This Side of the Grave (Page 48)

That’s right, no worry of a forest fire with Vlad around. My own control over fire had been far less during the brief time I’d borrowed the ability from him.

My hip vibrated. I jumped, tense from the circumstances, before realizing that it was just my cell phone. I pulled it out, seeing Bones’s number, and grimaced as I hit ignore again. Much as I wanted to talk to him, chatting or texting during a fiery interrogation was just not appropriate.

"As your numbers dwindle, so does my patience," Vlad said in a chillingly genial tone.

"Still not going to tell me what I want to know? Eeny, meeny, miny . . ." At "moe," the ghoul Vlad pointed at exploded like a firecracker, pelting flaming bits of things I didn’t even want to identify over the two ghouls on either side of him. It took all my willpower not to look away. Gross didn’t even begin to cover what that looked like. Instead of doing something completely girly, like saying, "Ewwww," I concentrated on what I’d overhead the ghouls talking about, and on how many lives would be destroyed if Apollyon’s plans were allowed to move forth.

"You’ll kill us anyway, no matter if we tell you what you want to know," a ghoul with scars on his neck finally said. The other ghoul, who looked to be in his teens, still flapped his mouth in that strange way, like he was miming a fish out of water. What’s the deal with that? I wondered.

Vlad shrugged. "If your information proves to be useful, after a period of time, I’ll let you go. Before that, you’ll be my captive, but you’ll be alive, which is more than your friends can say," he finished with a tip of his head toward the other corpses.

The ghoul grunted. "Why should I believe you’ll really let me live?" Vlad became very still, but his eyes blazed with a dangerous light. "Call me a liar one more time," he said, each word dripping with challenge.

Even though I wasn’t the one being threatened, a shiver still passed through me. This was one of the times I was glad I was on Vlad’s good side.

The younger ghoul flapped his lips again, mouth opening and closing even more frantically. I gave him an irritated look. Nobody liked a drama queen in the middle of an interrogation. But then my eyes narrowed, and I had him by the shirt before Vlad could speak.

"Open your mouth again," I said, because he’d shut it in what might have been surprise once I grabbed him.

"Don’t do it," the scarred ghoul ordered.

I snapped out a sideways kick, breaking his knee without once taking my eyes off the ghoul I held. Slowly, with a gaze that I now recognized as pleading, the ghoul opened his mouth.

Wide.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," I breathed.

Chapter Twenty-four

I kept staring into the ghoul’s mouth. Only a scarred lump of tissue remained where his tongue should have been. This mutilation couldn’t have happened after he was undead. Anything cut off him after that would grow back, same as with vampires. The scar tissue proved his lack of a tongue wasn’t a congenital condition, either. So someone had cut it off, then turned him into a ghoul shortly thereafter, judging from the permanently raw look to the scar. If it had been healed for a while before he’d become undead, the area would have been much smoother.

And I didn’t know many people who’d willingly consent to such a thing. Especially someone as young as this boy had been when all this happened.

But just to be sure . . .

I spun around, grabbing the other ghoul and shoving my knife into his mouth to hold it open.

"Did you have anything to do with that?" I asked, digging the blade in. "Lie to me, and I swear to God I’ll make Vlad puke with what I do to you."

"I didn’t do that to him," the ghoul said quickly. His gaze flicked behind me. "I’m not lying. He was like that when he was put in our group."

"And who put him there?" I asked, digging the knife in until it must have been grazing his sinuses, but I didn’t care. Mutilation. Forced changing of a teenager. He might not have done it, but he’d been a part of it.

"You know who," the ghoul rasped.

I didn’t blink. "Say the name. Convince me that I should believe you." My cell vibrated against my hip again, but I ignored it, not wanting to divert even an ounce of my attention away from the ghoul in front of me.

"Apollyon." The word was almost sighed. "He has several people like Dermot in his line.

He takes kids who are young, not too bright, then mutes them and changes them. They make good muscle. Got nowhere else to go, can’t talk, can’t write real well, so we know they can’t betray us."

I thought I’d been furious before, but that didn’t compare to the rage filling me now. My hands trembled, the knife digging even higher into the ghoul’s head. He screamed as much as he could with the blade in the way.

"Cat." Vlad’s voice was low but resonant. "Stop. We need him alive." I knew the wisdom in that. Knew that if I killed the ghoul, we wouldn’t find out if he knew where Apollyon was, and that was vitally important information. But my mind felt frozen with the urge to destroy anyone who’d been a part of such a horrible practice, and my knife kept on its upward path into the ghoul’s skull. Dermot couldn’t have been more than seventeen when he was tortured, killed, and then forced into this existence. The ghoul in front of me knew that.

Allowed it to continue. He had to pay.

"Cat! "

My hand trembled again . . . and then I yanked the knife out, twisting it in the process, savoring the scream the ghoul made. I moved away from him, taking in a deep, long breath to remind myself that I’d made the right decision. Information was more important than revenge. I chanted it in my mind like a litany until I began to feel stable.

"Aren’t you supposed to be burning him to get more details?" I asked Vlad, my voice almost normal despite the anger still swelling in me.

Vlad gave me an unfathomable look, the faintest smile hovering on his lips. "If you live long enough, Reaper, one day you might scare even me."

"Girl’s gotta have goals," I replied shortly. "And he’s still not spilling where Apollyon is."

"No, he’s not, is he?" Then Vlad made a series of odd motions with his hands, but no fire emanated from them.

"Are you having performance issues?" I asked in surprise.

"Bite your tongue," Vlad said, with a snort. "I was seeing if Dermot understood sign language, but from the look on his face, it seems not." I glanced at the young ghoul, who’d been watching Vlad’s hands with a sort of morbid fascination. He picks kids who are young, not too bright . . . the other ghoul had said about Apollyon. Did Dermot know that there was an entire language he could learn that required no verbal or written words? How trapped he must feel, forced into this life, and denied any real means to even communicate.