Yup. Stake Ming. Check for wounds. Be safe, cat-man.
Heading to Esther’s. Be safe, Nell, sugar.
I walked to the front windows, water in one hand. No weapons out. “Yummy,” I said aloud, reaching out through the land to her, reaching through the blood the land had tasted. Yummy had vampire hearing and she could hear me from inside. “Come here, please.”
There was a pop of sound and Yummy appeared on the porch. She was fully vamped out, with thin fangs and huge black pupils in red sclera. She was wearing some kind of vampire armor, and carried a lot of weapons, both blades and handguns. She stood two inches away from the window glass, her swords out to the sides, a look of fury on her face. If she had been warm-blooded, and had needed to breathe, she’d have fogged the glass.
I wasn’t afraid of her. I wasn’t afraid of much of anything right now, but I probably should be. “Who’s the other vampire? The one with Tomás?”
“I don’t believe you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Bishop Don Alonso Suarez de Fuentelsaz,” she said aloud to me. “Or you can call him Don Psycho, either works for me. What do you want, plant-woman?”
“I want to talk, and not outside in the cold. If you wish to be welcome in my house, which includes this porch, you’ll put away your weapons.” Watching her, I drank down the second glass of water.
Yummy snarled and sheathed the blades.
I reached out to her and into her blood. I couldn’t pulse life, because she was undead, but I could pulse calm, clearheaded thinking. I opened the door and stepped back as she entered, looking less angry and battle-riled. I said, “Tomás and Alonso Don Psycho were bitten by an arcenciel. We’ve been thinking for a while that Ming may have been bitten too. I’ll know in a minute or so. Has an arcenciel bitten you?”
The look of fury dropped slowly from Yummy’s face. Hereyes bled back to human even more slowly, but fast enough for me to know she wasn’t a current danger I’d have to kill. Relief washed through me like an icy stream and I breathed through a tightness in my chest I hadn’t recognized.
“Bitten…? No. But Inigo came to my lair before I woke last night. Before dusk, stinking of sunscreen. I haven’t seen him since. I think he’s true-dead or would have called me.”
Before I could tell her Inigo was still undead, buried in thorns at the boundary of my property, she went on.
“I have no idea how he got into my house, but Ming was there too, so…she might have let him in?” Yummy’s eyes flashed to me once before she realized the door was still open and took the knob in one hand. “He tried to kill me.”
Cold air flowed in through the open door.
Yummy stared out at the dark. She twisted her head back at me, moving like a lizard, which made my skin crawl. Her face was set in hard lines of sadness, a brokenness that I recognized, brokenness from betrayal—betrayal by her maker, betrayal by her lover. Even Occam had walked away from her.
I wondered how many others she had lost over the years of her life.Unlucky in love,I thought. In church-speak it was a curse for a woman.
Her voice toneless, Yummy asked, “Bitten where?”
“Chest.”
Faster than my eyes could follow, she leaped across the porch and to the ground. Yummy pushed aside Alonso’s tunic and ripped open his shirt, exposing the bite marks. She hissed in a breath she didn’t need. “I hope it hurts like the fires of hell, you filthy pig.”
The wounds looked half-healed, punctures that had become infected under the skin, and were now infecting the entire torso. The center of each fang mark was full of pus. Streaks of red, green, and a sickly yellow ran outward from each toothmark in a gruesome pattern, like a dying star. Alonso was dying.
TWENTY-ONE
Yummy walked to Tomás and ripped his clothes open. She sighed out the unneeded breath. The grand inquisitor was even more infected. His entire chest was swollen and puffy, a multicolored mass of infection. There was a gold chain around his neck and attached to the chain were two parts of a long quartz crystal, broken in half. She ripped them off his neck and wrapped the chain around her hand.
I walked out onto the porch in bare feet, and closed the door behind me.
Walking back to Alonso, Yummy sat beside him. She placed her hand on his chest and closed her eyes as if reading his body. “They were bitten days ago,” Yummy said, “and the dragon injected venom. A lot of venom. They don’t always do that, but she did this time. Venom, just a single hit, makes my kind mentally unstable. A full injection? Like this? I don’t know. Maybe kill? Maybe take them over and control them?”
“How do you know all this about dragon bites?”
“When we were together, Inigo told me the church never destroyed the secret things of other religions, other societies. The church kept the stolen books, the tablets, the scrolls, the crystals, the devices. ‘The churchknowsthings.’ That’s what he said. ‘They know how the world will end. They know when.’
“And when they ran their own names, as many priests have done, through the encoded words hidden within the Hebrew text in the Torah’s Coda, Tomás discovered how he would die the second time. The ancient texts suggested that he’d be redeemed, that he’d then be killed by a dragon, and that he’d be buried.” She stood, leaving the horrible wounds visible in the night, her eyes on his face. “Inigo discovered he would be killed on a tree after he was redeemed. I didn’t put redemption together with theidea of getting back souls, but I guess if you’re a priest, you have to have a soul in order to get it redeemed.”
Inigo’s death hadn’t said anything about a dragon. Only Tomás’ death prophecy had.Interesting.“Is there an antivenin?”
“For dragon bites? No. They live or die.” She shrugged.
I let that thought roam around in my head a bit, and then snorted like one of the mamas, a little contemptuous. I closed my eyes and sent my thoughts into the land beneath my frozen bare feet and considered. It would take time to visit with the land and inspect the ground and think things through. But the tree livedinthe land. He…it—whatever it was—knew things already.
