Chapter 29
CHAPTER 29
“ C an’t you go any faster?”
“If I go faster, we’ll get pulled over. Dammit, Mario, sheath the claws! We’ll get there and you shredding the car to bits isn’t going to make us get there any sooner!”
Mario knew Terry was right, and he tried to calm himself, but it wasn’t working. He was lucky that Terry, Angel, Otir, and Frer had quickly figured out something had happened when the Capriccio finale fell apart after his swing across the stage. Everyone knew something had gone wrong, of course, but his friends were smart. After Mario had told them about Alia during the show intermission, they had all broken the rules and secreted their cell phones in their costumes — and considering that the Eten brothers wore only tights with athletic supporters, it had made Mario smile, if only briefly. They’d been ready when Mario had finally stopped running and had begged the use of a cell phone from a kind tourist who had only asked for a picture with him in return for its use. He’d called Terry, who had picked up immediately, and they’d arrived with surprising speed in the brothers’ SUV, still in their own costumes. Mario had told them he could track Ilya, and they’d accepted it without question.
Now they were on the freeway, speeding north, with Terry driving because his Elvish reflexes were faster than anyone but Mario’s, and Mario had never learned to drive.
“Listen, I’m glad you all came, but you don’t need to risk yourselves in this fight. I don’t know how many vampires might actually be there. I can handle one, maybe two. Any more than that and I don’t think I’m coming out alive. That’s not counting whoever else they have in there, since I doubt the people who actually snatched Ilya are even paranormals. But I believe our friends are still alive. While I’m fighting, you try to get them out.”
“Fuck that,” was Frer’s surprising reply. “We’re in, Mario. You’re our friend, too.”
“We’re in,” Otir agreed. “Don’t discount us. Our ancestors fought the old gods. A couple of piddly little undead don’t frighten us.”
“Didn’t the elves kill one of your kind and send his head to Odin, who dumped it in a well to answer stupid questions for all time?” Terry asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“Smartass,” Frer growled. “Only till Ragnarok.”
“I saved back some magic for an emergency,” Angel added in a blatant attempt to head off an argument. “It’s not much, but I should be able to bind any purely human threats for a while. Assuming we surprise them and catch them in a group.”
Mario appreciated their willingness to help. He just hoped that the vampire and his minions — there were always minions — didn’t injure any of them. To protect its own existence, the vampire would try to kill anyone or anything it felt was a threat.
“There!” He pointed to the next exit, and Terry immediately steered for the ramp. They were well north of the city, where the traffic was sparse and signs of human habitation even sparser. The road they turned on was unlit, though well paved enough to not give the SUV any problem.
They continued on for a couple of miles, and Mario felt the connection to Ilya growing stronger. Then, as they topped a small rise, he saw the lights of a large house.
“Stop here!” he told Terry, and the half-elf pulled the SUV over to the shoulder. “We can’t just drive up. In fact, we need to get the car well off the road, just in case they have a patrol.”
Terry turned the headlights off, and with his own dark vision and Mario’s help, he drove into the desert perpendicular to the road. They finally found a cluster of large boulders and sparse vegetation, but it served well enough to make the vehicle less obvious. Otir and Frer opened the back, and Mario watched them digging into the rear for things to help in the rescue.
He knew the others would take some time to get to the house, but the sensation of Ilya being so near pulled at Mario, a summons he couldn’t resist.
“I have to go,” he said. “Terry, you guide them, since you can see in the dark. Try not to draw attention and watch out for wolves and bats.”
“Seriously?” Angel looked perturbed, but then she shooed him away. “Go on, Mario. We’ll follow as fast as we can.”
Mario could see as well in the moonless dark as in the daylight, and he took off across the barren earth, every stride bringing him closer to Ilya. He slowed when the lights from the windows of the mansion grew strong enough to throw shadows from the rocks and scrub brush around him. There was a tall, black metal fence stretching before him, but he wasn’t one of the magical creatures who could be repelled by cold iron. He moved to one side, where the windows were shielded by drapes, then leapt easily over the fence, landing silently on the other side. He could feel that Ilya was on the other side of the enormous house, so he kept to the shadows, moving almost invisibly along the cold stone of the house. He didn’t know if there were cameras or any other technological protections, but he doubted it. The location of the place spoke of complacency, that whoever had placed the vampire’s lair in this barren patch of desert counted on the stark remoteness and the lack of belief of this world for protection. It was a fortuitous mistake for Mario, and probably a fatal one for the people who’d taken Ilya.
His initial instinct, of course, was to rush to Ilya, to burst in and kill everything standing between them. The image of the Hanged Man card that Persephone had given him appeared in his mind, and her words of caution rang in his ears.
Slowly, Mario. You won’t reach your objective by blundering past the warning signs or falling into traps you could have avoided. Look at things from a different perspective.
There could be guards and traps, and while Mario was tough, he wasn’t immune to bullets. He needed to figure out if there were defenses to overcome, and, most importantly, where the vampire was.
The house seemed enormous, though probably made bigger in his mind because he wanted to hasten when he needed to go cautiously. Then he paused for a moment. A different perspective? Above, rather than below?
He looked upward. The house was three levels from the arrangement of the windows, but no doubt the ceilings were high, since the building soared up at least fifty feet, which was why he had spotted it from so far away. The roof was peaked and gabled, but Mario had no concern for heights. The walls were of rectangular, dressed stone, so it was easy enough for him to scale up the side of the building, moving quickly and as quietly as possible.
When he gained the roof, he saw that there were several skylights offering views into the rooms below. As he approached the first one, he caught the sound of an engine approaching, and he knelt, hurrying toward the front of the house and flattening himself against the shingles so he could overlook the main entrance.
A glossy black limousine was approaching from the opposite direction he and his friends had approached, coming from the north rather than the south. Gates opened at the entrance of a circular driveway, admitting the long, sleek vehicle before silently closing behind it. The limo pulled up to the front of the house, and Mario watched someone step down from where they had apparently been waiting below him, crossing to the car and opening one of the rear doors.
“Welcome, Master,” a voice said, and Mario wanted to snarl as he recognized it. Gordon Everley! He owed his lover an apology once they were out of this mess; Ilya had been right all along in thinking Gordon was involved.
Self-recrimination was forgotten, however, as someone emerged from the limo. Dressed in an impeccable suit that looked expensive even from this distance, Mario watched the tall, handsome blond man who stood up and walked toward Gordon. It was definitely one of the board members from Circo, a man he recalled named Alastair Blake. Mario was unsurprised when his fangs and claws extended of their own accord, because he knew, with the instincts that had been born into his kind for thousands of years, that this man was a vampire.
At last, his enemy had a name and a face — but Mario was likely running out of time.
His elevated position gave him a distinct advantage, and he backed away from the edge of the roof so the vampire wouldn’t spot him. He could still hear, however, as Gordon fawned over Blake and was abruptly shut down by his master.
“I’ll deal with your desires later, Gordon. Right now I hunger. Bring the werewolf to my chambers. We have a bit of time until the power of the dark moon is at its peak, and I will need all my strength to work the change.”
Any further conversation was cut off as they entered the house, and Mario knew he needed to find Ilya and the others and get them out before the vampire started the ritual. For that was all it could be: the vampire was going to make the blood sacrifices necessary to create another of his kind. And Mario had to stop him at all costs.
He moved to the closest of the skylights, which overlooked a darkened room that appeared empty from what he could tell, as he detected no heat signatures of anyone moving below. As he started toward the next one, a soft noise drew his attention. He turned, claws raised, lips parted to attack, but he spotted Terry as he gained the edge of the roof. The half-elf froze when he caught sight of Mario, holding up his hands.
“It’s just me,” he murmured softly. “I left the others when we got to the fence, since they can see well enough now.”
Mario relaxed, moving toward Terry and motioning for him to crouch down, lest anyone see them silhouetted against the sky.
“The vampire is here,” Mario whispered. “It sounds like he’s going to sacrifice Ilya and the others to make a new vampire. And Ilya was right — Gordon is involved. I suspect he’s a revenant, which is why he always creeped me out.”
Revenants were human servants who drank a vampire’s blood. It formed a different bond than when a vampire — or dhampir, for that matter — drank the blood of a human, marking them for other vampires to know to stay away. It was a bond that didn’t show, and it could only have been felt if he had ever touched Gordon, which he hadn’t. Revenants were necessary to a vampire’s survival, since they became addicted to the blood that extended their lives, and in return, they would do anything asked of them. If the vampire were to withhold blood or be destroyed, the revenant would quickly go mad and die. It was why revenants were often used by their masters as spies and assassins, since their complete loyalty was never in question. Gordon had sold his soul for a chance at immortality, and Mario felt no pity for anything that happened to him. In his eyes, Gordon Everley was no longer human.
“Check the other skylights. See if you can spot anything we can use,” he told Terry. “We don’t have much time.”
The half-elf nodded. “Be careful. Angel said there’s a ley line running beneath the area. It’s faint, but it might be why they built the house out here. She’s going to look for magical protections and try to bring them down.”
They separated, and Mario was grateful for Terry’s help, since there was a lot of roof to cover and he didn’t know how long the vampire would take to feed and prepare for the ritual. He could feel himself getting closer to Ilya, but he needed to check for any traps, obstacles, or other dangers that might be lying in wait for him.
The rooms below seemed to be empty of anything but furniture. But when he checked the fourth room, he could feel Ilya so close that it was hard to fight off the desire to break his way in. He continued to hold himself in check, but it grew harder as he felt time ticking away.
This skylight was bigger than the others, and round, appearing to have some mechanism which allowed it to open, since it sat into a recess with a lip around it rather than flush to the roof like the others. He pried at it experimentally, but it didn’t budge, not even when subjected to as much strength as he dared exert without shattering it and attracting notice. He stayed to one side, hopefully out of sight from the inhabitants, as he studied the situation. From what he could tell, it was near the center of the house and not against any outside walls, meaning the room below contained no windows.
There was also a glyph on the floor immediately beneath the skylight, and as Mario moved around the perimeter, he spotted cages along one wall. There were four of them, and he saw Daphne, Cole, and Gina in the first three.
The fourth held Ilya.
Mario’s heart raced. Ilya was alive and awake, his eyes open, but his face was creased in lines of concentration. Then his eyes widened, and he looked up directly at Mario. Their gazes locked and Ilya shook his head, looking panicked. No doubt he was worried about Mario’s safety, just as Mario was almost desperate about him. But Mario smiled, a feral hunter’s grin. He was going to save Ilya, and nothing was going to get in his way.
Again Mario felt the urge to rip the skylight open, but the glyph below gave him pause. There were two ways vampires came into being. One was the way his father had been created, where a vampire sacrificed a part of their own power to imbue another of their own bloodline with immortality. Mario knew of the other method, through sacrifice at the dark of the moon, with a call to dark spirits who were drawn to the spilled blood of innocents, taking that blood in exchange for making an undead. This skylight might be the most direct route to Ilya, but he was no mage or necromancer, and if he disturbed that glyph in the process, he had no idea what the consequences would be.
Terry must have noticed him lingering since he came over and peered down. “Gods, I hate black magic,” he muttered.
A possibility formed in Mario’s mind. “Do you know if the others brought rope?”
Terry cocked his head. “Okay, you have an idea. What is it?”
“I’m going to go in through another skylight and get into that room. I’ll see if I can open the skylight from inside. In the meantime, you get the rope, and be ready to drop it through. If I can’t open this one without screwing with that glyph, I’ll try for the one I’m entering through, or maybe the windows in that room.” He gave Terry a feral smile. “You and the others be ready for anything, okay? I admit it’s not much of a plan. I’m just making this up as I go along.”
“Improv can work,” Terry replied. “Where are you going in?”
After a last, determined nod to Ilya, Mario moved toward the previous skylight. The room below it appeared to be a study or office, and it was no more than twenty feet from the room where Ilya was imprisoned.
This skylight wasn’t meant to open, and it was no doubt bolted to the roof below its weatherproof sealant. But Mario’s claws were sharp, and with some effort, he managed to score a large circle in the thick acrylic. The floor of the room appeared to be carpeted, so he pressed against the weakened area until, with a sharp crack, it gave way and tumbled down to the floor below.
“Good luck,” Terry murmured, and Mario nodded.
Both Errante and Persephone had said he would return to the Carnival someday, but it suddenly occurred to him that neither had indicated he’d be alive when he did.
The knowledge didn’t change what he had to do. He shifted into full dhampir form before taking a deep breath and dropping through the hole.