Maid of Ice

by Shona Husk

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * * *

  Saba crossed her legs and sat. The linoleum was old and scuffed and cold on her backside. She rolled her shoulders and tried to clear her head while she waited for Detective Morgan to come back with the blood. This wasn’t the first time she’d used blood magic for other people, but it was something she avoided. She didn’t want to be bound to random people even for a short amount of time. She didn’t want to know every detail about them, and she would never do blood magic more than once for a person. Three times made an unbreakable bond.

  The bond with Desiree would fade fast, since her spirit was gone. This would be a temporary window into the past as remembered by the blood.

  She forced a couple of slow breaths. So why didn’t she believe her own rationalizations? Why couldn’t she let this job go? She didn’t need the money, and she didn’t need Morgan’s judgments on her profession.

  He walked into the unused office and closed the door. Her silver bowl balanced in one hand.

  “That’s all we can spare.”

  Not much, only a few milliliters in the bottom. One drop would’ve been plenty. This wasn’t like scrying in ink for missing persons and predicting the next move on the path they were on. This was more a melding of energies.

  “More than enough, thank you.”

  He sat on the floor opposite her in his dark gray suit pants, shirt sleeves rolled up, tanned arms draped over his knees as if he did this every day.

  “Are you going to watch?” She set the bowl down in front of her.

  “Yes.”

  For all his calm demeanor, he didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted him looking over her shoulder. The corners of her mouth turned up, yet she wanted him to believe in what she could do. To believe in her. The man who believed in nothing.

  He’d accepted who he was and didn’t need anything from anyone. She’d never had that luxury. The almost-smile faded. She could never just be herself around other people. This was as close as it got, and it was never good enough. This had to work for Desiree, for Detective Morgan, for herself. She needed to see something other than distrust in his eyes.

  “Don’t break the circle,” she said as she ripped open a paper packet of salt and sketched a circle around herself. In her mind she saw the wall as white marble shot with silver.

  “Not a problem.”

  She suppressed a shiver. What would he say after this? He’d already judged her and thought she was a con artist. This should seal the deal and have him running for a psychiatric assessment for her. Saba flicked the blade on her pen knife, exhaled, and nicked her finger with the knife.

  A drop of her blood fell into the bowl. The liquid turned milky immediately, and the room shrunk to a pinprick of light in soft, full, black. Then it blinked out and she was no longer in the office in the morgue. She was riding shotgun with Desiree.

  It was like a badly cut together film. The nightclub bounced and jerked. Light and sound crashing and blending. Her stomach flopped as the room spun and tilted. Black and red and white. The body she was in pulsed. Heat, lust, and alcohol pumped through her veins. She danced and drank till she could barely stand.

  A man with pale skin and dark clothes took her hand. His features were smudged like he was always in the shadows. They left the club. The air was sticky, but silent; her ears rung with the heavy bass from the nightclub. They walked and overly familiar hands crawled up her back. The name of a hotel smeared across her vision in pink. Paris. Lights were missing, letters were dark. She didn’t care.

  Clothes came off in the rush of anticipation. On the well-used bed Desiree worshiped every bony portion of the pale man like he was a god. Too drunk. The room spun out to blackness. The man’s face flickered into view and back again. Blackness. Not dead. Not yet. Blood still pumped with the burn of life, alcohol made liars of her senses. Her body was wrecked like delicate silk put through the spin cycle on hot. She was shaking and couldn’t stop. Voices, her eyes wouldn’t open. There was something cold resting on them. Her gut churned. She couldn’t scream. Heat scorched her arms. Her body arched, pressing against the hands holding her down. The voices chanted. Sadness as her blood was drained away. Her body was cooling. She was dying. A breath ripped her lungs, and eased out taking life with it. The blood stilled, moaning its loss. Desiree was dead.

  The connection didn’t break. Something was wrong. Out of the dark came a slow coiling cold. Not the absence of life, but life where there should be none. The link was made. Too late to hide. She knew where Desiree’s blood had gone. It had been drunk by an Albanex.

  Saba screamed.

  * * * *

  When her lips parted, Dale didn’t expect the scream that followed. He reacted without thinking. He reached for her and pulled her close as if he could protect her from demons he couldn’t see. Her eyes opened before he touched her.

  “You broke the circle,” Saba gasped.

  Aw shit. Salt was scattered over gray linoleum. Yesterday he wouldn’t have cared. Today, well, maybe it mattered even if he didn’t believe. That, and he didn’t want to sit through whatever she was doing again. After forty minutes of watching her eyes dart beneath their lids, his ass was numb.

  Her body was warm against his. Her heart raced, fed by fear. He smoothed his hand over her back, not sure what else to do. His body knew exactly what it should be doing with the lovely blonde half sitting in his lap, and it didn’t involve magic, real or imagined.

  She shoved him and sent him sprawling backward. The bowl tipped and spun across the floor, blood spilling and splattering in its wake.

  “What the hell?” Dale sat up.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Her eyes were wide. She raked her hand through her hair. Delicately curved ears that curled over at the top peeked through before being hidden under the thick pale waves. “You should have said.”

  Saba stood and glanced around, like she was seeing shadows he couldn’t. “You should have told me how she died. I shouldn’t have done that.” She stepped back. “He can track me.”

  “Who can track you?” Dale stood aware he’d missed an entire conversation and was playing catch up with someone who didn’t want to answer. He reached for her hands.

  Saba stared at him, instead of through him, as if realizing again he was in the room.

  There was a knock on the door. “Everything all right, Detective?”

  “Fine, leave us.” He sat Saba in a chair, determined to extract some answers from the afternoon’s craziness. He hadn’t come this far to not get answers, and if someone was now after Saba, then it was his job to keep her safe.

  Her face was a perfect mask. There was no trace of the terrified woman who had welcomed his embrace for half a second. She looked at him with rigid contempt as if he was the biggest liar on the planet.

  The gut instinct that had saved his life on more than one occasion wound his nerves tight, ready for action. Saba didn’t look like a threat, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t. She’d pulled a stunt bizarre enough to have him wanting to believe in her magic. He didn’t like it when the rules of the game changed and no one told him. Dale sat opposite her and took out his notepad and pen.

  “Start at the beginning and tell me what you saw.” Dale really wanted her to be right about Desiree’s last night. He wanted Saba to be anything other than a fraud. If anything but truth left those wide full lips, it would gut him. The alternative was just as bad—if magic were real, the question was what, not who, was he dealing with? Could Gwinfor really be what he claimed, a vampire?

  Her voice was thin and brittle. Her face was as white as his paper. “Desiree went to a club. Black knife on red.”

  Dale wrote down exactly what she said, not allowing himself to think of the implications. Treat her as another witness. Nothing more. Forget how the details were obtained. But the tang o
f salt and blood was thick in the air, and her fear had been real.

  Again Saba seemed to leave the room. Her body jerked like she was living another life somewhere else. “A goth club, lots of black, dog collars and…fangs.”

  His hand stopped functioning. Did she know about the vampire cult? Was the club the base? He forced the pen to move. It grated over the paper, but she’d seen his pause. Their eyes met. Distrust ripped the air and earth from between them until they stood at the edges of a widening chasm.

  “She met a man. They went to Paris….” She turned her head. “No. Paradise, a motel, some of the pink lights are broken. Room fourteen. Are you keeping up, Detective?”

  Dale nodded. His aching jaw clamped shut. He didn’t trust himself to talk. Only people involved in the case knew where Desiree had been found by a cleaner in the morning. He would check the lights on the motel and see if indeed some were missing, though he suspected he wouldn’t like the answer.

  “She was drunk. They had sex.” Her gazed centered on him, sharp as a blade. “Something wrong, Detective? Do I know too much? Did you know there were two other men? They held her down and slit her wrists. They took her blood. Damn you. They took her blood, and you didn’t tell me.” Her nails pressed into the melamine desk. If it had been wood, she would’ve left marks.

  She knew everything the police knew, and more. It wasn’t possible. He fought for composure. She could only know those details if she’d been there. And she couldn’t have been, not by magic. She couldn’t have gained this knowledge from a few milliliters of Desiree’s blood. It wasn’t possible.

  He countered with one of the few facts he had. “The cause of death was exsanguination. What happened to her blood?”

  She shuddered. “It was used in a ritual.”

  “Like the one you just did.”

  Her lips moved, and then she lied to him for the first time. “That’s all I got.” She stood to leave.

  “Sit down. We’re not done yet.”

  She hesitated but remained standing.

  “Who were the men?” Dale pressed on, not waiting for her acquiescence.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “I couldn’t see their faces.”

  “Damn it.” It was too convenient.

  “I gave what you wanted, what I could. Now you do your job.” She picked the bowl up off the floor.

  Brown stained the inside. The drops on the floor were now dried. All Dale could think was used up, as if the last bit of life had been sucked out by magic.

  “Do you do that to find missing people?” Had Quinn been convinced by a similar performance?

  “No. They are easy. I focus on an item of theirs and I can predict their future.”

  Dale ground his teeth. He had to know how she’d done whatever she had done, otherwise he’d have to pull her down to the station as a suspect.

  “Tell me what you did with the blood.” He pointed to the silver bowl clutched in her hands that was looking like shiny new evidence. “Right now you know more about Desiree’s last hours than I do. And I don’t like that, so sit down.”

  * * * *

  Saba sat, not willing to risk Morgan’s wrath. The bond with the Albanex was soft as spider silk on her skin, but its touch left her cold and chilled to her heart. The Albanex had drunk Desiree’s blood. For how long would she be bound by blood to the undead? Would he hunt her down for knowing? She ran her tongue over her dry lips.

  “Can I have some water please?” Drinking would help ground her.

  Dale poured some water into a plastic cup. She sipped, trying to buy some time. How much could she tell him without the truth hunting down every one of her kind? Ever since the Albah had been forced to live among Humans, there had been trouble. Refugees from the destruction of their civilization, they’d lost most of their law and tradition, and over the centuries it had become even more fragmented. The ritual for preventing death and becoming Albanex had been outlawed centuries ago and the magic was thought lost.

  But apparently someone knew. Cold coiled in her gut. And that someone had killed.

  Freshly made and seeking power and blood, blood magic animated his limbs, preventing nature from completing the cycle. Desiree was just one of many deaths that would follow if he wasn’t stopped. She placed the cup down. Telling Dale how to kill the Albanex was no betrayal to her people.

  “Desiree had coins on her eyes.” Saba could still feel the cold weight of the coins on her eyelids, an eerie insight into her own funeral. She blinked in an effort to erase the sensation. For a human, it didn’t matter as they had no magic for the gods to test. For an Albah, if their use of magic was more impure than the silver of the coins, their soul wasn’t given the chance to be reborn. Instead it was destroyed.

  Dale barely moved but again her revelation, her knowing, was breaking through his carefully constructed defenses. She was determined to rip them down and expose the weakness, if only so he would see her as something other than a curly-eared-freak.

  “Were they silver?” Saba was willing to bet they were also five sided. The undead bastard was corrupting Albah ritual to make a world where he was God.

  She’d felt his control. The men who’d killed Desiree were under his will. This was a cult. People were killing and feeding the Albanex in the hope he would grant them immortality. Lies. Humans couldn’t become vampire.

  Dale nodded, confirming her suspicion.

  “You have a vampire cult killing, Detective.” No sense in muddying the water with talk of Albanex or Albah, names once feared and now forgotten to humans. Better to pass it off as the vampires humans thought they knew and loved to hate. Better that than the truth. That the Albah had once sacrificed humans to feed the Albanex, the ancient Keepers of the Law. That the Keepers now slept entombed in the earth because no Albah had the stomach to kill the elders, or the guts to wake one and relearn the magic that had once doomed their people.

  “Can you ID the leader?”

  She wanted to be able to tell Dale his name but couldn’t. She didn’t know because Desiree didn’t know. But the Albanex would look Albah, blond-haired and blue-eyed. The only difference was no heart would beat in his chest. The life he had was stolen from the humans he bled. He’d broken the law, and someone had helped him. Someone had killed him and then revived him with blood and magic.

  “How did you learn, see, all of this from less than ten milliliters of blood?” Dale was trying to be neutral, but every action covered up revealed how uncomfortable he was. Like a man in a bath of worms, trying to sit still. His face betrayed his emotion, even though he was fighting hard to keep his expression neutral.

  Saba would’ve felt sorry for him, if he hadn’t risked her life for a dead woman’s justice. Still, she had to give him something, or he was going to slap her in cuffs and drag her downtown as a suspect because she knew too much that couldn’t be explained in Dale’s world. She was sure Quinn didn’t have the pull to break her out of jail. Not that jail would protect her from the Albanex.

  “Blood is personal. It travels through every organ. Without it you die. It carries your essence. If the person is alive, I see them. Every facet ripped open, every possible future exposed. In death I see who they were and the path that led them there. Desiree was troubled. She didn’t fit in. She wanted to belong.”

  Desiree was a prime candidate for the cult. A cult set up with the sole purpose for protecting and feeding the Albanex. That one of her own people could be so vain as to defy nature and cheat death was terrifying. She shivered. No matter how far she ran, if the Albanex wanted to find her, he would. Her only hope was once he’d digested Desiree’s blood the link would fade forever.

  “Why your blood?” Dale tapped his pen but wrote nothing down. This wasn’t the kind of interview he would ever want recorded. This way he could forget and put it down to a bad
meat pie or stress.

  “Magic is give and take. If I don’t sacrifice, I don’t get to see.”

  “You said you don’t do that for missing persons.”

  Saba smiled, her lips tight. He was listening and sucking in what she told him to examine later at his leisure. She tempered the urge to overload him with facts. That wouldn’t help the case, and right now they had the same goal. Stop the Albanex.

  “When I do readings, or searchings, enough energy surrounds the person that I can tap in. I don’t want to know everything about everyone I meet. People have a right to their secrets.” Yet she wanted to peel Dale open and know more about him, but not with magic. The memory of his arms around her lingered in an illusion of safety she wanted to indulge.

  He gazed at her with every thought carefully protected. He would never give away anything about himself, not unless it was dragged out of him kicking and screaming at the end of a knife.

  * * * *

  Dale’s stomach skated sideways. The talk of magic was making him queasy. Like a child eavesdropping on his parents and not understanding everything being said, but knowing it was bad. In the morning Dad had been gone, and Mom was broken. No amount of new age remedies had eased her pain. The fasting and herbal supplements had eventually taken their toll. A heart attack was the official reason. His father hadn’t bothered to show up at the funeral.

  Saba’s eyes were wide and her mouth tight. She looked like someone was sitting on her gravestone waiting for her to fall in. A side effect from the freaky shit she’d pulled earlier or real fear? His gut said it was real; his mind was still debating the implications. Someone, or something, had made her scream. That he could understand and focus on.

  “Who’s tracking you?”

  Her eyelids flickered and she glanced at her watch. “No one, the bond is broken.”

  That was a lie. He tapped his pen, blue dots staining the few notes he’d made. How could he call her on it when he didn’t know what she was hiding? He rolled his shoulders and leaned back. Fine. He’d gotten what he wanted and he wasn’t going to press.