The Mortal Touch

by Naomi Clark

  I raised an eyebrow, perturbed at how much he knew. “You’re well-informed.”

  “Some of it’s guesswork. I figured out you were hunting me down after you showed up at Obsidian with that skinny vampire kid. A little digging proved me right. The draugr was supposed to warn you off, but I figure whatever the vampires are holding over you is scarier than anything I can throw at you.” He shrugged. “But if we work together, we can take care of that. They can’t blackmail you if they’re all dead, and if you give me the master, we can start killing them off from the top down.”

  I mulled that over. The tide was lapping at my boots now, the night wearing on. The draugr I’d burned was nothing but ashes and smoldering embers. Good to know they burned fast, I thought absently.

  I had no loyalty to Mr. Cold, and I wouldn’t spit on Charlotte if I saw her on fire in the street. But Harmony and Ezra were okay, if annoying. I couldn’t condemn people to death for being annoying. And I’d just fought tooth and nail to keep Kinley alive – I wasn’t handing him over to anyone.

  Above all that, though, was a basic problem of math. Two people, even a warlock and a dhampir, could not take out an entire city’s worth of vampires. It was a numbers game, and vampires were good at increasing their numbers. Not to mention that eliminating the master of a city would create a nasty power vacuum. Unless Kaminski had an army waiting in the wings, his plan was a failure before it began. He’d better off quietly picking off one vampire at a time and hoping not to get caught.

  Of course, he’d been trying that, and that plan had failed too.

  I raked my hands through my hair and didn’t have to fake my exhausted sigh. “I just want this over with,” I said truthfully. “Where do we start?”

  Kaminski beamed, and for a second his forgettable face was full of life and charm. “I knew it. As soon as I realized you’d escaped, I knew you’d be the perfect recruit.”

  “Recruit?” I echoed.

  “We’ll talk on the way,” he said. “We should head to Obsidian. I need to move some supplies before the vampires come. And I’m assuming they will come?” He gave me a pointed look.

  “What about that?” I asked, pointing at the draugr and hopefully avoiding the question.

  The draugr swayed in place, staring out to sea through the tangle of seaweed wrapping its head. It made a low, keening sound that sent a shiver through me, and reached one dripping wet, bloated hand toward the waves.

  “It’ll go back into the sea if I stop giving it direct commands,” Kaminski said, gesturing at me impatiently. “Let’s walk and talk.”

  I was reluctant to just leave the draugr to its own devices, but Kaminski was already striding away. I hesitated, watching the draugr shuffle toward the incoming sea, and then followed the warlock. He was striding through the dunes, heading toward the more attractive end of the beach, which would bring us into town fairly quickly.

  “While you were in the business,” Kaminski began, putting air quotes around the business, “did you ever come across the Order of St Ana?”

  I shook my head. Elijah and I had been a pair of lone wolves, as we often joked. Sure, there were other bounty hunters and various underground groups, cults, and factions involved in the dirty undead world, on both sides, but we didn’t get involved with them. Varnham taught us it was better to fly solo.

  “The Order of St Anastasia has its roots in the Crusades, but the Order broke away from the church sometime in the thirteenth century. They started as a small, elite group of knights fighting to bring God to the heathens, but then ran afoul of a djinn in Egypt and afterwards dedicated themselves to fighting evil in all its supernatural forms.”

  Despite his sardonic tone on heathens, there was a note of true pride in his voice as he gave me the short history. “You’re a member?”

  “Inducted at sixteen and I’ve been fighting the good fight ever since.” He thumped his chest. “I’m surprised you never heard of us.”

  “Well,” I said with a shrug, glad I was behind him so he couldn’t see my cynical expression. I was willing to bet the Order of St Ana didn’t have half the illustrious history they claimed. Perception is reality. Nobody wants to hire Bob’s Discount Vampire Killers, but they’d pay through the nose for Interfectores Daemonium Civitates, or whatever bullshit Latin handle these people wanted to give themselves.

  It’s not that these organizations don’t exist – clearly they did. I was just skeptical that they were anymore proud and ancient than the Illuminati or the Hellfire Club.

  “Members of the Order are assigned all over the world, all with different specialties. Mine is vampires. Ridderport is my third assignment.”

  “What were the first two?” I asked.

  “I spent some time in Chicago and a small town in the Mid-South before that. I can’t even remember the name of it. It was bumfuck-nowhere place. Just one vampire. But I got him.”

  “Same M.O? The cocktail thing?”

  “In Chicago, yes. My own idea. My mentor thinks it’s a game-changer.”

  “Sure. You can roll it out to other nightclub owners. Start a franchise.”

  He shot me a dirty look over his shoulder. “It keeps vampire-hunters out of the line-of-fire. It’s a safe, guaranteed way to kill a blood-sucker.”

  “It’s impractical, endangers humans, and relies too much on chance,” I argued, against my better judgement. “Staking them is also guaranteed and cuts out a lot of middle-man bullshit.”

  “We can argue methodology later,” he said, now sounding genuinely pissed. “Let’s just get to Obsidian.”

  He stomped off ahead of me, and I followed, biting my tongue. I didn’t want to antagonize him – whatever else he might be, he was a warlock and no warlock was ever harmless. I already knew that about him.

  The lights of Ridderport blurred into view as we traipsed along the beach in silence. I had a sudden, weird flashback to creeping through the woods with Elijah all those years ago. I hadn’t known then that I was heading towards an inevitable twist in my destiny.

  This time I knew it. There was no escaping it. I just couldn’t tell which direction it was going to twist in, and it made me angry and a little afraid.

  Elijah, I thought, keeping my gaze fixed on Kaminski, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was raining by the time we reached Obsidian, the kind of light summer rain that steams on the pavement and leaves you feeling prickly and sticky. We’d made the rest of the walk in silence, which suited me fine. I was busy racking my brain for the best course of action. I had no weapons – I was beginning to think I’d wasted my time making those damn stakes – and no way to contact anyone. Or anyone to contact, really. I didn’t want to rope Kinley into this, and I had no faith in Mr. Cold’s crew riding to my rescue.

  Morality is a funny thing. If I’d met Kaminski two weeks earlier, I might have simply turned a blind eye to what he was doing. I still wouldn’t have liked his methods, but I’d have had no personal stake in the mess and no reason to come out of retirement because of it. My natural antipathy to warlocks aside, I could see myself turning the other way all too easily.

  And strangely, now, that made realization made me uncomfortable. Did I like Mr. Cold? Hell no, but part of me grudgingly respected his desire to protect his people, even if his people were vampires. I think that meant I was on his side now.

  But what did I do next?

  “Welcome back,” Kaminski said drily as he unlocked the front door of the club. “I’ll assume you remember where everything is.”

  I followed him inside, half-expected a squadron of vampires to jump out on us. But when Kaminski flicked the lights on and the neon signs around the walls buzzed to life, nothing happened. Kaminski strolled to the bar and plucked two shot glasses from the shelves.

  “A toast to our alliance?” he asked, fingers dancing over the bottles of booze. “What’s your poison?”

  His sense of humor sucked. “After my last drink here, I’
ll pass.”

  “That was different,” he said with a light laugh, as if we were old friends discussing some crazy college adventure. “You can’t blame me for trying. It was an interesting experiment.”

  I chewed my lip, remembering how terrible and how tempting his potion was. Even knowing what it did, the effect it had on me, my mouth still watered a little at the thought of it, my fangs threatening to push out.

  Kaminski gave me a sly look, one that reminded me with a jolt of Varnham, another man who’d liked his experiments. Varnham didn’t have a shred of magical ability but he’d had a real knack for sadism. I shuddered.

  “Relax,” he said. “I don’t poison my partners.”

  I took a seat at the bar, keeping a decent distance between us as he poured two shots of vodka. “So you usually work with a partner?” I asked, thinking about the girl Jesse had mentioned, who pushed the poisoned cocktails on unsuspecting customers.

  “It’s the usual St Ana protocol,” he said, a shadow passing over his face. “My partner’s out with injury right now. Vampire-related, believe it or not. She’ll be coming to Ridderport as soon as she’s recovered.”

  Well that was bad news. If Kaminski were to...disappear, someone who knew all about him was due to show up and start asking awkward questions. I sighed. You never got to kill just one person.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Kaminski asked, sliding one of the shot glasses my way.

  “Thinking about partners,” I said honestly. I took the glass, rolling it between my fingers and inhaling the nail-polish remover scent of the vodka. “It’s been a long time since I had one.”

  “You miss it?” he asked. “The hunting, the life?”

  He sounded honestly curious, and it occurred to me that he really thought we were forming an alliance here. I thought it showed a stunning naivete on his part, but maybe it made sense. Your story is pretty legendary, he’d said back on the beach.

  My reputation was built on being a vampire-killing machine. Elijah and I may not have belonged to any super-secret societies, but we’d made sure our names were known. It was how you kept getting work. From Kaminski’s point of view, what made more sense? That I’d turned my back on a lifetime of vampire-slaying to work with the enemy, or that I’d been blackmailed into it and needed a way out?

  “Yeah, I miss it,” I said, setting the shot glass down again. Let’s build some rapport, I thought. Buy some time while I figured out my next move. “It was all I ever knew. All I ever trained for, all I was ever remotely qualified for.”

  He nodded intently. “And it’s a never-ending battle, right? They never go away, they never stop making more of themselves. St Ana’s goal is a world without vampires, but it’s an impossible fight.”

  The fervor in his voice had me nodding in empathy despite myself. He sounded like me ten years ago. “And that’s why you always need new recruits.”

  “Hear, hear!” He raised his glass and downed his shot and grinned at me. “So, where do we find the master vampire?”

  I’d been about to swallow my own vodka and paused, glass almost to my lips. “What, you want to go after him tonight?”

  “Why not?” The fervor in his voice grew, verging on fanatical now. “There’s no time like the present, and between us we should be more than a match for him. Take him out, shut down the whole nest of cockroaches, and we can plan our next move at our leisure. Plus, it’ll make a great tribute for St Ana.”

  “Tribute?” I echoed, my skin crawling.

  He gave me an icy smile. “It’s tradition for new recruits to present the Order with the head of a vampire as part of the initiation.”

  “Initiation? Is this a club or a cult?”

  He looked offended. “You want to do this or not? You must want him dead and buried as much as I do.”

  I downed my vodka to avoid answering, slapping a plan together in my head. Didn’t it make more sense to take him to Chi Lin Garden, where at the very least there would be Ezra and Harmony to take care of him, rather than try to tackle him myself here on his turf?

  The vodka burned unpleasantly as I replayed my own ugly train of thought with a flash of conscience. Really? Was I really going to gift wrap Kaminski and leave him for Mr. Cold, who would undoubtedly torture him long and hard before killing him? Did I want this done that badly?

  Badly enough to shrug off a few pieces of my own humanity?

  I was suddenly stricken, torn between two equally dark paths. I would not give Kaminski to the vampires. And I would not give the vampires to Kaminski.

  I glanced up and saw his impatient glare. I’d lose him if I didn’t make a choice one way or another.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly, rising. “There’s enough darkness left to finish this.”

  It was like I’d told him Christmas was coming early. He bounced upright, clapping his hands together, and poured himself another shot. He downed it with a joyful whoop.

  “My first master! I knew approaching you was the right idea! Come on.” He beckoned at me impatiently.

  For a second, I thought he was planning to go down into the basement, and I balked. “Where are we going?”

  “Upstairs. For weapons,” he said, clapping his hands together again. “You may not need any, but I do.”

  His enthusiasm was nauseating. Had I been this excited about killing things?

  Actually, yeah, I probably had been. I had a sudden wish to have some sharp words with my younger self.

  Kaminski’s bedroom housed an impressive selection of weapons, both magical and mundane. One wall was covered with hooks, from which hung dozens of little leather pouches. They’d hold curses and charms, I thought with another shudder. Powders, stones, herbs, bones, all kinds of things blended together under the right phase of the moon or by the light of the right color candle, meant to paralyze or burn or transmute...

  I swallowed the old, familiar grief and focused on the mundane weapons instead. This was better. He had a nice selection of knives and some metallic stakes. Probably iron by the look of them. No guns, which was a shame, but I was never entirely comfortably with someone else’s gun anyway.

  I took the backpack Kaminski offered me and shoved in a couple of stakes. Then, after careful perusal, I took a Bowie knife from the wall. It was a good one, more than nine inches long and almost four inches wide. It was more like a butcher’s knife than anything else, and I could guarantee that whether you were vampire, mortal, or something in between, having this jammed in your ribs would slow you down.

  “That’s all you’re taking?” Kaminski asked me. He was stuffing his own bag full of leather pouches.

  “It’s all I need,” I said. The knife came with a sheath, and I fixed it to my jeans, making sure I could draw it smoothly.

  He nodded. “I’m jealous. I guess you get the best of both worlds really, don’t you? What’s it like?”

  “Being a dhampir?” I barked with laughter, a reel of chaotic memories flashing past my mind’s eye. “Messy. What are you taking?”

  “The usual. Garlic bombs, smoke bombs, light bomb...” He began reeling off charms in a gleeful manner and I tuned out. I didn’t have the heart to tell him vampires were completely unaffected by garlic. There was a reason I grew wild roses and not wild garlic.

  Still, it didn’t help my impression of his vaunted Order that they didn’t know that.

  “Ready to go?” I cut in eventually. “Night time’s burning.”

  He grinned, brimming with a hot, feverish excitement. He suddenly looked very young and I wished I could think of some other way to end this. Indoctrination is a hell of a drug, and Kaminski had the expression of someone who’d been indoctrinated hard.

  Outside the rain was heavier, but not quite heavy enough to mask the smell of vampires. I froze on the sidewalk, trying to pinpoint the scent.

  “Everything okay?” Kaminski asked behind me as he locked the club up.

  “Fine,” I said, heart speeding up. The scent was fresh and strong, but the stree
t was empty. A vampire, probably more than one, had passed by not long ago. It could just be coincidence.

  I didn’t want to count on it though.

  “Let’s go,” I said impatiently as Kaminski fumbled with his keys. My nerves jangled at the thought of Mr. Cold and a squad of vampires jumping out on us. A bloody confrontation on the street wouldn’t serve anyone’s best interests, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

  I scanned the darkness. Streetlights punctured the shadows at regular intervals, casting pools of stark white on the empty pavements. The area was eerily deserted. The rain and the late hour had cleared everyone away, I guessed. That was the logical answer, anyway, but my spine crawled all the same. This kind of emptiness, this kind of silence... It felt like the night was holding its breath, waiting for something.

  Waiting for blood.

  I shivered, stroking the hilt of the Bowie knife. Kaminski finished locking up and gave me a broad, happy smile.

  “Lead the way.”

  I returned his smile, although it felt like a grimace, and started walking. I tried to divide my attention between Kaminski and anything that might be lurking in the dark. The vampire stink faded as we moved away from Obsidian, but we were heading upwind, so any fresh scents wouldn’t come to me anyway. The rain would also dampen it, as well as sound.

  “Where are we heading?” Kaminski asked, jerking me from my neurotic reverie.

  “You’ll see,” I said absently.

  “Don’t you trust me?” he asked with a slight laugh.

  I glanced back at him. Rain had slicked his fair hair over his face, and in the shadows, he looked even more mundane and forgettable. To avoid answering his question, I asked one of my own.

  “What’s with the charm? The one that makes you all...” I waggled my fingers vaguely.

  “Forgettable?” He grinned, tapping his chest where the charm must hang. “Standard issue for all St Ana’s operatives. I’m sure you can imagine how useful it is for nobody to be able to describe you. Once we move on from a location, it’s like we were never there. Or as close as we can get to it, anyway.”