his back once more, silver eyes flashing before him.

He stared to rise up, but Loftus brought one foot down on his forearm, snapping it against the cavern floor. Tristan cried out and rolled over in time to see Loftus scoop the worm into his arms. It coiled around him, snakelike, and shrieked an inhuman sound that echoed off the cavern walls. Loftus ran into one of the tunnels. The tattered white dress was the last thing to disappear from view.

What the
fuck
had just happened.

At some point Fallon had stopped chanting. With his good arm, Tristan grabbed his ankle as he tried to run past and Fallon fell. It was the only move Tristan could perform at that moment, but it seemed effective enough.

“I’m going to take some blood from you,” he growled through his teeth. “And when you wake up you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on, you stupid,
stupid
boy.”

Breathing and grunting like a beast, Tristan filled his mouth with Fallon’s blood. He swallowed voraciously. His whole body tingled. There wasn’t enough blood in Fallon’s body for him, and there certainly wasn’t enough for the others. He had to stop. He didn’t want to.

He lifted his head from Fallon’s stained neck. A formless shout of rage and frustration escaped his throat. Fallon, unconscious but not dead, didn’t move. Tristan shoved him away and staggered to his feet. He did his best to set his broken arm, gritting his teeth against the burning pain.

“Shit,” he muttered.

It would have been so much easier to leave the others lying there. No one would ever find their bodies. He couldn’t say for sure whether any of them would bother saving him were the situation reversed.

Well. Maybe he did have a heart after all.

Getting them out was hell. He thought it would never end. He thought about quitting every damn second. The passage was so fucking narrow and difficult to navigate even when he wasn’t weak and trying to drag deadweight through it with a broken but healing arm. He cried out at the seeming futility of it so many times, unleashing demented curses into the darkness just because it made him feel better. Loftus was going to pay so hard just for this ignominious bullshit.