In Blood We Trust (9 page)

One of the vampires, a woman with long brunette hair, reared back from the greedy crowd, blood dripping from her chin then to the ground as she hissed in pleasure.

Gabriel scented that blood as if it'd gone into him and taken hold, and he craved it deep in his belly. He shuddered. His appetite had gotten much worse during the gathering, when he'd been so close to Mariah . . .

As he watched the group, he felt as if the only remaining humanity in him were floating, isolated, a part of their hunger yet not a part of it. But then a jagged screech brought him out of his lull, and he clawed the floor as he saw the chimera Neelan, half-man, half-serpent, quickly writhing into view, breathing a stream of fire at the brunette vampire and pulling her by the hair away from the body while pressing a silver cross to her forehead.

She screamed while more Civils came out of the shadows, all with crucifixes that they used on the vampires, their skin sizzling as they cried out.

Gabriel didn't move as a Civil came at him, too. When the quasi-angel—its gray wings only for show, its disposition hardly heavenly—pressed a crucifix to Gabriel's cheek, he took it as his punishment, gritting his teeth, scenting the burn of his flesh.

“No,” he heard someone say over by the victim's body. It sounded like the oldster.

The quasi-angel with the crucifix backed off Gabriel when he saw that he was getting no resistance from him. Gabriel's cheek flared with hot agony as he looked over at the carnage again.

The oldster was on his knees in front of the victim while the Civils pulled away the tamed vampires. He still had his revolvers in hand as he raised his arms, burying his face in the cradle of them, rocking forward.

“Just get them out of here,” the oldster said, voice muffled. Then he lowered his arms and yelled, “Get them in silver restraints and keep them in the empty north cell block until I come.”

Neelan spoke up. “You're in charge?”

“Who else?”

Neelan's bearded jaw stiffened, but his fellow Civils had already started wrapping silver chains around the vampires, roughly pushing them out of the hallway as the criminals stumbled along. None of the Civils had attacked them yet, though they kept glancing at the dead body with a mix of shock and rage on their faces.

As Gabriel's quasi-angel guard moved to bind him, the oldster barked out, “He's already calmed down—can't you see that he dragged himself away from this?”

“But—”

“I've got
him
for now. Go on with the others.”

The Civil kept standing there. “You're a were. A Red. Why should I—?”

“Don't make this more of a fight than it already is.” The oldster took a breath, exhaled. “The community's gonna decide what happens next, and I aim to provide enough coolheadedness so that right is done. Understand? We need to find out who initiated this before punishment's wielded. You can't fault vampires for hopping on a spill of blood after it's out there.”

“Yes, we can,” the quasi-angel said.

“That's how vamps
are
.” Then the oldster shut his mouth, gathered himself. He quietly said, “You need us just as much as we need you if we're going to band together against the people who'd hunt us.”

The quasi-angel looked down at Gabriel with such venom that even a vampire might've withered under it,
if
that vampire weren't already decimated from self-hatred.

The Civil didn't attack Gabriel, but he remained close. “We'll take the matter to the community, like you said. We lock up the ones who were a part of this until we decide what to do. And when you isolate the vamp who brought down . . .” He gestured toward the bloody victim, grimacing. “When you do that, we take an eye for an eye.”

The oldster nodded, his gaze slipping to Gabriel.

Hell,
Gabriel thought, the word biting through him. There'd be hell and more to pay, and he wasn't so sure he and all the others didn't deserve it, no matter who'd brought down the victim first.

The oldster hadn't moved away from the body, his revolvers still drawn. As the quasi-angel slowly left, his breathing was ragged, as if he wanted to gut Gabriel but was forcing himself not to.

When he was gone, the oldster spoke. “Damn you . . .”

Gabriel flinched. From his friend's tone, it was clear that the man who'd been so kind in taking Gabriel into the Badlands community when he'd needed it the most was just about to lose all faith in him and maybe even the rest of the vampires.

He peered at the blood on his hands again, ached to taste it, ached and resisted with all his might.

Then he closed his hands into fists. “I wish I could tell you what went on. But I can't.”

“Is this some sort of blackout, like the ones you used to have early on, when you came to us in the Badlands?”

“I . . . don't know.”

It felt like centuries ago, another lifetime. When Gabriel was human, he'd had a habit of overindulging—alcohol, women, sometimes drugs. Like so many others, he'd been reeling from the world's changes, hardly strong enough to face them. Then he'd been chosen by his maker, saved by a near-anonymous exchange with her. She'd been on a mission to save as many people as she could from any more mosquito epidemics or other coming pestilence with her monster immunity, her vampire blood. She'd moved on to the next and the next, as far as Gabriel knew, without staying behind to mentor him.

He'd gone a little crazy back then, bingeing as if blood were booze, reveling in the numbness of it, blacking out most nights. Then he'd met Abby, and he'd embraced the humanity that all new vampires were said to be left with until it faded after a few years.

Soon enough,
she'd
disappeared, as well.

Then he'd found out her fate—he hadn't known until too late that she'd been a stealth werewolf who'd gone to the Badlands to hide. She'd died there, a figment of his memories now, since he'd finally come to terms with what she was and why Mariah had possessed no choice but to kill her in order to defend herself.

It'd been a matter of survival, just like bloodletting was for a vampire.

The oldster now leveled a look on him, and it would've been worthy of any vampire glower had the old man been one.

“What do you remember, Gabriel?”

“After we left the gathering, our hungers were stoked. I remember coming inside, with the other younger vampires, then . . . nothing. Just this.”

He held up his hands, showing the oldster the red.

“You pieces of shit. I understand why there was a feeding frenzy when the blood was let, but that doesn't excuse the first vampire who brought this Civil down. This is murder, whether we're monsters or not.”

Gabriel just stared at the body, the once grand giraffe Civil, with his long neck and patterned fur, with his gentle disposition, now reduced to slush.

Then he felt it.

Mariah's presence.

It dug down in his core, deep in his blood as she came to stand nearby. He scented her skin—the earthy perfume of it. He heard her rhythms, churning like violin strings in a stormlike symphony.

Back in the Badlands, she'd been the one defending the community and killing those bad guys . . .

The oldster seemed to catch Gabriel's musings.

“She was with me and the Civil guards the entire time,” he said.

Gabriel hated himself even more for thinking that way.

She was next to him now, half in shadow from the light of the solar lanterns. He could also see movement on the walls. Shadow people.

Had any of them witnessed who'd attacked the victim first?

Had it been
him
?

As Mariah leaned against a wall, she wore an expression that spoke to Gabriel without words. Horror. Hunger.

He understood both equally.

“Just like 562,” she said. “You went for Civil blood.”

“No.” Gabriel frowned. “We weren't hungering for a certain kind of blood, I remember that much. The Civil was just . . . here. Walking along. Available.”

“Why?”

She wasn't asking why it was available. She wanted to know why they'd done it.

When Gabriel looked at her, she seemed to understand.

The bloodletting at the gathering had worked all of them up, and the only thing that had mattered was availability, not the type of blood.

Even now, the aroma from the small lake of red on the floor was wafting to Gabriel. He could see that it was doing the same to the oldster and Mariah, too.

“Gabriel,” the old man said with restraint. “When we arrived, you were sitting over there, apart from the feasting. Tell me that the blood on your hands is just accidental or that you tried to pry the other vampires off the victim. Give me a reason to let you off the hook.”

He could've just lied, but the only decency left in him said, “I can't.”

For all he knew, he could've been the one who'd brought down the Civil in the first place, and the rest of the uncontrolled younger vampires had scented the blood, taking advantage of the kill in their stimulated state. They hadn't been thinking, just
doing
.

The oldster sighed. “Hell's about to rain down, you know that, don't you?”

Stinging from the mention of hell, Gabriel started to respond, but the oldster raised a revolver and aimed it at him without even looking.

“Something tells me I should just get this over with now. We need the Civils if we're going to stay strong against bad guys. We don't need to become bad guys ourselves. . . .”

He hesitated, and that was all it took for Mariah to act.

It happened fast: She swung his arm over her shoulders and pulled him to his feet.

“Run,” she said, pushing him.

Even in that split second, he felt the heat of her. Felt her choked reaction to the blood on his hands as well as the response to merely being near him. But before he could start berserking again, his logic took over.

So did the surety that he couldn't go anywhere without her.

It was as if the devil itself were nipping at his heels as he scooped her into his arms and turned on full vampire speed, zooming them down the halls, over the walls, out of the asylum.

Away . . . Going to someplace, anyplace, where he could remember what had happened . . . where he could decide if he should even come back at all . . .

He didn't stop until they were on the other side of GBVille, near a General Benefactors building, its sleek lines sterile in the moonlight. Char burns marred the side of it, remnants of an abandoned bonfire from a lowlord's gathering. Pill-coma bodies lay around, dressed in the bland rags from a gang. No one—not even the few police that still roamed the streets, clueless as to the monster takeover—had bothered to remove them since they were so base.

That was when Gabriel realized that he hadn't heard the revolver go off behind them when they'd escaped. Was it because the oldster didn't want to shoot? Deep down, did he still believe Gabriel was the same guy he was out in the Badlands, when he'd been a hero, and that was why he'd hesitated?

Setting Mariah down on the ground, Gabriel changed direction and ran again, this time at the reinforced doors of the public GB building, where he wouldn't have to be invited in. He put a few dents in them before busting them open, then finding a bunch of higher-level humans propped against the white walls, passed out from the biological scare pills.

He spotted a water necklace on one of the humans; it was a luxury item, a symbol of prosperity to flaunt. Ripping it from the woman's neck, Gabriel broke it open, baptizing his hands with its contents, erasing the red as he then used the human's clothing to wipe them off.

He heard a sound behind him, a faint sliding.

Thinking it was Mariah, he turned but didn't find her.

Had it been a shadow person?

Or...

He remembered the night of the asylum power-blaster attack, when there'd been Witches who'd sounded just as quiet while they'd moved . . .

Fingers of discomfort crept over his shoulders as he finished cleaning his hands, but he didn't hear anything more. He wouldn't have even scented a Witch, since part of their defenses included being odorless, so he kept his gaze peeled.

Nothing more.

Not until Mariah came into the room. He could scent
her
, and he went giddy with the aroma.

“Your clothes,” he said, his voice sounding humanlike now that he was clean, now that he was away from that asylum. “I marked them with the victim's blood when I picked you up.”

A faint rustling told him that she was removing an outfit from a passed-out human, then taking off her own shirt and pants. He couldn't bear to look back at her. It'd undo him for certain.

All the while, he felt the empathy flowing through her and, by extension, him. He'd borrowed so many emotions from her that he could identify them perfectly by now.

“Tell me you didn't do it,” she said.

“I already said—I'm not sure.”

“You didn't. I know it, Gabriel.”

He completed one last scan of the room, and when he was content that they were alone, he turned to find her in one of the blasé, straight-skirted dresses that the hub women favored. But she was marked as a nonhub by the boots she still wore, and also by that red hair, recklessly shorn to her chin, giving her a waifish edge. She'd also taken a few water necklaces to wear, clearly anticipating her need for the liquid when she was in her human body.

It was a declaration that she still intended not to change form until she had to, at the next full moon.