Death's Mistress

Anthony was slumped against the wall, staring upward with an expression of stark terror. Half a dozen stakes had been pulled out of his chest, and lay scattered on the floor, their bloody tips pointing at the creature stroking red hands over Anthony’s torso. The tiny, delicate fingers slid through slippery blood, teasing the edges of mortal wounds almost playfully.

But they were stronger than they looked. One of them suddenly backhanded Anthony, the manicured nails tearing into his cheek and snapping his head around, smashing his face into the rough wall. He forced his head back up, working his jaw absently. A trickle of blood made its way down his cheek before he began sluggishly to heal.

This seemed to enrage his tormenter, who gave another of those unearthly screams. Another slash of nails laid open his chest, but although he jerked against the pain, he kept his teeth clenched on a scream. With a digging twist the nails gouged deeper, until he twitched helplessly against their merciless grip, his head tossing back and cracking against the unforgiving bricks.

“Rotting carrion. How many times do I have to kill you?” his tormenter hissed.

“A few more, it would seem,” Anthony said, grimacing. And then he had to grit his teeth again as those knifelike nails started tearing downward in sharp, hard tugs.

The movement galvanized me out of my shock. A moment later, I was slip-sliding down the tumbled mass of dirt as Anthony’s nightmare looked up, snarling. I tensed, gun in one hand and heavy-duty flashlight in the other. But then the lips that had been pulled back in a rictus softened into a smile, and the glittering hate in the eyes melted away, as if it had never been there at all. If it hadn’t been for the blood smearing her pale blue gown, she would have looked completely normal.

“Christine?”

“Hello, Dory.” Her voice was calm, even, friendly. If I hadn’t been watching, I’d have never known that her fingers were still tracking the furrowed paths of Anthony’s wounds, slick with his blood.

I’d ended up teetering precariously on a pile of fallen bricks, so I stepped cautiously to the side. She didn’t noticeably react. “Uh. What are you doing?” I asked, equally carefully.

“What does it look like?” Anthony asked hoarsely.

I thought he might be wise to stop drawing her attention. The hate returned to her eyes as she looked at him, so focused that I could feel it pulsing between them. Then her hand tightened on the stake in his heart, and before I could stop her, she had jerked it out.

Anthony choked back a scream, while Christine crouched over him, holding the bloody spike. She held it up, examining it with a puzzled frown. “Why isn’t he dead?” she asked me.

I was wondering the same thing, until I saw his neck. There was a stuttering, puckered line where, until very recently, a gaping wound had been. He’d healed, I realized in disbelief. The stubborn son of a bitch had healed a mortal neck injury with a stake through his heart. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible without seeing it myself.

It was a damn impressive trick, but I didn’t think he had another one. The resignation on his face said that clearly enough. Anthony had given up; he thought this was it. And I had no clue why.

He should have been able to snap Christine like a twig, drain her, defend himself a hundred different ways from someone with little more power than a human. But he wasn’t. And that couldn’t be good.

“The wood is showing through,” Christine complained, before I could figure it out. She proffered the gory stake. “I don’t understand. It worked last time.”

“Last time being?”

“Elyas,” she said impatiently.

I walked over to take the stake, shedding dirt with every step and fighting to keep my breathing slow and steady. I didn’t understand what was going on here, and that was bad. But the unmistakable flicker of madness in Christine’s eyes was worse. If she wasn’t ru

And Anthony dead.

I took the stake and examined it, crouching down beside Christine and her prey. I turned it over in my hands. “It looks okay to me,” I said. “Did you use the same type on Elyas?”

“Yes,” she said fretfully. “I had them made to my specifications in Zurich by a silversmith. The shaft is apple wood, but I had him inlay a little silver tip, you see?” She pointed out the razor-sharp end with a nicely manicured nail. It would have been pretty if it hadn’t had part of Anthony caught underneath it. “It makes it go in easier.”

“I bet it’s not as easily deflected by a rib, either,” I said, because she obviously expected me to say something.

She nodded. “It isn’t as good as a knife, of course, but at least it doesn’t splinter.”

“I tried iron banding once,” I told her, “quite a while ago, but I found that—” I broke off at a painful jab in my right calf. I glanced down to find Anthony’s hand gripping me. Right.

“Uh, so. Why did you kill Elyas again?”

She raised those lovely eyes from the stake to mine. “I’m sorry. Did you want him?” she asked politely.

“Not particularly, no.”

“I don’t blame you. He wasn’t much of a challenge.”

“Unlike Geminus?”

“Oh, no. He would have been interesting, but he wasn’t expecting it, you see. They rarely do.”

No, I didn’t suppose so. I was standing in front of her, watching Anthony’s blood drip from her hands, and I was still having a hard time picturing her as the murderer. Her scent was off, but she looked the same as always: sweetly i

And then she plunged the stake back into Anthony’s chest, and it became a little easier.

He did scream that time—a pathetic, mewling sound that had me grabbing Christine’s wrist before I thought about it. But she only crouched there, looking at me inquiringly. “Uh. You can’t kill him,” I said weakly, after a short hesitation.

Her head tilted curiously. “Why not?”

My mind raced, trying to come up with a reason, any reason, to save Anthony. It was a little difficult since I didn’t know why she wanted him dead in the first place. And then a voice spoke calmly behind me. “His death energy would bring down the ceiling on our heads. We would all die.”

Christine frowned, and let go of the stake. She slowly rose to her feet, bloody hands smoothing her crumpled skirt. “Louis-Cesare.”

“Christine.”

I glanced between the two of them. Louis-Cesare looked vaguely sick, regarding the tableau with a terrible sadness. But he did not look shocked.

He did not look surprised.

“What the hell?” I demanded, standing up.

He glanced at me and hesitated. But then his spine stiffened and he answered, “When I made Christine, it was as I told you. She had been drained of most of her magic, and with it, her life. She was close to death—so close, in fact, that I did not know if the process would take.” He paused to lick his lips. “When she awoke, it became rapidly obvious that… there was something wrong. She was lucid enough. She knew me, but she was… troubled.”

“Troubled as in…”

“She was violent. Disturbed. I put her to sleep, hoping it was merely the trauma of what she had been through. But the next night, when I went to check on her, she was gone. I tracked her to the abbey where she had been a novice and where she had once been whipped. I found it burned to the ground, and the abbess…”

I suddenly remembered a vision of a burned-out building, piles of ash and a desiccated corpse, as delicate and fragile as an insect’s exoskeleton. “Christine?”

He nodded, swallowing. “Others had been fed upon. I tracked Christine for miles, and finally found her with a group of pilgrims. Or… what remained of them.”

“Oh, gods.” That was Anthony. I wasn’t sure if it was a cry of pain, or because he was slowly reaching the same conclusion I was.