Thirteen
Faith sprinted along the street, weaving in and out of the crowds that barely noticed her except for the wind of her wake. Her coat and hair flew out behind her, and her feet hit the pavement with the rhythm of a drumroll.
“Suspect is approaching Lavaca Street,” the network monitor said at her wrist.
“I’m closing in!” Faith shouted back, running even harder. Less than a block ahead she could see the thin figure darting from one side to the other, deftly avoiding the humans as Faith did. “Where’s my cover from the west?”
“Closing from Eighth Street,” came the breathless answer. “You’ll catch her first.”
Faith pounded around the corner with her arms and legs pumping, adrenaline and wrath fueling her pursuit, her senses in overdrive. The hot, dark drive of the predator coursed through her until the universe reduced to her and her prey. Half a block. Closing in.
Out of either desperation or stupidity, the suspect veered suddenly off to the right, out into traffic. Horns blared all around, but it was just after dark on a Thursday and traffic was so heavy that they weren’t moving very fast to begin with. A skinny black-haired girl running between the cars was irritating but not especially noteworthy.
“Goddamn it, Sire, where are you?” Faith demanded into her com. “Now would be a great time for that teleporting thing you do!”
Before the sentence was even out of her mouth, one of the SUVs on Lavaca screeched to a halt as something heavy landed on its roof.
The Prime straightened, his eyes flashing silver in the streetlamps, and jumped down from the car right into the suspect’s path. She hissed and threw herself to the left, bouncing off the door of a Jaguar and rolling underneath it.
“I want eyes on every corner!” Faith snapped. “Twentyeight, Twelve, Nine, fan out!”
David strode among the cars, lithe and purposeful, and the humans in their vehicles either stared openly at him or turned their faces away in instinctive fear of the one creature designed perfectly to kill them. He paused, breathing in the chilly damp air of an early-spring night. His mouth opened slightly, revealing the curved ivory of his teeth, and the woman driving the SUV in front of him shrieked and covered her child’s face.
The light in the Signet flared, and he pushed out with one hand, seeming to move only air. The Jag slid sideways with the screech of rubber on pavement.
The suspect, suddenly losing her hiding place behind its tire, dove for another, getting her feet up underneath her to bolt. She made it about three steps.
David lifted one hand and made a tugging motion, and the vampire fell to her knees with a scream, dragged back toward him, her fingers clawing desperately at the dirty concrete until the nails broke and bled.
“Please!” she was screaming at the humans. “He’s going to kill me! Please! Call the police!”
David smiled. “We are the police,” he said, loudly enough that everyone could hear—and practically everyone had cracked their windows at least a few inches by now. David turned slowly in a circle, and Faith felt him grabbing every last mind on the scene and twisting it hard. Faces all around them bent easily to his will, and his words implanted on their weak mortal minds: “We are apprehending a fugitive. There is nothing more for you to see here.”
Then he seized the vampire around her collar and hauled her along with him off the street, leaving the Elite to restore the flow of traffic.
He threw the girl into the wall and waited for her to stop sniveling. Around him, the rest of the patrol unit had gathered, and Faith was waiting, too. They were inside an empty storefront with boarded-up windows; there would be no interference from the local cowboys.
“Ariana Blackthorn,” David said, staring down at her. He gestured and the Elite produced shackles. Considering the helpless-damsel number she’d been going for, she fought like a tiger until she was securely chained.
Finally, she seemed to understand she wasn’t going anywhere and slowly forced herself to stand up straight and face him head on.
Disgust and hatred were all over her otherwise pretty face. She spat at him, but he’d been expecting it and moved out of the way. They always liked to spit, for some reason. Next came the insults: demon, devil, accusations of bestiality for his known appetite for humans, and on and on.
The Blackthorn had created of him the perfect Antichrist. They had him set up to enslave and destroy all of vampire kind. He had to admit it was flattering.
Faith joined him, panting and sweaty, and muttered, “You couldn’t have just teleported and caught her before we’d all run ourselves into a coma chasing her?”
“I told you,” he said mildly, eyes still on the girl. “I don’t teleport. It’s a quantum-level shift that involves loosening the bond among all my molecules, and it requires so much energy that it’s advisable only in emergencies.”
“Like tonight?”
“No. Tonight I jumped down off a building and onto a car. Can we focus, please?”
He returned his attention to Ariana Blackthorn, who regarded him with utmost loathing. “I’m going to kill you!” she screamed, flinging herself forward to the end of her chains, then falling back against the wall. “I’m going to kill all of you! And that little Happy Meal bitch of yours in the city!”
David felt his blood run cold, but he clamped down on the reaction that he knew she’d want to see. “Keep ranting,” he said. “We have all night.”
He held his hand out to the left, and one of the lieutenants handed him a sheaf of papers. “Ariana Blackthorn,” he read. “Youngest of the Blackthorn women, not deemed suitable for an arranged marriage until lo and behold, an unattached Prime came into power here in the South. Your father made a deal to sell you to Auren, if not as a Queen then at least as a whore, in exchange for hunting grounds in his territory and safe harbor if the California war went badly, which of course it did. So your loving patriarch sent you to the bed of a psychopathic killer, and you weren’t heard from again.”
Ariana strained against her chains again. “I loved my Prime,” she spat, “and he loved me. We were a Pair, even if his stupid Signet didn’t understand. All I had to do was get stronger. My father didn’t like his women strong. So I waited. And I grew.”
“And when I killed your one true love, you ran and hid,” David finished for her callously. “For fifteen years you’ve scuttled around the underworld like a cockroach instead of facing your Prime’s killer. Then you were contacted by James Wallace, formerly of Auren’s Elite, and he helped you build your syndicate and then, quite conveniently, met his end.”
“I wanted justice,” she said. “I wanted to watch you suffer as you made my Lord suffer. I wanted to see everything you care for bleed and die and then bleed you myself.”
“I appreciate the honesty.” David replied. “Now perhaps you’ll favor me with a little more, Ariana. My Elite have the location of your headquarters, and as we speak they are infiltrating it and subduing your guards. We’ll have possession inside ten minutes. Now, unless you can give me a compelling reason not to kill every last soul I find inside, the whole building will burn. If you make sure I know where all your splinter factions are, I can promise you not to kill certain individuals, perhaps family, who might be dear to you.”
Ariana laughed, a high, eerie sound that was in no way sane. “Kill them all, I don’t care,” she answered. “And make sure you get my sister, too. She’s a race traitor just like you are, Sire, and since I swore to my father I wouldn’t kill her, you can do it for me. You owe me that much after you murdered my lover.”
“Here’s what I owe you, Ariana.” David took a step back and drew his sword. Two of the Elite took hold of her arms and forced her to her knees as he said, “I am sorry for your broken heart, or at least your thwarted ambitions. Ariana Blackthorn, you are hereby under an order of execution for conspiracy to murder thirty-two humans within my territory as well as seven of my Elite.”
“Do I get a last request?” Ariana asked with false sweetness.
He lifted his chin.
Her voice came out as a feline hiss. “I want to see the look on your face when they drag your precious little princess dead from the lake. I want you to hurt like I hurt when I held Auren’s lifeless body in my arms. I want to see your world come to an end.”
He stared into her eyes for a moment, then said flatly, “Request denied.”
Then he cut off her head.
An hour later Harlan pulled the car into an affluent suburb of West Austin, down a long street lined with the homes of the well-to-do. None of them approached the grandeur of the Haven, of course, but then, they weren’t built to house a hundred vampires. There was new growth in many of the front flower beds that would probably die in the last freeze that usually hit just before Easter. For now, though, the exultant breath of spring was in the air, even while the nights were still cold.
They stopped at the end of the street in front of an ordinary-looking two-story house where Faith and half the Elite were already waiting for him. Any human family could have lived there, but the lawn didn’t look like it had been mowed recently, and the curtains in the front windows were flat—they had been nailed up with boards behind them to block out the sun while still appearing mostly normal from the street. Considering their hatred for humans, the Blackthorn had been living very close to them, but it was a sound strategy for staying off his radar.
Or, it had been, until the sensor network was up and running long enough for his analytical eyes to discern a pattern among the movements of the vampires that lived here. They covered their tracks well, but not well enough.
“The property is secured,” Faith said as he got out of the car. Her voice was oddly strained. “We found twenty-six inside along with . . . Well, see for yourself.”