“Yes, it’s the ghouls. Their rhetoric is growing bolder. In certain areas, Masterless vampires have begun to disappear. It could be they’re stupid and got shriveled by one of our own kind, but there’s reason to believe it might be something more.”
I stared at him. Spade’s tiger-colored gaze was uncompromising. Gregor is behind this, I realized. The more paranoia about me becoming a vampire/ghoul hybrid, the more support he garnered for his cause to get me back so he could control me.
“Why wasn’t I told?”
Spade rolled his eyes. “Can’t you guess? Crispin doesn’t want this to influence your decision whether to turn into a vampire.”
“He doesn’t care about me,” I muttered before I could stop myself.
“You’re an idiot.”
I could feel my eyes turning angry green. “Excuse me?”
“Idiot,” Spade repeated, drawing the word out for emphasis. “Why do you think he fetched you from Vlad’s? Crispin knew if it came to a choice between you or Vlad’s people, you’d lose. Tepesh might be fond of you, but he’s beastly protective of his people.”
I had to glance away for a moment. Then I shook my head. “If Bones cared about me, fucking his way up and down New Orleans was a funny way to show it.”
Spade regarded me with cynicism. “If you thought Crispin was yours, and you didn’t care for his actions, why weren’t you waiting for him after New Orleans instead of jetting off with Tepesh?”
My jaw dropped. “Do you hear yourself?”
“You’re not thinking like a vampire,” Spade muttered. “The sooner you’re done with your human perceptions, the better. Look, can we discuss your reasoning inadequacies later? If I have to smell this rancid air a moment longer, I’ll dry heave.”
“Inadequacies? Screw you!”
Spade gave me an arch smile. “You should be less concerned with what I’m saying and more focused on what you’ll say to Crispin when you try to convince him to change you into a vampire.”
That made my heart skip a beat. Spade heard it and snorted. “Got your attention now, don’t I? Crispin’s the one who has to do it. I certainly wouldn’t dare. He’d kill anyone who changed you, make no mistake.”
“How do you know I’ve decided to cross over, anyway?”
The sarcasm and flippancy were wiped from Spade, and he gave me the most serious look he’d bestowed on me.
“Come now, Reaper. We both know you’ve been hanging on to your humanity too long. You just needed a push, didn’t you?”
So many different things ran through my mind. I remembered all the years of my childhood, hiding my growing inhuman abilities so I didn’t upset my mother. Later in school, how out of place I’d felt pretending to be “normal” when nothing about me was normal. And later still, in my teens and early twenties hunting vampires, hadn’t my humanity been more of a disguise than how I felt inside? Then there was now, how frustrated I was that I was too weak to take Gregor on myself. With no element of surprise about my dual nature, I’d always be too weak to battle the really old, mega-Master vampires—as long as I stayed part human, that was.
But more than that, even if Bones and I were through, the situation with Gregor magically disappeared, and there were no ghoul rumblings, could I ever go back to living among humans, pretending to be just like them?
No. I couldn’t pretend anymore that all the things inside me weren’t there. Even if I walked away from the undead world for good, I’d still be more vampire than human. And if I wasn’t going to walk away or try to pretend to be human again, then why was I still hanging on to my heartbeat? God, was Bones right? Had it really been just my deep-seated prejudice that held me back from taking this step before? There were a lot of reasons to change over. Did I have even one to stay the way I was?
“I’ll ask Bones to do it,” I heard myself say. “But he’ll probably say no.”
Spade didn’t have headphones to keep me from hearing where we were going. No, instead he whacked me a good one to make sure I stayed asleep for the majority of the trip. Spade was a Master vampire, so when I came to, damn, my head hurt.
“You should shower straightaway before you see him,” was Spade’s comment once I was awake. “You still smell dreadful. Crispin might refuse to sire you just because he won’t be able to stand getting close enough.”
I mentally cursed Spade up one side and down the other. Something cool brushed over my hand. Without opening my eyes, I knew it was Fabian, giving me his version of a sympathetic pat. He’d tagged along on this trip. Guess even a ghost couldn’t stand life at Trash Castle. At least Fabian never commented on my smell, one of the perks of not having a real nose.