Charming (44 page)

Anne Marie staggered backward and Sig threw herself down on the ground.

At the same moment, Andrej shot Anne Marie in the back of her skull.

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Y
eah, I know. When I mentioned making minor readjustments to Andrej’s straitjacket, I didn’t specify that these included stuffing a Glock down his sleeve and loosening the straps.

And I totally skipped over the conversation we’d had after I’d bounced him off some furniture for a while. The one where I’d explained to him that Anne Marie was still alive and that his uncle’s entire life—the one where he’d been a proud and respected vampire hunter—was about to go to waste in one bad day. The one where I’d informed him that his and his brother’s legacy among vampire hunters was going to be going down in history as the two incompetent screwups who let personal issues get in the way of stopping a new vampire queen before she got started. The one where I’d pointed out that his gun would only have one bullet, and not a silver bullet either, and that if he tried to shoot me while I was watching for it and he was bound up in a straitjacket, he would either waste his shot, or miraculously disable me and leave himself at the tender mercy of Anne Marie. The one where I’d told him that there
was just enough plastic explosive in his backpack to tear out his spine, and that I’d trigger it to cause a distraction if he didn’t take a shot when he had it. The one where I promised to give him a twenty-four-hour head start if he shot Anne Marie after I maneuvered her into a vulnerable position right in front of him. The one where I then assured him that I already had an entire secret society of hard-core monster hunters after my ass, and that the thought of a relative lightweight like him being added to the mix didn’t exactly scare me enough to make me break something as important as my word.

He wouldn’t have been much of a secret weapon if I’d gone around blabbing about all that, now would he?

After Andrej shot her, Anne Marie went still for one long, tense moment while her eyes fluttered and her mouth dropped open, and then she collapsed.

“What were you waiting for?” I demanded, glaring at Andrej. “You had a shot at her when she came into the room.”

“She could have killed me with one backhand from that close!” Andrej spat the words. He was still backed against the wall, a smoking hole in his right straitjacket sleeve.

Andrej began thrashing his way out of the straitjacket, pressing against the wall as I approached him as if he could sink into it and disappear. “YOU SAID YOU WOULDN’T HURT ME!” he yelled.

“I said I’d let you go,” I reminded him, and I landed a left uppercut under his jaw. Even if his arm had possessed the range of motion to stop it, he wouldn’t have been fast enough. Andrej slammed against the wall and then toppled sideways and stayed still. “I never said I’d let you leave first.”

I winced while refastening his straitjacket. That punch hadn’t had any art to it and my fourth finger had a dislocated knuckle, but it had been worth it.

“Tha’ was your big plan?” Sig croaked from behind me. “Giving Andrej a gun?”

“It only had one bullet in it,” I said, turning toward her. “How long have you been awake?”

“Since before you got’ere.” Sig didn’t make any effort to crane her neck to look at me. Her face was slack and her voice was mildly dreamy.

I knelt down beside her and propped her up in my arms.

“If you kiss me I’ll kill you,” she said faintly. “I’ve thrown up like eight or nine times and that bitch is still in my mouth.”

“I really don’t care,” I said.

“I do,” she said. So I kissed her on the forehead.

“What about the bomb?” she asked.

“It’s just some road flares and sculpting clay wrapped around a digital alarm clock,” I told her. I had also broken open a shotgun shell and sprinkled some gunpowder into my knapsack, and splashed a few household cleaners and some mercury from a broken thermometer onto the lining just to confuse the vampires’ sense of smell.

Unsheathing my wakizashi, I walked toward Anne Marie.

“Wait a minute.” Sig forced herself to her feet, swaying awkwardly. “Give me that thing.”

You don’t give someone else your katana or wakizashi. Not ever.

I looked at Sig’s face and gave her my wakizashi.

Her hands were still manacled in a way that impaired how far she could lift her arms, but Sig sank down to her knees and began to work on removing Anne Marie’s head from her body.

“Is Stanislav really dead?” Sig asked while she sawed.

“Yes,” I muttered, turning to watch Janice, who was still twitching like an epileptic in the middle of a seizure. This was one conversation I wasn’t looking forward to having.

“I guessat’s good,” Sig said, and stood unsteadily. I took the blade from her hands and kicked Anne Marie’s head away before turning to finish Janice. At some point my knuckle popped back into place with an audible click.

The padlock on Sig’s chains was too massive for my tension pick—it had probably been designed for restraining elephants or something—but too small for my knife. While I was rummaging around for the key or something I could use as an improvised pick, Molly and Choo came shuffling and hopping out of the far tunnel, both bound and chained like Sig. They were both covered with swellings and bruises and blood. Choo’s nose hadn’t just been broken—it had been shattered, and Molly was missing several teeth.

Eventually I freed all three of them. Their clothes were in shreds—the vampires had simply ripped their garments off rather than bother with buttons or snaps—and none of them wanted to wear the vampires’ clothes or any belonging to their victims. Molly managed to wrap herself up in the remnants, and I wound up giving Choo Andrej’s pants and Sig my shirt.

As for Andrej, he was still out cold. I’d released a lot of tension with that punch. If I’d released any more I would have killed him.

None of us talked much. Sig still seemed disoriented and only semiconscious, and Molly and Choo could barely speak—it had been less than twenty-four hours, but they hadn’t had a drink and they’d been under a lot of stress. I let them all have small sips from my canteen. Choo wouldn’t let go of the Glock I’d tossed down their tunnel… he had stooped down and picked it up with his palms even when his hands were bound and swollen behind his back. Molly had her back against a wall and was holding two knives over her chest to make a cross.

“How could you trust Andrej?” Molly asked when she was
reasonably composed. “He was going to let us get tortured to death just because his uncle doesn’t like getting dumped!”

“He’s spent his whole life worshipping vampire hunters,” I said. “The only reason they made their move when they did was because they thought Anne Marie was out of the picture. And he knew there was a chance I would keep my word too. Some chance of living to get revenge for his family is better than none.”

“Is that right?” Choo asked softly.

Molly looked at Sig, who was sitting on the ground with her arms around her knees, hands clutching her spear as if it were a guardrail. She still seemed to be having trouble focusing. I could see that Molly had something to say that involved Dvornik, but was tactfully refraining.

Choo got up and staggered over to where Andrej was still lying on the ground. Choo’s circulation and balance still weren’t a hundred percent. He stared down, his Glock pointed at Andrej’s forehead.

“Choo,” I said. I could have probably leaped across the room and overpowered him before he had a chance to do anything, but I didn’t. I honestly can’t say why not. It might have been respect for Choo—it was his decision, whatever the consequences, and one that might define his life or divide it into before and after. Or I might have just been that emotionally exhausted and ambivalent.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, Chauncey,” Molly rasped. “But this is getting out of hand. At least give yourself time to think about this.”

“I have,” he muttered, and pulled the trigger.

Sig looked up as the sound of the Glock filled the cavern. Molly looked down. Neither of them protested.

“I think you’d better get out of the monster-hunting business, Choo,” I told him when the reverb had died down. “For your own sake.”

“It might be all right for you. You’re leaving. But he would’ve come after Sig,” Choo said defensively. “He would’ve come after all of us.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe you did the right thing. But that’s not why you shot him.” And it wasn’t. Not when he did. Not the way he did.

Choo was silent for a time. “No, it’s not,” he admitted finally.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sig said quietly. Her words were still slightly slurred.

“Yes,” Molly said, sitting up. “Let’s. We can figure out how we’re going to clean this up later.”

I picked up a gym bag that I’d found while searching for the key to Sig’s manacles. It held a little over eighty thousand dollars: money left over from Anne Marie’s disciples and their entrance fees. Even split four ways it would make good traveling money.

There was one last surprise on the way out.

We were making an ungainly parade toward the exit when Sig stopped and stared uncertainly at the bodies stacked against the wall. “I can see Ted,” she said. “He’s just standing there looking at us.”

Molly thought Sig was hallucinating, but I realized that I’d been smelling Cahill’s scent mingled with the corpses all along. I walked over to where the bodies were stacked and moved the woman and the boy aside. There were signs where the ground had been disturbed beneath them, and I pulled one of the steel rods that were suspending the Christmas lights out of the wall and began jabbing it into the earth to loosen it up. Natural
burrowers or not, the vampires had to have kept some digging tools around, lots of them, but I didn’t feel like exploring the tunnels.

I already knew what I was going to find. Why else would Anne Marie have buried Cahill’s body when she hadn’t buried anyone else’s? When I uncovered him, Ted was lying there with two bloody bullet holes in his shirt, one in the center of his chest and one in his stomach. After what felt like an entire minute, I heard a heartbeat. Well, a heart twitch anyway.

Ted didn’t just have two puncture holes in his throat… he had blood on his lips. Black blood, dark and thick and alien. Vampire blood.

Anne Marie had begun the process of turning him.

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