Ivy brought these senses out full force. If that kept up, he was going to have to kill her. An Enforcer couldn’t afford any weakness. Especially not if his Council masters’ suspicions proved correct.
From what he’d learned from Ivy about psychic mortals trying to take their fates into their own hands, he feared that the world was on the brink of disaster.
He was glad he’d tracked Ivy down that first night in Chicago, but it was time he went about his mission a bit more straightforwardly.
He needed to go alone but was reluctant to leave her when she was anything but safe in her own home. She was being stalked, threatened, and there was magic involved. But she was the one after vampires; he didn’t sense a vampire was the one seeking her.
He went to the living-room window and checked the street outside the apartment building. It only took him a moment to register the impatient smoldering fire smoking in the being of someone in one of the autos parked outside.
Christopher grinned. Then went back to the bedroom to fasten Ivy’s wrist to the decorative iron headboard before leaving the apartment.
chapter sixteen
Would you prefer me to use a bolt cutter or pick the lock?”
Ivy woke to her cousin Selena’s sarcasm, and the realization that she had a whole lot of stupid behavior to answer for. She started to sit up, but her left arm was numb from being held above her head.
“Son of a bitch!”
She was handcuffed again.
Hence, Selena’s comment about locks and bolt cutters.
Ivy looked up at her cousin from her totally humiliating sprawled, naked-on-the-wrinkled-sheets, she’d-obviously-been-fucking position. “Please tell me you ripped his heart out,” she said.
“I waited until he left, then came in to make sure you were okay.” Selena leaned closer to Ivy. She gave her a visual lookover. “Did he bite you anywhere I don’t want to have a look at?”
Her police-officer cousin might as well have asked Ivy if she needed a rape kit. The humiliation burned, even while Ivy was grateful for her concern.
“He’d have spit out the blood and run screaming for the door,” she reminded Selena.
And likely killed her, too, in his rage and shame.
Selena pulled the sheet up around Ivy’s chest. The fall of the soft cloth on her sensitized skin sent an erotic rush through Ivy. What had that strigoi done to her? She tried not to smile like a contented wanton—what a lovely old-fashioned word—at the sensation.
“I don’t like the look of those bruises on your shoulders,” Selena said. “Does anything feel broken?”
The question brought Ivy back to earth. She was suddenly aware of sore hips and aching thighs. “Not that I intend to tell you about.”
A faint blush stained Selena’s pale, freckled cheeks. Ivy had to smile at embarrassing this tough homicide detective who’d seen it all. And certainly done quite a bit of it herself. Family was different, Ivy supposed. And the knowledge that little innocent cousin Ivy had been having vampire sex—well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Ivy certainly didn’t want to know details of Selena’s relationship with her vampire lover. And what about Aunt Cate and Lawrence? Oh, no, sweet aunties didn’t do that sort of thing, and it was beyond the pale to think about it if they did.
“Move over,” Selena said. “Let’s get you out of this bondage gear.”
She sat down beside Ivy and opened a case of picklocks. Not standard-issue police equipment, this gear. Members of their Traveler familia were taught interesting skills and were presented with useful hardware as they grew up. It wasn’t all memorizing grimoires, practicing magical rituals, and learning about herbs for their education.
“Why’d he leave you trussed up?” Selena asked.
Ivy looked away, and said, very softly, “He says I belong to him.”
“Poor bastard. Wait until you bring him home to meet the family.”
“Not happening. He’s English, by the way. Lawrence says that there are no English vampires, so I don’t know who or what he really is. Except he carries a pair of handcuffs.”
“Maybe he’s a cop.”
“Maybe a killer,” Ivy said. She was reluctant to speak the words, as if she owed some loyalty to Christopher. Her real loyalty had to be to the psychic members of the human race. “Of course, he’s a killer. You don’t get to be a vampire without killing someone. Oh, my Goddess!”
Ivy sat up straight with a sudden shock of realization. Her heart pounded hard at the grim possibility. The sheet fell down around her waist. Her bruised shoulder protested when she snatched the covering back over her bare breasts.
Selena finished unfastening the cuff and stood up. She looked thoughtfully at Ivy, the narrow-eyed, hardbitten cop all of a sudden. “I think I know what idea just occurred to you. There’s a strange vampire in town. He arrives at the same time a couple of people from our community have been murdered. The last stage in turning a mortal into a vampire involves a ritual murder by the companion to be turned using black magic, with the assistance of a vampire. There aren’t any companions in the local nests ready to be turned. If there were, the Enforcer of the City would have picked out some scumbag human in need of killing and overseen the ritual himself, and he would probably ask my advice about who got picked as vampire baby food.”
Three strikes and you’re vamp fodder was the Chicago way. Other Enforcers in other cities might not be so civic-minded about who got taken off the streets for use in Changes and Hunts as Ariel of Chicago. But he and Selena had worked out a compromise acceptable for his people and hers. Nobody died who didn’t deserve to.
“Ariel wouldn’t allow a psychic mortal’s life to be wasted on making a baby vampire,” Ivy said. “If the Enforcer of the City picked the sacrifice, there wouldn’t be any media coverage of disappearances, no evidence left to find, such as a hand found by local cops. But maybe that isn’t how they do it where the foreign vampire comes from.”
“Maybe the old-world vamps still think they can frighten the peasants with the occasional show of macabre force,” Selena said.
“Maybe the out-of-town vampire was brought in to oversee the ritual.” Just because Christopher had a brilliant smile and was an exciting lover didn’t make Ivy trust that he was one of the few good-guy vampires.
Ivy spun the scenario, because it was necessary to consider, but she hated every word she spoke, every bad thought of Christopher’s performing black rites using good people as victims. She could say it, be as hard-assed as she needed to be about him, but deep down, she couldn’t really believe it. She supposed this unwillingness had something to do with their having great sex, that they had interesting conversations, that he’d picked up her spilled books, that he’d put her in his coat when she was cold. But it was selfish to be sentimental when people were getting killed.
“Who did he perform the Change rites for?” Selena questioned.
“A strig’s companion?” Ivy ventured. “Strigs are on their own without the protection or resources of a nest. Maybe a strig asked him for help turning someone. Maybe he’s a roaming vampire for hire.” Ivy shrugged her bruised shoulders. “Ow. I don’t know.”
Selena shook her head. “Strigs generally drop off jacked-up companions at nests for help,” Selena said. “A strig can’t take care of a baby vampire, and they don’t like to lose one of their own, no matter who the parent is. Never mind the Law of the Blood that says strigs are dead to the undead and so are their get. The loner vampires usually have friends and connections inside the nests.”
What Ivy knew of the Laws of the Blood that governed the lives of vampires didn’t make much sense. The Laws seemed so out-of-date as to be dangerous to the survival of vampirekind. She supposed you had to be on the inside of a culture to really understand what held it together.
“So, if a baby vampire ends up left on a local nest’s doorstep, we’ll know that—”
“Aunt Cate thinks the killer is a demon,” Selena said. She eyed Iv
y critically. “I’m told Aunt Cate performed a binding-and-bringing ritual recently. One that put you in the center of all this crap.” She put her hands on her rounded hips. Selena was six feet tall and built like a Valkyrie. “The center of a murder investigation is not where you belong, Lilith Ivy McCoy Bailey. You aren’t trained for it.”
“No, but I was bred for it,” Ivy answered. “I’m tougher than I look,” she added.
“No, you’re not.”
So far, Ivy’s contribution to Selena’s crusade to civilize and normalize vampire and mortal relations had been to monitor vampires on the make for human partners. Not that the terms human and partner went together in vampires’ minds naturally. To vampires, who liked to forget they’d been human once themselves, humans were the servant class. Most of the victims of a vampire’s thirsts were only psychic enough to be slaves. If you were strong enough mentally to be picked as a companion someday, the exchange of blood with your vampire master led you into a form of madness. The insane craving could only be helped by your becoming a vampire, and you had to kill and consume a mortal to change—you couldn’t help yourself. Then you turned into an arrogant snob who got to take slaves and companions for yourself. Hell of a way to run a species, was Ivy’s opinion.
Nobody was given a choice. That was one of the Laws of the Blood: that companions were property, to be used as their vampire owner pleased.
Except, that wasn’t how it worked in Chicago anymore.
Ivy’s job was to follow and report on vampires trolling for prospective brides and grooms of Dracula and make sure they were obeying the new rules. Selena and Ariel took over from there if they weren’t.
Selena broke into Ivy’s thoughts. “You’re being stalked yourself. You should have called me about the break-in.”
“I was occupied.”
Selena glanced at the bed.
Ivy shook her head. “Oh, no. It’s been a lot more than that.” She filled in her cousin on everything since Christopher grabbed her in the rain. Everything but the weird mixing of their dream selves. Some things just weren’t anybody else’s business.
When Ivy was done, Selena’s response was, “Pack a few things, I’m getting you out of here.”
“The vampire can find me again if he wants to.”
“It’s not the vampire I’m worried about. At least he’s not on the top of my list. I think Aunt Cate might qualify for number one, but your stalker is the immediate problem. I’m not letting you be the next victim.”
Ivy gritted her teeth to avoid fighting an argument she couldn’t win.
“There’s more than one killer,” Selena added when the protests she’d expected didn’t come from Ivy. “I know this from my day job. More than one killer is what the forensics and profiling people are telling us. But they also think the killings in DeKalb are related to two bodies found here in the city with the same sort of ritual display.”
“More than one—?” A horrific notion shot painfully into Ivy’s mind. “You mean there’s a coven of serial killers out there?”
“I don’t mean anything of the sort!”
Selena’s quick vehemence told Ivy that her homicide-detective cousin certainly was considering the possibility.
“A demon-worshipping coven?” Ivy speculated. “Or crazy Satan worshippers who haven’t a clue what they’re playing with. Either way, they’re committing ritual murders to gather psychic power. Aunt Cate’s right.”
Selena was anything but convinced by her logic. “Satanists don’t know squat about what they’re doing.”
“Yeah. But if some coven has found a real spell they’re fooling around with—”
“If they manage to conjure up a demon, it will eat them, and we don’t have to worry about a trial,” Selena said. “But Aunt Cate needs to keep out of it. You need to keep out of it. Our folk aren’t the only ones being targeted.”
“We aren’t the only ones with psychic gifts,” Ivy reminded Selena. “Psychics might be the tiniest minority population on the planet, but we aren’t all related. We don’t know how many people have telepathy or see the future or are synesthetes?”
Why had she added synesthesia as a psychic gift when it was a proven neurological disorder? Christopher was unique. Couldn’t get much more unique than a vampire who heard in purple or had sex in green, or whatever all his cross-wired senses told him about sensing the world.
“The magic-using community doesn’t make the effort to find others of our kind, granted,” Selena said. “The tradition’s always been to let them find us, for pilgrims to seek out the way and all that crap. It’s vampires that actively hunt psychics, but not to kill them.”
In a way, that was reassuring. Except, maybe Christopher needed to ritually sacrifice psychic people to keep his neurological disorder under control.
“Euww.” What a terrible suspicion. “Never mind,” she said to Selena’s curious look.
Ivy hated thinking that way about Christopher even though she knew she had to consider every possibility. She gingerly touched her bruised shoulders, reminded herself, “Vampires are not our friends.”
“Get dressed,” Selena said. “And packed. We can talk in the car.”
chapter seventeen
How long are we going to wait?” Ted asked.
“You didn’t have to come with me,” Jack answered.
He didn’t want Ted there. Ted was a rapist who’d insist on having his way with the woman Jack wanted to sacrifice. He couldn’t even argue about it. The Master wanted terror, humiliation, pain. The demon lord needed strong emotions for his magic; it was their duty to bring him these gifts.
They’d been waiting in the shadows in front of the victim’s apartment building for a long time. Ted was getting cold and restless. He didn’t really have a stalker’s mentality. With him it was about charming the victim, face-to-face, or just grabbing her and pulling her into his car. Ted was about whatever was easiest, as long as he got to rape and kill.
“That woman’s still inside with her,” Ted said. “I say we take both of them.”
Ted didn’t recognize who that woman was, but Jack knew. He’d gotten a glimpse of her curly red hair when the tall woman got out of her car. The Master had described her; she was a major player in the city’s psychic underground. Jack’s host knew about her, but Jack didn’t dare try to access those memories. He knew the Master would want to take care of this dangerous woman himself.
“No,” was all he said to Ted.
Ted swore. He stomped up the block and back again, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Fingering his filleting knife, no doubt. He leaned over the sidewalk and grinned vainly at his reflection in an ice-rimmed oily puddle.
He was in a better mood when he got back, all smarmy smile. “Tell me more about vampires. You said the guy who left her place was a vamp. How could you tell?”
Whoever Ted had been before his rebirth, his host’s brain certainly hadn’t been gifted with much psychic ability. While Ted’s inferiority pleased Jack, he also found it inconvenient.
“There’s an aura around vampires, an extra energy. I can’t explain it. You have to learn to look for it.”
“Show me the next time we see one, okay?”
Jack didn’t like Ted’s eagerness about vampires. To Jack, it seemed almost like treachery toward their demon Master. “Why don’t you ask about demons? There’s nothing special about vampires. They’re just changed humans. They’re made. Demons are born in a dimension beyond our comprehension. They visit our realm to gain power, gather worshippers.” And, sometimes, if a worshipper was obedient and worthy enough, demon spirit would be passed into that human. Jack would be worthy of such difficult magical transformation, he had been promised. But he wasn’t about to let Ted in on the secret between himself and the Master. He admonished Ted, “Demons are naturally superior creatures, to be served.”
Ted laughed, but said seriously enough. “Born versus made. Yeah, I’ll keep the difference in mind. How long are we waiting?”<
br />
“You don’t have to stay.”
“You could come back in the daylight to kill the bitch,” Ted said. “We don’t have to hunt at night. Vampires do, right? They’re creatures of the night? They’re night hunters full of bloodlust?” Ted’s emphasis was on lust.
“Vampires sleep during the day,” Jack conceded.
“But we’re good to go twenty-four/seven.”
While that was true, daylight hunting didn’t seem right to Jack. Dark work was for the dark of night. He was probably being old-fashioned that way. Just as he was out of touch with this modern world in so many ways—look at how many the others had killed during their careers in this modern time. And they’d only done it for their own pleasure! Distasteful.
“You’re right, Ted,” he conceded. “Let’s go. This woman isn’t the only prey for me in this whole huge city.”
“Dick and John were planning to party in Lincoln Park. Maybe we can join them and make a competition out of it. Highest body count wins.”
Jack liked the notion. He’d once set the city of London shaking with terror. He’d love to have a city quaking at his feet again. The Master would drink in the energy of collective fear as well.
He smiled, almost liking Ted for this suggestion. “Win-win situation,” he said. “Yes. Let’s go.”
He glanced once more at his prey’s apartment window before walking away. “Until tomorrow, my dear.”
chapter eighteen
Christopher didn’t really know the Enforcer of the City of Chicago although they were brothers, of a sort, and had met once or twice. Like Christopher, Ariel, which was certainly not the name he’d been born with, was also the blood child of the Legacy—which was not the only vampire in England’s name, either. Christopher Bell didn’t understand the affectation so many vampires practiced of adopting fancy monikers.
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