Free The Damned by Nancy Holder, Debbie Viguié

interrupted herself. “What is it?” she asked. She listened.
    Jamie caught his breath and took stock of his weapons, just to be ready. Wished he had a bazooka. Thought about the lovely gun he was building, a sleek darlin’ that would shoot silver bullets. He’d been working on it for a while. He came from a long line of gunsmiths. A fella couldn’t let knowledge like that go to waste. Next up, one that shot wooden bullets.
    “We’re on our way back now,” Eriko said into the phone. “The resistance cell was dead when we got there. Aurora. She left a note. She wants Antonio, or she will convert us all.”
    Jamie counted the plastic vials of holy water in the pocket of his parachute pants. Six. Tested the sharpness of a stake on his thumb tip.
    She listened. “Hai. Hai.”
    “What’s going on?” Jamie asked after she had hung up.
    “Father Juan wants to see the note. And he is planning to send us to Moscow.”
    “Fine with me,” he said, “as long as we can get something done.” He tested another stake. “Kill something, I mean.”
    In the window he pictured Sofia’s sweet little face and then Maeve’s. What the hell, what did it matter where they went? No place was safe.
    As long as there were vampires and werewolves.
    B ELFAST, S IX Y EARS E ARLIER
J AMIE AND H IS G RANDFATHER
    The three coffins were plain and rough, like the man and the boy who respectfully tossed earth onto the lids, caps in hand. Standing beside his grandfather, Jamie, who was ten, knew that men didn’t cry.
    They got revenge.
    Through his unshed tears Jamie kept Father Patrick in his sights. He clenched his jaw so tightly that one of his molars cracked. The pain made him shudder from head to foot, but he was glad of it. He spat blood out on the turned earth, earning a smack on top of his head from his grandfather. Spitting on hallowed ground was not permitted. As if allowing werewolves and vampires to murder your family was.
    Maeve. His ma. His da. His family were dead, and he was just standing there. Jamie was so ashamed. And so angry.
    During the wake, while his grandfather got good and drunk, Jamie went down to the cellar where they kept the guns they ran for the Irish Republican Army. Various wooden boxes labeled POTATOES and O ’ LEARY GUNSMITHS were pushed up against the walls. Maybe it was too obvious that the O’Learys, makers of fine firearms for three generations, were the ones who stowed the illegal weapons of their local IRA cell. But they’d served the cause of freedom from English rule since Jamie’s grandfather had been a tot, and never a one been caught at it.
    Sure and the English had sworn to the peace in 1998, but never in their long and bloody history had the English given the Irish any reason to trust them. It was violence that had freed Northern Ireland—brawls, bombings, and shootings—and them that said any different were English sympathizers and cowards. Now there were vampires and werewolves to fight, and no decent weapons against them.
    Jamie took a crowbar to one of the large wooden boxes and opened it. The potatoes were still coated with earth; he gathered up an armful and dropped them onto the basement floor, wincing at the thudding sounds they made, so reminiscent of the dirt clods falling against the coffin lids of his ma and his little sister as the undertakers began their work.
    Jamie scowled at the first piece of the cache, a submachine gun. Too impersonal, and therefore not right for the job; he needed the proper handgun to deliver three shots, execution-style—two in the eyes, one in the forehead—and he needed a silencer. A bit more digging and he had his weapon—unlicensed military issue, could be used with a silencer.
    “That won’t serve, Jamie,” said a voice from behind him. It was his grandfather, eyes rimmed with red. His wispy gray hair was matted with sweat.
    “I’m killing him, Poppy,” Jamie insisted. “Father Patrick stood by and watched while they, they—”
    His