Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast (10 page)

“You look like crap,” Dad said, pausing to stare at me. I resisted the urge, like Marjo, to give him a one-fingered salute, because he'd only beat the crap out of me for it. Seeing him gave me a black, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to love him. I wanted to hit him. I didn't know what I wanted, except that I wanted this whole thing to just go away.

“Gee, thanks, Dad,” I said, and deliberately slumped back on the couch, giving him all the teen attitude I could. “I missed you too. I see you brought all your friends with you. Oh, wait.”

The last time my dad had rolled into Morganville, he'd done it in a literal kind of way—on a motorcycle, with a bunch of badass motorcycle biker buddies. No sign of them this time. I wondered when they'd finally told him to shove it, and how hard.

Dad didn't answer. He kept staring at me. He was wearing a leather jacket with lots of zippers, faded blue jeans, sturdy boots. Not too different from what I was wearing, minus the jacket, because only a stupid jerk would be in leather in this heat. Looking at
you
, Dad.

“Shane,” he said. “You knew I'd come back for you.”

“Yeah, that's really sweet. The last time I saw you, you were trying to blow my ass up along with a whole building full of vampires, remember? What's my middle name, Collateral Damage?” He'd have done it too. I knew my dad too well to think anything else. “You also left me to burn alive in a cage,
Dad
. So excuse me if I'm not getting all misty-eyed while the music swells.”

His expression—worn into a hard leather mask by wind and sun—didn't change. “It's a war, Shane. We talked about this.”

“Funny thing, I don't remember you saying,
If you get caught by the vampires, I'll leave you to burn, dumbass.
But maybe I'm just not remembering all the details of your clever plan.” Feeling was coming back into my fingers and toes. Not fun. It felt like I'd dipped them in battery acid and then rolled them in lye. “I can get over that. But you had to go and drag my friends into it.”

That was what I hated the most. Sure, he'd screwed me over—more than once, actually. But he was right, we'd kind of agreed that one or the other of us might have to bite it for the cause, back when I believed in his cause.

We hadn't agreed about innocent people, especially my friends, getting thrown on the pile of bodies.

“Your
friends
, right,” Dad said, with about a bottle's worth of cheap whiskey emphasis. “A half-vampire, a wannabe morbid freak, and—oh, you mean that girl, don't you? The little skinny one. She melted the brains right out of your head, didn't she? I warned you about that.”

Claire. He didn't even remember her name. I closed my eyes for a second, and there she was, smiling up at me with those clear, trusting eyes. She might be small, but she had a kind of strength my dad wouldn't ever understand. She was the first really pure thing that I'd ever known, and I wasn't about to let him take her away. She was waiting for me right now, back at the Glass House, probably studying and chewing a pencil. Or arguing with Eve. Or . . . wondering where the hell I was.

I had to get out of this. I had to get back to Claire.

Painful or not, my feet were functional again. I tested them by standing up. In the corner, Dead Jerome put aside his book. It was a battered, water-stained copy of
The Wizard of Oz.
Who did he think he was? The Cowardly Lion? The Scarecrow? Hell, maybe he thought he was Dorothy.

“Just like I thought, this is all about the girl. You probably think you're some knight in shining armor come to save her.” Dad's smile was sharp enough to cut diamonds. “You know how she sees you? A big, dumb idiot she can put on a leash. Her own pet pit bull. Your innocent little schoolgirl, she's wearing the Founder's symbol now. She's working for the vampires. I sure as hell hope she's like a porn star in the sack for you to be betraying your own like this.”

This time, I didn't need a knock on the head to see red. I felt my chin going down, my lungs filling, but I held on to my temper. Somehow.

He was trying to make me charge him.

“I love her, Dad,” I said. “Don't.”

“Love, yeah, right. You don't know the meaning of the word, Shane. She's working for the leeches. She's helping them regain control of Morganville. She has to go, and you know it.”

“Over my dead body.”

In the corner, Jerome laughed that scratchy, raspy laugh that made me want to tear out his voice box once and for all. “Could be arranged,” he croaked.

“Shut up,” my dad snapped without taking his eyes off of me. “Shane, listen to me. I've found the answer.”

“Wait—let me guess—forty-two?” No use. Dad wasn't anywhere near cool enough to be a Douglas Adams fan. “I don't care what you've found, Dad, and I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm going home. You want to have your pet dead guy stop me?”

His eyes fixed on my wrist, where I was wearing a bracelet. Not one of those things that would have identified me as vamp property—a hospital bracelet, white plastic with a big red cross on it.

“You wounded?” Not, of course, was I sick. I was just another foot soldier, to Dad. You were either wounded, or malingering.

“Whatever. I'm better,” I said.

It seemed, for just a second, that he softened. Maybe nobody but me would have noticed. Maybe I imagined it too. “Where were you hurt, boy?”

I shrugged and pointed to my abs, slightly off to one side. The scar still ached and felt hot. “Knife.”

He frowned. “How long ago?”

“Long enough.” The bracelet would be coming off in the next week. My grace period was nearly over.

He looked into my eyes, and for a second, just a second, I let myself believe he was genuinely concerned.

Sucker.

He always had been able to catch me off guard, no matter how carefully I watched him, and I didn't even see the punch coming until it was too late. It was hard, delivered with surgical precision, and it doubled me over and sent me stumbling back to flop onto the couch again.
Breathe
,
I told my muscles. My solar plexus told me to stuff it, and my insides throbbed, screaming in pain and terror. I heard myself making hard, gasping noises, and hated myself for it.
Next time. Next time I hit the bastard first.

I knew better, though.

Dad grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. He pointed my face in Jerome's direction. “I'm sorry, boy, but I need you to
listen
right now. You see him?
I brought him back, right out of the grave.
I can bring them all back, as many as I need. They'll fight for me, Shane, and they won't quit. It's time. We can take this town back, and we can finally end this nightmare
.
”

My frozen muscles finally unclenched, and I pulled in a whooping, hoarse gasp of air. Dad let go of my hair and stepped away.

He'd always known when to back off too.

“Your definition of—the end of the nightmare—is a little different—from mine,” I wheezed. “Mine doesn't include zombies.” I swallowed and tried to slow my heart rate. “How'd you do it, Dad? How the hell is he standing here?”

He brushed that aside. Of course. “I'm trying to explain to you that it's time to quit talking about the war, and time to start fighting it
.
We can win. We can destroy all of them.” He paused, and the glow in his eyes was the next best thing to a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. “I need you, son. We can do it together.”

That part, he really meant. It was sick and twisted, but he did need me.

And I needed to use that. “First, tell me how you do it,” I said. “I need to know what I'm signing up for.”

“Later.” Dad clapped me on the shoulder. “When you're convinced this is necessary, maybe. For now, all you need to know is that it's possible, I've done it. Jerome's proof.”

“No, Dad. Tell me how. Either I'm in it or I'm not. No more secrets.”

Nothing I was saying was going to register with him as a lie, because they weren't lies. I was saying what he wanted to hear. First rule of growing up with an abusive father: you cope, you bargain, you learn how to avoid getting hit.

And my father wasn't bright enough to know I'd figured it out.

Still, some instinct warned him; he looked at me with narrowed eyes, a frown wrinkling his forehead. “I'll tell you,” he said. “But you need to show me you can be trusted first.”

“Fine. Tell me what you need.” That translated into,
Tell me who you need me to beat up.
As long as I was willing to do that, he'd believe me.

I was hoping it would be Jerome.

“Of everybody who died in the last couple of years, who was the strongest?”

I blinked, not sure it was a trick question. “Jerome?”

“Besides Jerome.”

“I guess—probably Tommy Barnes.” Tommy was no teenager; he'd been in his thirties when he'd kicked it, and he'd been a big, mean, tough dude even the other big, mean, tough dudes had given a wide berth. He'd died in a bar fight,
I'd heard. Knifed from behind. He'd have snapped the neck off of anybody who'd tried it to his face.

“Big Tom? Yeah, he'd do.” Dad nodded thoughtfully. “All right, then. We're bringing him back.”

The last person on Earth I'd want to bring back from the grave would be Big Tommy Barnes. He'd been crazy-badass alive. I could only imagine death wouldn't have improved his temper.

But I nodded. “Show me.”

Dad took off his leather jacket, and then stripped off his shirt. In contrast to the sun-weathered skin of his arms, face, and neck, his chest was fish-belly white, and it was covered with tattoos. I remembered some of them, but not all the ink was old.

He'd recently had our family portrait tattooed over his heart.

I forgot to breathe for a second, staring at it. Yeah, it was crude, but those were the lines of Mom's face, and Alyssa's. I didn't realize, until I saw them, that I'd nearly forgotten how they looked.

Dad looked down at the tat. “I needed to remind myself,” he said.

My throat was so dry that it clicked when I swallowed. “Yeah.” My own face was there, frozen in indigo blue at the age of maybe sixteen. I looked thinner, and even in tattoo form I looked more hopeful. More sure.

Dad held out his right arm, and I realized that there was more new ink.

And this stuff was
moving.

I took a step back. There were dense, strange symbols on his arm, all in standard tattoo ink, but there was nothing standard about what the tats were doing—namely, they were revolving slowly like a DNA helix up and down the axis of his arm, under the skin. “
Christ,
Dad—”

“Had it done in Mexico,” he said. “There was an old priest there, he knew things from the Aztecs. They had a way to bring back the dead, so long as they hadn't been gone for more than two years, and were in decent condition otherwise. They used them as ceremonial warriors.” Dad flexed his arm, and the tattoos flexed with him. “This is part of what does it.”

I felt sick and cold now. This had moved way past what I knew. I wished wildly that I could show this to Claire; she'd probably be fascinated, full of theories and research.

She'd know what to do about it.

I swallowed hard and said, “And the other part?”

“That's where you come in,” Dad said. He pulled his T-shirt on again, hiding the portrait of our family, “I need you to prove you're up for this, Shane. Can you do that?”

I gulped air and finally, convulsively nodded.
Play for time,
I was telling myself.
Play for time, think of something you can do.
Short of chopping off my own father's arm, though. . . .

“This way,” Dad said. He went to the back of the room. There was a door there, and he'd added a new, sturdy lock to it that he opened with a key from his jacket.

Jerome gave me that creepy laugh again, and I felt my skin shiver into gooseflesh.

“Right. This might be a shock,” Dad said. “But trust me, it's for a good cause.”

He swung open the door and flipped on a harsh overhead light.

It was a windowless cell, and inside, chained to the floor with thick silver-plated links, was a vampire.

Not just any vampire. Oh no, that would have been too easy for my father.

It was Michael Glass, my best friend.

Michael looked—white. Paler than pale. I'd never seen him look like that. There were burns on his arms, big raised welts where the silver was touching, and there were cuts. He was leaking slow trickles of blood on the floor.

His eyes were usually blue, but now they were red, bright red. Scary monster red, like nothing human.

But it was still my best friend's voice whispering, “Help.”

I couldn't answer him. I backed up and slammed the door.

Jerome was laughing again, so I turned around, picked up a chair, and smashed him in the face with it. I could have hit him with a powder puff, for all the good it did. He grabbed the chair, broke the thick wood with a snap of his hands, and threw it back at me. I stumbled, and would have gone down except for the handy placement of a wall.

“Stop. Don't touch my son,” my father said. Jerome froze like he'd run into a brick wall, hands working like he still wanted to rip out my throat.

I turned on my dad and snarled, “That's my friend!”

“No, that's a vampire,” he said. “The youngest one. The weakest one. The one most of them won't come running to rescue.”