“You can’t do this.” An empty, unconvincing denial.
“But I have done ever so much worse to get where I am.”
I flashed on the memory of him dropping Carl with a twist of his arm. He’d incapacitated Hardin with a word. He was too strong, I couldn’t stop him.
I wished I had telekinesis, to throw him across the room. I wished to bring down lightning bolts from the sky. I wished for a bag of garlic and a bottle of holy water. I wished I was religious and wore a cross around my neck.
I considered. I took a step back, into the doorway, where I could see Detective Hardin leaning just outside. Her cross would hurt him, but it had to touch him.
“Katherine,” Arturo said. “You shouldn’t have to think about this. I can feel her pulse under my hand. I can stop it.”
I needed another few seconds.
“Ben, too,” I said, stalling. I turned my back to him, feigning despair, to hide what I was doing when I shifted aside the collar of Hardin’s shirt. “Don’t hurt him. Ben and I for Carl and Meg.”
“Of course. I assumed as much.”
Hardin didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink. Her eyes were half-lidded, staring at nothing. I touched the chain, and my fingers started to itch. It was silver. Damn.
Oh, well. I’d just have to cope. Gritting my teeth against the sting, I gripped the silver cross and chain and yanked. The latch broke, the necklace fell into my hand. The itch of the silver against my skin turned into a burn.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure Hardin’s all right. You’ll let her go, too? She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.”
“She won’t even remember what happened.”
“I don’t want to be your lackey.”
“I don’t want a lackey, I want a partner I can trust.”
Hands at my sides, clenched into fists, gritting my teeth against the searing pain of the silver, I moved toward the bed, my gaze downcast. I would not look into his eyes.
My mother still slept. Arturo’s touch was so light, he didn’t wake her. I stared at that hand. I put my own on the edge of the bed, like I was preparing to surrender, to hand myself over to him. This had to work.
“I think,” I said slowly. “I think you should leave my mother alone.”
I put the cross on his hand.
Like a snake had bitten him, he flinched away, jerking his hand back and cradling it to his chest. The cross spilled onto the sheet covering Mom’s chest. I picked it up and let it dangle, so he could see what it was, ignoring the pain it caused.
“Get out,” I said, still not looking at his face, those eyes. I had to assume he was glaring at me. When he didn’t move, a rage bubbled within me. Weeks of frustration, fear, and pain boiled. Damn the ones who had made me live in fear.
“Get out! Get out of here!” This came out as a growl, and Wolf stared out of my eyes, flexed inside my hands, my fingers curling like claws. I would Change right now and leap on him. Maybe he’d be able to stop me. And maybe he wouldn’t.
He moved toward the doorway, and I followed. I watched his shoulder, not his face. A rumbling in my chest felt like the start of a growl. I wanted to rip his throat out. My mouth hurt from wanting to grow fangs.
His lips turned in a careful smile. Lowering his gaze, he gave a small bow, his hand still clenched to his chest. The gesture was courtly.
Then he fled before me, like anyone would before a ravening wolf.
Actually, as much as I would have liked to see him run from me, he merely turned to the doorway and vanished with a breath. I shook my head, convinced I’d seen it wrong. He’d managed a vampire’s exit, the moment of shadow and the disappearance.
I clutched my stomach and felt like the luckiest girl in the world. He’d left me and Mom alone.
And my hand felt like it was going to fall off.
“Gah!” I dropped the cross and chain onto Mom’s bed. That was where I wanted to leave it, with her, in case he came back. I stretched my hand—a rash severe enough to show raised welts covered my palm. “Shit,” I muttered.
“Kitty? Hm . . . what time is it? It’s dark.” Mom turned her head and mumbled, sounding very small and lost.
“Sh, Mom. It’s okay. Everything’s okay. Go back to sleep.” I touched her hand, her forehead, brushing aside strands of ash-colored hair. I tried to sound soothing and not rattled. “Just go back to sleep. I’ll come see you later.”
“All right.”
“I love you.”
She smiled briefly as she drifted back to sleep. Still drugged out on painkillers, she’d never really woken up.
Relieved, I sighed. She was safe. She’d be safe. Could I collapse yet?
“Where is he? Where’d he go?” Hardin appeared in the doorway again, crossbow in hand, her gaze wild.
“He’s gone. You still want to arrest Denver’s Master vampire?”
“Jesus Christ,” she hissed. She rubbed the back of her neck, where the chain had broken off.
“Detective, could you do something for me?”
She joined me by the bed. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah. Could you tie this chain around her somehow? I don’t want to touch it if I don’t have to.” I showed her my injured palm.
“That’s my cross,” she said.
“I had to borrow it.”
She considered me a moment, then shook her head. Her taut expression managed to convey both trepidation and annoyance. But she did get the chain tied around Mom’s neck.
“The silver did that to you?”
Wincing, I nodded. “With silver bullets, it’s not the bullet that kills a werewolf. It’s the silver poisoning the blood.”
“Not very pretty I bet.”
“No, I imagine not.”
Straightening, Hardin regarded me. The trepidation was fading, losing to a severe look of aggravation. “You’re going to have to explain what that bastard did to me.”
“The vampire hypnotic voodoo.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“How do you think they get people to stay still while they drink their blood?”
She scowled. “I hate it when this crap actually makes sense.”
“Don’t look at his eyes next time, okay?”
“Let’s get going.”
I touched Mom’s hand one more time. She was sleeping, and the cross was visible, lying at the hollow of her throat. She was as safe as I could make her. Which wasn’t very. I hated to leave.
“She’ll be okay,” Hardin said, touching my arm. “I’ll make sure security is watching her room.”
Like that would help. Arturo would just work his wiles on them.
“I’ll have them string garlic in the doorway.” She grinned, but it wasn’t much of a joke.
We heard pounding footsteps ahead of us. Four cops, running down the corridor. Hardin’s backup.
“Took you guys long enough!” she barked at them. “Come on, we’re heading out.”
They shrugged and mumbled excuses. But I looked at the clock—the whole exchange with Arturo had only taken a couple of minutes. We hadn’t been here that long. Time had stretched to make it seem so.
After Hardin had a word with security, we walked out of the hospital together. “Your boyfriend was going to this guy’s home base. Where?”
“You know Obsidian? That art gallery on Fourteenth? He’s in the basement.”
“How many people has he got with him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen as many as twelve or fourteen. All vampires.”
“Well, this ought to be fun. Sawyer, you got that surveillance file on Mercedes Cook? She’s a known associate. We might get some idea of what we’ll find there.”
“Yeah, it’s in the car.”
“Sawyer,” I muttered. “Isn’t that the guy who shot me?” The cop in question ducked and ran ahead of us. Avoiding me. Oh, it was him.
“Let it go, Kitty,” Hardin said. Then, “Sunglasses.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Officer Sawyer handed her a manila folder, which she handed to me. Then she gathered her people around her: four uniformed officers who looked ready for war. I was frankly dumbstruck.
Nodding at the four officers, all men, all tough-looking, she said, “Tell them what you told me. Everything you know about what to expect from the vampires.”
I repeated it all, every bit of vampire lore I knew, everything I had seen with my own eyes. They were strong, they could drop grown men without effort, they could control your will simply by looking into your eyes. They were hard to kill. They had the experience of decades. Arturo had centuries behind him. How could I make them understand that?
The officers stared back at me, just as eager, just as ready. They’d heard what I’d said, but I wasn’t sure they understood it. This must have looked like some kind of video game to them. I was sending them to their doom.
Hardin followed up with instructions. “Don’t get separated. Stick with your partner, keep your eyes on each other. You see someone in trouble, call for backup. I don’t want big heroics on this. We’re dealing with unknowns here.”
We’d go in three cars. Hardin directed one of the patrol cars to stop in front, while hers and another parked in back. No flashing lights or sirens. We’d sneak in.
“They’ll know,” I said. “Before we even get out of the car.”
“Then we’ll be ready for them,” she said, confident.
We’re all gonna die, a voice in me wailed. Not the Wolf. I could tell, because the Wolf was urging me on. We must destroy those who harm us. We must do battle.
I didn’t know which instincts to listen to anymore.
chapter 15
During the drive, I flipped through the file folder containing the information about Mercedes Cook. The police had managed to cull a handful of photos from the hotel’s security cameras—digital images printed out on plain paper. They showed her in the hotel, mostly, interacting with the staff, entertaining visitors, many of them recognizable local celebrities. Some of the pictures were blurry—like the closed-circuit footage from the convenience store robberies. Vampires, not wanting to be seen. Maybe Arturo.
One of them stopped me cold. In it, I recognized the hallway outside Mercedes’s suite at the Brown Palace. A man was entering the room, his head up, his face clear. He held himself with a confidence that showed he belonged there. He knew what he was doing, and he had a plan. The man was deeply tanned, with sun-burnished blond hair and rugged, windblown skin.
It was Dack. I remembered now what he’d said: It’s a good thing, having a vampire owe you a favor. You want to be with the strongest. And he hadn’t answered when I asked if that was Rick. Evidently, he didn’t think so. With a sinking feeling, I realized that we’d found the spy in Rick’s camp. And I had no way to reach Rick to tell him, not if he wasn’t answering his phone. Dack was there, with him now, no doubt preparing to stab him in the back. And Ben was there, too.
The whole thing had fallen apart. I wondered if it was too late to grab Ben and run away.
“You recognize that guy,” Hardin said, glancing over.
“Yeah. I think we’re all screwed.”
“We’ll see about that. He a vampire, too?”
“No. He’s a lycanthrope.”
“Everyone’s got silver bullets this time. I checked.”
“Great. I’ll make sure I’m standing behind you all.”
“Probably a good idea.”
This was insane.
I called Rick again, to tell him about Dack, but he still didn’t answer. Then I called Ben. Who didn’t answer.
Obsidian was in a nicer part of downtown, a street filled with chic restaurants and funky boutiques, halfway between artsy and gentrified. The art gallery was a front; the interesting bit was the basement. Stairs around back led to the heart of Arturo’s empire.
I checked where Rick had told us to park, and Ben’s car wasn’t there. Ben wasn’t there. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was all already over. Maybe they were okay.
Hardin distributed equipment from the trunk of her car to her people: crosses, stakes, hand crossbows with wooden bolts, spray bottles of what I assumed was holy water. I took a handful of stakes and a cross, steel, the size of my hand. I decided that if all else failed, I would depend on my ability to run like hell. I slung my backpack over my shoulders.
Thus armed and prepared, we approached the building. I couldn’t imagine what this must look like from the outside. Five cops, stalking purposefully toward a dark building, carrying crossbows and crosses—they could only be hunting vampires.
The place was an isolated box surrounded by parking lots. I hesitated, hoping to smell something, sense something. But the street was silent, and the building looked dead.
Hardin pointed at her officers. “You two, watch the front. Don’t let anyone leave.”
The rest of us headed for the stairs in back.
She said, “You’re a civilian. I’m not going to ask you to do this if you don’t want to. But if you think you can help—”
“Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. But I’ll go.” I’d started this thing, I had to see it through.
Rick’s Beamer was parked in back. He was here, somewhere, fighting for his life or already dead. A couple of other cars were here. Not Ben’s.
Hardin repeated instructions to the remaining officers. “Don’t let anyone down those stairs, don’t let anyone leave.”
The last two cops—our rear guard as well as our backup—stayed behind, while Hardin and I made our way into the pit.
“You’ve been here before, right?” For all her efforts with the anti-vampire gear, she’d reverted to habit and held her gun at the ready. Shocking myself, I recognized the type—a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s been a while.”
“Tell me what to expect.”
“There’s a metal door at the bottom of the stairs. It opens on a hallway. There’s a closed door on each side. I don’t know what’s behind them. There’s another door at the end of the hall. It leads to what I guess you’d call his living room.”
Actually, it was more like a throne room, or a receiving hall—a holdover from an age of palaces and courts. There wasn’t a modern equivalent. This was where Arturo held court, and where Carl would come to pay his respects, negotiate a dispute, or do what he needed to do to keep peace between our kinds. Usually, Carl would bring his own retinue, enough of his pack to make a show of strength, to balance the dozen or so vampires Arturo displayed on his side. Sometimes, he’d bring me, when he needed a pretty young thing at his side to boost his own ego. An alpha could increase his standing by showing off how many helpless cubs he could protect. That was what I’d been to him—a helpless child. I’d hated those outings. I’d hated being put out for show.
One of those times, I’d met Rick. I’d been young—both agewise and wolfwise. I’d only been a werewolf for a year. Rick had been standing watch at the basement door, and I’d sneaked out when Carl wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t leave without Carl entirely, so I stuck around, sitting on the concrete steps, and chatted with Rick. He was the first vampire who ever deigned to speak to me at all. He could tell I was new to it all, and he was kind to me. After that, the whole place had seemed a little more real. More believable. Vampires became a little less scary.
If Arturo had returned from the hospital before us, I’d expect to find him in that room, surrounded by his minions. I had no idea where Rick might be. Almost, I expected him to still be standing guard at the door at the bottom of the steps. I’d sit down again and have a nice chat. He’d tell stories about Denver during the gold rush: The displacement in time, the sense of déjà vu, was visceral.
Har
din led the way down the stairs. I followed, continually looking over my shoulder.
At the base of the stairs, the metal door stood open.
Behind us, in the alley we’d just left, a man screamed.
Then another voice: “Officer down!”
Two shots fired. Hardin charged back up the stairs. I charged after her. I didn’t even get a chance to look through the door to see what might follow us.
At the top of the stairs, Hardin shouted, “Freeze! Freeze right there!” Then, “Dammit!”
She’d pressed herself to the wall and looked out at the alley. I crouched beside her, using the stairwell for shelter.
One of the two cops—I recognized Sawyer—turned back and forth, as if searching for quarry that was no longer visible. He held a gun in one hand and a spray bottle in the other. His arms were trembling. Nearby, the other cop lay still, facedown on the ground. I didn’t see any blood on him, no wounds. That didn’t mean anything. I looked up, back and forth, all around. Vampires could fall on us from above.
“Sawyer, where’d he go?”
“I don’t know, he just . . . just disappeared. Vanished.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep, steady breath. The air was still tonight, all the summer heat leached away leaving a calm, damp chill. Good. Without a breeze, the assailant couldn’t stay downwind.
Vampires smelled dead, but only partly. They were dead without the decay, the rot. They lacked heartbeats; they were cold. Any blood and warmth they had was stolen from a living body. They smelled out of place in the world, like they’d stepped out of it somehow.
I searched for that now, tasting the air, letting that little bit of the Wolf into my conscious mind so I could use those senses. I only needed a location, a direction where I could point Hardin and Sawyer.
I smelled vampires everywhere.
My heart racing, I pushed myself against the side of the concrete stairwell. Until something moved, until we spotted one of them, we couldn’t do anything. We’d be wasting what pathetic ammunition we brought by shooting at shadows. Firing blasts of holy water at nothing.
Sawyer knelt by his partner and touched his neck. He had to set down one of his weapons to do it, and to my dismay he set down the spray bottle. Not that I had faith in the spray bottles, notwithstanding the holy water in them. But the gun probably wouldn’t do any good.
Kitty and the Silver Bullet Page 23
