Dressed for the cold, but not well enough for battle, I was tucking amulets into pockets and into a thigh bag when the main room’s wall screen brightened. I stepped from the bedroom to see a view of the outside wall in the final moments of sunset.
“Holy baloney, Batman,” I said.
“What in Dante’s hells is that?” Leandro asked, coming into the room, dressed in yesterday’s clothes.
“Trouble,” I said. “Ojos. Alert EJ and the guard unit. Put this sequence on his wall screen. Tell him we’re on our way.”
Villetti handed me gloves. “For healing amulets.”
I stuck amulets into the gloves as we raced up one flight of stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Two
EJ
His wall screen flickered to life, andOjoswarned him he was about to be invaded. He quickly put his implements away and saved and closed his working file.
On the oversized screen, timestamped only minutes past,beforesunset, at six twenty-two p.m., a vampire waggled her fingers at the camera from the top of the building next door. She leaped. Her body flew across the alley, dropping fast. One story. Two. She reached out.
Like someone from the Mithran Cirque de la Lune, she grabbed the railing around Walter’s balcony, swung up both legs, and perched on the railing, toes and hands in a perfect balance. She made a kissy face at the nearest camera. Dropped onto the snow-covered balcony and pulled an amulet. With it, she unlocked Walter’s door from outside. Moments later, she had opened the inside steel shutters and slipped within. The shutters closed.
He checked the time on the video. She had entered Walter’s apartment thirty minutes before sunset. She had been wearing a full suit of armor with helmet and a blackened face shield, but there was no denying who she was. She never wore the queen’scolors, always her own, her armor a psychedelic nightmare of purples, electric blues, vibrant pinks, and shocking scarlets in abstract geometric shapes that gave most vampires fierce headaches when any light hit it. She used the garish design to great effect in battle.
The multicolored armor didn’t do much for a witch’s vision or brain either. He sat on the couch and replayed the vid.
His door pinged, and he clicked it open. Angie and Villetti entered and rushed to his side. Angie, her hands in gloves and singing with healing amulets, pounced on his couch and scrooched up to him. “Play.”
To Villetti, she said, “That’s Cousin Wacko. Walter will have a meltdown.”
Villetti said, “Wacko? That’s considered pejorative in America, yes?”
EJ smiled slightly. “She herself picked that nickname and similar others. She likes it. She likes everything that grates on the nerves, insults the senses, and affronts current social conventions.”
“I don’t remember meeting a vampire cousin,” Villetti said.
EJ said. “Shiloh Everhart Stone, our mother’s niece, our cousin, and witch with minor power, was turned against her will at age fifteen. After she came through the devoveo, it took a few years for her to become accustomed to all her powers—both vamp and witch. About the time she had it all under control, she was bitten by multiple insane werewolves.”
Villetti sat beside Angie, saying, “Witch, vampire, and werewolf?”
“She doesn’t shape-shift,” EJ said. “But the prions that create were-traits made her…” He paused as Shiloh jumped from the top story of the building next door.
“Made her crazy. Wacko,” Angie said, finishing his sentence,both of them excited, talking over each other, as if they repeated gossip come to life. “She reveled in it. Hotheaded. Violent.”
“How was she bitten by insane werewolves?” Villetti asked. “TheyChangedthe same night the vampires did.”
“Not all of them. Shiloh needed money. She requested the queen give her a bounty-hunting mission,” EJ said, “to track down and kill a werewolf that was still insane after theChange. Unfortunately, Shiloh and her boyfriend found an entire pack that had been turned by an insane wolf-bitch-queen before theChange. Werewolves killed the boyfriend, tore Shiloh into pieces, and nearly killed her. The queen’s people found her.”
“And now she works for the queen,” Angie said. “When EJ was twelve, I think, a blood clan member of one of the vamps she beheaded, took Rachel, her primo, human lover, and best friend, and tortured her, draining her slowly to death. To save her, Shiloh challenged the kidnapper’s Blood Master to Sangre Duello. Not the kidnapper. Her master.”
“Rash,” Villetti said.
EJ took up the narrative. “In her twelfth battle, she killed the Blood Master, and was well on the way to beheading her new blood family, one by one, until the kidnapper finally released Rachel. She drank her way through the rest of her new people, leaving them drained on their dueling floor. She posted the entire thing live on vamp social media, and when she was done, still covered in blood, she told the world that a clan of vampires was theirs for the taking. She renounced them. By morning, they were all under the fang of one new master or another. Or dead.”
“But the glut of blood, on top of the were-bite, did something even more to her,” Angie said. “She’s called Le Vampire Sauvage—the wild vampire. To us she was always just Cousin Wacko.” She poked EJ with an elbow. “Play it again.”
“Le Vampire Sauvage,” EJ said as the brutal, feral woman leaped from the building next door again. “And that title says everything. I adore her, but Aunt Jane once called her batshit crazy. And from the vids I’ve seen over the years, it fits.”
“Vids?” Villetti asked. “And what does she do for the queen?”
