Death Masks

I cleared my throat. "Um. No, you don’t get it. You can’t. Cannot. Literally."

"What?"

"The defenses I put up have two sides and they don’t have an off switch. We literally, physically can’t leave until they go down."

Susan looked up at me and then folded her arms, staring at her Coke can. "Crud," she said. "How long?"

I shook my head. "I built them to run for about eight hours. Sunrise is going to degrade it a little though. Maybe four hours, five at the most."

"Five hours," she said under her breath. "Oh, God."

"What’s wrong?"

She waved a hand vaguely. "I’ve been – been using some of the power. To be faster. Stronger. If I’m calm, it doesn’t get stirred up. But I haven’t been calm. It’s built up inside of me. Water on a dam. It wants to break free, to get loose."

I licked my lips. If Susan lost control of herself, there was no place to run. "What can I do to help?"

She shook her head, refusing to look up at me. "I don’t know. Let me have some quiet. Try to relax." Something cold and hungry flickered in her eyes. "Get your leg cleaned up. I can smell it. It’s – distracting."

"See if you can build the fire," I said, and slipped into my room, closing the door behind me. I went into the bathroom and closed that door too. My first-aid kit had its own spot on one of the shelves. I downed a couple of Tylenol, slipped out of the remains of my rented tux, and cleaned up the cut on my leg. It was a shallow cut, but a good four inches long, and it had bled messily. I used disinfectant soap with cold water to wash it out, then slathered it in an antibacterial gel before laying several plastic bandages over the injury, to hold it closed. It didn’t hurt. Or at least I didn’t pick it out from the background of aches and pains my body was telling me about.

Shivering again, I climbed into some sweats, a T-shirt, and a flannel bathrobe. I looked around in my closet, at a couple of the other things I’d made for a rainy day. I took one of the potions I’d brewed, the ones to counter the venom of the Red Court, and put it in my pocket. I missed my shield bracelet.

I opened the door to the living room and Susan was standing six inches away, her eyes black with no white to them, the designs on her skin flushed a dark maroon.

"I can still smell your blood," she whispered. "I think you need to find a way to hold me back, Harry. And you need to do it now."

Chapter Twenty-five

I didn’t have much left in me in the way of magic. I wouldn’t until I got a chance to rest and recuperate from what Nicodemus had done to me. I might have been able to manage a spell that would hold a normal person, but not a hungry vampire. And that was what Susan was. She’d gained strength in more senses than the merely physical, and that never happened without granting a certain amount of magical defense, even if in nothing but the naked will to fight. Snakeboy’s serpent-cloud had been one of the nastier spells I’d seen, and it had only slowed Susan down.

If she came at me, and it looked like she might, I wouldn’t be able to stop her.

My motto, after the past couple of years, was to be prepared. I had something that I knew could restrain her-assuming I could get past her and to the drawer where I kept it.

"Susan," I said quietly. "Susan, I need you to stay with me. Talk to me."

"Don’t want to talk," she said. Her eyelids lowered and she inhaled slowly. "I don’t want it to smell so good. Your blood. Your fear. But it does."

"The Fellowship," I said. I struggled to rein in my emotions. For her sake, I couldn’t afford to feel afraid. I edged a little toward her. "Let’s sit down. You can tell me about the Fellowship."

For a second, I thought she wouldn’t give way, but she did. "Fellowship," she said. "The Fellowship of Saint Giles."

"Saint Giles," I said. "The patron of lepers."

"And other outcasts. Like me. They’re all like me."

"You mean infected?"

"Infected. Half-turned. Half-human. Half-dead. There are a lot of ways to say it."

"Uh- huh," I said. "So what’s their deal?"

"The Fellowship tries to help people the Red Court has harmed. Work against the Red Court. Expose them whenever they can."

"Find a cure?"

"There is no cure."

I put my hand on her arm and guided her toward my couch. She moved with a dreamy deliberation. "So the tattoos are what? Your membership card?"

"A binding," she said. "A spell cut into my skin. To help me hold the darkness inside. To warn me when it is rising."

"What do you mean, warn you?"

She looked down at her design-covered hand, then showed it to me. The tattoos there and on her face were slowly growing brighter, and had turned a shade of medium scarlet. "To warn me when I’m about to lose control. Red, red, red. Danger, danger, danger."

The first night she’d arrived, when she’d been tussling with something outside, she’d stayed in the shadows for the first several moments inside, her face turned away. She’d been hiding the tattoos. "Here," I said quietly. "Sit down."

She sat on the couch and met my eyes. "Harry," she whispered. "It hurts. It hurts to fight it. I’m tired of holding on. I don’t know how long I can."

I knelt down to be on eye level with her. "Do you trust me?"

"With my heart. With my life."

"Close your eyes," I said.

She did.

I got up and walked slowly to the kitchen drawer. I didn’t move quickly. You don’t move quickly away from something that is thinking about making you food. It sets them off. Whatever had been placed inside her was growing-I could feel that, see it, hear it in her voice.

I was in danger. But it didn’t matter, because so was she.

I usually keep a gun in the kitchen drawer. At the time, I had a gun and a short length of silver-and-white rope in there. I picked up the rope and walked back over to her.

"Susan," I said quietly. "Give me your hands."

She opened her eyes and looked at the soft, fine rope. "That won’t hold me."

"I made it in case an ogre I pissed off came visiting. Give me your hands."

She was silent for a moment. Then she shrugged out of her jacket, and held her hands out, wrists up.

I tossed the rope at her and whispered, "Manacus."

I’d enchanted the rope six months before, but I’d done it right. It took barely a whisper of power to set the rope into motion. It whipped into the air, silver threads flashing, and bound itself around her wrists in neat loops.