Zombie’s Bite
Prologue
It
came in the middle of dinner. An impossibly long, impossibly hot,
impossibly mosquito-filled dinner on a terrace overlooking what a
tourist brochure would call a vista and Kit Marlowe called a swamp. The
once starched collar on his dress shirt had gone limp and was sticking
to his skin along with the curls at the back of his neck, and that was
despite the fact that vampires don’t sweat.
Or,
rather, they usually didn’t. But everything sweated here. Even the
diaphanous curtains around the French doors were hanging sad and
dispirited, and the quiet murmur of conversation was broken by forlorn
little drips from the rapidly melting ice sculpture in the middle of
the table. It was a cherub, which should have been ironic considering
that he was in hell, but was
surprisingly apt since what looked like tears were streaming down its
fat little cheeks to splash in the drip pan below.
Kit slapped another of the flying vermin and grimaced.
What genius had decided that al fresco dining made sense here?
Under a sea of swaying lanterns, which might as well have been runway
lights guiding the greedy bloodsuckers straight to their own dinner --
of his flesh. He hoped vampire blood gave them a sour stomach. He hoped
it poisoned the lot of them. He hoped they’d rise after three days
under his command, because he had a target in mind, oh yes, he did.
The
target in question was visible through the sculpture, the dark eyes,
perfect profile and wine reddened lips distorted by the ice into a
ferocious scowl that, Kit reflected grimly, probably provided a truer
glimpse of the creature than the usual flawless façade. Since his own
were likely equally as distorted, Kit allowed himself the luxury of
scowling back.
Mircea, the suave bastard, was having a good night. He had somehow
managed to turn a disaster of a meeting between the mad-as-a-hatter
Latin American consul, ostensible leader of all vampires south of the
border, and their own had-it-up-to-here-and-then-some lady, into
something almost . . . . Well, pleasant was hardly the word considering
the venue, but at least nobody had died.
Again.
Yet.
But
how long that would hold true was anyone’s guess. Alejandro, the
useless twit of a consul, was losing his grip on his senate, although
he was too far gone to know it. That had suited Kit, since the last
thing the North American Senate needed was an aggressive, expansionist
neighbor. Alejandro was an idiot, but he was a predictable idiot,
making him manageable.
Until recently, that is, when the master vampires who populated his
court had started running amuck with what amounted to zero supervision.
And soon thereafter had also run here, and not for the gumbo. Louisiana
had become a hot bed of illegal paranormal activity, none of which
followed the North American Senate’s laws or even seemed to realize
that they existed.
And
the usual threats didn’t work. Not when Alejandro’s masters knew that
their not-so-beloved consul was ultimately going to be held responsible
for their actions, and didn’t care if they lost him, would probably
prefer it at this point, if half the things Kit had heard were true.
And they were, he’d had his
best people on this for over a year. No, Alejandro wasn’t the problem;
he was just the figurehead his court kept around to take the fall if
anything went wrong. Someone else was the driving force behind this
farce, this virtual invasion, and God, the thought of those bastards trying their usual tactics in his territory just --
Damn it, he’d bent his fork.
He
slowly put it down. He couldn’t taste dinner anyway, not tonight, not
without knowing who. Who he
was after, who was the target he’d been chasing for so long, whose head
they had to cut off before anything was going to change. But they
couldn’t decapitate a shadow, and Kit didn’t have a name, after almost
a year he still didn’t, and it galled
him. Even more so with his lady’s eyes on him, sloe dark and assessing,
waiting for him to point out the culprit from the assembled villains
when that was the problem -- they all bloody were!
His
eyes swept the rogue’s gallery around the table once again, only to be
interrupted by a picture of his own scowling face that flashed before
his vision.
Thank you, Mircea, he
thought viciously, but schooled his features into a slightly more
benign expression. Or maybe not. Another image flashed, this time of
him looking cross-eyed and constipated. He sent back an image of his
extended middle finger, which stopped the flow of visual rebukes, but
was exactly no help otherwise.
Bugger it all! The smooth son of a bitch was looking cool and calm and
decidedly not bug-bit as he laughed convincingly at some comment by
that idiot Alejandro, who thought he was a wit. And he was, if you put
a “nit” in front of it, Kit thought, as the wine steward stopped by his
elbow.
“Make it a double,” he told the man, who hadn’t been bringing him wine.
Not that it had helped.
God,
the things he had on that vampire. God, how it galled him to sit here,
simpering and smiling -- or watching others do so -- and paying court
to an addlepated blight providence should have removed from the earth
centuries ago. God, the things he’d like to --
Careful,
Mircea’s warning murmur was enough to let him know that he had started
to project. Not that it mattered. Not with the level of incompetence in
this --
He
felt the scream rather than heard it, a soul-level reverberation that
caused him to knock the glass the steward had just filled out of his
hand. He saw it bounce on the table as if in slow motion, hitting the
pristine white cloth and rolling off the side, crashing to the floor
like a cymbal to underscore the voice in his head. The one crying out a
single word: “Master.”
Chapter One
“Is
it always this hard to find a room in New Orleans?” Dory asked, as the
owner of the crappy little motel fumbled with his keys.
“Nawlins,” he told her, glancing over a beefy shoulder. And taking a
moment to smile appreciatively at the tank top sweat had molded to her
torso and the short cap of brown hair sticking to her skull.
Dory frowned. “What?”
“You’re down south, little lady. Got to pronounce it right. Like the
French with Paree, you know?”
“Okay, so is it always this hard to find a room in Nawlins?”
“Nah,” he rattled the door, which appeared to be about as sturdy as the
rest of this place, which meant that Dory was amazed it hadn’t fallen
in on its own. “It’s Jazz Fest. Ain’t as bad as Mardi Gras, but it’s
close. Used to be just a local thing, but they keep on advertisin’, and
every year it gets bigger. We were sold out the whole week ‘till a guy
did a no show. ‘Course, he could still turn up later, but don’t you
worry, darlin’. I got your back.”
Literally, Dory thought, as a meaty hand found the back of her jeans.
Dory
indulged herself with a brief image of ripping it off and beating him
with it. It had been that kind of day. But it would be a bitch finding
another room.
“So,
uh . . . so are you in town for the music?” the guy asked, looking
vaguely concerned when his bicep was pinched, causing the hand to
magically spring away from its resting place.
“No.”
“Oh.
Uh, okay then,” he said, renewing his efforts to find the right key. A
few fumbling moments later he managed it, causing the door to swing
open with an audible groan. “Here, I’ll just help you with --”
He
stopped abruptly, having just discovered that the large duffle bag
she’d sat down while he fiddled did not move when he pulled on it. Or
when he yanked. Or when he put both hands on it and heaved.
“Good God, girl, what you got in there? A body?”
Dory
swung the pack up onto her shoulder and slipped past him. “Not yet.”
She kicked the door shut.
And
scowled, because the action had stirred up the air. The room smelled
like mildew, stale microwave popcorn, cigarettes and sex. She tossed
her gear onto the bed, sending up evidence that the comforter hadn’t
been washed since possibly the 80’s, and threw open a window. And just
as quickly regretted it.
Bayou is not an attractive smell. Bayou smells like somebody’s old
socks wrapped around a dead skunk, at least this one did, and the wind
was blowing this way. After a second, she decided on the popcorn and
cigarettes, since the screen over the window was torn and the tiny
winged vampires that abounded down here were being drawn in by the
overhead light.
At least they were until it flickered and went out.
She
sighed, closed the window, and fiddled with the air conditioner poking
out of its bottom half by the dim light from the parking lot. The
grumpy old item belched like a freight train for a couple seconds,
sending a cloud of dust into the room that coated her sweaty skin and
clumped on her eyelashes. And then sent forth a tepid stream of air
only barely cooler than the sauna outside.
Damn, it was hot.
Louisiana in spring might not be hell on earth, but it was running a
close second. Dory mentally added another grand to the tally sheet for
this job as a heat tax. And then another for the mosquitoes. And what
the hell, a third for the freaking smell, because it didn’t matter
anyway since it was looking less and less like she was going to collect
a damned thing.
She
flopped onto the bed, having forgotten the state of the comforter,
which was a hell of a name for something that reeked of sadness and
bourbon. She tore it off, threw it into a corner, and then lay back
down the sheets. Which might be cheap and paper thin, but at least had
seen the inside of a washing machine recently. And, finally, finally,
she breathed a small sigh of happiness, because the air conditioner’s
trickle of relief was pointed this way.
She toed off her shoes, and felt it tickle her soles.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that was better.
Somebody knocked on the door.
“Compliments of the management,” floated through the thin wood.
Dory
narrowed her eyes, and pulled a couple items out of her bag, because
this wasn’t the sort of place that had management. And because it
wouldn’t be the first time the hunter had become the hunted. She took
up a position to the side of the door, gun in one hand and stake in the
other, wishing the crack around the facing was big enough to see
through.
And then she didn’t have to.
“Aw,
come on, open up. I got the good stuff,” a familiar voice said.
Dory
sighed and opened up. And found the front desk guy, who also appeared
to be the place’s only employee, perusing the label on a large rum
bottle. “Spicy,” he told her, holding it out with a grin.
She
shoved the Glock into the holster at the small of her back. “I brought
my own.”
“Yeah, but it’s prob’ly warm. Everything’s warm this week.” The guy
swatted a mosquito, which left a worryingly large smear on his neck.
“You’d think it was the middle of summer already.”
“I noticed.”
“So
let me in. I got ice,” he said temptingly, and picked up a plastic
bucket. He held it out in one hand; the other still proffered the rum.
He waggled his eyebrows.
“Thanks,” Dory told him, and took them both.
And shut the door.
“Hey!”
There was no mint, but the ice was fine and the rum, surprisingly,
wasn’t half bad.
After making herself a tall one, Dory pulled over her bag and liberated
a packet. The latter was the case file she was currently running down,
which as usual involved a vampire. Not as usual, this one was a master,
and at third level, was powerful enough to pose a challenge.
That
was okay; Dory liked challenges. She especially liked challenges that
came with this kind of price tag. And the possibility of many, many
more big payouts later on, the kind that could put her always shaky
finances on solid ground for the first time in . . . well, ever . . .
if she didn’t screw it up.
She took a moment to admire the official bounty papers, which had the
old timey scrolls and elaborate flourishes of the Latin American
Senate. Who had missed their very bad boy repeatedly when he was in
their territory, and had decided that their luck wasn’t likely to
improve when he fled to the States. So they’d hired her, because it
seemed she was getting a reputation as someone who never missed. And
they wanted this guy dead or alive, with a preference for
dead-and-in-little-pieces.
That
suited Dory; manhandling a body through customs was never fun.
She
let her finger trace the seal, which was done in red wax like a prop
out of an old movie. She’d never seen it before this mission. How could
she have? She hunted vamps; she didn’t work for them. Well, not
officially, anyway.
There had occasionally been masters who ended up with revenants, the
mad results of a Change gone wrong, and been glad to pay her to clean
up their mess. Or a vamp who needed info on a rival that nobody else --
nobody vampire, anyway -- could get close enough to get. Or a master
who’d been ordered to deal with a subordinate, only to find out that he
was stronger than expected, and that he was in over his head . . . .
But a formal commission?
From a senate?
Yeah, she didn’t get a lot of those. Or, you know, any, because senates
could clean up their own messes. Senates were made up of the strongest
of the strong, the beautiful, charming monsters who ran roughshod over
everybody else in the vampire world. Senates didn’t need to employ a
dirty little dhampir.
Until, suddenly, they did. Or one did, and one was really all she
needed, wasn’t it? Dory folded the pretty paper, and dreamed of future
commissions. Official ones, lucrative ones . . . .
Somebody knocked on the door.
She
picked up her gun, and did a repeat of the side of the facing thing.
“I brought mint,” a familiar voice said hopefully.
She
eased open the door. And a bunch of the saddest, wiltiest mint leaves
she’d ever seen were thrust in at her like a bouquet. She regarded them
for a moment. Then she regarded the beefy face above them. “I thought
we could make mojitos?” the front desk guy said hopefully.
“No.”
“I
brought sugar,” he added, fumbling in his pocket as the door started to
close. “I found some little packets in the coffee room that --”
“No.”
“I
get off in an hour,” he said quickly, peering in the tiny slit that was
left. “I could run to the store and get some better --”
“No.”
The door shut.
Dory
went back to the bed, and picked up the photo that went with the file.
Unlike most, her prey looked like a vamp -- the Hollywood version,
anyway. Slicked back dark hair, too-pale face, menacing expression.
Visible Adam’s apple. No scars, of course. Vamps didn’t have them
unless they came pre-Change, and even then, they’d usually be covered
by a glamourie. Not that it looked like tall, dark and creepy was
worrying with one of those.
That
was the only break she’d had so far. Because this was not the sort of
guy you forgot. This was the sort of guy who gave grown men the willies
in broad daylight, and would probably send sensitive types screaming
after dark. This guy . . . was memorable.
At
least, she really hoped so, because she was tired of eating his dust.
Bastard was slick as the oil in his hair. Despite a rather broad
experience to pull from, Dory had missed him not once, not twice, but three freaking times already.
This did not happen.
This was not going to happen again.
She
was only getting paid once for this job, no matter how many weeks it
took her. Too many more and it was going to stop being a windfall and
start edging into liability territory, even with the heat tax. It was
also starting to be frankly embarrassing.
Son of a bitch was going down.
But
not tonight. Dory liked challenges, but she wasn’t stupid. Tomorrow, in
daylight, when even third degree masters were sluggish and slow, would
be quite good enough.
She
rooted around in the bag and liberated a plastic-wrapped shrimp po’boy
and a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce. There was no dessert, but the dime
bag of weed in her jeans would do fine. She was going to eat, shower
and take a little nap. And by morning everything would probably look a
whole lot more --
There was a knock on the door.
“Oh, give it a rest!” Dory said, around a mouthful of shrimp.
Right before the door was kicked open, and her prey stood there,
staring at her.
For
a split second, Dory stared back, lettuce falling from her lips because
there was a sandwich in her hand instead of a gun. And then shrimp were
scattering everywhere, and she was hitting the floor behind the bed
with her gun now where it was supposed to be. And preparing to do the
patented shoot-his-ankles-and-wait-for-him-to-drop maneuver.
Only to discover that the bed was on a platform.
Shit!
Her duffle was on the far side, where she’d dropped it to remove the
comforter. But it didn’t matter because the motel furniture was old
wood and splintered easily. The next second a chair was history, and a
makeshift stake was in her hand, and she was leaping over the bed --
And stopping, but not because he’d used power on her, which usually
didn’t work anyway.
But because he hadn’t.
He hadn’t done anything.
Dory stood there, breathing hard, the jagged edge of the wood actually denting his throat,
and he still didn’t. Her eyes locked with his, but there was none of
the anger she’d expected, none of the vengeance of a vamp who has
realized he’s being tracked and has decided to turn the tables, no
anything.
Except for pained pleading, which was so wildly out of place that it
threw her.
“Is this some kind of trick?” she snarled, after a moment.
The vamp didn’t say anything.
Dory’s hand tightened on the stake, slipping on sweat and possibly
blood, she was gripping it so hard. But she didn’t move. Not even when
he suddenly grabbed her arm, because it wasn’t an attack. More of an
entreaty, despite the strength that was enough to bruise the muscle.
“Kill . . . me . . . .” the pale lips whispered, right in her face.
“What?” She stared at him.
“Kill. Me.” And then, before she could process that, he started yelling
it -- “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!” and pushing her into the room. And
shrieking it in her face, and okay, if this was a freak-them-out
tactic, it was a really damned good one, Dory thought, wondering why
she didn’t just do what the maniac wanted.
But she didn’t get a chance.
Because a moment later, he had grabbed the stake, and was wrestling her
for it. And when he couldn’t separate it from her fingers, he stared
around, spied the one she’d left on top of her bag, and dove. And
turned to face her a moment later, blood coursing down his shirt from a
slit in his throat, and a grin of pure relief spreading over his
features --
Until he toppled over and hit the nasty floor, face first, and stayed
there.
Courtesy of the stake he’d just plunged through his heart.
Well . . . shit.
Chapter Two
The body was lying in a disgusting room in a motel Marlowe could only
assume was named Didn’t Want to Sleep in My Car, although he couldn’t
be sure. He who usually noticed everything couldn’t recall the name or
what the outside had looked like or who had been behind the front desk
or if there’d even been a front desk. He’d torn through the place too
fast to notice anything, and now he was just kneeling there, on a dingy
stretch of tile, wanting to rip someone’s head off.
But there was no one there.
“Find him,” he said hoarsely, his Child’s blood seeping through his
fingers.
“Sir
--” someone said, before someone else wisely shut him up through a
process Marlowe didn’t see, because he couldn’t see anything.
Except the slack features resting on the arm of his coat, and the slit
in the throat deep enough to have drenched his trouser leg, because
Allen had bled out before he got here.
He
had thought he might be in time. It would have drained him badly to
save one so close to death, but he could afford that now. And why could
he afford it? Why could he leave himself vulnerable when he never did?
Because half the senate was here with him. And some of his best men.
Yet Allen lay here, dead in his arms. The boy he’d found screaming over
the smoking corpses of his parents in the Great Fire, the boy he’d
raised as his own son, the boy who as a young man had chosen this life,
willingly, happily, just wanting to serve. And he had, admirably, for
the last four hundred years.
Until today.
Kit
surveyed the room expressionless. For once, he didn’t have to work at
it. He could feel it, the gaping hole in his Child’s chest where the
stake had stolen him away. It felt like it had been thrust into his
own: the pain, the loss, the endless, aching void --
Someone would bleed for this.
Someone would die for this.
And said someone would scream a long time before the end.
"Master?" Kit turned to see Heinrich, the ragged cow boy he’d picked up
in Germany long before there was a Germany, who was now a second level
master with a nose a bloodhound would envy. He’d been – literally --
sniffing around for clues, and it looked like he’d just found one.
“Did you find him?” Kit rasped.
“Her, my lord. We’re after a woman.” Heinrich held up what appeared to
be a single dark hair.
“You’re sure?” Kit glanced around. “This place looks like it rents by
the hour. There could have been dozens of people here in the last week
--”
“No,” Heinrich’s eyes went dreamy, the way they did whenever his nose
was in charge. It was as if it pulled brain power from all his other
senses, and maybe it did. Kit didn’t know how Hounds did their work,
and right then, he didn’t care. He just wanted the result.
“Well?” he prompted, after a minute. Because Heinrich could go on scent
journeys that lasted hours as he traced the story of a room back days
or even weeks. He could recreate whole scenes—who had been there, what
they’d been doing, where they’d been before they came—a hazy movie
playing in his mind formed from scent instead of sight, but almost as
good.
Almost.
Because he had a worrying frown on his forehead that Kit didn’t like.
“Young, yet old . . . human, yet not . . . adrenaline yet . . . no
fear,” Heinrich murmured. “She expected to take him, if it came to that
. . . she expected to win . . . .”
“She did
win,” Kit said harshly, keeping a lid clamped tight on his temper. He
couldn’t afford to lose it now. Not until he had her. “What do you
mean, human but not?”
Heinrich moved his head slightly, a lock of blond hair falling into his
eyes. Which he didn’t bother to push aside, since he didn’t need them,
anyway. “Not sure. Sweat is human, but . . . .”
“No human did this.”
“No.
There’s something else, so subtle, I can’t get a read on it. Something
dark . . . something shadowy . . . something . . . odd.”
“Odd?”
“Oddly familiar . . . .” He scented the tiny remnant again, which was
unprecedented. Heinrich never needed to do that twice. His forehead
wrinkled some more, trapping blond strands in the creases. “I know
this, I know this, but I can’t . . . quite . . . .”
“Familiar? Then you’ve scented her before?” Kit asked sharply. Because
that would mean she was in their files, which would make this
considerably more --
“No,” Heinrich said, squashing the hope before Kit could finish the
thought. “Not her. But someone . . . .”
“Someone with her? There were two?” That would make more sense. Allen
had been one of his best men. He wouldn’t have gone down easily.
“No. No others. Except for --”
“Sir?” A new voice from the doorway caused Kit to look up. It was Liam,
his second, his afro impeccable in spite of the heat, his smartly
fitted gray suit as dapper as if he hadn’t just sprinted across a
sweltering city in record time. Unlike the sweating bag of lard he had
by the arm, in a stained wife beater and sagging jeans. “Front desk
clerk,” Liam said, as the man stared at the bloody mess on the floor.
“We found him on his way back in.”
“Back in from where?” Kit asked. “Where has he been?”
“L-l-liquor store,” the man said, still staring. “I—I—I—”
“You—you—you what?” Kit jerked the man, who had been slowly sinking to his knees, the rest of the way down. “Where have you been?”
“I—I—I just went out for a minute. To get some better rum --”
His
pudgy hand was wrapped around a paper bag covered bottle, which he was
about to drop. Kit relieved him of it -- rein it in, rein it in, rein
it in and get some answers -- and the man just blinked at him. Kit would have thought he was under a suggestion, but he was too stupid to need one.
“He
said he was trying to impress the girl he let in here earlier,” Liam
said. “Petite, young -- maybe early twenties -- unusually strong. Said
she hefted a bag weighing almost as much as he does with no discernable
difficulty.”
“She
was hot, though,” the clerk said, tearing his eyes away from the body.
And glancing around like he expected to still find her here, keeping
company with a corpse. “And she liked rum . . . .” His eyes focused on
Kit’s. “Are you guys the cops? Is she in trouble?”
“More than you can possibly imagine,” Kit breathed, as another report,
this one a communication from his office in Las Vegas, came echoing
through his mind.
“My lord, we just found Allen’s last report, filed last night.”
“And?”
“He said he might have a line on that senator you had him checking out,
something big.”
“Did he say what?”
“No. But he did say he had picked up a complication. Someone was
tailing him, someone good, and he had to waste time shaking her. He
said he wouldn’t have bothered to mention it, but the last time, he got
a good look at her.”
“And?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but he said she was . . . rather, that he thought she
might be --”
“What, damn it! He thought she might be what?”
“Dhampir.”
Chapter Three
Being the hated cross between a vampire and a human had its downsides,
Dory thought. Like all of them, all of the downsides of both species
and then some. But it had its good points, too.
“I don’t know!” The guy with the coffee colored skin and impressive
dreads stared down at her wild-eyed. Maybe because he was currently
dangling two feet off the floor. “I swear -- they don’t tell me
anything!”
“Who is they?” Dory asked, hiking him a little higher. And wishing, not
for the first time, that she was a bit more statuesque. Five feet two
was a hell of a thing when you were trying to be intimidating, although
it appeared to be working at the moment.
“Th—the bokors. They run things. I just sell stuff,” he gestured around
at the voodoo paraphernalia that littered the tiny shop.
Nawlins was lousy with voodoo emporiums of one type or another. Mostly,
they all looked the same: tribal masks nailed to the walls or hanging
from the rafters, bins of straw dolls with beady little eyes that
seemed to follow you around the shop, mojo bags filled with odorous
clumps of who-knew-what, and candles of all kinds and descriptions. The
usual stuff designed for tourists who wanted a slightly creepier than
usual souvenir.
But this wasn’t just any old shop. A subtle symbol near the front door
proclaimed to those in the know that this was the real deal: a
licensed, bonded member of the Guild of Necromancers worked here. One
of the tolerated members of an otherwise hated breed, who served the
undead part of the supernatural community like doctors did for the
living.
Or, at least, that’s what they were supposed to do.
But certain bokors had a little more on the menu. Like, for instance,
adjusting the aura that vamps projected to others of their kind, the
invisible-to-humans field that told every vamp they met what clan they
belonged to, what family, what master. It was like wearing a
descriptive sign around your neck, one that no glamourie could conceal.
And one that made it very difficult to hide from those chasing you.
Dory therefore hadn’t been too surprised when she’d found this place’s
business card in the jacket of a certain crazy vamp. She’d been hot on
his tail all week. He had every reason to want a new aura, along with a
new face, and a bokor willing to bend the rules could give him both. It
all made sense . . . .
Right up until he killed himself.
Why bother getting a new aura if you’re just going to destroy it a few
hours later? Why off yourself when you’re doing a damned good job of
evading your pursuit even without a new identity? And why decide to die in front of her?
Dory didn’t know, but the questions had made her curious. And then the
cashier had come at her with a baseball bat, and curiosity morphed into
suspicion. A simmering little knot of it deep in her gut about her part
in this, and her sudden, too-good-to-be-true windfall.
She snarled, and Dreads got a slightly more panicked look on his face.
“L-look, I told you. I don’t know him from Adam --”
“You attacked me as soon as you saw his photo!”
He swallowed. Thinking on his feet -- or off them -- did not appear to
be his strong suit. “I—we’ve had some robberies lately. I was nervous
--”
“You should be,” Dory said, baring tiny fangs. They were a damned sight
smaller than her Sire’s, but still more than enough to rip this guy’s
throat out. Which was sounding better all the damned time.
Something of her thoughts must have leaked onto her face, because
Dreads suddenly turned café au lait. “He was in here this afternoon,”
he said in a rush.
“What did he want?”
“To talk to one of the bokors --”
“About?”
“I don’t know. They went in back. And after he left, the boss said
anybody asking about him ought to be considered dangerous --”
“But not him? Not the guy himself?”
“No. Boss said he wouldn’t be back.”
“And he knew this how?”
“I don’t know. I don’t!” he repeated, looking panicked when her grip tightened. “You’d have to ask --”
“Okay,” Dory said, and dragged him through a floral curtain.
The back of the shop was a lot less kitschy than the front, with plain
wooden countertops, rows of standing shelves, and an exam table that
didn’t look like it was getting much use since there were half a dozen
cardboard boxes sitting on top of it.
“You—you can’t be back here,” Dreads told her nervously.
“I’ll keep it in mind. Where is he?”
“Who?”
“The bokor!”
“I—he left a couple hours ago. He said he’d be back—you can’t look in
there!” he added, when Dory’s gaze slid over the boxes again.
“Thanks,” she told him, and went over to check them out.
The one on top contained bottles of little white pills. The ones below
held loose little white pills. They looked like coated aspirin, small
and round and innocuous looking. Only they weren’t, because nobody got
that worried about aspirin.
But as clues went, they kind of sucked.
She didn’t care if the bokors were running dope; dope didn’t work on
vampires. She was looking for . . . hell, she didn’t even know. But a
quick search didn’t turn up anything else of interest.
Maybe, she finally admitted, because there was nothing else there.
The paperwork on dead guy had said he was unstable. That he’d gone
crazy and taken out a couple villages, before hightailing it out of the
country. Maybe that whole scene earlier had just been more of the crazy
coming out. And maybe Dreads, who reeked of ganja and had a back room
full of pills, had just been nervous about anybody asking questions.
And maybe she should go score some etouffee and locate another bed for
the night because she was wasting her time.
Because seriously, if anything was going on, would someone like Dreads have been left to hold down the fort?
And then the curtain was ripped aside, and a dozen guys started
spilling into the room.
Dory blinked at them; that was helpful.
“Panic button?” she asked Dreads.
“Panic button,” he said viciously, right before her fist plowed him in the face.
He dropped, she swiped an arm across the table, and a few thousand
little white pills scattered everywhere, sending the guys in the lead
slipping and sliding and crashing into the shelving. That would have
been great, since the shelves did not appear to be properly attached,
and went down like dominoes, trapping half a dozen guys underneath. But
it quickly became a problem when the contents of all those shelves
smashed against the floor, sending noxious clouds boiling throughout
the room, toxic enough to make Dory’s throat close up.
Great.
Even worse, the fumes did not appear to bother her opponents. Like they
didn’t seem to register the splashes of acidic goo they were stepping
in, or the knife she sent into the nearest one’s throat, or the bullets
that shredded the head of the one behind him. Maybe because they were
already dead.
“Son of a bitch!” Dory coughed, and grabbed her lighter.
But she still needed an incendiary, and she didn’t think --
Oh, wait.
She slammed a foot down on the clerk, who was trying to crawl away, and
grabbed her bag off her back. This, she reflected -- stop to kick a zombie in the chest -- would be easier -- send it staggering back into several more -- if she had put the damned thing -- empty a clip into a guy trying to eat her thigh -- in a pocket! Where the hell --
Oh, there.
Her hand closed on smooth glass, and the next second a nearly full
bottle of rum wasn’t anymore as she sprayed the contents all over
the attacking throng, some of whom were still trying to crawl out from
under the shelving.
They didn’t make it. A second later, they were sizzling on the floor,
and the rest were sizzling on their feet, and the closest few were
going up like man shaped tiki torches. Dory smiled in relief.
Right up until the nearest one grabbed her.
The creature’s hair was on fire, along with most of its torso, but it
didn’t seem to notice that, either. Because zombies don’t feel pain, do
they? And the human body -- even a dead one -- doesn’t immediately
incinerate.
Might have thought of that before, Dory told herself grimly. Because
fighting a burning corpse wasn’t any more fun than fighting a
non-burning one. It might even be worse.
Make that definitely worse, she decided, as her jacket sleeve caught on
fire when she punched a hole through its face. And as she was forced to
duck under the table to get away from the rest of the bonfire brigade.
And as Dreads hopped up from the floor and slammed her in the side of
the head with something.
Something that left her less stunned than blinking in confusion.
“A tray?” she demanded, flipping the heavy metal table over onto the zombies.
He looked down at the flimsy aluminum object he was holding, and then
back up at her.
“It’s all I could reach.”
“A tray?”
“Look, I’m not paid enough for this,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I’m
just supposed to man the register, you know? This isn’t my --
augghhhh!” he screamed, as a fiery zombie grabbed him instead of Dory,
maybe because the rum had landed in its face and it couldn’t see past
the flames.
“No, you idiot! You’ve got the wrong one!” he shrieked. “Her! You’re
supposed to attack—erk,” he added, as the thing got him around the neck.
Dory slammed a new clip into place and shot it in the head. And grabbed
Dreads when it staggered back with half its cranium gone. And dragged
him behind the last remaining shelving unit still standing. Where they
got some solidarity going and began lobbing bottle after bottle at the
approaching horde. Some of which did nothing, and some of which
actually helped the other side by drenching the flames, and some of
which --
“Oh, that was a good one,” Dreads said, as a guy trying to flank them
from the left suddenly blazed up in brilliant blue flames that licked
the ceiling before going out. And reduced him to a column of powder
that filtered slowly down onto the floor.
And onto the smoking bodies of the other goons, who had finally taken
enough damage to stop moving.
Mostly.
Dory shot a final holdout until it stopped twitching, grabbed Dreads
and slammed him against the wall.
“Um,” he said eloquently.
“Talk,” she grated out.
“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath. And then: “I just got this job,
all right? They said there’d been a string of break ins and they needed
me to be vigilant -- that’s the word they used vigilant,
I had to look it up -- but they meant be twitchy with the panic button
if anything happened. So I was. And, okay, yeah, I knew some illegal
stuff was going on, but you know how hard it is to get a job when
you’re an ex-con? The Circle’s on my ass all the time and my parole
officer is a punk -- he’s maybe sixteen -- and he hates
me, and kept sending me to all these dead end jobs and -- well, a guy’s
gotta eat, right? But nobody cares. You make one little mistake and
nobody --”
“Shut up!” Dory told him, and shoved a gun in his face.
He shut up.
She kicked the nearest bottle of pills with her foot.
“The bokors are running drugs?”
He nodded.
“What kind?”
He mouthed something. She let up on the collar she was throttling him
with slightly and he dragged in a deep breath. And then breathed out an
answer. “D-designer drugs. You know, for the mages?”
“What mages?”
“Any mages. Well, any with cash, anyway.”
Dory frowned. “Why is a bokor selling drugs to mages? They deal with
vamps.” She glanced at the nearest sizzling pile. “And other dead
things.”
“But live ones have more money,” he pointed out. “You got any idea how
hard it is making a living off the vamp community? There’s just not
enough of ‘em. One of the bokors told me he was barely scraping by,
‘till he got an offer from someone down south --”
“To distribute illegal magical drugs?”
He nodded. “They sell like hotcakes. We put ‘em in the poppets -- you
know, those straw men they have outside? And people walk right out with
‘em --”
“What do they do?”
The guy frowned. “The poppets?”
“The. Drugs.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Depends on what you need. Like I said, they’re
designer.”
“Which means what?”
“Well, like this guy that came in here this afternoon. Not your guy --
another guy. He wanted to become a wardsmith. Make fancy keep out
spells for the well-heeled, you know? But he couldn’t pass the test.”
“The test?”
“To get his license. Nobody’ll hire a wardsmith who ain’t licensed.
Don’t you know anything?”
Dory jerked his head down. “I know I’m getting impatient.”
The guy swallowed, possibly because the gun barrel was now denting his
nose. “Well, anyway, he bought a bottle to help him pass the test.”
“How would a pill do that? You either have the talent or you don’t.”
“No, you either have the power
or you don’t,” Dreads corrected. “You can be as skilled as you like,
but skills ain’t nothing without the juice. Or maybe you got it, but
it’s not in the right area. Maybe it’s spread out all over, like with
most mages. A little in this talent, and little in that—until you take
the pill . . . .”
“And it concentrates your magic,” Dory guessed.
He nodded. “Pop a pill, adjust the spell that comes in the bottle -- to
tell it where your magic’s ‘sposed to go -- and wait a couple hours.
Then for the rest of the day, you’re super mage. Good for impressing
the ladies, passing tests, winning fights . . . it also gets you high
as fuck, which is a nice bonus --”
“And if a non-mage took it?”
He shrugged. “Humans don’t have magic.”
“But vamps do.”
“What?”
Dory slammed him against the wall again, trying to ignore the building
rage inside her. It wasn’t easy. If there was one thing she hated, it
was being played for a fool. “What would happen if a vampire took this?”
“What?” the guy said again, looking confused.
“What would happen?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Dreads looked at her, wide eyed. “Only
the bokors would know --”
“The ones in contact with ‘someone down south?’”
He nodded.
Dory snarled.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he said, in a very small voice.
“Then give me another target.”
Chapter Four
Bayou, Kit decided,
smelled like ass. He glowered at the heavy, moss laden trees, the
soupy, opaque water, the rotting vegetation. And what he was fairly
certain was the corpse of some small animal floating in a patch of
debris a dozen yards off shore.
But he wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure because he couldn’t separate one scent from another in
this fetid mess, which felt like it was actually assaulting him –
physically -- on all sides. It was worse than the bogs in Scotland. It
was worse than Sulphur Springs in Colorado, where one of his masters
had inexplicably chosen to live. It was worse than anything he’d ever
tried to scent through, because it wasn’t just one smell, it was all of
them!
And it was alive.
“That’s . . . really quite . . . something, isn’t it?” Heinrich said,
with a faintly shell-shocked look on his face.
“Tell me you can scent through it,” Kit rasped.
“I .
. . think so?” He’d never heard that level of uncertainty in the
usually confident voice before. Not about his nose.
“Then get on it,” Kit said, and the blond moved off to join the others.
Heinrich had his entire team here, the Baskervilles, as they liked to
call themselves, a group he’d recruited and trained for the hardest of
assignments. He’d heard about the morass of scents the bayou provided
to anyone with a nose, and had thought the trip offered a unique chance
to set them a challenge.
Well, they had one now, Kit thought grimly, watching through narrowed
eyes as they gyrated around, one even hanging off a nearby tree limb,
trying to catch a whiff of the creature they’d tracked here. If they’d
been a less able group, they’d have lost her already. First in the
quagmire the Old Quarter had become, which thanks to this festival was
completely packed with sweaty tourists, and then in that burnt out hulk
of a building, the air saturated with charred wood and potions of all
descriptions.
Why
the dhampir had decided to follow up murder with a spot of arson Kit
didn’t know, but it hadn’t made his job any easier. Not when she
scented as a plain human in a sea of them! But track her they had,
nonetheless, all the way here, to the edge of a particularly odorous
stretch of bayou.
If she was trying to get lost, she’d picked a good place.
Kit’s fist clenched at his side, nails biting into the soft tissue,
little half-moons of blood blooming against his flesh. He ought to be
thanking his men for their dedication to duty. He ought to be deciding
on an excuse for deserting dinner so abruptly. He ought to be doing a
lot of things.
But
all he could seem to manage was to stand here, fighting a rising tide
of anger.
He
couldn’t lose her. He owed a debt to one whose forgiveness he could
never ask, because he hadn’t been fast enough. He wouldn’t fail him
again. He wouldn’t if he had to slop through every inch of this
quagmire himself, on his hands and knees --
“Sir!”
Kit
whirled, and barely refrained from jumping. He should have felt
Heinrich come up behind him; should have heard him. The man had a nose,
but he galloped around like a colt, banging into everything. Hell, he
should have smelled him, even thought that had never been his talent,
because he was sweating from effort, the shaggy mane limp and falling
in his face . . .
A face that was currently beaming with pride.
“We have her.”
“Good.” Kit turned and strode over to the small knot of people who had
gathered at the water’s edge.
They
were looking at a forest of moss laden trees that led off into a dark,
watery jungle. Cypress knees broke the surface here and there, bleached
ghostly pale by whatever sun had managed to find its way under the
heavy canopy. Huge floating piles of algae and lily pads almost
obscured the water. A stray moonbeam hit a pair of alien eyes, not
hers, not human, but some gray backed leviathan of the deep, that
flashed a maw of jagged teeth at them before turning with a flip of its
tail and disappearing into the depths.
Kit heard one of the men swallow.
“It’s an alligator,” he snapped. “You could break it in half with one
hand.”
If it left me a hand, floated through the man’s mind, before he tamped the thought down hard.
Kit let it go.
There were boats drawn up on shore, ones they’d appropriated from a
nearby tourist location that hadn’t yet opened for the season. There
were canoes, kayaks, and a small fishing vessel -- silent types except
for the latter, so as not to alarm her unduly. Kit didn’t know her
strengths, didn’t know what abilities the bogeyman -- or woman -- of
his kind actually had, because all dhampirs were different. But some of
the old stories said she might match them in sensory ability, and he
wasn’t going to risk it.
“I
heard dhampirs are worse than gators,” one of his southern boys said,
throwing a shotgun over his back. “I heard they got claws and a tail
like an animal. I heard they can see a man in pure darkness. I heard --”
“I
don’t care what you’ve heard!” Kit said, studying at the map of the
waterways they’d found along with the boats. The place hadn’t opened
for the season yet because of an undue growth in vegetation, which had
made many of the usual routes impassable.
Good; that should limit the playing field.
“We
could split up; try to surround her,” Liam offered, looking over his
shoulder.
“That we could.” Kit looked up. “Karl, Adelin, take a canoe and branch
off to the right at the end of this leg,” he traced a finger along one
possible route. “Margo, Alex, take the kayaks and check out this
shallower area to the left. Heinrich, David, take the other canoe
straight down the main river, or whatever the hell they call this
thing.”
“And me, my lord?” Liam asked, dark eyes grave.
“You
and I will stay here, to make sure she doesn’t double back. And to be
available to move whenever anyone spots her.”
“Yes, sir,” Heinrich said staunchly. “And don’t worry, sir; we’ll find
her.”
Kit grabbed his arm. “Just remember: no killing.”
“Sir?”
“Your job is to locate her, not to take her down. You find her; you
call in, understood?”
Heinrich nodded. “And . . . then what?”
Kit felt his eyes go red. “And then she’s mine.”
Chapter Five
“You
have got to be kidding me,” Dory whispered, watching from a tree as a
vamp-filled canoe paddled through the liquid jungle below her.
“Shi—” Dreads began, before Dory clapped a hand over his mouth.
She’d had to bring him along or risk him informing her prey that she
was coming. He was also the only one who knew where their destination
was. Some factory the bokors had set up in the swamp, because
apparently they didn’t have noses. Or maybe, after a while, you just
didn’t smell this place anymore.
She
wished her nose would get on with that. Because between rotting fish,
decomposing plants, more than a hint of sulphur, and the waves of ganja
every time her companion moved, she was all but scent blind. Which is
how the posse had almost managed to slip up on her.
And it was
a posse. The one in front was in the classic pose of a Hound, face
forward, eyes closed, navigating by nose rather than the eyes he
probably thought of as secondary. The one in back was less into it,
glancing around nervously, but with a sharp gaze that said this wasn’t
a pleasure trip.
Not
that Dory had thought that, anyway. Master vamps -- dressed in suits,
no less -- didn’t often hang out in odorous bogs.
Unless they had a really good reason.
A really good reason like a dead family member.
In her hotel room.
Fuck.
She
was going to rip some bokor’s intestines out through his goddamned
throat.
“Maybe they’re just here for the . . . uh . . . ambiance?” Dreads
whispered, when the vamps had passed by, and she’d released his motor
mouth.
She
turned to look at him. He had a small book in his hand. “What is that?”
“Thesaurus. I’m improving myself. Thinking about going back to school.”
She looked at him some more.
He frowned.
“Ambiance,” he said, checking the book. “The character and atmosphere
of a --”
“I know what it is!”
“Well, excuse me. Some of us didn’t have a chance at a fancy education.”
“Neither did I!”
“Really?” He looked interested. “Then how come you talk like that? All
educated and shit?”
“I’ve lived a long time,” Dory said, looking through her bag.
“How
long? Do dhampirs live as long as vamps? I mean, you’re not . . .
ninety or something . . . are you?” he looked slightly alarmed.
“Four hundred and ninety would be closer.”
“Shit! No shit? Shit!” he said, staring at her, and looking fairly
appalled. “And I was thinking you were kinda . . . cute.”
“Shut. Up.”
And
he did, for about half a second. “What’s that?” he asked, just as a
shot rang out.
Dory
felt it part her hair as she dove down the tree, jerking Dreads along
with her. Before stuffing his lanky ass in a hollow between a bunch of
cypress trunks. For once, he didn’t have anything to say. He just
looked at her, throat working, as she put a finger to her lips.
And
then did it again, more forcefully, until he nodded, clutching his book.
After she was certain he’d done the math, she climbed back up the
trunk, bag in hand.
And sure enough, the vamps were back.
“The hell?”
The blond Hound was holding a gun, in the pose of a man who had just
snatched it away from his companion, a redhead with a buzz cut.
“I
told you,” the smaller man said, glancing around. “I saw something.”
“Of
course you saw something! This whole place is moving! That’s no reason
to --”
“No, I saw something. Something human --”
“So
you’re planning to shoot every human you see? People live out here! And
we were specifically told --”
“Yeah. Weird people. Scary people,” the other guy muttered.
The blond looked disgusted. “You’re afraid of humans now?”
“I’m
not afraid of anything,” his companion bristled. “Except . . . .”
“Except?”
The
redhead glanced around again. “What the boss said . . . that can’t be
right, can it? It must have been something else --”
“Something else that took Allen without a fight?” the blond asked,
shoving the other man’s gun into his waistband. “You saw that room as
well as I did. Lamps still on the tables, curtains still at the window,
crappy T.V. still on its crappy stand --”
“That’s what I’m saying. What could do that?”
“You
know what. We were told what. And you need to keep it together or --”
“I have it together! I just --”
“Just what?”
The redhead scowled. “Dhampir.” He said it the same way everyone did, with a disgusted curl of his lip. “That can’t be right.”
“Well, probably not now,” his companion said sourly. “That shot must
have alerted half the swamp that we’re --”
He
cut off as a speedboat raced up, sending water in a huge arc on one
side, high enough to almost drench Dory’s hiding place when it stopped
on a dime.
“What the hell was that?” A vamp with a mop of dark, curly hair leaned
over the side, addressing the blond.
Who
glared at the redhead for a second before swallowing. And then looked
up to answer his . . . head of house? It wasn’t really a guess. Curly’s
power signature was like a miniature sun, utterly eclipsing that of the
other two. And causing Dory to bite her lip.
First level master.
Had to be.
And pissed, judging by the way said power fluctuated, giving away the anger his face and voice were keeping on a tight leash.
Wonderful, she thought, digging through her bag. Just wonderful. This
job was getting better all the damned time.
“I’m sorry, sir. There was an accidental discharge --”
“It
wasn’t accidental,” the redhead said, because apparently he was stupid.
“Not accidental?” Curly repeated quietly.
“No, sir. I saw something --”
“And discharged your weapon to what? Ensure that it saw you, too?”
The voice didn’t change, but power flared, hot enough to cause the
blond to flinch. He wisely stayed silent. The redhead on the other
hand, apparently had a death wish.
“I’m sorry, sir. But I thought I had her --”
“Your job is not to think. Your job is to follow orders. Which you seem incapable of doing --”
“Sir --”
“-- or of listening when I am talking to you!” Curly snatched the idiot
out of the canoe with one hand. And left him dangling over the water
for a long moment, with the expression of a man who would dearly like
to throw him in.
Ultimately, he decided to throw him into the speedboat, instead. “Take
him back to shore,” he told someone curtly. “We can’t afford any more
mistakes.”
“Yes, sir.” An impressive ‘fro poked up from the driver’s seat, as the
master started climbing over the side of the boat. “Sir? Where are you
--”
“I’ll deal with this myself. Take him back to shore and stay there
until we have her.”
“Yes, sir.” The fro did not look happy. “But, perhaps . . . .”
“Perhaps what, Liam?”
“Perhaps it would be better if I went in David’s place?”
The
master looked up from where he was seating himself in the swaying
canoe, which the blond was helping to steady with an oar. “Why?”
Liam
looked unhappy some more. But he didn’t back down. “With my nose, I
could possibly be of more use here, while it seems a waste to have
someone with your expertise not directing --”
“Don’t patronize me,” the brunet said sourly. “And Heinrich’s nose is
quite adequate, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, sir. But if you find her --”
“Not if.”
“I meant to say, when you find her . . . wouldn’t it be better if someone else was at risk --”
“At risk?” The brunet’s face flushed.
“Sir.” The dark eyes were steady. “She is dhampir --”
“And we are eight masters! Or am I counting wrong?”
“No, sir.”
“She is one woman. One very foolish, very dead, woman. Nothing more!”
“Yes, sir.” Liam’s expression didn’t change, but he didn’t push it.
A
moment later, the speedboat took off with its disgraced cargo, and Dory
used the cover of the noise to climb back down to where her own
pain-in-the-ass was waiting. For once, he didn’t say anything. Just
watched her as she took a small carrying case out of her bag, and
started working a pod loose from its enveloping Styrofoam.
She
did it quietly, because the two in the canoe hadn’t moved on. They were
just sitting there, discussing what the other guy had seen. They didn’t
necessarily believe him, but they were going to check it out anyway.
Because whoever these guys were, they weren’t amateurs.
And they were out for blood. Her
blood. And why didn’t she think they were going to wait around while
she explained about fake bounties and living zombies and how none of
this was really her fault?
Because vamps were so great at listening to dhampirs. She only knew one
who might, and he wasn’t here. Just a bunch who thought she’d killed
their man, because they’d been meant to think that, and if she didn’t
come up with evidence to the contrary pretty damned quick, her hide was
going to end up tacked to Curly’s wall.
What are you doing?
Dreads mouthed, because apparently he couldn’t stop talking even now.
Dory shot him her best glare, which seemed to work, because his mouth
snapped shut. But his eyes followed her every move as she prepared to
lose some more money on this deal.
And held out a little silver ball on the palm of her hand.
God, she hated this part.
After a second, the pod cracked open, sending out tiny tendrils that
looked like slug slime and felt worse oozing over her flesh.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long. After a minute, the nasty tongue-like
protrusions slipped back inside and the pod closed. And then abruptly
took off in defiance of gravity, zooming off her palm and through the
trees on a crazy, zig zag course that made no sense at all.
To the eyes.
“There!” One of the vamps cried, responding to the wide arc of her
scent being left behind by the fleeing pod. And a second later the
canoe was all but levitating itself, shooting like a bullet through the
dark water.
Dory
waited for a second, then two, then grabbed Dreads by the front of his
t-shirt when she was sure they were out of range. “You’ve got to get
out of here.”
“No shit!”
The words burst out after being repressed for so long. “I thought I was
gonna have a heart attack! Nobody said anything about being shot at!
Nobody said --”
“Being shot at is the least of your problems.”
“My problems? My problems? How is any of this my --”
“Because they didn’t just follow my scent here, they followed yours,”
Dory said, keeping her grip on the tie dye when the guy tried to pull
away. “You can try telling them I kidnapped you --”
“You did kidnap me!”
“--
and forced you to come along, and maybe they’ll listen. Or maybe
they’ll rip your throat out, because they’re a man down, and you just
spent the afternoon with the person they think killed him.”
“Killed . . . they . . . what?” he stared at her. “Who’s been killed?
The only ones I saw were some zombies, and they were already --”
“The vamp -- the one that I showed you a picture of?”
He nodded.
“He
was part of their clan. Probably sent to investigate the stuff your
bosses have been selling. Only I didn’t know that. Because your bosses’
suppliers hired me to take him out for them, telling me some cock and
bull story about him levelling a couple villages in Mexico --”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“--
and I followed him here. But before I could do anything, he showed up
at my motel and offed himself.”
“What?”
Dory
nodded. “Slit his throat, then staked himself. Blood was everywhere.
Too much to clean up, and anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered --”
“He offed himself? You mean . . . why?”
“At
a guess? Because your bokors told him to,” Dory said, pulling him down
to their boat. It was a small one, but it had a motor. Dreads should be
able to keep ahead of the vamps, assuming she could keep them busy.
“Those pills you’re selling?” she added, because he was still talking.
“The ones that concentrate magic?”
“What about ‘em?”
“Well, vamps have magic, too.” She pushed him in. “But it’s different
from the human kind. It’s life magic -- the kind they steal from bad
little boys like you.”
He blinked. “So?”
“So
what happens to a body when all of its magic -- and therefore its life
-- is suddenly quarantined? Locked up by being redirected to something
stupid, like enhanced vision or whatever?”
He
blinked some more. “I . . . don’t know. I don’t know much about vamps.”
“Well, I do. And a dead body minus its animating life magic is pretty
much just a dead body, isn’t it? Like the kind your bokors control?”
He
stared at her, open mouthed, because he wasn’t stupid, after all. “You
think -- you mean -- they’re trying to --”
“Gain control of a master.”
Dory
couldn’t blame him for looking at her like she was crazy. Because
bokors didn’t have that kind of power. They controlled dead bodies,
true, but they controlled empty ones.
A dead human was just a vessel to be filled with a necromancer’s power,
a puppet with no way to resist because nobody was home anymore. A vamp,
on the other hand, while technically dead, was very much not empty.
And
they tended to react – violently -- to anyone who forgot that.
True, there were stories about especially strong bokors briefly seizing
control of baby vamps. Or of seeing through their eyes, to spy on a
vamp family by using one of its own members. That sort of thing was why
hunt-the-necromancer had once been a fashionable pastime. But
controlling a third level badass?
No way in hell.
Yet
she knew what she’d seen. And she’d been crazy vamp’s very next stop,
after talking to a bokor who said he wouldn’t be back. And who sold dangerous, illegal pills that just might be able to give him control of a master, at least for a little while.
Like
long enough for him to drive a stake through his own heart.
“But . . . but what for?” Dreads was asking. “Why would they --”
“I don’t know. That’s what you’re going to find out for me.”
He shook his head violently, sending the dreads flying. “No way. No way. I am out of this. I thought . . . it was supposed to be harmless, all right? Like selling weed. Nobody said anything --”
“Maybe not, but you’re in it now.”
“Like hell I am! I told you --”
“And
I’m telling you. You have two choices: do what I ask and get yourself
out of this mess, and maybe even pick up some reward bucks. Or ignore
me and run -- and see how far you get. If you’re smart, and lucky, you
might even last a couple days before they find you.”
Dreads glared at her through the hanging locks of hair. “I hate you.”
“Shouldn’t that be despise?” Dory asked, raising a brow. “Loathe?
Abominate --”
“Give me that!” He snatched the book he’d dropped on the way down the
tree out of her hand. And then looked up, biting his lip. “All right.
What do I have to do?”
Chapter Six
Kit
crushed the small silver object in his hand like tinfoil. Heinrich
stood by, shamefaced, because he’d just been beaten by one of his own
training toys. One he’d developed himself.
“Where did she get it?” Kit rasped.
Heinrich licked his lips. “We’ve been using them for a few years now,
to train the younger recruits’ noses. And you know mages. They steal
anything they think might give them an edge --”
“She’s not a mage.”
“No,
sir. But anyone can buy magic, if they have the money. And we designed
these to work off a charm that --”
"How many does she have?”
“I
-- there’s no way to be sure. But that wasn’t a copy. It must have been
lifted from one of our own supply depots. And if so . . .”
“If so?”
“They come in cases of twenty-four,” he admitted, looking miserable.
Kit didn’t say anything.
Sir. That was Liam’s voice, in his head. I don’t understand it, but we’re suddenly getting multiple hits, from all areas. It’s as if she’s suddenly everywhere at once --
She isn’t. Her toys are.
Sir?
“Explain it to him,” he told Heinrich, while he stared at the gloomy,
odorous morass in front of him.
She
hadn’t left. She knew they were on her tail, had probably seen him
during that debacle with David, knew what he was. And that he had
others with him: strong, vengeful, and closing in. Yet, instead of
slipping away quietly, she chose to deploy a no doubt costly diversion
and continue . . . doing what?
Kit’s lips pursed.
What about the man with her? Liam asked. The mage?
What about him?
We believe they’ve split up. He was just seen on a speedboat, tearing
downriver, and he was alone. Should we pursue?
No. We have his scent; we’ll deal with him later. Stay on the girl.
Yes, sir.
And inform our group of what’s happening. I want them to run down every
one of Heinrich’s inventions and destroy them.
“Uh,
sir?” Heinrich broke in. “It might be easier to find out which depot
was raided if we have an example to, uh . . . to go by . . .” he
trailed off as Kit handed him the destroyed remnants in his hand. “Yes,
sir,” he said, regarding them sadly.
Understood, Liam replied.
Kit thought for another moment. Do you still have that map of the waterways?
Yes, right here.
Plot every point where the scent trails have been detected. Call me
when you have it.
Yes, sir. Liam didn’t ask why.
Heinrich looked like he was about to, but wisely changed his mind. They
sat in silence for a few moments, or what passed for it here. Like with
his people, the night seemed to bring the bayou alive. Sluggish and
quiet in the daytime, it woke up after dark with almost as many sounds
as scents. Kit counted no less than six different kinds of frogs,
twelve birds, what might be a coyote, and the odd, grunting belch of
the giant reptiles nature had forgotten to kill in the last great
extinction event.
Alligators. What place did something like that have in the modern
world, Kit wondered, watching one eye him from the shadows. Of course,
he sometimes thought the same about himself.
He
didn’t know how to fight like this, chasing a bunch of toys in some
ridiculous cat and mouse game. He didn’t want to learn. He wanted what
he did know: open combat, one on one, a fight to the death. He wanted
to taste blood, wanted to hear bones crack and flesh tear, wanted --
To hurt.
And not just her.
He
was finding his current mix of emotions to be . . . disturbing. Human
anguish over the loss of a child, vampire rage at being challenged, the
grief of his men for their brother seeping through the bond . . . . The
whole of it was enough that he would welcome a distraction, even one
that left him with a few less teeth. He might even let the creature get
in a few blows before he took her out, might bleed a little while for
the child who had bled for him . . . .
Assuming they ever found her, that is.
Damn it! Where --
My Lord.
Tell me.
Liam
chose to show him, instead. The old laminated sign they’d ripped off
the door of the rental shop flashed before his vision, as clear as if
he was holding it himself. Color coded lines, green, blue and red,
snaked out from the shore, showing the paths his men had taken,
including his own. And all around them, in a profusion of squiggles,
were the trails of Heinrich’s annoying little devices.
Yes,
she’d had a whole case. And she’d used them, covering a large swath of
the swamp. Large, Kit thought, but not all.
“Take the boat,” he told Heinrich. “Follow the two closest trails, see
if they lead anywhere.”
“Sir?” The Hound looked confused.
“If
you locate her, let me know. Stay well away and hidden until I arrive.”
“Yes, sir, but . . . what are you going to do?”
“Check this out,” Kit said, pointing to an expanse of more or less
solid ground up ahead.
“But sir . . . no scent trails have been reported there.”
Kit
looked up, and allowed himself a small, vicious smile. “I know.”
Chapter Seven
God, she hated this thing,
Dory thought, pulling on a section of clingy fabric. It was already a
sauna out here, so what was she wearing? An all-enveloping, figure
hugging, hot-as-the-gates-of-hell body suit that only worked once and
cost the earth and she was so losing her shirt on this job!
But
that wasn’t the worst thing, she thought, ducking under a limb with a
thick, coiled snake draped around it. The worst thing was that there
wouldn’t be a paycheck at the end of it. The best she could hope for
was getting out from under with a whole skin -- and an empty bank
account -- and no prospect for all those lucrative future jobs that
she’d already begun to count on.
She
should have known it was too good to be true. Should have suspected the
two smiling reps who showed up in Brooklyn in person because obtaining her help was so damned important. Should have done due diligence --
But that was just it. She had.
She’d followed procedure, even after the extra-large retainer they’d
left with her -- in check form, she recalled, wincing. Damned thing had
probably bounced by now. But she hadn’t let the amount scrawled across
it stop her from calling the Latin American Senate itself to verify,
that very afternoon. Which the bastards had no doubt expected, because
she’d gotten all the right answers on the other end.
And it had
been the senate’s number. She wasn’t stupid enough to use the one off
the check! So whoever these suppliers were, they had connections at
court. Enough to get someone sympathetic to answer the phone, in any
case, which should make them easier to track. And she was going to
track them. Oh, yes. After this, she so very, very --
Dory’s thoughts cut out when she heard something off to the left.
Something that sounded like a person striding through the undergrowth,
and not being particularly stealthy about it. She froze beside the
trunk of a tree, the mesh on her suit immediately taking on the
appearance of crusty bark and moss. A flick of her wrist, and the
screen over her face adhered into place as well, obscuring the last
part that was still visible.
Chameleon suits cost the earth, although this one was supposed to be on
someone else’s dime. But they were worth every penny, she thought, as a
human form emerged from the undergrowth. Oh, yes, they were.
Because it was the master, his power a hot prickle across her skin even
a dozen yards away, his sharp dark eyes taking in the whole of the
glade --
And sliding right over her, without even pausing.
And
it looked like his nose wasn’t liking eau de swamp any better than
hers. Because he had breathed in at the same time, an automatic habit
for creatures accustomed to using scent as much as sight. And now he
was choking and swearing and coughing and tearing up.
Tell
me about it, buddy, Dory thought, and tried to tamp down her heartbeat.
It
was the only tell that might still give her away. The suit muffled it
somewhat --considering what she was after, she’d insisted on the
upgrade -- but this was a master. This close, he’d hear it; there was
no doubt of that. But would he be able to pick out the human among all
the scurrying, flapping, and swimming things around her?
She kind of hoped so.
Stop it,
she told herself firmly. He isn’t your prey. You’re after the people
who set you up. This one was played as much as you were, and lost a
Child in the process. At least, that was the only reason Dory could
think of for why a first level master in a designer tux would he
tromping his way through a quagmire in the middle of the night.
Tall, dark and creepy hadn’t been the Child of a Child, some distant
hanger on of the clan several times removed, barely a spark in the
darkness. No. He’d been made by the creature who had his head thrown
back, his ears working as none of his other senses would do. Because
that had been his Child who had died, his blood that had spilled on
that motel floor, a burning sun in his firmament that had suddenly
winked out.
Leaving everything darker behind it.
Dory
scowled behind the mask. She hated shit like this. She liked a clean,
open fight against an enemy who needed killing. Not some furtive chase
through the dark, trying to avoid slaying someone who the human part of
her felt slightly sorry for. And that the vamp part wanted to break, to
kill, to feel the heady, sweet blood of a master welling up under her --
Stop it!
But
it was too late. Her vampire nature hadn’t caused her to move, or to
utter a single sound -- she’d had too much practice for that. But it
had caused her heartbeat to speed up. Not enough to alert most vamps,
no, but a master? And one who had been looking for it?
Shit, Dory thought fervently, as the man’s eyes suddenly snapped open.
And looked straight at her.
* * *
It
was standing by the tree. Kit could map it with his ears as easily as
with sight, the hot thrum of its blood muffled in some way he didn’t
understand, but strong and steady and there, nonetheless. It was standing right by the tree.
Yet he couldn’t see it.
Until it moved, barely a ripple on the night, one his eyes wanted to
slide off of even as he leapt --
And
crashed to the ground, pinned in place like an animal by a sparkling
net of pain, like a hundred Tasers hitting him all at once. He roared
and ripped the thing in two, throwing it aside to finish sparking out
against the wet earth. And looked up --
And didn’t see her.
Son of a bitch.
Kit
jumped back to his feet, staring around, his pulse hammering, his
senses reaching out for a sound, a scent, a glimpse --
And found none of them.
But
she was here. He’d been right: the place to look wasn’t one that was
registering, all lit up temptingly, but the one that wasn’t. The one
conspicuous only by the absence of any activity at all until that
tell-tale glimmer.
He
didn’t see it now, not anywhere. Didn’t hear it, either, which probably
meant she’d moved, and moved quickly, out of range. But he hadn’t
imagined it, or the numerous toys she seemed to have with her.
But
people only used mage tricks if they thought their own strength
inadequate. Otherwise, why not just attack him, kill him now? Before he
could bring an army down on her head?
Because she couldn’t.
And
because that wasn’t happening anyway. He hadn’t brought his men along
for that; he’d brought them to help him find her. Now that he had . . .
This was his fight.
And it was about to get dirty.
* * *
Going to demand a goddamned refund,
Dory thought, watching a very costly net spell last all of a couple
seconds. Of course, those seconds bought her time to run like hell, to
get out of hearing range, to blend in with the cacophony of night on
the bayou. But it wasn’t like he was going to take the hint and go
away. Wasn’t like he was going to think, hey, you know what? She could
have thrown something a lot more lethal just now, maybe we should talk.
No.
Vamps didn’t think like that. If he stopped to wonder about it at all,
her actions would be taken for stupidity or weakness. And that would
only make him more inclined to find her again, because every predator
loves easy prey.
Her
lip curled, baring fangs that there was no one there to see. Because
she wasn’t prey. In the vamp world, she was pretty much the apex
predator, the mongoose to his snake. And she was about to Rikki Tikki
Tavi his ass.
Dory
hunkered down behind a tree, opened the maw on her great big bag, and
considered. She wanted to neutralize him -- had to neutralize him if
she was ever going to get anywhere -- but didn’t want to kill. Okay,
she wanted to kill, but
killing first level masters with big families was a good way to be on
the run for centuries. Vamps were like elephants; they never forgot a
damned thing. Not when it came to revenge, anyway.
So no killing.
But
damn if having to do non-lethal wasn’t a royal pain in the --
Dory
never even felt the blow land. One second, she was on the bank, pawing
through her bag, and the next she was hitting down in a patch of
mingled swamp and mud, face first.
And
the next she was flipping and hurling the object in her hand at the
blur coming at her like a freight train. A freight train that hit the
muck where she’d just been lying and stayed there, thrashing about in
the web spell she’d thrown, instead of ripping her throat out. But if
he got out of this one as fast as the other --
And he did.
But
Dory had expected that and already been moving, reaching into her bag
and lining things up, and then rapid firing spells at him as he threw
off the web and lunged for her again, muddy and wild-eyed and furious.
And
even more so when her arsenal in turn stunned him, tripped him, stunned
him, enmeshed him, stunned him, stunned him, freaking stunned him --
This
wasn’t working. He shrugged off everything she could throw at him,
almost as fast as she could throw it, and before long she was going to
be out of tricks. And then what?
Well, then she died, Dory thought, pragmatically.
But probably not quickly.
And fuck that.
She
bit the bullet – literally -- slipping a small silver capsule out of a
side pocket and into her mouth. It wasn’t cyanide, it wasn’t defeat,
because she wasn’t dying here today, no matter what asshole thought.
But, God, it suddenly felt that way!
But not because he’d grabbed her.
He
was still thrashing around, throwing off her last supposedly escape
proof net, when the disorientation of a $5,000 spell hit her like a
baseball bat to the head. Or make that heads. Because Shards was a next
level, coven crafted, how do you like them apples spell that left Dory
feeling like she’d just been ripped into a thousand pieces.
Which was unfair, since it was only three.
Three copies jumped out of her skin, looking like identical triplets.
Or like mirror images, only they weren’t. Decent illusion spells went
for $100 bucks a pop if you knew someone and twice that if you had to
pay retail; when you were forking over the price of a decent used car,
you got a little more.
Which was why the shards dove on command for the bag, grabbed fistfuls
of pain, and unleashed them on the master vamp, who – predictably --
had just jumped back to his feet.
And Dory Prime grabbed the sadly depleted leftovers and ran.
She
heard the fight escalate behind her, the Shards giving the vamp almost
as much hell as she would have, and that was with weapons. Once they
ran out, they’d attack him physically, for as long as the charm held,
which given what she’d seen of him so far, wouldn’t be long. But it
ought to buy her a couple minutes, and she needed them.
She
needed them badly, she realized, stopping by a cypress tree and panting
heavily, but not because she’d planned to.
But
because her head was still reeling from that initial savage blow. It
had been stunning, easily enough to have killed a human and to make a
vamp rethink his life goals. It felt like he’d cracked her freaking skull, to the point that her vision was blurry and her usually excellent reflexes were shot.
Which probably explained why she staggered trying to grab the tree,
tripped over a root and went tumbling down the short embankment into
the water.
And into the nursery for every damned gator in the swamp.
Dory looked up, dripping mud and dizzy as hell, and froze.
A
little moonlight filtered down through the heavy, mossy canopy,
gleaming off the lily pads and dappling the algae . . . and the backs
of more gators than she could count. They were everywhere. Everywhere. To the point that the “water” mostly wasn’t, but was made up of moonlight hitting the ridges on their knobby hides.
And
that wasn’t right, was it? Gators didn’t . . . flock . . . did they? Or
whatever the term was, although she was pretty sure there wasn’t one
because they didn’t do that! They were loners, or so she’d always heard
. . . .
Only it appeared that she’d heard wrong.
She’d also been wrong about the nursery thing. Because while some of
those hanging about on shore, grabbing a few moonbeams, were fairly
small, maybe three or four feet tip to tail, others . . . were not. She
spotted a bunch in the eleven to thirteen foot range, a few leviathans
of maybe fifteen, and one that she was pretty sure was her addled brain
playing tricks on her, because it had to be twenty freaking feet
long.
Dory
stared at it. Twenty feet of muscle. Twenty feet of terror. Twenty feet
of prehistoric hate with a maw of what-the-fuck and claws they didn’t
make anymore because even nature had looked at those things and
thought, you know what? That was a bad idea.
Like
stopping to gawk at the wildlife with a master on your tail, she
thought, when something flew out of the forest and grabbed her.
To
any watching humans, what happened next would have probably looked like
a blur, something so fast and fluid against the night that they could
have been excused for missing it all together. But Dory wasn’t human,
and she’d danced this dance before. So many times that it was like an
old tune on the radio, one you start humming with the first few notes,
without thinking.
One
second, the vamp version of the Incredible Hulk was grabbing her, and
the next her feet were in his stomach and he was being flipped over her
head and thrown half a dozen yards through the air.
Straight into the pit of hell.
Dory’s arrival had led to a little snarling and snapping, mostly among
the closest beasts. Which had sensed someone there who shouldn’t be,
even though they couldn’t see her. But her utter stillness and the
suit’s muffling abilities had ensured that they’d mostly calmed back
down.
Until a hundred and seventy pounds of enraged vampire splashed down,
right in the middle of them.
And
then froze, as all five of her remaining stun bombs hit him at once,
right in the chest.
He
disappeared under a few thousand tons of thrashing fury, and Dory
stumbled up the bank, feet slipping, head reeling, and stomach churning
because this wasn’t the way she did things.
This wasn’t the way she did things at all.
So much for non-lethal.
God damn.
Chapter Eight
Twenty minutes later, Dory was still shaken, although that could have
had something to do with floundering through a mile or more of swamp.
The “ground” around here was mostly moss and algae-covered water, with
the rest ankle deep mud spiked with trippy little roots. None of which
acted like roots should and stayed underground!
But
she’d made it. She was currently looking at a little building exactly
like the one Dreads had described: tin roof, wooden walls, stilts to
keep it out of the muck, and quite possibly the most obnoxious odor she
had ever smelled emanating from it. Seriously, there should have been
blue clouds hovering over the top, only she didn’t see any. Of course,
she couldn’t see much out of seriously watering eyes.
Well, at least she couldn’t miss it, she thought, squatting in a tree
and rolling a joint.
It
wasn’t likely to cover the smell, but that was okay since her nose had
basically shut down in self-defense at this point. It wasn’t likely to
help anything else, either, which was more of a problem. A big problem,
since her dhampir nature tended to rear its ugly -- and scary, and
completely insane -- head, whenever she got a little too upset.
Like
after feeding a guy to a bunch of modern dinosaurs, for instance.
Yeah, yeah, she hadn’t had a choice. She knew that. There’s a big
difference between feeling sorry for someone and dying for him, and
Dory wasn’t a saint. She’d never pretended to be. If he’d taken half a
second to talk to her . . . .
But
they never talked to her. Vamps freaked out when the bogeyman showed
up, and death was usually the only thing on their minds. Hers. And that
was when they didn’t blame her for killing one of their family.
Conversation had definitely not been on the menu.
Of course, you didn’t try, her conscience murmured.
Yeah, like she’d had a chance!
Sometimes she didn’t know what was wrong with her. She was dhampir.
She he wasn’t supposed to worry about things like this. She was
supposed to kill everything in a room and walk away, unaffected. Her
other half, the one that was squirming away under her skin right now,
sure didn’t have a problem with that. She’d woken up in too many rooms
full of corpses, after it had decided to come out for a joy ride, to
know.
And she’d worried over every one of them.
At
least she had for a long time. These days she had a better grip on
herself, and had developed tricks to keep the tiger in its cage. So
when it did get out, it was usually in the middle of a knock down drag
out when she was bleeding and in pain and not thinking clearly enough
to tamp it down.
And
in those cases, the people she found when she woke up weren’t the kind
you grieved over.
But
it hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a lot of years when she’d
stared around in horror at piles of bloody, broken bodies, and
wondered: did they all deserve it? Could they all have needed killing?
Or did her other half not care? Did it just get caught up in the
moment, like she’d seen some vamps do, laughing as they slaughtered
dozens, laughing even as they were stabbed over and over and --
Stop it!
But
she could still feel it, feel the tiger pacing, knew it wanted out.
Despite the horror story of an evening, it was still hungry. Because it
was always fucking hungry and --
“Shut up!” she said, aloud, which was stupid this close to her prey.
Not to mention crazy -- talking to herself in the middle of a swamp,
all alone, because she’d just killed the only other --
Stop it!
And finally, she did.
Dory
lit up, leaned back, and relaxed her body, letting a far more fragrant
haze engulf her. She breathed in, feeling the weed’s calming smoke hit
the burning core of her rage, like a bucket on a bonfire. But it was
better than nothing.
Calm, she told herself. Don’t think. Just breathe.
It
would have been easier if she wasn’t injured. But her expensive suit
had taken a tear in the hell pit, along with a good two inches of the
calf below, courtesy of some literal stick in the mud. It wasn’t a
physical problem -- her battered skull was more of an issue -- but it
was leaking and that tended to make her other half . . . antsy.
Like it needed the help.
But
the weed was strong, the wound was already closing, and she wasn’t in
any immediate danger. The tiger finally went back to sleep. Alone at
last, Dory gazed through hanging strands of moss at the little shack,
hoping no one had noticed her earlier slip up.
But
it didn’t look like it. In fact, she didn’t see any movement outside at
all. Looked like the guys were cozied up in the little house,
blissfully ignorant and busy cooking up their latest batch of --
Dory stopped, her eyes narrowing through a smoky exhale.
Because cooking up . . . what?
She’d been a little too busy to think about it before, but now she
wondered. Their suppliers were down south. They sent the pills through
the mail, like generic medicine. She didn’t have to take Dreads’ word
for that; she’d seen the labels on the boxes. And then the pills went
into the poppets.
So what, exactly, were they cooking?
She stubbed out her blunt and went to find out.
* * *
Ten
minutes later, most of a vampire erupted from the water. He was still
on slow-time, the sensory distorting trick his kind used when
confronted with multiple enemies at once. And so, for a second, he saw
everything: the droplets from his hair glittering like diamonds in a
shaft of moonlight; the puddles of blood on the water, like spilled
wine; the moss blowing in the wind, like sirens’ hair . . .
And
then time snapped back to normal, and with it came a roar of mingled
pain and fury that shook the treetops.
And
nothing else, because everything that could leave the area had already
done so.
Which was just as well, considering that his practically shredded right
leg gave way a moment later, sending him plunging back underneath on a
wash of agony.
Motherfu—
Sir! Liam’s alarmed voice echoed in his head, yet another pain. Are you --
Be silent!
But, sir --
And don’t contact me again until I damned well tell you!
Liam
terminated the conversation, but a thread of disapproval, like a silent
hmmph, reverberated through Kit’s brain. He shut his eyes. Liam would
make sure he paid for that later. That wasn’t the way a proper master
responded to his long-suffering chief of staff. Who was only trying to
help his quest and preserve his life at the same time, which he was
honor bound to do for both Kit’s and the family’s wellbeing . . . .
He’d heard it all before.
He was going to hear it again.
But not right now.
After a moment, he scraped himself off the bottom and slowly followed
the bitch up the beach.
He
collapsed onto a patch of odorous undergrowth, the skull of the last
craggy bastard who’d decided he’d make an easy meal still in his hand.
He tightened his grip slightly, hearing it pop under his palm with a
satisfying crunch. The body was back in the bloody pool, along with
thirty or more others and a good deal of his flesh.
A very good deal.
After a few moments, he rolled over, staring at the stars just visible
through the moss laden trees, and swallowed.
Well, you wanted to bleed, he told himself.
He didn’t look around at the empty patch of forest. He knew she wasn’t
there. He’d glimpsed her struggling up the bank, visible only when she
moved, a liquid outline against a night dappled with shifting shadows.
And limping.
Looked like the poor thing had twisted her ankle, he thought, and for
some reason, burst out laughing.
It felt good, despite everything, so he did it some more. He didn’t
know why. Probably something to do with his screwed up psyche, which
had never processed emotion the same as everyone else.
Not even when human. Especially
not when human. Kit stared at the mossy canopy above -- a soggy, drippy
canopy now, as it had started to rain -- and reminded himself that
things could be worse.
He could be a child again, watching a succession of siblings die of one
thing or another. From his sister Mary when he was four, to all his
brothers, one after the other, to his baby sister Jane. Who his parents
had seen fit to marry off when she was a slip of a girl of twelve, and
who had predictably died in childbirth a year later.
He’d only found out about that after he was Changed. He’d returned from
the rigors of his own untimely demise to discover that the Reaper had
done his work on the sweet, cherubic faced child. The one who had
dogged his steps as a toddler, clinging with a chubby hand to his one
pair of good hose until he’d been forced to tell her to stop. And then
crying because he was the only one who’d ever been kind to her, the
only one who saw a daughter as having any value at all.
So
he’d given her the hem of his coat to hold instead, and let her follow
him around. And she had, right up until he went away to school to
please his social climbing harridan of a mother. Then to London, and
beyond . . . .
And
by the time he returned, she was dead. He hadn’t known how to grieve
then, either. But he had known how to kill; oh yes, he had. Like her
fat oaf of a husband, who had wanted her dowry but swore not to touch
her until she was old enough, and had died for his lies.
No, Kit had never learned how to grieve the normal way.
But his would do just fine.
He felt the last great rent in his leg close up and tighten, the
muscles finally getting their act together and reconnecting. He rolled
to his knees – carefully -- and took stock. He was covered in gore, had
lesser wounds all over his body, and had lost a good deal more blood
than was recommended.
But then, so had someone else.
He
was on his hands and knees, his head hanging down almost to the ground,
which was the only reason he caught it. But swamp or not, scent blind
or not, half dead or not, there was one thing a vampire didn’t miss.
And a closer inspection of the tangled weeds and mold and mud beneath
him confirmed it.
Below the smell of his own blood, there was a trace . . .
Of someone else’s.
And,
once again, Heinrich had been right. It was odd. He smeared a bit on
his finger and tasted, just to be sure, and yes. It was familiar in a
way he didn’t understand.
It was also old.
Very old.
He paused for a moment; he had not expected that.
The
few misbegotten half breeds he’d come across had been young and barking
mad. Probably accounted for why someone normally staked them, often
before they reached double digits, the way you’d put down a rabid dog.
For what else could you possibly do with it?
But
that hadn’t happened here. This dhampir had lived three, perhaps four
hundred years, maybe even more; her blood was hard to read. It wasn’t
vampire, it wasn’t human, and even if it had been, he’d never met any
three hundred year old humans to compare. And yet she seemed
functional, at least enough to buy a bag of cursed toys to plague him
with.
He took a moment to absorb that.
And then he called Liam.
Dhampirs. Old ones. What do we know?
Old ones? Liam’s mental voice sounded puzzled. I . . . thought there weren’t any old ones.
So did I, Kit said grimly. Find out.
While Liam communicated with the office, Kit concentrated on that
unusual scent. And discovered another hint further up the bank. It was
barely a single drop of blood, too small even to see.
But then, he didn’t need to see it, did he?
And
it seemed she had more than a twisted ankle to worry about.
We have no dhampirs on record older than sixty years, Liam informed him, a short while later, while Kit was nosing through the undergrowth. Although,
I’m sorry to say, our information is not complete. They disappear into
the human population too easily, switching locations, identities, even
appearance at the drop of a hat. And we don’t have the same advantages
when tracking them as we do for our people. We usually only hear about
them when they cause trouble.
“Oh, this one is good at that,” Kit murmured.
This one? You mean you’ve found her? Liam’s mental voice sharpened.
Let’s say I plan to make her acquaintance shortly.
Yes, sir. I can have backup to your position in --
No. Kit got unsteadily to his feet, putting weight on the newly regrown muscle. It held. I’ll call if I need you.
Sir --
That will be all, Kit
said, and ended the communication. That wasn’t going to help get him
out of the dog house, but right then, he didn’t care. He took another
moment to check out the evening’s souvenirs, but none were an issue.
Except for the leg, which was still spongy, but would heal on the way.
He
set off through the forest at a slow jog, dodging trees and ducking
under vines, finding the more or less solid ground between patches of
marsh. His speed picked up as he learned how to move here, as his
strength started to return, as his nose woke up in a way it never had,
attuned to the faint traces of blood that might as well have been a
trail outlined in neon.
As he started closing in.
Chapter Nine
Dory
gagged; it looked like her nose hadn’t shut down, after all. Although
she really wished it had. Oh, God.
She’d discovered the source of the stench: hundreds of dead fish washed
up on the banks, and more in the water. It made the swim over just as
much fun as the rest of this trip had been. But at least her other half
was behaving.
It was probably off throwing up somewhere.
Dory
could see the fish because the shack was brilliantly lit, with beams
spearing out to illuminate the light rain that had started to fall, a
small dock, and a speedboat. The boat was loaded down with familiar
looking boxes. Dory climbed up a rusty ladder, and walked over to check
one out.
It wasn’t full of pills.
She
pulled out a nice, thick glass bottle with a grinning death’s head on
the label. Or maybe not quite dead. Because the grin was a little too
malevolent, and the eyes were a little too aware. And then a beam from
inside the house lit up a name in brilliant acid green: Zombie’s Bite.
Huh.
Dory opened it and took a sniff.
Rum.
She took a tiny taste.
Still rum.
She
pulled open another box: twelve more bottles in between cardboard
separations, so they didn’t knock against each other. She assumed the
rest of the boxes were the same, since they all bore identical labels.
She sat on her haunches and thought for a minute.
Box
after box of rum . . . in a swamp . . . full of dead fish and crazy
gators.
Nope, she had nothing.
Better go ask somebody, then.
The
shack turned out to be roomier than she’d thought, with an office type
set up: desk, a few empty filing cabinets, boxes of empty glass
bottles. And a label printing machine with a row of grinning death
heads spilling out onto the floor. But no people.
There were none anywhere else, either, like in the two outbuildings she
found on more solid ground behind the house. Just filthy wooden floors
that would never have passed an inspection, rows of dusty barrels, a
gas generator chugging noisily out back. And a big copper still,
gleaming in the gloom, surrounded by a bunch of different sized tanks.
Looked like somebody was bootlegging.
Probably the guys who drove up in a large truck a moment later,
rumbling down an old dirt road.
Dory
quickly drew back into the shadows, because raindrops were visible on
her suit. But it didn’t matter. They were too busy arguing to pay any
attention to her.
“--
the hell it have to be last night?” she heard someone say, before the
truck even stopped rolling.
“Because we’re done after tonight. And we still got a ton to do and I
wanted to cross something off the list.”
“So
you flush all the wastewater?” a guy asked, getting out of the cab.
“You couldn’t have found anything else --”
“It needed to be done.”
“Yeah, tonight.
When we wouldn’t have to smell all the fish it kills! God,” the guy
stared around. He was big, burly and wearing a sweaty Hawaiian shirt
and an even sweatier baseball cap. He took off the cap and wiped his
forehead, but it didn’t seem to help. So he took it off again and
smacked the other guy, who had just come around the truck, on the head.
“Cut
it out!” the smaller man said, frowning. “Anyway, it turned out to be
useful, didn’t it?”
“Useful?”
“Yeah. The dead fish lured up a bunch of gators, so I used them to test
the last batch.”
“You gave rum to the gators?”
“Well, I had to make sure it wouldn’t poison anyone, didn’t I?” the
little guy asked, working to get the chain off the warehouse door. “Too
high of a concentration and you don’t get zombified, you get dead.”
“Bet
the bokors’d like that,” the third guy, tall and lanky and chewing
tobacco, piped up.
Hawaiian shirt frowned. “Why would they like that?”
“Well, they like dead things, don’t they?”
“So?”
“So then they’d be deader.”
The big guy just looked at him for a moment.
And then the ball cap came into play again.
Dory
stared at them. They looked like the three stooges, only not as bright.
The bokors running this operation either hadn’t arrived yet, or were
long gone. But there was a better than average chance that these guys
knew where they were.
She
moved out into the opening between the house and the warehouses, which
was maybe the size of a couple basketball courts. It was well lit, with
the house lights spilling in from one side, and security lamps over the
warehouse doors on the other, not that it mattered. They still weren’t
paying any attention to her.
But
somebody else was. A prickle over her skin was the only warning she
received before she was suddenly airborne. She went flying -- literally
-- across the open space, landed hard, and rolled --
And was hit again before she could get back to her feet.
Only
this time, the angle was different, the angle was down, and that left
her prone and pummeled for a hellish few seconds -- which is a long
damned time when something that feels like an industrial pile driver is
smashing into you. But, like most dhampirs, Dory had her Sire’s
resiliency, along with a good deal of his strength. And five hundred
years of dirty tricks to go along with them.
So
she threw a handful of mud in her assailant’s eyes, stabbed him in the
neck when he reared back, and then kicked in the side of his head on
the way back to her feet --
And
hesitated, because she finally caught a glimpse of his face.
The master.
Oh, holy shit.
And then she was airborne again.
“Did
you hear somethin’?” the short guy asked, right before Dory smashed
down onto the barrel he’d been rolling. “Woah!” he sprang away. “Woah!
What was that?”
The
barrel rolling over me, Dory thought blearily, from under a couple
hundred pounds of liquor.
“What’s the matter? You hit something?” the big guy asked, from inside
the cab of the truck, which he was trying to back up to the door.
“No, something hit me!”
“Ghosts,” Lanky said, staring around, wide-eyed.
“Don’t start,” Hawaiian shirt warned him. “You know damned well --”
“If
there’s zombies, why can’t there be ghosts?” Lanky demanded. “It’s the
same thing in’it?”
“It is not the same thing!”
“How you figure that?”
“Because necromancy is based on known magical principles. It’s like
science, right? Ghosts are just superstition. Stories for the weak
minded.”
“Well, I believe in ‘em,” Lanky said, as Dory pushed the barrel off
her, causing it to roll back up the ramp.
“I rest my case.”
“I .
. . think I saw something too,” Short Stuff whispered, his eyes on the
gravity-defying barrel.
“What the hell did I do to get stuck with you two?” Hawaiian shirt
demanded.
And then someone snatched Dory off the ground.
Wonder who, she thought blearily, and plowed a fist into his face.
She
actually tried to plow it through his face and out the back of his
head. Which might have worked if he was human, considering the power
she put behind it. But, of course, he wasn’t, and it mostly just seemed
to piss him off.
Because the next few second’s beating was right up there with the worse
she’d ever had. One shoulder went numb, her already rattled head was
rattled some more, and she possibly broke a rib or three. Which was a
good trick considering that hers had the tensile strength of tempered
steel.
But then, so did the fist bashing into them.
At
least it was until she grabbed the barrel the two guys were still
staring at and smashed it over the madman’s head, drenching him in 150
proof and sending him stumbling backwards into the clearing.
And then threw on her lighter.
“What the -- what’s going on back there?” Hawaiian shirt demanded,
leaning out of the cab, trying to see.
“Ghosts!” Lanky said again, staring at the flaming barrel.
The
short guy didn’t say anything; he just stood there with his mouth
hanging open.
“Damn it!” Hawaiian shirt told them. “The boss’ll be here any minute
and you two are horsing --”
Dory
stopped listening. Sorry buddy, she thought, bending over and clutching
her stomach, while watching the vamp go up in flames. But if it’s you
or me, it’s gonna be you.
Of
course, she could be wrong, she thought, as the barrel suddenly
exploded outward, sending pieces of burning wood flying in all
directions. And leaving a vamp standing there in an incandescent mass
of blue fire. And fury.
Okay, you don’t see that every day, Dory thought, and moved.
Up
the ramp, to where a bunch of barrels on a rack were waiting to be
loaded. A shove sent it tumbling over, and they hit the dirt, some
falling out and one of them busting open. And one is all it took.
The
gushing alcohol hit the burning shards, and a moment later, the whole
area went up with a whoosh. The men started screaming and running
around, except for Hawaiian shirt, who gunned the truck, and only made
things worse when he forgot it was in reverse. He plowed into the fire,
panicked, and then shot back the other way. And smashed into a dark
blue Mercedes that Dory hadn’t noticed because it had arrived in the
midst of the chaos.
The bokors, she thought, and started for the car --
And the next thing she knew, she was in the water.
It
happened exactly that fast, between one blink and the next, although
the water wasn’t exactly close. But a motivated master can cross a lot
of ground in a hurry. Even while carrying a woman that he clearly
intended to drown.
Or
maybe the plan was to beat her to death; Dory couldn’t really tell. Or
maybe he just didn’t care at this point. And ding, ding, ding, we have
a winner, she thought, as her head and the bottom of the river came
into brutal contact -- repeatedly.
But
the river bottom, while muddy and horribly full of fish guts, was not
actually lethal. Not even when the master found one of those damned
roots to slam her head against instead, with the enthusiasm of someone
trying to drive it right on through. But that didn’t work either, which
would have had Dory pretty smug except that he didn’t have to kill her.
He
just had to keep on trying until she ran out of air, because the fish
soup they were swimming in appeared to have smothered the flames.
Like it was about to do to her.
Dory
thrashed and fought and kicked and tried to bite. She tried every
damned trick she knew, and invented a few new ones on the spot. She got
his testicles in a clench once, but he slipped out of it before she
could rip them off. And he wasn’t just fast; he was strong and
determined, and didn’t seem to care how much damage he took, since he’d
heal in time. Time she wouldn’t have, because her struggles were
getting weaker and her vision was getting darker, to the point that all
she could see above her were the silhouettes of floating fish, dancing
flames, and an agitated surface she was never going to reach again
because she couldn’t break his hold.
She couldn’t break it.
The
realization sunk in like a stone in her gut. Along with the fact that
her bag was back in the clearing where she’d dropped it, and didn’t
contain anything likely to work on this son of a bitch anyway. And she
was getting tired, while he had a whole family to draw strength from
and --
And it was going to be her, wasn’t it?
And then he released her.
It
took Dory, who was more than half drowned, a few seconds to realize
what had happened. And then another few to orient herself, and thrash
back to the surface. And some more to gasp air into oxygen-starved
lungs, while they simultaneously tried to cough up mud and muck and
freaking fish guts --
And what the hell?
She
didn’t know. She stared around, bleary eyed and disoriented, still
gasping for air. But all she saw was a merrily burning warehouse, a
bunch of dark figures running around backlit by the flames, and one
lone man standing on the pier, his arms raised --
And
a speedboat that almost took off what remained of her head.
Dory
dove, feeling the rush of water as it sped by, missing her by inches.
She swam back to the surface a moment later, in time to see the boat
disappear around a bend in the river and be hidden by a clump of trees.
But not before she’d glimpsed the crazed master at the wheel, blackened
and bloody and almost bald --
And speeding away from her.
For a moment, she just stared after him blankly.
Had
he thought she was dead? She’d still been fighting. How had he
missed that? And where the heck was he going?
Dory
decided she could figure it out later. Like after she dealt with this,
whatever the hell this was. She swam and then waded back on shore,
pausing only to take stock.
It
wasn’t encouraging. Unless you’d just come to terms with your own
mortality, that is. In which case, every pain, every dislocation, every
sharp, stabbing sensation -- hell, even the smell -- was suddenly okay. Was better than okay. Was pretty damned amazing, in fact, and where the fuck was that bokor?
She
rounded the house again, limping and still breathless, but didn’t find
him. The sleek Mercedes was gone, and the man she’d briefly seen on the
pier must have gone with it. Because all she saw was his henchmen,
still at work, now all but throwing whatever booze they could find into
the back of the truck.
Dory
jumped up onto the hood, the cab and then the back. Lanky was coming
around the side at a jog, until Dory reached down and plucked him up by
the ponytail. Leaving him dangling off the edge of the truck, three or
more feet off the ground, and probably in considerable pain.
For some reason, she wasn’t feeling too sympathetic.
“Oh,
God,” he whispered, pale blue eyes darting around, but utterly failing
to see her.
“Not quite,” Dory snarled, and jerked him up to her face.
“Oh God!” he repeated, looking seriously panicked.
“The bokor,” she demanded. “Where did he go?”
“Wh-who are you?” he whispered. “Wh-what are you?” And then, before she
could answer, one of his arms stopped flailing long enough to pull a
little bag out of his shirt and thrust it at her.
Dory looked at it. “What’s that?”
“G-goofer dust.”
“What?”
“Graveyard dust!”
Dory looked at it some more. “What?”
“And
. . . and angelica root! And Devil’s Dung! And ginseng and bluestones
and salt and whiskey!”
“Well, at least I can get behind that last one,” Dory said dryly.
The
man blinked, his eyes still searching fruitlessly for whatever held
him. But he appeared to be farsighted, because even this close, he
never focused. And then he scowled. “That damned Lulu! She charged me
fifty bucks for that bag! Said all malicious spirits, plus the evil eye, plus --”
“Is Lulu one of the bokors?”
“What?” He frowned.
“The people running this operation. I only saw a guy --”
“No,
that was the Reverend. But he doesn’t have time to make gris-gris
anymore. He’s busy.”
“I bet. So where’d he go?”
“B-back to Nawlins. They got a thing tonight --” he frowned some more.
“Hey, why do you care? You’re a ghost.”
Dory
pulled him onto the roof of the truck, slammed him down and whipped her
face screen off. Leaving him staring up in alarm at a disembodied face
floating in the air above him, and glaring down malevolently. “Which is
what you’re going to be unless you start talking,” she told him. “Fast.”
Chapter Ten
Faint moonlight illuminated lily pads and dark water as Kit tore down
the river, his movements as assured as if he’d done it a hundred times.
Cypress roots stuck up here and there, crowding the boat where the
stream was narrower; shallow sandbars lurked just under the surface,
ready to beach him; and some branches hung heavy and too close. Yet he
didn’t hit a single one.
His
actions were swift and sure; his hands on the wheel of the boat never
so much as trembled. But that was the problem. They were bloody well
supposed to!
Like
he was supposed to be able to call on Liam, or Heinrich, or a dozen
others to let them know that something had gone seriously wrong. Yet he
couldn’t. Even his brain didn’t seem to be under his own command.
What
had that dhampir done to him? What kind of magic could do this to
anyone, much less a master? And, most importantly, how did he break it?
He
roared internally, pouring everything he had into getting any kind of
response from his suddenly alien body. And, finally, he did. It was a
tiny thing, and nothing that would actually help. But it felt huge
nonetheless, when he was able to lift his index finger a scant quarter
inch off the steering wheel --
And was promptly slapped down for it -- hard.
His
whole body shook with the rebuke, which hurt more than anything the
dhampir had managed to do to him. It was as if fire licked every cell,
leaving him bent over and clinging to the wheel, to keep from passing
out and falling from the boat. It was terrible.
And terribly useful.
For,
in that moment of crystalline agony, he heard something -- no someone
-- a male voice muttering commands at the back of his mind. Commands
that somehow overrode his own, like someone was using his eyes to see
by the faint moonlight, using his hands to steady out the small craft,
using him . . .
Like a puppet.
Necromancer, Kit thought, the snarl in his mind like bared fangs.
And
immediately, the hold tightened, coiling throughout his body, like a
fist around his throat.
Someone didn’t like him knowing. Someone would have preferred him to
continue blaming that little dhampir. But slick though she might be,
she couldn’t do something like this. He hadn’t thought anyone in the
world could, not even a group of necromancers working together. He was
a first-level master, supposedly one of the most powerful creatures on
earth. This wasn’t possible.
But it was happening, nonetheless.
And
try though he might, he couldn’t seem to make enough difference to so
much as upset the little craft. And now they were slowing, coming up on
a pier jutting out into the water. Where several men waited by a car.
Kit
stopped the boat and leapt onto the pier, his voice greeting them by
name, although he’d never met them. Never even seen them, although he
would never forget them now. He memorized their faces, every crease,
every line, and judging by how many of those there were, they weren’t
using glamouries. That did not bode well for him, but at the moment, he
was less concerned with that that with what they were saying.
“Why did you choose him?” a tall man with a craggy face under an expensive haircut demanded. “Of all people --”
“He
was the only one who drank the rum,” Kit heard himself say. “Her
servants all had wine --”
“Then put it in the wine!”
“We
discussed this,” the second man, a vampire, commented. Older, white
haired, a definite Castilian lisp. Kit didn’t know him, but he hadn’t
met everyone in Alejandro’s entourage. “It’s detectable in wine. Not to
you, perhaps, but to us. It had to be spirits.”
“Don’t lose your nerve, Eric,” Kit added. “This is almost over.”
“Yes, if you can’t hold him!”
“I
can hold him. And it’s better this way.” Kit felt his hand come up, to
stroke his own chin. “Marlowe’s her chief of security. He can go
anywhere, do anything, and no one will question it.”
“Until they try to talk to him mentally, and it doesn’t work! Until she
does --”
“The
concert will keep her attention. He’ll come from behind. She’ll never
know what hit her.”
“And
Mircea?” the Spaniard demanded. “If your consul is removed, but he
remains, this is all for nothing. My master is not willing to meet him
in combat. He has already said, he will not attempt it.”
“Then your master’s a --” Craggy began, before Kit’s hand clamped on
his upper arm.
“He
will not have to,” he told the vampire easily, feeling his face stretch
into a smile. “I’ll turn on Basarab as soon as I’ve finished with her.
If I manage to kill him, all is well. If I don’t,” he shrugged. “I’ll
keep him busy long enough for your lot to do it for me, while
“rescuing” your poor consul from the chaos.”
“And once she is dead? If they capture your avatar?”
“As
soon as Senator Marlowe kills his consul in a dastardly bid for power,
he is dead. His men may not act, but half the senate will be there,
including the consul’s own guards. He won’t live to tell anyone
anything.”
“You
had better be right. My master is risking a great deal --”
“And
we’re not?” the craggy man interrupted. “Do you know what the vampires
will do to us if this blows up? Who they’ll give us to?”
“Yes,” the Spaniard smiled slightly. “I have made his acquaintance.”
“They say he can keep a man alive for weeks before death.”
Months, Kit thought viciously, and wished like hell that the senate’s
chief torturer was here right now.
“Come, gentlemen,” he heard himself say. “We have gone on a long
journey together. Let us not lose our nerve at the final hour.”
“It
is not nerves,” the Spaniard said, bristling. “You said you had thought
of everything, yet you lose track of your intended avatar for several
hours. And when you finally return with him, he is burnt, beaten and
bloody . . . and half bald!”
“Alliteration at its finest!”
“I am perfectly serious, ‘Reverend’,” the Spaniard snapped.
“As
am I. But as you know, the potion does not take effect immediately, and
I had no way of controlling him until it did so. I expected him to be
at his Lady’s side all evening, but circumstances . . . intervened.”
“And if they ‘intervene’ tonight?”
“That is why Eric is here, as a backup should I falter. But I assure
you, that will not be the case. By this time tomorrow, your master will
be in position to challenge for leadership of the North American
Senate, and we,” he glanced at his accomplice, “will be as rich as
Croesus.”
The
other two did not smile back, but they didn’t argue anymore, either.
“Now, let us concentrate on finding me a new tuxedo,” Kit said. “And
perhaps,” he added, looking ruefully up at his singed curls. “A hat.”
Chapter Eleven
Apocalypse -- how appropriate, Dory thought -- was the bar/hangout/hook
up joint for the local sup community. At least, it usually was. But
tonight it was all slickly dressed people, a special concert in honor
of the consuls’ visit, and invitation only.
Dory didn’t have an invitation.
She didn’t have any fucks left, either.
“I
don’t know how you’re going to—urp,” Dreads said, as Dory tossed him up
to the balcony of a nearby building. She waited a moment while a group
of partiers ran by, laughing and slipping on the watery street, while
they all tried to fit under the same umbrella. And then she jumped up
herself.
"Are
you gonna do that again?” Dreads asked, clinging to the balcony as she
looked upward.
“Why?”
“’Cause I want to know if I should throw up now or later!”
“Later,” she told him, and repeated the process.
“Why are we here?” he demanded, as they clambered over the third floor railing. “I told you, I already made the call --”
“And
got nowhere, because the senate isn’t in Vegas right now, it’s here.”
“Yeah, but I left the warning, like you said --”
“And
I appreciate it,” she said, pulling him to the end of the balcony.
There was no railing there, and the club roof was just across a narrow
alley. “Unfortunately, there’s only one guy who might have believed
you, and he’s here.”
“So you’re gonna go warn him?”
“We are.”
“Wait,” he said, looking down three stories at the wet, hard
cobblestones below. “I ain’t Shaft, all right? I won’t do you any good
in there --”
“You won’t have to fight.”
“Then why I gotta go at all?”
“Because invisibility doesn’t work on the nose, especially vampire
ones. An invisible puddle of fish guts, rum and swamp gunk moving
around is going to attract attention -- unless they have somebody to
blame it on. Somebody visible.”
He frowned at her. “So I’m what? A human air freshener?”
“Sort of the reverse,” Dory said, and tossed him onto the roof of the
club.
Predictably, he screamed the whole way. But that turned out to be a
good thing. Because there were a couple guards, one on each side of the
peak, who came over to see what the commotion was about. Giving her a
perfect chance to --
Wait.
Dory
paused, stake in hand, a frown crossing her features. Wait, she couldn’t whack
them, could she? They were technically the good guys, just a couple of
the senate’s vamps who had pissed somebody off enough to get stuck on a
roof in the rain. They didn’t deserve to die for that.
And, okay, that was . . . inconvenient.
She
left Dreads to it, while she started searching through her bag for
something less lethal.
Guns, ammo, plastic explosives . . . .
“Man, I just want to listen to some tunes, you know what I’m sayin’?”
he was telling them. The redhead grabbed his arm. “Hey man, it’s Jazz
Fest, man. Don’t be like that.”
“What do you want to do with the Stoner?” The ginger asked his partner,
whose expensive Jheri Curl was getting ruined by the rain.
“I have a couple ideas.”
The ginger vamp grinned. “You’d get high.”
“I’d
like to get high. This thing was supposed to start an hour ago.”
“When you’re consul, the party starts when you get there,” Ginger said
dryly.
Bowie knife, tire iron, grappling hook, rope . . . .
Jheri looked over the side of the roof. “How about we drop him off, see
how big of a spot he leaves?”
“Hey
man,” Dreads said, looking alarmed. “Naw man, I—I’ll just be goin’ --”
“Thought you wanted to hear some tunes.”
“Well, not if you’re gonna be like that about it.”
Ginger sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re going get more
of these as the night goes on, aren’t we?”
His companion shrugged. “Probably.”
“I need a drink.”
“Won’t help.”
“Hey,” Dreads said, looking back and forth between them. “Hey, but
seriously man, you two wanna get high? ‘Cause I can make that happen.”
The vamps exchanged a look.
Shit, Dory thought, and started searching faster.
“What do you have?” Jheri asked.
“My
man!” Dreads grinned at him, because he really didn’t know much about
vamps, did he? He threw open his jacket. “Ask and ye shall receive. I
got your three b’s: bud, beans and black beauties. I got cocoa puff, if
you want something with a little more kick. I got ‘shrooms that, whew, will get the party started, if you know what I --”
“Take whatever you want,” Jheri told him.
“Take? Naw, man, I’m sellin’. Gotta keep circulatin’, you know? I’ll
drop a little something later --”
“You’ll drop it now.”
“What?”
“It’s like the man said,” Ginger told him, lips twitching. “We only get
high if we get it in a form our systems can handle.”
“W-what form?”
They grinned.
“Oh,
shit!” Dreads said, and gave a panicked look in Dory’s general
direction. “Aren’t you done yet?”
Guess so, she thought.
And staked them.
“The
fuck?” Dreads said, stumbling back as twin bodies collapsed to their
knees in front of him.
“It’s okay,” Dory said, leveraging them to the roof. “You have to take
head and heart to kill them, and I only took --”
“The fuck?”
“--
one, so they’ll live. But they’ll be immobilized until someone removes
the stakes. They’re not powerful enough to --”
“The fuck?”
“Are you going to keep saying that?”
“What the hell you expect? You killed them!”
“They were dead anyway,” she said, picking up her bag and putting a
soothing arm around his shoulders. “Someone will find and unstake them
sooner or later, and until then, they’re really better off.”
“Better?” He craned his neck back around, because Dory was walking him
over to a dormer window.
“Well, it was either that or kill them for good. And they did say they
were bored --”
“I need to puke,” he told her, and really kind of looked it.
“All right.” She waited.
“All right . . . what?”
“Puke. It’s better out here than inside, with a bunch of super
sensitive noses—”
“You . . . you’re the most . . . you . . . damn it!”
Dory
waited some more. He didn’t puke. He just stood there, vibrating
slightly. “You ready?” she finally asked.
“Hell no! But let’s get this damned thing over with!”
“Good answer.” She led the way through the dormer.
Inside was what looked like a breakroom for the staff: cot, arm chair,
small T.V., overflowing ashtray. But no people. Although it was hard to
tell, since the music was loud enough to shake the rafters, making the
whole place seem to move with it. The concert might have waited, but
the party obviously hadn’t, a fact borne out when they slipped into the
hall, which was splashed with blue, pulsing light from a stairwell.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Dory said. “We’re going downstairs and check
it out. If the senator I know is there, we warn him and done. If he
isn’t, he’s probably with the consul. So we keep watch for the vamp and
hope she gets here before he does.”
“And if she don’t?”
“Let’s . . . hope she does,” Dory said, trying to sound upbeat.
Dreads looked like he was going to comment, then changed his mind. Just
as well. She would have had a hard time explaining what she intended to
do about Marlowe since she didn’t know herself.
Among other things, the lanky bastard back in the swamp had informed
her that she wasn’t just dealing with a first-level master which –
hello -- she’d already guessed, but with a senate member. And she
couldn’t take one of those on her best day. As she’d proved when he’d
almost killed her while on fire.
So,
yeah, if he showed up to assassinate the senate leaders -- or any
damned body else -- he was probably going to succeed. Unless she warned
them first. Or suddenly got about ten times stronger, which didn’t seem
likely.
“We
. . . could just leave a note,” Dreads said, looking at her. Like he
knew what she was thinking even though he couldn’t see her face.
And
damn, that sounded really good. But while Dory might not like vamps,
she liked even less the idea of the senate, the one group mostly
keeping them in line, suddenly being in chaos. While a bunch of drug
running assholes ran amuck, plundering at will.
Because that was the plan behind all this. Get their damned rum down
the throat of a master -- any master -- and they could control him, and
thereby his family. Could get them to sign over deeds, empty bank
accounts, and then stake each other once it was over, hiding the
evidence.
And
meanwhile the senate, who was supposed to stop that sort of thing,
would be in disarray, being challenged for control by Alejandro’s
masters. Who thought they were about to have it all: his senate, which
they all but ran anyway, and the North American one. Which would be
vulnerable after the death of its leader, and subject to an antiquated
system of duels to decide on a replacement.
But
in reality, they were being played, too, by bunch of necromancers with
delusions of grandeur. But their delusions were much more likely to
become reality. Because something like this wouldn’t just eviscerate
the senate. If they succeeded, it could alter the power structure of
the entire supernatural community, weakening the vamps, giving the
mages an unprecedented advantage, and throwing off the balance of power
that had kept the peace for centuries.
Mages attacking vamps. Vamps attacking mages. And the necromancers
cleaning up while everyone else fought for their lives.
So,
no, as much as she’d like to leave a warning and get out of there, she
couldn’t. Because she couldn’t know that it would go to the right guy,
or that it would go anywhere at all. Or that it would be in time if it
did.
Dory swallowed. “We’re staying.”
Dreads
sighed. “Okay, but how am I supposed to mingle like this?” He looked
down at his tie dye T-shirt and old jean jacket ensemble.
Dory
took a moment to realize what he meant; fashion had never really been
her thing. But he had a point. Everyone downstairs looked like they’d
just walked out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Dreads was going to
be thrown out on his ass in about ten seconds flat.
And they didn’t exactly have time to go shopping.
“I
don’t need the whole suit,” he told her. “You get me a tux jacket and a
top hat, and I can make it work. Go as a local character, you know?”
“A local character?”
“Yeah, you know. Like Ruthie the Duck Girl.”
“What?”
“Not
what, who. Roller-skating in her wedding gown through the Vieux Carre,
trailed by a bunch of ducks. Ain’t you never seen her?”
“No.” Dory thought she might remember that.
“Or
Chicken Man. Claims to be a voodoo priest, but it’s all show. He ain’t
even a mage. But he always draws a crowd anyway. Not every day you see
somebody bite the head off a live chicken, and drink its blood right
outta the neck.”
“Okay --”
“Or
the Lady with the Cross. She carries a big cross with her everywhere
she goes, and crawls along the sidewalk. They say it’s in penance for
killing her sister --”
“Okay.” Dory stopped him before she got a whole history of the city. “A jacket and a top hat?”
“A
jacket and a top hat. Then I can be . . . Professor Ganja, Vieux Carre
fixture and Jazz enthusiast.” He grinned. “Might even make a few sales.”
Dory nodded. She didn’t like to waste the time, but it would be
a waste if they got thrown out as soon as they showed up. “All right,
check the break room; there was a closet in there. I’ll take this one,”
she told him, and opened the door to a room across the hall.
And met Marlowe coming out of it.
Chapter Twelve
For
a moment, Kit just stared. This close, the invisible creature in front
of him wasn’t, with a head and body that the shifting light was playing
over, like a mannequin made out of glass. But it wasn’t a mannequin; it
was that damned dhampir.
It was that damned dhampir, he thought again, hope dawning.
And then she belted him.
It
was enough to send him staggering backwards, into the little room where
he and his nemesis had been waiting out of sight, so that nothing would
give them away. And where a massive battle had been waged internally
for more than half an hour. Waged and lost, because try as he might, he
couldn’t wrest back control.
Until her fist hit his jaw, almost shattering it. She followed him to
the floor, continuing the abuse because the necromancer obviously had
less experience with combat than with black magic. And Kit wasn’t
helping him, wasn’t even when the bitch broke his arm.
Because, suddenly, he could move.
Him, not his nemesis. It only lasted for a few seconds, while the shock of her assault reverberated through him. But it was enough.
Liam! He screamed mentally.
Sir? Liam’s always calm voice answered immediately. How may I --
The
voice cut off mid-sentence, as a metaphysical fist tightened around
Kit’s neck. And as two physical ones latched onto his throat, trying to
throttle him. Or maybe trying to pop his head off like a cork from a
champagne bottle, because that’s what it felt like.
And
judging by the dhampir’s enthusiasm, she just might have succee ded.
But the
damned bokor had recovered. And while he didn’t have Kit’s knowledge,
he did have his strength. Which he used to throw the woman off,
violently enough to send her stumbling back into the corridor. Where
she grabbed the carpet runner and jerked, at the same moment that his
body tried to follow up on the advantage, sending him sprawling.
And then
rolling down the hallway, wrapped up like a sausage in a bun -- or a
vamp in a carpet -- faster than the time it took to think the words.
Ha, he thought vaguely.
Good one.
But not
good enough. She came at him with a stake, lightning fast, the
invisible suit making the damned thing look like it was levitating. And
all right, he had a new nightmare now, Kit thought, right before his
fist punched through layers of carpet and grabbed her.
The bokor
had been aiming for her neck, but Kit managed to throw him slightly
off, resulting in an Alien-like grab to the face. Predictably, she sank
her fangs into his flesh, practically separating the ball of his thumb
from everything else, and forced the release. But she couldn’t
capitalize on it before the bokor backhanded her with every ounce of
force Kit had.
She
landed over by the stairs, on top of some Rasta who hadn’t gotten out
of the way fast enough, and didn’t immediately get back up again.
Come
on, Kit thought urgently, as the bokor fought with the wooly embrace.
You’re better than that! Didn’t you almost roast me alive? Didn’t you
break my arm, something no man has managed to do since my Change?
Didn’t you throw me into a lake of giant reptiles? Come on, get up!
And
she was obviously trying. But she was also obviously hurt, and it must
have been bad. Because she was floundering around like a drunk when she
had to know he was coming for her, was coming for her now.
And
he would have. But the moment he tore free of the confining carpet, the
music from downstairs was drowned out by a flourish of trumpets, like
something out of a medieval movie. But it wasn’t. It was that
theatrical bitch Alejandro, who insisted on acting like a king instead
of a consul.
And who, right now, probably had a queen alongside him.
The
bokor sent Kit careening through the nearest door, into a room with a
view, to confirm it. And sure enough, a horse drawn carriage had just
pulled up in front of the building, the neon glow from rows of club
signs reflecting in its shiny black surface. And off of the top of the
wet umbrella a footman was holding out, to keep the emerging consul dry.
Who
then turned with exaggerated, old world courtesy, to help his lady
descend.
No, not his lady, Kit seethed. My
lady. And not just his consul, but his master, the one who had Changed
him, the one who had elevated him far beyond his humble beginnings, the
one it was his duty to defend above all others.
Like it had once been his duty to Jane.
The
rage hit him suddenly, an all-consuming tide of white hot fury. It
surprised the bokor, who apparently wasn’t used to controlling through
that kind of emotion. Or feeling it, judging by his mental yelp.
Welcome to my world, Kit thought viciously, and screamed a warning: To the queen!
And was heard.
Below him, the dark haired beauty in a crimson evening dress and rubies
jerked her head up, looking straight at him. And two dozen lights in
his mental landscape, every Child he had in the area, suddenly flared
brilliantly, like novas in the night sky. Because they’d heard him, too.
Unfortunately, they also heard something else.
There’s a problem. Don’t let anyone through but me. The command flashed across his mind -- and outward to the family -- an instant before the connection shut down hard.
No, Kit thought, in disbelief. No!
Yes, the bokor told him nastily, jerking him away from the window. I
can’t make a connection for you, but I can damned well control one if
you leave it open. Now, let’s go see your lady, shall we? After all,
she’s expecting you.
Chapter Thirteen
“You
don’t look so good,” Dreads said, helping Dory back to her feet.
At least, that’s what
she thought he said. It was a little hard to tell, since his voice
sounded both near and far away at the same time. Like the corridor that
was telescoping in and out and in and out and --
She was so screwed.
She
grabbed the stair railing and hung on for dear life, while Dreads
talked some more.
She
wasn’t really listening, finding it a little hard to concentrate with
what felt like half her skull caved in, but she didn’t need to. There
was only one thing that a sane person would be telling her right now,
only one thing she ought to be doing, because this wasn’t a fight she
could win.
And dying here wasn’t going to help anybody.
But
something else might, she thought, as Dreads bent over to pick up his
stash, some of which had dropped from his coat when she crashed into
him.
Including a familiar little bottle of small, white pills.
They
were the ones she’d picked up in the bokor’s shop, and given to Dreads
when she sent him to warn the senate. She hadn’t known the whole damned
bunch was here, but they had a regional office in New Orleans, and he
was supposed to go there with the evidence if the phone call didn’t
work. And he had, which is where she’d found him, kicking his heels and
waiting for someone to talk to because everyone was here.
And now so were the pills.
She grabbed them with shaking hands, trying to get the cap off while
watching the door that Marlowe had just disappeared through.
“You said these take a couple hours to work,” she interrupted Dreads,
who was still talking. “Is there any way to speed it up?”
“Speed it up?”
“Yes, speed it up!” Dory said, still fighting with the cap because her
hands didn’t seem to work right. “Is there any way to make it take
effect faster?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, it’s not recommended --”
“How?”
“Okay, so there was this guy. He came into the shop one day --”
“The short version!” Dory said, finally managing to pop the cap off.
Dreads blinked. “You take more of them.”
“How many?”
“Depends on how fast you want ‘em to work. They’re not like human
drugs; they don’t got to work their way through your system, you know?
They’re a key that opens up your magic so the spell can tell it where
to go. But having most of your magic drain into one thing all at once
is kind of . . . unfun . . . so the pills have time release bits in ‘em
to stretch it out. Some go to work as soon as you take ‘em, but others
--
“So
if I take more pills, I’ll get more of the bits that trigger
immediately,” Dory summed up.
“Yeah. But like I said, that’s not rec -- what are you doing?” he
demanded, when she poured the entire contents of the bottle into her
palm.
“Taking all of them.”
He grabbed her wrist. “All of them? You got a death wish?”
“No. But I need a boost and I need it now --”
“Well, get it some other way!”
“There is no other way!”
“Listen to me!” he said holding on for dear life. “Responsible drug
use, okay? A pill tells your magic to reroute to one place. But that’s most of your magic not all of
your magic, ‘cause you’re a magical creature and you need some of it to
live. Too many pills and you reroute too much and nothing’s gonna work
right, if at all.”
Dory
paused. Man had a point. “How many can I safely take, than?”
He
waved his free hand around. “How should I know? People don’t do this!”
“Guess!”
“No
more than five.” He watched her pour most of the pills back in the
bottle, and swallow his best guess dosage. But he didn’t look happy. “I
don’t even know if they’ll work right on you. We don’t get dhampirs --”
“They won’t work unless you say the incantation. So say it.”
“I . . . what?”
“The spell! That activates the pills.”
“You want me to do it?”
“Who
else?” Dory said, her voice a little shrill, because she was suddenly
feeling . . . really weird. “I’m not a mage!”
“Well, neither am I. I’m mean I am, you know, technically, but --”
She grabbed him. “Say. The. Spell.”
“And
if I mess it up?” he stared at her, a little wall-eyed. “With that much
stuff in you, who knows what might --”
“You’re not going to mess it up. You fought zombies today. And a crazed
dhampir. And eluded a crap ton of master vamps, some of them Hounds.
You can do this!”
He
stared at her for what felt like a year, but was probably only a couple
seconds. And then he wet his lips. “So what do you want? I mean, where
you want your magic to—shit!”
That
last was in response to Marlowe, who had just barreled out of the room,
heading straight for the stairs.
“Strength!” Dory yelled, and crashed into him.
* * *
Kit
could have kissed her. Filthy, misbegotten half breed she might be, but
she was a stubborn filthy,
misbegotten half breed. As evidenced when she smashed into him, hard
enough to knock him to the floor. And by the dozen strikes that hit
down like machine gun fire all around his weaving and bobbing head. The
last of which --
Punched through the floor.
“It’s working!” the Rasta yelled, from by the stairs. “It’s working!”
“That was me!” she snarled, ripped her bleeding hand back out of the
hole. “You haven’t said the damned incantation yet!”
“Oh,
right.” He looked around. “Hey, have you seen that paper?”
“You don’t have it memorized?”
“I don’t do magic, okay? I just sell the stuff --”
“Then find it! It was just here!”
“Shit,” he said, and started looking around for something. But the
bokor didn’t seem to like that, and leapt for him, using Kit’s agility
to all but levitate off the floor. And to cross the small space between
one heartbeat and the next and grab for the man using Kit’s newly
mended broken arm.
Which the dhampir promptly broke again.
“Son
of a bitch!” he said, and wasn’t sure if it was him or his nemesis.
“No,
just a bitch,” the girl growled, and threw him through a doorway.
Kit
would have been back on his feet in a split second, but the bokor
wasn’t him. And while he might be controlling a vampire body, he was
still thinking -- and reacting -- more like a human. The dhampir
wasn’t.
Which was how Kit found himself sliding on his back across a slick wood
floor before plowing his head into a wall. And then through it, when she grabbed him before the bokor could react and started trying to force him through a nonexistent hole. Repeatedly.
There’s a window right there, Kit thought blearily, right before his
head and shoulders burst through the solid, old fashioned construction.
And out into the open air, leaving him to get splashed in the face by
the runoff from the roofline. He thought she might leave it there,
using the wall to trap him as she had the rug --
But no.
Because the next moment, he was falling two stories onto a bunch of
parked cars. Make that formerly parked, he revised, as the Lincoln
whose trunk he’d just landed on gave a surprised lurch. And took off
with a screech of the wheels, blasting away from the curb fast enough
to almost throw him onto the ground.
Almost, but not quite.
Because the bokor’s attention was on the dhampir, who had just jumped
onto the roof of another car, taking a shrieking Rasta along with her.
While Kit was on a car speeding away from his lady, and any harm he
might do her. And he damned well intended to stay that way.
He’d
landed butt down, half on the trunk and half on the back window, and
there weren’t a lot of hand holds. So he made some. He grasped hold of
the window openings on both sides of the car, dug his fingers through
the metal of the roof, and held on for dear life.
The
bokor realized what he was doing about the time that a VW bug came
screeching around a corner after them, nicking a lamppost in the
process because it was driving on the sidewalk for some reason. And
then veering off and skimming a brick wall on the other side. Kit could
see the dhampir yelling at the Rasta, who was behind the wheel but
clearly didn’t know how to drive.
But he knew how to floor it, because they were gaining fast.
And still arguing.
“--
pockets?” Floated back to Kit over the sound of tire squeals.
“I can’t . . . and drive!”
“You can’t drive anyway!”
“Oh, great, that’s what I get . . . helping.”
“You
haven’t helped yet! Now turn out your pockets and find the --”
“You turn them out! I have to watch the --”
They smashed into the back of Kit’s car.
The
dhampir, who’d started going through the man’s jacket, looked up in
surprise.
And
the next second, she was on the hood of the car, a slender figure
rippling with neon and spotted with rain, balancing for a second with
vampire-like ease on the wildly swerving vehicle. Before leaping at
Kit, stake in one hand and knife in the other, like someone who had
done this before. And fast enough that, if he hadn’t managed to get his
legs up in time, the evening could have ended right there.
As
it was, she went flying back into the Bug, hitting hard enough to
shatter the front windshield. And to send it swerving even more wildly
along the road than before. And then crashing into the Lincoln again,
when the Rasta hit the gas instead of the brake.
Throwing her right back onto Kit.
They
stared at each other for a second, almost nose to nose, something
neither had expected. And then the bokor was throwing her off and
trying to stamp her into the space between the cars, so that the Bug
would run her over. But that required splitting his attention between
Kit and the dhampir, and fighting two opponents at the same time didn’t
seem to be his forte. Because Kit’s hands stayed where they were.
That
left him fighting only with Kit’s legs, which nonetheless caught the
dhampir a savage blow, sending her flying onto the Bug’s bumper and
then jumping --
And missing, because the car they were in suddenly sped up.
It
was raining harder now, which had mostly cleared the streets. That was
lucky considering that they were all but flying through the narrow
lanes of Old Town, screeching around corners and threatening to turn
over. While Kit fought a terrible battle with the bokor for control of
his own hands.
The
creature finally managed to pry one up despite everything Kit could do
to stop him. Only to have to let it go again when he realized what Kit
already had: that the little dhampir hadn’t missed, after all. She had
caught onto their fender and was being dragged along behind the car.
Yes! Kit thought. Yes, you reckless bitch, come get me!
And
she was. The next moment, she pushed off from the road and grabbed
Kit’s right foot. And then his left trouser leg, and then his still
tender right thigh, causing him to gasp in pain as she used his body
like a ladder to pull herself up. The bokor started flailing his legs
around again, but she had a good grip now, and was riding them like a
bucking bronco at the fair.
Until the bokor finally realized that he didn’t have to figure out how
to kill the dhampir; he could simply order his puppet to do it for him.
Kit
felt himself automatically dropping into slow-mo, everything going calm
and quiet. He could suddenly see individual rain drops sluicing down
around him, see the panic in the Rasta’s eyes as he stared at them, see
the dhampir’s stake headed for his chest. And her surprise when it hit
metal, because Kit had just moved to the side, not hurrying, taking his
time.
Unlike a moment later, when he turned the full force of his speed and
fury on her.
* * *
Dory
suddenly remembered why fighting this guy the normal way wasn’t a great
idea. He dodged a blow, jerked his tie off, and wrapped it around her
neck in a single, almost impossible to see motion. And just that fast,
she was choking to death.
It was like the river all over again, only this time, she was
suffocating in open air. But none of it was getting down her throat,
and try as she might, she couldn’t shake him. This is why you fight the
old ones with toys, she reminded herself, as stamping on his feet
didn’t work and stabbing his calf – repeatedly -- didn’t work and then
an arm went around hers, holding her in place, and she couldn’t get
loose and she couldn’t breathe.
And then someone started blowing a horn.
Dreads, she realized, in the car behind her, and he was laying it on.
Why, she didn’t know, since the vampire wasn’t likely to be spooked by
a car horn. But someone else was.
Dory
didn’t know what the driver of the Lincoln had thought about all this,
but each crash had caused him to speed up, maybe trying to outrun the
crazy Bug on his tail. But that hadn’t worked, which must have panicked
him even more. And when Dreads started all the commotion, it was the
last straw.
He
floored it, despite the fact that they were coming up on a curve, the
big car taking it on two wheels. The Bug, which was not as heavy or
aerodynamic as the Lincoln, didn’t handle it so well, flipping onto its
side before skidding towards the nearest light post. Which fortunately
caught it before it slammed into a shop.
The Lincoln’s passengers weren’t so lucky.
Dory
was never entirely sure what happened next. She knew she was thrown
free, knew she rolled into a very hard brick wall, knew she managed to
rip the damned garrote off her neck before it finished killing her. But
other things were a little sketchier.
Like
how Dreads magically appeared at her side, or why the vamp hadn’t come
over to finish the job, or why she kept going back down every time she
tried to stand up.
Black outs. She was having mini blackouts, she realized, probably due
to lack of oxygen, and that wasn’t good. Like the fact that her senses
seemed to have cut out on her. Dreads was talking, as usual, she could
see his mouth moving, but no sound was coming out.
And
then the vamp was there, grabbing her up, and this was it, wasn’t it?
This was how she went out.
Fuck it, Dory thought savagely.
Make him feel it at least.
And
she did. An upward swipe of her arms broke his hold, but instead of
running she grabbed him back and flung him through a closed shop
window. And then dove after him, picking him up again amid glass and
wood and tourist tees, and slinging him with all her might at a very
solid brick wall.
And right on through it.
She
stared, not understanding, because that wasn’t what usually happened
when she threw a guy at a wall. But he was already coming at her again
and there was no time to think. Just to growl and run to meet him,
catching his fist in her hand, forming the proverbial immovable object
and irresistible force. Because for a moment, they just stayed like
that.
And then she forced it back.
The
look on his face was almost comical, but Dory wasn’t feeling very
funny. She snarled and picked him up, body slammed him, and then threw
him at the wall on the other side of the alley. This one didn’t break.
It
did, however, leave a vamp-shaped indentation in century’s old brick,
like the one she left when he came off the wall with a roar and
returned the favor. They proceeded down the alley, trading off full
body slams, and leaving a set of modern art sculptures behind them,
madness worked into stone. And somewhere along the way, Dory figured
out what Dreads must have been saying.
And then she spotted him at the end of the alley.
“The
pills!” she yelled, having just buried the vamp in brick again.
“What?”
Marlowe tore free and came after her, and she slung him into a wrought
iron fence, because she’d run out of wall. “Bring me the rest of the
pills!”
“You
don’t need any more pills! You gonna die if I give you any more pills!”
“I’m gonna die if you don’t!”
“Goddamnit!” he glared at her. But he came at a run, just as Marlowe
grabbed her again.
“You missed your turn,” he seethed.
“You
know . . . I never did learn . . . proper manners,” Dory panted, and
shoved him back at the fence. And ripped a section of old ironwork out
of the concrete, bolts and all, and started rolling him up in it. Like
the carpet, she thought, giggling hysterically, because she was high as
fuck. And because it was funny, a carpet full of pissed off vamp that
was snarling and snapping and trying to bite. And ripping off solid
iron pieces until she started hitting him in the head with one,
repeatedly. And then Dreads was there.
“When you do . . . the incantation . . . this time,” she told him,
“send it all . . . to hearing.”
He
threw up his hands. “But I just told it to go to strength! And you
can’t split it like that! Least not right after you just --”
“It’s not for me.”
“What?”
“It’s for him.”
“Him?” Dreads regarded the captive, snarling vampire. “But he ain’t
taken any pills.”
Dory
smiled and grabbed Marlowe’s remaining curls. “Give me a minute.”
Conclusion
A
baton hit the steel bars of the cell like a gunshot. Kit jumped off the
filthy bench and gave a little scream. And looked around, wild-eyed.
“That was loud, wasn’t it?” The dhampir asked, from the opposite bench.
“But I guess everything’s kind of loud to you right now, huh?”
“You bitch,” he whispered.
She
moved her bench slightly, and the ear piercing screech-scratch-squawk
of the protesting metal made him shudder and sit back down. “Uh huh.”
“You
two done?” the guard demanded. “’Cause you got a visitor.”
“About bloody time,” Marlowe said shakily. He didn’t understand what
had taken his men this long. He hadn’t been able to call them -- hadn’t
been able to do anything since that damned dhampir shoved half a bottle
of pills down his throat. Except get his ass kicked most of the way
across New Orleans.
Until the last of his strength drained away, leaving him sprawled in an
alley, half dead and weak as a kitten. Too weak to hear the damned
bokor anymore, but also too weak to defend himself. Including against
the two overweight cops who found them, still feebly trying to gouge
each other’s eyes out, maybe an hour later.
They’d been in jail ever since, cozied up to drunks and prostitutes and
a guy in a feather bra who kept singing Cole Porter songs.
But now his men were here.
Finally!
Only they weren’t.
Kit
looked up to see a handsome senator, the rich nap of his tuxedo fabric
-- bespoke, of course -- and the gleam of gold from his cufflinks
looking completely out of place amidst the grime. But his smile was as
easy as always, like the subtle pass of a folded bill to the cop. Who
pocketed it on his way out.
“Why
is he leaving?” Marlowe asked, grabbing the bars. “Where are my men?
Damn it, Mircea! Get me out of here!”
Mircea’s dark eyes swept over him, and Kit could swear he saw amusement
lurking in their depths. “You don’t look as bad as I expected.”
“Did you hear me? I said --”
“I
heard you, although it was difficult.” He pulled over a chair and sat
down, crossing his legs and taking out a gold cigarette case. “Is there
a reason we’re whispering?”
“I
can’t talk louder than this without giving myself a migraine!” Marlowe
hissed, hearing every syllable reverberate in his already bruised mind.
He shot the dhampir a look. God, when he got out of here, when he got
his power back, what he wasn’t going to --
“Cigarette?”
“I don’t want a damned cigarette! I want out!”
“Well, I’ll take one, love,” feather bra said, smiling charmingly as he
leaned past Marlowe.
Mircea obliged, and even lit the damned thing for him. Why, Kit didn’t
know. He’d given up figuring the creature out centuries ago.
He
was sitting back in his chair now, watching Kit through a haze of
smoke, one of those annoying half smiles on his face. Mircea did love
his little jokes. And Kit clearly wasn’t getting out of here until this
one had played out.
“Your men are well, as is your lady,” Mircea said. “The former are
rounding up the last of a group of nefarious types, while the latter .
. . is having a talk with our friend Alejandro.”
“He isn’t our friend!”
“No?
Perhaps not. But he seemed . . . unhappy . . . with some of the same
people we are. Including some of his own court, one of whom appears to
have been in this up to his formerly intact neck.”
“If
we discuss this elsewhere, you won’t need euphemisms,” Kit said,
annoyed.
Mircea smiled brilliantly. “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s something of a game
that way, isn’t it?”
“Mircea --”
“Rather like the games certain men have been playing with us. It seems
you were right: some of Alejandro’s people were engaging in illicit
activities, including running drugs into our territory. The drugs were
mostly benign; they were merely trying to get a foothold in the market
here. But one of the men they were using for distribution seems to have
been cleverer than most, and started tweaking the formula. He
eventually found a version that worked . . . on a more widespread
clientele. But then, I don’t have to tell you about that, do I?”
“Damn it, Mircea! Did you catch that son of a bitch?”
“Yes
and no. There were two in this particular charade, one of whom is
currently enjoying the tender embraces of our friend Jack.”
Marlowe smiled.
“He
was the most important, as it turns out, as the new formula was his
creation. He intended to use it locally, on a few of our wealthier
friends, in order to pay off some gambling debts. And to fund a rather
expensive set of tastes --”
“And the other?”
“In
a moment. As I said, this man, Eric Montrose, is local, and small time.
He stumbled across something, however, that wasn’t, and was contacted
some months ago about . . . expanding . . . his ambitions. He wisely
did not give his new partners the formula, however, and his supply was
burnt up in his shop this evening, all that didn’t go into the rum.”
“And what happened to the rum?”
“Some of it went up in flames, too. The rest is washing slowly out to
sea. Along with the three men who worked for Montrose.”
“And the other? The one who . . . inconvenienced . . . me?”
“The Reverend, as he was known, has suddenly vanished.”
Marlowe snarled.
“Yes, I know. But it wasn’t your Hounds who are to blame. We believe he
may be . . . better connected . . . than his dupes. Quite a bit better
connected.”
The
Black Circle, Marlowe thought. Yes, this reeked of them. As if regular
mages weren’t bad enough, his department also had to contend with the
slimly, magic-addicted, completely unscrupulous bastards that populated
the magical underworld.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kit said. “We’ll find him. I’ll find him. He killed Allen.”
“Yes.” Mircea’s expression turned grave. “I hoped you had reasoned that
out by now.”
“It
wasn’t too bloody hard! I had him checking out Montoya, our senatorial
friend. I suspected he might be behind the recent upswing in . . .
illicit activities . . . in the area, but needed proof. Allen must have
come a little too close to getting it, so they hired a dhampir to take
him out. And when she failed, they dosed him up and sent him to her
doorstep, like a goddamned present, to make sure she succeeded!”
“I
didn’t succeed. He killed himself; I told you that,” the creature said.
Kit
ignored her. “What I can’t understand is why they sent him to her after
he came under their control. They could have had him kill himself
anywhere, including hundreds of miles away. Why do it here? Unless they
wanted me to spend hours on a wild goose chase, until their noxious
brew took effect!”
“No,
they dosed him in the afternoon, before you touched the rum,” Mircea
murmured.
“Then why? What was the point?”
Mircea stubbed out his cigarette, and fastidiously tossed it in the
trash, despite the floor being a muddy mess. “To cause further
dissention in our ranks, most likely.”
“Dissention?” Kit frowned. “What dissention?”
Mircea had gotten up, to knock on the door, but at that he turned. And
met Kit’s eyes steadily. “Specifically, to ensure that you and I were
at each other’s throats.”
“What?” Kit wondered if his head had been hit harder than he’d thought,
because that made no damned sense at all. “Why would you care if I
killed a filthy, misbegotten, sordid half --”
He
broke off, because the turnkey was back, and was finally opening the
cell door.
But not for him.
Mircea -- elegant, dignified, polished Mircea -- slipped into the dirty
cell after the guard. And picked up the damned dhampir. And not to throw her over his shoulder, either.
But to cradle her in his arms.
Kit just stared.
And
then he noticed something, noticed a number of somethings, some of
which should have registered before. Like as soon as the fight shredded
enough of her suit for him to get a good look at her. Liquid dark eyes,
finely arched brows, a hint of amusement in the tilt of the lips, which
were also full and shapely and so similar to --
“No!” Kit said, but there was no denying it. The scent -- the damned scent -- no wonder Heinrich had thought it familiar! He hadn’t smelled it before, no.
But he had scented it’s . . . her . . . father.
“No!”
“I
came myself to make sure that you understood,” Mircea told him. “There
was no harm done to your family by my own. There will therefore be no
retaliation.”
Kit just stared at him.
“I
can walk,” the dhampir protested, as he carried her from the cell.
“More or less.”
“Perhaps this is my way of making sure I have you where I want you, for
once,” Mircea told her.
Kit thought he might throw up.
“At
least tell this oaf to let me go,” he said, because the damned cop was
in his way.
“Oh,
don’t worry,” Mircea said, glancing over his shoulder. “Your men should
be by to fetch you in an hour . . . or five.”
“Mircea!”
“You’ve had a hard day, in more ways than one, Kit.”
“Mircea . . . .”
“And you have a temper, you know you do.”
“Damn it, Mircea! Don’t you dare --”
“Just to be on the safe side, I think a little head start might be a
good idea, yes?”
“Mircea!” The door closed. “Mircea!”
Kit felt something pop.
And realized that he’d just ruptured his own eardrums.
Goddamnit!
“MIRCEA!”
The End
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