by Rain Oxford
We watched the humans surround the mansion, giving it about a hundred feet or so of distance. Each of them had a black, fist sized sack, which they buried at their respective positions. I focused on the woman’s mind again, careful to stay undetected.
I had no idea what it was called, but I saw a video screen of what looked like a shower stall, except the miniscule concrete room had a steel door. In the middle of the floor was a black item that resembled a large roach trap.
After a moment, the door opened, a young female was tossed in, and the door slammed shut. She appeared to be in her late teens, with dirty, mangled blond hair and torn clothes. Her hands were restrained behind her, but the second she was alone, she snapped the metal cuffs.
She was a vampire.
She didn’t even notice the object on the floor. If she had, she probably would have been trying to break it instead of the door. There was no warning before it flashed with a blinding white light. The video cut out for a while. When it came back, the young vampire was burned beyond recognition.
I pulled away from her mind and opened a connection between Henry and me. “We have a problem.”
Chapter 3
There was a lot of time left before dark and Stephen’s coven wouldn’t be in danger until then. The two immediate problems were that there were traitors in the coven and that the humans had experimented on vampires.
Henry appeared beside the car, shifted, picked up his clothes, and got in without dressing. “A light bomb?” he asked doubtfully. “Are you sure it isn’t some kind of acid gas bomb? I know you can buy ultraviolet lights, but it takes a lot to burn a vampire.”
He had a point. Vampires weren’t invincible, but they didn’t instantly burst into flame when they encountered sunlight. If that were so, they would be in danger constantly from things other than the sun that put off ultraviolet radiation. Of course, I had recently learned that all vampires of Earth were “diluted” descendants of the vampires that came here from the vampire world. Since the pure vampires burst into smoke when shot with a silver bullet, it was possible that they would do so when subjected to sunlight.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Earth’s vampires. For them, the sun just burned like a blowtorch. How quickly it took a vampire to die from direct sunlight was determined by the atmospheric quality and the vampire’s own blood. Darwin once told me that converted vampires, like Marcus, were more susceptible than born vampires, like Stephen.
“Maybe it is more than light. Whatever it is, we need to follow them back to their base and destroy all of it.”
“So you want me to get Marcus?”
“No, this is way too dangerous for him. I’m not taking a vampire into a vampire-hunter’s lair.”
Although he didn’t say anything, the concern on his face was obvious. He thought I was being overprotective of Marcus. I didn’t say anything because he didn’t know Marcus like I did and there was no point in arguing. Vampire or not, I still saw Marcus as the sixteen-year-old on the run from his father. I was not going to compromise on the young vampire’s safety.
“You stay here and find out which shifters are traitors. Get those things out of the ground and away from the vampires, too. Don’t take out the traitors until you know how many there are and who they are in case they attack the vampires. I’ll follow the humans.”
“Wouldn’t I be better use to you with the humans? I can get through any lock.”
I considered it. “I would be able to figure out which shifters are traitors.”
“I’m not the only one who’s got your back anymore. Maseré deals with traitors all the time and ridding Stephen of a few of them would strengthen their alliance. You and I could go after the humans.”
“I don’t know.” I normally didn’t get any more people involved than I had to.
“This isn’t a matter of asking for help,” Henry said, putting his clothes on. “In the human world, the rules are simple. You’re expected to take care of human cases on your own because your clients, allies, and enemies are all human. In the paranormal world, you’re still just a wizard; you can’t be expected to deal with vampires, shifters, and fae all at the same time. No paranormal is. You have me, Darwin, and your familiar, but Darwin’s off doing something else and so is Rocky.”
“Crap, I forgot to check on Mr. Thomas.”
“That’s exactly my point. You’re used to dealing with human cases all on your own. Now you’re still doing human cases, but you’re also taking on vampire, shifter, and wizard cases. I’m sure there’s a fae breaking some law out there somewhere, too. You can’t do five times the work on your own if you expect to keep up the quality, no matter how powerful you get.”
The humans were heading back to their Jeeps.
I nodded. “Alright.” I called Maseré. Henry didn’t look snide or approving, not that I had expected him to. Henry was ideal to work with because he could have a plan or opinion without trying to take over.
“Since you all started your summer break, I’ve talked to you more than my own boy,” Maseré groused.
“Well, you shouldn’t have let him off the leash then.”
He sighed. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
I could hear Anya yelling in the background and realized that she was probably driving him up the wall with her worrying. Darwin got a lot of his unruliness from his mother. “Okay, when I’m done dealing with the vampire hunters, I’ll figure out where Darwin is and make sure he at least checks in with you.”
“Vampire hunters?”
“Yes. That shifter I showed you earlier is in league with a pack of humans trying to take down Stephen’s coven. They have some sort of light bomb. The humans are leaving now for their base and I’m going to follow them. I need you to go to Stephen’s coven and figure out if there are any more traitors. Also, the light bombs are buried around the mansion and they need to be removed. Can you handle it?”
“I’ve been dealing with this kind of thing for longer than you’ve been alive.” His voice was all business now.
“Then I will leave Stephen to you and go after the humans.”
“Do you want some of my pack as backup? Vampire hunters tend to break like twigs when they see a badge.”
“For now I don’t, but I’ll let you know if I change my mind.” I hung up. “Switch with me. I’m going to try something new.”
We swapped seats and Henry put the car into drive, as he started down the path to get on the road, I checked in with my gargoyle. He was sitting on the roof of a building, looking into the window of another building. I could barely make out Mr. Thomas.
“I got another job for you,” I told him. “I need you to follow some vehicles without being seen.” I visualized the three Jeeps leaving the coven grounds.
An instant later, the gargoyle’s vision went black for a few seconds. When his vision returned, he was flying high over trees. I saw us in Henry’s truck before he flew past us and focused on three Jeeps, driving in a perfect line, all with perfectly matched speeds.
“Henry, slow down. Rocky is tracking them, so we don’t need to be right behind them.”
“What about Mr. Thomas?”
“He’s not cheating on his wife.”
* * *
We drove for two hours where the only spoken words were me giving him directions. When Rocky observed the humans parking in front of what looked like a decaying shack in the middle of the woods, I reached out blindly to tap Henry’s arm. The truck stopped and I pulled my mind away from Rocky.
“About two hundred feet ahead, there’s a right turn onto a dirt path. It’s another quarter mile in. It looks like a shack.” He put the truck into drive again. “We can’t just drive up to it.”
“I know, but we can’t leave my truck out in the open, either. If more hunters come, my truck would give us away.” He then drove off the road, into the ditch, and right through to the forest. My car sure as hell couldn’t have done that.
Once the truck was adequat
ely hidden, we got out. Unfortunately, maroon wasn’t the easiest color to hide in the woods.
We approached the compound cautiously, relying both on my instincts and his jaguar senses. Right before we reached the shack, I felt Rocky press against my consciousness questioningly. “Stay alert and don’t let anyone leave,” I told him.
Henry held out his hand to stop me from continuing and then sniffed a couple of trees. “There’s a perimeter. It smells like electricity. It’s not enough to be dangerous, but it’s definitely some kind of sensor. I bet you can confuse it with magic.”
“Possibly, but I have no idea how. Can’t we just walk over it?”
“I don’t know how thorough it is. I’ll shift and go invisible. If you can create a storm, blow some leaves around or something, it should be enough to serve as a decoy. I’ll tell you when I know the entrance is clear.”
I nodded, just about to open a mental link between us, when a small explosion went off inside. Henry looked at me and I just shrugged. My instincts fired up, urging me forward. “I think that was our distraction.”
We approached the shack easily without encountering anyone. Inside, it was exactly what I expected an abandoned shack to look like. There was just a bed and a kitchenette, and every surface was covered in dust. An animal had been in there from the looks of the cabinets, which were scratched and open.
“Over here,” Henry said, opening what appeared to be an empty pantry. He then lifted the floor of the pantry, which was no more than a section of plywood, to reveal a ladder. “I can’t see anything. Someone has been here in the last couple of minutes, but I don’t hear anyone at the moment. There’s running water, though.”
I pulled a penlight out of my pocket, clicked it on, and aimed it into the dark. It looked like a concrete basement. “This is going to suck,” I said before climbing down. Henry followed.
The room at the bottom was only eight by eight and there were two doors leading out of it. Henry ignored the door to our left and opened the one to our right. It led to another concrete hallway.
There was a drainpipe in the ceiling that was spilling a small stream of water in front of us, which flowed down the hallway. Since no one came running to investigate, I assumed the explosion had successfully distracted the humans.
Henry kept sniffing. “Are your instincts giving you anything?” he asked.
“No. Why? Are you picking something up?”
“Not in this form. My cat thinks I’m missing something, though.”
Another explosion came from somewhere in front of us, through at least two walls from the sound of it. “One explosion tells me they had an accident. Two tells me they’re either in the middle of a series of experiments, or they’re under attack.”
There was a right turn with a metal gate and a straight tunnel that turned left in fifty feet. I indicated the gate and started looking for a lever. “I think it’s this way.”
“The scent is stronger the other way.”
“They’re hiding from vampires; they know about disguising their scent. I bet they’re using the water to throw it off.”
He grabbed the bars of the gate to push or pull it, only to jerk his hands back with a pained growl. I couldn’t see what the wounds looked like, only that blood was dripping into the water.
“Is it silver?” I asked shining my light on the metal.
“It’s sharp and silver.”
I had to look very closely to see the silver, razor edges on the sides of the bars. It was meant to injure anyone trying to lift them. I pulled off my outer shirt and handed it to Henry. He would easily heal, but the silver was going to slow down the process quite a bit.
I remembered watching Flagstone use Hunt’s magic. “I might have an idea.” From the few martial arts classes I took at Quintessence, I knew it didn’t have a chance of working. Fortunately, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from doing it anyway.
I drew on the connection between Rocky and me, felt his strength, and pulled it into me. The gargoyle let me do it, but he didn’t make it easy for me. He could have stopped me if he wanted to. Despite the fact that he was the familiar and I was the wizard, he was far older than me. Since it was also his heart keeping me alive, our partnership was backwards in a lot of ways.
Nevertheless, I was pulling my weight. I felt the gargoyle’s magic join mine. Like when I killed John and took his magic, it was a smooth interaction. Of course, John’s magic made me sick for a long time afterwards. I pushed that out of my mind and focused on the pure strength of stone that my familiar gave me.
Adrenaline surged through me, reacting with the gargoyle’s strength. I felt the gargoyle’s presence grow stronger inside me and my own energy geared up for a fight. I didn’t visualize what was going to happen, I just did it. I kicked the gate, expelling all that strength into the bars. It wasn’t as smooth as I had expected; it was almost like an explosion inside me. Still, I was uninjured and standing, whereas the gate was on the ground.
Henry gaped at me. “When did you become the kung fu wizard?”
“Do not ever tell Darwin that I did that.”
“Obviously. I feel out of practice now.”
We continued without any banter. Unlike Darwin, Henry didn’t ramble or crack jokes when he was nervous. Then again, the jaguar shifter didn’t usually have anything to be nervous about. We quickly came to a room with three other doors, but it was what was in the room that made me stop and gape.
Every inch of the walls were covered in racks of weapons. Some of them, like arrows, didn’t seem very high-tech, but there were also bullets that were clear and filled with blood, specially designed plastic guns, and more light bombs. I picked up one of the blood-filled bullets.
“Vampires can dig bullets out of their bodies,” Henry explained. “However, if the bullets explode and fill them with liquid silver, they can’t get it out before it poisons them. Furthermore, if the bullets explode with silver-spiked blood in them, their bodies will absorb the blood automatically and spread the silver to his heart.”
“That’s sick. How do you know that?”
“I listen to my classes at Quintessence. Before vampires became the outcasts of the paranormals, they used to have very strong alliances with the shifters. Similarly, fae and wizards used to be allies. Sometimes they even exchanged mates or babies. Anyway, since vampires and shifters are both poisoned by silver, they got pretty good at learning to avoid it. Once the vampires became more ostracized, pack shifters like wolves and lions began to expose their children to silver to weaken its effect on them.”
“Did it work?”
He held up his bloody hands. “Obviously.” When I just gave him a blank stare, he nodded. “We’re not nearly as susceptible as vampires, and pack shifters are even less affected.”
“How come you’re susceptible, since your parents weren’t from Earth?”
“According to your vision, my mother wasn’t from Earth. We have no idea who my father is. Besides, as far as we know, Skrev shifters are affected, just like the pure vampires.”
“Except pure vampires burst into ash. What are the odds that the beings of two different worlds would be poisoned by a common Earth metal?”
“Probably not that bad considering Earth is a foreign world with different elements and germs. Besides, everyone has a different explanation for why silver hurts us. A lot of paranormals, including Darwin, believe that wizards and fae somehow made us susceptible to it in order to control our populations. Others think it was the humans. There are no clear historical roots to it.”
As we chatted, we checked one of the three doors, which opened to a room with small televisions set up. Above the surveillance screens was a wall-to-wall window into an exam room, but with seriously nasty looking medical tools. The two metal exam tables also had thick straps to restrain whoever was being examined. I hit buttons at random until the videos started playing.
Two of the videos showed a room of cages at different angles. They were like large dog ke
nnels, except it was people inside them. As bad as that was, I ignored them and turned my attention to the third screen, which showed the same vampire from the human’s vision. Having seen her death, it was odd to see her strapped to one of the exam tables. I looked up, but there was still no one in that room.
Three men in black uniforms surrounded her. She started struggling, presumably coming off whatever drugs they had used on her. Each of the men had what looked like portable spotlights, which they each took a turn shining on a different part of her body. The first two did nothing, but the third caused her to scream and thrash. They ignored her struggles for a few minutes until her skin started to burn. One of the men picked up a notebook and started writing down his observation while the other continued to burn the woman’s abdomen. It looked like a bad sunburn, but she was screaming as if it was burning her all the way through her skin.
Henry started hitting the switches until it turned off. “No more buttons,” he said, disgust and anger deepening his voice.
I ignored him, though, because I saw something odd in the exam room. There were some scalpels on the ground. Henry apparently noticed it as well, because he opened a door on the right side of the room that I hadn’t noticed. He sniffed around, holding out his hand to stop me from entering the exam room.
“Someone extremely powerful was in here.”
“Wizard powerful?”
“Felicity powerful,” he said. “A demon was in here.”
Since the wizards of Dothra were so much more powerful than human wizards, and usually pretty sinister, we referred to them as demons. At that point, I pushed him aside and went over to peer behind one of the exam tables, where a man in a black uniform was dead on the floor.
Getting right to work, I mentally noted his position, the objects around him, and the lack of blood. After a few minutes, I pointed to the tools, which were wet. “He was washing and polishing, so he didn’t have anyone in here.” I put my hand on the tables to check the temperature. There was a hot spot on one of them. “The demon attacked with that lightning thing. He didn’t run or even move, yet he was facing the demon that entered.”
