First Drop of Crimson

Chapter Thirty-four

The sound that came out of Nathanial’s throat would haunt her. It was a cross between a sob and the most despairing laugh Denise had ever heard.

“I should have known,” Nathanial said, still making that awful, keening cackle. “They never let me around you, which I thought was odd since I was supposed to be there to help you. Then they never asked me to tell you about the tricks I’d learned to stop the change, in addition to keeping the baser urges under control. There are meditations, certain herbs you steep together to drink…but none of that matters now, does it?”

Oliver slowed down enough to laser a glare on Nathanial. “Do not speak to her again,” he said.

“Stop it!” Denise cried out. “Let him speak.”

“Spade doesn’t—”

“I know Spade doesn’t want me talking to him,” Denise interrupted. “But even condemned prisoners get to have their last words.”

Then she gave Nathanial a steady look. “You never answered my question. Why did you do it? Do you have any idea what your decision ended up costing me? Raum murdered I don’t know how many members of my family looking for you. He threatened to kill the few that were left and branded me to force me to find you. You deserve to talk, but I deserve to know why.”

“I don’t have a good reason. I was a dirt-poor farmer in the eighteen sixties who stumbled onto the occult after a feverish priest stayed at my home. While he was raving, he talked about demons. It didn’t scare me; it fascinated me. I’d always dreamed of being more than I was, and the priest unwittingly gave me the tools to do that. When he got better, I tricked him into believing I wanted to aid his work, but I really sought to learn how to summon and trap a demon instead.”

Nathanial paused and sighed. “I was nineteen. Young, stupid, and arrogant. After I summoned Raum and bargained for long life and power, I sent him back to where he came from. I thought no one would be hurt. But then I found out I couldn’t control the effects of his brands. I’d wanted to be powerful, but I didn’t want to change into monsters from my nightmares. I found the priest I’d deceived and begged him for help. Together we learned how to curb the triggers to transformation and how to control what I changed into, when that still wasn’t enough. When he died, he left instructions for other priests to help me. It was one of them who told me about vampires, and how a vampire demonologist might be able to mute my brands in case Raum ever returned. I got the tattoos and I thought…I might be able to live a semi-normal life then. But the vampire who took me to the demonologists knew my blood was different. And after I got the tattoos, he sold me to Web.”

“You bargained your soul to a demon,” Oliver said without pity. “You deserve what you have coming to you.”

“I know I deserve it!” Nathanial shouted. “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I could turn back the clock so I never made that bargain, but I did. All through the past seventy years with Web, through every awful, degrading thing that they did to me, the only thing that kept me sane was knowing it could always be worse.” His voice broke with pain. “And now it will be, and I know it’s no more than I deserve, but that doesn’t make me any less afraid.”

Denise thought of her murdered cousins and aunts, her parents, and Raum’s howling threats that he’d kill the rest of her family if she didn’t return the man sitting across the seat from her. Then she thought of Randy’s brave smile before he went out that basement door, and the guilt and cowardice that had filled her ever since.

“If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?” she asked Nathanial quietly.

“That’s easy.” His voice was a rasp. “I want to live without being afraid or used or ashamed. I want a second chance.”

Denise closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she knew what she had to do.

“Oliver, pull over for a second,” she said.

He gave her a measured glare. “I’m not letting him go, no matter what you say.”

“I know,” Denise replied. “I just want you to stop for a moment. I promise, I won’t ask you to let him go.”

Oliver gave her a wary look, but pulled over to the side. Nathanial let out a weary grunt.

“Don’t worry. I couldn’t make a run for it even if I wanted to—and believe me, I want to. But Spade must’ve done something to me when he tranced me. I can’t make myself even grab the door handle to open it.”

“Good,” Oliver said shortly, glancing around before putting the car in park. He met Denise’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “It looks safe enough here for the moment, what do you want?”

Denise took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

And then she whipped up the gun Spade had left for her in the backseat and smashed the butt of it against Oliver’s head.

Spade prowled the docks, looking for any more of Web’s people. The scent of death hung in the air, sharpened with the harsher aroma of undead blood. Spade savored it. It was the scent of Denise’s safety.

The fighting had been brutal, but now most of Web’s people were dead. A few had managed to run off completely. Cat and Crispin were busy stacking the bodies into one of the larger boats, where an explosion would give them a modern version of a Viking funeral. In Spade’s opinion, it was more dignified than they deserved, but they couldn’t leave them out in the open as they were for humans to find. Flames would burn off any paranormal evidence in their blood, leaving only a strange cache of charred corpses with varying ages in the boat to be found, no supernatural traces left behind. As for Web’s monitors on the docks…they’d been found and destroyed.

Crispin already had to green-eye a few humans to forget the slaughter they’d stumbled onto. When the police didn’t show up, Spade suspected Web had warned them away from the docks earlier. Web wouldn’t have made Monaco his home without having an in with the local human authorities.

Spade felt a grim satisfaction as a search of the harbor and surrounding grounds of the hotels turned up no more vampires. As to the few that got away, he’d find them. They had no Master of their line to protect them now. It wouldn’t take him long to track them, especially not with the bounty he intended to put out on them—preferably delivered dead instead of undead.

“Spade!”

His head jerked around as he recognized Oliver’s voice, fear slithering up his spine. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to take Denise and Nathanial to Mencheres and stay with them until Spade rejoined them later.

Spade flew in the direction of Oliver’s voice, seeing the other man had just reached the docks. On foot.

“Where’s Denise?” he demanded, dropping out of the sky to grab Oliver. “Why isn’t she with you?”

“She knocked me out,” Oliver said thickly. “She’d been talking to Nathanial, and then she just clubbed me. I didn’t even see her raise the gun, she was so fast. When I came to, she’d already gone. I searched for her, but I didn’t find the SUV. I don’t know how long I was out…”

Spade threw back his head and roared with pain. There was only one reason Denise would have done such a thing.

She was going after the demon herself.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Nathanial muttered.

Denise threw him a quelling glare. Her palm still burned from where she’d cut the transmitter out after dumping Oliver’s unconscious body on the shoulder of the road. That blow to the head wouldn’t take too long to heal, with the vampire blood he’d drunk earlier. She’d cut Nathanial’s transmitter out, too. She couldn’t go through all this just for Mencheres to track them and stop her.

“You remember what the alternative is, right? If you like your soul and want to keep it awhile longer, you’ll quit saying this isn’t going to work and start brainstorming ways it will.”

“Raum is an ancient, powerful demon. You’re just a human. How do you think you can outfight Raum enough to stab him in the eyes? Call your boyfriend. He has a better chance of defeating Raum.”

“If I do that, I may as well shoot you with this gun. It would be more merciful.”

“You could shoot me all you want, it won’t kill me,” Nathanial said bleakly. “If it were that easy for me to die, I wouldn’t be here. I tried every way to kill myself over the years. Hung myself. Shot myself. Stabbed myself. Jumped off a cliff. Blew myself up. Even had someone cut my head off—”

“No,” Denise gasped. “You did not survive all that.”

Nathanial gave her a weary, jaded look. “You don’t get what these brands are, do you? If they’d let me speak to you before, I could have told you. They’re extensions of Raum’s power. All his power, including his regenerative power. So just like nothing but that bone knife can kill a demon, nothing but that bone knife can kill someone branded by a demon. Took me a while to figure that out, but by then, Thomas convinced me not to use the knife on myself.”

“Who’s Thomas?”

“Was. Thomas was the priest I tricked who later helped me.”

Denise cast another glance at him while she drove. “You didn’t really survive your head getting cut off, did you?”

“You know how vampires regrow a limb right away after it’s cut off?” Nathanial made a slicing gesture across his throat. “New head, same look, within an hour. Made the person who decapitated me shit himself before he fainted.”

Denise remembered Raum taunting her the day he’d branded her that she was now beyond mortal death. She didn’t realize how far beyond he’d meant.

“But I bled when Web stabbed me. Spade had to heal me.”

“Of course you bled. But he didn’t have to heal you. You’d have healed soon enough on your own. Might have taken a day. You haven’t been branded that long, you said. The longer you have the demon essence in you, the faster you’ll heal.”

This was all so hard to take in—and frightening. If she was successful, she’d be branded for the rest of her life…and that life might last longer than she could even conceive of.

Or it might end before the sun rose.

“We need Spade if you’re going to try to kill Raum,” Nathanial said for the tenth time.

Denise snapped out a reply without looking away from the road. “Don’t you get it? Spade won’t risk my life for your soul. He’ll offer you up to Raum in a heartbeat. I can’t get him involved.”

Nathanial was silent for a long moment. “Why are you doing this for me? Taking on a demon when you could just hand me over and get back to your life?”

She let out a long breath. Because she couldn’t live with herself if she gave him over to the demon, knowing what would happen. Because she’d made up her mind that she was not the same person who’d stayed below in the basement that fateful New Year’s Eve. It was time for her to stand tough. To face the monsters, instead of letting others fight them for her.

“You said you wanted a second chance? Well, Nathanial, so do I.”