Dread Nemesis of Mine (32 page)

"Real? But you are—" My mouth dropped open
as my slow wits picked up on the significance of his remark. "You
want to be like me?"

"Perhaps not a demon spawn," he said. "Real
flesh and blood would be enough."

"Why?"

"I believe my grasp on emotions is
improving." He pressed a hand to his midsection. "Based on the way
something inside me reacts to Elyssa's willingness to end my
existence makes me desire humanity. I do not wish to elicit
negative emotions in others because I am magically animated and
not, according to most standards, real."

I put a hand on his shoulder. "I understand
what you're going through. I've been there." Glancing back at the
cabin where the angel rested, I wondered what she would think of
his request. "I have no idea if Nightliss can turn you into a
human. Your creator, Mr. Gray, might know the answer."

"The Mr. Gray you mentioned earlier…he made
me?"

I grimaced, realizing I hadn't exactly sat
the poor golem down and explained my history with the gray men.
"Uh, I think so. From what I know, he's an angel like
Nightliss."

"Oh." Cinder looked at the ground. "Then
perhaps it is impossible. Otherwise, why did he not make me more
human?"

Aside from gray being his creator's favorite
color, I had no answer for him. "Look, let's talk about this
later." I motioned him onward. "Once Nightliss is up and about, she
can tell you for sure."

He stayed where he was. "Justin, I am sorry
for deceiving you."

My chest went cold. "What do you mean?"

"I did not actually desire to accompany you
to Adam. Instead, I wished only to ask you this question in
private."

I sighed in relief that his following me
wasn't part of an evil plot. "You don't have to come."

"Perhaps I will practice being bored as you
suggested earlier. It may further my understanding of
emotions."

"Are you sure you actually
feel
?" I
asked.

"According to definition, I believe I do."
He held out his hands and looked at them. "I also sense things by
touch, smell, sight, and sound." His arms dropped to his sides. "It
appears, however, I was not meant to experience or utilize
emotions. It was not until I
awoke
in Maximus's lab that the
first tingling of awareness or emotion entered into me. Whatever
caused such a change was not part of my original composition."

"Did Maximus do something to you?"

He opened his mouth, and then with robotic
precision, shrugged. "I do not know."

"Look, we'll talk about this. Just practice
your emotions, preferably somewhere away from Elyssa for now.
Okay?"

He nodded. "Thank you for listening,
Justin."

"No problem." I left him standing there and
headed for the corrugated steel building with a semi-circular roof
at the other side of the complex. A familiar figure emerged from
the front door and stormed toward one of the two-story dorm
buildings.
Adam
.

I hurried to catch up to him, following
inside where he slid a key into a door lock.

"Adam," I said.

He jerked. Looked at me. "Oh, Justin." He
opened the door. "Come on in."

I followed him into the dorm room. Two
unopened suitcases sat atop a still made bed. He moved them to the
floor then opened a duffel bag and dug out a memory card. I hoped
for a cue to start my talk, but he didn't say anything else,
content to keep messing with his arcphone, popping the memory card
in and looking at something on the screen.

"What you got there?" I asked.

He grunted. Flicked his finger and activated
the holographic display. A dizzying array of symbols filled the
air. Something about them seemed awfully familiar. He waved his
hand across the sea of symbols, arriving at a complicated pattern I
felt certain I'd seen before.

"Remember this?" he said.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to recall. "I
think I do."

"The spells you took from your mom's
computer. You asked me and Shelton to look them over."

My heart clenched. "The spells of mass
destruction? The ones someone could use to wipe out an entire race
of supernaturals?"

"Time we put it to use, Justin." He turned
off the display and shoved the phone in his pocket. "I deciphered
the runes for one of the spells. Got them all in place. Now all I
need to do is power the spell."

"You mean you're going to—"

"Yeah. We're going to wipe out every vampire
in Atlanta."

"Adam, this is a really, really bad idea." I
held out my hand. "Why don't you give me the memory card, and we'll
figure out a safer way to contain Maximus?"

His eyes flared. "After all the evil Maximus
and his army have done, you just want to let him go?"

"I never said that."

"No, but you might as well." He crossed his
arms. "Think about it. Maximus knows by now about what happened
here. He'll also know the Templars will make a play for him in
Atlanta. I'm sure his brainwashed minions are ready to go
toe-to-toe with Templars again, especially armed with those
bullets."

"Yeah, but he won't have Dash to help him.
He's out of places to run."

"He still has Daelissa on his side. And
there's nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal." Adam threw
his hands up. "Think about it, Justin! What's worse—losing more
Templars, or taking the vamps down without a fight?"

"Not every one of them is evil. And like you
said, he's brainwashed a lot of them." I shook my head. "And what
about other vampires—those who aren't even involved with Maximus?
That spell will kill them as well."

"Maybe they deserve it. They're bloodsucking
parasites."

Deep down, I really didn't have a soft spot
for vampires, but Felicia had proven not all of them were bad
people. "What if somebody else's sister is in there? Someone's
brother? Someone's kid? You'll be killing them. Felicia showed us
people can change, even vampires." I held out a hand imploringly.
"Adam, everyone deserves a chance to prove they're not a
monster."

His eyes reddened. "It's the only way. The
best way."

"Deep down in your heart, do you really
believe that?" I ran a hand down my face. "Believe me, if I had a
spell I could target Maximus with, I would do it. He needs to die.
Anyone who'd risk a vampling plague to advance his own power isn't
someone you want to keep sucking breath. Or blood, for that
matter."

Adam leaned against the door and slid down
it until he sat on the floor. "I don't know what to feel anymore.
Or believe," he said in a whisper. "I used to think I'd be okay
with Felicia ending up dead. After all the horrible things she'd
done to her body, I figured I'd get a phone call in the middle of
the night. Find out she was dead. Instead, she became a
vampire."

"It's not your fault."

"No, no, no, Justin. That's where you're
wrong." He gave a hollow laugh. "If I hadn't become so obsessed
with finding my parents' murderer, I wouldn't have ignored her. She
needed love and attention. I gave her nothing except the bare
minimum." He sighed. "Everything else, every emotion, every hour of
every day, I spent searching for the killer and training myself to
end them." His eyes met mine. "I drove her to this. I might as well
have thrown her in that room full of vamplings myself."

I walked over to him and held out my hand.
"Take it."

He looked up, puzzled, and gripped my
hand.

I pulled him to his feet. "What's done is
done. The important thing is that we make the right decisions from
here on out. Slaughtering vampires en masse is probably not one of
them."

He sighed. Pulled the memory card from his
phone. Handed it to me. I looked at the innocuous sliver of plastic
for a moment before handing it back. "I trust you not to use it," I
said. "But it may have other uses."

His eyebrow perked up. "Oh?"

"Can you modify it to knock out or disable
vampires instead of kill them?"

He pursed his lips and stared into the
distance. "The spell goes after the magical DNA vampires rely on to
live. It strips it out one tiny part of the equation, and kills
them. It's possible, with enough study, I could figure out how to
alter the runes, make it nonlethal, but that might take
months."

I shrugged. "Well, it might be useful in the
future."

He held up the chip. "The spells on here are
so advanced, I find it hard to believe even your mom could have
written them. It took me and Shelton some serious computer time to
decode even a couple of runes."

"If that's true, who's capable of such
complex spells?"

"It's not just about writing them, Justin.
It's also about powering them." He slid the phone into his front
pocket. "Even if you hadn't talked me out of this, I'd have to find
a heavy-duty arc generator and be able to focus the energy from it
to pull off a spell of this magnitude. There are only a couple of
individuals I know with that kind of power, and one of them has
helped us before."

"Nightliss and Daelissa." I thought back to
the display of power the dark angel had shown during my fight with
Vadaemos. It also reminded me why I'd come to find Adam in the
first place. "Nightliss is here."

His eyes went wide. "Here?" A look of wonder
lit his face. "Can she help?"

I grimaced and explained the situation.
"Meghan is helping her—or trying to. Nothing is certain yet."

His face fell. "Oh. Please let me know the
instant you find out."

"Of course. Hopefully we'll know something
soon." I had more to say, but pain spiked in my calf. I clenched my
teeth. Dark smoky tendrils carved the air before me. A bright
coppery scent filled my nostrils. I lost all sense of balance, and
fell hard onto my back.

Maximus leers down at me. He extends a hand.
A flare of anger energizes me. With a roar, I spring to my feet and
ram a fist at the vampire's face. I miss and hit the wall behind
him. Concrete dust billows from the hole my fist makes. Maximus
yells. Fear shows in his face. I lunge. An invisible force stops me
inches from his throat. A blinding flash of light seems to explode
in my head and I fall back, staggering, and squeezing my
temples.

"Justin, stop! It's me!"

I looked up to see Adam, staff glowing
bright before him.

"Wh—what happened?" My head ached. Sharp
pains raced up and down my leg.

"You yelled something about Maximus and
nearly caved in my skull." He backed into the hallway, clearly not
taking any chances. "Dude, you must be suffering some kind of
post-traumatic stress. Have you talked to Meghan about it?"

A sinking feeling in my guts told me it had
nothing to do with stress. The vampling curse was doing something
to my mind. Bad enough it might kill me, but if it made me a danger
to everyone around, that would be much worse. I nodded. "Yeah.
Maybe I should see if she has something I can take."

"Probably a good idea." He lowered his
staff. The glow winked out. "I'll study the runes some more and let
you know if I figure anything out. Okay?"

"Yeah." I pinched the bridge of my nose to
fight back a throbbing headache and left the room. "Sorry about,
uh, you know." I waved at the hole in the wall.

Rather than return to the cabin, I took a
long walk around the Templar compound, breathing the night air,
giving my head time to clear, and the headache time to fade. My
guts twisted inside me as I considered the inevitable conclusion to
the vampling infection. An occasional wave of hope took the sting
of fear away as I meandered the complex, but uncertainty kept
dealing it a deathblow before it could stick.

I walked past the edge of the central
buildings toward a grassy area where a few trees grew. An old stone
shed sat in the center, the wear and tear on it giving it the
appearance of being much older than most of the other buildings in
the area. Cinder sat at the base of the outbuilding with a glazed
expression on his impassive features. Even though the moon gave off
some light, I probably wouldn't have seen him without my night
vision.

He looked at me. "I think I have 'gotten a
handle', as you say, on being bored. At first I found the new
environment to be most stimulating, but after achieving a great
deal of familiarity with it by sitting here for over an hour, I
sensed an uncomfortable lack of newness which urged me to seek out
new stimuli. But I deemed it best to stay here away from the other
Templars lest they decide I am a threat."

"I don't think I've ever heard boredom
described quite that way, but you've nailed it on the head." I
studied him for a moment. "I should send you to a speech
therapist."

"Are my vocal communications garbled?"

"No, but you hardly use any inflections so I
can't tell if you're happy, sad, bored, or what. Maybe I should sit
you down in front of some soap operas for a while. You'll hear all
sorts of inflections then."

"I would be grateful, Justin."

Something about his calm manner brought a
sense of peace to me. I took a seat on the grass across from him,
questions about this strange being bubbling in my mind. My phone
chimed with a text message from Elyssa before I had a chance to ask
him anything.

Nightliss is awake.

I sprang to my feet.

"Have I offended you in some way?" Cinder
asked.

I shook my head. "Nightliss is
conscious."

"May I speak with her?" The faintest hint of
hope registered in his voice.

"I don't know if she has her strength back
yet. Let's see what's going on before we assault her with a ton of
questions, okay?"

He stood. Gave a stiff nod. "This is
acceptable."

When we reached the cabin, Elyssa waited
outside. She spared Cinder a cursory glance and stopped me. "She's
still weak, Justin. Meghan didn't want her seeing anyone yet, but
she keeps asking for you." Her lip trembled. "I hope she can
help."