Blood Rules (17 page)

“Hana?” Pucci asked with more emphasis.

She sighed, and Chaplin trained his big brown eyes on her.

“For goodness' sake, Antonio,” she finally said, coming to a stand. “There is a time for talking and a time for thinking. This would be a thinking moment.”

The big man bristled. Hell, the oldster could've testified that Pucci's brown hair was about to stand on end. Maybe his olivetoned skin even went a little ruddier, although he wasn't sure Pucci's ego allowed blushing.

But Hana didn't shy away. No, she gave the man a look that told everyone just who held the power in the relationship. And maybe that was why she stuck with Pucci—because she liked controlling a person no one else could tame.

The oldster was no therapist. However, he was astute enough at picking up unsaid vibes to know that it was time to move on, before Pucci decided to be twice the dick he was.

He pointed toward the tents. “Should we mingle, ask round for a place to stay and for water sources?”

Hana agreed, leading Chaplin and the oldster toward the tents. Pucci trailed behind like the caboose he was.

The smoke grew even thicker because of the campfires. Near one of them, outside a tent, some sort of meeting was in progress. Seven humans surrounding a long-bearded man who was writing in the dirt. Once he was done, his audience leaned in to read whatever he'd written.

Followers, the oldster thought. They weren't using computers out here, so they were simulating the act of following their leader's Texts.

Whatever entertained the masses.

More cheers went up from the opposite side of the camp, but there was an even louder sound nearby—and it was in Old American.

“Where's my sun-shield blanket?” a small, old crotchety voice yelled.

Hana, Chaplin, and the oldster exchanged surprised glances.

They turned a corner, going toward where they thought they'd heard the voice when they were stopped short by the sight of a nightmare waiting just beyond the tents.

A leathered, tall figure wearing FlyShoes, a chest puncher rising from its back like a network of cables and steel . . .

Pucci's voice came from behind the oldster. “Stamp?”

The oldster's body temperature blasted as he jumped backward, behind a tent, where the rest of the Badlanders had darted, too. But he kept himself from changing.

Doing it here would be a death sentence.

Breathe,
he told himself.
Don't change....

Hana and Pucci were holding to each other, as if it were the only way they could ward off their changes, too. Her hand fisted his shirt, and he clung to her like a safety blanket.

Chaplin was sticking his nose round the tent, peeking to see if Stamp was approaching. The Shredder wouldn't just stroll into a populated area, would he? People would freak because the presence of a monster hunter would mean just one thing . . .

Monsters.

When Chaplin looked back at the group, he seemed bewildered. He jerked his snout toward where they'd seen Stamp, as if asking the oldster to check round the tent, too.

When he did, there was nothing out there.

Just the dirt and tumble trees and rocks.

“He's gone,” the oldster said.

Pucci asked, “Like he was never really there?”

“Just like that, yeah.”

They'd all seen him—it hadn't been a figment of the oldster's imagination. For some reason, he thought that maybe Stamp had wanted it that way—uncertainty. Fright.

“What should we do?” Hana asked. “Run?”

Chaplin was shaking his head, and Pucci seemed to understand.

“In order to run fast enough, we'd have to change here in the camp,” the big man whispered. “Everyone would see us . . . or at least the blur we'd leave. We might cause an uproar and someone would alert the higher authorities.”

Hana glanced up at him from the cradle of his arms. “What other choice do we have?”

The oldster's smile was a dim one, but it held respect for the Shredder. Not a bad plan to make the prey weak with doubt.

“He's flushing us out into the open, blurs or not. Afterward, Stamp will go right back to tracking us. Or, if we stay here because we know he's out there, he'll only wait, and he'll do that until there's a full moon. Then we'll be forced to leave because there's no way we can control a change or the need to hunt.”

No ifs, ands, or buts about it, the oldster thought. Stamp had shown himself because he wanted them to know that they were cornered.

But the oldster wondered if Stamp expected a geriatric to have some game left in him, too.

“He expects us to run,” he said, “and we damned well should. We can rustle up some heat suits to carry with us so we don't have to find shelter during the day. Then we get us an empty tent near the very edge of camp where we can undergo a change, then bust out undetected. It's a chance we'll have to take, and Stamp thinks we wouldn't dare risk it. But if we do, we'll at least get a head start on him. Hopefully Mariah and Gabriel will have gotten to the nearest hub by now, and once we arrive at it, too, it'll be harder for Stamp to track our scents with all the other peoples' smells.”

The oldster got no arguments from the others as the dawn crept ever closer in the sky, no doubt moving as surely as the Shredder who had tracked them here.

T
his was the second night that Gabriel and Mariah had been on the outskirts of main GBVille, and already he wasn't loving the alteration in their plans.

And that alteration was named Taraline.

Yeah, Taraline. They'd had little choice but to bring her along.

They'd settled in a long cave that'd been created by a gathering of boulders just outside Little Romania, one of the many burgs where offshore vendors and local labor stayed until it was time to go into this main urban hub itself to work their General Benefactor jobs. Other burgs—Singaporetown, New-New Delhi, Saigon41—surrounded GBVille like lower satellites rotating the hub that was set on the higher, leveled tree-bare rise. GBVille was nowhere near the size that old Denver had been; it was far more concentrated, the population whittled down after the mosquito epidemic in particular. It was even the smallest hub in the United States, though a lot of them had shrunk in size and scope during the recent Indian sanctions.

Gabriel glanced at Mariah, who was looking up at the hub, too. At this distance, the gray buildings looked like stabs of sculpture, all celebrating the hope and devotion that the General Benefactors Corporation extended toward its populace. The structures took on the forms of clasped hands, old-time cathedrals, domes that resembled pregnant bellies hinting of fertility and fruitful promise. Below that, shaded boulders and smoke lingered, almost as if they held up all that shiny-murky urbanness.

The place buzzed with vibration, even from this distance. Gabriel could feel it in his very bones. He wondered if Mariah could, as well, though he doubted that a were-creature would feel it out of her most powerful form.

Reluctantly, he glanced to the other side of him, where Taraline took in the sights.

Clamping down on his vampire temper, Gabriel crooked his finger at her, then guided her back into their boulder cave so no one would see her standing there in that veil. Not that this remote location they'd camped out in had a lot of humans coming and going, but you could never be too careful with a companion who practically shouted,
LOOK AT ME! DISEASE!

He stopped in the solar torch-lit dimness of the cave—Taraline had thought to bring a few of her own supplies when they'd left the necropolis, but he didn't have it in him to be thankful for that.

“You shouldn't be out there for anyone to see,” he said.

Even under her veil, he could've sworn Taraline was smiling at him. And it'd be a satisfied smile, too, because after she'd caught Mariah and him in that herb house, she'd become queen of the castle.

“I'm sorry,” she said in that deep voice. “I haven't seen GBVille in years. Even from down here, it seems so very different.”

Mariah walked up behind him, giving him room. She'd been doing that ever since they'd sped out of the necropolis, and Gabriel wondered if it was because of . . .

Well, what'd gone down in that herb house.

The claw marks Mariah had abraded into his back still burned, though Gabriel knew they'd healed by now. It was the brute inside him that kept the reminder alive—the urges he hadn't been able to ditch when she'd brought out the beast in him.

But now was the time to handle the other difficult woman in his life.

“Taraline,” he said, “just to be clear, you're to stay here while we canvass the hub. There's no way you can go with us.”

When they'd arrived, they'd decided to get comfortable in a camping area outside the actual hub while they came up with a mode of operation. And just as Taraline had done last night during the planning phase, she butted heads with him now.

“But I can blend.”

“Yeah, I saw all that blending back in the necropolis, with the people who moved through those shadows. I'm sure you're just as adept, too, because that's the only way the living dead can exist among others. But you won't blend here. Believe me.”

“I see. Even if I'm not contagious, I'm hideous, and that's a worse disease.”

Gabriel tamped down the urge to wipe her mind with some voice sway, but just after Taraline had discovered him and Mariah in the herb house, he'd tried some hypnotic words on her and they hadn't worked. Taraline had a real strong mind, and just before he'd even considered speeding toward her to whip off her veil so he could look into her eyes for a stronger moment of persuasion, she'd beaten him to it.

Now, she repeated the same gesture she'd made back at that herb house, calmly lifting up a flap that blended into her veil so expertly that Gabriel hadn't noticed it before.

Below it were two more flaps.

When she raised those, Gabriel saw her eyes. Watery blue eyes, and he peered into them, sensing the same thing he'd known the other night—that she wouldn't ever expose him and Mariah. She would genuinely aid them as much as she could.

Her thoughts were so pure that Gabriel couldn't refute them. He couldn't even bring himself to look into those eyes to see if he could hypnotize her into leaving altogether because, as Mariah kept reminding him, Taraline had gotten them this far. Was it possible she'd be even more helpful?

Had the psychic foreseen
that
?

“Listen,” Gabriel whispered. “Just leave the hub for another night. Are you getting me?”

The woman smoothed down her eye flaps as well as the top flap, almost like a lady demurely adjusting a blouse that had gaped open to show her necessaries.

“I understand,” she said softly. Mariah took a step closer, and his imprint-link with her began thudding. This made him even angrier, because the last thing he needed was to feel her so acutely. She only reminded him of the worst when he only wanted the better.

Taraline held up her hands, and Gabriel knew he was about to hear another plea to come with them. Wonderful.

“I wasn't sure before today that I could think of a way to carry through with a plan that's been brewing in my head, but now I think I'm more confident in its execution.” She paused, as if presenting something grand to them. “The friend I spoke of? The asylum contact? She was sympathetic to me before I left society, and I think I can find her, if she's still here. She worked from her home, so—”

“Your friend's a shut-in?” Mariah asked.

Of course she'd be interested in another fellow recluse. Mariah and her father had also been the type who'd cut themselves off from society for fear of bad guys everywhere. Hubs were full of shut-away humans who weren't nearly as overstimulated as the people who'd chosen to go outside in the streets. Mariah and her dad had left their hub a while ago, so who knew if they would've ended up like a lot of the rest of the city people—too spastic and distracted to think for themselves if they should ever come out of their homes.

Taraline was nodding as she said, “If I could contact my friend, ask a few questions without her ever knowing why, maybe we could all make our way into the asylum together.”

Gabriel ignored her assumptions. “You want to talk to her without her knowing why we're asking about that asylum? Let me guess—are you suggesting that I sway her?”

“If she were on excessive job neuroenhancers, your sway probably wouldn't be of much use. But she had her intake under control.”

Gabriel wrapped his mind around what Taraline was suggesting: swaying a human while they were in a hub. He'd wanted to avoid the act even more than he'd done out in the nowheres. Here, there'd be fewer places to hide if he should be caught. Here, there'd be computer reception and arm cameras everywhere, and humans could capture him committing his monster crimes....

“We'll give it some thought, Taraline,” he said, mostly to assuage her. “Just stay here while we scout things out. We'll be back before you know it.”

“But—”

Gabriel raised a finger, and she stopped right there. Maybe she was remembering his fangs and red eyes. And maybe that was a fine thing.

Leaving Taraline in the cave, he went outside, where he stood on a flat rock that offered a view of GBVille in all its questionable glory.

As the vibrations from the hub dug into him, the scent of meat soup wafted by, souring the air with a tinge of vinegar even from about a half mile out of Little Romania. Hunger didn't affect him or Mariah, as they'd done their best to hunt before entering the more populous areas. Until the full moon, Mariah would do all right eating the human food they could trade for with the remaining pure water they had from the Badlands, but finding sustenance would get a lot tougher for Gabriel from this point on.