Chapter 19

We make it a block and a half on foot before we"re spotted.

"Shit," Caspian snarls, "I'd hoped we"d make it a bit farther before we ran into these assholes."

Fear, anxiety, worry, anger, disgust, they whirl inside me in a furious maelstrom, one intermixed with the other and the next till I can"t tell one emotion from the other.

"I don"t want to kill anyone else," I whisper, heart pounding in my chest. "I can"t do this, Cas."

He pushes me back around a corner and flat against the wall of a large red-brick apartment building. "Mae, love." His eyes are fully black, his skin hard and marbled, fangs fully extended. "You must."

A keening whimper squeezes past my gritted teeth. "I can"t! I can"t!"

He shakes me—hard enough to break a mortal"s bones, but being low on blood and vitality, and an immortal anyway, all it does is get my attention, jostling me out of my panic. "You have to, Maeve. This is our chance to change the status quo of immortal and mortal society. We won't get another chance. And you're it, my amazing, powerful, beautiful bloodmate. I"m sorry—I know that"s too much pressure for any one person, especially someone who"s only lived nineteen years as a mortal. But you don"t have a choice, honey. This is the start of a revolution, but it"ll be dead in the water before it can even start if you get killed or captured. So you have to snap out of it and DO WHATEVER IT TAKES, okay? I know—I know you"re sick of killing. I know you"re sick of death. And I"m sorry. But there"s no choice. They"re coming, and they don"t care if you"re ready or not."

His words somehow sear into me, burning away the panic. I catch a mental glimpse, images sans sound, of Caspian in an unfamiliar uniform, blood on his face, muddy, exhausted, hands on a young mortal"s shoulders, shaking him, yelling in his face.

A memory—Caspian from some war or another.

An explosion rocks us—heat and concussive force and grit and shards and shrapnel and death—it all washes harmlessly over Caspian"s back as he wraps his body over and around me, turtling.

I smell burning hair and cloth.

Hear a feral snarl—mine.

Caspian uncurls and stares down at me. "Good to go?"

All those emotions are still there, but they"re now locked away inside a glass bottle, down deep. I can see them, sense them, but not feel them.

I guess danger has a way of activating the best—or worst—in me.

I straighten and stalk around my mate, noting idly that his shirt is burned away, hanging in threads and tatters. His hair is singed in the back, patchy and scorched. He"ll shave it when he"s unblooded and it will grow back when he feeds next.

As I watch, he passes a hand over the bare spots. Growls a curse, bends, and rummages in the backpack he dropped when he shielded me. He comes up with a foot-long knife in a leather sheath—the sheath is old, faded, battered; he pulls the knife free and the massive, gently curved blade with a needle point and serrations near the crossguard is every bit as old and well-worn as the sheath.

Before I can say a word, he grabs a handful of hair and hacks it off. Again, and again, till there"s nothing left but patches and stubble—he scrapes the stubble off in a few long, smooth, practiced passes.

The whole thing took less than thirty seconds.

"I liked my hair that length," he grumbles. "Gonna take me fucking months to get it back ."

"I thought it would grow back right away?" I ask.

"I wish. It takes way longer for a vampire to regrow hair than even a mortal—the less blood we have, the slower it grows."

"I thought it would go right back to the length it was when you—" I stop, laughing. "Movie bullshit. You were born, you weren"t turned. Got it."

He looks…still hot, of course, but in a more brutal way, somehow. Severe, martial. Or maybe that's just the fury in his eyes.

I can"t help but laugh. "I"ve been attacked how many times and I"ve never seen you bat an eye, except when I vented and you didn"t know if I was alive. But these assholes fuck up your hair, and you"re about to go full murdering savage on them."

His black eyes glitter and suck in all available light. His voice is dark and thick. "Vampires are known to be quite vain, especially about our hair."

He turns away and prowls to the edge of the wall, spins the knife on his palm, once, twice, sucks in a deep breath, glances at me, bares his teeth in what is most assuredly not a grin, and then rounds the corner.

Automatic weapons fire chatters and cracks, spitting dust and shards of stone.

An unblooded vampire, pissed off, with a foot-long bowie knife.

Not good for anyone.

The guns go silent mid-burst, all at once:

CRACKCRACKCRACKCRACK—

Crunch.

Splat.

Squelch-snap.

A disembodied arm hurls past me, flinging an arc of blood in a messy crescent.

A leg follows. They both splat-crack somewhere behind me.

I peek around the corner. Caspian has slaughtered ten or twelve Enforcers, fae all. Throats are slashed or ripped out; others are eviscerated, and others yet are, as I witnessed, ripped limb from limb.

He"s feeding off of a writhing, wriggling, gurgling, fighting male; I sense no pheromones.

The blood hits my nostrils, belatedly: fire snaps through my veins, crackling and roaring, a conflagration of bloodlust.

FEED.__ Caspian"s voice echoes in my head, rabid and snarling and still furious. And I realize he"s pissed off about more than the hair.

I realize he"s been burying his emotions this whole time—everything that"s not love for me.

The hair thing was simply the straw that broke the camel"s back.

He has unleashed his fury, his fear.

The order reverberating in my head, I beeline for the nearest still-warm body—it's not a corpse, I realize, but nearly one. Caspian threw him against a parked panel van, crushing his skull inside the helmet. Which is good for me, because it means he still has most of his blood. I snatch the body up one-handed, and there is no desire in me, now, only fury. I feel the pheromones bubbling, and I slam a mental sluice gate down upon it, savagely, blocking the flow.

My fangs sink into soft flesh, and I taste Death.

It is sweet and sour at once, like a not-quite-ripe strawberry. Without the pheromones, I receive no deluge of memory, of life.

Only the coppery tang of blood and the sweet-and-sour twist of Death. I pull, and pull, and pull. He"s already dead, he just doesn"t know it, so I don"t need to stop. And then, ohhhh, sweet light of life—my fae draws vitality from him, and it is pure honey, golden and sweet and only a touch of sour, just enough to make sweet all the sweeter.

I pull. Draw. Drink. No memory, no reminder that this was a life, a person, a human. Not a mortal, but still a human nonetheless. no, this is pure savagery given free rein, and it is…

Lovely.

I delve within. My mind casts about, searching, hunting. There is only the faintest ghost of Death lurking in these shallows.

Death is not a being, as I understand It. Not a gaunt figure in a black cloak wielding a scythe, not a glowing-eyed demon lurking in the shadows.

If Death is a being, It is too big to comprehend Its scale, even as I swim in the waters of Death.

Perhaps what I perceive as the waters of Death are, in fact, Death itself, but writ so God-sized that I mistake my puny human-sized movements as swimming and Its existence as water, when in fact I"m an ant crawling up a leg, unable to conceive that the thing I'm crawling on is a being so vastly, infinitely larger than me that my notions of perception are simply incapable of seeing the whole.

Such are the thoughts of a vaer as she drains blood and vitality from an already-dying fae.

The blood is sweet, the vitality sweeter yet. But sweetest of all is the edge of Death as It steals through the male.

I feel It.

The male twitches, ever so gently, a last attempt to fight—valiantly, I consider. And then, the flow of blood slows, and the surge of vitality congeals. I pull, PULL.

Here, in this fae male"s soul, I perceive Death as a shadow hungrier than even I. Death creeps up from the toes. Death eats downward from the crown. Death is fire, insatiable, unquenchable, stealing and eating and leaving not even ash in Its wake.

RELEASE HIM BEFORE HE DIES!Caspian"s voice is a desperate shout in my skull, shocking me so badly that I involuntarily let go.

I drop the male, and he hits the ground with a not-loud enough thud. I look down: he"s a husk. His skin is wrinkled, paper-thin and nearly translucent, showing his bones like a leg inside panty-hose. His hair is shock-white, his mouth a pained rictus, his eyes open but withered to shriveled white grapes, loose in the sockets. He is utterly dessicated.

Yet there"s something else, something even more wrong. He's not just shriveled and desiccated, he"s…he"s become an it. A mummy. An ancient artifact, so long dead that any semblance of humanity is long, long gone.

It makes me understand something else: corpses, even those fairly old, retain vitality, at least to some degree. Even a body in a casket at a viewing contains some vitality, and its this which lends the aura of personhood to the body. Even after they begin to molder down in the dirt, the being retains vitality until there"s nothing left of the body.

A mummy, however—that is a body which has had its vitality carefully removed. Vitality does not live in the liquid, or the organs, or any such physical place. No. I do not think we humans, mortal or immortal, can comprehend where the vitality does live.

All we fae know is that it tastes fucking delicious, and it provides magic. But where does it come from? Where does it go? We know not. We know that no more than we know the origin of consciousness.

I glance at Caspian, shaking the sleepy, strange, introspective thoughts off like a dog shakes off water. "Why"d you yell at me?" I ask out loud.

Caspian tosses his corpse aside, flinging it ten feet as easily as mortal me would have tossed an apple core into a trash can just in front of me.

He dashes his wrist across his lips. "That"s how you make a nosferatu." He swallows, licks his lips. "Although, I"m not sure what would happen if you did it, since you were taking vitality and not just blood. Nothing, perhaps. Or perhaps something far worse than a nosferatu."

"Nosferatu?" I question. "I thought…I thought that was a Hollywood bullshit word for vampires, like from another culture. Some other vampire legend from another culture. Like, Mexican or something."

Caspian laughs, an inhuman barking snarl of amusement. "There"s so much wrong with what you just said, my love. No, no. No. In mortal terms, nosferatu simply means vampire, and it is thought, again by mortals, to mean "vampire"." He sighs. "This is a question for Alistair." He casts his eyes skyward. "Alistair?"

I hear a chuckle in my mind and feel Alistair"s presence wreath around me. You only love me for my history knowledge. The word is thought to be Romanian, but there is very little concrete evidence for the actual origin, to the point that even I, and many much, much older vampires also versed in history, do not know the origins. It is, however, the oldest known word used in reference to our kind. But to us—to vampires, I mean—a nosferatu is something different.

A nosferatu, in vampire culture, is…a monster—a monster to US. To mortals, it is the source of their legends about vampires. It is a heartless, mindless, inhuman savage. An unliving demon with a hunger only for blood and flesh. A vampire, like Caspian and the rest of us, has control. A soul. Humanity. We need blood to return to true life, and we cannot truly die, thus we use the term undead, but we are living beings. We are human. We have consciences and morals, though they are vastly different from those of mortals.

A nosferatu, however, has none of that. It is a corpse animated by hate and evil that wishes for nothing but blood and death and destruction. It does not merely drink blood…it devours flesh. It devours corpses whole, bones and all. Soul and all.

A nosferatu is created by draining a mortal of all blood and then continuing to attempt to drink after the blood is depleted. The venom, it is believed, curdles, or…I don"t know. Goes bad, inside the mortal. The magic in our venom twists something inside the dying mortal, mixing with the onset of death. Perhaps it reacts with vitality—I doubt any vampire scientist has thought to consult a fae on this. Once the mortal is dead and the vampire refuses to stop attempting to drink, a change occurs. Instead of receiving blood, the vampire injects venom, more and more and more. This paralyzes the vampire, making him or her unable to pull away after a certain point, becoming locked in place, and venom is then injected into the mortal. The venom used under normal circumstances is measured in micronometers, not even milliliters. once the bloodlock process has begun, venom is injected by the LITER, replacing blood in the mortal"s veins until the vampire him- or herself is depleted of all venom. This is, uniformly and without exception, fatal to the vampire. And even if it wasn"t, the newly-created nosferatu will turn on the vampire who created it.

A nosferatu is nearly impossible to destroy—I do not say kill, mind you. We can be killed because we are, in a way, alive. A nosferatu is not. It is an IT, a dead thing. As such, it requires immense magic of horrifically destructive power to destroy. Think nuclear explosion but in magical terms. Even a real nuclear explosion would not end it. Decapitation will not end it—it will simply regrow its head within seconds. Truly.

"So…have you ever seen one?"

Silence.

Yes. Once. In Dresden, 1945. In fact, the Allied bombing of that city was a mortal cover-up for an immortal campaign to destroy a single nosferatu, which was created quite intentionally by a NazI SS vampire officer. It was successful, but the cost…my god, the cost. His voice, even thus, mentally, is haunted. Human memory was altered—ALL humans who directly witnessed the events of those three days. All residents, all Allied forces, all Axis forces—the Fae cast a glamour unlike any other in history. It was done under the oversight of the Tribunal and the combined mortal commanders with knowledge of immortals, and those fae who cast it subsequently had their memories of HOW they did it erased, and those who witnessed them do it as well, all so it couldn"t be repeated.

"What happened? What did they do?" I ask.

I don"t know. I was sent by immortal command within the mortal ranks to investigate the reports of a nosferatu.He trails off, shaky. What I saw will haunt me for the rest of time. I will not recount it. Suffice it to say that it was…there are no words to encapsulate the nightmare I witnessed in that deity-forsaken city. That a German could do that to his own people? Mortals, perhaps, but GERMAN mortals. Not even Jews, just…average, innocent Germans. For what? I can almost see him shaking his head. I gave my report to Command, recommending eradication by any means necessary. My memory of what happened was erased, like everyone else's. What remains is the story that was given—a three-day bombing campaign by Allied forces. But beneath that memory is something darker: the truth. What that is, I don"t know, and honestly, I don"t want to. Once I gave my report, I was tasked with finding out who created it. He"d be dead, of course, but I was tasked with being absolutely certain. I spent six months tracking down stories and rumors and reports, even after the war was over. I found him. I found his body. He was an SS officer, as I've said. He was stationed at Neuengamme…he made the nosferatu from a Jew. It was…a kind of sick joke, I suppose. They knew the end was coming by then, so that particular officer decided he"d have his fun while ending his life his own way—turning a Jew into a nosferatu and unleashing it upon the German people—mortals, whom I was given to understand he hated as much as he hated Jews—and Jewish mortals he hated most of all. As I understand it, Immortal Command made sure the reports of the deaths caused by the nosferatu were blamed on the various atrocities of war—rogue SS, overzealous Allied freedom fighters, and so on. And Dresden, poor Dresden…

Another pause.

Storytime is over. You"ve wasted whatever headstart you may have had listening to me. Go! Even though the bloodbond, I can sense the army arrayed against you, and they"re coming. We are in the city with you, and we will do what we can to distract them.

I snap out of the listening reverie, shaken out of it as well by Caspian as he wraps an arm around me and launches us into a full-strength leap.

We fly, or nearly. We land on the arm of a streetlamp, and Caspian lets go of me, and he leaps away. My eyes flutter and twitch as my sight adjusts, and I see him already half a mile away, leaping from streetlamp to telephone pole to rooftop.

Fully blooded and glutted with fresh vitality, I fling myself into the air.

Lightening my body is now an act as easy and natural as clenching my fist. That instinct that always takes over does so again, and this time I try to pay attention to what I'm doing: I call upon the wind.

It answers.

Gusting in a powerful straight-line blast, it rockets me forward with the velocity of a bullet. I catch Caspian, somehow, clinging to him, and the wind propels us forward.

Miles, miles, fleeting by in a flash.

Are you…flying?Caspian asks, incredulous. I"ve always heard it's impossible, for fae or vampire, and shifters only can if their animal has wings, which is rare.

I don"t know, Cas. It"s one of those things—something to do with lightening my body and calling the wind.

You ARE flying, then! Vampires and fae can both lighten themselves using different abilities but vampires cannot manipulate the elements, and for a fae to lighten their body requires enough vitality that none can do that AND manipulate elements. You can use your vampiric ability to lighten yourself and your fae magic to call the wind—et voila, flying.

Did you just use French on me?

I AM two hundred years old, honey. You pick things up.

The wind that propels us is hurricane-powerful. Cars shudder, scrape, and bounce beneath us. Hapless mortals are thrown aside or knocked down. Stoplights strain at the lines, twisting and flailing. Windows rattle.

I have no idea where we"re going, but Caspian doesn"t tell me to change directions, not that I know how.

He hears my thoughts—Keep going this way. You picked the right direction by accident, fortunately.

But then…

We slam into something invisible.

Bones snap, and pain smashes through me—my own, and Caspian"s.

Freshly fed and full of vitality, I send a blast of healing through us both, an act as instinctual as drawing breath when you breach the surface of a pool after diving too deeply.

The pain remains—healing does nothing for pain.

But pain wakes you up. It makes you angry, if you can see through it.

And I can see through it:

A fae mage. An ancient glamourworker.

She"s every bit of three thousand years old if she"s a day—I can taste the age on her from a thousand yards away, where I smashed onto the pavement, feeling grit under my cheeks and hands, agony blasting through me—my body hasn"t forgotten the pain of every bone in my body breaking, even though the actual injury is already healed. Nerves are stupid—they"re slow to forget such all-encompassing pain.

She stands tall despite being wrinkled and weathered, like an old scrap of thick leather left out in the elements for too long. Hair the color of cumulus clouds drifts in a wind only she can feel, her eyes the color of lightning as it flashes in a summer storm blazing with vitality, with surging power. Her hands clawed into talons clutching air as if to crush it in her fist and shake with the effort.

Dirt plumes upward around me in a fountain, spewing up with enough force to shatter and dissolve the concrete road instantly.

I choke on dirt.

Swallow it. Breathe it. Die within it.

Or, I would.

But…

I am vampire, and I do not need to breathe.

She"s mine, I say to Caspian. You take the rest.

Gladly.

He uses the cover of the fountain of soil to hide his movements as he breaks free of the plume. I feel him, feel his rage burning like the heart of a volcano. How well he hid this hate from me, even when we were connected, bonded. It"s only now, for some reason, that he has let it loose.

Hate. For what?

Life, it would seem.

I smell…a dozen—fifty—a hundred heartbeats. A hundred different sources of blood, of life.

Ninety-nine—eighty-six—seventy-two.

In a heartbeat, he"s erased twenty-eight life sources. I don"t question how.

I have my own enemy.

I cast out with my mind, for now content to let myself be carried upward by the skyward-soaring fountain of soil—it"s quite comfortable, if I ignore that part of my brain telling me I need to breathe.

It should have dissolved my flesh off my bones, but even blooded vampires are made of sterner stuff than that, or it"s healed already, or I don"t know. Maybe I don"t have flesh, maybe it"s been sand-blasted off and I just can"t feel it.

I feel her.

God, her soul is as withered as her body. Whatever humanity once dwelled in that twisted husk is mostly gone, now. She"s as much a creature of hate as a nosferatu—hate for life, hate for death, hate for joy. She"s existed so long that she"s just…distilled.

She is concentrated power, and magic, and hatred for all things. A weapon to be pointed and let loose, and hope she doesn't take you with her as she destroys.

Calliope. Her name is Calliope. Perhaps the Calliope from myth. Stranger things have turned out to be true, I"m discovering.

I taste her magic—charred meat, soured milk, and rotting things. There is power in such things—entropy is as implacably powerful as gravity, and not even tricks of vaer magic can skirt it like I sort of did in my flight.

I didn"t delay or pause or manipulate gravity, I merely…circumvented it, slightly, and momentarily.

Her magic is that of entropy and death, of root and rot. Of things that wriggle in the compost heap, of the flies that cloud over a pile of shit, laying eggs and beginning new life; of the mycological rebirth in the death of trees and leaves and old bones.

Her magic is fae, but twisted.

She cackles, a sound like a knife clacking across dry white bone. "I taste you too!" Her voice carries above the roar of the dirt, which still spews in an endless fountain, holding me in place an unknowable distance above the ground.

"You taste of Life and Death, child. Sweet and sour, honey and vinegar. Your magic will be delicious." She cackles again. "You have so much power! You drip with it, child. It seeps from your pores. Yet you know nothing! Nothing! You think that dusty, crusty, impotent old imp, Elias, your pathetic grandfather, is a powerful mage? He"s a child, to me. You? You are less than a child. Less than an infant. You"re barely a thought, to me. I was ancient when your first ancestors were still shitting in caves."

She"s not wrong.

But she doesn"t know me.

I seize a fistful of vitality from the raging, white-hot maelstrom of power within me, and slam a fist downward. Into the earth. I find the vein of dirt she"s opened and pinch it shut.

I hear her gasp, choking in surprise.

I send a feather of wind up at my feet, keeping my body light, slowly weighing myself down so I settle to the earth gently, gracefully.

I feel Caspian"s pride and awe at my little display.

Calliope is still gasping for air—she must have somehow tied the flow of dirt to her lungs, in some way and for some reason I cannot fathom. She"s distant, physically. A thousand yards—a speck, to mortal eyes.

I leap the distance with a little burst of wind.

(I feel my ocean of vitality, now, and each display of flight costs me dearly—I see why fae cannot do this.)

"You may be ancient," I say, standing inches from her, glaring into her magic-hot eyes with my own, "and you may wield your magic with consummate skill borne from millennia of experience…"

I reach down into the earth—mentally, yes, but also with my actual hands, digging them down into the soft cool black loam—and find roots, find life, and I call it upward.

This is fae magic.

My eyes flash white, so bright it rivals a nuclear detonation, or the sun itself. I call the roots and they answer.

Skinny little things at first. No thicker than my pinky. They coil around her bare toes, then her ankles.

She wears a white shift, or perhaps a toga, something that looks like it"s the traditional dress of whatever time and place that is her origin. It"s belted at the waist with what looks like a belt of hair or fur, knotted at her belly button.

The roots twist and reach, curl and unfurl, creeping up around her calves, her thighs. Her waist.

They thicken.

Wrist thick, now.

Her shift splits, rips. I catch a mercifully brief glimpse of her naked breast and sex before the roots thicken and obscure her flesh.

They circle her throat, which flexes and bobs as she struggles for breath. Her mouth is open, gagging for air.

A tendril of root seeks the opening of her mouth, dives in.

—That was a little too easy, I think. To myself, to Caspian, I don"t know.

And…it was.

A scream rips through the air like a serrated knife, cutting and slicing. The sound of it is a weapon. My ears bleed. I feel fae, her own forces, fall to the ground, howling, wailing. Caspian screams.

I scream.

When the sound dulls and goes silent, Calliope stands before me, naked, heaving with gasps. Her skin is brown as the mountain of dirt behind me. Her breasts are shriveled, shrunken, sagging lumps on her chest, her belly a bag of wrinkles, her thighs bunches of knots, her sex a dark slit in the maze of infinite folds and wrinkles.

Her eyes blaze like fury made physical.

She spits root, and laughs a sound of amused joy. "At last! A challenge! I won't have had this much fun since I caused Vesuvius to blow. The screams that day were delicious."

I feel Death reaching for her. I feel It.

"Death may be your friend, but he"s MY master," she hisses at me, spitting the words as if each one disgusts her. "Now the real fun begins."

She clenches a fist in front of me and explosively bursts the fist open.

Fire erupts in my veins.

And that is not a metaphor.