In Blood We Trust (23 page)

“Death,” she said. “We should have known it'd be all around us. Why are we surprised that it's happening so frequently?”

She was right, and it made the oldster feel like a naïf. He'd always been so hopeful about a sort of utopia, even if it was back in the New Badlands, where he'd brought together different were-creatures in the belief that they could coexist, just because their blood didn't suit each other's tastes and they wouldn't pursue each other. But that experiment had been shot to shit.

And he'd been silly enough to think there'd be a chance to prove nature wrong here, in an even bigger place with worse creatures.

Falisha placed her hands on her ample, nightgown-draped hips. “Why did a vampire actually destroy instead of just mind-screw Pucci?”

He finally took his hand away from his revolver. “I'm not sure what went on.”

Although he could guess. Pucci had probably gotten up in Hana's face again and it'd goaded Gabriel, who was no one to trifle with lately.

“Well, I heard about Pucci's joyful personality,” she said. “The shadows talk to us, you know. That's what happens between two low-class groups—gossip. We're entertained by the antics of the popular crowd.”

She was talking as if the country still had high schools instead of Nets think tanks and virtual classrooms. The oldster wondered how long ago she'd lived, how long ago she'd been resurrected. She looked in her midthirties, although she was a long-lived creature who would stay ageless.

When Hana sat up and away from the oldster's comforting hold, all of them stirred.

But it was her cold voice that caused a freeze.

“He killed Pucci . . .”

Damn it, she'd heard them talking.

The oldster, Falisha, and Chaplin hesitated, because it was as if a fictional zombie had come back to life and they weren't sure how to treat her.

“An eye for an eye,” Hana added, her Somali accent coming back now in her quiet rage.

“Hana,” said the oldster, his arm still round her.

When she jarringly shook him off, he lifted both hands. Chaplin even cringed.

“My grandmother used to tell me that when one takes from another, they are due payback. That is how it used to be where she lived. That is how it should be now.”

The oldster tried again. “You're in shock. . . .”

“Antonio was my love,” she said. “My life.”

Something in the oldster wanted to point out that Pucci had hit her not even a week ago.

Falisha was the one who had the gumption to step up. Falisha—a tik-tik who'd likened herself to old Switzerland.

“How did it work with you and Pucci?” she gently asked as Hana narrowly stared at the tik-tik. “Were you addicted to the apologies he made after every time he bullied you? Did he, in turn, resent you for making him depend on your affection?”

“Were you a brain doctor before you became a ghoul?” Hana asked. Yup, Gabriel's sway had sure worn off.

Actually, the oldster had never heard her like this before. But then, all of them had undergone some madness and change: Mariah, Gabriel . . . even Chaplin as he moped round, so different from his former self.

Falisha smiled. “I'm not a ghoul, Hana. We didn't even have any in this asylum. But, yes, you could say I had a background in dealing with the wounded. I was a social worker in the 1990s. I saw women like you every week.”

“Women like me.”

The tik-tik touched Hana's arm, but right before she pulled away, Falisha sucked in a breath.

Her expression was . . .

Hungry.

She seemed hungry.

She glanced at the oldster, reading his face. He put his arm round Hana firmer than ever, and Falisha's expression fell for some reason.

Without explanation, she stood, her voice shaking.

“You'll want to get out of here now, before the vampires see you trying to avoid them. They'll know something's amiss with you and they'll go into your minds to do what they need to.”

Chaplin yipped, as if asking a question.

None of them understood, but Falisha had stepped back, anyway, encouraging them to come out of the nook.

“I mean it,” she said. “Get out now.”

There seemed to be something else bothering her.

The oldster came onto the walkway. Chaplin went to Hana, fronting her, the ultimate guard.

Falisha began to walk, glancing round. She hadn't been in this kind of hurry before now.

A gremlin was lingering near the pool of blood where Pucci had once lain, and it was sniffing at the red. The tik-tik woman didn't even chide him, instead bending down to whisper in its ear.

The nasty sped off, a blur of puke-yellow fur and long ears as a throttled sound escaped from Hana's throat. The oldster rushed her along.

“The shadows will be here soon to clean everything,” Falisha said.

She was walking so quickly that all of them exerted themselves to keep pace.

“Falisha,” the oldster said, but she cut him off.

“Move along, Michael!”

She pointed to the door of a second watchtower just as a crowd of gremlins ran past them and started to gnaw round the lock of the wooden door.

The iron device plunked to the ground and Falisha reached through. When she had opened the door, the gremlins sped ahead into the darkness.

“They'll look for shadows and warn us if they see any,” she said, “or they'll chase them away.”

Judging by her footsteps, she'd begun to descend a staircase.

Hana spoke. “Are you taking us to Gabriel?”

It was ridiculous, but the oldster just kept leading her down the stairs.

Falisha said, “I'm only showing you one of the many passages that no one has really found in this asylum, but maybe that's because tik-tiks and gremlins aren't busy with all the politicking. Where you go from there is up to you.”

She circled down, down the stairs as the oldster hugged the wall as well as Hana, following the tik-tik.

When they got to the bottom, Falisha led them into a tunnel. It was dark, but she seemed to know the way, guiding them with urgings until they came to a rise.

Then she opened another door, moonlight filtering in.

She ushered Chaplin out first, and the dog peered round outside. The oldster saw that Falisha had taken them to a spot shaded by a stone tree forest, sponsored by General Benefactors. The pale art pieces were like frozen bones spearing toward the sky, clustered together, an attempt by GB to add some nature to the area.

Chaplin made a small yawping sound that served as an okay. Before the oldster guided Hana out, Falisha doffed her nightgown and handed it to the other woman, who'd already taken off the oldster's vest and handed it back to him.

He didn't look in the tik-tik's direction. She'd remained in the darkness, but propriety demanded that he still not acknowledge her bareness of skin.

She was a tik-tik, he reminded himself.

Hana didn't put on the nightgown, because she was already bent, her skin waving over her altering bones as she started her change to were-form.

She was just itching to catch up to Gabriel, the oldster thought. But they didn't have a chance. Since they didn't know where he'd gone, tracking would be their best option, if the vampire had left the earth disturbed.

Chaplin sidled up next to her, just as he'd always done with Mariah, watching the were-change, expressionless.

When the oldster made a move to join them outside, Falisha grabbed his hand.

“If you decide to come back,” Falisha said, “don't do it for a while. And look me up before you make your presence known here.”

When she'd grabbed him, she'd put herself into the moonlight. She wore the strangest expression: puzzlement? Yearning? Sorrow?

What? What was each of them about?

Much to his astonishment, she touched his face with her fingertips, brushing them over his skin. Her naked body was voluptuous—rounded breasts, arms, stomach.

The oldster shivered, and at first he thought it was because she was a repulsive creature.

But that wasn't it at all.

He stepped away from her, fast. So fast that Falisha seemed to know that she'd damn well been put in her place.

She didn't talk about what'd just happened between them, instead saying, “You care for Hana, don't you? You really care.”

What was it to her? “Of course I do. She's a good friend. Almost even like a daughter.”

Falisha sighed, and it seemed pained.

Then she put a hand on her belly. “When I touched her, I felt a child forming.”

The words didn't come together for a few seconds. In that amount of time, a bunch of gremlins peeked from behind the door frame, their eyes glowing in the night.

The tik-tik woman began to shut the door, closing it on the eerie sight.

“Please get Hana out of here now,” she said before she entirely disappeared.

She closed the oldster all the way out, leaving him grasping at the realization of what she—a hungry tik-tik—had given up for Hana's sake.

And, evidently, his.

D
uring their escape, Stamp and Mags had made it to the fringes of GBVille.

Evidently, so had a few others.

When the pair heard a door in a dirt-ragged hill moan open, they sought cover behind a boulder. Stamp reached for his only weapons—the shivs.

He pulled them out of their wrappings, and they were still slightly crusted from the gore of the female vampire he'd shoved the blades into. Mags took a step back, but he didn't ask why because, right then, Mariah's Intel Dog, then a naked woman, busted out of that door and into the shade of that stone forest.

He recognized the female right away—Hana—and her dark skin was flowing as she bent over, obviously racked by the intensity of a willful change to were-form.

Meanwhile, he could see the oldster talking to someone just inside the door. Stamp strained to hear, but all he caught were low murmurs. When the door slammed, the oldster came over to Hana, who groaned and panted during her alteration.

But she didn't change all the way. She was crying too hard.

Actual tears from a monster.

Stamp chuffed, then shot a glance back to Mags, waiting so still behind him that he might've mistaken her for one of those stone trees nearby if he didn't know any better.

He flipped both shivs into his palms, gesturing toward the monsters with them.

Mags narrowed her dark almond-shaped eyes and shook her head.
Just stay quiet,
was what she would've said if they could communicate out loud.

Okay, so she wanted to hold their position and wait until they were in the clear before making their full escape from GBVille. Not a bad idea. It might even be prudent to see what was going down with these monsters and why they seemed to be running off, too. There had to be good reasons for that Intel Dog to be stomping around Hana with clear agitation and for her to be in half-change mode, her eyes glowing, her teeth long as she fell to the ground on all fours.

The old guy reached for a nightgown that lay by Hana's side and offered it to her, like that was going to cover up all her monster issues or something.

Then Stamp heard him say, “Hana . . .”

“Damn him!” There was a serrated wildness in her tone.

Behind Stamp, Mags moved sharply, and Stamp lifted a hand, quieting her, concentrating on how Hana's teeth were so white and long in the moonlight.

Who would've ever thought a deer would need teeth like that unless the creature had turned into a blood drinker somewhere along the line?

“I know you want to stop me,” the woman said to the old man, refusing to accept the dress he was still holding out to her, “but I am going to find him.”

This was getting more interesting by the moment.

“It's not safe, Hana.”

The Intel Dog barked in obvious agreement.

“I do not care how strong he is,” she said. “I can be stronger. I can be hungrier, because of what he took away from me. He
killed
Pucci and then ran away.”

Stamp gripped the bases of the shivs even tighter. He recalled that Hana had a mate—a big guy who'd followed her around the cell corridors. Pucci.

But it seemed as if someone had wasted the guy and she was out to get the killer. That was probably even why these monsters were out here, ready to chase, unless they'd merely been scared away from the hub by those mind-wiping vampires.

Who'd killed Pucci, though? A random vamp?

All Stamp really knew was that he heard in her voice the same kind of vengefulness he'd cultivated after Gabriel had bested him back in the nowheres.

The same hatred.

The oldster had taken her by the arm now, as if holding her back from doing something impulsive.

“I'm telling you that you can't go on any hunts,” he said. “You're in no condition to.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No. Falisha told me something . . .” He sat next to her, his voice softening. “You're pregnant, Hana.”

The air seemed to bond into itself, twining around and around until it squeezed all the oxygen out of the atmosphere.

Pregnant, Stamp thought. A damned were-creature. It'd be born, not bitten, a curse on the world. It'd be some kind of hybrid between a deer and an elk, too. A mutant all around.

Just what this world needed—another type of abomination.

It wasn't until the oldster spoke again that things seemed to go back into motion.