Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (69 page)

“I saw her. She shattered them with some kind of spell.”

The bartender was talking, while Rico held onto the girl.

“Why carry all this?” Miguel held one of the girl’s guns  negligently in one hand, with the rest tucked into his belt. “If  she’s so powerful?”

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“I’m telling you, she’s some kind of witch,” the bartender  said stubbornly. “The mage I sent you this morning was her  brother. She came looking for him.”

“Where did you take him?” the girl demanded, her voice

full of cold, brittle anger.

Everyone ignore her. “Her aura feels strange,” Miguel said, running a hand an inch or so above her body. “Not human, but not exactly mage either.”

“What are you girl?” Rico demanded his breath in her face.  She didn’t flinch, despite the fact that she had to be able to see  his fangs at that range. If she hadn’t known what the villagers  feared before, she certainly did now.

“Tell me what you’ve done with my brother or I’ll show  you.” She sounded no more concerned about her predicament  than she had at the bar. Tomas couldn’t tell if that was bravado  or stupidity, but he was leaning towards the latter. Her heart rate  had barely sped up, despite the obvious danger.

“What about me?” the bartender demanded. “You said if I  brought you the mage, I was safe. I want my nephew’s safety in  exchange for this one.”

“That will depend,” Rico said, jerking her close, “on what  she can do. You had better hope one of them is what the master  wants, or we’ll be taking out the price for our inconvenience in  your blood.”

Tomas didn’t move, didn’t breath, a lifetime’s habit keeping him so still that a small bird lit on a tree branch right in front of his face. But inside, he was reeling. It wasn’t the cavalierkidnapping that surprised him. The men’s master, a vampire named Alejandro, had been organizing hunts on the Day of the  Dead for as long as Tomas had known him. While families

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across Mexico were busily collecting delicacies for the dead  – chocolate for
 
mole
, fresh eggs for the
 
pan de muerto
, cigarettes  and mescal  –  Alejandro was collecting treats of his own. Strong,  smart, cunning  –  they’d all had some advantage that made them  attractive prey. Assembled together, they were always told the  same thing: last  until morning or escape beyond the borders of  Alejandro’s lands and win your freedom. They were given  flashlights, weapons and maps showing the extent of the tenmile square area he claimed. Then, at midnight, they were  released.

No one ever lived to see  dawn.

The participants had changed over the years, from Aztecs to conquistadors to local farmers sprinkled with the occasional  American tourist. But one group Alejandro had always left strictly alone was magic users. He liked a challenge, but not prey capable of bringing down the wrath of the Silver Circle, the guardian body of the magical community, on his head. He was twisted, cruel and sadistic, but he wasn’t crazy. At least, he hadn’t been before. It seemed that some things had changed around here, after all.

“I told you to let go of me.” The girl’s heart rate had finally  sped up, but Tomas didn’t think it was from fear. Her  complexion was flushed and her eyes were bright, but she  wasn’t trembling, wasn’t panicking. And there was something  wrong about  that, because even if she were a witch, at three to  one odds, with two of the three being master vampires, most  magic users would be more than a little intimidated. His  estimate of her intelligence took another dive, just as what felt  like a silent thunderclap exploded in the air all around him.

A shock wave ran through the ground, shivering through his body like a jolt to his funny bone. It shook the surrounding trees and caused the dusty soil to rise up like  steam. The little bird took off in a startled  flutter of wings and Tomas made a grab for

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the limb it had been sitting on, catching hold just as the ground  beneath his feet began to buck and slide. Within seconds the  slide became a torrent of red earth heading for the side of the  mountain  –  and a drop  of more than a mile.

The bartender lost his footing and went down, hitting his head against the side of a massive oak. It must have knocked him out, because the last Tomas saw of him was his body rumbling over the cliff, still as limp as a rag doll. The two vampires jumped for the trees on the opposite path, out of the main rush of earth. They made it, but the girl wasn’t so lucky.  She fell into the crashing stream of rocks, foliage and dirt, her scream lost in the roar of half a mountainside sluicing away.

Tomas hadn’t wanted to get close enough for the vampires to scent him, but it meant that she was too far away from him to grab. She managed to catch hold of a tree stump in the middle of the sliding mass, but she was getting pounded by a hail of debris.  Tomas tried to tell himself that she could hold on, that he didn’t have to risk being seen by Alejandro’s men on a dangerous rescue attempt. He didn’t mind the thought of dying so much  –  considering what he was about to face, that was pretty much inevitable  –  but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take Alejandro with him.

Then the church bell began to chime, its plaintive call cutting through the sound of the earthquake, reverberating across the valley only to be thrown back by the nearby hills.  Tomas glanced behind him to see the back end of the old building hanging precariously over nothing at all, its foundation half gone in the landslide. With a shudder and a crack, the church broke in half, the heavy stones of its colonial-era construction beginning  to crumble. Some of them were ancient, having been looted by the builders from nearby Mayan ruins, and weighed hundreds of pounds apiece. Even if the girl managed to hold on to her precarious perch, they would sweep

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her over the mountainside or break her into pieces where she

lay.

Bile rolled up thick in his throat. Alejandro had wanted to make a monster of him, a carbon copy of himself. But he’d probably be pleased enough at the thought that he’d turned  Tomas into someone who would stand by and watch an innocent die because saving her might cost him something. He might never live to kill that creature, but he wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

Tomas let go of the limb and leapt for the one spot of colour in the darkness, the girls pale face, using her as a beacon to guide him through the hail of falling debris. He reached her just before the first of the ancient stones did, grabbed her around the waist and leaped for the side of the path that remained half stable. It was the one where his old associates  were trying to scramble to steadier ground, but at the moment, that seemed a minor issue. Despite senses that made the falling hillside look as if it was doing so in slow motion, he couldn’t dodge everything.  He twisted to avoid a stone taller than him, and slammed into a smaller one he hadn’t seen. He heard his left knee break, but all he felt was a curious popping sensation, no real pain  –  not yet  –and then they were landing on a surface that wasn’t falling but was far from steady.

Tomas rolled and got  up on his good knee in time to block a savage kick from Miguel. He’d hoped that, in the confusion and danger, his old comrades might not have recognized him, but no such luck. Miguel hit a nearby tree hard, but filled back onto his feet almost immediately  and was back before Tomas could regain his stance.

Powerful hands choked him, setting spots dancing in front of his eyes. He grabbed his assailant’s arms in an attempt to keep his throat uncrushed. He pushed Miguel’s arm the wrong way back until he heard  the elbow crack. The vamp didn’t let

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go, but his hold weakened enough for Tomas to twist and get an  arm into his stomach, using all his strength to send him  staggering into the path of the falling church. One of the  tumbling pews caught Miguel on the side  of his head, knocking  him back against the newly created embankment, where the  heavy wooden cross from the altar pinned him with the force of  a sledgehammer.

It wasn’t quite a stake, but it seemed to do the trick, Tomas thought dazedly, right before something long and sharp slammed into his side.

“So the traitor has come back to us at last,” Rico hissed in  his ear twisting the shard of wood so that it scraped along his  ribs, sending stabs of hot pain all up and down his midsection.  “Allow me to be the first to welcome you home.”

Tomas jerked away before the sliver could reach his heart, but his knee wouldn’t support him and he stumbled. He felt the hillside disintegrate under his foot and then he was falling, tumbling halfway down the side of the embankment. He grasped the top of a coffin, one of many now sticking out of the newly churned earth, to save himself, and the lid popped open just in time to intercept another slice from Reno’s stake. A pale, silverfish-grey arm flopped out of the tilted casket, and Tomas sent its owner a silent apology before breaking it off the limb to use it as a makeshift weapon.

He spun to see Rico a few feet away, his hand raised to strike. Only the blow never fell. Rico jerked once, twice, then he dropped, falling along with the last of the debris into the valley below. For a moment, Tomas didn’t understand what had happened. Then a cascade of spent shotgun shells tumbled down the embankment, rattling against the coffin lid like bones, and he looked up to see a pair of slanting hazel eyes staring down at him.

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“Are you all right?” The girl’s blood was dripping onto his

face, a soft wet plucking like a light rain.

“I should be asking you that,” he said, struggling to get back

over the edge with only one good leg.

He felt it  when his skin absorbed her blood, soaking it up like water on parched earth, using it to begin repairs on the damage he’d suffered. But it wasn’t enough to do much good.  What he needed was a true feeding, something he hadn’t taken time for recently. It had  cost him in the fight; he couldn’t afford to let it lessen his already slim chances against Alejandro.

He paused by Miguel’s impaled body, still full of the blood he’d recently stolen, some of it already pooling in his eye sockets. The sight worked on Tomas the way the smell of a feast would on a starving human. His mouth began to water and his fangs to lengthen without any conscious command from him. He would have delayed it, would have gotten rid of the girl first, but he couldn’t risk having the blood  coagulate and lose the energy it contained.

“I have to feed,” he said simply.

Instead of recoiling as he’d expected, she merely took in his injuries with an experienced eye. “Yeah. Heroics have a way of coming back and biting you in the ass. But when you ’ve done we need to talk.”

He nodded and hunched over Miguel so at least she wouldn’t have to watch. Tomas  couldn’t remember the last time he’d fed from another vampire, but he quickly recalled why it wasn’t common practice. The reused blood nourished him, the light-headed rush of feeding giving the same almost narcotic high as always, but the taste was like metal in his mouth. He forced himself to finish, trying to concentrate on mending and on the grating sensation in his knee slowly fading. The healing

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of wounds, especially if done so quickly, was excruciating and  this was no exception. Tears had leaked out of the corners of his  eyes by the time he was finished, forced out by the pain, but  Tomas didn’t mind. Pain was good. Pain meant he was still  alive.

“I hate it when that happens.”

Tomas looked up to find the girl scowling around at the cemetery. Or what was left of it. A huge swathe had been carved out of the middle, where nothing but slick red earth remained.  On either side, coffins stuck out of the  ground like bony fingers, with a few marigold crosses scattered here and there haphazardly. Up above, on the crest of the hill, the remaining half of the church swayed dangerously on its ancient foundations. One last pew teetered precariously on the edge  of the abyss, half in and half out of the structure, while inside the church, a single candle still burned.

“You handle yourself pretty well in a fight,” she continued,

as Tomas rose from Miguel’s  exsanguinated corpse.

“I’ve had some practice.”

She gave  a sputtering laugh, short and mocking. “Yeah, I

bet.”

Tomas pulled himself over the edge and examined her.  Amazingly, she seemed to be all right. There was a shallow cut on her forehead and a few scrapes and scratches here and there, but nothing serious.  It was little short of miraculous.

“We need to talk, but we ought to get out of here,” she said,  slinging her shotgun over her back again. He’d heard her  reloading while he fed. “Half the village is likely to be here any  minute.”

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Tomas sat down on the  edge of a stone bearing weathered

Mayan hieroglyphs. “I doubt it,” he said wryly.

She studied him silently for a moment, then plopped down

alongside. “Want to fill me in?”

“This is the Day of the Dead. And in this area, that term has  always had more than  one meaning.” He spent a few minutes  sketching out for her Alejandro’s idea of a good time, making it  as clinical and unemotional as he could. It didn’t seem to help.

“Let me get this straight. That son of a bitch has taken
 
my

brother
 
to use in his stupid games?”