The Graves of Saints (11 page)

‘Where are you going?’ Anita asked as he opened the door.

‘To a funeral,’ Santiago said. ‘After that, maybe to war.’

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Charlotte’s eyes fluttered open. She was surprised to find that she had been dozing, her head nested between pillows and the bedclothes pulled up to her neck. The drone of
voices from CNN came from the television in the hotel room that Octavian had secured for her. She had been watching numbly and had had no intention of sleeping. Shadows had the capacity for sleep
but not the human necessity; yet she had apparently drifted off.

Drifted
? she thought with bleary amusement.
More like plummeted
.

She sat up and propped herself on a couple of pillows, staring at the television and trying to make sense of the images there. Football players in action, some kind of sports report. Then the
reassuring smile of a news anchor before cutting to a Middle Eastern city street scene, black smoke rising as a crush of people fled from uniformed men wielding batons. Children, covered in blood,
being treated in a makeshift hospital.

The world we’ve made
, she thought. Whenever she pondered such things, she had to wonder if immortality held any real allure.

There came a brisk knock at the door, the sort that implied it hadn’t been the first. Had that been what had woken her?

Frowning, she whipped back the covers and padded to the door in her underpants and a fitted black tee. She would need clothes, especially something for the funeral. Charlotte had gone days
wearing the same outfit in the past, but never on purpose. If anything, she had grown more concerned about hygiene and clean clothes since leaving humanity behind.

She stood on her toes and looked through the peephole in the door, spying Allison Vigeant standing in the hall. As Charlotte reached for the deadbolt, the other vampire knocked again.

‘All right, hang on!’ Charlotte said.

She removed the safety latch and opened the door. ‘What’s up?’

Allison arched an eyebrow. ‘You were sleeping?’

‘I crashed,’ Charlotte replied. ‘Weird, right?’

‘Sometimes we need to go dormant, like hibernating,’ Allison said. ‘Other times it’s just reflex. Conditioned behavior from human life.’ She looked Charlotte up and
down, surveying her many intricate tattoos. ‘Can I come in a minute?’

‘Sure. Sorry,’ Charlotte replied, backing up to let her pass. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I just thought we should get to know each other a little,’ Allison said. ‘You being the new girl and all.’

Charlotte closed the door and followed Allison back into the room. She glanced at the nightstand and saw the clock.

‘Sort of a strange time for a get-to-know-you, isn’t it?’ Charlotte asked. ‘Quarter past six in the morning?’

Allison slid into a chair and gazed at her, once again seeming to take her measure. In another life, Charlotte would have felt self-conscious about being in her underpants and t-shirt in front
of this woman she barely knew, but modesty had mostly died with her humanity.

‘I didn’t expect you to be sleeping,’ Allison said.

Charlotte nodded, then crawled back into bed, sitting up against the propped pillows. She crossed her hands in her lap.

‘What do you want to know? Octavian and Metzger spent about two hours interrogating me last night. I figure you’ve probably already heard about it from them.’

‘From Peter, yes,’ Allison said. ‘Metzger is afraid to come near me in case I decide to rip his throat out.’

‘That’s going to make for an interesting alliance.’

‘Yeah. It is,’ Allison replied. ‘What do you know about me?’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘Only what Octavian’s told me. One of his best friends. Badass vamp hunter. Fugitive. UN figured you for a traitor. Now Octavian’s going to shove you down
their throats.’

‘How does that strike you?’

‘If Octavian vouches for you, that’s good enough for me. It’s not like I have a lot of choices. He’s pretty much the only reason I’m alive right now. He could have
killed me when we met, and he’s had opportunities to let me die.’

‘But he’s taken you under his wing,’ Allison said.

‘I guess, yeah.’

‘And that’s enough for you to be willing to go to war for him?’

Charlotte bristled, cocking her head. ‘Cortez and his coven raped and murdered me and turned me into this. If I go to war, it’s not for Octavian.’

‘What if he wants you elsewhere?’ Allison asked. ‘The chaos you helped stop in Massachusetts is going to have repercussions. The world is going to start unraveling.’

‘That’s my fight too, isn’t it? I have to live here.’ Charlotte slid to the edge of the bed and stared at her. ‘What exactly do you want from me? You want me to
leave?’

Allison settled back into the chair, steepling her fingers on her chest. ‘Not at all. I’m like you. If Peter vouches for you, that’s good enough for me. But that doesn’t
mean I don’t get to be curious and to wonder about you and your allegiances.’

Charlotte threw up her hands. ‘Look, I told those guys everything I know about Cortez. I told them every safe house I ever visited and the names of every member of the coven I knew.
It’s a hell of a head start, I think. There’s nothing else I can offer. And if I was out to kill Octavian, I’m sure I had an opportunity or two when we were fighting Navalica. You
want to know whose side I’m on? Don’t be stupid. I’m on my own side first. But I’m smart enough to know that Octavian’s on my side, too. He wants to keep me alive and
to take Cortez down. Seeing as how those are my two top priorities, yeah . . . I’ll fight for him. Wherever he wants me, that’s where I’ll go.’

Allison nodded thoughtfully, turning to glance out the slider at the gray sky lightening over the city.

‘He’s a sort of mentor to you, now, I suppose,’ Allison said, turning her attention back to Charlotte. ‘He’s good at it, you know. Being the “vampire
godfather”, taking ordinary Shadows under his wing and making heroes out of them. He did it for me and a lot of people I loved. But you’d better be very sure that’s what you
want.’

‘I’m sure,’ Charlotte insisted.

‘See,’ Allison went on, ‘there were a lot of us, once upon a time. What Peter was talking about last night, the group he mentioned? Most of us are dead. Old friends and old
lovers. We won the battles that mattered, yeah. But not without a cost. Not without a price that you have to be willing to pay if you’re going to get into this. Most of us never got the
chance to decide, to know what we were getting ourselves into. So maybe I’m coming off as a cold bitch. I’m sure I am, actually; I haven’t had a lot to laugh about, or anybody to
laugh with, for a long time. Might be I don’t remember how to be pleasant. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to really think about what you’re getting into, and to run like hell
if you want.’

Charlotte blinked in surprise. She had thought that this visit was about suspicion, and that was certainly part of it. But what Allison had brought her this morning was an unexpected
kindness.

‘I . . .’ she began, faltering. ‘Look, I appreciate it. Honestly. But whatever happens from here on in, I’m choosing it. After I got away from Cortez I just wanted to
have a life, but now that I know all of this is happening, I can’t just do nothing about it. Besides . . . even if I wanted to run, I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

Allison sat forward, pushing her hair away from her face. ‘All right, then. You’re in. But Peter’s going to have a lot on his mind, so if he’s your godfather, from now on
I’m your fairy godmother. You have questions, you need combat training, you’re trying to deal with the life you left behind, come to me. I’ll do what I can to help you get through
it.’

Charlotte smiled, touched by her words and slightly taken aback. Allison stood to leave and Charlotte scrambled out of the bed to follow her.

‘Thank you,’ Charlotte said. ‘Really. Thanks so much.’

She didn’t expect to find a friend in this grim hunter. She didn’t express the sentiment out loud, however. It seemed clear that there would be no hugs and late-night girl talk
between them. Perhaps ‘friend’ was too strong a word, but ‘ally’ would do.

‘My pleasure,’ Allison said, reaching the door. She pulled it open and then turned, standing silhouetted against the corridor beyond. ‘Let’s be clear, though. If it turns
out you’re bullshitting and that you’re still taking orders from Cortez, I’ll spend hours killing you.’

Charlotte could only stare, wide-eyed, as Allison left, shutting the door behind her. She’d believed every word.

It seemed that perhaps even ‘ally’ was too strong a word.

Saint-Denis, France

Hannah woke in seething pain. Her skull felt like it might split and her belly and ribs ached so much that she couldn’t breathe. Tears sprang to her eyes and she cried
out, head back, venting her pain to a God she feared must be deaf.
Where the hell am I?
she thought.
Charlie
?

And then she remembered the demon, and that it had killed Charlie, whom she had never really stopped loving.

The pain turned her mournful sob into a moan. ‘God!’ she cried out, reaching down to put one hand on her belly – her rounded, distended belly. Something moved beneath the skin
and she screamed, eyes widening as she propped herself up.

On the stairs.

Leading up from the sepulcher in the basement of the cathedral.

At the bottom of the stairs, the demon lay upon Charlie’s corpse, stripping flesh and muscle from the bones, which jerked and twitched obscenely. Her eyelids fluttered and the edges of her
vision dimmed, but she forced herself not to pass out again, searching her mind for the last traces of memory from before she had fallen unconscious. The demon had killed him, then come past him,
reaching for her.

Why did it let me go?
she wondered.

Another spasm clutched at her gut and she cried out in pain and put both hands on her stomach. Eyes wide, she felt a fullness descend inside her, stretching her open, searing her vagina with
pain, and then she knew and felt stupid for not understanding immediately.

The demon had not let her go at all.

Her heart raced and her breath came in desperate hitches of denial. She propped herself higher on an elbow, the hard edges of the stone stairs biting into her back, and she looked down and saw
the blood soaking through the crotch of her pants.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, tears springing to her eyes.
What is happening to me?

Horror swept through her, her gorge rising in disgust even as the pain and fullness grew worse. Something inside her, growing and twisting and trying to come out . . . trying to be born.

Shrieking, tears streaming down her cheeks, unmindful of anyone who might bear witness, Hannah reached down and tore at the button and zipper of her pants. Even as she shrugged them down,
fighting the pain and weakness that had left her stranded there on the stairs, she felt the surge from inside her, the stretching of her vagina as something wriggled inside her, struggling to be
free. Pushing her pants down, she caught sight of herself . . . opening . . . and the blood- and mucous-smeared thing that was emerging, its skin a chitinous, insectoid armor.

As it pushed free, pain wrenched a scream from her throat and she threw her head back, slamming her skull against the stairs. Her thoughts blurred and her legs began to spasm and kick of their
own accord, splayed wide. For a moment she thought the grotesque birth had already taken place, her lower half numbed by trauma, and then she felt it push again and slide from within her.

She couldn’t look at it, could only close her eyes tightly and feel it slither over her, leaving a wet, stinking trail. It mewled beside her, fetid, brimstone breath on her cheek, and then
she heard it on the stairs, clicking and then clattering as it slid up into the cathedral, where people would still be recovering from an earthquake, unable to imagine what the earth had shaken
loose.

For several minutes, sickness roiling in her gut, she lay weeping on the stairs and listened for the screams she knew must come from above any minute now. Below her came wet, grinding, snapping
noises and she wondered if the demon had begun to gnaw on Charlie’s bones. Sobbing, she pushed all thoughts of Charlie away. She couldn’t think of him, now, couldn’t allow herself
to wonder what might have happened if she could have just stopped with her sarcasm and little cruelties and opened her heart to him, told him how she really felt. That she still loved him.

Shaking, eyes burning with tears, pants around her ankles, she turned on her side and began to consider modesty.
So weak
, she thought. In all her life she had never felt so fragile and
tentative. Grief felt like an iron shroud upon her, crushing her, suffocating her so that she did not even want to rise from her defilement.

But she had to. If she stayed here, when the demon had finished consuming Charlie, it would crawl up the stairs and come for her. Again.

Hannah forced herself to reach a trembling hand down and begin to drag her pants upward. Then she halted, brows knitted.
How
? she asked herself. The last thing she remembered was the
demon reaching for her, touching her, and then a cold fire racing through her and pain shooting through her belly that sent her reeling toward the stairs. She had fallen on the stone steps and
unconsciousness had claimed her. But when she’d come around, her clothes had not been torn. She’d had to remove her own pants for that . . .
Stop. Don’t think about
it
.

The demon had impregnated her with nothing but a touch.

A spasm wracked her body, bile burned its way up the back of her throat and she twisted to one side, spraying vomit onto the wall and stairs. Disgusted, she inched away, wrinkling her nose at
the smell and at this humiliation added to all the rest.

‘Come. You’ve got to hurry,’ a voice said.

Recoiling from the gentle kindness, she fought for modesty, trying to drag her pants up the rest of the way even as she lolled her head back and looked to see who had come upon her in her ruin.
Light from above silhouetted him, but when she blinked she saw that she knew him, and her humiliation was complete.