The Beast

FORTY-THREE

“It’s so peaceful out here. So beautiful.”

As Bitty said the words, Mary glanced over at the girl. The pair of them were strolling down one of Pine Grove Cemetery’s miles of paved lanes. Overhead, the moon was giving them more than enough illumination to see by, the silvery glow landing on the tops of fluffy pine boughs and also the elegant bare limbs of maple and oak trees. All around, headstones, statues, and mausoleums dotted the rolling lawns and shores of man-made ponds, until you could almost imagine you were walking through a stage set.

“Yes, it is,” Mary murmured. “It’s nice to think that all this is for the ghosts of the people buried here, but I believe it’s more for the folks who come to visit. It can be really hard, especially in the beginning, to come visit a family member or a friend who’s passed. I mean, after my mother died and I put her ashes in the ground, it took me months and months to come back. When I finally got here, though, it was easier in some ways than I’d thought, mostly because of how lovely it is—we’re going over there. She’s right there.”

Stepping off onto the grass, Mary was careful where she trod. “Here, follow me. The dead are in the front of the markers. And yes, I know it’s weird, but I hate the idea of trampling anyone.”

“Oh!” Bitty looked down at a beautiful headstone inscribed with a Jewish Star of David and the name Epstein. “I beg your pardon. Excuse me.”

The two of them wended their way in farther, until Mary stopped at a rose-colored granite marker with the name Cecilia Luce carved upon it.

“Hi, Mom,” she whispered, getting down on her haunches to pick a fallen leaf off the front the headstone. “How are you?”

As she ran her fingertips over the engraved name and the dates, Bitty knelt down on the other side.

“What did she pass from?” the girl asked.

“M.S. Multiple sclerosis.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a human disease where the body’s immune system attacks the coating that protects your nerve fibers? Without that sheath, you can’t tell your body what to do, so you lose the ability to walk, feed yourself, speak. Or at least, my mom did. Some people with it have long periods of remission when the disease isn’t active. She wasn’t one of them.” Mary rubbed the center of her chest. “There are more options for treatment now than there were fifteen or twenty years ago when she was first diagnosed. Maybe she would have lasted longer in this era of medicine. Who knows.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Every day. The thing is . . . I don’t want to freak you out, but I’m not convinced you ever get over a death like that of your mother’s. I think it’s more that you get used to the loss. Kind of like getting in cold water? There’s a shock to the system in the beginning, but an accommodation happens so you don’t notice the chill as much as the years pass—and sometimes, you even forget you’re in the tub at all after a while. But there are always memories that come back to you and remind you of who is missing.”

“I think of my mom a lot. I dream of her, too. She comes to me in dreams and talks to me.”

“What does she say?”

As a cold breeze rolled through, Bitty tucked some hair back behind her ear. “That everything is going to be okay, and I’m going to have a new family soon. That’s what got me thinking about my uncle.”

“Well, I think that’s lovely.” Mary let herself sit back on her butt, her thigh-level coat a barrier to the damp ground. “Does she look healthy in your dreams?”

“Oh, yes. I like that most. She’s with my baby brother, the one who passed as well.”

“We gave your mother his ashes.”

“I know. She put them in her suitcase. She said that she wanted to make sure they came with us if we were told to go.”

“It might be nice to put them together at some point.”

“I think that’s a really good idea.”

There was a long pause. “Hey, Bitty?”

“Mmm?”

Mary picked a little stick off the ground and bent it up and down to give her fingers something to do. “I, ah, I wish I’d known how worried your mom was about the resources at Safe Place. I would have worked really hard to reassure her.” She glanced over at the girl. “Are you worried about any of that?”

Bitty put her hands in her coat pockets and looked around. “I don’t know. Everyone’s really nice. You especially. But it’s scary, you know.”

“I know. Just talk to me, okay? If you get scared. I’ll give you my cell phone number. You can call me at any time directly.”

“I don’t want to be a burden.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what worries me. Your mom didn’t want to be one, which I can absolutely respect—but the end result was that things were much harder on her, and you, than they had to be. Do you know what I mean?”

Bitty nodded and fell silent.

After a while, the girl said, “My father used to hit me.”

Deep in the grungy heart of downtown, Rhage ran through an alley, his shitkickers landing on the asphalt like thunder, his autoloader up, his rage in check so that it was an engine that drove him on, not a disaster that flipped him out.

As his target darted across another street, he stuck to the fucker like glue, that sickly sweet lesser smell like the vapor trail of a jet across the night sky, easily trackable.

It was a new recruit. Probably from out at that abandoned factory.

He could tell because the thing was all panicked, tripping and slipping before scrambling away in a mess of arms and legs, no weapons on him, no one coming to his rescue.

He was a lone rat without a mischief.

And as the slayer fell for the umpteenth time, his feet knocked out from under him by what looked like a carburetor, he finally didn’t get up again. He just held his leg to his chest and moaned, rolling onto his back.

“No, p-p-p-please, no!”

As Rhage pulled up to his prey and stopped, for the first time in recorded history, he hesitated before the kill. But he couldn’t not stab the fucker. If he left the damn thing on the streets, it was just going to heal up and find others of its kind to fight with . . . or it was going to get discovered by a human and end up on some fucking YouTube video.

“Nooooooo—”

Rhage shoved the thing’s arms out of the way and buried his black dagger right in the center of that now-hollow chest.

With a flash and a pop!, the slayer disappeared into thin air, nothing but a greasy stain of the Omega’s blood on the pavement and an acrid burn left behind—

Rhage jerked around, switching his dagger for an autoloader. Flaring his nostrils, he sniffed at the air and then let out a growl.

“I know you’re there. Show yourself.”

When nothing moved in the shadows at the far end of the alley, he took three steps back so that he had cover in the doorway of an abandoned tenement building.

In the distance, sirens howled like stray dogs, and on the next block over, some humans shouted at one another. Closer by, something was dripping off the fire escape behind him, and there was a rattling higher up, as if the gusts coming from the river were agitating the scaffolding’s tenuous hold on the brick.

“You fucking pussy,” he called out. “Show yourself.”

His natural arrogance told him he could handle whatever this was all by himself, but some vague unease he couldn’t put a name to had him signaling for back-up by triggering a beacon located on the inside of his jacket’s collar.

It wasn’t that he was frightened—fuck, no. And he felt stupid the second he’d done it.

But there was another male vampire hiding over there, and the only thing he knew for sure? It wasn’t Xcor.

Because they knew where that bastard was.

The rest of those sonsabitches were an open question.