Monsters & Empire, page 20
“Grendel, wait,” Bayo said.
She turned around, the Ember flaring with irritation.
“Take me with you,” Bayo said. “Don’t go alone.”
She scowled, and rage flared through the Ember. “How could you do it?” she snarled.
“Do what?” Bayo asked.
“You called your son, your little boy, ‘Common,’” Grendel said.
Bayo took a step back. “You knew about that?”
Baring her fangs, she hissed. “I want to bite you and not in a nice way.”
He huffed, irritated at her overreaction or at himself. He held up his hands, palms out. “It was a slip of the tongue.”
“Would you slip and slap him?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Bayo said.
“The slur might be worse,” Grendel muttered.
“How can you say that?” Bayo roared. A hand tightened around his forearm. He’d forgotten about Taig. He tried to jerk out of the Vampire’s grip and failed.
“You won’t find me as easy to beat up as a woman,” Taig hissed.
Which was when Bayo realized his hands had curled into fists. He wanted to protest, but then remembered he had beaten up Grendel before. He let his arms go limp. “Grendel, he didn’t hear. He wasn’t in the room.”
Grendel stared at him for a moment, and then rubbed her eyes. “What’s worse than the slip is that I don’t think you understand how horrible that word is.”
“It’s not an insult in the UMS,” Bayo said. “It means something different here. I’m getting that.”
“I don’t think it means anything different here,” Grendel said, and the Ember was so thick with her disappointment, Bayo’s mouth went dry.
He imagined her on the border, and what would happen if she were captured. “I’m trying to help you,” he said.
She huffed through her fangs. “Help me by helping our people—”
“I have,” Bayo said. He’d cut himself off from the Order, from his country, and from his brother—not for the Alliance—for his son, but he had done it.
Grendel said, “Come up with a way to talk to our soldiers in the out-of-time. It was a problem when we fought the mine guards and Quake and Richter. Work with Madison and Taig; they’re military. They’d know better than me how to utilize soldiers in Vampire armor.” Her tone was cool and calculating, without a shred of sympathy for him and what he’d given up. He might never have his sons’ love, but he’d given up his world for their freedom.
Grendel took a step back and shook her head. He felt it then—her sadness and a looming loneliness, but also shame. She was ashamed of him. For a word. His skin heated; his fists curled again. She was being stupid.
Turning on her heel, she left time, soared over the front gate, and scaled the building across the street, as silent and pale as moonlight. The second woman in his life rejecting him. He almost went after her, but Taig held him back. Grendel vanished over the rooftops, and real-time came crashing down.
Bayo exhaled. Stepped back. He’d thought he’d lost everything: Mandy and his boys, his brotherhood, his country, his world. Watching her depart, he realized this was the moment he’d lost everything.
PART II
CHAPTER 20
Grendel was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming because it had been over two hundred twenty-five years since she’d looked up at the Eiffel Tower with her husband, Ron. She squeezed his hand, looked over at him, and saw Bayo.
“Oh, come on!” Grendel hissed. It had been over a month since she’d last seen him, but he kept popping up in her unbloody dreams.
He looked at her, and his eyebrows rose. “I guess you would still be asleep now. It’s not quite sunset.”
Grendel growled so loudly she woke herself up … and hit her head on the bed above. Her hair got caught on the naked springs, and she growled more. The mattress squeaked. Paws padded close by.
“Everything all right down there?” Lupin asked, poking his snout beneath the bed.
Grendel took a deep breath, inhaled dust and dust bunnies, and coughed. “Fine.”
Over a month. It had been over a month since she’d left Chicago and him. But she couldn’t escape Bayo when she closed her eyes. It was unbloody unfair.
He panted. It was a wolf laugh.
Sometimes she missed Mop. She left him with Mandy and the boys since she couldn’t watch him during the day.
She peered out from beneath the bed. The light coming through the window was dim enough. She pulled herself out of her daytime refuge beneath the bed in the Elizabethtown cabins and stretched. Muscles sore from sleeping on the floor loosened and aches vanished, one benefit of Vampirism. Heading into the bathroom, she looked into the mirror and saw Bayo’s face from her dream.
Old Gods, she shouldn’t miss him. Leaning on the sink, she groaned. “It’s not just that he called his child ‘Common.’ All parents make mistakes at some point. I know I did.”
Claws clicked on wooden floorboards, and Lupin and Lupina sat down in the doorway and cocked their heads.
Turning back to the sink, she splashed water on her face. “Calling a child ‘Common’ is so much worse than calling a child stupid or lazy, and it’s horrible to call children those things! ‘Common’ is a slur and a state that isn’t alterable!”
“You dreamed about Bayo again,” Lupin surmised.
Lupina growled. She still hadn’t forgiven Bayo for breaking Lupin’s back.
Grendel ran a brush through her hair with too much vigor. She dreamed about Bayo almost every night. “He doesn’t even know why it’s a problem. He’s so … so … so …”
She thought of the miners he’d saved, of walking through them at the train station in New Vale, how their numbers seemed never ending. She remembered him bursting into Jack and Cherie’s house and changing their understanding of the upcoming invasion. The sincerity in his eyes … Even if they’d seen no sign of the change in plans, even though most of the UMS’s troops still amassed in Paducah, Kentucky, it was vital intel. Blowing up a metal bridge would not keep UMS troops out if they created ice bridges.
Beowulf’s name was synonymous with the epic hero. And he was that. She respected him for his heroism and for turning against his Order when he found evidence that they were wrong.
But …
She couldn’t love a man who would verbally abuse a child or who labeled a whole swathe of people as lesser beings for traits they could not control.
She sighed. “Heroes are complicated.”
“So are Vampires,” Lupin said, narrowing his eyes.
She turned around. “Should I have tried to teach him what he believes is wrong?” She sighed and leaned back against the sink, thinking of Owen’s fiercely determined face, so much like Bayo’s. Ian had Bayo’s Magick, but he didn’t have Bayo’s ferocity. When Ian felt threatened, things fell off walls and shook. It was all bluster. Owen didn’t have Bayo’s Magick. But Owen had the same protective urges that bordered on self-destructive that flowed through Bayo’s veins. Did Bayo even see that? Did he even see Owen at all?
Would Mandy let him see either child? The thing was, if Bayo maintained his attitude, Grendel wasn’t sure he should see them. Grendel couldn’t forgive a man who’d let stubbornness and prejudice keep him away from his children, abandoning them due to pride. She couldn’t.
Tying her hair back in a ponytail, she went to the door, put on her Folkt made boots—thinking very hard that she should not think of the happy time when she and Bayo bought them in Folktlan—and then she slipped on an oversized, sun-proof windbreaker. She didn’t plan to be near the border, so she didn’t need her armor. Still, although July in Southern Illinois was hot and steamy, she wouldn’t go out without sun-proof garments that covered her whole body. She slipped on a holster with a compact, silent Ember pistol, and headed down to the front desk of the main building. Lupin and Lupina loped beside her, but they kept glancing northward, toward the forested hills. “You guys want to go hunting?” she asked them.
Tails wagged.
“It’s not that we don’t appreciate cooked food,” Lupin said.
Lupina growled.
“But we don’t appreciate it as much as raw food,” Lupin added.
Grendel’s eyebrows lifted. She gave them the remains of animals she’d drained. Those were raw.
Seemingly reading her mind, Lupin continued, “Or the dead animals you share with us …”
Lupina whined.
“We miss bloody steaks,” Lupin said. “Deer steaks.” He lifted his nose. “And we smell an injured old buck.” He licked his lips.
It was their day off. Also, she’d promised Stan, the Magickal rat at the front desk, that she’d help him take care of the non-Magickal rats that had invaded the cabin resort’s restaurant, because, in his words, “They’re so like me I don’t want to kill them myself, but I want them dead. They’re terrorizing our pups and attracting the damn snakes who won’t care if we’re Magickal or not.”
“Have fun,” she said. “See you in the morning!”
The two wolves’ tails wagged. They gave happy pants and then trotted off into the forest behind the cabins.
Grendel decided she wanted blood before coffee. She left time and resolutely did not think about Bayo’s blood.
The blood of six non-Magickal rats later, and after trapping two rattlesnakes in a bag—endemic to this part of Illinois—she finally went to the front desk.
The bag of snakes hissed.
Her ghosts also hissed. “You aren’t an old hag anymore. You could seduce some stupid chump and drink human blood.”
“Not interested in some stupid chump,” Grendel hissed back.
“You wouldn’t have to sleep with him to get him to feed you,” her ghosts objected. “You could just string him along.”
“Take his money while you’re at it!”
Dropping the hissing bag of snakes at the front door, she muttered, “There were reasons you all were bound for Hell.”
“What does that mean?” her ghosts asked.
Instead of answering, she entered the resort office. As soon as she did, Stan, the Magickal rat owner-manager of the cabins, shrieked on the counter, “Why didn’t you drink the snake blood too! Kill them, kill them!”
Grendel did not like snakes as food or otherwise. Killing them had been her first instinct—especially since Stan had pups, and the snakes could creep into rat holes—but Geoff and Annette had always insisted that snakes were an important part of the ecosystem. “It’s my day off. I’ll take them out into the woods and release them.”
“They’ll come back!” Stan squeaked.
“Their range is only 1.6 miles or so,” Grendel said. Geoff’s son had told her that. “I’ll dump them far away.”
Stan’s little snout trembled. “That’s not far enough!”
“I’ll make sure I drop them off three miles away.”
Stan’s snout still trembled.
“Six miles away?” Grendel suggested.
He groomed his snout with ink-stained paws.
“Twenty miles?” Grendel suggested.
He dropped his paws, but still said nothing. He just looked up at her bleakly.
“Look,” Grendel said. “The non-Magickal rats are coming from somewhere. If I let these guys live, they’ll keep those non-Magickal rats from coming here. And if I take them far enough away, they won’t hurt you.”
Stan sighed. “I suppose that’s true. I brought my family all this way to get away from the dumb rats in Chicago’s sewers, and here they are in Podunkville.”
There was technically no city in Illinois called “Podunkville,” but Grendel nodded sympathetically.
A faun wearing a khaki shirt and a backpack, head covered with a hat that accommodated his horns and ears, came in and asked Stan for a map. After he’d left, Grendel dropped low and whispered, “Any changes I should know about?”
Chicago sewer rats weren’t the only reason Stan and his wife, Becky, had relocated. The couple were trusted spies and members of RoNet.
Stan looked side to side, sniffed the air carefully, and then scampered closer. “Nothing new. Our agent has only temporary access to the Dragon King. She’s hopeful he’ll allow her into his household, but not yet.” Grendel sighed and nodded tightly. Grendel did not know who this agent was and doubted Stan knew, either. The less who knew, the better.
Stan continued, “The Dragon King doesn’t talk strategy around her. Our other agents have UMS troops still amassed in Paducah, just as we expected. There’s been some troops making runs along Route 667—you know where that is, just on the other side of the Ohio River. They don’t cross into Indiana, though. The Indiana boys are keeping them out, let me tell you. You’ve heard about the Wild Boar Brigade?”
Grendel nodded. Magickal wild hogs in Indiana had teamed up with Indiana’s humans to hunt non-Magickal “invasive wild hogs” and “invasive humans” from the UMS. Rumor had it Magickal hogs didn’t mind eating those “invaders,” Magickal or otherwise. She shuddered, despite herself.
Stan flicked a tail. “Some troops are being stationed in Sturgis, Kentucky, up in the northeast. We’ve seen a few down at the river’s edge, where the Saline flows into the Ohio, but their numbers are small. Heard a few are also stationed out west, in Perryville, Missouri, on the other side of the Mississippi. Again, small numbers, but locals saw them by the river there on the regular for a while.” Grendel knew about the troops in Sturgis to the east, and Perryville to the west. Intelligence believed they were mostly scouts, and that the major thrust of the invasion would still be on the southernmost tip of the state.
“Thanks, Stan,” she said.
His little ears perked up. “Oh, and I almost forgot. You have mail!”
He ran over to a metal sorting tray and pushed out an envelope. “Came yesterday,” Stan said.
Scooping it up, Grendel studied the cursive writing on the envelope. It looked so textbook perfect, Grendel suspected it was junk mail.
The Bag o’ Snakes began hissing with such ferocity, they were audible in the office.
Stan squeaked in terror.
Tucking the letter into her pocket, she thanked Stan and promised, “I’ll get rid of them!”
Exiting, she scooped up the stick she’d tied the bag to and threw it in the back of Lucky, Geoff’s pickup.
Geoff had given the truck a makeover since the UMS had a description of the vehicle. Lucky was now cherry red, with white walled tires, and had Indiana license plates. Geoff had insisted that Grendel needed Lucky for this mission. And maybe she did. The old truck had so much Ember in his gears he could mostly drive himself.
Lucky honked happily as she climbed aboard, saying, “Stan wants those rattlers taken a good twenty miles from here.” She thought about it. “It also needs to be far from any of our friends in the SMASH.” The SMASH was the Small Mammals and Smart Herbivores Defense Association. They were mostly older critters with families or creatures considered ineligible for regular service. They were prepared to fight for their own little bits of the forest, and Grendel respected them for it. She patted the steering wheel. “You pick the place.”
Lucky honked again and flipped his headlights on all by himself—Grendel always forgot—she didn’t need them. They trundled out onto the main road, and Lucky turned northwest, leaving her to her thoughts. Which was unfortunate. Of course, she thought of her nemesis invading her dreams. She wondered if it had really been him, or just … a dream.
CHAPTER 21
In a light fitful sleep, sitting in the passenger side of Taig’s kid’s van, Bayo dreamed of Grendel, a strange tower of iron beams, and a city awash in lights. She vanished, and he spent the rest of the dream searching for her, but all he found was the darkness of the cave. There were two other Vampires in the cave with him. One of them woke him up with a poke.
“You’re having a nightmare,” Taig said, sticking his head out of the curtain between the back and the front of the van and yawning.
It hadn’t started out as a nightmare. Grendel had been with him, really with him. He found himself in dreams with her almost every night. The dreams had cleared some things up for him—or helped to clear things up.
Taig turned to his son, Mike. “How far out are we?”
“Not too far from Brockport,” Mike said, and in a grumble, he added, “But Bayo and Madison wanted to go hiking in the Garden of the Gods.”
Madison’s voice came from the back, sounding too cheery for someone who had just woken up. He’d told Bayo that he and Grendel had both been morning people when they were alive. Now they were early evening people. “You should come with us,” Madison said. “Getting out into nature is good for a man.”
“Sleep is good for a man,” Taig said, putting a protective hand on his son’s shoulder.
“And a beer,” said Mike.
“Suit yourself,” said Madison, rustling in the back and humming happily like the old man he was. He did not exude savagery. He and Taig had just been justifiably wary about someone who’d been a Vampire hunter and beaten up a friend of theirs recently. Once Bayo convinced them he would not stake them or theirs, the edge in their dealings with him had almost disappeared. Only almost because they were as angry at Bayo for calling Owen “Common” as Grendel had been.
It had taken him a while to understand why they were angry. They’d had time to see he was changing. Grendel had left too soon.
Grendel had forgiven him for mentally violating her and beating her up twice, even if she hadn’t forgotten. But then he’d called Owen “Common,” and that had been unforgivable to her. It said something about someone who could forgive so much abuse against themselves but not be able to forgive the abuse of a child.
Bayo had messed up. But he didn’t believe in giving up.
“Ah … there’s the entrance to the park,” said Mike, flipping on the turn signal. A few minutes later, they turned off the main road. Bayo wanted to see the park. He also wanted to be distracted. He was within a few miles of Grendel—or at least, she was stationed at Elizabethtown. Bayo didn’t know if she was out on patrol. His skin prickled at the thought of her out alone along the river’s edge. He wondered if she’d gotten the letter he’d sent her.
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