This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress, #5)(60)

Two of them spat curses, the nastiest from the ghoul wearing the fang trophies. I didn’t give Vlad a chance to act, but swiped my blade through the ghoul’s throat before he could say anything else. Now he had two necklaces; one made of fangs, the other made of the last blood he’d ever shed.

The other ghoul who’d cursed me burst into flames that burned so fiercely, his screams were cut off in seconds. I glanced toward the cinema, hoping none of the moviegoers would decide to check out the sudden blaze of fire, if they saw it. But before I could drop my mental shields to better pick up on any “what’s that light over there?” thoughts, the flames on the ghoul vanished, leaving only smoke curling up over his remains.

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.”