Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

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IT WAS SUDDENLY a hand-to-hand fight, and we were outnumbered. It was Nathaniel who used a gun first, the sound thunderous even outside. It startled the man in front of me so that I stabbed him through the heart and was able to throw him back into the mass of his friends. And then suddenly, they stopped fighting. They cried out in confusion, almost in pain. I had no idea what had happened. I knew it wasn't any magic of mine.

Rodrigo and Rodina grabbed us and started running while Ru guarded our backs, but none of the others chased us. We ran. I tapped that part of me that was my beasts, that part that helped me work out with real lycanthropes in the gym, and I ran so that the streets were a black blur. I ran until the evil wind at our backs wasn't fast enough to keep up. Nathaniel stayed at my side easily, and so did Rodina and Rodrigo, but Ru stumbled and his sister had to grab him to keep him with us. I raced toward the white light shining as if the full moon had fallen to earth. I could see it more in front of my eyes the closer we got to it.

The triplets were actually behind us as we ran through the entrance to the huge stone building. If we survived, I'd make them do more cardio. A white-haired woman dressed in a long skirt and what was supposed to be authentic clothing but wasn't quite said, "We're closing for the day."

Rodrigo pulled a gun and showed it to her. "Run away now. Bad things are coming."

She ran away, yelling for help. She went through a side door into a cafe that was apparently still open. I hoped no one got brave. I wanted to use the ghosts, not make new ones.

Damian was suddenly loud in our heads again. He wanted to know where we were, and we thought it at him. He was above us in the night sky, and he thought of the gaol as old hunting grounds.

Two dark shapes appeared in the doorway. They were dark-haired, pale-skinned, dressed in black as if they'd come from central casting for vampires, one male, one female, but they were the real deal. They stalked in through the doors because they didn't need anyone's permission to get inside a public building. They looked at the people huddling in the cafe. They grinned wide enough to flash fangs.

"We will feast tonight, as of old," the man said.

The woman said, "They've seen us. We have to kill them now."

"No," I said, "you will not harm these people."

"You have no power over the dead in Ireland, necromancer," the woman said.

"You will not harm anyone in this building tonight," I said. I heard a whisper in the hallway and felt a cold wind down my spine. It wasn't vampires. I closed my eyes briefly and the whole building burned with ghosts like white phosphorus, thick with the moving pulse of hundreds, maybe thousands of restless spirits. They were angry. I'd never felt so much anger from ghosts before, and then I realized why. They were angry at the vampires.

"How many people did you kill in here over the centuries?" I asked.

They smirked at each other. "Enough," she said, and he nodded.

I pressed my still bleeding hand against the stone wall and felt the power shivering through the building, just waiting. Nathaniel put his hand over mine, and you could feel the building's bones shift and surge.

"What was that?" the male vampire asked.

Damian ran through the doorway, shoving past the two vampires. He joined us, breathing as if he'd run a race. He held his hand out to me. I cut his hand, and he reached out toward ours as we touched the stones.

"What is it?" he asked, as he placed his bleeding hand over ours against the stones.

"Vengeance."

The building shuddered around us, and a wind started down the hallway at our backs, not from the outside, but from inside the building. The two vampires went for the door, but a new vampire was there to stop them. He was huge by any standard, a giant of a man who had to stoop through the door and straighten up carefully.

"Damian, you shit bag. You killed Roarke!"

"Bachman, I see she called you back from Dublin."

"It served its purpose, for there stands the power that will make M'Lady into the new Queen of All Darkness."

"This is the one who's been tearing people apart in Dublin," Damian said.

"And now that you've let all these people see us, I'll get to slaughter them all," he growled at us.

"He's always been more beast than vampire," Damian said.

The Harlequin brought up their guns and Bachman did rush into battle, but not with us. He dived through the doorway into the cafe and screams followed.

"Save them!" I said.

"We can't leave you alone," Rodina said.

The wind spilled our hair around our faces. I could see the light like white fire burning through the building. It shuddered above us, like a giant waking.

"We aren't alone," I said. "Go and save them. That's an order!"

"No more people die here because of us," Dami

an said. Somewhere in all of it, the two vampires had vanished outside again. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought they were more afraid of Bachman than us.

The triplets went through the door and toward the sound of screams. We walked forward and the ghosts came with us. The light was so bright that I could see the individual shapes of the vampires in the blackness as they swept toward us. I'd never seen so many that could fly like that. It was a rare gift and I remembered that Damian was amazing at it, too. It was her bloodline; they could all fly.

A vampire had a man in its grasp, feeding at his throat as it rose into the air. A gun exploded near us; the vampire wavered and dropped the man, who fell heavily to the parking lot. A second shot, a heavier boom of a sound, and the vampire exploded in a fine red mist. I knew who it was before I saw Edward step out of cover and say, "Did you forget to invite me to the party?"

"Never. Keep them off of the civilians."

"Who keeps them off of you?"

"They do," I said, motioning at the ghosts.

"You told me ghosts can't hurt people."

"They can't on their own," I said.

The ghosts swarmed around us, formed a pulsing, throbbing cloud as white and shining as Moroven's was black and dark. She stepped out of that cloud of shadows and illusion and called out, "Ghosts cannot harm us!"

"We harmed them!" Damian yelled, and he shared memories of walking into cells where people who could not afford to pay the gaoler starved to death, so the bite was a mercy in the end. Skin fever hot to the touch, vampires feasting on them like vultures at a corpse, draining them dry. The new prisoners, still healthy and beautiful, but Moroven liked beauty and collected them for herself. The victims that were tortured as part of their sentence, and pleased her because of new scars. Children weeping in the dark held, comforted, and killed. So many dead, so much murder. Moroven's kiss of vampires had treated the gaol as their personal grocery store for centuries. It was as if Damian's memories joined with the ghosts, made their stories, their lives, real again. The power of it roared upward like a thunderous waterfall of ghosts. They wailed and began to talk, and a lot them remembered exactly which vampire had killed them.

The townsfolk were screaming and pointing now; even they could see it. The ghosts cried out for vengeance the way a murdered zombie will go after its murderer above all else. Ghosts don't have a physical form that can harm anyone, but I'd given them blood and I was holding the hand of my vampire servant and my moitie bete. We touched our bleeding hands together the way I'd combined power with another necromancer to raise a bigger, older zombie, and the ghosts became a roaring storm of wind and rage that attacked the vampires.