Of Masques and Martyrs (18 page)

“Oh, Jesus, no,” she whispered to herself, and the tiniest modulation of her voice was audible to her.

“No!” she screamed and clamped her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes shut.

She didn’t want to feel. To hear. To see.

Allison Vigeant wanted, very badly, to be dead. After what Hannibal had done to her, death was the only escape. But the barbaric son of a bitch hadn’t even allowed her that.

She looked down at her naked body, at her plump breasts, hanging a little too low for perfection. At the large, dark circles of her nipples, at her belly where it rounded slightly before dropping off to the small patch of pubic hair she’d left intact when she’d first shaved the rest several years before.

All her bones were whole, her skull no longer pounding from where it had cracked. Her breasts smeared with blood but otherwise unmarred. Spattered red on the unbroken white skin of her abdomen. Her sex open ever so slightly, but not torn asunder as it had been . . . when he’d ripped her open.

Allison didn’t bother trying to choke back the sobs that tore from her throat. There was no camera on her now, no celebrity spotlight for which to submerge her emotions and instincts. She heaved in huge gasps of air she no longer needed, and let them out again in long keening wails. Blood welled up in the comers of her eyes, and she panicked at first, before realizing what they were.

Tears.

She started to laugh then, and even as she heard the cackling sound emerging from her own mouth, Allison recognized that she had begun to go mad.

Allison had never wanted this. Immortality had been hers for the asking, and she had turned away from it at every step. She had never wanted the pain and horror that came from being one of them. They might have gained amazing abilities, but they had lost so much. So much.

But if the day had come when age frightened her enough, when the concept of death was close enough at hand, that she had chosen to live forever, it should have been Will. It should have been Will, with her, holding her close in an act of love, the way it had been those years ago for Peter and Meaghan. Poor Meaghan.

Hannibal had taken everything from Allison, and that was the worst. The agony and the humiliation were beyond the limits of human endurance. He had killed her, after all. But he’d stolen more than her dignity and self-respect, more than her confidence in herself. Hannibal had stolen the essence of her relationship with Will. There was love, yes, but there was also a respect and self-determination that they would never have again.

“You bastard,” she whispered between gasping sobs.

Only after she’d said it did she realize she was talking to Will, not to Hannibal. Hannibal was a monster. When she killed him—and she would—Allison intended to make him suffer as much as she could, yet she knew that it would never approach her own level of suffering. He didn’t have the heart for it. Didn’t care enough about anything to feel much beyond the physical.

But Will . . . hadn’t come for her. She knew it was unfair the moment the thought came to her, but Allison couldn’t help it. He hadn’t been there to stop it from happening. A part of her blamed him, and she felt ashamed.

Hannibal had violated her in one long nightmare; he’d done things that sanity, by its own definition, would force her to forget—if she wasn’t determined to remember. She lived in the shadows now, was one of them, and her body did not bear the scars of the abominations he had visited upon her. But her heart and soul were scarred by them. They existed in her mind, and always would.

“My God,” she growled to herself, staring at the splashes of blood on the floor. “He’ll pay.”

Her fingers elongated into claws, and fangs grew from her mouth. Allison closed her eyes, concentrating, and was wracked with physical pain and anguished cries as wounds began to open all over her body. Her abdomen tore, blood spilling from her belly, her viscera barely staying in place. Her vagina and rectum were slashed and ripped by thought alone. Welts rose on her face and breasts, one of which had only a wound where her nipple had been.

Slashes appeared on her face and throat, arms and legs. There were bites out of her left breast and thigh.

Allison took the pain, all of it, a second time. She screamed and did not even attempt to contain it. These were her scars. Hers. And she would wear them for Hannibal until the moment when she ate his black heart.

She turned toward the bars, bleeding profusely onto the cement, and only then did she see Erika watching her. Crying.

“I suppose you’ll want to leave now?” the vampire girl said.

“You suppose wrong,” Allison replied, and was stunned by the ragged croak of her voice. Those wounds. “I want to see Hannibal.”

“That would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, especially right now,” Erika said. “He would destroy you. Hasn’t he done enough to you?”

“Oh, yes,” Allison agreed. “But now it’s my turn.”

She began to move toward the bars, and Erika backed off a step.

“You’re outnumbered hundreds to one,” Erika said, shaking her head as she stared at Allison, eyes ranging over the wounds on Allison’s naked body.

“What more can he do to me, Erika?” Allison asked, then narrowed her eyes. “You’re partially responsible for this, you know. You brought me to him.”

Erika nodded. “I know. But I had no idea what he’d planned for you. I thought you were just going to be bait for Cody.”

Allison stopped at the bars, wrapped her bloody fingers around them, and thought about what her body could do—that she could simply turn to mist and slip through the bars. Rip Erika’s head from her body, and move on from there.

“That doesn’t excuse what happened to you, or my part in it,” Erika continued. “But everything I did, I did with a purpose. Hannibal sent me down here to shoot you.”

“Shoot me?” Allison asked, almost hysterical. “Shoot me? That’s a little tame for him, isn’t it? And a little useless in my current state.”

Erika produced what looked like a small dart gun, the kind Allison had seen used on animals in hundreds of public television documentaries.

“With this,” she explained, but didn’t point the weapon at Allison. ”It’s how he killed Rolf, how he captured me. It freezes the electrochemical process that allows us to shape-shift, among other things. It leaves you with the hunger, but steals away the power. If I shot you with it now, you’d die for sure. Those wounds would kill you this time.”

Erika looked away a moment, apparently not wishing to pay too much attention to Allison’s wounds. Allison had to wonder at the girl’s willingness to turn away from her. Was she so certain of her ability to destroy Allison in battle, or truly guileless in her approach?

“Bullshit,” Allison said in her guttural croak. “You can still shift. I’ve seen you.”

“I got better,” Erika snapped, then paused. “Look, do you honestly think anything but death would have stopped Rolf from killing Hannibal? There’s an antidote, okay? An antivirus, if that makes sense to you. I won’t bore you with the details of my own torture session with Hannibal, not after what you went through. But with Rolf dead, my only choices seemed to be to die, to join up with Hannibal, or to pretend to do so long enough to see if I could do any good.

“Now the shit is starting to hit the fan. Hannibal and all of his American clans are moving to New Orleans tonight. It’s already dusk, and they’re heading out right now. Come tomorrow night, they’re going to destroy Peter and our coven, even if it means destroying the entire city. That’s hundreds of vampires, probably more. Not including Hannibal’s followers in Atlanta. Doesn’t look like those bastards are going to make it, thank God.”

Allison raised her eyebrows, interested despite herself.

“What’s happening in Atlanta?”

“U.N. forces spent the day evacuating the city,” Erika explained. “Half an hour ago, they set it aflame.”

“Dear God,” Allison whispered.

“It’s just the beginning,” Erika added. “You can be sure Hannibal’s not happy about it, either.”

Hannibal.
That name again. Allison felt her rage and humiliation simultaneously. She never wanted to hear that name again, and yet she wanted to look into his eyes as he died at her hand. She glared at Erika.

“You could have stopped him,” Allison said, feeling her own tears coming now. She sank to the cold floor, sat in a sticky mess of her own blood. “You could have saved me from this.”

Erika glanced at the floor of the corridor, then quickly back up at Allison. The two shadow women stared at one another through the bars of Allison’s cell.

“I could have,” Erika agreed. “But there was too much at stake. Don’t you get it? With this”—she held the dart gun up—“Hannibal will destroy our coven. The war is over before the battle even begins. It was a horrible decision, but it was the only one I could make. We’ve got to get this stuff and the antidote to Peter right away. I hate to even say it, but I don’t think he can win without it.”

“Who’s we?” Allison asked, angrily wiping at her tears.

“Me,” Erika answered. “Sebastiano. He’s trying to make up for betraying Rolf in Austria. He’s been cursing himself ever since, and more than ever now that Rolf is dead. He was a coward. He wanted to be on the winning side. Now he just wants to die well.”

Allison actually smiled.

“Fuck that,” she said. “I died once already, and I’m not going to do it again anytime soon. And what about me? You weren’t planning on just leaving me here, were you?”

“No,” Erika admitted. “If I don’t shoot you up with this junk, you could go wherever you want, anyway. But I was hoping you’d come with us.”

Allison thought about it. Despite all Erika had done, she had to admit to herself that she might have done the same. But the madness that was in her soul now, that probably would always be there, demanded she destroy Hannibal. Still, now was not the time. Even if Erika and Sebastiano helped her, the numbers were too great. And if she sacrificed herself foolishly, Peter and the others might never know of the danger they had to face.

“I’ll come,” she said at last. “But we’re not going to New Orleans.”

“What?” Erika said incredulously. “You’re insane. We’ve got to get this stuff to Peter and George and maybe they can—”

“George is a lovely old man, Erika, but he was a fucking coroner before he became our doc in residence. He’s no chemist. And Peter knows magick and war, that’s it. We’ve got to get this stuff where it will do the most good. We’ve got to bring it to Roberto Jimenez in Atlanta.”

Erika opened her mouth, but before she could speak, both of them started at the sudden cloud of mist that appeared in the corridor.

“He’s here for me!” Erika said, and Allison knew she meant that Hannibal had come to punish her for her betrayal.

But it wasn’t Hannibal. Allison sensed that, somehow.

“No,” she said, watching as the mist took on the form of a man. “He’s here for
me
.”

Will Cody stood in the prison corridor, staring at Allison. She felt self-conscious about her wounds, but did not make any effort to erase them.

“Jesus God,” Will whispered, his face ashen. “What’s he done to you?”

Allison misted through the bars and, for Will’s sake, when she appeared on the other side, the wounds were gone. She took his hand and kissed his cheek, and said, “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

 

From the moment he stepped off Burgundy Street and into the Harvest Moon, Kuromaku knew he had come to the wrong place. He had seen similar clubs in cities around the world. The walls were hung with twisted visions of hell that might have nauseated Bosch. Metal abominations disguised as art erupted from the floor in the oddest places. In cages hung from the ceiling, half-naked men and women who didn’t look old enough to vote gyrated. What the rest of the crowd was doing on the floor of the club couldn’t really have passed for dancing anywhere else.

The Harvest Moon smelled of sweat and sex and too much beer. Girls burst the seams of antebellum gowns, or wore pants without seats. Pale, fey boys with ankhs paid more attention to one another than to the women in the room. A pounding, grating noise that might have had music somewhere at its origin sprayed the room like shrapnel.

Kuromaku almost turned and left. It was as if he had asked the cab driver where to find God, and the man had told him to go to church. But this place was his only lead, and he reasoned that even in a room filled with wannabes, there had to be at least one person who had actually met a vampire. In the twenty-first century, in a city like New Orleans, even the most careful among the shadow race would not stay hidden forever.

Kuromaku was taller than average for a Japanese man, his hair cut short, and his stare severe and unforgiving. His Armani suit was so dark navy as to be almost black, and cut with far too much flair for a typical businessman. Otherwise, he might have been a simple tourist.

He carried himself with a warning of danger in every step. As he moved into the club, hooded eyes and smirking mouths followed him, but silently. And the silence spread out from him like ripples on water. They knew he was the real thing, come among them. They could sense it. And in that moment, he knew that he had put his old life behind him. He might still be able to access his wealth, but the moment he had dreamed of Peter, the moment he had resolved to return the warrior’s sword to him, Kuromaku had joined a war he had been avoiding for years.

Saddened, he glanced around the club again, at the vampire lovers.

Kuromaku could smell their excitement, their arousal, and their fear as he moved to the bar. Many of them actually began to breathe heavily, but none made any move toward him. Now that the object of their desire was within reach, they did not know how to reach for it. Even the bartender did not approach him. Nobody did.

Until, at last, a blond girl of ample build, whose face was painted with dark ochre shades and white enough to be a deathmask, crept forward. She said nothing, only stood near and watched him.