In Blood We Trust (13 page)

He sat on a part of the couch that wasn't ruined by a stream of stuffing. He was surprised he'd gotten inside this place if it belonged to the lizard-man now. Then again, Mariah obviously still moved around it as if it were hers, no matter who'd taken it over. She would always possess it.

Mariah's garbled tone was barely audible. “I keep seeing my family in here, and knowing that lowlords moved in after we left seems like a desecration. But even back when my father and me left for the Badlands, bad guys were moving in on everything. Why wouldn't they move in here, too?”

She walked to the wall, her hand hovering over the stain, not daring to touch it. After a moment she let her hand fall. Then she turned her back on the sight altogether.

“So what now?” She had blanked her mind, and maybe that was why she was so in control.

“We could track down this lowlord, wake him up, see if he or his gang knows anything about this house's history and where your remaining bad guys went off to after . . .”

He was about to say
the attack
.

Mariah was quiet for a while. She wandered away from the wall, rounded a corner, disappeared.

Gabriel got up to see where she'd gone.

He found her in a bedroom, where pink rags slouched from a curtain rod over the iron-barred window. The bed's frame had crumbled, broken under the bare yellowed mattress and, behind him on the door, broken locks hung, useless, a reminder of how the bad guys had broken in to hurt the girl who'd slept here. In a corner, near a long mirror where he could see himself, a teddy bear rested, one-eyed, resigned, its fur matted.

Mariah went to it, held it. She looked normal. So human now.

“Chaplin's,” she said.

Vampires didn't have real hearts to break, Gabriel thought, but this sight sorely tested his composure. So did the sadness emanating from her in slow waves that drenched him.

She added, “My dog tried so hard to save me that night, but they took him down, just before they loosed the werewolf on me.”

He watched her, searching for signs that she was about to go into half change again. But something about holding Chaplin's stuffed animal was soothing her.

“I might never be able to close this chapter of my life,” she said, as if that teddy bear had brought about an epiphany. “Now that I'm strong enough to finally face those . . .
men
. . . I may not ever get the chance. They could be dead. They could be in another part of the country.”

“And they could be doing to other people what they did to you and your family.”

She looked over at him. “It wasn't so long ago that you hated me for giving in to bloodlust.”

“That was before . . .” What—before his vampire had fully kicked in? Before he'd been faced with more bad guys than he'd known what to do with, first with Stamp, then at the asylum? Before Mariah had come along to push along his natural progress?

She didn't put down the toy, just kept it against her chest.

“I've been learning more from the older vampires,” he said.

She nodded, as if relieved that he was finally at the point where he wanted to talk about it.

“They call this stage I'm in
the gloaming
. That's an old word for
dusk
, but to our kind, it means the time before darkness really settles in. It takes a while to get there, but once we do, it's a quick stage, and they say it's happening because our brains don't adapt as fast as the rest of our bodies after we're turned. The wisest of the vampires even told me something about how my psychological composition—my memories, my conditioning—is what's clinging to humanity. It's not actually humanity itself.” He dwelled on that for a moment, but it didn't register much. “Once my mind fully adapts, the gloaming is over.”

“I can't picture you being like them. Watching everyone all the time. So cool. Remote. Even though they're so hungry inside.”

“Vampires consider the aptitude to separate emotion from thinking a gift.”

She moved her thumb over the toy animal. “Maybe we were-creatures do the same, in a way. We can think more when we're in our human forms, but we lose it when we're not. It's only when we're in half change that we can do both at the same time.” She hesitated. “But I remembered what I was doing when I went into lunar form this last time. That was different.”

“We've all got our good traits. It's just a matter of accepting them for what they are.”

Silence again.

Then she said, “Did you ever think that weres and vampires never hung out together before because we're just too different? That it's just as simple as that? And that it's the same for
all
monsters?”

Why did she say it as if she'd been discovering this with every passing night?

“Maybe for others it's always been that way,” he said. “Maybe they never got as far as we did, though.”

“And how far is that?”

Her gaze was wide, as if she needed to finally hear him say it. As if she suspected that he couldn't . . . or shouldn't.

But he wasn't going to let anything stop him from being with her.

He walked to her, got to his knee, cupped her face in his hands. “I love you, Mariah. That's how far it's gone, and it's not going to matter when my gloaming's over and done with. You know that, right?”

A yanking sensation made him feel as if his blood had been pulled out of him, rushing toward her. And he would give her that and more.

He didn't think about how her emotions might be projecting onto him, how that blood might've been sacrificing itself because she was taking it, possessing it. What he felt had to be real, just this one time, and he wanted to hold on to it, even after he'd lost everything and gone full vampire.

Couldn't he keep just that one thing?

“I love you, too,” she said, gripping one of his wrists, holding the stuffed animal with her other hand. “So much that I don't know what to do with it sometimes.”

Already, the temperature was rising between them, the air seeming to waver as it reacted to the heat rising off her skin.

He should back away before it consumed him, too, calling his hunger, bringing on the self-destructive desire to drink the poison of her blood. Yet before they even got that far, something banged against the outside of the house.

The hinges on the front door screamed.

By the time a voice jarred both Gabriel and Mariah to their feet, someone had run inside, then halted at the bedroom entrance.

A man with brown hair that fringed his face, yellow eyes, and pointy teeth stood there. A man wearing all dark gray, his hands curved at his sides and his back curved into a hunch.

“I hear you're asking some rude questions,” he said, breathing heavily.

Plattoh came to stand just in back of him, a grin on his lizard-man face.

I
'd been too deep into Gabriel—then too taken off-guard by the appearance of a were-creature in my old house—to change right away. It was just stunning to see a thing so blasphemous against the innocence that was somehow still lingering here in my bedroom, and I was floating in some sort of stasis.

But the were-man was under no such disadvantage: in fact, his face was moving, as if his cheekbones were shifting, his jaw priming up to lengthen and accommodate a set of big were-teeth.

Next to me, Gabriel's posture had gone feral, ready to bring on his own full change if the were-man went even a step farther.

All I could manage was to stare at Plattoh the lizard-man as two more were-creatures took up positions behind him, both in midchange, as well.

They must've carried the traitor here in a rush,
I thought,
after he'd tracked his buddies down.

Plattoh said, “Curious about the lowlord? Plattoh bring him to you.”

“Thanks,” Gabriel and I said at the same time. Through our link, I felt him straining against his powers. But so far, the others hadn't attacked. Maybe he was thinking we could parley without bloodshed. A vampire's logic would've led him to that conclusion.

Or maybe nobody—not even the Dallas crowd—really wanted a confrontation since we were all-for-one, one-for-all monsters now.

When the were-man saw that we weren't forcing a showdown, he remained in midchange. But some brown fur had begun to sprout on his skin and he had a snout.

A werewolf.

“So why did Plattoh take it upon himself to fetch me for you two?” he asked.

The lizard-man answered. “Plattoh told you before, Tyree—newcomers asking about you. Plattoh only looking out for you.”

“I suppose you were.” The were-man dug into a pocket of his vest, took out a water bead that had obviously lost its way from the length of a necklace, then flicked it to Plattoh. To his men, he said, “Get him out of here.”

His partners grabbed Plattoh and ushered him out while the lizard-man said, “This my home!”

“You'll have the run of it again,” Tyree said to him without glancing away from us.

He was watching me in particular, and his intensity ruffled my skin.

What did he see? It was almost as if . . .

As if he were thinking that he recognized me?

Something revolved in his yellow gaze, and he smiled with those pointy teeth.

“Well, well,” he said, suddenly the gracious host. “Just look at the variety of the company we get here in Dallas. I still can't get used to hearing monsters who speak the language and don't try to fool others by using Text. I got sick of Text real quick after the smart people took to their homes or went underground.”

We didn't respond.

“Why
did
you come into Plattoh's home?” he asked.

“Looking for a place to rest our bones,” Gabriel said, still terribly restless.

Behind Tyree, the were-man's cronies took up positions again.

“Why did you pick this home,” he asked, “and no other?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

Tyree took a step into the room, his boots thudding on the rug next to the skeletal remains of a lock from my door. In my memories, I heard the sound of it breaking as the bad guys busted in.

“Maybe,” Tyree said, “you're just stupid, not lucky. Sometimes it's a good idea never to walk through a door, no matter how open you think it might be. You see, Plattoh became one of my followers when he arrived in the hub, and he's been loyal enough for me to grant him a house in my territory. He's a bit of an immature tattletale, but he makes for some good eyes and ears.”

Tyree gave me another strange glance.

Panic was welling in me, but I had to know whether I was on the right track about him before I allowed myself to freak out.

“You're a lowlord?” I asked. “How did a monster manage that?”

The were-man shrugged. “Before monsters took over here in Dallas, I was smart enough to hide in plain sight. I wasn't an idiot, though—I never changed in front of any human, but I had the grit that it took to run a gang. I learned Text. I acted just like them. And now that the monsters are boss, I made an easy transition to their side—the side I've always been on. I claimed this territory, mostly because it holds . . . memories.”

I didn't want to know what he meant by that. Yeah, even after I'd come all this way to know everything.

Instead I said, “A lowlord was a perfect disguise.”

“It was for years, ever since I got . . .” He gave yet another long look to me. “. . . freed.”

My heart pumped, pumped, and pumped.

The were-man smiled even wider, the tips of his teeth seeming to gleam in the moonlight coming through the window. “Back when I was young, I got caught by some men. They kept me on a leash and used me as a weapon when they crashed houses. They kept the secret of what I was in exchange for what I did for them. Their deaths were what freed me.”

The panic in me turned to a vibrating jitter.

I was so afraid of what he was going to say next that I was frozen again, my sight gone blue with more shock.

I felt Gabriel gearing up in response to me, but I threw a thought to him.

I
had
to hear all of it from Tyree. Had to be a hundred percent sure in this new hub, in this territory that wasn't mine.

Tyree's gaze now held a familiar, rapacious gleam, and I knew.

God-all, I knew for certain, even though I'd hoped he was dead.

It felt as if I were changing backward now, shrinking into my human form out of utter and complete devastation, reduced to my weakest.

“Normally,” he drawled, “I'd say you wandered into the wrong house, little girl, but it seems you found the right one after all.”

In my mind's eye, I saw this stranger—this big, awful, surreal wolf named Tyree—coming into my bedroom, hovering over me, his saliva dripping over my nightgown as I struggled to get free from my captors . . .

“But my dad,” I said weakly. “He stabbed you in the heart with silver . . .”

“And he missed my pumper just by an inch.” Some of Tyree's smugness disappeared. “It was enough to disable me while you both left me for dead on the floor and ran out of here to who knows where. You never even looked at my face to see the pain I was in as I slid back into my human form. As for my owners? They soon died from those bullet wounds your dad put in them.”

He took another step forward, and Gabriel's mind grabbed me.

No.
This was mine.

I started coming back to myself, remembering just what I was, what I had, what I'd been planning to do if I ever met any of the bad guys who'd messed me up.