Chapter Thirty-Two

 

 

 

“Come on, Asher. You gotta help me out.”

Fingers in his hair, in his mouth. Someone lifting his head up.

Asher winced. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He was so tired. His legs were already asleep. If they stopped shaking him a minute, he could maybe fall asleep. He needed the rest.

“Drink,” someone told him. “Come on, I know you can do it.”

He couldn’t. He didn’t want to.

He grimaced at the bitter, viscous liquid that poured into his mouth. The taste was going to make him retch.

“Pinch his nose,” the voice said.

A third hand pressed Asher’s nostrils shut. Panic arced through him. Between the gag in his mouth and the clamp around his nose, he was going to suffocate. He jerked, trying to get that point across, and found himself choking back the ichor filling his mouth.

It burned as it went down. It reminded him of whiskey, the first time he’d imbibed any. It reminded him of Halloran’s blood, decanted down his throat to repair the body Ambrose’s minions had broken.

Ambrose.

The stampede.

A single gunshot made to count.

Asher jackknifed upright, shaking off the hands that held him, and doubled over.

“It’s all right. You’re gonna be all right…”

Halloran’s voice seemed to come from very far away, a whole fanfare’s worth of drumming in Asher’s ears. He blinked back tears as he coughed, trying to dislodge the fire in his gullet.

They were still in the street. The dust had settled again, no sign of the cattle or gunmen anywhere. A jagged path of briny blackness puddled on the hard-packed ground between the fallen, proof that vampire casualties ranked among the humans.

“Asher, look at me,” Halloran demanded.

It seemed a strange thing, to want to obey him now that the strings holding them prisoner had been obliterated at last. Asher turned his head. He meant to do as he was told, but the man kneeling beside Halloran in the dirt caught Asher’s eye.

I must be losing my mind. “Uncle Howard?”

For a hallucination, Asher’s uncle was rather dusty and worn down. A tear in his sleeve exposed a grimy white shirt underneath.

“Hello, nephew.”

“What…what are you…?”

Halloran darted to his feet, startling in his speed, and rounded to face the town hall.

At the top of the porch steps, on the raised dais, Malachi leaned on his father’s wolf’s head cane. “Twenty-five dead. Willowbranch Farm razed to the ground. All our cattle gone… And one of you three murdered our protector.”

“It was me,” Halloran said. “I did it.”

Twenty-five vampires might have been lost in the flurry of the stampede, though not trampled, but enough remained to encircle the wounded townspeople barely struggling to their feet. From the corner of his eye, Asher spotted Charlie fumbling his sleeve open to offer Blackjack his blood. Maud was wrestling her rifle from under the body of a fallen horse. She seemed all right, but with just her and Blackjack to back him, Halloran wouldn’t stand a chance.

“No,” Asher gritted out.

Malachi flicked those dangerous grey eyes of his in his direction. “Something to say?” He seemed more amused than dubious.

“It wasn’t—”

“You really gonna to take the word of a bloodbag over mine?” Halloran balled his hands at his sides. His fists bore the smear of Ambrose’s blood. He’d been close enough to come to blows with their mayor. That might count against him.

“You word meant more before I found you entertaining traitors,” said Malachi.

Uncle Howard thinned his lips but offered no defense.

“And since I trust neither of you, I’ll have it from someone who always speaks the truth.” Malachi turned and gestured into the house.

Matheson and Angelita were marched out at gunpoint. Enough of Ambrose’s human puppets had outlived him that Malachi still had lackeys to order around.

“Well, sister?” Malachi cocked his head. “Father always said you were full of insights.”

“I don’t…”

“Speak up!”

When Ambrose shouted, his voice boomed like a clamp of thunder. His townspeople were trained to fear that roar early in life, the better to try to avoid it in adulthood. When Malachi did it, glee slithered through. It made him sound not quite sane.

Angelita narrowed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Then you’re of no use to me, are you?” Malachi waved a hand.

The clangor of a gunshot jolted Asher back a step.

The button-down bodice of Angelita’s day suit darkened to a deep emerald, then to black. Her fingertips came away red when she pressed them to the stain.

Asher made to race for the dais as Angelita’s knees crumbled beneath her, but Halloran’s arm shot out, stopping him mid-motion.

At the top of the stairs, Malachi casually retrieved his foot from under his sister’s hand and wiped the bloodied toe against her sleeve. “Well, perhaps you are both guilty.”

“He’s not,” Halloran growled.

Asher would’ve liked to offer a protest of his own, but his throat had clamped shut. He couldn’t look away from Angelita slowly breathing her last.

“Save it for the trial. The crypt ought to do you just fine until then.” With a wave of the hand, Malachi gestured his men to remove them.

Halloran shook off the first hand that touched him. He broke the second. But he was just a vampire and he’d wasted quite a bit of his blood on Asher. It didn’t take long for Malachi’s acolytes to drive him to his knees.

Asher found himself dragged down, too, the violence unnecessary but indiscriminate. He didn’t have the strength to resist.

He glimpsed of Uncle Howard scrabbling to stand as the vampires closed in, but none had been ordered to attack him. Maud and Blackjack were on their feet, too, but neither said nor did anything to stop Malachi.

Cowards.

Asher spat in their direction. One of Malachi’s brethren whacked him over the ear with the back of a heavy fist. He must’ve thought the phlegm meant for him.

The blow dimmed Asher’s awareness enough that he put up no fight as they hauled him through the square.

A kaleidoscope of colors exploded behind his eyes once inside the church. The empty hall echoed with the scrape of boots. He lost his footing halfway down the stairs and landed in the crypt on hands and knees. Only Halloran’s timely grab stopped him from cracking his skull against the stone.

The door slammed shut behind them, draining what little light there was from the small, dark chamber.

Asher slumped against the bottom step. “They know you can break through that… right?”

Halloran gave a noncommittal grunt.

“Can’t you?”

“Maybe if I had a couple of bloodbags.”

The shadows seemed to muffle his voice. The sting of the retort leached out by the same token.

“You got me.”

“And you’re so clever you couldn’t teach a hen to cluck.”

“You need me clever to be your dinner? Here.” Asher pushed up his sleeve. He couldn’t feel Malachi’s bite anymore, courtesy of Halloran’s generosity, and though the phantom pain of cattle hooves lingered, he knew his broken bones had reset themselves back into alignment. “Have at it and get us out of here.”

“And then what?” Pitch-black darkness concealed Halloran’s approach. Only the jangle of his spurs gave him away. “We shoot our way outta here?”

“Maud and Blackjack—”

“Will be racin’ out of town as we speak, if they got any brains left.”

Although he knew Halloran couldn’t see it, Asher scowled. “I thought you trusted ’em to be loyal.”

“There’s loyal, and there’s plain dumb. Ain’t a bloodsucker in Sargasso who don’t want to rip us to shreds right now.”

“What’re you saying? That Malachi just saved our lives?”

Halloran’s silence could well have been a denial, but without the benefit of seeing his expression, all Asher had to go on was his own gut feeling.

“Why the hell would he do that? He shot his own sister—”

“Girl with her abilities…wouldn’t you?”

No, ’cause I ain’t a psychopath. Asher bit back his first retort. “You knew?”

“Doc’s been getting her medication on the sly. Romero noticed it a couple of weeks ago.”

“And, what, she tells you everything?”

The shadows were too compact to make out Halloran’s nod, but Asher felt it, just like he felt the scrape of a sleeve against his arm as Halloran settled beside him. Whatever he was hoping to accomplish by pacing the crypt, he appeared to have given up the search.

“What happens now? We wait for Malachi to put us on trial?”

“Now we find out how Sargasso copes without its tyrant-in-chief.” Halloran’s voice was a warm, low rumble in his ear. “Ain’t that what you wanted all along?”

Asher thought of the bodies strewn all over Main Street, of Angelita bleeding to death on the town hall steps.

“I didn’t plan for it to work out like this—”

“’Course not.”

“But you did.” Asher took Halloran’s silence to mean that he was right.

Octavian, Redemption and now Ambrose—all of them were parts of a bigger whole. By chance or design, Halloran had managed to bring back Uncle Howard and maneuver so that they all survived the fallout.

Resentment had blinded Asher to his machinations in the past.

It took a little fumbling to find Halloran’s hand in the dark and intertwine their fingers. Ambrose’s dried blood had turned Halloran’s skin even coarser.

“You’re gonna tell me everything,” Asher told him, resting his head on Halloran’s broad shoulder. “And when you’re done, we’ll find a way out of here. Do you understand me? I’ve had enough of Sargasso.”

“We can’t,” said Halloran, his voice a whisper.

“Why?”

“Your uncle’s not the only one who made it out of Redemption alive.” Halloran wound an arm around Asher’s shoulders and pressed his lips to his ear. “They’ve been scouting us since the New Morning blaze. ’Bout a handful, up on the ridges.”

“That’s what you were lookin’ at all those nights…” Not scanning the horizon for cattle rustlers, but keeping an eye on a far greater threat.

Halloran hummed in acquiescence. “If it were me, I’d strike soon, ’fore Sargasso’s had time to get its ducks in order.”

Asher tried to imagine it—Halloran at the head of a vampire outfit hell-bent on destruction. The closest he could come was the night Redemption fell. “How soon is soon?”

“If it were me?” Halloran’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. “Tonight.”

Asher brushed his lips to Halloran’s wrist. “Thank God. I’ve had enough of prisons.”