If Lee had kept hold of it if he’d used it if he’d known how dangerous it could be in his hands…
But perhaps he had. It no longer mattered. Lee was dead, and Rose felt a curious sense of loss that had eluded her upon her parents’ deaths. Maybe, against expectations, they had been friends after all.
Francesco pushed past her and moved to her right, far enough away so that they did not offer an easy target. Patrick was standing to her left, making strange grunting noises as his head jerked at the air like a startled chicken’s. He’d been damaged, but she sensed that he still had some fight in him.
Good. They were going to need it.
“And here we are,” Duval said, his voice like a corpse’s teeth falling onto a gravestone. Here was a creature that should never talk, because his language was something other than words. “The vampires, and the Humains.”
“Humains that have killed enough of you,” Rose said.
Duval shrugged. “We can always swell our ranks. You… you lose a Humain, and your weak philosophy means you can’t replace them. Like this one.” He nodded at Connie’s crumpled corpse. “A child, thin spine, easy to crush. But she had the feel of… thirty years? A lot of vampire knowledge just… gone.” He opened his hand as if releasing a butterfly, and Rose sensed Francesco tensing to attack.
“Back,” Duval said. He held up the Bane. It was an unremarkable thing, considering what it was purported to do. Worked in metal, shaped like two large bowls rim to rim, a handle on one domed side. Its edges glimmered with blood, and Rose sensed something very old emanating from it, as well as something fresher.
“It’s a lump of metal,” Francesco said. He laughed. “You think it gives you any more power than you had before?”
“I feel it,” Duval said, and he sounded so convinced that Rose had little doubt. “It’s filling me with itself. Older than we know, and stronger.” He held it up to the light, turning it this way and that.
“How’d you even know it was here?” Francesco asked, genuinely interested.
“Your human wasn’t the only one who could use the internet. The pet of an associate of mine across the ocean heard… a whisper. Passed the whisper on to me. And here we are.”
“What sort of whisper?”
“The usual,” Duval said. “Rumor of rumors. I’ve been chasing down such Bane whispers for a century.”
Just killing time, Rose thought, her choice of words disturbing more than amusing. There’s the two of them, the three of us… and this has to end soon.
“Well, now you have your lump of metal,” Francesco said. “A piece of rubbish dug up from an old grave, surrounded by myth. And it’s suckers like you that believe it.”
“‘Suckers’?” Duval grinned, and he was all teeth. “Then why are you going through so much to stop us?”
“Just in case,” Francesco said. And then he shrugged. “And because, sometimes, being a Humain gets boring.”
“I don’t believe you,” the vampire said. He looked at Rose, then Patrick, then back to Francesco. “Three of you, two of us. One of you is”—he nodded at Patrick, feigning sadness—“almost finished, it seems. And another”—to Rose—“five years, maybe? Probably less. You fight well, yes. But not when it counts.”
He lowered the Bane and held it out to Bindy. She touched it and gasped, and Rose tried to see what the true effect was. Were the vampires really seeming to swell before her eyes? Did their teeth really seem to grow? Or was it all in her: an expectation of things happening?
“Francesco?” she whispered.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” She heard the caution in his voice as well, and realized that he had no idea what was about to happen. Then: “When I give the word, we rush them.”
“Yes,” Rose said, and she glanced at Patrick to see if he’d heard. He nodded strangely. His left arm was twitching, left leg seemingly hanging limp and taking no weight. She thought perhaps his neck was broken.
“Ready…” Francesco said, and then there was a sound behind them.
Rose spun around and Marty was there, shuffling into the room with an old spearhead clasped in one hand, the other hugged his chest, holding in the pain. Rose was so shocked that for a second she couldn’t move, and that was all her brother needed to pass close to Patrick and start along the aisle beside the tumbled shelves.
Duval sighed. “If a job’s worth doing…” He nodded at Bindy, and she grinned horribly as she advanced on the bloodstained boy.
Marty paused and dropped the spearhead. It clanged off a fallen metal shelf, the sound surprisingly loud. He swayed, looking down at the floor, and Rose knew that he was about to faint.
“Leave him,” she said, pleading. “He’s just a—”
Bindy leapt, hands reaching, jaws stretching, and Marty stepped to one side faster than Rose could follow. He punched the falling woman, using her own momentum to drive his clawed hand into her stomach, and as she doubled over his forearm Marty growled, new teeth bared in pink, split gums.
“What—” Francesco said.
Marty chewed away the back of Bindy’s neck with one massive bite, exposing her spine and the base of her skull. Then he drove his other hand up through the wound and pulled, dragging out a handful of brain.
“Oh, Marty,” Rose said, but he was not looking at her. As he shoved the dead vampire aside, flicking the mess of her brains from his hand, he turned to face Duval.
“You killed my parents,” he said. “So come on, then, fucker.”
Duval grinned, lifted the Bane, and did as he was invited.
Maybe it was the rage that made him unbeatable.
Upon waking back in that deserted ransacked room, and realizing what had happened, Marty’s first instinct had been to exult. The grief of his parents’ deaths, which he had somehow been keeping at bay, was lessened now, a remote thing that seemed as if it had happened years ago, not days. The pain from Duval’s tortures, both physical and mental, had similarly faded. He had slid from the shelf and stood tall, taking in his surroundings even though the lights were now off. And he had felt more in control than he ever had before.
And then the rage had started to build as he thought of that vampire biting into him. He’d thought he wanted it, but the vampire had given him no choice. He had asked Rose to turn him, and that would have been his long-lost sister—his guardian angel—not that monster. Choice had been taken from him, along with whatever was left of his life. Undeath stretched before him. And, knowing that, he wasn’t at all sure he had ever wanted it at all.
It was only a short walk to room seventy-two, but in that time his rage built and his old, human self remained, an angry force that he was not sure he could ever shed. Humain? he thought, and he wondered at Rose’s turning. Had she felt like this? Perhaps he would get to ask her.
But first, the monster needed to pay.
On the way, he slipped through a door into a darkened room, all pains and injuries vanished, now that he was something else. He’d never felt such power. It took seconds to find what he was looking for, an unremarkable old weapon wrapped in oilcloth. He would not need it… it was just a part of the play.
Then room seventy-two, and his easy killing of the vampire bitch, and Rose’s gasped Oh, Marty as he stood facing the monster Duval. Those two words cast one sliver of doubt, but he flicked the mess of brain and shattered bone from his hand and said, “Come on, then, fucker.”