TWENTY

Zev springs from his perch, landing in front of Charlie. He casually kicks the shotgun out of reach. “Okay,” he says. “A deal’s a deal—and hey, you did sell me an awful lot of beer back in the day. But before I kill you, can I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“What the hell am I?” There’s a note of genuine frustration under the manic glee in his voice. “I’m not a werewolf, I’m not a vampire. I don’t think my real name is even Zev. Everything keeps sliding around in my head, and it’s getting worse. About the only thing I am sure of is that it’s all her fault, and you two seem to be real close. So what am I?”

Charlie regards Zev calmly for a second. “What are you? That’s easy.” He leans forward an inch or two, locks eyes with Zev, and says, “You’re done.”

The noose drops over Zev’s head as silently as a snake, and tightens its grip just as fast. It yanks him straight up through the hole in the ceiling and into the darkness beyond.

Charlie and I stare up at the black mouth of the opening for a second. Then we move.

I dive for the spot Charlie gestured to when he gave his little “I give up” speech. Charlie scrambles after the shotgun, breaks it open, and reloads it with standard shells.

I find the case peeking out from under a stack of old fashion magazines, almost invisible unless you’ve got your face pressed to the floor; that’s how Charlie must have seen it. I yank it out, undo the clasps, and rip it open.

Hello, my lovelies.

Twin escrima sticks nestled in black foam. Eighteen inches of polished ironwood tipped with silver spikes, each with a folding silver blade a foot long that snaps out and locks at a forty-five degree angle.

My scythes.

I yank them out, pop ’em open, and stand up. I wouldn’t say I feel invulnerable, exactly, but an enraged grizzly could walk through the door right now and I’d tell him to run. One look in my eyes and he’d do it, too.

Charlie snaps the twelve-gauge shut. “How’s the Doc?”

“Twitching and groaning,” I say, glancing over at him. “Probably has a concussion—we’ll ask him when he wakes up.”

“If that isn’t soon, he’ll miss the good part.”

Above us, absolute silence.

No growling, no thrashing, no curses or howls. The shapeshifting thing that seemed unkillable a minute ago isn’t looking so invincible anymore. And any second now we’re going to come face-to-face with the being that just ate it whole.

“How’d you know it would attack Zev?” I ask, my eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“That thing’s attracted to despair. Nobody makes as many jokes as laughing boy did unless they’re hurting inside. Bad.”

I blink. “And what if it had come after you, instead? You know, to make me despair?”

“Then I’d feel pretty stupid. For a few seconds, anyway.”

“You know that hole is also our exit, right?”

“I wasn’t planning on stumbing around in these tunnels until it found us, no.”

“Ideas?”

“Lot of this stuff looks like it might burn.”

A natural chimney and plenty of fuel. Problem is, the top of the chimney is no doubt covered, and that means we could find ourself not only trapped underground but blind and asphyxiated. “I don’t think so. You have these things in your chest now, called lungs; they wouldn’t appreciate suffering from smoke inhalation.”

“Then I guess we go up there and introduce ourselves.”

I have this sudden strong mental image of what we’ll find halfway up: the Gallowsman, perched in a crazy-ass web of cables, ropes, and wires like a four-legged spider, with Zev wrapped in a cocoon of the same stuff. The Gallowsman’s head will be tilted all the way to one side, lying flat on his shoulder like it was glued there. His eyes will bulge from their sockets, as big as hard-boiled eggs, his black, distended tongue lolling from his mouth like a dead eel.…

“Sounds like fun,” I say. “How about we take a look, first?”

“You’re the one with the sharp things. Cover me.” I walk over and give him the flashlight. He hops closer to the hole, holding the shotgun with one hand, and shines the beam upward.

“Huh,” he says.

I’m ready to chop to pieces anything that might drop out of there. “What do you see?”

“Not much. Empty. Ends in a trapdoor, looks like. And there are rungs carved in the side of the shaft.”

So that’s why we didn’t hear Zev struggling—it dragged him up and out. “Think you can climb with that leg?”

Charlie grunts. “I’ll manage. You and the Doc might have to give me a hand.”

Speaking of which, Doctor Pete is now sitting up and clutching his head. “Goddamn it,” he says. “This is—ow! This is not acceptable. Concussion damage in human beings is cumulative.”

I walk over and help him to his feet. “If you can utter that sentence without slurring your words, you’re probably okay. But Charlie isn’t—his leg’s broken. Take a look.”

Doctor Pete automatically shifts into professional mode—I knew he would—and examines Charlie’s leg. We rig a makeshift splint, and then Doctor Pete and I start piling up enough furniture to get us closer to the ceiling.

I go up first myself, with one scythe closed and stuck in my belt, and the other open and clenched between my teeth. Charlie’s below me, shining the flashlight beam up. When I get to the top of the shaft I have a moment of panic when I think the trapdoor is locked—then I realize it’s on springs, and I have to pull down to open it, not push.

Of course. Very like a real gallows, only this one closes automatically after use. More like a doggy door, really.

That makes me think about Galahad, but I don’t have time to worry about him right now. I cautiously stick my head through the opening, holding my scythe in one hand, but nothing drops around my neck or tries to throttle me. The trapdoor’s set into a round, raised stone platform in the middle of a dark room, the beam of the flashlight from below showing me only vague shapes. I climb out and tell Charlie to come up; he manages pretty well, even with one leg in a splint.

In a few minutes we’re all above ground again. The flashlight reveals a room very similar to the one in Longinus’s basement: black draperies on the walls, lots of candles. The door isn’t obvious, but with a little searching we find it; it opens into the apse of the church, behind the altar.

I can smell burnt flesh as soon as we step out. What’s left of the cross Jimmy Zhang was lashed to hangs from the back of the door, and his ashy remains now lie scattered at my feet. Something’s been dragged through them and up the aisle.

“Gone,” Charlie says.

“Yeah,” I say, frowning. “The Gallowsman must have taken him somewhere else to string him up. Makes a certain amount of sense; Father Stone was probably killed right here in the church, but the body was left outside for everyone to see.”

“Why?” Doctor Pete asks.

It’s a good question, and I think I finally have an answer. “The same reason Athena Shaker killed Therese Isamu and left the body in Cassiar’s room. Same reason the master vampire killed Vince Shelly with a silver fork and bled him like a slaughtered pig. Same message, too: This is my town now. I’ve been thinking of this as a war between pires and thropes, but it’s not; there’s a third element, with its own agenda.”

“The cult?” Charlie says.

“No. The first two victims, Father Stone and Maureen Selkic, were both members of the cult. No, I think the third element is the Gallowsman himself. Now that Ahaseurus is dead, he’s not under anyone’s control. He started off killing cult members—his former masters—but he’s escalated since then. He took down Doctor Pete—the townie version, I mean—and now Zev. He’s staking his own claim on this place.”

“Three-way war,” Charlie says, nodding. “Two ways to play that.”

“If you’re smart, yeah. You can either join forces with one side to gang up against the other, or wait on the sidelines until one side beats the other and then attack the survivor while he’s still weakened from the fight.”

Doctor Pete sighs and sinks into a pew. “So which side is going to do what?”

“Well, assuming the African Queen is still stashed in the trunk of her car,” I say, sitting down beside him, “we’ve already taken one side out of play. If we get the master vampire, we’re handing the town over to the Gallowsman; if we take out the Gallowsman, by tomorrow night the whole town will be vampirized. So I’m going to suggest we go back to Charlie’s, regroup, maybe drink a gallon or so of high-octane coffee, and then do something daring and stupid.”

“As usual,” Charlie says. “Wait. Did you say ‘do something stupid’ or ‘work with someone stupid’?”

*   *   *

The walk across town is a long one. The streets are still deserted, and the storm that surrounds the place like a fence has gotten bigger, darker, and angrier; lightning the color of blood arcs and flashes constantly, but there’s no thunder. The silence makes it feel like the storm is a million miles away and bigger than the world.

We get back to the Longinus house without incident, me and Doctor Pete helping Charlie hobble along, and retrieve Athena’s car. The thumping from the trunk tells me she’s still in there, and Galahad’s frantic barking when we pull up to Charlie’s place tells me he probably needs to be walked. He doesn’t rush to the door to greet me, though, which is odd—

Sheriff Stoker is sitting on Charlie’s couch, a riot shotgun across his knees. Galahad’s wearing his leash, and the other end is tied to the leg of my kitchen table. He’s managed to drag the table up to the kitchen doorway, but it’s gotten jammed there.

“Come in and sit down,” Stoker says. “We need to talk.”

I’m too exhausted to say anything clever. I go over to Galahad and assure him I’m all right, then lean against the wall. Charlie lowers himself carefully onto a chair, and after a second so does Doctor Pete.

Stoker’s face is impassive. “So. To save time, I’m going to assume you pretty much know what’s going on. If that’s not true, ask me whatever you need to and I’ll do my best to fill you in. Let’s keep this discussion short, though—things are going south fast.”

“Did you kill Ahaseurus?” I ask him.

“So he is dead. No. I’ve been running things since he disappeared, as best I could.”

Doctor Pete glares at him. “That include locking people up for murders they didn’t commit?”

“I needed leverage to keep a lid on the war. One from your side, one from theirs. Hostages to fortune, I believe it’s called.”

That brings a tired, humorless smile to my face. “But what you got was misfortune. Funny, I thought being the Gallowsman’s pal was supposed to prevent that.”

Stoker stares at me coldly. “He’s supposed to do all sorts of things. What he’s not supposed to do is kill the people he was brought here to serve.”

“You can’t control him anymore, because Longinus was the man with the plan. So what’s next, Stoker? Every human being in this town is going to be pale, hairy, or swaying at the end of a rope inside of twenty-four hours—and we can’t leave, either.”

“I know.” He pauses, then looks away. “I’m here to offer an alliance. Way I figure it, we’re about all that’s left to mount any kind of resistance.”

“What, you can’t convince any of your cult buddies—”

“There’s nobody left, Jace. I’ve been to house after house. Empty. I don’t know which side got them, either. Maybe they were eaten or drained, maybe the Gallowsman dragged them into the tunnels, maybe they’re all hanging upside down in somebody’s backyard shed waiting for nightfall. But I do know this: It all started with you. And that’s how it’s going to end, too.”

I stare back, then nod slowly. “Yeah. You’re right. Now here’s a few things you don’t know: First, we’ve got the alpha werewolf locked in the trunk of the car outside. Second, I know who the master vampire is.”

“You do?” says Doctor Pete. He sounds surprised.

“Not only that, I know where he is.” I pull out my phone, put it on the coffee table, and slide it over to Stoker. “Take a look.”

He picks it up, studies the screen. “What am I looking at?”

“Figure it out for yourself.”

He thinks for a second, then hits a few buttons. He’s found the video file—

There’s a flash of white light.

Sucker.

*   *   *

Every induced-recall experience so far has had me playing the role of a woman from someone’s memory, Doctor Pete’s or Charlie’s or Cassius’s. Stoker’s no different—except that this time, I seem to be almost completely passive. I’m lying down, I’m naked, and it’s very hard to focus my thoughts. I realize I must be drugged, or maybe brain-damaged. My arms and legs are restrained—to keep me from hurting myself? There’s an IV in each of my arms. I must be in a hospital.

But why am I in a box?

It’s made out of glass, or maybe thick plastic. I can hear sounds, but they’re so muffled that I’m not sure what’s causing them. Machinery? People talking? I finally make out a few words, but I can’t understand them; they’re not in English. Something Asian?

There’s a smudge on the glass ceiling of my box. I stare at the smudge for a few years, struggling to focus beyond it. When I finally manage to, all I see is a plain white surface a few feet above me. It’s not nearly as interesting as the smudge, and to alleviate my disappointment I decide to embark on an ambitious, multistage project: turning my head.

Whew. It’s a long road, filled with toil, heartbreak, unexpected surprises—I never saw that second smudge coming, for instance—and eventual success. I can’t take all the credit, though; gravity did give me some assistance in the final phases, and it’ll definitely receive a big thank-you in the acknowledgments.

There’s another glass box beside me, with a man in it.

Stoker.

His head is shaved, and he looks younger. Just as massive, though: his muscular arms are pressed up against the sides of his container, as is the top of his skull. He’s got twice as many tubes stuck in his arms as I do, and three of them are bright red. I guess he’s getting a transfusion.

It takes a while for the facts to coalesce into a realization.

I’m not in a hospital. Those tubes aren’t giving Stoker blood; they’re taking it away.

I’m in a yakuza blood farm.

I should be horrified, but I don’t seem to remember how. It’s more than drugs, it’s magic; the part of me that’s still Jace remembers the blood farm Stoker and I took down in Stanley Park, where the victims had all had their brains wiped by sorcery.

That’s not the case here, though. I can still think, still feel, however distantly. So can Stoker; he manages to turn his head to look back at me, and his dark eyes hold more than numb acceptance. They hold rage—rage suppressed, rage that’s been smothered and chained but still glows with stubborn heat. It warms me, too, quickens my sluggish pulse, melts a few of the cobwebs wrapped around my brain. I struggle to say something, to tell him this, but the best I can do is to soundlessly move my lips.

He nods, ever so slightly. His own lips move while his fingers twitch, but he isn’t speaking to me. He’s reciting a spell.

His eyes clear. He glances to the side, studies the tubes draining his blood away, and leans forward as far as he can. He gets his teeth on one of the tubes and yanks it out with a twist of his head. Blood starts to leak from the end and pool on his stomach. He puts his head back down, stares blankly at the ceiling, and waits.

It doesn’t take long. Somewhere, a little sensor tells a technician that valuable product is being wasted. Before very long, an Asian man in a white smock is peering into Stoker’s cubicle. Stoker’s face is as empty as a discarded wallet. The technician unlocks the lid and lifts it up, then leans in to reattach the tube.

Stoker clamps onto the technician’s windpipe with his teeth, and rips it out with a yank of his head.

He must have silver or wood implanted in his teeth; it’s the only way he could inflict a wound like that on a pire. Blood gushes everywhere, but only for a moment—it’s a fatal wound, and as soon as the pire’s body figures that out his immortality vanishes and he pays off his time debt to the universe all at once. Flesh and blood turn instantly to dust, and the technician’s bones clatter down the stepladder he’d been standing on and onto the floor.

Stoker grits his teeth and starts yanking on the restraints. They’re designed less to physically imprison than to keep arms and legs from thrashing about, and he manages to rip both his arms free in about thirty seconds. He unbuckles his legs, tears the other tubes from his arms, and leaps out of his cubicle.

That’s the last I see of him for some time. I hear what might be shouting, somewhere.

I sort of drift away in the interim. I should feel relief, I suppose, but I don’t. If I feel anything at all, it’s a kind of regret.

Eventually Stoker comes back. He opens the lid to my own glass coffin and stares down at me. He’s covered in gray and white dust, like he’s been rooting through the remains of cold campfires. Even with the lid up, it’s very quiet.

He stares down at me for a long time.

“I should just leave you here,” he says finally. I feel no surprise at this, just a twinge of shame.

“I understand why you did it,” he says. “I make a better martyr than a leader, and me dying in one of these places would make great propaganda for the Resistance.”

He shakes his head. “But you fucked up. Even now, after all this time, you don’t understand these bloodsuckers. You think they can be reasoned with, negotiated with. Maybe they can—but not by us. You don’t negotiate with livestock. That’s all we are to them, and that’s why they stabbed you in the back and took you, too. Your little power play is over, and you lost. Me, I was prepared—an antihypnotic spell and silver crowns over my teeth, painted white.”

I know I should say something in my defense, but I don’t. Maybe I’m unable to speak, or maybe I just have nothing to offer.

“You did get one thing right. Us dying in service to our cause will be good for recruitment. So that’s what’s going to happen: from this moment on, both you and Aristotle Stoker are dead. I’m going underground, so deep no one will find me—but I’m not giving up. Oh, no.”

He leans in, only inches from my face. “I had a revelation recently. In order to fight these monsters, you have to become a monster. Something as big and scary and inhuman as they are. That’s what I’m going to do—reinvent myself as a creature even they’ll be frightened of. I’ve even thought of a name: the Impaler. What do you think?”

I do my best to nod. He seems to understand.

“No one will know who I am, or where I came from. Not even the FHR. I will be invisible and lethal, a murdering ghost. And it will be their turn to be afraid.”

Something touches the inside of my thigh, very quickly and lightly, and then warmth gushes down my leg. Femoral artery.

“Good-bye, Linda,” he says softly. “You’ll be remembered, and revered, and missed.”

He stays with me until the end.

I’m grateful for that.

*   *   *

Azura and I had set up the trap beforehand. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to use the memory trick on the sheriff, and since Azura had already broken into prison to get access to Tair, it made sense to use the opportunity to swap this fake Stoker for the real thing. If, you know, your definition of sense is trading an officer of the law for a convicted serial killer and terrorist.

But then, by the time he wound up behind bars, Stoker wasn’t quite the killer he used to be. In fact, I hadn’t captured him; he’d turned himself in, claiming the mystic artifacts he’d been using had affected his sanity. He swore he was through with murder, and had a grandiose plan to save the remaining human population that didn’t involve eliminating all the supernaturals on the planet.

I wasn’t entirely convinced. But Stoker hadn’t given us any trouble since surrendering, though he refused to volunteer information on his former associates in the FHR. His days of ruthless slaughter might actually be at an end.…

Sigh. Just when I need a singleminded killing machine, he goes and reforms. I can hear the universe—several of them, in fact—sniggering behind my back. Real funny, guys.

I open my eyes. Stoker does the same. We stare at each other for a moment, and then he smiles and glances around. “Huh. Now this is what I call a jailbreak.”

“Oh, you’ve just exchanged one cell for another,” I say. “This one is slightly larger, but a lot more dangerous. Azura filled you in?”

Stoker nods. “Anything new since the last time you two spoke?”

I tell him about Athena, and the tunnels, and the Gallowsman. He takes it all in stride. I hate to say it, but I’m actually glad he’s here; no matter how capable or competent this reality’s Stoker is, he hasn’t spent his entire life training to fight supernatural beings. Mine has.

He’s examining his own arms critically as I talk, but I know he’s paying attention. “Hmmm. Not in peak shape,” he murmurs. “Fewer scars, as well. Guess it’ll do. What’s our plan?”

“We take down the master vampire,” I say. “Then figure out a way to deal with the Gallowsman.”

Charlie clears his throat. “You keep calling him that. The master vampire. Why don’t you use his name? We know who it has to be, right?”

I hesistate. “Yes,” I admit. “It’s Cassius. I don’t know how he ignored my cross—maybe it’s because he’s from a reality where religious symbols don’t affect pires—but it has to be him.”

But it isn’t really Cassius, I want to say. It’s a magnified, distorted version of him, warped by this reality’s rules and Ahaseurus’s magic. A Cassius with his ethics gutted, a centuries-old pire stripped of any morality or empathy and filled with a bottomless loathing for yours truly. Yeah, I have no trouble facing the truth of that at all.

“You know where he is?” Stoker asks.

“No. But I know where he’ll be.”

“Where?”

“Wherever I am. He knows I’ve got Ahaseurus’s spell book, and Cassius is no slouch at magic himself. It’s his shot at taking control. He’s probably searched my place already.”

“But it’s not there?” asks Doctor Pete.

“No, I brought it with me and stashed it here.”

“Maybe we should have a look at it ourselves,” Doctor Pete suggests. “I may not be a high-level shaman, but I know my way around a book of spells.”

“I know a few things myself,” Stoker says, giving the Doc a curious glance.

“I’ll get it,” I say.

I hid the thing in Charlie’s garage, under a stack of old motorcycle magazines. It’s still there. I pull it out, then pause for a minute before going back into the house.

Something’s not right.

Charlie’s garage is neat, tools all hung in their places, floor swept, boxes on shelves properly labeled. But still, I have this sense of something being out of place.

I look around. It takes me a moment, because it’s right under my nose; it’s the stack of old magazines I used to hide the book. It’s the only thing here that’s not neatly organized—the magazines are just in a pile on a bench, not even properly aligned with one another. I frown, then look under the bench; there’s an empty cardboard box there labeled MOTORCYCLE MAGS 1992–94.

I start looking through the pile. I find what I’m searching for in the middle, where the casual sloppiness of the magazines has been used to hide a slightly larger object. It wouldn’t have meant anything to me a few days ago, but now I realize what I have in my hands … and what it means.

I go back inside, holding it in one hand and the spell book in the other. I’m not sure if it’s safe to let them touch.

“Jace?” Charlie says when I walk in. He can tell right away that something’s up, without me saying a word.

“I thought there was only one book,” Stoker says.

“So did I,” I reply. “I was wrong. This is the missing piece of the puzzle. I know who killed Ahaseurus now, and I think I know why.”

“Who?” Charlie asks.

“You,” I tell him.