Chapter Thirteen
EJ
They hadn’t found Ivyanna Holmes.
EJ slumped in the passenger seat, listening as Walter preordered Hot Nows from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. For once, EJ didn’t sneer at the thought of the coffee quality or hot sugary treats. Angie was cold, drained, and suffering from the long night. It hadn’t been all that great for him either.
The naked woman had been a witch. An old, powerful suckhead witch. A witch with a succubus in her.
Walter had seemed to know her.
EJ had never seen anything like the attack working she had thrown, and the next time he was at his secure, encrypted system, he would search for video of similar explosions recovered from the war, and stored in the military’s version of the underweb.
He’d picked up the amulet the witch had thrown and placed it in a null pouch in his jacket.
There was little energy left in it, but it was possible that he could trace the remnants of the exhausted working.
Power always left a trail. If there was vid, and he could enhance any audio of the wyrd she had spoken when she threw the amulet, he’d get an understanding of more than the basics, enough to experiment and pass along to his successors in Section Seven.
And to family. When he found time, which didn’t look like soon.
Walter pulled up to the brightly lit donut bakery.
As it was just before five a.m., they didn’t have to wait in line.
The partiers usually went home at four when the bars closed, and most early-shift workers didn’t start until five thirty.
Not all chain businesses had survived the wars, but McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme were alive and well, though expensive, having partnered with cattle farms, processing plants, farmers, and suppliers to keep themselves open.
As soon as Walter drove up, the auto-clerk handed out their order, its plas-steel arm a bright blue in the lights.
EJ popped open his coffee and sipped the scalding liquid before biting into an original glazed donut. Son of a witch. He closed his eyes as the taste hit his tongue and sent a sugar shock through him. He missed this stuff.
EJ devoured the donut, took another, and sipped again. “Tell us about the witch.”
Walter’s expression didn’t change, but blood moved once through his carotid arteries as his heart beat. His pupils widened, as if he might vamp out. EJ tensed. The moment passed, and Walter’s eyes became the brown of his human self. EJ’s hands relaxed. The car moved toward home on auto.
“Nyoka came into her magic at a young age,” he said, “and used it to create for herself a sensuous body infused with power, a magic that was meant to coerce and shackle, to subjugate and annihilate. Her body was flawless, her magic one that could enslave man or woman. Naked, she was perfection. But even with her beguilements and her witch power, she was a…an instrument to be used. In the eyes of her master, her owner, she was a thing, not a person. And the fact that her master was also her father meant nothing to his desires.”
EJ’s mind dropped unexpectedly into Delta Mode. Power thrummed through him. Forcing himself to relax, he folded Delta and put it away, sliding into Theta.
“Nyoka and I were of an age when we met. About fourteen. Our owners were related, three generations up the line, and both were vampires. Her owner, and the sire of his vampire line, was Maximus. He was Willim’s great-grandfather and his vampire sire as well.
Relationships between my kind are always overly complicated.
“At that age, Nyoka was already a woman. I was still a boy, used by Willim for his pleasure.
“In that year, in the heat of summer when a malaria epidemic swept through and killed hundreds, whispers raced through the island’s slave population of a safe haven in the mountains, a place for slaves who ran away to live in freedom.
“Hearing of freedom to be found in the mountains, I ran away. Willim sent trackers after me. Men who had less mercy than the dogs with which they hunted. They caught me in less than a day, and they brought me back to him in the dark of night.”
Walter fell silent, staring into the snowy night.
The scent of coffee and donuts had filled the car’s interior, though EJ had lost his appetite at Walter’s tale.
Clinically, he knew he needed the sugar and the dopamine, so he bit into the second donut, the sugar glaze crispy.
The donut was so sweet it made his teeth hurt.
He sipped his coffee, waiting to see if Walter would continue.
Sleet and wind battered the car windows as the vehicle drove them toward home.
Into the silence, Walter took a breath as if to speak, as the vehicle wove through the dark streets. EJ and Angie waited, almost breathless, to hear the story they had never been told. Walter’s full history wasn’t even in his unredacted dossier kept by the queen.
On the exhale, Walter continued his tale. “When the trackers returned with me, Willim was in the midst of a private party. White men and liquor, cards and large sums of money, sex with unwilling slaves. Blood and sweat and fear and power.
“With his…friends?…watching, Willim branded me. Nyoka, badly abused and broken, looked on, unable to help me, forced to help him.”
The silence went sharp and spiked and darker than the night.
Angie’s eyes were on Walter’s face, on his brand. EJ listened for hints of discordant tones from the brand, but any magic trapped in it was currently dormant.
“How did she help?” EJ asked softly into that silence. “As a witch or as a woman?”
Walter laughed, a colorless reverberation, bitter and tired. “With Nyoka, there was never a difference. And before you ask, I remember nothing of that night but the pain of the red-hot brand touching my cheek.
“Willim spent the following nights…showing me the error of my ways. But as Nyoka told me later, the night of my capture and branding was the axis upon which the rest of her life turned. That night she used her magic to…” Walter stopped, a sharp, short pause this time, as if he rearranged his thoughts and parsed his words.
“She used a working to help me survive the pain.
“The next night, as a first step to vengeance, she turned her beguilements upon Maximus. Five years later, she convinced that vampire to turn her. Soon after, Willim turned me.”
The silence returned. Sleet became snow, big globs of slush hitting the windshield as the auto-drive vehicle took them home. EJ downed his cooling coffee. Ate the rest of the donut. Angie nibbled, her eyes on Walter. Waiting. A patient knowing in her eyes.
“Ten years after that,” Walter eventually continued, “the day she came out of the devoveo, she turned the tables on Maximus. This I know only by records and by Nyoka’s retelling, for I remained in the devoveo for another year.”
EJ hadn’t heard the term in years, but remembered that the devoveo was the decade or so that vamps had spent in insanity after being turned.
Things were different now. The insanity lasted far less time, and fangheads’ power was also far less.
Only the old ones, turned long before the Change, when they got back their souls, still had true vampire gifts.
“Nyoka killed her vampire sire,” Walter said, “her own father who had abused her so. She destroyed his entire family. Killed every white person on the plantation. She sent the slaves into the mountains to hide.
“Word went out about a slave uprising. When the authorities came, they found the plantation and the houses deserted except for the bodies, none of which had a mark on them.
That night, she killed the authorities in the same way, all but one.
Him, she sent back to tell all who would listen that a devil had taken over the plantation.
“A military regiment came next. She killed all but one. Him she sent back, again with the message that a devil had killed everyone.” Walter’s words fell away, as if they dropped from a long cliff.
As if he had never spoken them before. With a slight smile, he said, “Many whites left the island for a time, for safety.
“I had presumed that, since they had no marks on them, that Nyoka had drained them dry and healed the bites, but now that I have seen the working she threw at us, my assumptions may have been incorrect. Heart attacks. Brain aneurysms. Strokes.”
His smile disappeared. He shrugged faintly, but it wasn’t diffident. There was grief in that slight movement.
“The plantation Nyoka had emptied eventually sold to new owners. Willim and his business partner bought it. Most of the slaves were caught and brought back, including Nyoka. Willim laid eyes upon her, and he desired her. She let him take her, so she could use him for her own ends.”
Walter looked down at his hands, his face unexpectedly full of emotion that EJ couldn’t name at first. And then he knew it. Bittersweet love, soul-deep hatred, vengeance, reprisal, and desolation all intertwined. Love for Nyoka. Fear for her. Fear of her. Hatred for Willim.
“Under her influence,” Walter said, “Willim tired of Jamaica. He sold everything to his partner and took six human slaves and us with him to Wales.
“On the voyage, Nyoka made Willim totally hers, her prisoner, her servant. Though he had been a drinker of blood for many years, her mesmerism was greater than his.” The vengeance that had been contained in the intense expression took over Walter’s face.
Again EJ’s mind and body automatically tightened as if for battle, but Walter didn’t attack. Didn’t move except to breathe.
“When we anchored off the quay, we took the small rowboat to shore under the dark of night. Nyoka dove into the black water and vanished into the darkness. Willim went insane with grief.” Walter smiled. “As you children might say, she got away clean.
“Years later, when the Brits outlawed slavery, she came back.”
His smile changed again. This time it showed loneliness, pain, joy, shame—emotions so complex EJ couldn’t parse them at all.