Up From the Grave

Twenty

Once they’d gotten the liquid silver out of Tate, he, Juan, and Cooper did a sweep of the facility, making sure more guards weren’t holed up somewhere waiting for their chance to attack. Denise still hadn’t returned with the missing child, but I wasn’t worried. Only demon bone stabbed through her eyes could kill Denise, and Madigan didn’t have any. Almost no one did. Demon bone was harder to come by than astatine.

Dave, however, was with Bones and me. He stared down at Madigan’s corpse, his mouth compressed into a thin, tight line.

“Normally, I’d enjoy carving up the bastard’s chest, but right now, the thought doesn’t appeal.”

Bones tapped the large knife he’d confiscated from the compound’s operating room against his thigh.

“Can’t afford to wait. With each day, the blood loses power.”

Dave’s brow went up. “You raised me after I was in the ground for over three months.”

“She forced a lot of vampire blood into you as you were dying,” Bones said, with an approving glance at me. Then he kicked Madigan’s prone form. “This sod barely drank a drop.”

Dave let out a sigh of concession before pulling off his shirt and handing it to me with a sardonic smile.

“You were there to watch this put into my chest. Guess it’s fitting that you’re here to watch it cut out, too.”

“It was Rodney’s, then yours, so it’s a good heart,” I replied, preparing myself for what was to come. “He doesn’t deserve it.”

Dave grunted. “And I don’t want his, but here we are anyway.”

So saying, he accepted the knife from Bones and knelt next to Madigan. Instead of undoing buttons, he sliced through Madigan’s shirt, exposing the older man’s pale, gray-furred torso.

“Any trick to this?” Dave asked, resting the sharp tip over Madigan’s chest.

Bones let out a slight snort. “No, this is the easy part. Putting it back properly is where you need delicacy and precision.”

Dave drove the blade through the center of Madigan’s chest. Then he hacked away a section of rib cage, exposing the former operative’s heart. A few slices later, and Dave was holding it up like a grim trophy.

“Would’ve sworn it would be black,” he muttered.

If evil left a stain, it would have been, but Madigan’s heart looked like everyone else’s. That didn’t mean I wanted closer contact with it, yet when Dave extended it to me, I took it. As unsettling as this was, it didn’t compare with what was coming.

Dave handed the bloody knife to Bones and visibly braced.

Bones didn’t hesitate. He shoved it to the hilt under Dave’s rib cage. Then, just as quick and brutal, he cut a space wide enough for his hand and plunged that in next. Harsh noises escaped Dave’s tightly closed lips, but he didn’t scream. I would have, if it were my heart being cut out of my chest. Repeatedly, yet those ragged sounds were the only indication Dave gave of how much it hurt, let alone the mental trauma of seeing Bones withdraw his heart from his chest.

“Now, Kitten,” Bones said in a clipped tone.

I handed him Madigan’s heart and took Dave’s, placing it in Madigan’s open chest cavity. Then I wiped my hands on my borrowed lab coat, which was now more red than white. In the short time it took to do that, Bones finished with Dave, who staggered as he backed away.

“You need to eat,” Bones told him. “There’s plenty here, so have at it, and remember—raw will mend you faster.”

He wasn’t referring to a ghoul’s usual meal of uncooked butcher cuts. I chided myself for my instant flash of nausea as Dave left to follow those instructions. He couldn’t help what he needed to survive, and as Bones had pointed out, there were lots of dead soldiers to choose from. Besides, Dave’s part in this might be finished, but ours wasn’t.

“Bring me two,” Bones said. He knelt next to Madigan’s body, arranging the parts inside with skill born of practice.

I left the elevation shaft and went to the other room, where the compound’s employees waited with obedient silence. Then I selected two of the healthiest-looking and led them from the group. Before they saw the interior of the elevation shaft, I stared into their eyes with my gaze lit up.

“Don’t be afraid,” I told them in a resonant voice. “You won’t be harmed.”

If I hadn’t done that before I led them inside the circular room, they would have been pants-pissing terrified at seeing a body with its chest carved open and a vampire leaning over it while cutting his own throat. Hell, it made me antsy, and I’d seen the same years ago when Bones raised Dave as a ghoul. Changing someone into a vampire was downright prissy-looking by comparison.

Once Bones had drained a couple pints of his blood into Madigan’s chest cavity, he sat back. Quickly, I led the man and woman over. He drank from each of them and returned to his grisly task of forcing more blood out of him and into Madigan’s gaping chest. Since he didn’t need my help for this, I led the two donors back to their group. They’d be a little woozy, but otherwise fine.

Before I could return to the elevation platform, I ran into Tate.

“We have a problem,” he stated.

I glanced around warily. “More guards?”

“No, we took care of the stragglers,” he said in a dismissive way. Then his tone hardened. “I’m talking about software. Turns out the Dante machine wasn’t the only self-destruct mechanism.”

I groaned. “You don’t mean . . .”

“That Madigan had an emergency kill switch that flash-fried every memory stick and hard drive in here?” Tate supplied darkly. “Yeah, I do. Not even cell phones and tablets escaped. Everything’s toast.”

I fought the urge to bang my head against the nearest wall. No wonder the smug bastard had said that if he killed himself, we’d never discover his secrets! Incineration machines. Laser nets. Software self-destruct devices. Madigan had been paranoid to a fantastic degree to install all of these safety measures in this facility. Who, or what, had he been trying to protect?

At least we might still be able to find out.

“All isn’t necessarily lost,” I said, nodding at the open elevation platform behind Tate.

He turned, watching as Bones flooded Madigan’s replacement heart with vampire blood in an attempt to bring him back as a ghoul. If he’d drunk more of it before he died, his transformation would be inevitable after switching his heart with a ghoul’s and reactivating it with vampire blood. But Madigan had swallowed only a few drops of Bones’s blood at most. Would it be enough?

I hoped so.

Finally, after Bones refitted Madigan’s ribs over his heart and covered that area with more blood, he stood up, running a weary hand through his snow-white hair.

“How long before we know if it works?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “He’ll rise within a few hours or stay dead forever. Either way, we need to leave. A distress signal could have been sent when our attack began, so we’ve stayed too long as it is.”

True, and we didn’t need the added complication of dealing with reinforcements while waiting to see if Madigan came back from the grave. But before we went anywhere . . .

“Has Denise found the child yet?” I asked Tate.

Before he could respond, a feminine voice beat him to it.

“She found me,” Denise said, sounding shell-shocked.

I turned, my eyes widening when I saw her. She’d shifted back to her own appearance, and her neck and mahogany-colored hair were drenched with fresh blood. The medical scrubs she wore were bloodier, too, and she had a large new hole in them right around her heart.

“I tried to warn you,” Dave called out from farther behind her.

“You should’ve been more specific!” she shot back, annoyance replacing her shock.

Tate shook his head. “This is my fault. A couple weeks ago, I told Katie that if she ever got the chance, she needed to escape and kill anyone who tried to stop her.”

“Kill?” I repeated in disbelief. “She’s a child, Tate.”

The look he gave me was pitying. “In age only. I told you that you didn’t know the half of what Madigan had done. Well, she’s the half.”

“She’s more than half,” Denise replied dourly. “That little girl snapped my neck as soon as she saw me, then cut my throat when I got up after that, and then impaled me with a pipe she ripped off the wall when I got up after that! Needless to say, after that last one, I stayed down until Homicidal Goldilocks left.”

I stared, my mind refusing to accept what Denise said even though I knew she wouldn’t lie. The auburn-haired child I’d glimpsed couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She also looked to be less than half of Denise’s weight. How could she have the strength to do all that, let alone the resolve to be that merciless?

“Bloody hell.” Bones sighed. “She’s it, isn’t she?”

“She’s what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the idea that a fifth grader had whipped my supernaturally unkillable friend’s ass in three different, lethal ways.

“The culmination of all of Madigan’s work,” Tate said in a steady voice. “Katie’s human, but she’s also part vampire and part ghoul, and Madigan raised her to be a killing machine.”