The fall of kings, p.11
The Fall of Kings, page 11
He was already looking at the blueprints before the first shots rang out. The distant crack of gunfire could be mistaken for firecrackers if you weren’t expecting gunshots. More than the bullets or the frantic grunts from the SWAT team over the radio saying they couldn’t locate the shooter in the rows of vehicles, it was the screaming that got to Simon.
Two floors full of frightened civilians, who had wanted nothing more than to cheer on the home team were now screaming in fear for their lives. How many little kids would never go to another baseball game or be able to watch the Astros on TV without reliving today? Simon really hated Melissa. Another volley of gunfire sounded and then nothing.
“Suspect is down.” The radio crackled. “We have a suspect down. Requesting backup to secure the floor.”
Suspect down. The phrase gripped Simon. For a moment he let himself imagine that Melissa was that easy to kill. Captain Munroe clapped Simon on the back, his smile as wide as a Cadillac fender.
“Well, that is about as good of an outcome as we could’ve hoped for.” Munroe’s genial accent relaxed for the first time since Simon had met the man.
“Something’s not right.” Simon shrugged off the captain’s arm. “Where’s Duncan?”
Simon looked passed Munroe to the spot where Duncan stood the moment before. The broad shadow was gone, a hollow socket in the puzzle Simon was piecing together.
“He’s probably already up there,” Munroe drawled nodding to the parking garage, concern coming back to his eyes. “What are you thinking McGreggor?”
“Something doesn’t fit,” Simon said. His eyes flitting back to the blueprint.
“Male suspect DOA,” A voice called over the radio.
“Male?” Simon spun around facing Munroe. “Send officers to the exit of the emergency stairwell. Don’t let anyone leave.”
“You don’t think we’ve got’em?” Munroe didn’t sound judgmental, only resigned.
“Better safe than sorry,” Simon answered over his shoulder, already making his way out the tent.
“Where are you going?” Munroe trailed after him.
“The maintenance ladder.” Simon didn’t stop when he heard Munroe pause and swear. That cold grip of intuition pushing him towards his target.
Chapter Sixteen
Kadir left Emma in the vestibule of Vlad’s apartment with only a nod. She had spent the elevator ride ignoring the worry nesting in her brain that Aaron had gotten loose. For a moment she leaned her forehead against the dark oak door of the library until she could no longer justify not going inside.
There wasn’t any blood on the floor or the walls as she had imagined. The well-appointed abattoir she’d half-expected to return to looked more or less the same as when she left, though Fields was absent, along with the tray and pitcher of blood. Aaron seemed much improved. The snarling and snapping was replaced by the vacant stare of a man returned from a long journey. When she crossed the threshold, he stirred, those glossy eyes finding her first with anger and then recognition. Vlad and Ava who had been sitting comfortably across from Aaron turned to acknowledge her.
“What did the boy tell you?” Sevystian materialized from behind her in the shadows nearest the door.
“Jesus!” Emma slammed a hand to her chest, holding herself up by the strength of the door handle she was still clutching. Her heart pounded, sending little tremors of shock jittering down her legs. “I’m getting you a bell.”
“It wouldn’t do any good.” Ava looked up, her voice sweet and low with a smile to match. “His kind only make noise when they want to, bell or no bell.”
The confusion must have shown on Emma’s face.
“It is part of their inherent magic.” Ava turned back to Aaron who grunted softly, pulling uncomfortably at the ties holding him to the chair. “Even you, little cowboy. A vampire’s magic is almost entirely related to hunting, and the older they become the stronger that magic grows. It is possible that Sevystian may not even make a noise if he were to attempt it.”
“Hunting magic.” Emma paused letting the information sink in with the million other things she would have been perfectly fine never knowing and settled herself into an oversized armchair. “Right, that’s not weird.”
Sevystian followed her, coming to stand behind her chair, his hands resting on its leather back, close enough to her neck that she could feel their heat.
“For us it is not.” Vlad shared a mischievous smile with her. “Join us please. I would like to hear about your time with the boy.”
“There really isn’t much to say.” Emma leaned against the high back of the chair and felt Sevystian’s long fingers reach out to brush the side of her throat with excruciating gentility. “I wasn’t there all that long and James didn’t say anything but all this Order crap. Nothing Melissa hasn’t tried to shove down my throat.”
“What took you so long?” Sevystian drew little circles with his fingertips.
“Kadir took me to lunch.” Emma yawned, the weight of recent events pulling her into the near delirium of fatigue. “We ran into the HPD dudes in the elevator, so we had to ride all the way to the lobby and then Kadir was all like, ‘you haven’t eaten’. It was a losing battle, so I let him feed me.” Emma yawned again, looking up at Sevystian, who wore an expression she couldn’t place. “Don’t tell him, but I think it was probably a good idea.”
“Your secret is safe with us.” Vlad smiled blandly, his lips pulling into a thin line. “Ranger Davis seems to be improving. Language is coming back to him, slowly.”
“I didn’t think it would take this long,” Emma admitted. Embarrassment crept red and hot up her neck, tingling in her cheeks.
“What reference do you have for a transition such as this?” Sevystian’s voice was almost in her ear and suddenly the heat in her cheeks seemed to migrate towards an entirely different point in her body.
Emma shrugged not wanting to confess that most of her vampiric knowledge came from pop-culture. Vlad smirked at her. His clever eyes told her he knew all too well from whence her information came.
“Magic is as magic does,” Ava hummed shuffling the tarot deck. “Vlad is older, Aaron was closer to death, Melissa’s hate tainted the transition. Even the movement of the tides can affect how magic works its will.”
“All this crap Aaron is going through, the aggression, the bloodlust, it’s all still the effects of Melissa’s intention when she stabbed him?” Emma leaned away from Sevystian; his touch was distracting.
“The easy answer is yes.” Ava reached out pulling Emma’s hands into her own and placed the deck between her outstretched palms.
“What’s the real answer?” Emma looked at the cards, the backs were dark brown with peeling gold filigree, the edges thoroughly foxed. They felt heavy and warm in her palms and Emma thought she could hear them breathing. She shook off the thought and looked into Ava’s face, waiting for an answer, a hard one.
“He didn’t ask for this.” Ava gave her a sympathetic look. “Aaron made a sacrifice, with full consent and understanding that it could lead to his death. There is power in that and—”
“And the transition has to fight that too.” Emma let her gaze droop to the cards in her palm, blinking back angry tears.
“It is not so much that Aaron is fighting it, more so that it is an unknown factor we did not take into account.” Ava looked sharply down at the deck of cards in Emma’s hands and snatched them away.
“A newly turned vampire is usually disoriented, death is not an obstacle one can easily transverse.” Vlad leaned forward his attention settling fully on Emma. “I expected Aaron to be greatly confused, possibly even aggressive when first coming into consciousness. The explosive power he demonstrated, even before his first feeding, is not common. Vampires grow into their power. Aaron demonstrated a strength I have only seen in vampires decades on from their transitions.”
“You just …” Emma rubbed her forehead, digging for some good news, or maybe she was checking to see just how many wrinkles this was giving her. “You just told me that he was getting better.”
“Now that he’s fed, he is reacting more in keeping with the normal transition process.” As Vlad spoke Ava began laying out the Tarot cards on the fine mahogany coffee table. Vlad paused in his explanation; his attention drawn to the spread.
Fields walked in with a tray, laden heavy with a large crystal decanter of more blood. As the late afternoon light played off the angles of the glass, sending rainbows into the somber room, Emma wondered if Sevystian had eaten since the night before. The lines around his scowl told her not.
“I… I…” The room went utterly still as Aaron fought for words.
“Aaron.” Emma flung herself out of the chair, curling herself around Aaron’s feet to look up into his deep brown eyes. Most of the frantic wild glaze was gone and though still confused, he looked aware. The man looking back at her was her friend. “Hey there.”
“Hey.” Aaron’s voice was rough. “Thirsty.”
“I’ll get you some water.” Emma put her hand on his knee to steady herself as she stood, when a large hand rested on her in the high middle of her back, stopping her.
“He doesn’t need water.” It was Sevystian.
How easily she had forgotten. Blushing furiously at her mistake, Emma tapped her forehead with her fingers as if she could physically stick the reality of Aaron’s new existence into her brain. Emma watched Sevystian ease the highball of blood to Aaron’s lips with the kind of care with which he had attended to her when he had fed from her the night before.
“He’ll need something fresh soon.” Vlad’s voice came from somewhere behind her, reasonable and measured.
“How fresh?” Emma peered at the blood Fields just brought in. She was admittedly not an expert, but she thought it looked pretty fresh.
“From the vein I am afraid,” Vlad spoke with the same bland voice he had used earlier, a voice that was purposefully calm.
Emma stood up, ready to offer up her blue veins. All the vampires in the room lunged for her. Vlad reached her first, yanking her out of biting distance. Aaron snapped and tugged at his ropes for a moment before settling down.
“His control is brittle and given the unpredictable nature of his transformation, your safety cannot be guaranteed.” Sevystian held out the empty crystal as proof.
“I am unwilling to take that chance with your life, Emma,” Vlad agreed with Sevystian. His own glass dangling elegantly half-finished from his long fingers. “Under normal circumstances Aaron would be taken on his first hunt as soon as he woke.”
“But...” Emma stopped; frustration was sending her into the heights of her vocal register. “If he would hurt me, he could hurt someone else, maybe even kill them.”
“Better them, than you.” It was a surprise to hear Ava be so dismissive of someone else’s life, even if that person was a nameless, faceless stranger. Ava shrugged at Emma’s shock. “Those are the stakes, your blood or someone else’s. He’s going to have to work off all that power somehow.”
“So, he goes back to normal after?” Emma pinched the bridge of her nose, holding onto the hope Aaron would come back to them just as he had been.
“No,” Sevystian’s voice was gentle. “He’s not human anymore, Emma.”
Something came loose in Emma’s chest and floated around, all sharp edges and fleeting memories.
“So, what do we do?” Emma ran her hands through her hair pulling until it stung before letting go. “We can’t exactly take him to a random neighborhood and let him go wild.”
“No,” Fields spoke with his proper sardonic tone, educated and thoroughly tired of their collective bullshit. “I know a place. The population is of a certain variety. If one were to go missing, there wouldn’t be a fuss.”
“I’m not draining homeless people,” Aaron’s voice was slow, like he was working for every word he managed to say. “They have it rough enough.”
Only Fields seemed unsurprised by Aaron’s sudden input in the conversation.
“No need to worry, Ranger Davis.” There was a twisted smile in Fields’ voice and a twinkle in his eyes. “I doubt you will object.”
Aaron eyed him skeptically before nodding. His eyes darted to Emma, and she could see a glimmer of the Aaron she knew hidden behind those blown pupils. The air conditioning kicked on and Aaron jerked, his attention suddenly centered on the soft rattle from the vents. Vlad offered Emma his hand and lead her further away from Aaron. His stiff arm and grim face telling Emma not to trust Aaron’s sudden normality just yet.
“Fields, you and Buchannan will take Aaron tonight.” Vlad picked up his glass from the coffee table, slugged back the last of the blood, giving no credence to the look of objection Fields was giving him. “You cannot handle a feral fledgling by yourself, and I will not leave Emma here alone. Should the Order take this opportunity to descend on us again I do not want to be without my right hand.”
“Of course, sir,” Fields smiled flatly. Vlad motioned with the empty glass towards Sevystian.
That horrible sharp feeling floating around in Emma’s chest made itself known. Everything about Aaron’s situation felt like a disaster, one wrong move and the world would come crumbling down around him. He had almost become a murderer once today. Now Vlad was sending him out where he almost certainly would become one. Something like guilt lodged itself behind her sternum.
Chapter Seventeen
The late evening sun was setting into the hard orange and red of late summer when Fields and Buchannan loaded their unpredictable companion into one of Wallachia Holding’s black SUV’s. In the few hours since his transition Aaron had slowly come back to himself. It was a slower process than Fields had previously experienced. Then again, tuberculosis wasn’t a shard of glass in the gut, though some days it had felt like it.
Fields pulled out a pair of sleek black aviators and slid them on. He didn’t really remember where he had picked up this particular pair. Sunglasses were a vampiric essential as far as Fields was concerned. Though perfect eyesight was among a vampire’s many advantages, he still had a sizable collection of fashionable eyewear, the spectacles he had worn as a human among them. His mother had been kind enough to bury them with him. Sliding on the shades now felt like slipping into a comfortable sweater, and even the twitchy fledgling in the back seat couldn’t change that.
Generally speaking, Fields didn’t enjoy company when he ventured to the darker sides of his nature. There was something unseemly about what he did. It wasn’t shame, he had let go of shame sometime when his lungs still actively contributed to keeping him alive. It had most likely slithered away to die like most of his aristocratic sensibilities in the first field hospital to which he had been assigned. War left little room for feelings like shame. It wasn’t a fan of guilt either.
“Hang tough, buddy,” Buchannan twisted around to reassure Aaron who had hissed away from the sunlight glaring into the back seat as they exited the parking garage. “You won’t even notice it after a few weeks.”
Buchannan blinked into the light a few times before hunting his pockets for his own pair of sunglasses. Not finding any, he rifled through the console and glove box before finding a beaten-up pair of gas station specials. Pulling out a corner of his T-shirt, Buchannan smeared around the fingerprints on the lenses until he was satisfied which made Fields grind his teeth, as he fought the urge to take them and properly clean them. That was simply how Buchannan was and how he had always been; messy.
“Here.” Buchannan tossed the glasses back to Aaron and continued squinting through the windshield.
“The screen time is going to ruin your eyes before the sun does.” Fields tossed the warning towards Buchannan, swallowing down a warm feeling of affection that threatened to bubble up for him.
“Well then, I guess it’s a good thing I’m already dead.” Buchannan gave him a cheeky grin that Fields didn’t have to turn to see. “We headed to Galveston? Gonna take a turn on the cruise boats, come back with a tan and enough free crabs to rule a small island?”
“You are not getting crabs.” If there was a more put-upon vampire in the entire country Fields had yet to meet them.
“I could already have them.” The little snort of humorous derision was all Buchannan needed to keep going. “Well how would you know? Have you been checking?”
“Distinctly not.” Fields lifted one well-groomed eyebrow; his lips pursed in a perfectly posh expression.
“Like I said I might already have them.” Buchannan batted his eyes at the butler, tilting his head closer to him and making pouty lips until Fields pushed him away with an eye roll.
“I very much doubt that this is in any way helpful to our new ward.” Fields ignored the little huff from the back seat. “There is no situation I can imagine where I could be impressed upon to board a cruise ship.”
“Do you know how old you sound right now?” Buchannan slid down in the front seat, propping his foot up on the dash, starting to mock Fields’ accent. “I remember the lido deck on the Titanic, such a tragedy they’ve never been able to replicate such a fine vessel.” Buchannan let out a garish laugh, pantomiming polishing a Mr. Peanut style monocle.
Aaron chuckled from the back and while Fields was pleased to hear that the man was feeling more like himself, he wished it could be at someone else’s expense.
“Are you quite done?” Fields sighed.
Buchannan adjusted the pretend monocle one more time, squinting his face overdramatically, earning him another dark chuckle from the back.
“Now I am.” He mimed putting the thing back into his pocket and Fields shook his head.
“It might shock you to learn I was never on the Titanic.” Fields deftly maneuvered the SUV onto the highway. “Lido deck or no.”
Buchannan blinked at him mouth agape.
“Sounds like he’s got you, buddy.” Aaron’s voice was still raw from injury and disuse.
“You are supposed to be on my side!” Buchannan squawked, popping up in his seat to turn around and stare at Aaron, an over exaggerated look of betrayal on his face. “We were going to be friends. I called you Buddy. You have betrayed the sacred bonds of Buddies the world over. How could you?”
