Of Masques and Martyrs (31 page)

Then, suddenly, Cody simply disappeared, leaving Jimenez staring at the furious features of Allison Vigeant’s face. But Cody hadn’t disappeared, not really. For Roberto could feel the vampire standing just behind him. Cody had moved so quickly, Roberto hadn’t even seen him.

“If I wanted you dead, Commander,” Cody whispered, “you’d be dead. When this thing is over, if you still think you can kill me, and you’re still inclined to it . . .

“Well, you’re welcome to try.”

 

In the courtyard, Kuromaku stood alone. Everyone else was inside, preparing, waiting for Peter to lay out his plan. But Kuromaku already knew the plan. Peter had explained it to him already, and though it might not have been his choice, it did make a great deal of sense. Peter had always been a superior strategist.

“Maku?”

Kuromaku turned to see Peter standing at the far end of the garden path. He was an odd sight, to say the least, in crisp, dark blue jeans, a light cotton shirt whose two buttons were open at the neck, and brown leather hiking boots. The odd part, however, was the long scabbard that hung on a low belt around his waist, and the ancient sword sheathed therein.

“You still move very quietly for a human,” Kuromaku said.

Peter smiled. “If that’s a compliment, I’ll take it.”

“I thought I should say something nice before mocking your fighting attire.”

“What does the fashionable warrior wear these days?” Peter asked as they both began to move toward one another on the path.

“If he’s good enough with a sword,” Kuromaku replied, “he can wear whatever he wants.”

They shared a quiet laugh.

“It feels strange, but incredibly good at the same time,” Peter said. “The sword, I mean. For so long I let what I’d become define me, for better and for worse. But with this sword at my side, I think I’m finally starting to remember who I really am.”

“My friend,” Kuromaku said, “I could have told you that.”

“You have no idea how glad I am that you’ve come,” Peter said warmly, and laid a hand on Kuromaku’s shoulder.

“I missed out on the fun in the last two shadow wars,” Kuromaku replied. “I wasn’t going to let you keep me out of it again. Besides, my dreams would have haunted me.”

At the thought of his dreams, he wondered if he should tell Peter the one detail he’d left out up until now: the wound in Peter’s side, bleeding badly. Now that Peter was human, the dream seemed more prophetic than ever. But Kuromaku figured it was best not to mention it. He couldn’t change what was to come, so all it would serve to do would be to make Peter more anxious than he already was.

“Whatever brought you here, I’m proud to fight at your side again,” Peter said sincerely, then pulled Kuromaku into a tight embrace.

When they parted, he looked at Peter closely, saw the lines around his eyes, the redness in them.

“I’m sorry you lost your friend,” Kuromaku said. “George was a good man, and he cared for you very much.”

Peter nodded. “Thank you, but I’m human now. I’d better start to get used to loss again. To aging and dying—and to living, in a way.”

“So you’re not going to take the Gift again?”

“Old friend, I’ve already got the Gift,” Peter replied with a smirk. “The gift of life. That’s what George taught me. Now I’ve got to use it the way he always did, the way he would have wanted if he were still here.”

Peter glanced over his shoulder. “They’re waiting,” he said. “You coming in?”

Kuromaku nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it,” he replied. “I can’t wait to hear what the rest of them think of your plan.”

“Trust me,” Peter said. “They’re going to love it.”

Swords at their sides, the two old warriors entered the convent.

It had begun.

—ALANIS MORRISSETTE, “All I Really Want”

 

 

 

 

DUSK CAME TOO SOON.

Not, perhaps, for the residents of the former Ursuline convent. They had done all they could to prepare for the onrushing night. But the people of New Orleans, and the many visitors to the shining Crescent City, had not had any real time to prepare. Nor, for the most part, any warning.

Octavian’s coven had spent hours during the day spreading the word, trying to convince local merchants and residents that there was real danger present. For the most part, they did so with a modicum of subtlety. And for those humans aware that shadows walked among them, those who knew precisely who it was that lived in the old convent, that subtle warning was enough.

However, despite that the existence of vampires was now accepted by all but the most hardened skeptics, it was only human nature for most people to believe that such things could not happen to them, in their cities or towns. The average person had never seen a vampire except on the news. To that significant majority, the whisper of trouble and mad-sounding ravings about a vampire war were just that: whispers and ravings.

It wasn’t until the police arrived, urging the closing of stores and restaurants, the evacuation of homes . . . it wasn’t until the cops started mentioning Venice and Salzburg that the real exodus began.

So, though the area immediately surrounding the convent was nearly deserted at dusk, the rest of the city was swallowed by a frenzied whirlpool of humanity, determined to escape but trapped in their own mad rhythm. There were no costumes, there was no music save for that blaring from the radios inside rows of gridlocked cars, and the only ones dancing were the dozen or so vampire-obsessed teens who were brave and crazy enough to believe their own bullshit. Their friends were running with the rest, but this small group laughed and spun in circles and drank each other’s blood in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

Wrought iron balconies were empty of everything but ghosts, and steaming kettles of gumbo cooled on restaurant stoves whose fires had quickly been extinguished. There had been some looting, but such urges had been overwhelmed, in all but the most desperate, by fear.

There were still a few police officers out spreading the word, and some had gone AWOL once the public had been informed of the danger. Their duty was done, these deserters apparently believed. But the rest of the force had cordoned off an area two blocks in every direction from the convent. Some of the officers there, among the silently spinning blue lights, looked at the convent warily. But most of them, the veterans in particular, kept watch the other direction, waiting for the attack upon the convent they’d been told to expect.

Waiting for all hell to break loose.

In a Greek Revival mansion on First Street in the Garden District, the last of the sun’s meager illumination drained from the sky like the final trickle of blood from a killing wound. The doors opened wide, and death poured out onto the steps, onto the streets, an army of slashing claws and flashing fangs.

In cemeteries around the city, crypts were thrown violently open, and they emerged—the undead sleeping among the dead. In the basement of Robideau’s jazz club, the presidential suite at the Monteleone, the depths of a new display under construction at the Aquarium of the Americas . . . they rose. Hannibal’s clan. The army of the lord of vampires. And even he didn’t know how many of them there were, though he would have guessed somewhere around six or seven hundred. Had it not been for the burning of Atlanta, there would have been so very many more.

The predators swept across the chaotic herd, each falling upon the first human it found, and then another if it did not feel quite sated. Hannibal had ordered them to feed before rendezvousing for the battle itself, but none of them had ever imagined how easy it would be. In those first few minutes, nearly one thousand souls departed the Earth at the hands of Hannibal’s savage army.

But even then, even when they began to lift up off their victims like bloated carrion birds, and float on toward their destination . . . even then, the screaming had only begun.

 

“Do you hear them?” Peter whispered in the dark.

Nikki could see the moonlight glinting off his eyes in the unlit bedroom. There was pain in those eyes, and she felt it too. Pain all around them. Horror and death and grief.

“Yes,” she admitted, though she did not want to focus on the cries of the dying which joined together into a hellish version of the drone that erupted from the stadium every time the Saints played a home game.

Together they looked out at the empty streets—several blocks away they could see the blue lights of a police car Bashing—and their fingers twined together in a desperate grasp for something that had been growing between them, something that this night might take away forever. In the distance, fires burned in several areas, but Nikki had not been in New Orleans long enough to be able to figure out where the flames were coming from. Car horns blared, and finally a police siren did begin to wail, but the patrol cars up the block did not respond.

They waited. All of them waited.

Nikki began to weep quietly. When Peter’s grip tightened on her hand and he pulled her closer to him, she looked up, her brows knitted with anguish.

“We’re just sitting here in the dark and they’re all . . . they’re dying out there,” she said. “I don’t want you to go.”

“We’ll be all right,” he whispered. “You’ll see. Just stay here, in the convent. I’ll . . . I’ll come back for you.”

Head down, hair hanging across her face, Nikki took a deep breath. She’d be left alone in a moment, alone in the convent with the half dozen other coven members who’d elected to remain human, and who’d given far too much of their blood to those who had only newly joined the race of shadows. But the newcomers had needed the blood for strength, and control. And inside the convent, the humans could do nothing but wait, and hope.

“You better,” she said finally, her voice a light raspy whisper.

But her frown did not disappear, and she turned away from the window.

“I will come back,” Peter said again, and this time it had the sound of a promise.

He reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, turned her toward him. Their eyes met, and she saw that, despite his magick, some of the sparkle had gone from those eyes. The lines around them were a little deeper than before. Nikki wanted to smile at these signs of Peter’s new humanity, but didn’t have the heart for it. It was not a time for smiles.

“I’ve just found my humanity again,” he said. “I’ve got life back, and I’ve got death back. In some ways, it’s as if I went to sleep in 1453, and am just waking up now. It’s a new world to me.”

“And you need me to help you through it,” she said skeptically, coldly.

Peter’s eyes narrowed. He clutched her shoulders and stared at her intensely, as though he were trying to communicate with her, his thoughts to her thoughts.

“I could do it myself,” he said, his voice softening as his eyes searched hers. “But I wouldn’t want to do it without you.”

For a moment, just a moment, Nikki stopped breathing. Her eyes wide, lips slightly parted, heart pounding in her chest. It was the strangest moment of her life, and she wanted so much more of it.

That’s when he kissed her.

It wasn’t the first kiss, but somehow, it still seemed like a beginning to her.

Then Peter pulled away, walked silently to the door, and was gone. She sat by herself in the darkness, then, waiting for him to return. Waiting for the screaming to stop. Waiting for the dawn.

After a few minutes, she stood and walked through the convent toward the chapel. Peter, and all the others, believed in God so fiercely that it bewildered her. Her faith had always been such a limp, lifeless thing. But if they believed, and she prayed for them, perhaps God would hear and help. The shadows who followed Peter Octavian, who believed in life and love and humanity, had to be the most pitiful of all God’s creations, Nikki thought. Monsters, they were, perhaps even damned, and yet they still believed in Him.

Nikki hoped they were right. And just in case, she sat in a pew, folded her hands, and began to pray.

 

Detectives Jack Michaud and LeeAnne Cataldo stood in front of their unmarked prowl car where it was parked across Decatur Street, face to face with a patrol vehicle whose blue lights spun ghosts across French Quarter facades. Jack sipped café au lait from a paper cup and his eyes scanned the street ahead. LeeAnne just watched him, astonished by his calm. Her fingers traced the grip of her service weapon, and she felt the comfortable weight of her backup piece, a Heckler & Koch VP70, in the rear waistband of her jeans.

She’d never carried the H&K before, just had it in the house. It wasn’t the kind of gun the department would have approved of. The nine-millimeter semiauto’s magazine held eighteen rounds. You didn’t make an arrest with a gun like that. You just killed people. Or anything else that got in your way.

LeeAnne had never been one to break the rules. But tonight the rules were suspended. Tonight, it was just survival of the fittest. Which was obvious enough just by the fact that the police who had cordoned off the area around the convent weren’t moving. Though there weren’t very many people left around Jackson Square—at least, from what LeeAnne could see from two blocks away—not far beyond it, the traffic was at a dead stop.

And they could hear the screaming.

“Jesus, I don’t think I can just sit here, LeeAnne,” Jack Michaud said suddenly, his face pale. He took another sip of his coffee, eyes darting back and forth over the rim as he scanned the street. Finally, he turned to look at her.

“We’re cops, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “There’s people being fucking slaughtered out there, and we’re just supposed to sit here and wait? We’re sitting ducks here! At least if we were out there maybe we’d be doing somebody some good!”

Glass shattered just to the north, and a car alarm began its whooping shriek. Which was good, LeeAnne thought. Maybe that way, they wouldn’t hear the screams anymore.