Bitten to Death

“Yes!” Vayl pressed his forefingers onto the word and pushed. It sank into the surrounding metal. Moments later, with the whispering whoosh I associated with hydraulics, the mirrored section, along with the geniuses Eryx had idolized, swung inward.

We grinned at each other in delight. Vayl felt inside and found a light switch. When he flipped it we saw a hallway covered with a mural the artist had called The Daemon Wars. The setting looked fairly recent. Times Square full of cars I dated to the fifties. Humans carried on with their business, oblivious to the vampires and hell spawn battling in alleyways, sewers, and on rooftops, just out of their sight.

“Were you around for this?” I asked, shoving a thumb at the painting.

“Of course.”

“How come I’ve never heard of it?”

He darted a glance at me that looked almost—amused. “Our department was only involved peripherally. And other than us, the government stayed out completely.”

I stared at the painting another minute. One of the fighters had caught my eye. A woman with honey-colored hair pulled back into a braid. I could only see her profile, but it looked oddly familiar. I shook my head. Couldn’t be. Evie’s twenty-four, for God’s sake.

I pulled Grief and nodded as Vayl led me into a red-painted, gold-carpeted room full of open shelves, glass cases, and carefully arranged displays.

“This must be the Preserve,” he said.

“Wow” was my brilliant reply. Vayl had said Hamon was a math professor, but given how the items we passed were posed, lit, and grouped, it looked to me like his secret passion had been museum curation.

Enormous statues of long-nosed faces stood on their own waist-high pedestals. Original paintings, all depicting scenes of war or martyrdom, filled the walls. Skeletons of dinosaurs posed as if in full chase of the recomposed bones of their mammalian prey. Two gigantic round tablets containing ancient writings stood on their ends, propped by intricately detailed Ionic columns. They filled one entire end of the room.

“Don’t these people ever throw anything away?” I asked.

“Why would they? This is the stuff of legend!” Vayl fingered a full-scale costume made of dried yellow grasses that reminded me of Dorothy’s Scarecrow minus the suit that made him charming. The mask that topped it looked like the contraptions people wear after they’ve broken their necks, except colorful tufted feathers stuck out of the band that ran around the forehead. To one side of it stood a six-foot-long spear draped in hemp-braided beads.

We explored the whole area, discovering priceless relics neither of us had ever seen before and antiques my grandparents’ folks would’ve used when they were kids. We knew we’d found Eryx’s prize possession when we reached the center of the exhibit. Sitting on a velvet-covered dais was a mask the size of a pro basketball player. When worn it would cover the entire body, front and back, except for maybe the ankles. The carved wood shone as if it were polished daily. And a wreath of silk laurel leaves circled the forehead.

Though some of the other masks we’d seen in the Preserve had worn the faces of animals and fiends, this one clearly symbolized a human. It looked like a Master’s hand had done the carving of lips, nose, ears, cheeks, and forehead. The most amazing parts of the whole piece were the eyes, painted so artfully that they looked real, and you had to look hard to see where the empty space had been left in the pupils for the wearer to see through.

Vayl said, “I do not care for the whiskers. It detracts from the artistry of the rest of the piece.”

It did seem odd that the crafter had carved lines that radiated out from the face to the edges of the mask. “It’s probably some magically symbolic thing like those words at the bottom,” I guessed. I’d been taking pictures with my Monise all along. Now I got a close-up of the phrase, which wasn’t in a language either one of us recognized.

“Do you suppose this is symbolic?” he asked, pointing to a small door that had been built into the front of it, about a foot below the face. It was square, with a round, black knob. As soon as he touched the door, an image appeared to the left of the dais. It was a vampire wearing a brown suit with a ruffled white shirt underneath. He’d clasped his hands in front of his hips to speak, making it easy for me to recognize the ring on his pinky finger. The same one I’d seen on the dangling corpse in Blas’s room.

“It’s Hamon, isn’t it?” I asked as Vayl stepped back from the hologram.

“Yes.”

For a few seconds we watched the former Deyrar stare thoughtfully over our heads. Finally he spoke. “I will not welcome you,” he said, in a voice I found hauntingly familiar. “Not yet at least. By solving the puzzle of my death-spell and the riddle of unlocking the Preserve’s doors, you have proved yourself clever. But that does not necessarily make you a fitting Deyrar, dearling. Especially if you are the one who killed me, since my sudden demise is the only way this recording could be activated.”

He swallowed several times, struggling with emotions he didn’t care to share. “I have given everything to assure the continuance of this Trust. You could have had all my secrets willingly if you had just waited until I was prepared to step down. But now—no, I will not reveal it all. Only this. If I am gone, my mate, Octavia, will follow me quite soon. We ruled over the Trust together, partners, as has been the case for Deyrars since the first pair powered this Trust. If you wish to keep this community alive, you must also find a partner. Ideally a mate. Give her to the mask. Let Octavia decide if your choice is appropriate. But do it quickly. If Octavia dies without initiating a renewal within the mask, the Trust will die with her.”

Hamon’s image flickered and faded away.

“Dearling! That’s where I’ve heard that word before!” I exclaimed. When Vayl sent me a startled look, I said, “Every time we’re in a room full of blood this face appears to me. The first time it showed up, it said ‘dearling.’ I think it’s Hamon, or what’s left of him, still hanging around trying to save the Trust.”

Vayl shook his head. “He was certainly devoted.”

“I guess you could use that word. I’d go for something a little more extreme myself. Like obsessed. Or, oh, I don’t know . . . bonkers?”

Vayl ignored me as he regarded the mask with even more interest than he’d shown it before. “What do you