When Dusk Comes, page 29
“When?” Samael asked, his words almost sticking in his throat.
“Effective immediately. I’ll officially return tomorrow, but we can tell the congregation you’ve gathered now. I’ve a lot to do and such little time to do it in.” Lucia’s words were steady and decisive.
“But, Lucia, I don’t believe this is wise. You’ve been gone so long.
What would you say? How would you explain your absence?” Samael’s flustered response stopped Lucia in her tracks. The entire caravan of bodies came to a sudden halt just short of the door.
“Do we have a problem?” She turned to face him more fully.
Adrian appeared at Lucia’s side so quickly any passerby would think he teleported. His hulking size added an air of physical intimidation to her presence, but the vampire queen was terrifying enough on her own. Samael reflexively stepped back and diverted his gaze from her eyes.
“Will you not step down from your position?” she asked, her voice dropping to a growl.
“Of course, my Queen. I am but a humble servant who serves at your pleasure,” he said.
For a moment Lucia couldn’t decipher the sincerity of his words, but she allowed the moment to pass. She lifted her chin as she spoke. “As for what we will tell the world, we will tell them the truth. We’ll mount a full scale public investigation into the source of our deadly opposition. We will expose them for the murderous fiends they are. And we shall know peace once more,” she proclaimed with full confidence.
“Yes, my Queen,” he said flatly.
“Is Charlie here?” she asked, resuming the procession. “I would like to inform her before the others.”
“Yes, my Queen. Upstairs.”
The elevator ride to the penthouse suite was long and completely silent.
Lucia observed Samael from the corner of her eye. There’s something you’re not telling me, she decided as she watched him.
* * *
“You’re so dead!” Erin screamed her threat of revenge at Ozzy’s smug face.
“It’s not my fault you’re so slow!” He laughed before dodging the throw pillow launched at his head.
“You know, I’m starting to regret inviting you over here to play on the big TV.” Erin exaggerated a scowl. “I should have left you playing on that tiny thing! So ungrateful,” she muttered as she got ready to lose yet another round of play on Ozzy’s video game.
“Don’t be a sore loser.” He laughed while adjusting his cushion on the floor.
“Well, don’t be such a sore winner,” she groaned.
Addy smiled at the pair from the kitchen. In a few minutes she’d call them to the table for an early lunch. But for now, she relished the moment of normalcy. She couldn’t stop the grin that crept up on her face from Ozzy’s loud infectious laugh. That boy loved to torment Erin about her age.
She wondered if maybe he had a little crush on her. The smile widened.
Cari really has raised a sweet boy. Addy thought of how he always offered to throw out the garbage and volunteered to help anytime he could make himself useful. If he were a few years older she would consider playing matchmaker between him and Charlie. She needs a good-hearted mate like that, she thought sadly. Thoughts of Charlie were always drowned in equal parts worry and sadness. I should never have come here. She shook the thought loose and busied her hands.
* * *
The bones in Caridad’s knees crashed into each other painfully as she ran.
The cartilage that should cushion the contact having long vanished under her weight and overuse. Her heart raced so high in her throat she was sure it would escape through her mouth. She heard her sisters screaming behind her, but there was no time to stop. There was hardly time to think.
The cabin loomed large in the horizon. The sun, at its highest point in the sky, shone brightly on her efforts. Cari pushed harder, willing her legs to move faster, bur compliance was sketchy. She saw them as she crested a small hill. Like spiders crawling together all aiming for the same place. Cari was aiming there too.
“Eight, nine, ten.” She counted the figures running toward the cabin, the ones the spirits warned her about only moments ago. But it’s the middle of the day? Cari contemplated that fact as she ran, her body slowing despite her best efforts to bolt with inhuman speed.
The invaders were fast as they descended upon the house. She had no doubt of their nature. The barriers had failed. They were unprotected.
Her lungs burned as they struggled for air. She wheezed as she went, regretting the cigar she had smoking that morning. Her thighs threatened to tear down the middle, but she pushed harder despite the pain. When she made it to a side door leading to the cabin’s utility room, she collapsed forward to catch her breath. The stitch in her side made inhaling nearly impossible. Coño. She worked hard to steady herself as quietly and quickly as possible.
Her vision cleared just in time to see Lucia’s vampire crew drop like flies as if they were taking turns passing out in slow motion, though no source of danger was immediately apparent. Then she smelled it. The strangely sweet vapors in the air. It was misplaced among the usual aromas.
“Osvaldo!” she called to her son, who sat on the floor playing video games with Erin, neither one aware of the horror show about to begin.
“Mami?” Ozzy turned his head toward the sound of his mom’s voice, confusion etched on his face. “What are you— what’s wrong!” He scrambled to his feet.
“Come here!” she called out between painful gasps for oxygen. Ozzy got as far as the edge of the couch before the windows around them exploded. A dozen vampires crashed in through the shattering glass. The sharp rain ushered in thunderous noise and death.
The living room erupted in gushing streams of blood from the fallen guards, painting the walls with angry red splatters. Their unconscious bodies never stood a chance. Caridad’s human eyes struggled to see everything at once. Her eyes narrowed in on attacking vampire. She focused on a single face covered in some kind of clear jelly. Her mouth moved quickly as she mutters ancient chants passed down from generations. The wind blew hard in response to Cari’s speeding lips, taking some of the toxic air with it.
“Erin!” Nicholas called, the only one of Lucia’s vampires still standing.
His white V-neck sweater was drenched in blood. Three strange bodies were piled at his feet like rumpled jeans discarded after a long night out.
How long has he known my name? The thought percolated in Erin’s mind as the carnage came into full relief.
A black blur lunged toward her from the nothing. She had no place to go. Nothing to protect herself with. Her brain moved too slowly for the unfolding danger. She managed only to shove Ozzy’s body behind herself and prepared to use her attacker’s body weight against them.
Nicholas moved faster than the pair barreling toward Erin. He sprung towards them, fangs first, and connected with a bare neck covered in something foul. The pressure from his bite crushed a spine, causing irreparable damage. But the limp body landed against him, knocking his balance backwards, and giving the second intruder enough room to extend toward Erin, his fist finding her hip in place of her face. He hadn’t counted on being dragged back by an enraged Nicholas struggling to his feet.
“You weren’t supposed to hurt anyone! This wasn’t the deal!” Addy screamed as her face ripped open. Her mouth transforming into a horrible maw. Her clothes tore at the seams and fell away from breaking bones.
Before Erin could produce a scream from her grimacing mouth, the massive gray wolf that had been Addy was in the air, teeth chomping and heinous growls, whizzing toward the next vampire making his advance on Erin and Ozzy. Addy’s wolf nearly severs the vampire’s head as her jaw clamped down around his neck. The way the wolf shook the lifeless vampire reminded Erin of a German Shepherd with a toy.
The two women who had been standing with Addy in the kitchen transformed in less dramatic fashion. The hulking obsidian wolves followed the gray one. The remaining vampires piled on Nicholas and the three werewolves. They became a tangled mess of gnashing teeth and hideous screams. The invading vampires struggled to reach Erin, who kicked and punched at the arms that tried to get her. Her body acted as a shield for the boy who was frozen in place by fear despite Erin’s desperate screams that
he run. This was nothing like the fights she and Max spent so much time training to defend themselves against.
Caridad reached for what she can find that was sharp and deadly. She found a box cutter carelessly left near the pile of boxed goods delivered last night. She pushed the black button up the track. The clicks came in quick succession, revealing another centimeter of blade with each sound.
“Leave them alone!” Cari screeched with the force of a mother in full defensive mode, her voice deep and alien. Her calls to the ancestors had been answered, but they were not enough. The monstrous demons that made their way toward her kids wouldn’t be distracted much longer. Cari could sense the life leaving one of the black wolves, with the other not far behind. They wouldn’t survive this, and she couldn’t risk getting trapped.
The blood ran from Cari’s arm in dark red currents, the blade sinking in deep and ripping her flesh as she screamed. The pain sent her to her knees.
Her vision blurred as the blood poured from her wound. For what she needed, the spirits must be paid in advance.
“Cari!” Caridad’s youngest sister was the first to burst into the cabin behind her, the other two right behind her. The four sisters crammed together in the small utility room, a front row seat to the gruesome scene.
There was no time to explain the plan, but they understood to follow Cari’s lead. The sisters fell to their knees and called to the spirits for power and protection. Caridad focused her calls on a single otherworldly entity.
The Mother of Water would save them. The sisters chanted together, making a desperate soulful song of their prayers. Ozzy grabbed his stomach, the pain pulling him toward the utility room.
As soon as the boy was out of harm’s way, Erin bolted to the kitchen for a knife. Now that she no longer had to act as a human shield she could join
the fight in earnest. She turned back to the living room in time to see a vampire pick up Addy with both hands and break her back over his knee.
Erin’s heart stopped at the sight of her friend howling in pain and landing limply on the ground. She cried out from the anguish ripping through her chest like a wildfire.
“You fucking bastard!” Erin raged, black handle firmly in hand. She lunged, with tears burning in her eyes, at the vampire squaring off against her. The way he crossed over Addy’s lifeless body as if she were nothing sent a flood of heat coursing through her veins. She heard the chants from Cari and her sisters and tried to repeat them even if she didn’t know what they meant. Time slowed to a crawl. The blood pumped hard to her muscles. She screamed again as the chef’s knife found the soft tissue of the vampire’s right eye. His anguished scream only emboldened the abject hatred burning a hole straight through Erin’s soul. The knife nearly moved of its own accord five times before the vampire could even raise his hands.
Sweat and blood pour from Caridad in equal measure. Her face paled and the nausea rose in her stomach, but having her son safely sheltered behind her with her sisters didn’t complete the task. She prayed harder. She willed the spirits to move around Erin, to move inside of her, to guide and protect her.
Nicholas staggered toward Erin as she stabbed her would-be assailant to death, her blade moving at a blinding inhuman speed. The back of Nicholas’ head blistered under the deadly sunlight draining his strength, but the mountain of a man slogged forward, his broken bones healing far too slowly. Toxins were growing and multiplying in his system with every second, but the power of his promise to his queen kept him moving. He willed his legs to carry him even as he lost feeling below the knee.
“Nicholas!” Erin ran to the massive man. His face was starting to droop with paralysis. By the time she closed the small distance between them, his legs gave out from under him. “Just hold on!” Erin cried. Her body shook from shock and pain and terror. Hold on to what, she had no idea.
“I saved you,” he mumbled.
Erin had never noticed his Greek accent before. She could hardly remember saying more than two words to him or his brother. “Yes, you did.” The tears rolled in hot streams down her face. “Just stay with me.”
She sat down cross-legged on the floor with him, placing his massive head on her lap. They sat in a semicircle of death, surrounded by bodies of friend and foe alike. “Stay with me!” Erin’s scream was high-pitched and frantic.
The foam bubbled up in his mouth while convulsions claimed his body.
Nicholas’ body fell perfectly still before the two remaining vampires descended from the rafters. He’d never know he failed.
Caridad pulled what she could from the spirits, but the she’d already taken so much and paid so much. There was nothing left. She offered Erin what she could. The protection of her ancestors.
“Well, you’re a fuck of a lot of trouble.” The two vampires stood over Erin as she struggled to get out from under Nicholas’ dead weight. “Why don’t you just stop fighting, bitch?”
The male vampire, his hair as black as night and his eyes a ghostly blue, offered her a lopsided grin. The female, smaller, paler with a white shock of hair in the middle of her red-orange mane, didn’t speak. She merely stared at Erin as if trying to determine which cut of her flesh might be the juiciest.
“Eat shit.” Erin lunged as soon as she scrambled to her feet, the knife still tightly held in her hand. The last bit of help pushed onward, took hold of her arm as she sent the blade plunging into the vampire’s neck. She
dragged the blade hard across his throat, hoping to sever as many life sustaining body parts as possible. The foul, clear jelly smeared all over the vampire left Erin’s arm sticky and smelling like hot garbage left out on the street.
The small female, standing at least six inches shorter than Erin, didn’t move a muscle. She watched her comrade collapse to the floor without so much as a wince. “He was a dick,” she said with a shrug.
Erin spun around and slashed wildly at the woman, but the vampire dodged the clumsy stabs with ease. There was no gas left in Erin’s tank. She tumbled to her knees, her legs shaking under her own weight as she willed herself back to an upright position.
“Don’t make this so hard on yourself,” the vampire said as if growing bored with Erin’s fight for her life.
“Go to hell,” Erin said with a sneer. She lunged forward again, aiming at her eye, but she didn’t make it anywhere near her target.
“Suit yourself,” the woman said with a shrug before delivering a single punch to Erin’s face that turned her world black.
Chapter Twenty Eight
The fortified jeep ambled up the path. It climbed over fallen trees and thick brush as it made its way toward the secluded cabin in the woods.
“I think we need a re-branding,” Samael offered as they planned the announcement for Lucía’s return.
“Absolutely.” Lucía nodded. It had been far too long since she considered any changes. Complacency had blinded her to the discontentment growing among her people. “Perhaps we can establish a counsel made up of the clan leaders, or leaders elected from the community,” she posited options aloud as the jeep bumped along.
“My Queen.” Adrian’s back stiffened. The minor change in his posture rings the alarm to the backseat passengers.
“What is it?” Lucía asked reflexively but unnecessarily. Even in the waning daylight she could see what it was. She didn’t waste another moment sitting still. She was gone before Samael reacted, the car door swinging back and forth as the jeep climbs.
The sun stung Lucía’s exposed skin, but she didn’t register the pain. Her other senses were on overdrive, and her body a blue blur. The odor of unknown intruders was faint and grows fainter as she ran toward the cabin.
Dread willed her to move faster still. The overwhelming stink of blood obscured anything else that might be present.
Blood and death, but no Erin, of that Lucía was sure before she even burst through the front doors as if they were constructed from tissue paper.
The sight stopped Lucía and forced her to her knees. She clutched her chest as if that might keep her heart from exploding.
Tears flowed from a place so remote within her she had long believed it lost to time. A sickly cold sweat formed a stinging film over her slowly healing burns. She surveyed the carnage. Long streaky trails of blood led out the door, revealing that several bodies had been dragged and taken.
Thick dark, blood covered Lucía’s expensive black suit as she crawled to Nicholas’ lifeless body. A mournful wail escaped from her chest. She was more animal than person in her expression of grief, the anguish of her loss too much to contain. Her hands looked so small wrapped around Nicholas’ chest.
The gold from Erin’s watch glistened in the dying light streaming in through the broken windows. Lucía was outside her own body as she picked it up. It was cold without Erin’s body heat, its face smashed on one side and caked with blood. She ran her thumb over the shattered glass.
“My God,” Samael whispered through a wave of nausea.
Adrian pushed him aside to join Lucía at his brother’s side. He clawed desperately at his brother’s chest with the fury of a broken heart until Lucía pulled him in to her arms. The sight of such a huge man sobbing forced Samael to avert his eyes.
Lucía moved amongst the corpses of her loved ones, taking stock and carving new scars on her mangled heart with each identification. She shut her eyes when she came across the hulking gray wolf, her body bent and broken, the fur dyed red in places where it used to be white. Lucía laid her hand over Addy’s eyes to close them. She didn’t know how she was going
to tell Charlie what happened. How she failed to keep her grandmother safe as promised. How would she tell Pete that she hadn’t keep his daughter safe either?
“Lucía.” Samael came up behind her leaving Adrian to mourn his brother alone. “I don’t see Erin amongst them.”
