Kiss of Angels Read online

  "I like my blondes with more curves and fewer slabs." Tony glanced back at the shop, which had shuttered its windows and killed the lights in the minute since they'd left. "Do you think they'll be okay? Those two kids?"

  "No idea, love. Does it really matter?"

  "No, but yes. I like love to conquer all."

  Grace gave him a slow, surprised smile. "Do you, now. What are you doing asking someone like me on a date for, then? There's no happy ending for Grace O'Malley, copper. She's already dead and lost to this world."

  "That's not true, though, is it? There's always the kiss of angels."

  "That's just a silly story, love."

  "Can't be. I'm a good Italian Catholic boy, and I know there are angels." Tony offered Grace his elbow, and when she took it, smiled. "After all, I've got one on my arm."

  "Oh my God." Grace sounded like one of her teen runaways, though she followed it up with a laugh. "My god, and it's me who's Irish and should have the gift of the Blarney Stone."

  "I'll share," Tony offered, "when you think you might want to kiss me."

  Grace's eyebrows rose. "Will you, now."

  "I hope so." Tony took a deep breath. "If you'd like to go out again, that is. I, uh. There's an event coming up that I'd…I should probably ask later. After a second date. Or a sixth. Otherwise Margrit says I should just put a r—" He bit his tongue to silence himself while Grace stared at him, obviously trying not to laugh again.

  "Well, you can't leave me hanging, copper. What's the big event? The Policeman's Ball? A communion? Your best friend's wedding? Oh, lord, it is." She did laugh again, as Tony felt his expression go stricken, then leaned in to kiss his cheek. "Ask after the third date, love, and Grace will see."

  AWAKENING

  The pain of awakening was exquisite. The weight of wet earth lifting away; the ash and oak driven through an unbeating heart now pulled free. The burning iron unwound from wrist and ankle no more than bone, and the hunger, oh: the raging hunger, awakening as did the desiccated flesh.

  Strong slim arms to carry a weightless body: female. The savior was female. Wind rushed across filthy skin, though the air itself sounded still and so the wind spoke of speed. Great speed. Inhuman speed. The savior was vampire. One of their own. One who had escaped the betrayal.

  Rage boiled up, fast and sweet as blood. So long. It had been so long since the betrayal, and only now did rescue come? But no: fury failed as fast as it had risen. Revenge could come later. Later, when strength had returned to dried-up muscle and blackened skin was once more flush with color. Flush with blood.

  There were so many humans. The scent of their blood carried even on the speeding wind. Blood pounding hard in fat bodies, lush for draining. The need to taste that wealth sent a spasm through a useless body, cracking fragile bones with its strength. A spasm, no more, from a frame that had once sped across continents in hours, had once ripped body from bone not through great strength but through terrible speed. A spasm: merely a pathetic response from dead flesh.

  This was not life, oh no, but it was more than had been granted for years uncounted, and that would be enough.

  #

  The bodies were disgusting. More than a dozen of them, all twisted and broken and blackened from their time beneath the earth. They'd weighed almost nothing, but their stench made up for their lightness. Rotten soil, rotten flesh, rotten wood, rusted iron, scummy water. They stank, and Ursula thought that if she'd considered that possibility beforehand, she might not have retrieved the vampires at all.

  But then, she didn't often think of consequences beforehand, which, as it turned out, was probably the most vampiric of her inherited traits. Well, that and the speed, but being quick never got her in trouble, whereas acting without thinking often did.

  Poor impulse control. She could all but hear her sister mocking her with the words, light and teasing and fond. Kate was her own father's daughter, ridden with the dragonly lust for treasures. Ursula was Kate's treasure; Ursula and their human, if not exactly mortal, mother Sarah. There were few things in the world as safe as being a dragon's hoard.

  She had left Kate behind, though. Left her behind with the red dragon who was Kate's father, and had come to Europe alone with a mind to rescue the vampires her own father had betrayed. "Daisani," she said under her breath, half-mocking. "Master of the vampires." Only half mocking, though, because in the end he had mastered them, had set them away from the world, and if anyone could claim mastery over killing machines harder to herd than cats, then it was probably the one who had hidden them.

  The one who had betrayed them.

  It shouldn't matter to her. She was half human, as was Kate. She kept to their mother's last name, Hopkins; they both did, because they were not of the Old Races, not the way the others were. Not bound by their antiquated laws, not when her very existence flaunted them. Never betray our presence to humanity. Never breed children outside of your own race.

  And never kill one of your own, but there were none of her own, no other half-breeds with vampires for fathers, and so she had very little problem killing those who were almost like her. Not vampires themselves, for a host of reasons. For one, Eliseo Daisani, her father, was the first other vampire she'd ever met.

  For another, these creeping, twitching lumps that were her kin should by all counts be dead, and they weren't. They had been buried in earth, soaked in holy water, staked by wood and bound by iron, and lain beneath the Vatican for over a century, and still they had life in them. It was possible that vampires could not die at all. In that case, her father had done an even crueler crime than Ursula might have otherwise imagined.

  And she was perpetuating it now, leaving them to scream their thin airy screams as she sat and stared in fascinated horror at what living, breathing creatures could become. Stealing them from beneath the Vatican had been the work of a few hours. Finding enough blood to feed them, that had been harder.

  If she'd been Kate—if she'd had the baubles and priceless jewels Kate collected as happenstance—Ursula would have left restitution for the farmers whose cattle she'd slaughtered to get the necessary blood. Gallons of it, stinking as badly as the vampires, in its own way. She didn't need blood, not the way vampires in legend did. She liked her steaks rare, and perhaps ate more red meat than most, but she'd never craved blood as sustenance. Nor had she had time to ask her father if he did, or if that, like so many other things, was simply part of the stories that had grown up around his people.

  Poor impulse control, she thought again, but her impulses were well and truly under control now. There would be consequences to this, if she finished. But there were consequences if she didn't, too; the vampires had been taken from the world once already, and she was not the one to put them back away, not now that she'd begun. The blood waited; all she needed to do was drip—or pour—its thickening heat down dry throats, and they would waken fully.

  And then, if necessary, she would run.

  #

  Blood. Not from a body, but from a bucket. Cold, compared to the heat pumped by a living heart. Warmer, though, than the wet earth had been; kinder than stakes and iron could ever be. Bitter in flavor. The blood of cattle, tasting of the grasses those beasts chewed. Horse blood was sweeter, tinged with oats and grains, and the blood of carnivores was richest of all, flavored by fat and living flesh. To be given the blood of cows would be an insult, if it had not been so long since there had been blood at all.

  Strength returned far more quickly than reason might expect. Dried muscle burned as blood forced its way through shriveled veins. There was no digesting, not like lesser creatures did. Blood was all, life, sustenance, and shape, and it ran from the victim to the vampire as if they were one.

  Of the brethren whom Daisani had betrayed in Rome, Lona had died last, and lived first. Pain and power ruptured through her, bones cracking with returning strength, and within a breath she changed from husk to healthy.

  The girl feeding her leapt backward, clearing a dozen feet i
n a single motion, and betrayed herself as vampire with the action. Lona had known it anyway, had understood it from the moment slender arms had scooped her up, but this was truth, this was verification, and the girl now crouched across a room littered by bodies, and was poised to run.

  She was clever, then, because no wise thing would trust a newly-wakened vampire, not even one who had drunk her fill of cow's blood and who needed nothing more for weeks. Days. Perhaps only hours, after the unknown length of sleep, but not now, not in this moment.

  Clever but not pretty. Not a beauty, at least, with her dark hair and plain, forthright features that shifted and slid toward greater loveliness the longer Lona looked. Not the subtle change a vampire could command, but something more. Something that said the gaze had lied at first, had mis-seen shocking beauty as something ordinary. The girl was not—was not—that attractive, but the compelling lie of her face reminded Lona of another.

  Lona bared her teeth—such flat ordinary teeth, such mortal teeth, because no vampire showed its true face until the kill was upon it—and the first words she spoke in over a century were accusation: "You are Eliseo Daisani's get."

  "I am the one who released you from his prison." Not a denial but most certainly a reminder. A challenge. Lona sank into a crouch of her own, two predators across from each other, and between them the others slowly came to life.

  Most were gone within minutes, never so much as looking between Lona and the girl, never so much as questioning their fate, only escaping this last room, this stone house in the hills beyond Rome. Returning to a world that would not know them, and to revel in the power that granted.

  "How long," Lona said when those who were leaving had gone. Two or three remained, besides herself. Made wiser, perhaps, by the years under the earth, or simply too weak and tired yet to go. But the girl, Daisani's daughter, was the important one here, and Lona would not leave until she had her answers.

  "About a hundred and twenty years. Things have changed."

  "You were there?"

  "For the changes?" The girl nodded. "For the capture? No."

  No: Lona knew that already. The wind brought Rome's scent, told her where she was, told her about the plants in bloom outside on scrubby hills, told her the distances her fellow prisoners had already traveled, but nothing about the girl's scent was familiar. There had been a human there that night, a man, a vampire killer, and he, Lona would hunt. His children, if not himself, and their children all the way down until no drop of his blood remained unspilled. But this girl had not been there that night more than a century past, and tonight she had freed Lona. They were allies, if not friends, at least for the moment. "Tell me."

  Silence, as the girl studied that request. Searched it for answers, and finally said "There are eight billion humans now."

  #

  The vampire, so newly fed and flushed with blood, turned white. She was not like Daisani: not swarthy to begin with, and she had been buried beneath the earth for decades on end. Dirt stains had left her already, shuddered away as her flesh rebounded from its destitution, but even cleansed and milky from a lack of sun, she paled.

  It had not, Ursula thought, been the kindest way to explain the changes of the past hundred and more years, but it may have been the only way. There were too many changes, too vast to number even though she'd lived through them, and the doubling and redoubling of the human population seemed the only way to encapsulate what a century of sleep had missed.

  "We're everywhere in their stories," she said after a pause. "They make mistakes about us. They think we're bound to night, like the gargoyles, and some of them think we're…romantic. But none of them know what we really are at all."

  "How many?" The vampire's voice was hoarse, not with disuse but with shock.

  Ursula shrugged. "You're the second vampire I've ever spoken with. I think he buried them all."

  The vampire's lip curled. She wasn't pretty, Ursula thought, but even with her crouched naked and angry, with ragged hair falling around her shoulders in discolored lumps, she could be mistaken for beautiful. Daisani was like that too: not handsome, but he caught the eye. Perhaps it was a vampiric trait. Ursula had the sudden urge to look at herself in a mirror, but there were none in the house she'd taken, and it would be poor impulse control to leave this awakening vampire to assuage her own vanity.

  "How did you escape? Favorite daughter?"

  "Unknown daughter." There were so many more things she could say to that, confessions of blood, but that would be telling far more than she should. Even the admission of the unknown was dangerous; it could lead to questions of her bloodline.

  Had led to questions of her bloodline: that was clear inside a breath. The vampire's black eyes narrowed and Ursula dropped her jaw in response, hissing. Warning. Threatening. Different. A vampire—a full-blooded vampire—had to start the shift into its natural form in order to feed. In order to threaten. Fluid black oil would swim over the skin, under the skin, removing all question of their false humanity.

  Ursula's shift was no more human: men did not dislocate their jaws, drop them loose beyond the obvious stretch of muscle and sinew, nor did their teeth shape and shatter, new rows coming to sharp life like a shark's. But her coloration didn't distort, and somehow that difference was all, in the eyes of humanity. She had rarely slipped, had rarely let even a hint of her other face be seen by humans, but when she had, they had stared, shaken themselves, and stared again, then dismissed what they'd seen as a hideous trick of light.

  Harder, though, to dismiss the black oil slick that crawled over a full vampire's face, and utterly impossible for a vampire to dismiss its lack in Ursula. The creature across from her hissed in return, but it was a wary sound, not challenging. "What are you?"

  "Chimera." That was the name Janx had given them: children of two races, heir to some and all and none of what their parents were.

  Shock passed over the vampire's face a second time. "Forbidden."

  "Things," Ursula said dryly, "have changed."

  #

  Fear roiled in Lona's gut, base prey fear that told her to bolt. Told her to be like the others, to run, find blood, regain full strength. To become what she had always been: an apex predator. To start, maybe, with this wild thing in front of her, this girl who was half of one thing and half of another and altogether something else of her own. Lona's fingers curled against the stone floor, nails scraping old dirt. Her own old dirt, probably, shed from a healing body. She could pounce, rend, kill—unless the half of one thing, half of another, gave the girl unexpected strength or let her ghost away like a djinn. Wiser to wait and see what the girl was, what she could do, before moving to the kill.

  When, Lona thought, bemused, had any vampire heeded wisdom? Wisdom, thoughtfulness, consideration: those were for slower creatures. For things that could not cross a continent at a run, moving from one ocean to another in days. Wisdom was for those who couldn't act, react, and act again as fast as thought. Wisdom—

  —wisdom, or its brother planning, had captured and buried a dozen vampires beneath the Vatican, and more, if what this girl said, more the whole world 'round.

  Lona undug her fingernails from the stone and hunched smaller. Held herself still and made herself wait. Wait, which no vampire ever did. Wait, and think of the changes she'd already learned about: eight billion humans, and a chimera not drowned at birth.

  There were answers lying within those two things by themselves, if she had the wit to dig and discover them. It was hard, hard to think ahead, hard to listen without acting. But there were so many humans, and a chimera whose father was Eliseo Daisani, and that chimera had come to waken the vampires. There were smart questions she should ask, things she should consider and weigh and respond to. One, one stood out, one was most important of all: "Why?"

  The girl huffed air through her nose, noisy snort of sound. "Because he betrayed all of us. All of you. Because nobody else was awake to undo what he'd done, and someone had to. Because the world i
s changing for the Old Races. The Negotiator has made sure of that. We're allowed to interbreed. The selkies have come out of hiding. There might be a future for all of us, now, and the vampires should be part of that."

  "No." The word came slowly, painfully. A hundred years and more of sleep had ingrained patience, or a truth, in Lona's blackened bones. "We feed. We kill. We do not…moderate. And if there were so many humans coming…" Hideous truth, that Eliseo Daisani had been right to bury the vampires. That they couldn't be allowed to go on as they were in a world where humans reproduced by the millions every day.

  It was not an argument Lona could have even imagined, much less imagined agreeing with, before the death of sleep.

  "Oh," said the girl, "so I should have left you buried?"

  Lona lifted a hand: wait. Not that vampires ever waited on anything. And yet: wait. Slow consideration, as if the water seeping into her body over a century had distanced the space between thoughts. "Your vision. What is it?"

  She could see in a heartbeat that the girl had no vision. That the impulse to free the vampires had been that and that alone: impulse, acted on as any vampire might act. Immediately and rashly. The girl was one of them, then, no matter what else she might be. "Revenge," Lona asked. Said. Not a question, not really. "Survival. Domination."

  "Don't be stupid," the girl said without missing a breath. "There are too many humans, and they're better than ever at killing and capturing things. A few dozen vampires will never conquer them. Integration. If you want to survive, integrate."

  "Ashe has done." Lona hissed the accusation, but whatever had prompted the girl to free the vampires, it wasn't disgust at Daisani's embrace of humanity. She shrugged, saying, "It's worked very well for him."

  "And you?"

  The girl turned her head. Quarter inch, no more. Show of throat. Vulnerability. Then she righted herself, letting one shoulder rise and fall. "I belong more to humanity than the Old Races. Integration is more appealing than genocide. Or suicide."