Octavia's War Read online

  Ángel had not spoken or disputed Remmy at all, yet Octavia saw his troubled look. There was something bothering him that he wasn’t ready to talk about.

  She found she was watching over her shoulder a lot, after that. Every now and again, she would turn and look back the way they had come and minutely examine the horizon for signs of anything out of the ordinary.

  “There’s nothing behind us,” Ángel said, the last time she looked back.

  “How do you know that?” she demanded.

  “I just know.” His eyes under the hat were shadowed.

  Remmy considered him. “They say that one of every trinity becomes the hunter, with extraordinary senses and instincts. Maybe that’s you.”

  Octavia frowned. “He could hear the safe without leaning up against it.”

  “Shouldn’t you be the hunter?” Ángel said to Remmy. “Aren’t vampires hunters anyway?”

  “Yes, they are, but how did you know that? Lucky guess, I wonder?” Remmy said.

  “My superstitious mother.” Ángel shrugged. “She had a story for everything.”

  “I am a hunter of humans and other earthly creatures,” Remmy said, without any apparent self-consciousness. “You, though, will be hunting prey of a completely different kind.”

  Octave stared at him. “You’re not even embarrassed to tell us you kill humans?” she asked, amazed.

  “I didn’t say I kill those I catch.” Remmy gave her a small smile. “No human has regretted allowing me to feed from them. None of them remember me doing so.”

  Even Ángel was staring at him, now. Octavia caught Ángel’s glance as he looked at her. She could see a dozen different emotions in his eyes and his face. He was repelled and at the same time, fascinated.

  This was such a different world from the one they had run away from last night.

  Remmy turned and began walking again and she and Ángel followed. Remmy seemed to have an uncanny sense of direction. She kept checking the position of the sun to be sure and he never wavered from their north-east direction.

  “There’s a rift and a bluff, about ten miles ahead,” Ángel said softly as time moved on.

  “I am aware of that,” Remmy said. “Once we are on the other side of the arroyo, we can bend east to avoid them both.”

  Other than odd comments like that, none of them spoke. It left Octavia with far too much time to think and she had difficulty thinking of anything except the bonding that was supposed to be building between them. She found she was studying one or the other of them, speculating about them. And their bodies.

  Annoyed, she tried to distract herself with mentally writing a report about how she had been forced to abandon her identity and position inside the Garcia family. The dry phrases couldn’t hold her attention and the whole time she fought with the wording, a part of her was wondering if the DEA would even be a part of her future.

  There were too many unknowns ahead, that was the problem. Just like the open and endless land around them, her future stretched on without many details.

  Then she would realize she was staring at Remmy’s rear as he walked, following the line of his ass under the worn jeans and the long length of his legs.

  And she would be back to cursing at herself for her lack of mental discipline.

  “I’m curious,” Ángel said, changing his pace so he was walking alongside her. “Back in the kitchen, you interrogated both of us about how we felt about this trinity thing. You didn’t like that we didn’t resent it as you did. Is that because…well…you’re….”

  “What Ángel is trying to say with surprisingly delicacy is do you resent this because you’re the one female, between two men.” Remmy didn’t look back.

  Octavia hitched her backpack into a better position. “I hadn’t even thought of that,” she admitted. “It doesn’t bother me.” Quite the opposite, she mentally whispered.

  “What I was trying to say,” Ángel said heavily, “is that I understand why Remmy has no major objections to this—”

  “You do?” Octavia said, surprised. “Remmy, is that true? You don’t mind being bonded for life to two people you don’t know all that well, just because you kinda like both of them?”

  Remmy didn’t look around. “Your version of ‘for life’ is not the same as mine.”

  “And that’s something I didn’t think of,” Ángel muttered. “Even if we both live to a hundred, that’s still only about seventy-five years for you to wait us out. That’s probably nothing to you, right?”

  “I know some vampires who have lived for thousands of years,” Remmy said. “For them, seventy-five years is nothing. For me, it is still an investment in time, for which I have not yet lost my perspective. Why are you even discussing this? The trinity is inevitable.”

  “I want to know why Octavia resents it so,” Ángel said. “I would not take her unwillingly, not after the way my brother treated her.”

  Octavia sighed. “It’s not the same,” she said. “Your brother…no offense, Ángel…he was just the job. It happened to involve sex and not a lot of it. Your brother gets his jollies in other ways.”

  “You’re still unwilling,” Ángel pointed out.

  Not about the sex. She held her teeth together, stopping the words from escaping.

  “Ángel does have a point there,” Remmy said. For the first time he halted and turned back to look at them both. He wasn’t sweating. He didn’t look as though he was exerting himself at all. “It would ease my mind if you’d share the reasons for your resentment. I think I might already know, only confirm it for me and put Ángel out of his misery.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know,” Octavia told him. “No one knows.”

  “You think the FBI doesn’t know why you wanted to join the DEA?” Remmy said, his tone gentle.

  Octavia swallowed. “They told you?”

  “I asked.” Remmy gave her an apologetic smile. “Not until Severo took an interest in you and it became clear that you would have to play a sexual role with him. I wanted to know how strong your commitment was, you see. I wanted to know if you could handle the pressure of having to…perform. Otherwise, I would have gotten you the hell out of Mexico.”

  “Even though I could get real, verifiable information about the cartel? You still would have pulled me out?”

  “If you had one inch less backbone than you do, yes, I would have,” Remmy said flatly. “It was the Garcia cartel we were trying to bring down. They don’t kid around.” He glanced at Ángel. “I’m sorry, Ángel. This must be very surreal for you.”

  Ángel shrugged. “They stopped being my family years ago. I only wish I’d had the escape hatch you could have given Octavia. It would have saved me many years of…well, many years I will never get back.”

  Remmy was back to looking at Octavia. “Your sister, yes?”

  Octavia realized she was playing with the crucifix lying against her chest. “Yes.” Her throat had closed up and she could barely speak the word.

  “Sister?” Ángel said curiously.

  Octavia sighed. “My little sister. We live…we lived in New Mexico and she got in with the wrong people.”

  “Heroin, crystal meth and cocaine, if I remember correctly,” Remmy added.

  Octavia nodded. “Then, when she couldn’t keep up her job, she ran out of money and started running up debts with the gangs for her smack. I only found out about this later. She ran away from home the day she was fired from her job. None of us knew about the drugs. Her disappearance was a complete surprise to us.”

  Ángel was looking at her with sympathy. “Debts to the gangs never turn out well. We set them up so they never end. It’s the first step on a slope into Hell itself.” He resettled the hat with one hand. “If you were working in Mexico then you must have thought she had been brought down here.”

  Octavia sighed. “I joined the DEA and investigated on the side. I found out she had been sold to Alonzo Mingo.”

  Ángel closed his eyes. “Say no more,” he said h
eavily. “I know who he is. I understand now.”

  “Do you?” Octavia asked, genuinely curious. “There’s a reason I agreed to go ahead when your brother took a liking to me. Alonzo was his man and when I had free range of the compound, I was able to find out what happened to her. Alonzo put Mandy in a brothel in Chihuahua. She worked on her back to pay for the drugs, until she died, ten months later. When she died, she was blind from untreated syphilis, only that wasn’t what killed her. Complications from AIDS did.”

  Ángel nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said heavily. “But you have to know, you must know, I spent all my days trying to dismantle what my family had built. I hated it. I hate them. They are the scum of the earth and I am ashamed to call them blood.”

  Octavia had always known that Ángel was different from his family. That didn’t stop the anguish from crimping her heart and making her eyes sting with scalding tears. “You want to know why I resent all this?” She waved her hand toward Remmy and Ángel himself. “This isn’t my war,” she said heavily. “My war is back there, in Chihuahua. I don’t want to be the savior of the human race. I just want to wipe out the sub-species that parade as humans. This, all this, is taking me away from that war.”

  Her chest was heaving and she stopped, breathless.

  Ángel didn’t speak.

  Remmy’s hand rested on her shoulder. “If it is of any comfort at all, Octavia, let me point out that in my two hundred years, I have learned that there is always another monster out there to take care of. I have been dealing with them for all my life. The faces change, the names change, yet the inhumanity never goes away. When we have won against the Grimoré, those you want your vengeance against will still be there.”

  His hand was heavy, yet not hot as Ángel’s fingers had been.

  She looked at him. “Besides, we have no choice, right?”

  Remmy grimaced and his hand dropped away.

  “I have the same problem as Octavia,” Ángel said quietly. “We can talk about this until the sun passes over. We can hammer out details and I can tell you every story my mother ever told me about things that go bump in the night. I understand in my head that you have to be speaking the truth about everything. I heard the tumblers in the safe. In my gut, though, I still don’t believe. You say you’re a vampire, yet you’re walking around in daylight and your teeth look perfectly normal to me. You say there’s this supernatural enemy chasing us, yet there’s nothing behind us for miles, not even my brother.” Ángel shook his head. “I don’t know if I want to believe about the trinity because it gives me what I want, or if it’s the power of the trinity itself talking me into it.”

  “Does it matter?” Remmy asked.

  “About the trinity? According to you, nothing’s going to stop it whether I believe or not.”

  “Your faith, or lack of it, will not halt this,” Remmy said heavily. “They’re coming for us. Surely you must be able to feel that? Or have you been too long an intellectual man?”

  Octavia put the backpack down and shaded her eyes. “Give us a break, Remmy. Twelve hours ago, we thought the worst of our problems was Ángel’s father coming after us with machetes swinging.”

  Ángel glanced at her and nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

  Remmy sighed. “We don’t have time for this.” He thrust out his hand back the way they had come, toward the farmhouse they had left behind. “I buried a man back there who neither of you knew, even though you were both in positions within the organization that would let you at least glance at every face of every man who ever worked for Garcia. That means the man with the rifle was not a member of the cartel. Yet he was clearly there to keep you baled up until someone else arrived to deal with you. Unless you have a stash of enemies I don’t know about, the only other party that would want to delay you at the farmhouse is the Grimoré.”

  Octavia pressed her lips together, holding back her irritation, because even though she resented being spoken to like a newbie in the profession, she couldn’t disagree with Remmy. If she hadn’t been so caught up in the details, she might have seen that for herself.

  “I’m forgetting basics,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” Remmy said flatly. It was Bear’s short, irascible tone. It was the voice he had always used when she was being stupid.

  Ángel was staring down at the ground, frowning heavily. “Octavia, get the gun out,” he said softly.

  “Why?”

  “Do it,” Remmy said shortly.

  She bent and pulled the heavy gun out of the pocket and cocked it. She looked at Ángel. “Now what?”

  “Behind you!” he said, his chin jerking up, his gaze on something over her shoulder.

  “Move to your right,” Remmy said, his voice quiet, yet she heard it with perfect clarity.

  Instead, she turned. It seemed to her that everyone was moving very slowly, including the two creatures that were bounding down the rocky foot of the bluff they were following.

  She saw almost human bodies, moving in animal ways—they were bent over, using their shorter arms to slap upon the ground and pull themselves forward. Their heads were up and their eyes were red and glowing even in the bright sunlight. Their mouths were full of teeth that were narrow and sharp, bent at all sorts of angles that crossed each other. Their faces were pulled into snarling, inhuman grimaces.

  The sound they made as they loped toward the three of them was an awful bass rumbling growl.

  Even though the creatures were moving fast, Octavia still had time to lift the gun and aim it.

  She realized from the way they were changing their lope to a shortened stride that the creatures were going to leap. “Remmy, take the one on the right,” she said, using the same clear, unhurried tone he had.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As the creature on the left leapt off the ground, its hands out to grab her, she took a half-step forward and to the side, to meet it when it was at the apex of the leap and would have no ground beneath it to push off against. She reached with her left hand and the throat slammed into the crux of her thumb and fingers. She absorbed the impact, only mildly surprised her elbow had not bent and given way.

  The creature was still in mid-air, gravity not yet pulling it down. She raised the gun, put it against the thing’s temple and pulled the trigger.

  The creature was slammed sideways by the impact and the force of the shot threw the gun back, too. That was a good thing. She wanted the gun to go there. She had been expecting it to kick that much. Now it was flung out to her right, all she had to do was pivot on her heel.

  She turned, as the second creature that she had left for Remmy was dropping to the ground, Remmy’s hands around its throat. She let the heavy gun follow it down to the rocky ground, the barrel coming to rest almost naturally against the back of its head.

  She pulled the trigger and both the gun and the creature jumped.

  Octavia let the gun raise her arm up into the air, keeping a grip on the butt so it didn’t go flying.

  Suddenly, she could hear everything. She could smell gun smoke and the thick black evil smelling blood pouring from the still creatures. Remmy was breathing hard.

  Ángel edged in between them. “They’re not behind us at all,” he said urgently. “They’re all around us. We’ve walked in among them.”

  “They are spreading across the land like shadows on a cloudy day,” Remmy said. “There is nowhere we can go where they are not already gathered. We just have to find a way through them, that is all.”

  He pushed at the creature at his feet with his boot. “Do you still not believe?” he asked them.

  “I don’t believe how fast Octavia moved,” Ángel said, looking at her. “That wasn’t natural.”

  “No, indeed,” Remmy said quietly.

  Octavia held the gun out to Ángel, her hand shaking. “Take it,” she said quickly.

  When he took it, she moved three steps away, bent over and vomited. They could see her clearly. There was nowhere on this blasted, open landsca
pe where she could be in private.

  Each time she thought she had finished, her stomach would roil again and more would come up. She couldn’t get the sight of the crooked teeth out of her head. She couldn’t stop hearing the sound they had made. Even now, she could smell the foul stench of them and that made her stomach clamp, too.

  Remmy helped her stand up straight when she was finally done. He used the corner of his shirt to wipe her forehead and all she could focus on was the pale, flat plain of his stomach that was revealed by the half-open shirt. Her hands twitched to stroke the flesh. Even now, in this desperate moment, the bonding was playing with her.

  “A crying woman does all sorts of things to my innards, my darling beauty,” Remmy said gently and blotted her cheeks. “It’s done now,” he added, “and we must be away from here.”

  Ángel took her arm. It was a soft grip, meant to comfort, not lead. “Let’s get away from the stink,” he said. “You’ll feel better then.”

  Octavia sniffed and nodded. “Yes. God, yes. Anywhere away from here.” She glanced at the bodies once more and stumbled away from them.

  “If I remember this area properly, there’s a cave in the base of that bluff, at the end of a short crevasse,” Remmy said, pointing ahead at a shadow on the face of the bluff. “The rattlers like it, which keeps humans away. We can clear them out easily enough and be safe until sunset.”

  “How often have you been here?” Ángel asked. “Because you’re right, there is a cave up there.”

  “I was here in 1884,” Remmy said. “When the border was being formalized.”

  Octavia stared at him. He remembered even after a century had passed?

  Remmy gave them a self-conscious smile. “We do not forget anything.” Then his smile faded. “Alas…” he added.

  Chapter Six

  After the vampeen attack, Octavia no longer wondered if any of the supernatural stuff was really true. She had been handed her proof in a physical and irrefutable way. Oddly, that made it easier to adjust to the new and crazy tilt to the world she was now in. The vampeen were real and they were killable. That meant everything else was real. If it was real, then it would have rules and natural laws, even if she didn’t know what those rules and laws were, yet. She would be able to learn them and that would make everything understandable, like why Remmy could move about in daylight.