Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast by Immortal_Love Stories, a Bite Page B

been in his thirties when he’d kicked it, and he’d been a big, mean, tough dude even the other big, mean, tough dudes had given a wide berth. He’d died in a bar fight,
I’d heard. Knifed from behind. He’d have snapped the neck off of anybody who’d tried it to his face.
    â€œBig Tom? Yeah, he’d do.” Dad nodded thoughtfully. “All right, then. We’re bringing him back.”
    The last person on Earth I’d want to bring back from the grave would be Big Tommy Barnes. He’d been crazy-badass alive. I could only imagine death wouldn’t have improved his temper.
    But I nodded. “Show me.”
    Dad took off his leather jacket, and then stripped off his shirt. In contrast to the sun-weathered skin of his arms, face, and neck, his chest was fish-belly white, and it was covered with tattoos. I remembered some of them, but not all the ink was old.
    He’d recently had our family portrait tattooed over his heart.
    I forgot to breathe for a second, staring at it. Yeah, it was crude, but those were the lines of Mom’s face, and Alyssa’s. I didn’t realize, until I saw them, that I’d nearly forgotten how they looked.
    Dad looked down at the tat. “I needed to remind myself,” he said.
    My throat was so dry that it clicked when I swallowed. “Yeah.” My own face was there, frozen in indigo blue at the age of maybe sixteen. I looked thinner, and even in tattoo form I looked more hopeful. More sure.
    Dad held out his right arm, and I realized that there was more new ink.
    And this stuff was moving.

    I took a step back. There were dense, strange symbols on his arm, all in standard tattoo ink, but there was nothing standard about what the tats were doing—namely, they were revolving slowly like a DNA helix up and down the axis of his arm, under the skin. “ Christ, Dad—”
    â€œHad it done in Mexico,” he said. “There was an old priest there, he knew things from the Aztecs. They had a way to bring back the dead, so long as they hadn’t been gone for more than two years, and were in decent condition otherwise. They used them as ceremonial warriors.” Dad flexed his arm, and the tattoos flexed with him. “This is part of what does it.”
    I felt sick and cold now. This had moved way past what I knew. I wished wildly that I could show this to Claire; she’d probably be fascinated, full of theories and research.
    She’d know what to do about it.
    I swallowed hard and said, “And the other part?”
    â€œThat’s where you come in,” Dad said. He pulled his T-shirt on again, hiding the portrait of our family, “I need you to prove you’re up for this, Shane. Can you do that?”
    I gulped air and finally, convulsively nodded. Play for time, I was telling myself. Play for time, think of something you can do. Short of chopping off my own father’s arm, though. . . .
    â€œThis way,” Dad said. He went to the back of the room. There was a door there, and he’d added a new, sturdy lock to it that he opened with a key from his jacket.
    Jerome gave me that creepy laugh again, and I felt my skin shiver into gooseflesh.

    â€œRight. This might be a shock,” Dad said. “But trust me, it’s for a good cause.”
    He swung open the door and flipped on a harsh overhead light.
    It was a windowless cell, and inside, chained to the floor with thick silver-plated links, was a vampire.
    Not just any vampire. Oh no, that would have been too easy for my father.
    It was Michael Glass, my best friend.
    Michael looked—white. Paler than pale. I’d never seen him look like that. There were burns on his arms, big raised welts where the silver was touching, and there were cuts. He was leaking slow trickles of blood on the floor.
    His eyes were usually blue, but now they were red, bright red. Scary monster red, like nothing human.
    But it was still my best