Vampire U (17 page)

"Alex would never share a prize like you," he said.  "I knew he would bring you here, and that his desire for your blood and body would blind him to the trap he'd put himself in.  I was right."

"What if you'd been wrong?" I said, shocked by his dispassionate logic.  "What if he'd bitten me in the tunnels or killed you instead?"

"Then we would both be dead."  His eyes softened, and I caught a glimmer of the Mander I'd begun to love.  "But this is no time for timid measures.  If I had done nothing, neither of us would have lived a day longer."  He shrugged out of his suit jacket and offered it to me.

I snatched it out of his hands and draped it around my naked shoulders.  I wanted to argue with him, but I felt the truth of his words.  How many more nights could I have avoided Alex before he or his goons dragged me away?  Mander's move had been a desperate gamble, but there had been no better alternatives.  My anger fizzled, and I stumbled forward and fell against his chest.  "I'm pissed off," I whispered.  "But I understand why you did it."

Mander let out a sigh of relief as he folded me into his arms.  In my mind, I felt his presence, not controlling me, only warming and comforting, soothing my jagged nerves.  His hands cradled my head, and I lifted my face to him like a flower opening to the sun.  Our lips met, and despite the power of the monster inside him, I felt something pure and wonderful in that kiss.  I could sense the man that Mander had been long ago, before Le Moyne had made him the creature he was.

The dank dungeon around us fell seemed to fall away as Mander became the center of my existence.  Whatever his sins, I knew I could forgive this man anything if we could only be together.  He'd lowered me into the mouth of hell, but he'd come back for me, risking his own life to carry me out again.

He stepped back, breaking the kiss and leaving me breathless.  My naked skin rippled with gooseflesh.  "We need to be ready," he said softly.

"For what?" I asked, but I already knew.

"The Elder will have felt Alex's death," Mander whispered.  "As will the others."  He turned toward the room's single entrance, a narrow, arched door that led to a black hallway.  Mander pushed me behind him.  "They're coming," he said.

Mander stood motionless, tense as a coiled spring.  I peered over his shoulder into the darkness, waiting.  
Le Moyne.
  Despite all I'd seen since the Equinox Ball, the idea of a centuries-old historical figure walking into the room seemed absurd.  "Are you sure?" I asked.  I'd been through so much, and the relief I'd felt upon Alex's death felt like the fleeting remnants of a dream now.  Alex had never been the real threat.

I heard soft scuffling footsteps, and something moved in the dark entryway.  I peered into the gloom, struggling to see.

Jacob Crabtree stepped into the torchlight, and confused relief replaced my dread.

"Jacob?"  Astonished, I stepped around Mander.  "I can't believe you found us!"

"Stay back," Mander warned me.

I turned to him, shaking my head.  "It's okay, Mander.  This is Jacob.  He's the editor for the 
Scryer.
  He helped me last night when Alex..."

The hard look in Mander's eyes cut through my words like a razor.  "It's him, Danielle.  It's the Elder."

I looked back at Jacob, and now I realized this wasn't the nerdy grad student I'd seen fighting with a printer in the school paper's pitiful office.  Behind his wireframe glasses, Jacob's beady eyes held a wicked light.

But Jacob was my friend.  My brain struggled to make excuses for him.  He'd received my text and had the foresight to bring a flashlight to the tunnels beneath the Cane Street Bridge.  He'd followed my footprints in the muck.

"Danielle," Mander urged.  "Get behind me."

Jacob watched me with gleeful amusement.  "Monsieur Deslauriers, I don't think she understands."

"I hardly remember you myself," Mander said.

Jacob laughed.  "It's been what?  A hundred years or more since I turned you?"

The admission from Jacob's own lips jolted the warm cocoon of my denial, turning my bowels to ice.  I shook my head at the impossibility and pulled Mander's jacket tight, covering myself as much as I could.  "No," I said.  "No way.  Jacob, stop kidding around."

Jacob shook his head, chuckling.  "Naive girl, don't you understand?  Mander thought his plan clever and subtle, but I've known for years of his desire to destroy all that I've built.  All he needed was you - strong, inquisitive, and pure.  A threat to Beta House, if you could be brought close enough to see the truth.  I brought you to Romanus University and gave him to you, even goaded you into attending the Equniox Ball when his invitation wasn't enough.

"You were the perfect bait for a perfect trap."

His words rang true; no other school had offered me a scholarship.  "But why take me to Momma Bones?" I said.  "Why let her tell me so much about you?"

The Elder of Beta House flashed a wicked smile.  "So you could do me a favor, Danielle.  Now that you've told me everything the old witch knows, I'll have to dispose of her."

"Is that why you came to the dorm and saved me from Alex?"

Jacob scoffed.  "Only a convenient side effect.  You forced me to intervene when your own stupidity almost got you killed."

"You needed her alive to lure me here," Mander said, stepping in front of me as he glared a challenge at Jacob.  "But I won't go without a fight."

Jacob began to pace, moving in a slow circle along the curved wall.  He shook his head.  "The trap wasn't meant to lure 
you,
 my child.  You 
were
 the trap."

Mander paused, and a frown came over his face, followed by sudden realization.  "You wanted Alex dead.  But why?"

Jacob gestured to the oily stain where Alex Golov had burned.  "I could have killed you years ago, but it happens that you're right.  Beta House's survival - our survival - depends on secrecy as much as blood.  Keg parties full of naive young women?"  He snorted in disgust.  "The future is no place for such public displays of indulgence.  In an age when anyone can upload high-definition video to the internet in seconds, it's only a matter of time before our fraternity's secrets are revealed.  As much as it wounded me, Alex had to die."

Jacob's leisurely circle was closing in as he spoke.  His usually tight voice was soft and seductive now, like slender fingers weaving an invisible snare of words.  "But now that he's gone, you can have all that you want.  Take the mantle of leadership, my child.  Lead the coven while I remain in the shadows.  You can save us from the demise that Alex would have wrought."  Each step brought him closer to the center of the Heart, where the blood-drenched wooden pillar waited, erected hundreds of years ago by the Houma tribes, corrupted by the very spirit they hoped to destroy.

Mander circled with Jacob, keeping himself between the Elder and me.  "I have no interest in saving you, nor you me.  I'm nothing more than another obscene creation meant to sustain your life.  What we've done is evil, and I mean to end it."

Jacob snarled.  "Hypocrite.  You'd be a hundred years in the grave if you didn't feed."

"I've taken only what I needed to survive," Mander said.

"And how is your survival more noble than mine?" Jacob asked.  "What have you done with the precious gift I've given you?"

Mander clenched his jaw.  "My sins are behind me."  He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I saw the sincerity in his eyes.

Jacob saw it too, and he laughed.  "Because of 
her?
  Oh, Mander, you're too old to be so foolish.  Is it love you think you feel?"

Mander snarled.  "What I feel is my conscience."

"If you want to change things, then it's power you need, my son," Jacob said.  "Take what you need to grow strong," Jacob said.  "Begin with her."  He pointed at me, and I cowered, still shaken by the revelation of who Jacob was.

Mander turned again, and when our eyes met, I saw the demon in him, the 
petro loa.
  He entered my mind, reading my thoughts.  Yet at the same time, I felt his emotions laid bare, the turmoil of a war between desire and love, between survival and conscience.

Jacob sensed his conflict and stepped closer.  "You see, my child?  She fears you.  She knows what you are.  Take her, Mander.  Drink her virgin blood here, in the Heart, and you'll become as powerful as I am.  We can build a new coven, one that feeds in secrecy.  A coven ready for the twenty-first century with its spy satellites and smartphones. 

"The world has changed so much, but not everything threatens us.  In a global economy, we don't need to carefully harvest American schoolgirls.  In Eastern Europe, prostitutes clamor for the chance to come to America.  We can smuggle them here on container ships and feed with no one to question their disappearances.  We can abandon the foolish pretense of Beta House and lead the coven into a new era of secret prosperity.

All you have to do," he whispered in Mander's ear from just inches away, "is what comes naturally."

Mander's eyes seemed to dull, like shining obsidian occluded by storm clouds.  He took a step toward me, and my heart dropped into my stomach as his lips curled back to reveal gleaming white fangs.

My bare heel slipped on the damp rock as I backed away, and I stumbled to my knees at the foot of the 
Baton Rouge
.  Mander stood over me, eyes burning like red coals.

Behind him, Jacob grinned like a madman.  "Yes!  Do it!"

Mander took me by the throat and lifted my slender frame.  As though I weighed nothing, he pressed me back against the ancient totem at the center of the Heart.  I didn't bother to resist, but stared into his eyes, my gaze steady and defiant.  He bent forward and parted his lips, just inches from my throat.  I felt no terror, only a quiet sense of sad acceptance.  When I raised my chin to give him my neck, Mander cocked his head like a curious dog.  "Why do you not struggle?"

The tight grip around my throat made each word a labor.  "You know why," I said.  "You've been in my head.  You've felt what I feel.  Jacob is right; I'm terrified of what you are.  I won't fight you because I love you, Mander.  
Who
 you are, not the monster that lives inside you."

His cheek twitched, and I felt his grip loosen.  In the flickering shadows, Jacob let out a frustrated growl.  "Don't listen to this 
cow,
 Deslauriers!  She's food!  Nothing more!  
Taste
 her."

I stared at Mander's eyes, searching for humanity in the swirling flames as he struggled with himself.  But in this unholy place, where the 
petro loa’s
 influence was strongest, I knew it was a losing battle.  "Please remember that I love you," I said, not to the fiery vampire's eyes before me, but to the soul of a man trapped deep inside.

I closed my eyes and waited for the bite that would bring the end.

"No," Mander said.  My feet touched the floor again, and I opened my eyes again to find him turning defiantly toward Jacob.  "I won't do it."

Jacob snarled.  "You're a fool if you think you can defy me.  I made you!"

Mander didn't waste words on a reply.  He moved with blinding speed.  One moment he stood over me, and the next I felt the air stir as it collapsed on the space he had occupied.  Mander hurled toward Jacob with hands like claws, ready to rip out the Elder vampire's throat.

Mander's speed and ferocity were inhuman, fueled by his own rage as much as the demon inside him.  No man could have dodged his attack.  It should have ended before it began, with Jacob twitching on the floor.  But Jacob was a man no longer, and here in the Heart, where his link to the demon of the 
Baton Rouge
 was strongest, he slipped aside with a casual amusement.

As Mander rushed past him, Jacob spun and shoved Mander in the back, using his own momentum to send him crashing against the chamber's stone wall with a sickening thud.  My heart sank as he crumpled to the floor and lay motionless.

As Jacob walked to Mander's motionless body with a slow, confident stride, I heard a rush of stamping feet.  Tearing my eyes away from Mander, I saw a flurry of motion as the men of Beta House came pouring through the chamber's single doorway.  Their eyes shone with red rage, and they moved like beasts, hunched over, snarling and snapping with vicious energy.  They poured into the room, dozens of them, spreading out along the walls until they formed a broad circle.  None moved any closer to the blood-soaked totem in the Heart's center, and those nearest to Mander snarled down at him with feral growls.  Froth and spittle flew, a far cry from the suave frat boys I remembered at the Equinox Ball.  As Jacob approached the wall, they backed away, and their hostile expressions melted into fawning gazes of adoration.

Jacob ignored them, looking down at Mander.  "We could have achieved great things together, my child," he said.  The voice that came from his mouth wasn't Jacob's, but something deep and ancient, the 
petro loa
 reaching out of the spirit world, pouring its strength into the hollow shell of Le Moyne's body.  "You would have lived for an eternity as a prince."  He delivered a swift kick to Mander's ribcage, eliciting a weak grunt of pain.  "All you had to do was take Alex's place."  Another kick curled Mander into a protective ball.  "But you chose this mortal girl.  You chose your 
conscience."
  The last word dripped with contempt, and Jacob reached down and grabbed Mander by the neck, lifting him easily into the air with a strength that should have been impossible for his slender frame.

I cowered against the 
Baton Rouge
 as hope left my heart.  The circle of vampires squirmed with excitement as they watched their master hold Mander aloft, and the torchlight cast writhing shadows on the walls behind them in a nightmarish tableau.

Jacob's voice - the 
petro loa's
 voice - rose to a thunderous bellow.  "Behold, my children!  Behold the price of weakness.  This one sought to be less than what we are.  He sought to be 
human!"

The vampires laughed, a low, ghoulish devoid of humor and full of hate.  Jacob grinned a shark's grin, his fangs gleaming in the firelight.

"But for men like us, humans are only cattle," Jacob continued.  "Let this heretic see what happens to cattle."  He tightened his grip on Mander's throat, and I watched Mander's legs kick feebly in the air as he struggled.  Jacob pulled him downward until their faces were just inches apart.  His red eyes blazed, and a gloating smile bared drool-slick fangs.  "Every man in this room will feast on this woman you hold so dear, my child.  And you will see it all before you die."

A howl of excitement rose from the gathered vampires, a hellish chorus that filled the chamber with its echoes.  The circle of Betas hunched over, eyes and fangs gleaming with lust and hunger as they stared at me.  I only hoped my end would come quickly.

For a moment, Mander only hung limp in Jacob's grip.  Then his hands lashed out, quick as a viper's strike.  One hand glanced off the side of Jacob's skull, but the other found his face.  A thumb gouged Jacob's eye, shattering his glasses, extinguishing that hellish light, and sending black blood spurting from a socket.

Jacob screamed, an earsplitting cry so full of rage and hate that my heart seemed to shrink in my chest.  Yet in the same moment, I felt a fierce surge of triumph.  Mander  had only been waiting for his chance, and even with the odds against him, he attacked.

All around the room, vampires roared their hatred, but before they could pounce, Jacob hurled Mander with his immense strength, a wild and reflexive motion that sent the younger vampire tumbling through the air toward me.  As I threw myself toward the ground, I heard Mander's body hit the totem behind me with a loud crack.

Wood older than memory shattered beneath his weight as the 
Baton Rouge
 gave way.  It groaned and fell with a crash, and when I raised my head, Mander lay limp.  He'd only feigned injury before, but the ragdoll pile of limbs told me that this was real.  Mander was done fighting.

I spun to see Jacob coming toward me, his face a snarling nightmare with blood pouring from the empty socket of his left eye.  I braced myself for a swift and violent end, but he strode past me and grabbed Mander by waistband and collar, lifting him overhead with ease.

All around us, vampires roared their approval like bloodthirsty fans at a boxing match.  Mander hung unconscious in Jacob's hands as the Elder carried him back to the center of the room.  I scooted out of the way, full of fear and revulsion.  Spears of pain shot through my nude legs as hard, dry splinters of the broken 
Baton Rouge
 pierced my skin.

Jacob carried Mander to the center and held him aloft over the broken stump of the totem.  Only two feet of wood remained jutting up from the room's center, terminating in a long, jagged spike.  As Jacob raised Mander to impale him, some part of my brain noticed that the totem's heartwood still looked fresh and new, as though long years in the dark and the blood of countless innocents couldn't touch its core.

Mander opened his eyes halfway, but they were groggy and dull.  Hanging upside down in Jacob's arms, he met the Elder's eyes.  In the din of the vampires around us, Jacob's words were meant only for Mander.  "I'll take her last, but I won't kill her.  She'll hover on the razor's edge between life and death, and for endless years, she'll beg for me to drain her."  He hefted Mander and shouted to his coven, "See what happens to those who lack commitment to our cause!"

I didn't want to watch, but I couldn't tear my eyes away.  Mander was moments from a horrible death, one I knew I'd envy when Jacob and the vampires of Beta House started on me.

I sat broken and bleeding amid the shards of the 
Baton Rouge
, my thighs and palms stabbed by its splinters, a dozen sharp stings that made me wince with pain.  If I couldn't stand that small irritation, how would I endure what was coming?

In that moment, a terrible desire flooded me.  Not just to survive, but to 
live.
  In the darkness of the long nights since the Equinox Ball, I'd forgotten the joys of life, even as Mander and I had skirted the edges of a doomed love that felt pure and bright enough to push back the shadows.

Jacob Crabtree was about to end that love with violent murder, and that would be only the beginning of my suffering.  I wouldn't lie on the ground and await that gruesome fate.  With grim determination, my fist clutched the shard of hardwood that had stabbed my palm.  It was several inches long, shaped like a crude dagger with a cruel spike as its blade.  Oblivious of the pain, I pushed myself up and raised it above my head, aiming for Jacob's back.

A psychic force slammed into my mind like a train, and I froze.  Jacob hadn't turned; the ancient and malevolent presence in my head could only be the 
petro loa
 itself.  Next to this overwhelming force, Alex' brute strength and Mander's seductive touch were nothing.

Stay your hand, woman,
 it whispered, its words booming in my brain.  
You fear for your life, but I can protect you.  I can give you the gift of immortality.  Power.  Your heart's desire.  I can even save him.  Simply stay your hand and accept me.
  Dark tendrils of thought coiled around my consciousness, strangling hope and ambition, eroding my will.  I understood how Le Moyne had succumbed so long ago; the words of the demon seemed the only reasonable course.  It could save Mander.  Everything could be okay again.

Yet even as the demon wrapped itself around my mind, I knew that Mander would rather die than see me taken by this creature.  
Your purity gives you strength,
 he'd told me.  Even when I begged him to take my virginity, he had refused.  Had he known that this moment might come?  That I would be forced to contend with a temptation too strong to resist?

The demon's words were true, I knew.  It could turn me into one of these monsters and give me the ability to feed on humanity.  I could grow old and wise and powerful while my body stayed forever young.  But living wasn't simply a matter of surviving at the expense of others.  The demon in my head could never understand that; it saw only its own needs.  But Morgan's friendship and Mander's love had taught me to see past myself, to think of the countless young women like Kara Thompson, women robbed of their lives by the evil spirit that infected Baton Rouge like some malignant tumor.  If I relented now, countless more would suffer the same fate.

I thought of Morgan's face, so sweet and full of life.  Her bronzed skin and the twinkle in her blue eyes were like a memory of another world, as though I'd lingered in darkness for years and not just days.  Soon Morgan would be home in Dallas, and though her family might have questions, might frown on her decision to abandon Romanus University so thoroughly, at least she would be alive.  She would find love, marry, have children, and grow old.

She might never know that I'd bought her happiness with my own, but I accepted that.  I might die.  Mander might die.  But we would die fighting.

The demon's presence in my head felt like a tremendous weight chained to my ankles, hauling me into a dark abyss as I gazed helplessly at the fading light above.  Perhaps it was my purity that saved me, or perhaps my love for Mander.  But it was all those women like Morgan and Kara that gave me the strength to push away from that weight, to struggle to pull myself toward the light.

The black tentacles coiled around my consciousness snapped like rotten inner tubes, freeing me to act.  Mander still hung in the air above Jacob's head, a heartbeat from death by impalement.  There was no time for clever words, no time to gloat.  With a soft grunt of exertion, I gripped the long wooden splinter in both hands and brought it down with all my strength, plunging it into the depression between Jacob's shoulder blades.  It tore at my palms as it plunged into the soft, yielding flesh alongside his spine, shearing through corrupted muscle and bone with ease.  I felt it sink into his ancient, blackened heart, and the shard flared with sudden heat.  I jerked back, falling to my knees and clutching my fists around seared palms as Jacob staggered forward.

He let out a hoarse death rattle, and the strength went out of his arms.  He stumbled, dropping Mander not onto the ruined spike of the totem, but onto the hard stone floor beyond.

Jacob himself was not so lucky.

After three centuries of preying on innocents, the shell of the man who had once been Pierre Le Moyne fell forward.  The sharp point of the broken totem buried itself in his ribcage, and his weight bore down, impaling him on the stake.  Flames didn't simply consume him; they burst from his body in gouts of unholy hellfire, shining from mouth and eye sockets with a brightness tempered only by the thick sulfuric smoke that billowed from his carcass.

As one, the dozens of vampires that surrounded us let out a howl of utter despair.  They lunged forward, claws and fangs reaching for me, but none made it.  Ankles twisted with sudden clumsiness, and Betas crumpled to the floor thrashing and screaming in unknowable pain.  Their cries pierced my eardrums like frozen ice picks, but I ignored them and crawled to Mander.

My love lay shivering at the base of the totem, illuminated by the Elder's funeral pyre, a long, black shadow spilling out behind him.  Like his brethren, Mander was in complete agony.  Ignoring the blast furnace heat and billowing smoke at my back, I scooped him into my arms and pulled his head up.

"You're okay!" I said as tears streamed down my cheeks.  "He's dead!  It's over!"

Mander's whole body convulsed, and his jaw clenched, lips peeled back in a snarling rictus of pain.  "Go, Danielle," he whispered, but his voice sounded as dry and ragged as a corpse.  "Run."

I tried to refuse him, to tell him that I could never leave him, but when I looked up, I saw how hopeless it was.  The vampires of Beta House had appeared as young men, strapping and full of life.  But now they writhed on the ground, and I could see that they were diminished, somehow.  Their lustrous black and brown and blonde hair had lost its sheen, and gray streaks were rapidly appearing, spreading out.  Hairlines quickly receded, and wrinkles appeared on smooth, young faces.

"What's happening?" I asked aloud as tears streaked down my face.

"You've freed us all," Mander said.  "You've ended it.  I only wish we'd had more time together."  He reached up and touched my cheek with a trembling hand.

"No," I said, not wanting to admit what I already knew.  Le Moyne's death hadn't just wounded the 
petro loa.
  It had destroyed it.  Now all its dark magics were coming undone in one swift and final death throe.  Suddenly cut off from the demon's power, all the years the vampires had stolen from innocent victims were suddenly catching up with them.

Mander was dying, just like all the Betas around us.  And he'd known all along that this would happen.

"Damn you," I told him as I cradled his head in my lap.  My tears fell on his pallid face, which I noticed now had a withered look, as though he'd aged ten years in the space of a few heartbeats.  I stared down at him, engraving every line and curve of him into my memory.  Despite the hell he'd put me through, it was a face I didn't want to forget.

On impulse, I bent and pressed my lips hard against his.  Mander stiffened in my arms, but he returned my kiss.  His consciousness flooded into mine, and in that moment we were one being, two sides of the same coin: on one side, a man rapidly approaching an overdue death, his shoulders heavy with the weight of sin and guilt he carried, and on the other, an innocent virgin, bursting with life and potential, her whole life still ahead.