The Vampire's Betrayal (18 page)

“How then are we to deal with the Slayer when she is activated?” Iban asked.

“She didn’t say,” Melaphia said, righting herself.

“She just said that the Slayer was sired of greatness and carried greatness within her.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Travis asked.

“I think I can answer the last part about carrying greatness within her,” I said. They all looked at me expectantly. “Connie’s pregnant.”

It sounded strange to hear that out loud. It was all I’d been thinking about for the last twenty-four hours, but as I said the words I still couldn’t reconcile myself to their meaning. Could it be possible? Had I fathered a child?

Melaphia’s dark eyes went wide. “You? I mean, yours?”

“I’m sure she hasn’t been with anybody else.”

Everyone but William was stunned into silence.

“What happened last night, Jack?” he asked.

“I put her under glamour like you said. Then I…did what I had to do,” I said, not able to put the awful truth into words. “Then, while I was listening to see if she still had a heartbeat, I heard another one. A small one, and I knew. I sealed the wound, woke her up, and told her she got sick with the flu and passed out. Then I told her she was dehydrated and started forcing her to drink fluids. I stayed with her until just now to make sure she was going to be all right.”

“How could she possibly survive blood loss like that?” Tobey asked.

Travis, looking stonier than one of the carvings on Mount Rushmore, said, “The Slayer’s powers of healing will be as great as ours. This is another sign that she is close to being activated.”

“How far along is she?” Melaphia asked.

“A few days is all.”

“How can you detect a life that small?” Iban wanted to know.

William said, “Jack is a very sensitive creature. I’ve known it all his life. We all know about his power to feel out the dead, even reanimate. It seems he is also as sensitive to the presence of life. I doubt if any medical device could detect a heartbeat at this stage, but with his gift, Jack can.”

My sire and I just looked at each other. It was as hard to read William as ever, but I could swear I saw something like awe in his face. “It looks as if Jack is much more special than even I understood. He has just fathered a child.” One corner of his mouth turned up in the barest suggestion of a smile.

“If all this is true,” Travis said, “he has sired another vampire slayer.” Travis looked like he wanted to spit on the ground. “How do we know this voodoo spirit has the interest of the blood drinkers at heart? Has she seen the slayers at work as I have?”

“She has your interests at heart because William made a pact with her a couple hundred years ago,” Melaphia said, lifting her chin. “And sealed it with the gift of the blood.” Melaphia took any offense to the Maman personally.

“She’s never let us down before. Remember who saved us from Reedrek not long ago,” I said. “The voodoo blood has saved my bacon more times than I want to remember.”

I turned to William to see why he hadn’t jumped to Lalee’s defense, but he was looking worried, too, in a way I found unsettling for some reason. Finally, he said, “I trust Lalee. Jack did the right thing by refraining from killing the Slayer, even though he may not have known why at the time.”

Travis was finished speaking, but he didn’t look any happier. Everyone else looked uneasy, too, and they were staring at me. None of them was familiar with the old religion that Melaphia practiced, although they’d seen a pretty good demo the night when we captured Reedrek.

“Maybe there’s another explanation for this,” I said. “Could there have been some kind of immaculate conception thing going on in the underworld?”

“That hasn’t happened in more than two thousand years, and I don’t think we should expect to ever see it again,” William said.

“I’m sorry, Jack, but somebody has to say it. Could Connie have had another lover?” Tobey asked.

For some reason that didn’t make me mad. I guess because I understood that Tobey didn’t know Connie like I did. “No,” I said. “No way.”

Travis said, “I still don’t like it. Nothing in my own culture’s lore and writings indicates that a slayer should be allowed to live.”

“I don’t know what to think at this point,” Tobey said, scratching his head.

Suddenly my relief was gone. I was no longer sure that Connie was out of danger at the hands of these blood drinkers. She still needed my protection. I had to think of still another plan, dammit.

Melaphia, William, Travis, and the others started debating the relative trustworthiness of voodoo and Mayan and Celtic spirituality and prophecies. Melaphia said something about the word
sire
in some prophecy possibly having more than one meaning. Then they speculated on who Connie’s vampire father might have been.

It was all too much for me. I hadn’t slept any in the last day because of having to nurse Connie, and my head was starting to hurt. I went to the wet bar at the far side of the room to pour myself some blood, and while they were all talking at once, I backed out of the room and took the stairs up to the main floor two at a time.

I drove to the garage and saw through the window that the irregulars’ card game was in full swing. It was kind of comforting in a goofy way. My whole life had been turned on its head the last couple of months. It was good to see that part of my world was still normal. As normal as a human, two shape shifters, and a faerie playing cards could be, that is.

Speaking of things kind of normal but really not, I heard the scrape of Huey’s shovel as he continued to despoil his own grave. I went around back to see him laboring under the watchful eye of the same crow that had been there the other night. It seemed Huey had made little progress, but this activity at least gave him a purpose in life—that is to say, death—when he wasn’t otherwise busy detailing cars.

I wondered if I’d done Huey any favors by accidentally raising him from the dead. He appeared to me as a ghost once shortly after Reedrek had murdered him, and he had reported that in heaven, he had all the beer he could drink. And it was good imported stuff, too.

Then I got drunk during a voodoo ritual and misapplied a prayer to the god of the underworld—and Huey was reborn, after a fashion. He’d dug his way out of his own grave with his bare hands, to my and Werm’s drunken horror. Sending him back seemed too grisly to contemplate, so here he was, a sort of mascot of the business you might say. Besides, he was proving to be useful. The next time he said he saw little blue men, I was going to sit up and take notice. He could speak shape shifter and see through fey glamour. Who knew what else the little guy could do?

“How’s it going, Hugh-man?” I greeted him.

“All right, I reckon,” Huey reported.

“Haven’t hit pay dirt yet?”

“No sir. I ain’t seen no sign of that car.”

The crow made a screeching noise, startling us both. I looked at Huey sheepishly. A vampire and a zombie shouldn’t be afraid of anything, much less a crow.

“It’s tryin’ to tell us somethin’,” Huey said.

“How do you know?”

“It’s been trying its best to talk to me all night. Just listen.”

The crow flapped its wings and made some other noises, and they weren’t any sounds I’d ever heard come out of a crow before. “Maybe it got ahold of some bad roadkill,” I speculated. My remark seemed to agitate the crow even more. It beat its wings furiously and fixed its beady eyes on me in a creepy fashion.

“My uncle Elroy had a crow that could talk like one of them talking birds,” Huey said.

“Like a parrot?”

“Yep. But only after Uncle Elroy had split its tongue with a knife.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” I said. “I don’t want you picked up by the ASPCA.” I was glad Huey didn’t have a penchant for getting in trouble with the law. If the authorities were inspired to examine him too closely, especially that loose eyeball, there’d be a lot of explaining to do.

“Naw. I wouldn’t do that to a dumb animal.”

The crow probably had more IQ points than Huey, but I refrained from pointing that out.

“Ain’t you going to join the poker game?” Huey asked.

“No. I had to find someplace to think.”

“You got problems?”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“Why don’t you run them by me? Sometimes it helps to talk to somebody.” Huey leaned on his shovel thoughtfully.

I wondered how many vampires had a zombie as a therapist. What the hell? Huey would probably be as good a sounding board as anybody. I told him the predicament and he listened as if he understood.

“That there’s a hard one, Jack. Let me think.” He scratched his chin sagely. “Do you think you could talk Connie into leaving Savannah?”

“That might work for a while, but some rogue vampire somewhere will eventually track her down. Besides, I don’t know if I could convince her to go.”

“What if she had a reason to go? And what if she changed her name and went to a place that was way back in the country or somewhere she was hard to find?”

I started to reply that I couldn’t think of a reason she’d go to a hick town and change her name. But then it hit me that Huey was right. There was a way I could accomplish those things with one scheme.

But it would mean losing Connie and my child forever.

Speed helped me think, so I didn’t go straight to my storage unit near Bonaventure Cemetery. Instead I raced along the back roads, close to the intracoastal waterways that snaked their way between Georgia’s barrier islands and the tidal marshes fringing the shoreline. Known as the inland passage since the first European set foot on what would become Savannah soil, these water highways protected small craft from Atlantic nor’easters and tropical storms bubbling up from the Caribbean.

The waterways where Spanish traders and Franciscan friars used to travel now sported marinas boasting high-tech wireless Internet connections and digital TV at every slip.

As much as I loved fast cars, I now longed for the old days when I rode a black horse with silver-studded tack through the marshes. I used to scare the piss out of night fishermen and anybody else who crossed my path, creating legends all my own. I was the stuff of children’s nightmares and the star of young girls’ dreams, or so I’ve been told.

Those were the good old days before I met Connie Jones.

When she was still a patrolwoman, she’d come upon me lying half in a ditch where I’d wrecked my car. Vampires never bother with seat belts. My injuries would have been lethal to a mortal human being, and yet to her astonishment I did survive. She’d had her eye on me ever since, a nagging suspicion in the back of her mind telling her that there was something strange about me.

In those months when she’d dogged me, her curiosity aroused, I hadn’t wanted to discourage her attentions because I was drawn to her by another kind of arousal. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would have done things differently. Maybe if during one of the many times she’d stopped and ticketed me for speeding, I had scared her with my fangs or put some negative glamour on her, I might have frightened her away or discouraged her enough to leave me alone. But no, I encouraged her attentions, egging her on for my own selfish reasons.

Because of me, she had been led to the edge of an abyss, and one more step would give her the deadly knowledge that would put her on a bloody course of destruction—either mine or hers or both.

It was time for me to put my selfishness aside and do what needed to be done for her sake and for the sake of my child. But I couldn’t do it alone. I needed the help of the only other man who I knew for sure loved her and would, I was convinced, lay down his life to protect her if need be.

My friend Seth. To whom I’d have to lie like a dog for this whole scheme to work. I couldn’t let him know that Connie was pregnant, and I couldn’t let him know that I’d almost killed her last night. All the explanations in the world about how it would have been best for her would not make a difference to Seth. If he knew I’d tried to kill Connie, he would try to kill me. There was no doubt in my mind.

When I got to the guarded storage unit where I spent my daylight hours, I found Seth asleep on the couch in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He had been bunking at my place since he came to town to shape up a wayward pack of werewolves before they got out of control and into trouble with the law.

I shook him, and he came awake as quickly as every good predator should. He blinked his yellow-green wolf’s eyes at me expectantly and sat up. “What?” he said.

“We’ve got to talk,” I said, sitting down next to him.

“Oh, man, I just hate it when a conversation starts that way. What did I do wrong, huh? Just tell me. It’s my hair, isn’t it?” He pawed his sleep-tousled brown mane. “I went running in the woods earlier tonight, so maybe I picked up some burrs. No, it’s my butt. It’s too big.”

“Shut up, doofus. This is serious.”

Something in my tone convinced him. “Am I going to need coffee for this?”

“You’re going to need whiskey for this, but it’s too early for you and too late for me.”

Seth cleared his throat. “This does sound serious.” He eyed the kitchen area.

“Want me to make the coffee? I could use some myself,” I said.

“No!” he said emphatically. “I’ve tasted your coffee. I’d sooner drink formaldehyde. I’m not immortal like you are, you know.
I
can be poisoned.”

Seth ambled off to the kitchen, which was separated from the den by a Formica-covered bar. I followed him and sat down on one of the bar stools. “This is a long story,” I began. “And you’re just going to have to trust me that I know what I’m talking about.”

“Okay,” Seth said warily. He’d put the coffee and filter in place and was pouring the water into the coffeemaker’s reservoir.

“Connie’s in danger, and you have to help me get her away from Savannah.”

Seth froze. “In danger from who?”

“From me. And the other vampires.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about, Jack? You love Connie. What the hell’s going on?”

As best I could, I explained about the prophecies, the birthmark, what happened in the underworld, all of it. I also laid out the reasons Travis said that trying to get her to hook up with the vampires to fight the bad guys wouldn’t do any good. Of course I left out the part about Connie’s pregnancy, the fact that I already tried to kill her, and what Melaphia and William had found out from Lalee.