Chapter Eleven – Jack
Chapter Eleven
Jack
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked the strange woman I sat beside. It was wintertime in Vegas. Good for me, seeing as I got more hours awake, but bad in most other respects—the wind could whip in from the desert and freeze the legs off of even the most determined hooker.
“No, you?” Sam asked, shouting over the wind as she looked over. She didn’t have any hair to whip—I wondered what that must feel like, the sensation of air against one’s scalp, if it was anything good, like fingernails.
“Not in the least,” I said.
We’d been driving for the past forty-five minutes, following my remembered directions. Rosalie’s bunker had been a bit off the charts—and I hadn’t spent long looking at it, after I’d set off explosions and been freed from the earth. I wasn’t really sure what we’d find.
We wound past the other shanties and shacks, people determined to live an off-the-grid lifestyle and those who wanted space to make meth, until we reached the final turn that I remembered.
“Go slow. Potholes,” I counseled.
“Thanks.” She took it down a gear and flicked her headlights up to bright.
Three minutes later, the remnants of Rosalie’s bunker loomed. It’d looked like an RV for all intents and purposes—the bunker part had been the underground tunnels and mineshafts it’d been connected to. Sam put her car into park, and hopped out.
The Pack had been by to pick their bikes up from out front.
And some of Maya’s crew had come by to dig out the guns and silver munitions since I was last here, leaving an open pit underneath the RV, which they’d left up precariously on jacks.
The RV itself was half-slagged—it looked like the explosions I’d triggered had set it on fire.
Sam looked over at me. “What happened here?”
“You think Tamo went down without a fight?” I walked up in the light of her headlights and kicked the rubble, remembering.
I’d been close to death before, but never so much as when Tamo had tried to kill me.
“Your man was planting bombs before he got caught. Tamo bled him out, I killed Tamo, and then had to run away underground from the werewolves who were angry at the time. The only thing that got me out alive was your man’s C4. ”
One of her eyebrows rose archly. “One vampire drank all of Bryan’s blood?”
“He also got beat up.” I decided to leave Maya out of things, despite the fact she’d been there and had drank from him. “Tamo was a huge fucking vampire.”
“So I’ve heard.” She gestured out at the surrounding rocks. “Can you guess where Bryan was last?”
“Hmm.” I jumped up to the top of what remained of the RV’s roof.
The structure underneath me shimmied and that instability was echoed into the landscape beyond.
All the land behind the RV had settled down after the bombs, into the collapsed mine shafts below.
“I think it’s over there.” I pointed, and looked down at her.
“I’d say it’s not safe for a human, but… .”
“I’ll be fine,” she cut me off. “Show me.”
“Your funeral,” I said with a shrug. She glared, and I jumped down to the RV’s far side.
I halfway expected her to levitate herself over, like something out of a superhero movie, but she didn’t, she made her own way around the RV, her white clothing bright beneath the starlight.
I stood for a second, getting my bearings, then guesstimating where we had been—there was the initial tunnel, and then a hallway, and then the offshoot where Bryan had been.
All the rubble looked the same on this side of it.
Considering how close I’d been to being underneath it—I shuddered at the memory.
“Here?” she asked, coming to where I stood.
“I think so.” I swung my arms wide. “Within a radius of twenty feet or so of here, for sure. Honestly not sure how far down.”
“All right. Back up.”
I was unused to taking orders from strangers, but I was highly curious. And if she was going to excavate down to get to his body, I probably wanted to be out of boulder-throwing range. I jumped back a few mounds of earth and crouched, ready to jump again.
She did something with her hands in front of her. It was like she was dancing—or drawing a word. It was oddly compelling to watch and so I didn’t trust it—doubly so when it started to glow.
When her hands were moving so fast that the image of what she drew hung in front of her, like a sparkler’s stream, she cast it away from her. The glow spun outward and then dropped, waves of brightness rippling out from it as it sank into the ground.
I was unsure what we were waiting for. I hadn’t known magic literally existed in the world until recently.
It made sense, given that I was a vampire and now I knew several werewolves—but whereas movies and books had given me templates for us, albeit occasionally misinformed ones, I had no guidebook for what she was yet.
The ground beneath our feet sighed. Nothing shifted that I could tell, but I heard a sound as if an hourglass had been turned, and the sands inside it were pouring out. Then a new brightness emerged, in the shape of a man, liberating itself, climbing out of the ground as though it were a door.
I moved closer, quietly—whatever happened next, I wanted to see.
“My heart,” Sam whispered, reaching out her hand, and placing it on the bright-man’s chest. “What did they do to you?”
I waited for him to answer her. He looked exactly like he did when he’d been murdered, only glowing blue. The cross tattoos on his arms were especially radiant.
She walked up to stand beneath him—he hovered a good foot off the ground now—and walked around him in a circle, inspecting every part.
When she reached the front of him again she told him something, too quietly for me to hear, and leaned in to kiss his cheek.
Then she stepped back, snapped her fingers, and the image disappeared.
I had done as she asked and she had powers unknown to me, plus every right to be pissed. So I hung back, waiting—and when the wind changed, I could taste her tears.
“Are you all right?” I asked from a respectful distance.
“No. But here I stand,” she said. And then she swayed and fell over into black.
My fear almost cost her her life. I thought she might be playing with me, luring me in for revenge, and so I didn’t run as quickly as I could—and by the time I reached her side it was almost too late.
Her body lay in darkness—like a well of shadow had opened up beneath her, like a hungry mouth.
Nothing reflected in it, not the stars nor waning moon, it was like it was eating all light—and her.
I grabbed for her without thinking, trying to pull her out of it, feeling whatever it was that wanted her pulling back.
Beneath us both the mouth yawned wider, trying to entrap me. I knew I couldn’t let it get all the way under me—if I did, neither of us would come out.
“Sam!” I shouted, pulling. I held her knee and a shoulder, making her sprawl in an ungainly fashion as I yanked her to my side.
I jerked her toward me and darkness splashed against my hand, and I had never felt that caliber of cold before, it was like getting shot with ice. “SAM!” I shouted, as loud as I could.
I’d spun her head toward me and was afraid to drag her any harder—I was strong, but she was mortal, and in this strange game of tug-of-war it seemed possible I could pull her in two.
“SAMANTHA! WAKE UP!” I shouted. “brYAN NEEDS YOU!”
At that, she finally stirred—and as she did, the darkness shrank beneath her, like it was draining out. I stumbled back when it let go of her, holding her to my chest, panting in fear and pain from where the bitingly cold dark had splashed me.
Her eyes blinked open, registered where she was and who she was touching, and her expression changed to one of horror.
“Get off me, beast!”
“You’re the one on me,” I said, shifting to the side, now trying to keep both her and the thing that’d attacked her in my line of sight.
The dark tide was gone now though, everything back to normal under starlight.
“You fainted and something came up out of the ground to try to eat you, it looked like.”
She rolled to a crouch, blinking. “The conduit—I must’ve left it open for a second too long.”
Her eyes scanned the ground. “And?” I prompted.
“I let something other than Bryan through.”
“Did it go back? Or is it still here?” I stood now, scanning the ground, waiting for any and all shadows to betray me.
“I don’t feel it,” she said, shaking her head and standing too.
“You didn’t feel it the first time, so that’s not exactly comforting.”
She took a step back. “We should go.”
“Agreed,” I said, and followed her back, eyes watching for darkness.