Jeaniene Frost - This Side of the Grave

“Someone’s coming, and it’s not Mencheres,” Vlad said, jerking his head.

I drew out another knife as I headed in the direction he’d indicated, ducking to use the bushes as camouflage again. But when I was about twenty yards away, I caught familiar scents on the air, and my tenseness eased.

The sight of the vampires, one with gray streaks in his hair, the other so skinny that the bones of his shoulders all but jutted through his shirt, only confirmed who they were.

“Ed. Scratch,” I called out, not raising my voice. “Over here.”

I turned back around without waiting for them, not wanting to leave Vlad alone for long with the ghouls. Granted, the odds of Vlad being overcome were about nil, but the odds that he might decide to torch one—or both—of them in my absence were much higher.

To my relief, both Dermot and the other ghoul were still alive when I jogged back to Vlad, though in the few minutes that I’d been gone, the scarred ghoul looked like he’d passed through a volcano. Mencheres must have dropped his power from him, because he was on the ground, Vlad’s booted foot over his mouth. Must be why I hadn’t heard any yelling even though he’d obviously been burned.

“He doesn’t appear to know where Apollyon is,” Vlad stated. “I’m not surprised. Apollyon would have to be an idiot to tell where he was to anyone in a group such as this. They report in and receive instructions by e-mail. I have the address and passwords.”

Ed and Scratch appeared behind me in the next moment, one of them letting out a slow whistle as they took in the slain bodies that were still held upright, plus the still-alive, burnt ghoul under Vlad’s foot.

“Looks like we missed the party,” Ed observed.

Vlad’s smile was arch. “But you’re just in time for the cleanup.”

“How come I’m not surprised to hear that?” Scratch muttered, shaking his head. “What a mess, but better them than us.”

“Wise outlook,” Vlad commented.

The ghoul tapped on Vlad’s foot, blinking repeatedly at him. Vlad moved it aside an inch, which was apparently enough for him to talk.

“There are more of us here. In this city, I mean. We’re supposed to recruit, add to our numbers, kill some vamps, and then spread out to another city. We’re also supposed to leave if we see the Reaper or Bones. That’s good information. Good enough for my life, like you agreed,” he finished.

Vlad removed his foot all the way, but fire began to dance down his hands. “We already know most of that, so the information’s not good at all.”

“Vlad,” I said, and his brows rose at the sharpness to my voice. “He’s done his best to tell you all he knows, so you need to let him go.

He opened his mouth, about to argue . . . and then smiled. “Of course.”

The ghoul got up, looking in quick darts between Vlad and the promise of freedom behind him, before he began to back away one step at a time.

“Not. So. Fast,” I said, drawing out each word with venom.

“He promised to let me live!” the ghoul sputtered.

“ Vlad promised. I didn’t,” I said, leaping onto his back when he tried to run. Mencheres’s power didn’t attempt to restrain him, so he flipped over and fought me with furious blows, but I was glad. I wanted to beat him into submission. To show him what it was like to be helpless no matter how hard he fought. That was the least I could do for Dermot and all the others like him.

“A vampire made that same mistake once, forgetting I was there and only getting Bones’s promise not to kill him,” I went on several moments later. Multiple places on my body still stung from the ghoul’s blows, but they were healing with every second. I didn’t pause to talk more, but swiped my knife through the ghoul’s neck with a clean, savage cut, feeling the coldest form of satisfaction as his head rolled to the side.

“He didn’t like how it turned out, either,” I finished, wiping the blade on the ghoul’s shirt. “You know what they say. The devil’s in the details.”

We stayed a couple more hours atthe drive-in just to make sure no other, tardier ghouls showed up, and that all evidence of what happened was erased from the scene. It wasn’t just out of concern for the police. We didn’t want any ghouls to figure out what happened, if more of them used this as a meet-up spot aside from this departed group.

Mencheres insisted that Dermot not go back with us to the town house. His point that no matter how he’d been abused by Apollyon and the other ghouls, Dermot still might be a threat, was too logical to ignore. Stockholm syndrome was a definite possibility, and it wouldn’t be right to just assume Mencheres would put the power whammy on Dermot if he wigged out and tried to kill one of us. Plus, we couldn’t take him with us on our stakeouts. So, with assurances I wasn’t even sure Dermot believed, I sent him off with Ed and Scratch, who swore on pain of death to treat him well and take him to a safe place. Once this thing with Apollyon was over, I now had a new item on my To Do list: Find an undead therapist for the traumatized ghoul, and have someone teach Dermot sign language.

I called Bones back three times, but in each instance, I only got his voice mail. Figures now that I could talk, he wasn’t able to. Worry nagged at me, but I shoved it back with all the other things I wouldn’t allow myself to dwell on. I hadn’t been able to answer Bones’s calls before, but that didn’t mean I was in mortal danger. He was tough. He could take care of himself. I should stop with the paranoid images of his drying corpse running through my mind.

As an extra precaution in case anyone observed our activities at the drive-in, Mencheres doubled back several times on our way to the town house, then parked a half mile away and carried me as he and Vlad flew the rest of the way. I didn’t bother to tell them that I could fly now, too. One, I was tired. Two, I still couldn’t fly that well , and if I crashed into a telephone pole or something similar in front of Vlad, he’d never let me live it down.

We landed around back, in the darkest part of the lawn, and then went around to the front of the town house. It was about the same size as the place I’d grown up in, but I bet Mencheres hadn’t stayed anywhere this small in the past thousand years. He slept on the pullout couch while Vlad and I occupied the two upper bedrooms. I’d just taken my boots off on the patio—remnants of my upbringing, when tracking dirt inside a house was akin to a capital crime—when Mencheres suddenly jerked his head up to stare at the sky.

“Aliens?” I joked, but tensed anyway, reaching for my knives. Ghouls couldn’t fly, but what if someone else menacing had somehow managed to follow us from the drive-in? Our enemies weren’t only of the flesh-eater variety . . .

My senses began to tingle like they’d been shot with steroids even as Mencheres said, “Bones.”

Vlad barely had time to mutter, “And this had been such a nice evening,” before the vampire in question dropped out of the sky, landing a few feet away with his black coat swirling around him. Joy and yearning slashed across my subconscious as our eyes met. I went to him, throwing my arms around him, reveling in the strength and vehemence of his answering embrace.

“I missed you, Kitten,” he growled. Then his mouth crushed over mine, his kiss more filled with raw need than romantic welcome.

That was fine; I felt the same way. Aside from my compulsive urge to run my hands over him to assure myself that he was really here, relief, happiness, and the most profound feeling of rightness zoomed through me, settling all the way to my core. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d missed Bones until that very moment, hadn’t let myself acknowledge how everything felt off when I was apart from him. On some levels, it was frightening how much a part of me he’d become. It let me know just how much I’d crumble if anything happened to him.