Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
“ O ne, two, three, and we’re on…”
Barbara Benson, the freshly animated undead, smiled brightly at the camera as it rolled, the bright lights making it impossible to see the camera, or the cameraman, or the lights crew.
“Welcome to Singsong City Sentinel’s nightly news, broadcast from the ashes of the Convention Center. That’s right, folks. We’re here, in the ashes of what used to be the biggest convention center in the Midwest, but is now nothing but ashes and some old metal beams. Let me tell you, if I still had to breathe, I’d be struggling. Let’s ask our guest for the evening, Miss Nova Star. Is it hard to breathe right now?”
I smiled brightly at the camera past Barbara Benson and nodded. “I think it’s harder because I’m nervous than because of the ashes.” I sneezed and Barbara laughed.
“Well, there you have it. Miss Nova Star is going to talk about the events that took place a month ago right here. Why don’t you tell us what happened in your own words?” Her voice became soft, compassionate, perfectly pitched for the emotion of the moment.
I fought the sick sensation and took a deep breath, then sniffed a few times because of the ashes tickling my nose. “My mother isn’t Patricia Clarence. The real Patricia Watford, that was her maiden name, was buried in a small town in Switzerland. At sixteen years of age, she died in childbirth delivering a half human, half demon baby. You see, without medical intervention, no human mother, particularly one who used illegal drugs regularly, could survive having a demon-blooded child. My mother, Lira Hood, daughter of Calumny of the Seven, met Patricia while doing a drug run, and decided?—”
“A drug run?” my mother scoffed, coming out of the darkness to take the chair to my left, frowning at me darkly. “If you’re going to tell a story on live national television, be certain to get your facts straight.”
She’d arrived right on schedule. She was almost too predictable, and I knew which news channels leaked what to her publicist.
Barbara Benson gasped. “Mrs. Clarence. I’m so glad that you decided to join us. I do appreciate having more than one side of the story. Would you like to tell us what happened? How did you meet Patricia, the tragic teen mother, with nowhere to turn?”
My mother sat up stiffly. She was going to kill me when this was over. “I met Patricia Watford when she tried to steal from me. I could tell by her condition that she wasn’t going to last long, so I let her take my money and coat, but I followed her. This was winter in Switzerland. She was extremely slow, as she was heavily pregnant and sick. When I walked in on her, she was terrified, tried to fight me off, but she was too weak to do much. She was living in a shed, no heat, no plumbing, no hygiene, but she was trying to eat, trying to cook on a small fire in the middle of the floor. It’s a wonder she didn’t burn it all down around her.” She shifted uncomfortably and took a deep, calming breath before she continued.
“At the time, I wasn’t in any position to help her, as I was running from a vampire who had marked my whole family. Still, I had a few contacts and got her to a house where she could be cared for, not a proper medical facility, but at least somewhere heated, somewhere she would be safe. When I heard she was dead, I took her name.”
“And her face,” I added.
Barbara sighed heavily, shaking her head. “And that’s what we call a real tragedy.”
My mother gave her a sharp look. “No, the real tragedy is that her death could have been prevented with some basic health care. But her parents cut her off when they heard that she was pregnant with something not entirely human. They believed in protecting humanity above all else, even though they were personally the worst kinds of humans. They spent their fortune on gambling and other vices I’d rather not mention on national television.” She gave me an icy look.
I smiled back at her. “And that’s why you felt justified in killing them?”
Her brow furrowed in shocked horror. “No! I didn’t kill them.”
“No, you had your father, Calumny of the Seven, do it.”
Barbara raised a hand. “Nova, please. Let’s listen to your mother’s side of the story.”
“Or I could tell it,” Mr. Good said, coming out of the shadows, manacles on his hands, orange jumpsuit looking garish in the camera lights. Oh good. Gabby had come through for me. Hopefully Philip and Fin were doing their parts at a good distance as well.
My mother’s gasp was harsh, and she looked at me like I’d betrayed her. There was fear in her eyes for the first time, not that she’d be revealed as a fake and a phony, but that my father would find out that she’d been unfaithful to him.
Barbara smiled delightedly at Mr. Good, her teeth in fairly good condition considering how long she’d been dead. “Mr. Good! I’m so glad you could join us. You’re going to explain why you turned over your business and money to Nova Star?”
“She’s my daughter,” he said with a shrug of his large shoulders. He made those manacles look so small and delicate, nothing close to strong enough to hold him.
“Nova Star is your daughter? And Mrs. Clarence…”
He shrugged again. “You see, her husband, who she loves desperately, couldn’t have children, so she came to me for help. She tried all the medical methods of conception, but nothing worked. She knew I’d be able to help her, although she didn’t expect me to offer my services personally.”
We all stared at him. My mind was completely boggled at his words, mostly because they went against everything he’d told me before, but here he was, trying to protect her from the threat that bothered her most. He really did care about her. Unbelievable.
“I see,” Barbara finally said, then cleared her throat and looked at her notes. “Was that your only involvement in the story about Patricia Watford, or can you add another angle?”
“Sure. I was her drug dealer. When she got pregnant, I cut her off, had her call her parents, and got to hear the exchange. This was early on, before Mrs. Clarence met her. Mrs. Clarence wasn’t involved in that kind of work, dealing drugs, doing collections. Calumny used her for her mind, her business sense, and I don’t blame him. She kept his books, that’s all. She was brilliant. Still is.” He dared to glance at my mother, who stared back at him with a perplexed look on her face. She didn’t know what to think about him coming here and trying to shine a flattering light on her, to make her a saint while he was a drug dealer.
“I also worked collections,” she said, still frowning at him. “I was vicious with my knives, but I never killed anyone. Calumny didn’t like throwing away lives. Not like Salina.” She clenched her jaw and Mr. Good flinched at the vampire’s name.
“Who is Salina?” Barbara asked, looking concerned.
“The vampire who marked my family,” she said, forcing a polite smile as she looked at the undead reporter. “The vampire who slaughtered every member of the Seven who wouldn’t give their lives and souls to her.”
“She stays in Eastern Europe except when she hunts,” Mr. Good said, glancing at the dark shadows around us, invisible to us where we sat in the spotlight, like sitting ducks just waiting to be consumed. “She’s been hunting Mrs. Clarence for a long time now. She took a dead girl’s identity because there was no one who could save her. No harm done.”
“No harm done?” I said, scowling at Mr. Good. “The Watfords were burned alive in their own house.”
“It was an accident, and they deserved to die for the way they treated their daughter. They drove her to the drugs and killed her at the end by refusing to give her any of the help she desperately needed. They knew she would die, and they left her to it, telling her that she’d brought it upon herself. Truly, she could have made better decisions, but cutting her off like that…” He shook his head, lips pursed disapprovingly.
The man was so good at twisting the truth to suit his own world view.
I said, “The trouble with stealing someone’s identity is that sometimes death isn’t as embracing as you’d expect it to be.”
“Patricia Watford is alive?” Barbara asked, looking truly intrigued.
I shook my head. “No, but the baby survived. In the time when Salina was attacking everyone with her red army, the baby was born, the mother died, and the baby vanished. Twenty years later, that child went back looking for answers, and found records of her mother, Patricia Watford, only she was married now, happily living the dream, money, family, safety and security, while she had nothing but loneliness and desperation.”
“Surely that’s impossible,” my mother said, clearly stunned.
“That explains a lot,” Mr. Goods said, nodding. “Someone was asking around about Patricia. I guess she got someone to talk. I’ll have to look into the matter. It should have been a sealed case.”
I looked at him in exasperation. “You’re in a high security prison. You also dumped your entire business on me. You don’t get to look into the matter, threatening, torturing, or whatever you usually mean by that.”
His eyes twinkled. “Be gentle with them. They may all perish from your goodness.”
“Goodness?” a voice demanded, coming out of the darkness. It was my voice, how it had been before I’d died and come back to life, so I was only slightly surprised to see someone who looked exactly like me stepping into the camera lights, holding a gun, and aiming it at my head. Her grip was terrible.
Barbara gasped. “Please put down the gun, Miss. You don’t want to hurt anybody.”
She snarled, swinging the gun at Barbara before returning it squarely back on my head. I wouldn’t enjoy coming back from a bullet to the brain, and it might cause memory loss, which would bother Bones. It would bother me too. I hated not remembering.
“Welcome to the show,” I said, offering her a hard smile.
“Welcome?” Her eyes burned with flickering red that showed how close she was to igniting everything in reach. Happily, everything that was flammable had already burned. Other than us. “You stole my mother. You stole my fiancé. Your whole life was a lie, but you had everything. I was the real daughter of Patricia Watford, but I got nothing!”
I nodded. “You stole Callie’s life, didn’t you? How long did you play the part of my friend, trying to get an opportunity to steal mine?”
“Your life?” She gestured at me. “You’re not Cassandra Clarence. You were manufactured and held up as the perfect little angel, but you’re Mr. Good’s daughter! How is he not worse than a demon?”
We all looked at Mr. Good, who smiled diabolically as if to prove her point.
She continued, gesturing with her gun. “You had everything, but you never appreciated it. You didn’t love your prince charming, and you didn’t focus on making the business strong. All you cared about was being ‘The Saint,’ the perfect little untouched human who had to save everyone else. But that changed when I got you alone after the meeting, when I finally cut you apart.” She smiled in a truly creepy way, but then her face fell and the demonic fire flared in her eyes. “But you weren’t Cassandra Clarence. I could kill hundreds of people, but none of that would give me what I worked so hard for. Because she never existed.”
“Well, that explains things very well,” Barbara said, nodding and grimacing, like she shared Patricia’s baby’s frustration.
While my clone was looking at her, I pulled my beautiful shotgun out of the chair case leaning against me, and cocked it loudly, getting everyone’s attention.
I stood up, aiming my gun casually in my duplicate’s direction. “Do you have a name?” I asked pleasantly. “Or should I just call you Miss Watford?”
“How dare you call me anything!” She raised the gun to shoot me, but a knife slid through the bones of her hand, making her drop the gun while she bled, staring at the knife in shock.
My mother walked over to her. “Patricia was going to name you Fiora, after the fire demon Feoran that she loved so much.” She grasped Fiora’s wrist and pulled out her knife, making the girl with my face cry out in shock and pain.
My mother put an arm around her shoulder and led her over to my seat, helping her sit down. “Let me fix that.” She pulled out a handkerchief and started binding the wound, like it wasn’t her knife that she’d thrown at the girl. It was a little unnerving how incredibly good she was with knives. That was a side of my mother I’d never seen before. “You could have come to me for help. That’s what we do, help those who have nowhere else to turn.”
Fiora grimaced. “I did. Your company got me an ID, work, and a place to live. It was better than where I came from, but there was Cassandra in her ivory tower, existing to be adored. I started thinking how easy it would be to take her place, how I would be the daughter who would appreciate all the things she took for granted.”
“She never was very good at appreciating what she was given, but you didn’t see the other side of it, the hours of painful surgery, the isolation to keep her from being discovered, the rules she had to follow, and the perfection she had to maintain. She never had the luxury of being herself, at least not until you killed her.” My mother smiled, and it was a bit frightening. “You killed my daughter. What I’m curious about is how you produced the video of her alive, running back into the flames.”
She glanced away from us into the shadowy corners of the site and then shook her head. “It’s just a video. Those are easy enough to fake.”
“You have a background in movie making?” Mr. Good asked, voice carefully neutral. What did he think about all this?
“Also the dark magic construct,” I said.
She glared at me, hostile instead of apologetic with my mom. Callie had always been like that, weirdly worshipful of Mrs. Clarence.
“You had a partner?” Barbara asked gently.
“She hired it done,” I said, studying her. “She had the makeup artist helping her. It was her boyfriend who helped Fiora summon the demon. The artist’s lucky you didn’t steal her face.”
She sneered at me. “I don’t go around stealing people’s lives. Callie deserved it, and so did you.”
I took a deep breath, so I didn’t accidentally shoot her. At that moment, I smelled something strange, sweet, cloying.
Barbara started blinking blearily and then her head tilted to the side, stilled in death.
She was here. Salina the vampire was here with her death aura. My heart started racing faster, but I took a deep breath and grasped my gun. She couldn’t hurt me as long as I was wearing the bracelet. That’s the only reason Mercury had been on board with this.
Fiora started gagging and choking, grabbing her throat and convulsing. My mother and Mr. Good exchanged glances.
“Fifty feet?” my mother asked.
He nodded as he studied the dying girl with calculation. He knew what this looked like. He must have some resistance to the death aura or he couldn’t have worked with her. They were prepared for this eventuality, but Fiora was not.
I couldn’t watch her die. I’d promised Mercury that I’d keep the bracelet on, that I wouldn’t jeopardize my health in this ridiculous scheme, but I still pulled my bracelet off and shoved it over her hand.
The death aura hit me hard. Every vein in my body was on fire, like my blood had evaporated or boiled. I jerked and then slumped as my heart beat two ragged beats and stopped.
My double inhaled a jerky breath, looking around wildly while my mother crouched beside me, grabbing my wrist and looking furious. My eyes were still open, and I wasn’t losing consciousness, but I was definitely not breathing, and my heart wasn’t beating, so, yep, probably dead.
“Her eyes are glazing over. It’s too late,” Mr. Good said, tugging at my mother’s shoulder. He didn’t have handcuffs on anymore. Terrifying. And the sorcerers had to keep their distance because they had no immunity to Salina’s death aura. I was supposed to be using my vampire-killing gun to shoot Salina apart until she was weak enough that Mercury could approach with his undead. He could fight her armies and win, but not even his undead could get close to her. Why did I give my murderer the bracelet? She’d killed me. She deserved to die! I was too stupid to live. Apparently. Because I was dead.
Mr. Good ran a hand down my mother’s arm, looking at her like she was a miracle. “We need to leave now, or we die here.”
My mother turned on him with a snarl, a knife in each hand. “My daughter died for this idiot human-demon who already killed her! What is wrong with her?”
My double looked at me, horrified that I’d pull the Saint card one last time. I would have given her a spiteful smile if I’d been able to move my face.
Mr. Good smiled gently at my mother and touched her hair, carefully. He was so stupidly in love, poor idiot. “She took after my own mother. She was a nun. Couldn’t see suffering she didn’t want to relieve. Well, Lira, do we run?”
My mother looked around past the cameras, the lights, hands trembling as she gripped her knives so tight. Finally, she shook her head. “No. I’ve been running for long enough, and it never really was my sport.” She gave him a snarling smile that was positively pirate, and then stepped away from Mr. Good, knives drawn while he cracked his knuckles. They were both going to die. Why weren’t they running? They were supposed to run! That was the plan! My mother was a hard-hearted hypocrite, and Mr. Good was a cowardly psychopath. They had to run. If they stayed here, faced the vampire’s death aura, they’d die. Even if they could withstand her aura, she’d kill them.
Of course, no one told my mother what to do, and she couldn’t hear me because I wasn’t actually saying anything. Nope. The dead don’t lie or scream. Unless a necromancer shows up. I wasn’t coming back, either, not while that death aura got stronger and stronger. My mother kicked off her shoes, cut the sides of her pencil skirt and pulled a scarf over her face.
“She wasn’t supposed to save me,” my double said, still sitting in my chair, clutching her bandaged hand and staring at me like her world had broken.
The clouds of smoke grew visibly red, and the next moment she was there, a shadow of flickering red and black, striking Mr. Good, sending him flying before she was on my mother. My mother was fast. So fast, sliding under her claws and ripping up with her knives before spinning out of range. Not dying. Before Salina could recover, Mr. Good was on her, shadowy bat wings unfolding out of his spine as he launched at her, his own infernal claws extended as he raked across the vampire’s back. That was creepy. I didn’t want to know what kind of deal he made with a demon to get those new appendages.
I lay there on the ground, unable to do anything but watch. I couldn’t even eat popcorn, and it was definitely a fight worthy of popcorn. My mother was, frankly, awesome. Sissy would have been so impressed. Mr. Good was a nightmare of power and kept getting up every time she threw him, bleeding more each time. He kept coming until she finally threw him at one of the beams. It and he went down in a crash and a flurry of ashes.
The vampire spun around and grabbed my mother by the throat. Salina gripped my mom’s wrists with the other hand as she stared with these incredibly creepy eyes, completely red and dripping down her cheeks. Girl didn’t smell too great, either, but like I could complain since I was dead.
The vampire sorceress’s voice was as pretty as she was creepy. “Calumny’s pretty little daughter. At last I have captured you. Such a prize. So hard-won. I’m going to kill you slowly, sipping you of every drop of life until you?—”
My shotgun boomed, sending Fiora and my weapon flying. It blew a good chunk of the vampire away. She screamed and turned to see who had shot her, and my mother took the opportunity to kick her in the side where she’d been shot.
The vampire shrieked and threw my mother, but releasing her wrists when she was holding knives wasn’t clear thinking. My mother aimed her knives at the vampire’s throat and thigh as she sailed through the air, making sure Salina would lose a lot of blood. Of course, my mom came down hard and didn’t get up.
Mr. Good roared and charged Salina with a beam and skewered her, sending a shower of blood and black goop up to mix with the ashes.
It was about then that I lurched up, my body starting to regenerate as Salina’s death aura bled out of her.
I snatched my shotgun out of Fiora’s slack grasp, dropped the shells, reloaded, and then aimed carefully.
Boom!
My shot went through her heart, taking out a huge chunk of it. I dropped the shells and reloaded as I walked slowly towards the skewered, flailing vampire.
Boom!
That time my silver shot went through her throat, sending my mother’s knife clattering. The vampire screamed and clawed at the beam holding her in place, glaring at me with eyes that conveyed a world of hatred. She opened her mouth, wide, then wider, and wider until a swarm of insects came out.
Boom! I shot that mouth, and the insects, sending them scuttling around like specks of leaves caught in a whirlwind.
“Stay back,” Mr. Good warned, looking super creepy as he went to crouch over my mother’s still form. He picked her up, cradling her head on his shoulder as he came towards me. “Grab the demon. Salina never goes anywhere without her red army. That means we retreat now.”
I started jogging towards him. “Shouldn’t we chop off her head or something?”
“She can’t be killed while she’s filled with her magic, no matter how many times you shoot her, but if her magic can be undone…”
“Then we need Mercury.”
The hotel across the street from the burned out conference center was lit by a flash of lightning, outlining the silhouette of my favorite dark sorcerer. In that moment, my skin grew cold as Mercury, without a shirt, unleashed a rain storm and a horde of his undead. The ground beneath us parted, ashes were flung, mixing with the icy rain, and the dead came crawling up to meet the army of vampires that had caught up to their mistress and were trying to rip through us to get to her. The vampires all wore red, but it looked like their clothing was dyed in blood. That’s also what it smelled like. The rain only made things more pungent.
“This isn’t what I signed up for,” Fiora said, grabbing onto my arm, my gun arm.
I shook her off and drew a pistol, shooting one of the random vamps through the eye with a silver bullet soaked in holy water.
The vampire screamed, and that was before rats swarmed him, dragging him down into the squirming mass.
“That’s a nice bullet,” Mr. Good said, conversationally, still holding my unconscious mother, who looked chic and pulled together even unconscious and soaked. I should say something. I mean, she was married to someone else, but if Mr. Good put her on the ground with all the zombie rats…No. Absolutely not.
“Silver and holy water,” I said, absently handing him one of my pistols. Somehow, it seemed like he could shoot and carry my mother at the same time. Yep. He could definitely do that.
I shot a vampire that tried to take him from behind at the same time I got one swinging at Fiora. Double shot. Then I spun and fired at two more vampires, careful shots so I didn’t waste my bullets. I only had a limited number on me, and I was already worn out. Undead? Same thing.
Mr. Good starting using my gun as a club, which he was very talented at, and then it went quiet. No vampire screams, nothing but the trembling ground underneath as Mercury walked through his rotting army without a shirt. He was also wet, rivulets of water running over those fascinating muscles and dark magic runes. Were the cameras still rolling? I hoped so.
He walked slowly through the crowd of undead that was holding down every vampire, ripping pieces off of them. One blood vamp broke away and came at Mercury. I shot it before it could touch a piece of his perfect flesh.
He paused, glanced down at his arm where my bullet had burned him, then gave me a look with a slightly raised brow before he continued stalking towards Salina, still skewered and foaming at what was left of her mouth.
“You came to my city,” he said in a soft voice, but it went through me like a hurricane for all of that. “You killed my woman and drew first blood. I challenge you to a battle. To the death.”
She hissed and spat at him before her words came together in a swelling sound that hurt my ears. “Little Mercury thinks to challenge me, the mighty Salina of the Blood? You are weak. Soft. Leaving power you could take, because you’re afraid of a little taint. You could have been great, but you are nothing. You waited until your little pets weakened me before you could come against me. You?—”
Boom!
She screamed as her head went rolling across the ashy, broken pavement, the scream dying when it realized it wasn’t connected to her lungs. And those were my last silver shots.
Mercury pulled out his sword, the cankered nasty one, and started hacking at the vampire still pinned to a beam.
“You know,” he said, seemingly focused on his hack job as I approached cautiously. “I was going to do a proper mage battle for you, as you requested.”
I snorted and then collapsed against his back, wrapping my arms around him and hanging onto him, sure he could hold me up and hack apart a vampire at the same time. “I don’t want to see Salina with her shirt off. What happened to vampires being beautiful? She’s so hideous.”
He stopped hacking and then turned to gesture at Fiora, who was staying close to Mr. Good and my unconscious mother, like she didn’t know what else to do.
“Demon, if you summon flames that devour this vampire, I won’t kill you,” Mercury said to her, like it was a great favor.
She shook her head. “I can’t control it.” Was that remorse in her eyes for the fire that killed so many? Yes, it was.
Mercury’s voice was assuring. “I can. Summon the flames, and I will control them. Be useful even if you can’t be good. Otherwise, I will do terrible things to you that you can’t even imagine.” Assuring or threatening? That low voice was mesmerizing. That’s what it was.
She frowned and then wincing, put her hand on what was left of the headless vampire’s oozing chest. Demon flames leapt up, dark red fire hungry, desperate chaos that wanted to devour all life, all happiness, all good.
Mercury dropped the vampire’s head into the flames and they flared up, burning hotter and hotter until it went out as suddenly as it had started, leaving Salina the vampire nothing but ashes.
The blood vampires that weren’t ripped apart retreated, and Mercury’s undead followed them, slaughtering them as they went.
I inhaled sharply and then sat down amidst the zombie rats that streamed all around me, my ears buzzing, my lungs aching. I’d officially started breathing, which means I wasn’t undead anymore. I hated coming back to life. Undead wasn’t nearly so painful.
“Now what happened to her?” Fiora demanded, sounding hysterical.
Mercury ignored her as he picked me up in his arms and cradled me against his chest. “You promised that you’d wear the bracelet. You lied to me, fiancé. I was going to do an elaborate proposal with no shirt, but now, after you let yourself die, I’m taking you home without anything but this. Will you marry me, Nova? Why yes, Oswald, I’d be delighted. That’s done then. We’re going to our home. And we are going to sit on the couch and eat ice cream and watch television for at least a week. I let you die today, but that’s not going to happen again. We’re getting married the second we get off the couch. You lost your scheduling rights when you gave your protective bracelet to your own murderer. Do you think I can live without you? I can’t. Let’s be very clear about that right now, because you apparently can’t help yourself. If you die, I die.” He grumbled under his breath as he carried me out of the ashes and towards the car where Bones was waiting.
I pressed my eyes against his neck while my head pounded. “But my mom. She needs to go to the hospital. And Mr. Good needs to go back to jail before he strangles someone, and Fiora needs to go to jail to serve her time for murdering all those people, and the dark sorcerer who made that construct needs to be fined and possibly jailed, and…”
He kissed me, cutting off my words and each and every drop of pain in that blissful connection. I should have stopped him, put my foot down, but I couldn’t feel my feet. And he was right. I had promised to wear the protection bracelet. And to think I’d missed out on an epic proposal just to save my murderer. I really was an idiot.