B R Kingsolver - [Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill 02] - Night Stalker

by Kingsolver

  Barclay lay in the middle of a huge four-poster canopy bed. He looked rather innocent in sleep.

  “I dreamed of this moment,” Michaela said. “Of standing over him like this, and then cutting his head off like he did to my father.” She took a deep breath and let it out, then raised her head to look at me. She shook her head. “Taking him to Laurent is the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

  With a shrug, I said, “I don’t know. Best of a set of bad choices, I suppose. Killing him turns all his minions loose on the city without any supervision. Your shifter allies wouldn’t like that any more than the paranormals or humans would. Letting him win and become Master is an even worse choice. The man is insane.”

  She nodded. “Let’s roll him up and get the hell out of here before something goes wrong. I’ve got an itch between my shoulder blades that this whole thing has been too easy.”

  Michaela and her sisters rolled him up in the bed clothes and tied the bundle. Two of the dhampir hoisted him to their shoulders, and we headed out.

  We made it to the stairway going up, and then the roof caved in. Literally.

  When I felt the magic, I cried a warning, then leaped to the side and curled in a ball where the wall met the floor. The roof came down—plaster, beams, and beautiful cast-plaster crown molding. The sound was deafening, the dust choking, and I tightened my shield to prevent breathing the dust.

  Using ley energy, I pushed debris off me and rose to my knees. Three mages stood at the top of the stairs, a man and two women.

  Most of my party had escaped the fall, but those immediately behind me who weren’t quick enough got caught. I saw the broken bodies of a dhampir and three wolfmen who weren’t going to see the sunset.

  Michaela had followed my lead, and she stirred behind me. Her sisters who were carrying Barclay had gone the other way and found some shelter partially under the staircase across the corridor from me.

  A fireball flew downward, hitting the debris, and a wolfman howled. I used ley energy to push the next one to the side, and it hit the wall above the stairs, leaving a long, smoldering black scorch mark.

  I wasn’t keen on tackling three mages, but they had us penned down.

  “Michaela!”

  “Uh, what the hell?”

  “Focus! Is there another way out of here?”

  Hesitation, during which I deflected another fireball. Two of the mages were pyromancers, which was a fairly common affinity, along with air and water. The third mage hadn’t revealed her affinity yet, but the ceiling collapse made me suspect she might have been an earth mage. There were other ways to bring down a structure, however. I hoped she wasn’t a ley line mage like me.

  “Yeah, there probably is, but I don’t know where it is. Carleton would have an escape tunnel somewhere. Who the hell are those people?”

  “Barclay’s mage thralls,” I said. “Probably as crazy as he is.”

  A gun went off, firing several times, joined by a volley of fire from the wolfmen. I deflected two more fireballs, one of which set the ruined ceiling on fire. Great.

  “Save your ammunition,” I said, rising to my feet and shedding my coat. With my sword in my right hand, I picked my way through the debris on the floor. When I felt like I had solid footing, I charged ahead, mounting the stairs at a run. A fireball hit my shield, and as it poured around me, I saw the carpet catch fire.

  My range wasn’t as great as the mages’, but when I got close enough, I pushed with ley energy and saw all three rock on their heels. I followed that with a concentrated burst of energy aimed at the one who hadn’t thrown a fireball yet. Whether I was right or wrong, I judged her the most dangerous threat. The burst hit her and sent her flying backward. I then sent bursts at the two pyromancers. One spun around and fell, the other ducked, and I evidently missed him because he stood upright and threw another fireball at me.

  It exploded in the short space between our two shields, then I was on him. The spells used to forge my sword included a negate-magic spell, designed for penetrating personal shields. My first cut didn’t make it through his shield but weakened it. Our shields collided, and I sucked the energy from his shield into my own. I thrust with my blade, and my opponent’s eyes widened in shock as the sword penetrated below his breast bone and sank to the hilt.

  I raised my foot and kicked him in the chest with ley line force, wrenching my blade free.

  The mage farthest from me, the non-pyromancer, raised her arms. Casting a spell didn’t require anything other than will, as my teachers had pounded into me, but many spellcasters developed dramatic habits. Taking her motions as a tipoff that she was preparing a spell, I hurled a ley missile—a small, green ball of pure ley energy—at her. She staggered as her shield failed, and the second missile vaporized her.

  Whirling toward the other pyromancer, I found myself enveloped in flame. Rather than a fireball, she had cast a sword of fire, four feet long and a foot in diameter. Sort of a short-range flamethrower.

  I could feel the heat even through my shield, and as I backed away from her, I tightened the shield until it was airtight. The problem with that was that I needed oxygen to breath.

  She probably thought she had me on the run, so she advanced, swiping at me with her flaming club. I hit her with a ley missile. The flames died, and she staggered, then stood still, her head bowed and shoulders slumped.

  “Yield!” I said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was faint and weary. “I yield.” She fell to her knees. “No more.”

  I approached her warily, but when I grabbed her hair and pulled her face up, the pain and exhaustion I saw tore at my heart. She had bite marks on both sides of her neck, both wrists, and the insides of both elbows. Barclay had been feeding on her far too much.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re coming with me. If you attempt to escape or harm me or my comrades, I’ll kill you.”

  “I understand.”

  I reached under her arm and pulled her to her feet. Turning to the stairs, I yelled, “Let’s go!”

  Dhampir and wolfmen poured up the stairs, which were engulfed in flames, some carrying their dead or wounded fellows. Many had cloth soaked with water wrapped around their faces. The two dhampir carrying Barclay passed me, and then Michaela was there, her shirt soaked with water from somewhere and wrapped around her head with only her hair and eyes showing. The building was filling with smoke. She looked at the dead mage, then looked around.

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “Dead. This one’s coming with us.”

  Michaela nodded and slipped her arm through that of the mage. We pulled her along, through corridors choked with smoke and then out of the building. We ran across the lawn away from the mansion, and when we stopped and looked back, I saw smoke billowing out of the door we had exited. By the time we crawled over the estate wall, the fire had spread to the upper stories, and smoke rose high above the house.

  “All of Barclay’s children,” Michaela said softly. I knew she was thinking of all her father’s children that Barclay inherited. Many of them she had known most of her life.

  I could see thralls escaping. My heart cried out for those who were asleep or got trapped. Unlike Michaela, I couldn’t spare any sympathy for the vampires hibernating in the basement.

  CHAPTER 29

  There was a frantic rush down the hill to where all the cars were parked. The smoke rising from the mansion behind us grew, and by the time we crossed the main road that ran toward the coast below the Carleton estate, we could hear sirens in the distance.

  Although I had to shepherd the dazed mage along, Michaela and Donna stayed with me. The shifters and the other dhampir quickly outpaced us and disappeared.

  After we crossed the main road and the grasslands it ran through, Donna said, “Let me carry her. If they block off the road before we can get out, we’re screwed.”

  Michaela and I lifted the mage onto Donna’s back and strapped her in place.<
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  “Hold onto her shoulders,” I told the mage. “Don’t let go, and don’t put your arms around her neck. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded. “I understand just fine.” Her eyes were bleak. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “I’m going to get you help,” I said. I wondered if there was a twelve-step program for people addicted to vampires. Blood Whores Anonymous or something.

  She closed her eyes and clamped her hands onto Donna’s shoulder. The dhampir took off at a pace that soon took them out of sight.

  “Go on,” I told Michaela. “If I angle up the road, I won’t have as far to go, and you can pick me up on the way out.”

  She nodded and took off running at a pace I couldn’t hope to match.

  The road we had followed into the area trended southwest. I figured that if I ran straight east, I would intersect the road and have to run only half the distance.

  As I ran, I watched the smoke plume grow to the north. The sirens grew closer, and then receded as they turned north toward the mansion. Donna was right, soon the area would be swarming with cops as well as firefighters.

  A helicopter from a TV station flew overhead a few hundred yards in front of me, and I cringed. The whole vampire fiasco had drawn far too much attention from the human press and local authorities. I knew that Frankie and Blair must be living their worst nightmare, and we had just added to it.

  I reached the grasslands and saw a steady caravan of vehicles heading east toward town on the road below me. As I got closer, the traffic thinned out, and by the time I reached the road, the only vehicle there was a red sports car, stopped with its engine running.

  I jumped in, and Michaela took off before I could get my seatbelt fastened. She held up her phone and said, “The cops are setting up a roadblock on this road where it meets the main road. Most of us got out, thankfully including those carrying the bodies and the wounded.”

  “How many bodies?” I asked. “I know some people got caught when the ceiling fell in.”

  She nodded, her face grim. “Doris didn’t make it, and four of the shifters died. If it wasn’t for you, it would have been a hell of a lot worse.”

  A dozen or so vehicles were backed up when we reached the pavement. Cops in uniform were talking to the people in the first car in line. Michaela, with complete indifference to precedence, drove around all of them until she reached the front. A couple of cops came running toward us, yelling and waving their arms.

  “Hey, lady, you have to wait your turn!” one of the cops said as he approached the car.

  “Like hell,” she returned. “There’s a fire back over there, and I have no intention of waiting for it to reach here. What’s the matter with you? Why are you stopping people trying to evacuate? Look officer,” she leaned out her window and pointed to the smoke, “the fire is over there, and this road leads down there. Two entirely different directions. Therefore, logic should tell you that nobody driving up this road had anything to do with starting the forest on fire up there.”

  She gave him an angry, pissed-off-rich-bitch expression that I was sure had served her well many times.

  “Uh-oh,” I said, as I saw Lieutenant Blair walking toward us. Michaela cast a glance away from the cop she was trying to intimidate and said a single word under her breath.

  Blair leaned down and looked in the car. He just stared at us for at least a full minute, then asked, “What are you two doing here?”

  I had no idea what the dhampir and shifters had been telling the cops, but never one to keep my mouth shut when I could put my foot in it, I said, “Michaela was telling me about a great place to watch the sunset.”

  Blair rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, the clouds aren’t very cooperative today,” I said.

  “We, my sisters and I, invited Erin for a picnic,” Michaela said. “Unfortunately, when we got here, we found a bunch of bikers were throwing a keg party. Then we saw the smoke up the hill, and nobody wants to get trapped by a forest fire, something Officer Bumble-Fumble here doesn’t seem to grasp, so we are trying to get back to town.”

  Blair shook his head. “I’m not going to get a straight answer out of either of you, am I?”

  “Probably not,” I said, watching a steady stream of fire trucks and ambulances coming up the hill from the city. I wondered what they would tell the press when they found hundreds of bodies in the rubble.

  Blair stood and surveyed the other cars waiting. “Bikers, huh?”

  “Yes,” Michaela said. “A very rough crowd.” She let a little disgust creep into her voice. “Very hairy. I don’t think a lot of them ever heard of a razor.”

  Blair turned to the uniformed cop. “Sergeant, let them all go, just make sure they head back to town and don’t interfere with any of our or the fire department’s operations.”

  Michaela smiled and batted her eyes at him. “Thank you, Jordan,” she purred, then put the car in gear and floored it, throwing gravel behind us as we jumped out ahead of the other vehicles.

  As we drove toward town, I said, “Do you like opera?”

  “Yeah, I do. I go with Jordan, Lieutenant Blair, sometimes. That made it extra fun to tease him back there. Why do you ask?”

  Michaela drove fast, ignoring traffic and yellow lights. Sunset came early to Westport in the late autumn, and the low-hanging clouds made it seem like twilight already.

  “Who owns Carleton House?” I asked as we drove.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, you told me that Harry put the waste business in your name. But Lord Carleton is dead, like really dead. So who owns the estate? Do vampires make wills?”

  “You know,” Michaela said, “that is a very good question. Rodrick happened to be there when Guy died, and just assumed control of the place, but I have no idea who the legal owner is.”

  “Yeah, well, whoever becomes master of this city is going to have to find another place to live. And you know something? Inheritance of Barclay’s followers just got a lot less complicated.”

  “Yeah. Crispy critters.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The Waste Disposal offices. You wouldn’t happen to have any magic that will keep Rodrick asleep, do you? Or immobilize him when he wakes up?”

  “I can set wards on a room. He won’t be able to break those.”

  “Fantastic! Do you need anything? Any tools or ingredients or anything like that?”

  “No, I have everything I need.”

  We zoomed through the outer gate of a compound with several buildings and came to a screeching halt in front of one of them.

  “Let’s go!” Michaela said, leaping out of the car while the engine was still winding down to a halt.

  I followed her as she punched a code into a keypad by the door, then sprinted through the corridors, skidding around corners. I was at least fifty feet behind her when she finally slid to a stop by a wide steel door with a metal wheel. Several of her sisters were gathered there.

  “This is the room,” Michaela announced when I joined them.

  I reached for the wheel to open the door, but she stopped me. “Where are you going?”

  “Inside. You want a room that is closed on all sides, right? That means I need to set wards in all the corners. Unless this place is built like a fortress, he’ll just break through the walls if all I do is ward the doors.”

  All of the dhampir looked uneasy, and several glanced at their watches.

  “I’ll be quick.” I pulled open the door to find a storage room with blackened concrete walls. The roll of bed covers we had carried out of Carleton House was lying on the floor in the center of the room, and it was moving. I shut the door.

  “This isn’t good,” I said. At least the room didn’t have any windows.

  I quickly sketched a rune at each corner of the door frame, then cast the warding spell. I couldn’t hear anything from inside the room, but the dhampir with their enhanced abilities were becoming increasingly agitated. I understood
. A two-hundred-year-old vamp was nothing to toy with. He could probably punch his way through a brick wall. I had seen Flynn twist a younger vamp’s head off one night, just like opening a bottle.

  “He’s not coming through the door,” I said. “Can you show me or sketch me a floor plan? Is there a room above this one or below it? And by the way, how thick are these walls?”

  “It’s an incineration chamber,” Donna said. “It’s where we burn certain kinds of biological waste we don’t want to take to the landfill.”

  “Like bodies, ya know?” Sarah, Liam’s heartthrob, helpfully chimed in.

  Her sisters all glowered at her, but Donna said, “The walls are about eighteen inches thick. Heat-resistant concrete, firebrick, and steel.”

  “Oh, well, that should keep him in,” I said. I doubted I could get through those walls without expending a hell of a lot of magic.

  “That’s what we were hoping.” Donna was still casting side-eyed glances at the door.

  “What’s next?” Michaela asked.

  “Give me your phone.” She handed it to me. “You said that you wanted to negotiate conditions with Monsieur Laurent. I’m going to call him, tell him you have Rodrick, and you want to barter. Then I’m going to give you the phone.”

  Michaela grinned. “Assuming we reach an agreement, where should we make the delivery?”

  “There’s an old flour mill off West Twenty-Fourth Street,” I said. “A good place for an ambush if you get there first.”

  “I know the place. When?”

  “When do you want to take Barclay there?”

  “Tomorrow, in the daylight,” Donna said. I totally agreed with her and gave her a thumb’s up.

  As soon as the sun was completely down, I dialed the number I had for Laurent.

  “Allo?”

  “Monsieur Laurent, c’est Erin McLane.” I continued in French. “I am with someone who holds Rodrick Barclay captive and wants to discuss terms to deliver him to you.”

  I handed the phone to Michaela, then turned to Donna, who seemed to be next in charge. “You don’t suppose I could get a ride to Rosie’s, do you? I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I need a shower.”