Autumn Bones

Thirty

Two days later—or to be more precise, two days and a night later—I returned to the House of Shadows.

In accordance with the instructions on the engraved invitation, Jen and I arrived at eleven thirty. The temperature had dropped and it was a chilly night, more like October than September. We stood shivering in the courtyard for a few minutes, waiting for Cody to pull up in a cruiser and join us. God knows what would happen if things did go wrong, but at least he looked reassuring and official in his cold-weather police duty jacket.

“Are you okay?” he asked Jen.

She gave him a wan smile. “Not really.”

“Let’s get this over with.” I banged the door knocker.

Unsurprisingly, the undead doorman had a problem with Cody’s presence. I suppose the only surprising thing was that he didn’t have a problem with mine. Jen was prepared to claim me as family if necessary, but apparently being Hel’s liaison included the privilege of attending vampire risings.

Lucky me.

In the end, Lady Eris was summoned, arriving in a cloud of irritation and impatience. “There is no justification for your presence here, wolf.”

Cody planted his hands on his utility belt. “Are you kidding? There’s a dead woman on the premises.”

Lady Eris shot him a glare. “Unrisen, not dead.”

He shrugged. “Until she rises, she’s dead. And as long as she’s dead, police presence is justified.”

“He’s right,” I added, trying my best to sound authoritative. “He’s here at my request. Just in case.”

“There is no time to argue the matter.” She pursed her carmine lips and turned her glare on me. “Fine. The wolf may remain on the premises, but he may not attend the ceremony. Once he has confirmed the initiate has risen, he will depart. Does that suffice to resolve the issue?”

Cody and I exchanged a quick glance. He gave me a faint nod. It was probably the best compromise we were going to get.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

With that settled, the denizens of the House of Shadows assembled to file through the manor into the . . . crypt, I guess you’d call it. Back in the day, it was probably a cellar storage room, with stairs leading down from an aisle adjacent to an incongruous kitchen. As Jen and I were escorted past it, I wondered briefly why Lady Eris’s vampire brood hadn’t disassembled it, then remembered that their mortal acolytes still required human sustenance.

Anyway.

The walls of the crypt were covered with stucco, and dozens of candles burned in niches and on stands arrayed around the cellar. A fresco of the night sky adorned the ceiling, smudged with decades’ worth of candle smoke. A big slab of marble like a sarcophagus sat hulking in the center of the space.

Jen let out a faint sound, reaching involuntarily for my hand. I grabbed hers, squeezing hard.

Bethany Cassopolis lay motionless on the marble slab, looking bloodless and pretty fucking dead. Her black hair was fanned out over the marble, her hands were folded on her chest, and her normally Mediterranean olive-toned skin was pale and ashen. The fact that she looked so much like her sister made it even more unnerving. Weirdly, a length of scarlet ribbon had been run beneath her chin and tied in a bow atop her head.

I took a deep breath. After the night’s chill outside, the air in the crypt was close and stifling, but although I was beginning to sweat under the leather of my secondhand motorcycle jacket, the sweat turned cold on my skin.

“Brethren and sistren,” Lady Eris said in a mellifluous voice. Okay, so apparently sistren is an actual word. “We gather here tonight to celebrate the initiation of a new member into our midst. Hail, sister!”

“Hail, sister!” a dozen-plus voices echoed.

Creepy, right?

She glanced around the crypt, her gaze settling on Jen. “Does the family of the initiate wish to bid her mortal sibling a farewell?”

“Are you serious?” Jen blurted. Lady Eris raised one perfect eyebrow. “Jesus!” Jen stared at her sister. Unheeded tears spilled down her cheeks. “Jesus, Beth! Did you have to?”

“You should be grateful,” Geoffrey the prat informed her in a supercilious manner. “It is a tremendous honor that we accord her.” Other vampires murmured in agreement. Jen fixed Geoffrey with a death stare filled with hatred. He actually looked slightly nonplussed.

“Very well.” Lady Eris raised her voice. Not much, but it held an unmistakable ring of command. “Let the ritual commence.”

She offered a series of invocations to the Goddess of Night in all her incarnations, of which there were many. I concentrated on taking mental notes for my database, counting the vampires in the crypt. Altogether, there were sixteen of them. Seventeen if I counted Bethany, which I wasn’t ready to do yet.

Other than Jen and me, there was only one other mortal present. I recognized him as the guy who’d played John the Baptist in the tableau vivant. He stood quiet and patient, gazing at Bethany with a look of glazed envy.

Bethany just continued to look dead.

I clutched Jen’s hand in my left, my right resting on dauda-dagr’s hilt, its coolness caressing my palm. The candles burned, wicks crackling faintly here and there. I was hyper-aware of my heart thudding steadily in my chest, the soft whoosh of air entering and exiting my lungs.

Lady Eris beckoned. One of the other female vampires brought forth a silver chalice and set it on the edge of the sarcophagus. Another inclined her head to Geoffrey the prat, proffering a little silver knife with a curved blade.

Ceremoniously, Geoffrey unbuttoned his brocade waistcoat and removed it, handing it to the nearby doorman, who folded it neatly over one arm. Then Bethany’s blood-bonded mate unbuttoned the ruffled cuff of his left shirtsleeve and rolled it up to expose a pale, muscular forearm before accepting the knife.

Making a fist of his left hand, he held it over the chalice. With the knife in his right hand, he slashed the length of his inner forearm.

The other vampires sighed in approval, making the candle flames flicker and sway, sending dancing shadows around the crypt.

Okay, so it turns out that vampires aren’t actually bloodless, which I guess I’d known on some level, since it’s their blood that turns mortals. Exactly how it could work without a beating heart to circulate it, I’d never understood. It’s just . . . it’s not human blood that runs in their veins. What pulsed out of the gash in Geoffrey’s arm was an opaque, pearlescent liquid that spidered over his skin and streamed into the chalice. The way it slithered and skittered reminded me of mercury from a high school science experiment.

I swallowed hard.

Jen squeezed my hand tighter.

The gash on Geoffrey’s arm was already knitting, fading to a faint silvery line. He shook a few errant drops into the chalice before bowing to Lady Eris and offering the knife to her.

She pricked her forefinger and extended it. One, two, three perfect shimmering globules formed at the tip of her finger, falling into the bowl of the vessel.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the faint sound of the candles and three mortals breathing.

Then Lady Eris bent over the sarcophagus. With one decisive slash, she severed the ribbon binding Bethany’s jaw shut.

“Now,” she said.

Bethany’s jaw went slack and open, revealing nascent fangs. Two male vampires flanked her, raising her torso from the marble. Her limp spine sagged in their grip, and her slack jaw gaped wider.

Jen looked away, her nails biting into the palm of my hand.

I wanted to look away, too, but I didn’t. I made myself watch as Geoffrey the prat raised the chalice to Bethany’s lips with surprising tenderness, tipping its contents into her open mouth, carefully and judiciously.

For no particular reason, I counted the seconds that passed in my head.

One, two, three . . .

On three, Bethany’s body convulsed. Her spine arched rigidly and her throat worked, swallowing. Her skin flushed in reverse, by which I mean that it turned even paler, taking on a faint luminosity. Her throat worked again as Geoffrey poured the last of the blood from the chalice into her mouth.

With the last gulp, her eyes flew open wide, dark and terrified. Her hands scrabbled frantically at her chest, her upper lip curled to reveal lengthening fangs, and she made a breathless choking sound.

“It’s all right. You’re all right,” Lady Eris said in a soothing voice, laying one hand on Bethany’s brow. Bethany’s terrified gaze met hers. I could feel the weight of vampiric hypnosis emanating from the brood mistress. “It’s the shock of rising, that’s all. Do you remember we discussed this?”

Bethany gave the faintest hint of a nod, drawing in a gasp of air and gagging on it.

“There is no need to draw breath until you’re ready to speak, sister,” Lady Eris continued. “You’re in your new body, your reborn body. Listen. Listen to its silence. Revel in the silence. Listen.”

The panic in Bethany’s eyes began to fade, replaced by something else. Something dark and needful.

“Yes.” Lady Eris smiled. “You begin to understand, to truly understand. When all other needs are gone, only one remains.”

“To feed,” Bethany whispered.

“Yes.” Lady Eris beckoned again. One of the female vampires led John the Baptist to the sarcophagus. “To feed.”

I glanced over at Jen. She was watching now, a look of sick fascination on her face as her sister, still supported by a pair of vampires, reached for John the Baptist’s outstretched arm, sank her brand-new fangs into his wrist, and began slurping down his blood.

Okay, ew. Earlier in the summer, I’d caught a glimpse of exactly how disturbingly erotic it could be to be fed on by a vampire, and let me tell you, that so does not apply to the newly risen. It was more like watching a starving person gorge herself in a particularly disgusting manner.

When John the Baptist sank to his knees with a guttural groan, the vampire attendants eased him away from Bethany. She sat upright and unsupported now, her eyes bright, twin rivulets of blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. She took a deep, experimental breath, licked all around her lips, and smiled broadly. “I feel good,” she announced. “I feel great!”

A polite golf clap went around the crypt.

Geoffrey the prat spread his arms. “Welcome, my love,” he said to her. “Welcome, my sister.”

Bethany glanced at him. “Oh, fuck you!” His mouth fell open in shock. Lady Eris did the one-eyebrow raise. “You made me wait long enough for it.” Bethany looked around the room. “Jen!”

Jen blinked. “Uh . . . yeah?”

Her sister grinned again, revealing bloodstained teeth. “C’mon, girl! We’ve got unfinished business at home. Let’s go!”

“Huh?”

“Let’s go!” Bethany hopped off the sarcophagus with startling speed, nearly falling over and catching herself in the blink of an eye. “Wow. That’s gonna take some getting used to.” She grabbed Jen’s arm, yanking her away from me. “Car keys in your purse?”

“Hey!” I protested.

“You can call someone for a ride,” Bethany said over her shoulder, already dragging Jen toward the stairs. “This is a family matter.”

“Bethany!” Geoffrey said in a thunderous voice. “I do not grant permission for this!”

“I don’t need your permission anymore,” she retorted. “Unless her ladyship forbids it, I’ll be back before dawn.”

He shot Lady Eris a look of appeal.

She shrugged. “I’ll allow it.”

By the time he got his protest out, Bethany and Jen were halfway up the stairs, and by the time I pushed my way through the vampire throng in the crypt, they were out the door, leaving a puzzled-looking Cody in the foyer.

“I take it the rising worked,” he said. “Should I have stopped them?”

“Probably,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

He glanced toward the courtyard. “Should we go after them?”

“Definitely.”

The taillights of Jen’s old LeBaron were already vanishing in the distance when we set out after them in the cruiser, which didn’t really matter since I was pretty sure that Bethany was headed for the Cassopolis home. Cody put on the siren and the lights and we took off at a good clip, which also didn’t matter since apparently being turned into a vampire also meant driving like a . . . well, like a bat out of hell. I guess lightning-fast reflexes and a total lack of fear of dying will do that to a person. I hoped Jen was okay.

The Cassopolises’ place was a dingy ranch house on the outskirts of East Pemkowet. We arrived to find the front door standing wide open and lights on inside the house. Cody took the lead and I followed him, drawing dauda-dagr as a precaution.

Jen’s kid brother, Brandon, was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, looking sleep-disheveled and shell-shocked. Without a word he pointed down the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, where we could hear shouting.

I didn’t have a whole lot of love for Jen’s father. Mr. Cassopolis was a mean drunk with a bad temper. He hit his wife, and the only reason Jen still lived at home was because she worried that he’d start in on Brandon.

Still, it was disconcerting to see someone I knew as a parent pinned up against his own bedroom wall inches above the floor, clad in a pair of light-blue pajamas, his bare feet kicking futilely.

Bethany held him effortlessly in place, one hand clamped around his throat. “...understand me, Dad?” she was saying. “If you ever, ever lay a hand on Mom, or Jen, or Brandon, or . . . fucking anyone, I will kill you.” She bared her blood-crusted teeth and sharp fangs at him. “I will drink you dry. Understand?”

His eyes bulged. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have replied either way. I had a bad feeling that newly risen vampires weren’t entirely aware of their own strength.

Bethany gave her father a little shake, using her free hand to bat away Jen’s efforts to pull her off, ignoring her pleas. Their mother was pulling at her own hair and screaming; just screaming, over and over, like a police siren.

“Understand?”

“Bethany!” Cody shouted, drawing his gun. “Let him go!”

She laughed. “You gonna shoot me? Go ahead. I’m not finished here. Not until he agrees.”

Cody and I exchanged a glance. Shooting Bethany with a service pistol wouldn’t do much except slow her down and piss her off. Vampires don’t die easily and they heal incredibly fast. Sunlight works, but that whole stake-in-the-heart thing is a myth. You pretty much have to cut off their heads to kill them.

Unless you have a magic dagger.

I planted the tip of dauda-dagr between her shoulder blades. “He can’t talk, Bethany! You’re fucking strangling him!”

She stiffened. “Don’t. Just . . . don’t.”

“Let him down!”

“You’re killing him, you fuckwit!” Jen shouted at her sister, helpless tears in her eyes. “Jesus! Is this your idea of helping?”

“I spent eight years waiting to get to this point!” Bethany shouted back at her. “Eight fucking years!”

Mr. Cassopolis’s feet were kicking more feebly. I hesitated.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Cody growled at Bethany, green phosphorescence flaring behind his eyes. “Don’t make me rip your throat out.”

“I’d like to see you—”

“Daisy?” It was a new voice, a voice I recognized but couldn’t place. “Shit!”

There was a click, and bright light flooded the Cassopolises’ master bedroom. Artificial sunlight, full-spectrum lighting.

Bethany howled in agony, dropping her father. He crumpled, wheezing. She scrambled across the floor, eyes screwed shut and swollen, striking out blindly over and over.

“Ow!”

A sharp snap, like a stick breaking. Also, the very bright light went out.

I turned around.

Lee Hastings was huddled on the floor, his leather duster pooling around him, the light box strapped to his chest cracked and dented. He was cradling an obviously broken forearm and blinking owlishly. Bethany looked sort of scorched, her skin bubbly and flaky. Cody was wrestling his half-shifted features back under control, breathing hard, looking annoyed and disgruntled. Mrs. Cassopolis had stopped screaming, settling for clutching at the neckline of her nightgown. Twelve-year-old Brandon was peering around the door of his parents’ bedroom, his expression uncertain.

I looked at Jen.

She looked back at me. “Well, that went well.”