Bone Crossed

He shook his head. “She knows something—she didn’t talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don’t think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me ...” He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I’d heard a heavy feeding could cause that. “I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe’s contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre’s pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault.”

“She’s crazy.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know her. She’s trying to do what is best for her people.”

The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else’s favorite. She’d been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants—mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre—the second vampire I’d killed—and a really creepy character named Wulfe.

Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.

Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy—I’d call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn’t been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I’d met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn’t know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.

The first time I met Marsilia, I’d kind of admired her ... at least until she’d enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel’s the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him ... easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.

“Not to be argumentative, Stefan,” I said. “But she’s bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those ... those things that Andre made.”

His face closed down. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us.”

“Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one.” Demonic possession isn’t a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn’t succeed. “But you are right. I don’t know what makes her tick. I don’t know you, either.”

He just looked at me, expressionlessly. “You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre’s victims like that.”

“Wulfe killed them.” He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need to defend himself.

“You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens.”

About that time he got angry, too. “I did it for you. Don’t you understand? She would have destroyed you if she’d known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And she would have killed you!” He was on his feet when he finished.

“They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn’t like you had a conversation with them.” I stood up, too.

“They would have had to die anyway. They knew about us.”

“There we disagree,” I told him. “What about your vaunted power over human minds?”

“It only works if the contact with us is very short—a feeding, no more than that.”

“They were living, breathing people who were murdered. By you.”

“How did you know that Mercy was at Andre’s?” Warren’s calm voice broke between us like a wave of ice water as he came down the stairs. He walked past me and used the key to open the cage door. “I’ve been wondering about that for a while.”

“What do you mean?” asked Stefan.

“I mean that we knew she’d found Andre because she told Ben, thinking he couldn’t tell anyone else because he’d not changed back from his wolf in all the time since the demon-possessed died. Ben changed so he could tell us, but we still couldn’t go after her because we didn’t know where Andre was. You had no way to know what she was doing. How did you know she was off killing Andre, just in time to cover up the crime?”

Stefan made no move to come out of the cage. He folded his arms and leaned a shoulder against the bars instead as he considered Warren’s question.

“It was Wulfe, wasn’t it?” I said. “He knew what I was doing because one of the homes I found was his.”