Dark Heir

Santana was no longer alone. By the scent patterns I counted five humans, all smelling of stress and fear, probably barely alive from blood loss, and maybe two other vamps, but the scents were hard to read beneath the chlorine and the stink of Santana burning. His being on fire might make him easier to kill, but it wouldn’t make him easier to get along with. I breathed steadily and discerned the vamps’ location on the warm, humid night air. Indicating their scent positions as best I was able, I held two fingers curled down near my mouth, like vamp teeth, then held up four fingers, before pointing in two different directions.

Eli made a cutting motion across his own throat, asking me if they were kill targets. I thought about it, hating to be stuck in this position—the position of deciding who lived and who died. Or, rather, who remained undead and who found true-death. I held out a hand, palm up, as if serving him a plate of hors d’oeuvres. The gesture said, Your choice. I hoped it indicated that if the vamps were prisoners, no. If they were willing participants, yes.

I patted the left side of my chest to indicate a heartbeat and pointed where I smelled humans. Eli nodded and flipped down his ocular. I eased out of the foliage to give him better room and visual access. He flipped back and forth between the low-light and the infrared oculars and used his entire hand to point out where the humans were. All five in one location.

Pulling harder on Beast’s night vision, I spotted something close to the far end of the pool, silvery and . . . The vision resolved into humans, all together, lying in a pile, unmoving but still alive. Barely. Inside me, Beast growled low, the vibration juddering my chest. They had been drained and might be so close to death they couldn’t be saved. This was going to be messy.

For half a second, I debated calling in SWAT and medic, but I decided that the vamps might just finish off the humans if they heard sirens or smelled cops. And I reconsidered calling vamp HQ for backup. It was a risk to do neither, but . . . Undecided, I held up my vamp fang-teeth gesture and then pointed, asking if the vamps were stationary. After feeding, they might show on infrared, but they always showed on low-light. Eli pointed to lounge-type garden furniture beneath the gallery. An unmoving form reclined on each one, which I could see now that he pointed them out. The vamps were the full length of the courtyard apart. I nodded. Then he pointed up and inside the part of the house farthest from the street and made a waffling motion. There was something hot up there, showing in infrared on his PIR device.

Like maybe a vamp on fire. Yeah.

Two on the lower floor near the pool, one or two upstairs. Why couldn’t they all be in one place, easy to herd up and dispatch? I pointed to the vamps on the lounges and mouthed, Go.

We separated and raced in, Eli to the right, me to the left. Eli’s vamp was lying facedown. It raised up and Eli took it—him or her—from behind, his left arm around the vamp’s throat, his right stabbing up into the vamp’s rib cage. In a human it would have been a kidney strike, a killing stroke that would sever the main artery feeding the kidney and the main nerve keeping it healthy. It was said to be so painful that a human taken down couldn’t even draw breath to scream but would bleed out and die on the spot. Silently.

Didn’t happen quite that way with the vamp. The death wail was an instant ululation that echoed off the house walls and into the night. The other vamp leaped high, toward Eli from twenty feet away. If the vamp had used his vamp speed, I never would have had a chance—there would have been a pop of displaced air and Eli dead on the ground. But the vamp was in predator mode and leaped, like a wolf onto prey. Still drawing on Beast, I leaped too, judging the vamp’s speed and direction even as I shoved off with my back foot. We hit in midair, about two feet from Eli and the vamp he was now fighting.

The next moments were blurred images of vamped-out predators, both female, ripping and tearing at us with talons and fangs. The sound of blows landing. And the overwhelming, night-blasting explosion of an automatic subgun as Eli emptied the extended magazine into the vamp he’d stabbed.

Over that, I heard nothing, not even the screaming of both vamps in mortal danger.

Eli’s vamp was falling, mostly in two parts, but still alive, somehow, her face in a rictus of fury. Mine was on the ground, a silver stake in her heart but still clawing at the lawn, trying to reach me. I kicked her over and rammed in a second stake. And then six more for good measure. The stink of nitrocellulose, corroding silver, and vamp blood filled the air. Finally the staked vamp lay still, weirdly not yet true-dead, but close. She looked like she had been in intimate contact with a porcupine. I chuffed out snarling laughter that I couldn’t hear.

The face of the vamp at my feet resolved into someone I knew. I checked out Eli’s opponent, who was unmoving also. I knew them. Lorraine and Cieran, formally of Clan Desmarais, or maybe of Mearkanis. I didn’t remember and it really didn’t matter, because both clans had lost in the vamp war last year and the vamps who had survived had been seconded to Clan Pellissier. In Pellissier they were the lowest of the low, as all vamps from defeated clans were. But more important, they had once served as scions to Adrianna. She had turned them; they were her children. It was no accident that they were here with Santana. It had to have been planned from the beginning, though whether Santana had found them or they had found him and brought him here to recuperate I might never know. Not now. Because no way was I leaving them alive.

Eli was already moving for the nearest door, ramming a new mag home in his small, automatic subgun. I fell into place at his left. The door to the long, narrow hallway that separated the front half of the house from the back was unlocked, and we entered, Eli taking point, which my Beast didn’t like at all. But I knew Eli could survive a frontal attack by using the minigun, and I stood a better chance than he did of surviving an attack from behind.

But the place was empty, cool, the air-conditioning running with a soft hum. It smelled a lot like the Rousseau Clan Home, of old vamp blood and mold, but there was also an overlay of Clorox. In the last few hours, someone had been there to clean. Beneath the smell of cleansers were the fresher smell of human blood and the stink of scorched vamp. Joseph Santana, aka Joses Bar-Judas, aka the Son of Darkness, was there. And so was a female vamp. Dominique. There was no longer any doubt. Inside, I cursed.

My hearing was returning and sirens sounded in the distance, still muffled. Eli muttered, “Dang nosy neighbors, upset over a little weapons fire in the middle of the night.”