Of Masques and Martyrs (35 page)

Perhaps even frightened.

Then the gunfire started. Everywhere. Drowning out the sounds of battle. Vampire and shadow alike turned to see what was happening. Legions of dead warriors turned to look. But Cody and Allison did not turn. They knew exactly what was happening.

“What is—?” Hannibal began.

Allison descended upon him.

—BONNIE RAITT, “Longing in Their Hearts”

 

 

 

 

“WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON DOWN THERE?” Roberto Jimenez asked, shouting to be heard over the roar of the helicopter’s rotors. “Nobody was supposed to open fire until Cody gave the green light!”

The copilot shouted into the commlink attached to his helmet, but Commander Jimenez couldn’t make out the words. After a moment, the man looked up at him and raised his voice to be heard.

“Beta Unit was under attack, Commander! They had to save themselves. All hell’s breaking loose!” the copilot reported.

Roberto felt sick. His troops were armed with hollow-point rounds, each loaded with the serum Hannibal had devised to prevent the bloodsuckers from shapeshifting. One on one, they’d be able to kill them all. Of that, he was confident. But he’d promised Cody and Vigeant that he’d hold off until they could get their own people clear, then move in. It shouldn’t have mattered to him—they were all vampires, in the end. But Berto hated the idea that they might think he’d betrayed them.

The copilot stared at him, waiting for instructions.

“Ah, fuck it!” Jimenez said angrily. “Get down low and circle around that block. I want a clear shot at all the major hot spots.”

The chopper dove then, but Roberto was a seasoned soldier. He barely shifted in order to maintain his balance. He went to the door on the side of the helicopter’s belly, ratcheted up the handle, and slid it back on its tracks, bracing himself against the strength of the wind trying to suck him out.

Swiftly, he latched himself by a cable to the inside of the helicopter, then picked up a specially rigged CAMEL tube—a computer-aided missile, easy launch weapon similar in some ways to the antiquated LAWS rocket, or even the basic grenade launcher. The CAMEL, however, could fire just about anything, and it never missed.

UNSF Commander Jimenez placed his right eye to the telescopic sight on top of the CAMEL, and waited.

“Hot zone!” the pilot, Captain Nathanson, called out.

Jimenez scanned the ground below, saw a sizable crowd of vampire warriors tearing each other apart, and pulled the trigger on the CAMEL. The missile erupted from its tube and its computer tracking guided it instantly to the center of the gathered vampires.

It didn’t explode on impact. But it wasn’t supposed to. Instead, it opened, and gas began to pour out.

Then the chopper was moving on, trying to stay as far from the spreading gas as possible so the rotors wouldn’t suck all the gas away. They moved around the block like that, Roberto reloading new gas missiles into the CAMEL and firing them into the crowd below. It took just minutes.

“Nathanson!” he roared to the pilot. “Find someplace to set her down!”

Moments later, they set down on the street in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, and Commander Jimenez leaped out, a pair of assault rifles over his shoulder. He waved the chopper off and ran toward the massacre happening just a few blocks away.

He’d given Will and Allison his word, and things had gotten out of control. If he could, he wanted to make sure they lived to be pissed off at him.

 

Hannibal threw Allison back at Cody’s feet, hard. She rolled and came up quickly. Behind them, a pair of vampires and a member of their own coven went down in a spray of bullets.

“That asshole!” Allison snarled, and some of her rage turned on Roberto Jimenez. But not for long. Not while Hannibal was still alive.

“Later,” Will warned her.

Grimly, she agreed. “Later.”

“So you’ve brought the cavalry, is that it?” Hannibal asked. “How nice. My warriors will have a feast to celebrate your destruction.”

Allison and Will exchanged glances.

“You’re an idiot,” she told Hannibal, and he blinked as if she’d slapped him. “That’s always been your biggest handicap. You overestimate your own intelligence. We’re all going to die now, thanks to you. You created the means of your own destruction!”

“Yeah,” Cody drawled. “Thanks a lot.”

Hannibal frowned, still not understanding. Will laughed at Allison’s side, and she glanced over to see that it wasn’t a laugh of derision, but genuine amusement.

The lord of vampires was not amused.

“I will rip that laugh from your throat, Cody,” Hannibal raged, and tensed to spring.

“My lord!” one of his followers cried as she threw herself in front of Hannibal, grabbing at his legs. “They’re killing us, my lord!”

Then she was dead.

Hannibal stared down at her in horror, and then Allison watched as the realization spread across his face. Amazement, horror, fury. He opened his mouth to curse them, but all he could manage was a single word.

“How?” he roared, bloody spittle flying from his mouth.

Allison was about to answer, but another figure stepped forward from her right.

“I’m how,” Yano said proudly. “I stole it from you, you evil son of a bitch. My sins are so great I may never get to heaven, but I’ll be damned if you’ll turn this world into hell.”

The vampire lord faced Sebastiano and the rage that had been building within Hannibal, driving him on to even greater savagery, seemed now to disappear. In its absence, there was only a cold hatred, a gleeful, murderous evil like nothing Allison had ever seen.

“And now you are twice the betrayer,” Hannibal said, voice low and dangerous, “and you will feel twice the agony.”

The bloody conflict had thinned the ranks of both sides, and the four of them faced one another in a quiet corner a block and a half to the northeast of the convent, where the walls cast a moonshadow over them like a shroud. Not far away, the dying continued. Vampires and shadows and U.N. soldiers. But in that brief moment, their conflict was their own. Intimate.

“Your arrogance is incredible,” Cody said as Hannibal began to move toward Yano.

Then Cody changed. Allison watched, fascinated, as she had every time she’d seen it done. In seconds, thick brown fur sprouted all over his body, and at first she didn’t know what it was he was changing into. He just grew and grew, and then she saw the way his hands were becoming claws, the way his face had pushed out into a snout, and she knew. Her lover had transformed into the largest grizzly she had ever seen.

Beyond him, Sebastiano was also changing. His white hair spread, became fur, and then he was a mountain gorilla with snow-white fur all over, hugely powerful arms swinging at his sides.

Silently, Hannibal also changed. Into a wolf. A very large wolf, but a wolf nevertheless.

Allison almost laughed. This was what it came down to, after all. Hannibal had limited himself, and his power, to the traditions of mythical vampirism. It would be his end, she knew.

Right now.

“You can’t honestly think you can kill all three of us,” she said.

Hannibal lunged for her. Allison’s fingers sprouted into silver claws and she ducked aside and slashed at him as he passed, ripping furrows into the dark wolf’s fur. But Hannibal was fast, and in his wolf’s jaws, he’d caught a piece of her gut, hanging from her ragged stomach wound, and now he pulled it with him.

Allison shrieked and changed to mist, her only thoughts of escaping the pain.

Even as mist she could see. It would have been difficult for her to describe, but there seemed some kind of radar, an impression of solid objects all around her. She was aware in a way she knew had to do with memory and mind function and probably the minor telepathy shared by shadows of the same blood lineage.

That was how she sensed that the battle had moved even farther up the street, farther away from the convent. That was how she saw the snow-white mountain gorilla and the huge brown bear converge on a one-eyed wolf whose ribs were scored with silver gashes. The bear beat at the wolf’s head with one huge paw, and it tumbled several yards across the pavement, where the gorilla lifted it over its head, about to shatter it on the street, or perhaps break it over its knee.

Which was when the gunfire began.

Only the wolf was unscathed.

The first bullet cutting into Will Cody’s flesh trapped him forever in the shape of that bear. The second and third and fourth just tore away chunks of flesh and muscle and shattered bone that would never heal. Next to him, Yano suffered as well. The white fur of the gorilla was splashed with red, and it fell dead as a bullet shattered its skull, spraying brain matter onto the bear.

The wolf fell to the street and turned, frightened, toward the soldiers, prepared to dodge their next attack.

The mist was screaming.

Allison had moved instantly, re-formed behind the pair of soldiers, and killed them in tandem, breaking one’s neck while she tore the other’s throat out.

Too late. And too soon.

As they fell to the ground, she looked up and realized with profound horror and revulsion that only Hannibal remained standing. She ought to have let the soldiers live. She knew that now. Yet even as she watched, the broken and bloody ursine form of Will Cody rose slightly from the street and reached for the wolf, grabbed it by the leg.

The snap of the breaking bone echoed across the street, somehow louder than the gunfire and screams, now more distant than ever. The wolf howled, turned on the bear, and sank its fangs into the furry throat of the much larger beast.

“God, Will, no!” Allison shrieked.

Trapped in the form of the bear, Will Cody could not change, could not heal to defend himself. Hannibal, the wolf, tore chunks of flesh from the bear’s throat.

Hot tears of blood began to burn Allison’s cheeks. Her mind snapped a little then, as she realized what was happening, and she lunged across the street at the one-eyed wolf.

Fresh blood spurted from the bear’s neck.

 

Roberto ran full-out down Chartres Street. The battle was just ahead, soldiers firing wildly into a street crowded with monsters. He shouldn’t have cared. He knew he shouldn’t. For the world to be safe, they all needed to die. But they didn’t all
deserve
to die, and that was where he ran into problems.

Nothing was going as planned.

“Hold your fire!” he screamed into the commlink attached to his collar. “This is UNSF Commander Jimenez! Hold your goddamn fire! Don’t shoot unless you’re under attack!”

He could see clouds of the gas he’d fired growing ever larger. The gas was thinning out, yes, and being carried by the wind, but it should have done its job. Another few seconds, and most of the damned vampires in New Orleans ought to be unable to change form. Then they could try to figure out which were with Octavian and which with Hannibal.

If any of them were alive after the next sixty seconds or so.

 

Allison had dug long silver claws into Hannibal midleap, and she dragged him away from Will’s broken and bloody body, used her momentum to slam him to the ground. Any of his followers would already have lost their concentration, allowed the pain of silver poisoning—and fear of the silver itself—to destroy them.

Hannibal was not so easy to kill.

The wolf’s jaws fastened to the wound on her breast where her nipple was missing, and tore at her flesh. With the intense strength of her pain, Allison batted the beast away, heard the snap of its neck. The wolf hit the street, rolled . . . changed.

When it rose to its feet, it was Hannibal again. His eye was still gone, though the silver wound had closed somewhat. The slashes in his side weren’t quite as visible through his tattered clothing, but she imagined they were also slow in healing.

There they stood, face to face, as the last of Will Cody’s life pumped out onto the ground. Grief and rage threatened to overwhelm Allison, and her knees felt suddenly weak. But she glanced over at the dying animal, the bear that would never again look like the man she loved, and she knew she could not rest until it was over.

She’d wanted to destroy Hannibal wearing every wound, every humiliation and violation he had inflicted upon her. But she was too vulnerable this way, she now realized. He had used her wounds against her twice already. As they stalked one another now, Allison changed, becoming whole once more. Hannibal seemed startled momentarily, and it occurred to her that she must look good. Fresh and beautiful, even her clothes intact. While he, the lord of vampires, was ravaged and bloody.

“Vain bastard,” she whispered, and Allison Vigeant smiled cruelly.

She wanted it to take a long time for Hannibal to die.

She didn’t see the small cloud of mist that blew toward them, a thin low fog that was quite out of place in the French Quarter of New Orleans at this time of year. But it wasn’t mist, and it wasn’t fog. It was gas. And before either of them had another chance to leap at the other, to rip and tear and rend, it had enveloped them both.

Already it was dissipating, passing them by, but Allison knew right off what had happened. She knew, as well, that the margin for error that came with vampirism had just disappeared. As a human female member of Octavian’s coven, she had learned how to fight, how to protect herself. She hoped it was enough.

As she rushed at Hannibal, it occurred to her that the gunfire had ceased, and she wondered if that meant all the others were dead.

Hannibal lashed out at her, and Allison ducked. Shock registered on his face as he realized he’d lost some of his speed. Perhaps he’d also tried to change, to make his hands into claws, and been unable to do so. The element of surprise was on her side, then, and she took full advantage of it.