This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress 5)

A swipe of my hand indicated the wall of Remnants between us. "Let me through." Her brow ticked up, and then a path appeared amidst the mass of transparent bodies. I went through that chasm, refusing to look at Bones in case by gesture or mime he'd try to tell me not to do what I was about to. It won't affect you, won't affect you, I repeated like a litany as I took the glass from Marie's outstretched hand and then tipped it to my mouth, swallowing deeply.

Relief swept through me at the bitter, cloying taste, so different from vampire blood. If I didn't like it, then it couldn't have the same effect as vampire blood did, because that tasted like ambrosia to me. I let the glass drop from my hand once it was empty, feeling small, petty satisfaction to see it shatter upon impact. I was pissed enough at Marie to want to see her in tiny pieces on the floor, too, but right now, I'd settle for imagining the glittering shards of crystal were bits of her corpse.

"You got what you wanted. Now get them off him," I said, feeling stronger by the moment. The draining effect from my contact with the Remnants must be wearing off. Good.

That meant Bones wouldn't suffer any lingering damage, either. I didn't know if spectral abuse could somehow screw with a vampire's natural ability to heal, but that must not be the case, so Bones should be fine as soon as those energy-munchers got the hell away.

I swung my head around to glare at the shadows still funneling through his body. They'd better pray once I finally bit the dust, I stayed all the way dead, or I'd come back and kick their asses for this -

Those shadows fell from Bones so abruptly that he dropped to the floor before catching himself, crumpling into a heap. I ran over to him, cradling him, biting my lip so hard I drew blood from my rage at how slowly he pushed himself upright. Then I lasered a glare at Marie.

She watched us with the oddest look on her face, the Remnants who'd so recently tormented Bones now appearing around her.

"You can send your little friends back to their graves, or you can play with them all night.

I don't care, but we're leaving," I told her curtly, noticing Bones looking between me and Marie with a sort of angry incredulity. The wall of Remnants surged toward Marie, until she was surrounded above, below, and on all sides by the twisting, diaphanous horde. Still showing off her power, I noted in contempt, as if we hadn't gotten the message before.

"I ordered them back to their graves the same time I had them release him," Marie said, each word holding only the sugary flavors of her accent instead of the echoing timbres of the grave.

"Bullshit," I snapped, feeling another wave of anger rip through me, followed by an almost overwhelming hunger. "They're still here, aren't they?"

"Kitten, your voice . . ." Bones said with disbelief.

Something slammed into me so hard that my vision went black. I braced for pain, but strangely, it didn't come. Sounds became muffled, disorganized. I thought I heard Bones shouting, but couldn't focus on what he was saying or even where he was anymore. Air rushed by me in ever greater whooshes, reminding me of how it felt when I'd fallen from the bridge, but I couldn't be falling. I was still in the room beneath the cemetery, wasn't I?

Flashes filled my vision; streaks of silver and white going by so fast, they were almost indistinguishable. I could see through them dimly, but it was as if I was watching things from a long way off. A groan came out of my mouth, part of me registering that it sounded like it was filled with the voices of people who'd died decades, centuries, even millennia ago. As if in a dream, I watched Bones gently lower me to the concrete floor and then punch Marie so hard that she smashed against the far corner of the room.

"I'll grant you that one strike," she said, the words seeming to echo in my mind, "but only one. Now, will you listen to what you must do to help her, or will you make me kill you and leave her at the mercy of the grave?"

I could hear Bones reply and Marie answer, but somehow their words were lost to me amidst the keen of countless others, so much louder than when I'd picked up on humans'

thoughts. His touch wasn't lost, though, when he knelt next to me and scooped me up in his arms. The feel of his skin on mine was an anchor I tried to focus on amidst the whirling chaos that had overtaken me.

I was so cold. So empty. So HUNGRY.

As he carried me out of the room, Marie stopped him, pressing her mouth to my ear. She murmured something, but it was only one voice among thousands, her words snatched away by the roar in my mind before I could fully register her question. Bones yanked me away, but I could still feel the burn of her lips against my skin. His long strides took me into the blackness of the tunnel, brushing by Jacques as though the ghoul wasn't even there. My fingers dragged along the damp walls as we passed, faintly bemused by the trails of light they seemed to leave. That light increased, pulling itself from the walls to reach toward me with seeking tentacles, but I wasn't afraid. I was sad. There were so many of them, poor things, and they were so hungry. . .

Grinding metal sounded ahead, then a thicker ray of silvery light shone at the end of the tunnel. Bones increased his pace, jumping straight up into it when we were bathed in its glow, and then everything around me exploded. The voices became deafening, the cold mind-numbing, the hunger insatiable. Those sensations increased, until it felt like I was struggling in the midst of a huge silken web to get away, but all the while my efforts only tightened the cage around me.

Chapter Seventeen

The first thing that registered was thescent of smoke, curling around my nostrils as if begging to be inhaled. The next realization was that my arms felt stiff and my wrists were sore. I opened my eyes, the bland grayness of a concrete ceiling above me, Bones's pale, na**d flesh to my right.

"What?" I began, trying to sit up, only to have something pull on my arms. I tilted my head backward, shocked to see that I was manacled to a wall even as another glance revealed that Bones and I were on a narrow bed. My gaze flew to him once more, noting the cigarette he set down even as he exhaled a long plume of white.

"Why are you lying there smoking while I'm chained to a wall?" I demanded.

The look he gave me was a mixture of relief and cynicism. "Since it seems you don't remember anything about the past two days, let me assure you, luv - I earned that smoke." Two days? The last thing I clearly remembered was Bones carrying me out of that underground room with Marie. That was two days ago? And during that time, it had somehow become necessary to chain me to a wall?

"Oh shit," I whispered, the memory of my voice sounding like the gateway to hell reverberating across my mind. "Marie's blood . . . I absorbed some of her powers, didn't I?" He grunted even as he pulled a key out from under the bed. "Kitten, that's quite the understatement."

I thumped my head against the bed a couple times, more angry than afraid. Goddamn Marie. Why the hell had she insisted on me drinking her blood? Wasn't it enough that she'd figured out where I got my abilities from? Guess not. She had to add to my problems by forcing me to drink from her. Now in addition to freaking people out once it became known that I could absorb vampire powers through feeding, Marie made sure to have proof that I could do the same thing with ghouls. People would be flocking to Apollyon's side once these little tidbits were revealed.

"She must want war," I said, rubbing my wrists when Bones unlocked the manacles. "If she didn't, she would've just killed us. Once news of this hits, nothing but my public execution will calm things down with the ghouls."

"That's not going to happen," he said coolly.

I grunted. "I'm not in favor of dying, either, but when people hear about this, Apollyon's going to be fighting off converts with a stick - "

"I meant Marie's not telling anyone, though you're also right that I won't let any of that zealot's sods touch you."

I sat all the way up, wondering briefly at the dampness beneath me but more focused on what he'd just said.

"Marie won't tell anyone?" I repeated. "That doesn't make sense. Why else would she have used such drastic measures to make me drink her blood, if she didn't think it could benefit her in some way? And what other way could it benefit her except to tell everyone that I can absorb powers from vampires and ghouls? I don't think she did it just so I can be her new voodoo buddy."

His mouth twisted. "I don't think so, either, but the last thing she said to me was if we revealed to anyone that you were able to siphon powers from ghouls, or that you'd drunk her blood, she'd kill the pair of us. Said she'd know it if we told anyone, too. Must mean she already has some ghostly buggers spying on us. Makes me want to hire an expert to banish every filmy-fleshed one of them I come across, and double goes with the Remnants."

"Don't say that." Thank God Fabian was with Dave or the ghost would've been inconsolable at hearing Bones speak so coldly about his kind. "They're not the same as Fabian or other ghosts," I went on, my voice catching at a fresh surge of memory. "Marie said that, but I could also feel them. They're not conscious of right, wrong, what they're doing, any of that.

Those Remnants are just . . . like huge gaping holes of need that gravitate toward whatever energy source they're pointed at. They couldn't help what they did to you - "

"Sweet bleedin' Christ," Bones interrupted. "Try not to let this turn you into a Ghost Whisperer, hmm? Adopting Fabian is one thing, but we're already turning away spooks by the dozen. If you want another pet, we'll get you more cats."

"Speaking of my cat," I began.

"He's here," Bones said, rising from the bed. "Not in this room, for obvious reasons, but Ed dropped him off yesterday."

I let my gaze travel over his nudity because, one, who wouldn't? And two, it was almost habit for me to admire him every time he rose from the bed. But something caught my eye when I lingered over his muscled thighs, making disbelief snake through me. A glance at the dampness under me as I scooted aside only confirmed it, not to mention the matching pink smudges on my own thighs.

"Bones, are you serious?" I gasped. "You couldn't wait to have sex with me until I was conscious?" Sure, he was a very sexual person. Almost insatiable, some might claim, and I'd be tempted to agree, but this was crossing a line -

He began to laugh in a way that was more ironic than amused. "You may not want to have this conversation until you're a bit less . . . agitated," he said, seeming to choose his words with care.

I crossed my arms over my chest, not tapping my foot only because it was still on the bed.

"You're not going to try that whole lame male 'I had to do it or I'd explode' excuse, are you? Because it's bullshit for humans, but even more so for a vampire, especially one as old as you."

His brow arched in challenge. "Really think I'd shag you if you were out cold? Didn't we cover this a long time ago, before we even started dating?" I gave a pointed glance down at the pink stains on the bed, evidence of his cl**ax due to the blood-to-water ratio in vampire bodies. "So you made those . . . by yourself?" And rubbed some on me for good measure? I mentally added, but didn't say out loud.

"No, luv, you were most definitely part of those, but you weren't unconscious," he replied evenly. "You were crazed with hunger from the effects of Marie's blood, and I don't mean hunger in the nutritional sense."

Oh. My cheeks actually tingled with the urge to blush. That hadn't occurred to me, even though one of the last things I remembered with clarity was a feeling of incredible hunger. Guess I'd misjudged what kind of hunger.

I strained my mind more, trying to think past that moment in the graveyard. After a short wait, a scattershot of images danced across my memory. Bones's pale body rising over mine, his mouth open in a moan . . . crimson drops of blood on his skin that I licked away before biting him again . . . his hair, so dark against my thighs when he lowered his head between them . . . the restraintsdigging into my wrists while waves of pleasure and need crested within me . . .

Yeah, I'd been involved, all right. And bitey, too, it seemed. "Well, um . . . sorry for accusing you of, ah . . ."

"Taking advantage of my own wife while she was out cold?" he supplied.

I winced. "I'm starting to get little glimpses of what happened - though why'd you chain me to a wall? Don't tell me that Marie's blood temporarily turned me into a bondage junkie, too."

If so, that begged the question of what exactly the voodoo queen was into for kicks, if I'd absorbed that from her, too . . .

Bones actually took in a breath before he spoke. "Kitten, let it alone for now. It'll only upset you, and it wasn't your fault."

"What?" I burst out, dread replacing the lingering warmth those sensual images had evoked.

He sat down, taking my hand, his fingers stroking over my knuckles. The fact that he was being comforting made me even more nervous about what he was about to say.

"In the rituals Marie was famous for back in the eighteen hundreds, she'd take her followers into the woods off Lake Pontchartrain," he said, still sounding like he was cherry-picking his words. "There they'd chant, watch Marie do tricks with a pet snake, and drink from a vat of wine sprinkled with her blood. Due to Marie's position as priestess of the voodoo god Zombi, her blood was supposed to give the participants some of Zombi's power over the dead, a side effect being uncontrollable lust, if you consider all the orgies that took place." Relief surged in me. "But that's great news! Then I don't have the ability to siphon ghoul powers like I do vampire ones, because Marie's blood could affect anyone that way - "