In Blood We Trust (10 page)

Would they have to stay away from GBVille that long? And what was going to happen to his vampire brethren while they were locked up? Would the Civils carry out some revenge?

In a flash, his vampire logic took over, freezing out his humanity.

His fellow vampires could and would take care of themselves. No one was more capable.

Mariah had narrowed her green eyes at him. She'd sensed the lightning-fast change. “Hopefully everyone will realize that it was just a small group of young vampires who lost control tonight. Either way, your older ones will know what to do with them, and how to talk down the Civils.”

“Right. Everyone wants a monster society. Everyone will want to work this out so it doesn't happen again in the future.”

He could feel a twinge of sorrow in her, and he thought it might be because she suspected a Civil killing
would
happen again, maybe even because of the were-creatures. With them, impulse ruled all, even logic, and she was the worst-case scenario.

But what were they inheriting, anyway? He glanced around the room, which was a monument to prosperity. Sculptures of peace and harmony. A glimmerfall frozen in midtumble behind a reception desk where a General Benefactors employee slumbered.

Mariah was so far away from him that she might as well have been another sculpture—but one that beat with the life and blood he couldn't live without.

“So are we running?” she asked. “Or are we going to stay here until they hunt us down?”

“Is there a choice?”

She sat on the ground, as if settling in for some planning before taking off again. “I think we need to go farther for the time being. Out of the hub. I, at least, can try coming back in a few days, when matters have cooled. By then, they might even know what happened with the victim. Surely some shadow people were round to witness it.”

Gabriel didn't know if that would be a good or bad thing. “And if matters are still unsolved at that point?”

“Then matters won't
ever
cool.” Mariah pulled her legs up, wrapping her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. As her emotion infiltrated him, he knew that he'd never find anyone like her anywhere else. That he couldn't exist without her. It wasn't like Abby, where he'd thought he'd fallen into some sort of love brought on because of how he was clinging to humanity. Mariah had accepted what it was to be a monster. And she was the only one who could make him lose control and find it within the same heartbeat, only to cycle around again.

She was terrible for him, but he wasn't a person anymore. The same rules of love didn't apply. He needed what he needed now, and she was it—a poison. A drink he desired just as much as any blood.

Her expression altered as she read his face. Did his want for her show so much?

Her voice lowered to a thick whisper. “So where do we go?”

She was with him. His Mariah—the only one he had left.

“Now that we've heard that other hubs have been taken over, we have a choice in destination,” he said. “We can go just about anywhere that the power is out.”

“Without power,” she said, “humans don't have much, do they?”

“No weapons, no surveillance. No hunting us down. We're probably in more of a situation here, as it stands.”

She swallowed hard, and he could feel the rise of something in her. He'd felt it earlier tonight, when they'd been together in bed—a lightning strike of memory, anger . . . a need just as great as his own.

Without checking himself, he looked into her eyes, and even from this distance, he jumped into her mind.

He read where she wanted to go easily. “Dallas. You're thinking of Dallas.”

She drew back from him.

Every fiber in him wanted to give her what
she
wanted, though she didn't seem as if she were champing at the bit to ask it of him.

“There's no good reason for me to go to Dallas,” she said.

“That's a lie.”

She blinked, flushed in mortification. The roar of her vital signs consumed him as he got to all fours, making his way toward her.

“We know from the monsters who've couriered messages back and forth between the hubs that Dallas fell already,” he said. “It's probably even the closest hub that we know of that's secretly monster-secured. And it's your hometown.”

The place where her very own bad men had turned her life upside down during the attack on her family.

“Forget it,” she said.

“It makes sense you'd long to go there, Mariah. I came out to the Badlands to pick up my past. Why wouldn't you want to do the same one day, especially after you exchanged with 562?” He inched even closer. “You told me once that there must be a reason we were given these powers. That this is how nature works. That maybe it's up to us to balance things out if they weren't being balanced already.”

“I think we should leave well enough alone, Gabriel.” But her tone betrayed her true need. “We stay away a few days, then come back here when the time is right. If Chaplin were here, he'd say the same thing—no Dallas.”

She had Chaplin to balance her, just as Gabriel had the clinging humanity. Night by night, both got a little further away from them.

“Chaplin's not the one who's here now, Mariah,” he said.

Gabriel felt a plunging emotion in her that he couldn't quite grasp until it leveled into anguish.

Was it because she was just now realizing that Chaplin belonged to a different time in her life, before Gabriel had come along to encourage the beast in her that Chaplin had tried to make her face and tame?

She looked perplexed. “I suppose I've wanted to know if those bad guys who escaped my dad's weapons are still there. I want to know what happened to them, if they ever got what was coming to them. But that doesn't mean it's wise to go.”

“And if you found out that they aren't there? Or that someone else took bullets to them?”

She lowered her gaze, trumped by his persuasion. “I might get a bit of peace from it.”

Gabriel would give anything for that to happen. He, himself, had often wondered what he might be if he were to confront his own past—his absentee maker. Like Mariah, he'd been made and abandoned, except she hadn't been as willing as he was.

“I say that's where we head, then,” he said, getting to a knee right in front of her, so close that her eyes went lighter in color as she shivered in his presence.

His appetite liked that—it liked that he could still be a hero to her in some way, too.

At her silence, Gabriel got to his feet, holding out a hand.

“We'll go there for a few nights,” he said. “Just like you said. We don't even have to do any searching if you don't want to. We'll lie low in a place where other monsters are in charge.” He waited a beat. “We have to go
somewhere
, Mariah.”

She didn't agree, but in the light green of her eyes, he saw a glint of desire so strong that it tore through him.

A few seconds later, she took hold of Gabriel's hand, and they ran off.

T
he next night, the oldster sat in an anteroom of the asylum that had clearly been used as a lounge for the medical professionals who'd worked there. Round him were “live paintings,” which had, when there'd been electricity, shimmered with images of lakes and ponds. Now they were just a bunch of burned-out pixels hovering over caffeine machines and plug-in stations where the humans had downloaded software into their personal computers.

He leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on a steel table. Across from him, a tik-tik woman named Falisha sat tall, her dark hair wound up into coils, giving her a faintly Grecian look, like statues you could see on a Nets museum. She was actually just as long-lived as those statues, too, because she had the same kind of existence as a vampire, animated until terminated. She wore a sheer white nightgown of a dress, a thick black ribbon round her throat and, up close, her eyes, deep-set and dark blue, were ringed by red. But it wasn't from exhaustion. All the tik-tiks carried that trait, and the color slanted up from the corners of her gaze like geisha makeup.

“I appreciate your giving me some time,” the oldster said.

She merely inclined her head, but didn't utter anything.

“You seem to be the one all the tik-tiks look up to.” No one knew these women all that well, as they kept to their lonesome most times. But the oldster was still observant in his waning years, and he knew that if he wanted to talk to the group, he should go through this Falisha first.

A gremlin scurried up her chair legs and settled into her lap, blinking its obscenely long lashes up at her. Its long two front teeth were comical.

She gave the oldster a considering look. “Michael . . . That's your name, isn't it?”

She had a frank way of talking that got the oldster's attention. And not necessarily in a good way since his gaze kept straying to her lips—lush, curvy at the top, like a bow.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, righting himself.

“You must be at the dead end of an investigation if you're chatting with
me
about the killing.”

He kept to his poker face. There wasn't a need for her to know just what he was up to—especially that he hadn't possessed the guts to shoot a silver bullet into the main suspect, Gabriel, as the vampire had sped off with Mariah last night. Gabriel had made himself a fugitive, but damned if the oldster had given his friend—the savior of the Badlands—just one more chance and refrained from giving chase.
He
could've just as easily turned into his were-form, putting on his quickness, but he'd only watched Gabriel go, hoping against hope that his friend would get far enough away that it would give the Civils enough time to simmer down a notch. And to find out if one of the other vampires had attacked the victim first.

Not that the oldster wanted any Reds to be guilty. It was just that he'd promised the Civils that he would sort out this killing, and he didn't want to find out that his friend had been the cause of it. Besides, there was too much ill will quietly traveling through this asylum for this matter to go unanswered. So much of it that the oldster wondered if the monster community was about to destroy itself before they'd really even gotten started.

“I would think you'd be spending more time with the vampires than a tik-tik,” Falisha added.

“As you might've heard, the vampires have closed ranks. They say they want to handle the situation on their own.”

And when Gabriel returned—if he ever did—they would sort him out, too,
if
he was guilty. They'd also be giving their more unstable young vampires like Gabriel better training in controlling themselves and their bloodlust.

Meanwhile, the oldster couldn't get the image of Gabriel and his bloody hands out of his head. More and more lately, the old man was thinking of him as an other. Not one of his own kind anymore.

But was the vampire
ever
really one of the Badlanders?

Falisha rested a hand on the gremlin's head. “Are the vampires conducting their own investigation then?”

“Yup. And they'll be getting back to me with their findings soon enough. You can trust in that. They know what kind of stakes we're up against.”

As Falisha petted the gremlin, its tongue lolled out of its mouth, its eyes rolling back into its head in delight. In a parallel world, the buxom tik-tik woman and the little nasty might've made for a portrait of a tainted scarlet woman with her lap dog.

“Listen,” the oldster said. “I asked you to chat with me because I'm only trying to get at any angle I can to put together a full picture. I'm talking to everyone who was at that gathering.”

“The tik-tiks will cooperate.”

“Good. Did you happen to see that group of vampires leave the dancing last night? Do you know if there was one in particular that broke off from the rest?”

“No and no.”

“Do you know if any of your women might've seen anything like that?”

“No. But you can ask them.” She shot a question right back at him. “Have you tried speaking to the shadow people about this?”

Damn, this woman was full of more curiosity than the oldster needed. “I do have someone taking care of that, ma'am.”

He'd already rounded up Taraline. Last night, when he'd sought her out, she'd been watching over Hana in her quarters as Pucci had apologized over and over again to her. Taraline had been real quiet as she'd deserted that duty and gone off with the oldster. The sort of quiet that made a person walk a few feet behind a shadow.

Falisha stopped petting the gremlin, tapping it on the buttocks, making it jump off her lap with a grumble. It scurried out of the room, bitching in apparent complaint the entire time.

She scanned the oldster up and down, and he straightened in his chair. When had
he
been put in the hot seat?

“You wouldn't be interviewing us tik-tiks because you think we're somehow at fault, now, would you?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Because I'll volunteer to have a vampire enter my mind, just to show that I and the other tik-tiks have no reason to lie, or even to kill a Civil.”

“Ma'am, I know that you and your women enjoy one kind of meal, and one kind only. And it ain't got anything to do with a male Civil monster.”

She smiled faintly, acknowledging that he'd scored a point. “Even so . . . you're here, picking my brain, as if you suspect we're somehow involved.”

“Why would I think that?”