The Graves of Saints (23 page)

Holly might still be alive. The priest as well. Allison and Taweret were filled with toxin and vulnerable, and there were too many humans still to protect.

It occurred to him that he might not be able to save any of them.

‘No, no, no,’ he muttered, pummeling another vampire until it split like ripe fruit and burned in the sun. It felt so much better than turning them to stone.

He spun around, taking stock, counting vampires and counting allies. He needed a spell that would kill the vampires without hurting anyone else and he was coming up dry. Still, he kept fighting,
moving methodically now, quickly, turning vampires to stone or ice. He saw Kuromaku slashing and killing. Saw Kazimir appear behind a vampire and do the same, grabbing hold of the leech and tugging
off its head, ripping its suit open, exposing it to the sun.

Police cars roared up. Cops piled out, hiding behind their doors, guns at the ready, looking for an opening even though there was nothing they could do without the Medusa toxin. Brave or stupid,
Octavian didn’t know.

It was a matter of numbers now. Numbers and speed. He kept moving. Amber and Miles dropped from the sky and destroyed one at a time.

Too many.

God damn you, Cortez. Too many.

Magic burning through him, crackling all of him, he turned to another vampire, about to destroy it. The ground seemed to shift and buck beneath its feet and then a thick tree root burst from the
soil and speared the vampire through the chest, piercing its heart. The vampire gave a gasp and dust came out of its mouth. It began to molder to dust inside of its sunsuit, dead.
Disintegrating.

Octavian glanced around, thinking of Holly and Groff and the other two magicians he had invited here, but none of them was still standing.

The ground erupted. Voices rose in shouts, some of victory and others of fear, as the roots thrust from the soil, some twining around the vampires and dragging them down and others skewering
them through the heart. Several hung impaled on roots that had thrust so high they were like grotesque trees.

In moments, it was done.

Someone else had done what Octavian could not – killed the leeches while leaving his allies untouched.

He felt the magic dissipate from him, fizzing against his skin as it burned off. He dropped a few feet to the ground, landing in a crouch. Gazing around him, he saw his friends surveying the
damage and the police rushing forward to try to aid the fallen and make sure all of the vampires were dead.

Octavian frowned as he approached one of the roots that jutted from the cemetery grounds. He touched the wood, brows knitted, and then looked down at the soil beneath it.
An earthwitch
,
he thought. But unless Gaea herself had stepped in, which he doubted, that made no sense. He’d only ever met one earthwitch powerful enough to do something like this.

He blinked, a hitch in his breath, and fell to his knees. He touched the blades of grass and then pushed his fingers into the loose dirt around the root. When he spoke, it was in a whisper.

‘Keomany?’

Brattleboro, Vermont

The police cars began to roll out of Summerfields Orchard a little before ten in the morning. Cat Hein stood and watched as the line of vehicles departed – Brattleboro
and State Police vehicles, as well as crime-scene folks, who had finally finished up their work. The coroner’s people had been gone before the sun had risen on the first full day of autumn,
taking with them the torn and broken bodies of several of her close friends, and a number of other kind and gentle folks to whom she had offered her hospitality.

She and Tori had held each other last night and cried as they waited for the police and ambulances to arrive. The EMTs had wandered the clearing with wide eyes, pale and shaken by the carnage
and by their inability to save a single life. Those who had more than minor bumps and scrapes or broken bones were already dead or quickly fading by the time they had rushed through the rows of
apple trees with their equipment. A burly, gentle-eyed EMT threw up and then kept apologizing when he began to cry and could not stop. Several cops vanished into the trees for a while and Cat had
heard retching from at least one of them, though they pretended they had only been investigating.

It had been the longest night of Cat’s life and now she was just numb. She stood and watched a state police captain talking quietly with Ted Gately, the Brattleboro police chief. Her phone
buzzed and she slipped it from her pants pocket to see that it was Tori calling.

‘Hi, honey,’ she answered.

‘Why are they still here?’ Tori asked, her voice brittle. Cat’s chest tightened. A little part of Tori had broken last night, no matter what new magic might have come into the
world, and Cat feared it would never be repaired.

‘They’re going,’ she said. ‘Though Chief Gately says he’s going to post a car at the end of the drive and he wants us to stay closed for the day –’

‘As if there’s any way we would open for business with all the . . . the mess up here.’

‘He means well, Tori. I’m a cantankerous bitch, and even I think he’s a sweet old man,’ Cat said, as she watched the state police captain drive off and Chief Gately lean
down to the window of a Brattleboro police car to give orders to two of his men.

‘I know,’ Tori said, sighing. ‘I do. And I’m glad they’re going to stay, as long as they stay down there. Whatever happens now is for us to decide.’

There was weight and significance to her words beyond their simple meaning, but Cat could not reply the way she might have liked, for Chief Gately had just patted the roof of the patrol car to
send the men on their way and was walking across the dusty parking lot toward her.

‘The chief’s coming over to talk,’ she said. ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’

‘Okay. Thank him from me, please.’

Cat said that she would and they exchanged their I-love-yous even as Cat met the chief’s gaze, silently pleading for a moment’s indulgence. When she had ended the call she clutched
the phone in her hand instead of putting it back into her pocket, as if that would keep Tori closer to her.

‘I’ll have someone at the end of the drive all day and through the night,’ Chief Gately said. He had wiry gray eyebrows that stuck out at crazy angles and the skin around his
eyes sagged enough that she thought it must partly obscure his vision, but he still seemed a formidable man.

‘Tori wants me to thank you, Chief. For everything,’ Cat said. ‘But are you sure that’s necessary? I mean, if any of them got away, we have no reason to assume that
they’re going to come back.’

Chief Gately nodded with an expression of grim approval. ‘No, I don’t suppose they will, after what you gals did to them.’ He put his hands on his hips, the leather of his
gunbelt creaking. ‘I spent sixty years or so being absolutely sure that ghosts and vampires and witches and magic were a whole lot of bunk. I guess I can file it all under things I wish
I’d never learned. But I’m damn glad you ladies were able to defend yourselves. If not for that bit of hoodoo . . .’

He trailed off, obviously not knowing how to finish. They had not mentioned Keomany to the police, had claimed that the roots that had been summoned up to destroy the vampires the night before
had been elemental magic wielded by the earthwitches who had gathered for the equinox. He was right about one thing, though. Without that ‘hoodoo’, none of them would have lived to see
the dawn.

‘Anyway,’ the chief continued, ‘you’ve got my direct line and the dispatch number. You call immediately if you even so much as glimpse anything out of order around here,
especially after sundown. And leave the crime-scene tape up until I tell you, all right? The eggheads may want another look at something in there, although I think it’s all pretty
self-explanatory.’

‘We won’t touch it,’ Cat promised. ‘And thank you again.’

‘What a world we live in, now,’ Chief Gately said, shaking his head. He turned to walk to his car, then paused and turned toward her again. ‘You know you’re gonna have an
inspection team out here to take statements, right? Could be UN or maybe FBI doing their grunt work. Standard procedure when vampires are concerned.’

Cat hesitated. She wished that she could have asked him not to report the incident, but she knew there was no chance of that. It would have been better if they could have handled the whole thing
themselves, but the people who had been killed – her friends and guests – had families and others who loved them. It wasn’t as if the survivors could have simply built a pyre in
the orchard. Not in modern times.

‘I understand,’ she said, still biting her tongue.

She didn’t want the UN involved. That meant Task Force Victor, and that meant that Octavian would find out.

Her thoughts went back to the blessed clearing with the fence around it, the one they had opted not to use, and the new growth that now thrived there. Octavian would want a say in what happened
next at Summerfields, and Cat was determined to see that he didn’t get it. This place belonged to her and Tori, nobody else.

Still, if Octavian had to find out, better that he find out from her.

She thanked Chief Gately and shook his hand, then watched until he had pulled out onto the road and turned toward town. Cat turned and started walking up through the orchard again, passing the
shop and barn which would remain locked up all day.

Her phone was still in her hand. Reluctantly she tapped the screen and searched her contacts for him. Octavian. Her finger hovered for a moment before she tapped the screen again. She picked up
her pace as she listened to it ring.

‘Cat,’ Octavian said, answering. ‘You were on my list to call this morning.’

She frowned. ‘Why would you call, after the way we left it the last time you were here?’

‘There are a lot of ugly things happening right now and I was worried that you might be in danger.’

She held her breath, the muscles tensing across her back. ‘And why would that be?’

‘I guess you know that Nikki’s dead.’

Cat shuddered and let out a breath, cursing herself. ‘Shit, yes. I’m sorry. I’m not myself or I would have—’

‘It’s all right. I understand. And there’s more. Her funeral was this morning. During the service, we were attacked by vampires—’

‘This morning? During the day? Wouldn’t that make them Shadows?’

‘They wore these suits, some kind of protective covering. Most of us are okay, but it wasn’t anything I did. At the end, something bizarre happened.’

She listened in amazement as he told her about the roots bursting from the soil and impaling the vampires, wondering all the while if it was possible that Keomany – whatever she had become
– could have extended her influence hundreds of miles away. It was difficult to conceive of, but no more so than any other explanation.

‘I know Keomany’s dead,’ he went on, ‘but I’ve never seen another earthwitch with power like this. Have you?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t.’

‘And, truth be told, it sort of . . . well, I’m not an empath, but it just
felt
like her. Does that sound crazy to you?’

While they had been talking, she had kept walking uphill through the orchard, and now she came in sight of the fence that had been built around the clearing where the new growth had sprung up,
where the tree that Keomany had grown for them towered higher than all of the others.

‘Peter, has it not occurred to you to wonder why I called you? I mean, you meant to call me, you said . . . but I called you, remember?’

There was a moment of silence on the phone.

‘You did,’ he agreed.

‘Let me ask you a question. Why did those vampires come after you today? Why did they kill Nikki and then crash her funeral like this? What’s the point?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice tense. ‘The only thing we can figure at this point is that Cortez killed Nikki to get to me, and if that’s true, he probably
engineered the attack this morning and a trap left for a friend of mine last night for the same reason.’

‘And what the hell does any of that have to do with us?’ Cat asked, still angry but now also afraid.

‘Besides what happened with the roots this morning?’ he replied. ‘If he’s going after people I love – my friends – he may know I have ties to
Summerfields.’

‘We’re not friends,’ Cat said quickly.

‘Aren’t we?’ Octavian asked.

To her surprise, she realized she wasn’t sure.

‘We’re allies at the very least,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you think? At least that. We want the same things for the world.’

Cat paused, frowning as she stared at the wall around the clearing. One panel of the wall had been removed and she stared at that gap, awaiting whatever might emerge. She could hear Octavian
breathing on the line but had nearly forgotten she was even on the phone.

‘Hello?’ Octavian said.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, then cleared her throat. ‘I’m here.’

‘And?’

‘And, yes, we do want the same things for the world. Sometimes I forget that. People die around you. They die because they know you, and sometimes because they know people who know you,
and that just . . . it fucking sucks.’

She said this last with a hitch in her throat.

‘Cat?’ Octavian said, worried now. ‘Did something happen?’

‘You’re a dangerous man, Peter. But I forget that we’re on the same side. That it’s a dangerous world and the fight to keep it safe belongs to all of us.’

‘Cat,’ he said again. ‘Tell me.’

No one had come out from the fenced clearing, so she approached the opening in the wall and peeked inside. Ed Rushton was there, still pale from terror and lack of sleep, but alive and working.
And Tori, of course – her beautiful Tori. But nobody else. Not unless you counted the figure that now lay on its side on the grass, curled up like a sleeping infant or a night-blooming
flower, and perhaps she was a little of both. The new growth remained still. Its apple-red skin did not rise and fall with breath, nor did the vines and leaves of its hair or the bark on its arms
react in any way to her arrival. It seemed inert, almost as if it were a husk now abandoned.