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“Everyone is moving like chess pieces, but the board is much too big. The queen is unprotected. She needs her seven sisters.”
Okay, now he was starting to freak me out. He was speaking like someone in a dream—and I was no stranger to receiving weird messages in my dreams. But this was really happening, and no matter how much I might wish it were a nightmare, it wasn’t.
“Dad, which queen are you talking about?” He couldn’t mean me. I only had one sister, and I was about as protected as I could possibly be. Yet who else could he be referring to?
“Shooting stars. Here they come.”
“What—?”
The roar of engines cut me off mid-question. Holden grabbed Sutherland and yanked him off the path, dragging him into the trees, and Desmond and I followed. A moment later six motorcycles sped down the path, their headlights cutting perilously close to exposing us. Their engines rumbled like angry giants, and continued to do so as they idled in the clearing near the castle.
“This can’t be good,” I whispered, slipping past Desmond and weaving my way through the trees. I’d use the noise as cover to let me get closer, but the second the engines cut off I’d have to stop moving. They might only be human, but there was no way to hide the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot.
I got within a few feet of the trees nearest the castle, finally able to see the structure itself, though I couldn’t make out the new arrivals. Their headlights were aimed at one of the stone walls, and all six of them remained on their bikes.
I almost jumped when Desmond touched my back.
Holden and Sutherland were a little ways away, my father sitting down in the moss, holding up individual leaves to investigate their patterns. He started constructing piles of them in a wide circle around himself like he had with the papers at the vampire council headquarters. As long as he kept quiet, he could build himself a leaf fort for all I cared.
He’d known they were coming.
Maybe he had better hearing than us. Holden probably would have heard them too if he hadn’t been busy asking Sutherland questions.
I didn’t want to assume my father was a psychic, or some weird vampire fort
uneteller. If there was a way to limit the amount of bizarro stuff my family was capable of, that would be awesome. So I wrote it off as a fluke and pushed thoughts of the seven sisters out of my mind.
But why choose the Pleiades of all constellations? It was an awfully specific thing to start muttering about.
No. Bad Secret. Focus on what’s important.
Yes, right. Task at hand and all that good stuff.
I dropped to my hands and knees and shuffled forward. If anyone were to look over in our direction, I didn’t want to be standing right in their line of sight. After what seemed like eons of waiting, they cut their motors one by one, and again the sounds of silence reigned.
The lead biker removed his helmet, and I recognized him as one of the twins at the bar. Lars or Sven, the blond Scandinavians. Lars set his helmet on the seat of his bike, and the other five gang members lifted their visors but stayed seated.
“Oy. You up there.” He didn’t sound like he was from Norway. I was disappointed my version of his backstory was so far off. This guy might have stumbled in from the Jersey Shore given his horrific accent. “Go get Bill.”
Bill.
Bill?
Were we seriously here to kill a necromancer biker named Bill? Fuck me running, this night kept getting better and better. Now I wasn’t sure if Lars would be named something hideous like Jim-Bob or something else far less exotic and romantic than what I’d concocted for him. I liked my version of events better, because the real-life truth was shaping up to be such a disappointment.
The armed guard on the first deck disappeared, and for several minutes nothing happened. A bustling drew my attention from the group of bikers towards the castle entrance, where a rotund man was huffing his way down a short flight of stairs. One of the armed guards followed him, but the other had returned to his post again.
“Whatdya want?”
“Marcela sent me to make sure you’re taking all necessary precautions to safeguard yourself. The girl may not have returned yet, but Marcela wants us all to be prepared.”
“I was nicely protected up in the tower, but now I’m down here, exposed and in the open thanks to you.” Bill rubbed his expansive belly. He had a rather impressive salt-and-pepper beard, and his wiry hair was tucked under a black ball cap with the Hands of Death logo on the front.
I crawled closer. I had two of them right in front of me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get another opportunity like this. Desmond, who was closest to me, latched on to my ankle with a tight grip. I spun around, ready to spit venom, but he held up his watch with his free hand and shook his head.
Fuck. I’d forgotten about the timing. I had to wait at least another twenty minutes, and in that time Lars might be gone, and Fat Bill would have waddled back up to his well-protected tower. I was quickly going to lose this wonderful opportunity, but Desmond was right to stop me. If I went out and killed these two but some of the others got away, there was a chance they’d be able to warn the rest of the necros. I’d be sending all the other teams into a death trap if that was the case. This might be a great opportunity to take out two of them, but I had to remember there were nineteen others we had to keep in mind.
“You needed the exercise anyway, old man.”
