She nodded at me, her body jerking and twisting in convulsions, forcing moans of pain from her lips. She looked terrified, but she nodded.
I put my left hand over her eyes.
I pressed my mouth to hers, swiftly, gently, tasting the blood, and her tears, and mine.
I saw her lips form the word, “Maggie . . .”
And I . . .
I used the knife.
I saved a child.
I won a war.
God forgive me.
Chapter 49
Everything changed the night the Red Court died. It made the history books.
First, for the unexplained destruction of several structures in Chichén Itzá. A thousand years of jungle hadn’t managed to bring the place down, but half an hour of slugfest between practitioners who know what they’re doing can leave city blocks in ruins. It was later attributed to an extremely powerful localized earthquake. No one could explain all the corpses—some of them with dental work featuring techniques last used a hundred years before, some whose hearts had been violently torn from their chests, and whose bodies had been affected by some kind of mutation that had rendered their bones almost unrecognizable as human. Fewer than 5 percent of them were ever identified—and those were all people who had abruptly gone missing in the past ten or fifteen years. No explanation was ever offered for such a confluence of missing persons, though theories abounded, none of them true.
I could have screamed the truth from the mountaintops and blended right in with all the rest of the nuts. Everyone knows that vampires aren’t real.
Second, it made the books because of all the sudden disappearances or apparent outright murders of important officials, businessmen, and financiers in cities and governments throughout Latin America. The drug cartels took the rap for that one, even in the nations where they weren’t really strong enough to pull such tactics off. Martial law got declared virtually everywhere south of Texas, and a dozen revolutions in eight or ten different countries all kicked off, seemingly on the same night.
I’ve heard that nature abhors a vacuum—though if that’s true, then I can’t figure why about ninety-nine zillion percent of creation is vacuum. But I do know that governments hate ’em, and always rush to fill them up. So do criminals. Which probably tells you more about human beings than it does about nature. Most of the nations in South America proper kept their balance. Central America turned into a war zone, with various interests fighting to claim the territory the vampires had left behind them.
Finally, it made the books in the supernatural community as the night of bad dreams. Before the next sunset, the Paranet was buzzing with activity, with men and women scattered over half the world communicating about the vivid and troubling dreams they’d had. Pregnant women and mothers who had recently delivered had been hardest hit. Several had to be hospitalized and sedated. But everyone with a smidge of talent who was sleeping at the time was troubled by dreams. The general theme was always the same: dead children. The world in flames. Terror and death spreading across the globe in an unstoppable wave, destroying anything resembling order or civilization.
I don’t remember what happened when the ritual went off. There’s a blank spot in my head about two minutes wide. I had no desire whatsoever to find out what was there.
The next thing I remember is standing outside the temple with Maggie in my arms, wrapped up in the heavy feather cloak her mother had left behind. She was still shivering and crying quietly, but only in sheer reaction and weariness now, rather than terror. The shackles lay broken on the ground behind me. I don’t remember how I got them off her without hurting her. She leaned against me, using a fold of the cloak as a pillow, and I sat down on the top step, holding her, to see what I had paid for.
The Red Court was dead. Gone. Every one of them. Most of the remains were little more than black sludge. That, I thought, marked the dead vampires. The half-breeds, though, only lost the vampire parts of their nature. The curse had cured them.
Of course, it was the vampire inside them that had kept them young and beautiful.
I saw hundreds of people on the ground aging a year for every one of my breaths. I watched them wither away to nothing, for the most part. It seemed that half-breeds came in a couple of flavors—those who had managed to discipline their thirst for blood, and thus carried on for centuries, and those who had not been half-vampires for very long. Very few of the latter had ranked in the Red King’s Court. It turned out that most of the young half vampires had been working for the Fellowship, and many had already been killed by the Reds—but I heard later that more than two hundred others had been freed from their curse.
But for me, it wouldn’t matter how many I’d freed in that instant of choice. No matter how high the number, it would need to be plus one to be square in my book.
Inevitably, the Red Court had contained a few newbies, and after the ritual went off, they were merely human again. They, and the other humans too dim to run any sooner, didn’t last long once the Grey Council broke open the cattle car and freed the prisoners. The terror the Reds had inflicted on their victims became rage, and the deaths the Reds and their retainers suffered as a result weren’t pretty ones. I saw a matronly woman who was all alone beat Alamaya to death with a rock.
I didn’t get involved. I’d had enough for one day.
I sat and I rocked my daughter until she fell asleep against me. My godmother came to sit beside me, her gown singed and spattered with blood, a contented smile upon her face. People talked to me. I ignored them. They didn’t push. I think Lea was warning them off.
Ebenezar, still bearing the Blackstaff in his left hand, came to me sometime later. He looked at the Leanansidhe and said, “Family business. Please excuse us.”
She smirked at him and inclined her head. Then she stood up and drifted away.
Ebenezar sat down next to me on the eastern steps of the temple of Kukulcan and stared out at the jungle around us, beneath us. “Dawn’s about here,” he said.
I looked. He was right.
“Locals stay hidden in their houses until sunrise around here. Red Court would meet here sometimes. Induct new nobility and so on. Survival trait.”
“Yeah,” I said. It was like that a lot, especially in nations that didn’t have a ton of international respect. Something weird happens in Mexico; twenty million people can say that they saw it and no one cares.
“Sun comes up, they’ll be out. They’ll call authorities. People will ask questions.”
I listened to his statements and didn’t disagree with any of them. After a moment, I realized that they were connected to a line of thought, and I said, “It’s time to go.”
“Aye, soon,” Ebenezar said.
“You never told me, sir,” I said.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ve done things in my life, Hoss. Bad things. I’ve made enemies. I didn’t want you to have them, too.” He sighed. “At least . . . not until you were ready.” He looked around at the remains of the Red Court. “Reckon you more or less are.”
I thought about that while the sky grew lighter. Then I said, “How did Arianna know?”
Ebenezar shook his head. “A dinner. Maggie—my Maggie—asked me to a dinner. She’d just taken up with that Raith bastard. Arianna was there. Maggie didn’t warn me. They had some scheme they wanted my support on. The vampires thought I was just Maggie’s mentor, then.” He sighed. “I wanted nothing to do with it. Said she shouldn’t want it, either. And we fought.”
I grunted. “Fought like family.”
“Yes,” he said. “Raith missed it. He’s never had any family that was sane. Arianna saw it. Filed it away for future reference.”
“Is everything in the open now?” I asked.
“Everything’s never in the open, son,” he responded. “There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times. Or that’s been my experience.”