In Blood We Trust (6 page)

“Mr. Stamp, I think you know why the government turned aside from your type of Shredder. They replaced you with those Witches instead.”

Stamp's jaw got harder, almost as if he hated the sound of
Witches
just as much as he did
scrubs
.

And the monsters had been banking on that. If they could get Stamp or Mags to give them more information about these new Shredder models, they could vanquish them. The Witches who had been guarding the monsters in the asylum might provide all kinds of trouble if any of them had escaped that first attack with the power blaster.

Gabriel stared at Stamp, willing him to look into his eyes.

But Stamp seemed to know that it would be over for him if he did so, and he backed away from the bars, turned around, then sat on the floor, facing away from them in flagrant contempt.

“Stamp,” the oldster said.

But the young Shredder was immovable.

Without even summoning it, Gabriel's mind began to swirl—cold, vicious, the beginning of a brain freeze.

All he needed to do was to modulate his voice, command Stamp to turn around so he could catch Gabriel's eye . . .

But the oldster seemed to see what was happening, and he pulled Hana and Pucci away.

Was he thinking of that night, when Gabriel had gone too far in being a vampire and almost lost it like 562 had?

“Leave it to the more experienced vampires, Gabriel,” the man said quietly, but with an authority that had really asserted itself since they'd come to GBVille. “
They
know how to contain themselves.”

That last pull of humanity in Gabriel responded with a full-on yank, and he stepped back from the cell, gathering himself.

When he looked away from the bars, he saw the group of Civils, headed by Neelan the chimera, watching him.

Gabriel walked away from all of them, heading toward the older vampires at the end of the corridor, drawn by that pulsing restlessness that seemed to pull him in on an invisible line of red.

S
tamp had been waiting silently with his back to his captors, taking in every word, every nuance.

Cracks were beginning to show between the monsters and their different factions, even just a short time after the lot of them had taken over GBVille. There were fissures that Stamp had predicted would show, because monsters were evil, greedy things in general, and he expected they'd go animal on each other sooner rather than later.

Beasts didn't know any better.

As Stamp listened to the sound of Gabriel leaving, he imagined the vampire sauntering away, his arms curved at his sides like the gunslinger he thought he was.

Fangslinger
was more like it.

Then he took a peek behind him, catching Gabriel's were-creature friends as they went in the opposite direction, trading discomfited glances, as if promising each other that they were going to keep tabs on their vampire pal.

After that, the corridor emptied in front of Stamp's cell, though he knew there'd be a Civil guard or two lingering nearby.

He made his way to the silver bars again, the thin hemp of his prisoner garb brushing the floor as he crawled over it. He moved so efficiently, as he'd been taught when he was just barely into his teens during Shredder training, that the woman in the adjacent cell didn't even realize he'd arrived until she glanced over at him, her eyes wide with surprise at seeing him suddenly appear.

Stamp merely grinned at her, one human to another. From listening to her talk with the monsters before, he knew her name was Jo, and that she'd done something to aid the scrubs in taking over GBVille. She was one of the humans who'd refused to take government stunner pills or to run the streets like an idiot, and the monsters didn't quite know what to do with her when she'd quite easily surrendered to their care.

The torchlight burnished the length of her tied-back auburn hair as she sat in front of the bars, looking down the corridor to see if any monsters were coming to chat with her.

“You seem out of sorts,” he said.

Jo ignored him. Smart, if she wanted to get on the monsters' good side, because Stamp was a well-known rabblerouser.

He kept trying to engage her, though. “I've heard what you've been telling the beasts. How you've been asking to join their ranks.”

Sighing, Jo rolled her eyes, but she didn't move away from the bars.

“Do you have any preferences?” he asked, a taunting note in his voice. “You can't be turned into a Civil, since they can only be born. But what kind of Red would you want to be? A vamp? A were? Or maybe your tastes run to something more exotic, like one of those tik-tik women.”

“Shut up, Stamp.”

A response—now he was getting somewhere. “Of course, you'd have to be dead to be raised up as a tik-tik, wouldn't you? But anyone who turns on their own species to willingly become a scrub is dead to me, anyway.”

Jo slanted him a look that told him she'd had enough of life as it was—being locked in her house, existing under the threat of everything bad outside. She'd been one of the good people he'd defended as a Shredder, making sure they never saw a monster, much less fell prey to one.

And, damn him, he still had a soft spot for protecting humans, mostly because he wished someone had been around to do it when his own parents had been blown up in a marketplace by monster sympathizers when he was a child.

The woman finally spoke. “Don't you see the way the world is going?”

“The way of the monsters?” he said through his teeth.

“Yes. They're survivors, Stamp. They've endured through massive hunts. They're stronger than any of us, the fittest, and they're the ones who'll be around years from now, when everyone or everything else has ensured their own destruction, just like we humans have.”

“So you're casting your lot with them.”

“It's a practical move.”

“Who's to say monsters aren't just as dangerous to themselves?”

Now Jo smiled. “Everyone's dangerous.”

She had a gentle face, heart-shaped, a little sorrowful yet strong all the same. A face like Stamp's mother.

Then again, Stamp could barely picture his parents most times. It'd been so long ago, and besides, the images he'd carried in his personal computer had been wiped out with that power blaster the monsters had used on GBVille.

He looked at the deadened screen on his arm, then rested it facedown on the stump of a leg that had been animated by gears and machine parts, until that 562 thing had torn it off during its full-moon freak-out.

Jo kept talking. “The difference between monsters and humans is this: They're just rising, and humans are the ones falling. If I want to survive, I'll go with the winners, not the losers.”

“Good to know that I and the government sacrificed so much for people like you.”

“No, don't misunderstand.” Jo leaned forward. “I appreciate what kids like you did. It's just time to move on.”

“
I'd
rather go down fighting as what I am, not as a vile monster.”

He spit, and Jo's gaze filled with horror. Even though GBVille still had running water from corporate resources, it was the ultimate insult to waste it.

“Then down you'll go,” Jo whispered. She already sounded like an old vampire—emotionless. Animated by something other than a soul.

Stamp's trigger finger itched. He'd been willing to extend one more chance to her, and she'd squandered it.

What he'd give for a chest puncher or a stake right now. But maybe monster-hunting weapons were even too good for a monster sympathizer—people who had turned on their own kind.

He burned Jo with a stare, but she didn't seem to care. And he would've kept right on staring except for the clatter he heard down the corridor.

Footsteps.

When his partner, Mags, came into view, he pulled himself to a one-legged stand, adrenalized. The Civil guard—a stone creature named Keesie who looked to Stamp like a cross between a mushroom and a statue—led her into her cell and locked her inside.

Stamp ran his gaze over her, but he told himself that it was only because he wanted to see that she was okay from this latest round of questioning she'd obviously undergone.

She leaned against her cell wall, her gray clothing just about hanging off her, her black hair pulled back to emphasize bladed cheekbones and an exotic, dark-skinned face. She clearly hadn't been eating much, and that pierced Stamp. Mags had always been cut by athletic curves, and to see her like this—thinner and less active—just about killed him.

When she turned her face to him, he saw surrender in her brown almond-shaped eyes. The scars she'd earned a couple of weeks ago from a tussle with Mariah before the Badlander had become whatever monster she was now had nearly healed, but there was something in Mags that hadn't likewise mended.

Was it because the monsters had left her and Stamp alive when they could've just killed them?

Was she grateful for that?

His disappointment was sharp, and it only brought his concern for Mags to a pinpoint. He told himself that he cared so much because they had to escape. She had to be up to it.

“What did they do to you?” he asked.

“Nothing much.” Mags looked ahead of her again, expression a blank.

“You tried to keep them out of your mind. I know you that well, Mags. But divide and conquer—that's their strategy. They're keeping you away from me and thinking that'll put some distance between us.”

He said it a little possessively, yet that couldn't be right. Mags wasn't his.

An unidentifiable weight fell inside him, but he didn't pay mind to it.

“I'm not sure what they meant to do,” she said.

He lowered his voice. “Well, they won't do it again. We're gonna get out of here.”

A beat thudded between them. Then she laughed, a serrated sound.

“You think we're just going to bust out?” she asked.

As she laughed again, Stamp wouldn't believe that Mags, his right-hand woman who'd been through bloody thick and thin with him when it came to hunting down these scrubs, had lost her will.

When she'd finished, she said, “Where would we go, John?”

“Anywhere. To another hub, just to see what's happening. Or to more ex-Shredders. Even if they were sitting on their asses when we came to some of them before, they'll change their minds now. No Shredder I know would stand for a monster takeover.”

Mags sank down the wall, closing her eyes.

“Don't give up,” Stamp said.

“I'm tired.” Her voice was only a wisp. “Really . . . tired.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jo resting in her cell, too. She'd obviously heard every word. And when her gaze met Stamp's, there was a clear
I told you so
there.

His lip curled as he heard vampires coming back into the corridor. They unlocked Jo from her cell this time, and she glowed at them, going willingly to wherever they were taking her.

Stamp crawled back to his bed, where he lay down, regrouping, believing with all of his heart that Mags was still with him.

T
he second I stepped out of 562's cove with Chaplin, I heard those drumbeats from the asylum possessing the warm air like the footsteps of a fretting ghost.

“Are there lowlords somewhere?” I asked my dog, going back to my earlier suspicions about what could possibly be making the sounds.

Behind the asylum walls?
he asked.

Chaplin was right. Lowlords—thugs who'd ruled gangs of bad guys in the hubs and had often done the bidding of politicians who refused to come out of their offices—would be just as run-out or drugged up as the rest of the distractoids right now. Besides, they wouldn't be in our territory—not unless they'd woken up and decided to take back GBVille.

We jogged up the hill to the hub, through the sin lane, to the asylum. By the time we arrived at the lower gates, where the ogre and the Yeren were still keeping guard, it seemed like more drums had joined the original one.

While passing those two Civils, I noticed that they kept looking toward the ruckus, as if the pounding were marching up their spines, making the gray skin of the ogre and the monkey fur of the Yeren stand on end.

Can you feel it?
Chaplin asked as we left them behind.
In the ground?

“Can't say I do.” But my dog would be way more sensitive than me. Sensitive enough to recognize that we'd picked up some company in the shadows of the walls near us, as well.

Chaplin barked at them in greeting, and I searched for signs of life along the brick: a flutter of dark clothing here, a waving movement in the blackness there. Then Taraline seemed to come out and materialize in front of us before I even got a bead on her.

She wasn't so talented because of any preter skills—she was just one of the shadow people who'd blended right into wherever they needed to ever since they'd caught the dreaded dymorrdia disease, which had forced them out of society and into body-covering veils, gloves, and shrouded clothing. Some had remained in the hubs, hiding in plain sight, people who'd fallen between the cracks. But most had decided to retreat to near-distant necropolises, living amongst the other half-dead.

Taraline's veils fluttered in the slight wind. I'd seen her face only once, when she'd revealed it to 562 in an effort to tame her/him during the rampage. Her plan had worked, too, until 562 had turned her/his attention to sucking Taraline's blood in preparation for an exchange that I'd interrupted. In the end, I'd given Taraline my own blood to compensate for what she'd sacrificed to 562.