"Why don't you come to the ladies' room and let me help sponge you off?" Marlene's voice was low, gentle, but also contained a plea, when Damali shook her head no.
"I have fresh clothes for you." Marlene's eyes met Carlos's for a moment and then she turned back to Damali. "You don't want that all over the seats."
Neither woman needed to say it. They both knew speaking of the miscarriage was off-limits right now.
Carlos watched Damali nod and close her eyes. For the first time since the surreal had begun to unfold, he saw it-her condition, her team's condition. The awareness and memory of her pregnancy slammed into his brain. She'd survived the unthinkable. Tears of heartbreak stung his eyes and nose, but he refused to let them fall. The chairman would pay. Carlos tightened his fists and stared out the window for a moment. Thiswas not over. The sight of Damali's blood-caked, tattered dress stole his breath and shredded his soul.
He turned in his seat and moved a lock off her damp brow. "I'll be all right. Go with Marlene," Carlos said quietly, ashamed that he'd been bugging so hard that the obvious had never occurred to him. Each member of the Guardian squad was dirty, bloodied, gashed, and seemed to be hanging on to fatigue like it were a life jacket. But Damali's condition made him want to weep. He kept his eyes on her grime-smudged face and allowed his gaze to travel down her disheveled clothing, stop at her blood-streaked thighs, and he was forced to look away.
He watched tears well in her eyes as she stood with effort. His abdomen clenched, and somewhere within the recesses of his mind he knew that her body was riddled with a pain he could only imagine. It was a pain that no man could know. The dark side had clawed life from her womb, and her uterus was contracting, purging the life it had once held... his baby girl was bleeding, horrible cramps making her steps unsteady while she held her head high and passed her Guardian team. Each male lowered his eyes and let out a slow, quiet breath, almost as though he could feel the sharp contraction stabs as Damali and Marlene made their way down the narrow aisle to the bathroom.
Shabazz, Lopez, and Dan, the tactical sensors in the group, were nearly ashen in complexion as Damali approached them. Rider and Jose had practically stopped breathing, the scent of blood now too much for the team's noses to absorb within the tight confines of the plane. J.L. broke down and silently wept; Big Mike allowed quiet tears to stream down his huge face and simply leaned back against the seat with his eyes closed. Monk Lin and Imam Asula were hunched forward in a silent, but urgent, prayer.
A new level of respect and awe entered Carlos as he watched how Damali bore the burden like a true warrior, only a grimace giving any indication of how badly she hurt. And he also knew that the pain went beyond the physical. It was a deep gash within her psyche that might never heal. It wasn't supposed to go down like this.
He could barely stare behind her as Marlene escorted her down the narrow aisle past her team. They had murdered his baby and cut out his woman's heart in the process. Yeah, it was all coming back to him-very clearly. There wasn't a place on the planet the chairman would be able to hide, and council chambers weren't far enough under the earth to protect that old SOB.
Steadier now, Carlos breathed in slowly and let his breath out with concerted effort. Father Pat was now at his side, and Carlos almost retched when he looked at the pool of blood Damali had left in the leather seat. He could feel the team watching the elderly cleric as Father Patrick murmured a prayer and used paper towels, holy water, and an airsickness bag to clean off the place where Damali had been sitting. With reverence, the old man folded away the debris and dried the seat, constantly murmuring prayers, then sealed the top of the plastic bag with holy water.
Defeat claimed Carlos as Father Patrick walked to the trash chute, stopping at each bloody footprint Damali had left in the carpet to strike holy water in the sign of the crucifix upon them, and then made the sign of the cross over the small plastic bag he disposed of before he returned to slide into a seat beside Carlos. But Carlos didn't look at him. He couldn't. The remains of the dark side's damage had been reduced to gore and had been deposited in the jet's trash bin.
"I don't have the blood hunger," Carlos said quietly. "I thought I was supposed to go into the Light, to some kinda place of peace-at least that's the hype you gave me when I made my deal with you guys. You reneged."
From the corner of his eye, he watched Father Patrick lean forward and stare at him. Their eyes met.
"No, I didn't renege, Carlos," the old man said. "I don't know what's going on, either. This is beyond all our comprehension. We all saw you go to ash in broad daylight and then regenerate under that same sun. And, yet, now you don't bear fangs. We don't know what that means."
Carlos nodded, no longer angry at the cleric, just weary. "I can't smell, I can't taste, I can barely see. I can hardly walk. Surelythat's going to change when the sun drops."
Father Patrick nodded. "Have you ever considered that youcan see, can smell, can taste and hear-just not with a vampire's acuteness? Maybe you're just... human."
Carlos stared at Father Patrick in horror. He kept his tone low and controlled, fury nearly stealing the words forming in his mind. "Haveyou considered how f**king insane it is for me to be a Joe regular now with everything that's about to jump off? There's gonna be hell to pay for the bullshit that was done to Damali alone!" He held the cleric's gaze, a fragile part of him dangerously near the breaking point. "No, Father Patrick. If that's why I'm like this, then there was nopoint in bringing me back-'cause I'm only gonna live a very short time. Youknow I'm going after that bastard, right? Human, daywalker in rehab, whatever it is they brought back, I have one mission. To take the chairman's f**king head."
The elderly cleric's eyes burned with a quiet rage that matched Carlos's. But he kept his voice low, his expression tight, as he spoke. "No, Carlos.You need to get very clear, son. Ifthey brought you back," he said pointing upward, "then there is a higher purpose for you. Even what had been your kind can't bring back the already extinguished. The Light has interceded through the hand of Christ, who only did that once, to my knowledge, and his name was Lazarus. You think aboutthat and focus onthat while Marlene is helping Damali. You work forHim , now-just like I do. Our teams have been through enough. Damali has been through enough. You need to think about what that young woman, our Neteru, just experienced and is going through, instead of your own rage and need for revenge just so you can satisfy your own ego."
Father Patrick glanced over his shoulder at the dozing team. "I'm sick to death with all of this, too, Carlos. You have no idea how traumatized we all are."
When Carlos didn't respond, Father Patrick looked back at Carlos. "My advice is that you give a quiet prayer of thanks for being returned to her, in whatever condition. Say a resoundingthank you for being delivered from a torture chamber in Hell, and count your blessings instead of your losses." He nodded toward Jose and Father Lopez. "Be thankful that the ones left in your line were moved by instinct. That through their faith and choice to follow the Light, they gathered your ashes and prayed on your behalf-as we all did. That the Neteru cried out to Heaven for your redemption and return. That the angels heard her cries and that she gave upmuch for your salvation. And that now we are being transported to safety under the protection of the Vatican! Therefore, we follow the orders that come down from On High to the letter, from this point forward. We wait until we get a sign from On High before we act. Deviate, and I'll kill you myself."
With that, Father Patrick stood up, his tattered blue robes swishing about him as he walked back to his seat, sat down, and closed his eyes.
THE SIMULTANEOUS loss of five masters had devastated his empire. Three councilmen had been exterminated, leaving only him and two weakened councilmen at his side. Topside, second-level vampires had returned to feudal law, and were-demons were making violent inroads into all territories, which would radically reduce food supplies and block transports to chambers.
For a while, awaiting the inevitable inquiry, the remaining members of the Vampire Council had spoken in nervous whispers and intermittent hisses as they continued to discuss the empire's vulnerabilities, but soon, even their essence would begin to expire.
It had already started. Just like that. Instant evaporation of what had been. The Light was dredging them; he could feel it as day set the planet above on fire. The chairman drew from the reserves of night, wrapping it around his embattled chambers like a dark, woolen cloak to protect his dying loyalists. Somewhere on earth, it was always night, making it perpetual. But silence had replaced his remaining councilmen's hoarse, starving murmurs. Blood was slowing in their veins, making it a thick and putrid slurry that robbed their vitality. He could painfully feel the stringy clots congeal within his cold body as though gelatin set to mold.
Yes, it was inevitable. Soon, without food, they would have to ration, reduce themselves to ashen stasis and suffer, where they'd all be forced to lie prone, crumbled to near dust, waiting on the table to quicken again with resources-fresh blood. In just one night, their outer vaults had been pillaged and burned by the weres. Council chambers now were filled with dark, charcoal-hued smoke as each elderly vampire slowly wasted away.
The chairman sat quietly, plotting. To risk surfacing topside to make more masters was too risky right now. He summoned patience. Second-generations from all the regions were unstable, and three attempts to telepathically elevate second-generation lieutenants had been disastrous. They'd torched on impact. The Light had intervened. Even those he'd sent a transport cloud for had perished in the care of weak couriers that were vulnerable to upper-level demon incursion. His summons in order to elevate the weaker generations to master status in chambers had failed. And yet Yonnie remained. Why?
It made his black heart burn that even destroyed, Carlos Rivera had left behind a master who was not beholden to the empire. Carlos had made Yonnie with good intent. A council-level vampire's turn bite had been used forthe Light ? To help a man, to save him from sure extinction, to give himhis due ? Compassion and empathy were in the bite, not greed or power-lust? Horrified, the chairman sat numbly looking off into the vast caverns. Never in all his thousands of years of rule... never was there a provision in the black tome that sat beneath his crest for such sacrilege against the empire! Empathy in a bite? Never.
His councilmen glanced at him and then shut their eyes. They also had come to the same conclusion. No wonder their resources had slowed to a mere trickle. Even dead, Carlos had bested them. The Neteru was a poisonous variable and no less formidable. Maybe even more so, because it was the Light in her that had ruined a good vampire. Yes, he'd submitted Carlos Rivera to the sun, had clawed out his woman's insides and broken her spirit. He wondered if she'd died. That was a hopeful thought.
He kicked at a withered, expired bat that had dropped at his feet. The once screeching, swirling, gorgeous mass of red-eyed creatures had barely enough energy to cling to the rafters. The chairman glanced at his fellow councilmen in despair. Their onyx robes were beginning to show signs of age, the hems becoming tattered, and their crests had begun to collect particles of dust. It was wise to sleep and save their energy as much as possible during this fallow time in the empire. Yet he hated that their breaths were now foul, their skins decaying, cracking, and peering, festering with gangrene.
Substantially weakened by the civil war, the Neteru's successful attacks with Carlos Rivera against their empire, and the subsequent investigation into their failures by the level seven, forced them each to remain very still upon their marble thrones. The inquisition into their failures had been so vicious that it had barely left them enough energy to merely think, let alone move. Speaking was a waste of energy, unless absolutely necessary. Breathing had to be done in slow, measured sips of air, inhaled with great effort.