In Blood We Trust (5 page)

“Dang, Gabriel,” the old guy said, immediately moving aside just as fast as the other monsters had done when they'd seen Gabriel glowering his way down the halls.

Gabriel sensed how the oldster's pulse had picked up, beating in that clean, unblocked cadence that distinguished the Badlanders from any polluted urban hubite.

“Oldster,” Gabriel said by way of greeting.

But the other man just kept looking him up and down. “Looking a little rough tonight, aren't ya?”

He even said it with a certain amount of discomfort, but that was how it'd been lately between Gabriel and the Badlanders—the oldster, Hana, Pucci, and even Chaplin. And though the oldster didn't have to say another thing about it, Gabriel had the feeling that the man knew Gabriel's vampire had come out in full force because he'd been around Mariah.

Gabriel's olfactory buds—multiplied and strengthened by vampirism—caught scent of the oldster's humanlike skin. After turning his face away, Gabriel knew that the guy understood he was hungry.

Still
hungry.

“Maybe you ought to take a run outside,” the oldster said. “Work off some of that steam in you.”

“I said I'd be here for tonight's questioning, and I keep my promises, Michael.”

When the oldster lifted an eyebrow, Gabriel just about whipped out some mind-reading mojo so he could find out what was going through the other man's head for certain.

It was second nature to do that now. After being with Mariah, especially this time, it seemed so easy to give in to what he used to consider so base.

And to be
better
at it than ever before.

But weren't all the older vampires—especially the eldest, McKellan—telling him that with the passing of years, humanity seemed less important to their kind?

Irrelevant, even?

The oldster gave Gabriel a wary glance. He would know how to block and even thwart a mind intrusion, anyway, because Gabriel had given him and the other Badlanders pointers when he'd first begun learning more about how his powers worked.

Jerking his chin toward another corner, where voices bounced off the walls, the oldster walked ahead, and Gabriel followed him, encountering more monsters. Only his blood relatives—fellow descendants of 562—failed to fall away from him as he passed: There were the tik-tik women who seemed normal enough while in their humanlike guises. You would never know that when they found their perfect meals—pregnant human women—the tik-tiks removed their heads and allowed this disembodied part of them to feed on the wombs, all while making that
tik-tik-tik
sound. 562 had first created them from the corpse of a dead woman, and they were the vilest of Red creatures.

The gremlins ran a close second, though, and as the sickly yellow-furred, slab-toothed rabbitlike creatures scuttled over the walls, chuckling in low, guttural giggles, they latched their bulbous, dark, long-lashed gazes on Gabriel and the oldster. They had been another one of 562's questionable experiments to raise the dead, this time with an animal.

Gabriel ignored a gremlin that hung down from the ceiling, dry-heaving at the monsters below as if it intended to barf on them. Classy. The stupid things had no fear.

He'd never considered himself biased before, but if he had to be a Red, he was glad he was a vampire, a creature that 562 had been proud of in its later years. 562 had been just as fierce about its were-creatures, too.

But the more Gabriel thought about 562, the more withdrawn he became, his fangs finally retracting, his gaze clearing. Musing about the origin of the Reds was just about as good as taking a precious cold shower, he supposed. But maybe that was because of how it hurt to remember the way in which he'd broken into 562's brain with Mariah, decimating their mother/father's motor skills.

Before that, he'd come so close to going over to 562's side, even when the origin had been killing all those Civils. He'd been so close to becoming a real menace before Mariah had pulled him out of it.

As he and the oldster approached the cells, Gabriel saw that an ancient group of vampires was staring inside some cages down the way, lethargic smiles on their faces, as if they were considering who should be their next meals in this fine buffet. Though they stood still, almost as if they were frozen in time, there was a stirring in the creatures. An excitement that fluttered Gabriel's blood, too.

Near them, a group of were-creatures lingered. Gabriel knew them well—the Badlanders, including Pucci, with his dusky skin and massive chest and shoulders, looking like the were-elk he was when the change came upon him. Then there was Hana, his dark-skinned consort, with robes and a head scarf that echoed her colors as a were–mule deer.

Gabriel tilted his head as he sensed the same sort of restlessness coming off them, too.

Was it because they'd all been cooped up in this hub? Were they all just dying to let themselves loose on the captivated meals inside this asylum as well as out of it?

Just in back of the Badlanders, there was another patch of monsters—Civils—and Gabriel recognized Neelan, the half-man/half-serpent chimera, among them.

The oldster spoke to Gabriel well before they arrived at the groups. “While you and the other vamps were resting, the Civils reported that there's really nowhere else to look for 562's stored blood in the labs.”

“It'll save them the bother of confiscating it in the future, then.”

The Civil monsters all thought 562 was dead and that its termination just hadn't had any effect on the preter compositions of its Red progeny. So if there was still blood from 562 in the asylum, they didn't want any more Reds taking it and going as berserk as their origin had during the full moon.

A dead 562 was a good 562 because, by the Civils' way of thinking, the creature's powerful blood couldn't be taken anymore if none existed. It didn't even matter that Mariah, the community's hero and recipient of 562's blood, had been on the Civils' side that night.

No one knew how long that might last if her hunger grew to match 562's.

That was why it was a fine thing that no one but Gabriel, the Badlanders, and a few vampires knew where the vegetative 562 was actually being stored.

The oldster paused in his walking, still far enough away from the groups to guarantee a private word—unless you counted the vampires who'd be able to hear them.

“The Civils have been even more nervous than usual about what might happen if vampires or we weres got a hold of a 562 sample. Or—and I shudder to even think it—what would go down if a tik-tik or gremlin found one.”

“It might make everyone as powerful as Mariah could ultimately be.”

“Yeah.”

Gabriel couldn't stop himself—he zapped out with his mind force and took a peek into the oldster's head, just to see if the man had gone so far as to imagine himself as a 562-type were-creature.

But there was only confusion in the oldster. A snowy storm of bewilderment in his mind.

What kind of price would we
all
pay if anyone else dared take 562's blood ... ?
he was thinking.

The oldster erected a mental block, shoving Gabriel out of his head while shooting him an irritated glance just for good measure.

Then they continued on.

Gabriel focused on the Civil monsters straight ahead as he drew near. Neelan, the chimera, was looking right back at him, stroking his beard. The half-man, half-serpent narrowed his eyes, too, clearly thinking that Gabriel looked “rough,” just as the oldster had said.

“Evening, Neelan,” Gabriel said pleasantly, but it came out a little jagged in spite of his best intentions.

“Gabriel.”

With that, he and the oldster arrived at the cells, which mainly contained humans who had failed to be distracted by the government's pills out in the hub, the ones who were still aware enough to be a danger to the monsters who had taken over by stealth. And if the pills had worn off the distractoids who'd been susceptible to those pills, it'd been all too easy for the vampires to hypnotize them, leaving them out in the streets with the others.

Then again, there were also humans who had come here of their own free will, and these people were asking for blood exchanges to make them better survivors, just like the monsters.

Those were the cells that the vampires stayed closest to.

But Gabriel was aiming for yet another cell altogether, and when he stood in front of the silver bars that had come crashing down after the power blast in this corridor, the occupant slowly raised his head.

In Johnson Stamp's bottomless dark gaze, there was a hateful spark, and Gabriel liked it.

It reminded him of how Stamp's blood had tasted a couple of weeks ago, when 562's rampage had caused enough distraction and destruction for a crazed Gabriel to pounce all over it when the Shredder had been wounded.

Good. So good.

Gabriel smiled. When the Shredder had first tracked the Badlanders here to GBVille, he'd been all spit and shine in his slayer uniform. A young pup, just in his early twenties, slim as the barrel of an old pistol and just as full of explosion. Now he was minus a leg, but not any of his attitude, as he sneered at Gabriel from a corner of his cell, sitting with his arm propped on the leg he could still bend.

“My pal the vampire,” he said. “I was wondering when you'd show again.”

The oldster had taken up Gabriel's back. Pucci and Hana had even wandered over to add their support.

Feisty as ever, the old man said, “This ain't no courtesy call, Stump, and you know it.”

At the demeaning nickname, Stamp's spine stiffened.

Gabriel stood in front of the oldster. This was still his war with the Shredder.

“Just thought you'd want an update, Stamp. I talked to your partner in crime before dawn, and she had something interesting to give up.”

“Mags?”

It was the first time Gabriel had ever seen the kid invested in another person. His arm slid off his knee, his posture going into that of a protector's.

“What did you do to her to get information, scrub?” he asked.

Gabriel let the jibe bounce off him. “What do you
think
a vampire can do?”

He was just poking at the boy, but it worked.

Stamp gritted his jaw, his eyes darkening even more. “I'm going to fucking kill you.”

Behind Gabriel, Pucci laughed. No one else did, though.

Then Stamp grabbed the post of his meager bed, dragging himself to a pathetic stand. He wobbled on his one leg.

“Where is she now?”

“With vampires.” Older ones, and Gabriel had the feeling they had more in store for Mags than just questioning.

“If you went into her mind . . .”

Gabriel only smiled again. “Her mind. It's a cluttered place. She didn't want to give anything up, and she resisted doing just that for a while. But she let something loose.”

Stamp launched himself toward them, reaching through the bars, and how a man with only one leg crossed the floor that fast, Gabriel didn't know. But that was a Shredder for you—quick, lethal, never to be underestimated.

“Check yourself,” Gabriel said coolly, not flinching even an inch as Stamp's fingers nearly brushed him, “or you'll find that I've also become comfortable with freezing minds.”

“I hear that's what you did with that 562 monster.” Stamp pointed at him. “You messed that thing up good with Mariah's help. Hell, Gabriel, you're a
real
goddamned vampire now. Are you proud?”

That should've stung as much as the punishing curse that Stamp had thrown at Gabriel. But over the last couple of weeks, Gabriel had found himself weighing his true nature against the absence of humanity. The older vamps told him that soon, he wouldn't even miss it. Besides, now that monsters were taking over the hubs, there was no need to hide behind a human façade to protect yourself anymore—you could be what you were.

That had come to make perfect sense at times, too.

Gabriel had even occasionally wondered what had been so great about humanity in the first place, especially since he was able to borrow emotions from Mariah. And he was wondering that same thing right now as he inched away from what was left of his conscience.

Even so, a tug pulled low in his chest.

It got him . . . this time. “I'm not here to talk about me, Stamp.”

The oldster had come around to Gabriel's other side, his voice loaded with sarcasm. “We got ourselves a little background on you ex-Shredders, thanks to your Mags. It seems that you two discovered recently that most of your other ex-Shredders—you know, the ones who were frakkin' paid off to live quiet lives after the government announced that monsters were extinct in society—advised you to stop hunting. Your friends even warned you that the government wouldn't take kindly to your resurrected enthusiasm for tracking and shredding.”

Pucci spoke up from behind Gabriel, his voice booming. “Mags revealed that after the government got rid of you Shredders, they went from extermination phase right into preter experimentation. That's why they were putting the monsters who were unfortunate enough to get caught into these asylums.”

The oldster leaned against the bars, just daring Stamp to reach through them again. “Now, putting all that together, why do you think the government switched gears in such a way, Stump?”

“I don't know.” The kid glared past Gabriel, at nothing, it seemed. But Gabriel knew that he was barricading his mind from any reads.

He remembered the taste of Stamp again, and his animated pulse gave a small blast.

Hana finally said something, and Gabriel stepped aside to let her do it. Her robes swished around her, smelling clean from the refreshing tawnyvale herb they used in the rooms.