Tainted Blood

by DC Malone

  “Is that so? What do those empathic powers of yours tell you? Am I afraid?”

  “They—” Gladys swallowed hard. “They tell me you’ve gone insane.”

  She lunged at me with the full force of her might, bringing one blindingly fast hand down at my face like a tiger’s claw. The brute strength alone would have been enough to snap my neck, and my senses were nowhere near fast enough to even allow me to start moving before she hit me. It was a point-blank assault from a creature that could have flipped a bulldozer with one arm.

  But I was the one in control of that arm.

  Barely an inch from my face, Gladys’s whole body betrayed her. Her hand, the one she so desperately wanted to slam through my skull, seized and bent backward at an awkward angle. It kept bending, past the point it should have been able to, until there was a loud pop.

  Gladys screamed.

  I released her, and she fell back cradling her broken wrist. “Do you know what the original name for the vampires meant? The name given in my tongue?”

  “Your—your tongue?”

  “Yes, mine.” I took another step toward her, and she scrambled back. “It meant servant. That name was given by us. Your life was given by us. And now it will be taken by us.”

  Gladys screamed again as her body went rigid and she fell to her knees in front of me. The tall, powerful woman was gone, replaced by a creature wracked with fear and helplessness.

  But I could barely see that. It was her blood that I saw. That blackened mix that was bestowed upon that first wretched human an eon ago by my brethren. It had been a gift. A contract.

  Now it was an affront and a betrayal.

  The woman screamed again as I slid my mind around the blood in her veins, making it press hard against the body that tried to contain it. Her screams must have grown louder, more frenzied, but I could only just hear them. It was the blood that called to something—

  A soft tap against my arm called me back from the shadows and the blood. “Mer, I think you’ve won.” Francie sounded small and worried. “You don’t have to…”

  Luka was standing next to me also, his expression tired but impassive. I hadn’t even noticed their approach.

  “I—I don’t know what this is,” Francie continued. “But I know the sound of pain. And of fear. And I’m afraid you’re going to do something you’re going to have to live with forever. Look at her.”

  I looked at my friend instead. Her eyes were wide with shock, but I could see the concern in them. The love and the compassion, too.

  I followed her gaze to the woman kneeling before us. I too could see the fear and the pain in her expression. She was a shell of the woman I had met less than an hour ago. She was beaten. I could see that.

  But I could also see the blood.

  Gladys shrieked once more, but it cut off in her throat almost before it began. Her head twisted violently to one side.

  There was another loud pop.

  Chapter 29

  It was a few days later, and I sat with my elbows perched on the bar at Francie’s nursing a glass that now only held an ounce or two of melted ice. It was three or four in the morning and the bar had already been closed for a while, but I didn’t have anywhere to be. Or, maybe more accurately, I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to be.

  I couldn’t seem to find a way to settle. The case was wrapped up, such as it was. Luka had taken care of what was left at the warehouse, including taking Carl to be put before the mercy of the Congregation, whatever that meant. But the Bessons didn’t get the happy ending I was hoping for them. I wasn’t surprised by the fact that I couldn’t find Mark; Gladys had made it clear that he had been successfully turned into one of the revenants, and they bore no resemblance to their former selves. And, mercifully, all of them had dropped dead along with their master.

  It was the thought of Maggie that left the lingering impression, though. If Gladys could be believed, Maggie had been killed after the conversion didn’t work on her, but I could find no evidence of that. No body, no sign that she had ever even been there. Just gone. Which was somehow even worse than the tragedy of her death. It didn’t sit well at all that there were people and groups in this world who were powerful enough to not just kill other people and get away with it, but powerful enough to simply erase them.

  Luka had assured me that my actions would not go unnoticed by the Congregation. At first, I thought that might be a bad thing, but he seemed to think the higher-ups would see it all as a job done well—that, perhaps, they would see me as a valuable asset and start sending real work my way. A few days ago, I might have been excited by the prospect of getting to dig into some of the bizarre cases the Congregation was sure to have crop up. But now, as I sat there finding patterns in the woodgrain of a bar I knew better than the back of my own hand, the thought only left me more uneasy.

  Would I lose more of myself the next time around? Or worse yet, would I find more of myself?

  “I think that was last call.” Francie emerged from the small back room next to my office, where she was prepping things for the next day. Her expression was tired, but she wore a cheery smile that went all the way up to her piercing eyes.

  She held me with those piercing eyes until I had to look away.

  “Oh, just one more, Mom.” I slid my glass across the bar to her. “We’ll call it a nightcap.”

  “At this hour, we’ll call it breakfast.” She caught the glass and mixed another gin and tonic. It didn’t escape my notice that it was mostly tonic.

  “Join me?” She’d been there all day, and I had been too, pretty much. But it wasn’t the same thing when the bar was crowded and filled with noise.

  “Sure, but just—”

  “Just seltzer for you,” I finished.

  She filled a glass with her bubbly water and took a seat across from me. We sat in companionable silence until I was nearly finished with my drink. When I looked up, I found Francie studying me intently.

  “What’s with the look?”

  “Just pondering,” she said.

  “About me?”

  “Sure, you. Everything that happened. All that stuff.”

  “What’s your take?” I understood we had been skirting around that topic for the last few days. I had convinced myself it was just to give all the craziness a break for a bit, but I think, somewhere inside, I knew it was because I was dreading it.

  “It’s all above my paygrade,” Francie said, smiling again. “But Luka seemed satisfied. And you did essentially save the world singlehandedly. That’s got to be a feather in your cap.”

  “Uh-huh.” I finished off the dregs in my glass. The only thing that stopped me from asking for another was that I already knew what the answer would be. “Anything else? Thoughts or musings?”

  “Yeah, one.”

  I looked up from the bar when she didn’t elaborate.

  “There you are.” She smiled. “You’ve only looked me in the eye a handful of times since… since that day at the warehouse.”

  “You’ve got me… It’s your intoxicating beauty. I can’t bear to look for too long—”

  “Mer.”

  I sighed. “It’s the way that you look at me.”

  “What way? I look at you just like I always have.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s exactly what I mean. You look at me like…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m me! Like I didn’t flat out murder that woman in cold blood!”

  “She would have killed us all, Mer. She was about to murder Luka before you stepped in, and she would have killed me too, eventually. You stopped a maniac that actually thought she and others like her should be in control of the entire world. That’s not an exaggeration.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself when I can’t sleep, or when I find myself staring at the same dark spot on the wall for two hours straight. That’s what I tell myself. I rid the world of a monster.”

  “And you did.”

  “But you k
now what I see every time I try to convince myself of that? I see your face. That sincere and worried expression you had as you were pleading for the life of that same monster.”

  “I wasn’t pleading for her life, Mer. After everything she did—everything she still wanted to do—she deserved what she got. My concern was for you. That’s all.”

  “Would you have done it?” I asked. It was strange, but I didn’t just want to know Francie’s opinion; I needed her judgment. I needed her to judge me—right or wrong. A big part of me thought I knew the answer, but that same part of me was pretty sure my outlook on the matter was meaningless. I was tainted in some way.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “But your heart says something, doesn’t it?” I asked. “She was beaten and no longer a threat. You tried to stop me.”

  “You want my honest opinion, don’t you?”

  “Desperately.”

  “Well, you’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Francie smiled. I’m not sure how, but the look conveyed love and sadness in equal measure. “This is what I think, and it’s a crappy thought, but I think it’s the truth. There are people in this world, people who do great things, who have a say about how the world is for the rest of us. They keep us from disaster or act as a catalyst for change. And you’re one of those people, Mer.”

  “But?”

  “There’s always a but, isn’t there? But there’s a flip side to that greatness. A cost. Those people like you, they save us or make things better for us, but each time it costs them a chunk. A chunk of their sanity—their soul, maybe. Sometimes it’s a small chunk… sometimes it’s not so small. But it all adds up. Right? Wrong? I don’t know, and I don’t know that anyone does.”

  She lifted my gaze from the bar with a gentle finger under my chin.

  “All I know is I’m glad I get to be your friend. And I am grateful I’m not you, Meredith Bale.”

  Keep reading for the opening scenes of:

  Dark Vessel

  Meredith Bale Mysteries Book Three

  Chapter 1

  You know how some people have that activity or hobby that clicks so well with them that it occupies a significant portion of their daily thoughts? I’m not talking about an obsession or anything, just that thing that calls to them when they’re off doing other things. Less important things, like hunting for a deadbeat ex-husband who fell off the radar after falling behind on child support payments. Or taxes.

  For some people, it’s building model airplanes or ships in bottles. Other people collect really bizarre things like antique teeth or roller skate wheels or little plastic figures with oversized heads and big eyes.

  But for me, it was poker.

  The fact that I didn’t learn how much I enjoyed the game until I was nearly thirty may have been the single greatest travesty in human history. Okay, that may be a slight overstatement. But it’s not too far off…

  I enjoyed the simple mechanics of the game. And I liked the camaraderie and general good time of sitting around a table late at night with a group of friends. But mostly, I just liked winning. There’s nothing quite like seeing that slightly drunk half-stranger across the table slam down his cards after losing for the fifth or sixth time in a row. The string of slurred curses that inevitably followed was like a song from an angel.

  I’d like to say there was an art to my winning—that I was simply able to look into the eyes of the other players and discern the strength of their hands. I’m actually pretty good at reading people, and I’m sure that way of winning is quite satisfying too. But who needs to win like that when you have a foolproof method of cheating?

  “Is this your new strategy, Mer?” Francie asked from across the green felt-topped table. “You’re going to take so long to make a play that the rest of us just give up and go home to our beds?”

  It was only the five of us that night. Francie and Nic, who had become regulars at the games over the past few weeks, and two bar stalwarts who just happened to not want to leave at closing time. The two presumed derelicts were called Sam and Neuter, though I sincerely hoped Neuter wasn’t the man’s real name. They were in their late forties or fifties—their constant patronage at the bar had weathered them to the point it was hard to tell for sure—and looked enough alike, with their shoulder-length salt and pepper hair and matching goatees, that they could have been brothers.

  “I’m thinking.” I wasn’t doing anything of the sort. What I was doing was waiting for the large, dower-faced man behind my opponents to make his slow circuit around the table. He was slow, but it took even longer because he had to wait for each person at the table to lift their hole cards before progressing to the next. They inevitably did it, but sometimes we had to wait them out until the squirming began.

  When his task was finally complete, my living-challenged accomplice gave me a curt nod, then drifted off to aimlessly wander into the middle of a nearby pool table.

  “Call.” I tossed my coins into the pile and tipped over my cards.

  “A pair of sevens?” Sam flipped his cards over like they were on fire and might burn him. He had a pair of sixes. “You beat me with a pair of friggin’ sevens? Tha’s what, three times tonight it’s been that close?” He craned his neck around, prompting his shaggy hair to bloom out around his head like blown dandelion spores. “It’s a mirror, ain’t it? You can see my cards. I know you can.”

  “Hate to say it, Sam my man, but you’ve got a tell.” I scooped my prize of about a dozen nickels and dimes toward my pile. The stakes were admittedly low, but the thrill was all in the win. An entire night’s worth of winning would probably net me five or six bucks, which I would promptly deposit in Francie’s tip jar. But I was building my mystique… and that was priceless.

  “I don’t have a tell.” Sam hesitated. “What is it?”

  “And give up my advantage? You must think I’ve dyed the brains right out of my head.”

  I pushed back from the table and stood up. “The ladies’ room calls. Nature’s way of giving someone else a chance to win, I guess.”

  “Hardy har.” Nic had folded early during the last hand, and he’d spent the time stacking his remaining coins neatly. It looked like he had about thirty cents left. “But do take your time…”

  I had made it halfway across the barroom before the sound of knocking at the exterior door stopped me.

  “Jeez… you’d think the drunks would give it up at some point,” Nic said.

  “Why’d you look at me when you said that?” Neuter croaked.

  Francie got up and walked over to the door, leaving the two men to their banter. “I’d recognize the shadow of that spiky hair anywhere,” she said, throwing open the locks. “And while he may be a lot of things, I’m pretty sure he isn’t a drunk.”

  I recognized the hair, too. Hiram. Crap! I rushed across the room toward the door, but it was too late. Francie was already welcoming him inside.

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to take you up on your offer to join this little… game,” he said to Francie as he slipped off his trench coat. He turned his gaze on me as I walked over. “No need to greet me so closely, Meredith. I’m loaded up on antinausea meds, but they only do so much.”

  “Hey, Hiram. I’m not sure about you being this close to me tonight. I’m feeling a little extra extra…”

  He narrowed his eyes and walked around me. “I’ll take my chances.”

  I hung my head as he sauntered toward the card table. The jig was up. My glorious reign was about to come crumbling to an end. But, then again, maybe he wouldn’t mention—

  Hiram turned back and pitched his voice low. “What’s the deal with the shade lurking around behind everyone?”

  It wasn’t pitched nearly low enough.

  “Oh. My. God! I’m going to kill you, Meredith! We’ve been doing this for weeks!”

  I ducked my head and beelined it for the restroom, leaving Francie behind to explain to the others what her out
burst was all about. I was pretty sure she was going to leave the details about the ghost out, but I was equally sure she was going to let the others know about the cheating.

  Oh well, it had been a good run.

  I stayed in the restroom for ten minutes or so, giving Francie and the others plenty of time to see that it had all just been a harmless little joke. I was sure we’d have a good laugh about it in a day or so. Pretty sure…

  When I walked back out to join them, they were all clustered near the bar. To a one, they looked like they were at a funeral, solemn and silent and waiting for the funeral director. Or the recently departed…

  “Do I know how to kill a good time or what?”

  I was met with more silence.

  “Oh, come on, guys. It was a joke. It isn’t like we were playing for real money or anything.”

  “Meredith—” Francie started.

  “Sure, I’m a cheater. But I’m a lovable cheater. There is a difference.”

  “Meredith.”

  This time, I became aware of the tone of warning in Francie’s voice. I turned back at the sound of the men’s room door clacking shut behind me.

  A cop emerged. He was in his late thirties or early forties, a little thick around the middle, and wore a thousand-mile stare that said he’d seen some stuff. And whatever that stuff had been, it hadn’t been all that long ago. His suit was wrinkled like he’d been in it for too many hours, and his hat was pushed back on his head to reveal his sweat-glossed forehead. Even if he hadn’t had a bright shiny badge stuck to his belt, I would have known he was a cop at first sight. He had the look.

  “Meredith Bale?”

  I ignored him and spun back toward the crowd at the bar. “You called the freaking cops on me? It was a friendly card game!”

  “Ms. Bale, I’m not here because anybody called me. There’s been a murder—another murder. And I’d like you to come with me.”

  I spun back to face him, trying to figure out which scenario was stranger—having my friends call the cops on me for cheating at cards or having a cop show up at well past three in the morning to accuse me of murdering people.