Her slender arms were purple with bruises and polka dotted with bites and dried specks and trails of blood. Her legs, bare save for the small skirt she wore, bore the same. Her delicate hands were bloodstained and curled into claws that continued to grip the sheets beneath her though no breath filled her body.
Seth left to perform a quick search of her small rural home. He found what he sought in the bathroom and returned to the bedroom.
Lifting the slight form, he supported her with one arm while he ripped the bloody sheets from the bed and shook a clean white one over it. He laid the young woman down and closed those long-lashed, sightless, accusing eyes.
He had searched for her every chance he could, narrowing her location down a little more each day. It was a big damned planet. And so much was going on in North Carolina right now.
Excuses. For the inexcusable.
He turned to the crib a few feet away. Anguish pierced him as he approached it.
The body within was so tiny. He lifted the babe and placed him in his mother’s arms, then tucked the sheet around them like a cocoon.
Two gifted ones lost.
There were three phenomena Seth always felt internally, no matter how far away they took place: the birth of a gifted one, the death of either a gifted one or an immortal, and the transformation of a gifted one into an immortal. The first triggered a sort of breathless tingle in his chest, as this babe’s birth had three months earlier. It had been a single bright moment among a host of dark ones.
The second spawned a feeling of emptiness. Seth had thought the emptiness created by the babe’s death an extension of the loneliness that had besieged him ever since he had assigned Ami to be Marcus’s Second. Had he realized it was the result of a gifted one dying, perhaps he could have found these two sooner. Soon enough, perhaps, to save the mother.
The third, the transformation of a gifted one into an immortal, spawned a sick feeling of dread within him. So heavy he could follow it like a scent in the wind. But such took time. Time this woman, the victim of the half-dozen vampires whose blood now painted the walls, had lacked.
The vampires had tried to turn her. But, as often happened, their bloodlust had thwarted their desire, driving them to drain her before the transformation could conclude. It was the only reason there were two bodies to enshroud and bury instead of one.
He lifted the bundle into his arms. They were so light. Somehow that made it all the worse.
Outside, a brisk wind bearing the scent of snow lashed him. He almost wished it carried with it the punishing sting of sleet.
The beautiful countryside outside Gyeongju, South Korea, bore a white blanket that seemed to dampen sound like cotton balls. Thunder rumbled overhead, spawned not by any meteorological disturbance, but by Seth’s grief.
He would have to find a shovel.
“Here.”
Seth spun around.
As always, the figure that stepped from the shadows the house cast in the moonlight reminded him of a buff Jim Morrison. His dark, wavy hair lifted and fell with the breeze, tumbling past his shoulders. His chest was bare, hairless. Soft leather pants hung low on his hips.
Seth hadn’t heard his arrival and wondered if the noise the vampires had made as he had slaughtered them had drowned it out, or if he had simply been so distracted he had missed it.
The leather pants rustled slightly as the other strolled forward. Snow and ice crunched beneath his boots. One large hand clasped the handle of a shovel he held out to Seth.
Seth glanced down at the burden in his arms. He didn’t want to lay them on the ground even long enough to dig the grave. Yet he didn’t want to return them inside to the blood-spattered room in which both had died.
“Never mind,” his visitor said. “I’ll do it.”
Seth would have been unable to suppress his shock if he hadn’t been so numb.
“Did you know them?” the other asked as he stuck the shovel deep into the frozen earth and removed a hunk of soil.
“Not really. I knew they were gifted ones. I looked in on her over the years as I do to all of the gifted ones. But . . .”
“They didn’t know you.”
Seth nodded.
The sound of the metal blade stabbing the ground seemed obscenely loud.
Neither spoke as the grave took shape.
When it was long and deep enough, Seth lowered the bodies into it with care.
His companion abandoned the shovel and joined Seth in singing a prayer for mother and son in an ancient language none currently living had ever heard spoken.
When silence reigned once more, Seth picked up the shovel and started returning the soil to its home. “Could we maybe do this another time?” he asked without looking up at the other, who was taller than himself by a couple of inches.
“Do what?”
“Whatever it is you’re here to do. Or say. I really have no interest in your threats tonight. If you and the others did more than sit on your precious asses and observe, perhaps I wouldn’t be doing this right now.”
“I’ll issue no threats tonight, cousin.”
“Well, whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Are you going to tell me you’re here because you missed me?”
“No,” he said simply.
From the corner of his eye, Seth watched him pace away a few yards, pause, pace back. Cross his arms. Uncross them. Pace away again.
He seemed . . . off.
Unsettled.
Something.
“What’s with you tonight?”
“Nothing.”
Finished filling the grave, Seth set the shovel aside and turned to the house. He closed his eyes, pictured the kitchen. The gas pipe behind the stove sprang a leak. A small spark and it ignited. He would visit her family and plant the memory of an explosion, of mother and child being killed instantly, then given a lovely funeral.
No one would see the bodies. No eyebrows would be raised by the bites. No inquiries would be made. No sensational headlines would proclaim their deaths vampire kills. No one would know the truth. Only Seth and . . .
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”
Tense silence.
“Zach—”
“Your phone is broken.”
Seth frowned. “What?”
“Your phone is broken,” Zach repeated. Seth pulled his cell from a back pocket and gave it a look. No wonder things had been so quiet. The device had been shattered by a vampire strike.
Seth looked at Zach. Why would he care if Seth’s phone . . .
Alarm struck him. “What’s happened?” It must be bad for this one to risk the wrath of the others to interfere and bring it to Seth’s attention. “Who’s been trying to reach me?”
Zach’s jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth.
Seth knew what this would cost him and wondered if he would—
“Your people in North Carolina.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them.”
Seth swore and prepared to teleport to David’s place.
“Seth.”
“What?”
Zach met his gaze. “You’re battling a mythological beast there.”
Seth shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Hydra,” Zach clarified. “You’re fighting the Lernaean Hydra.”
“The Greek mythological creature Hercules was sent to slay that had all the heads?”
Zach nodded shortly. “Cut off one head and it grows two more. Your immortal black sheep didn’t know what he was breeding when he undertook his uprising.”
“I assume you mean Sebastien.”
“You can’t defeat it. Every head poses a threat. To you. To us. The more heads, the greater the threat. They can’t know who you are. And they can’t know who we are. The others won’t stand for it. Already there have been rumblings.”
They had cut off Sebastien’s “head” and Montrose Keegan and the Vampire King had replaced him. They had cut off those two’s heads and . . . were still trying to find out who had taken their place. Was Zach saying Emrys wasn’t working alone? That whomever they fought now would conquer them?