Edged Blade

by J. C. Daniels

  I hadn’t seen Damon in nearly two weeks.

  I hadn’t had sex in so long, I didn’t even want to think about it.

  And Justin was doing one thing guaranteed to make Damon’s brain shut down.

  “You know, this is what happens when you hook up with a shifter, Kit,” Justin said, pushing up onto his elbows. His black T-shirt rode up, baring his flat belly. “The animal kicks in too easily, shuts down the brain. Now, me? If we were still together, I wouldn’t be all that worried if your bedroom smelled like another man.”

  “That’s because you can’t scent another man in my bedroom, you asshole.”

  He shrugged. Crossing his feet at the ankle, he said, “He knows we’re done. I just—hey!”

  Justin glared at me from the floor.

  I let go of his ankles and smiled.

  “You were saying?”

  He cocked his head. “Well, the view is nicer from down here.”

  “You’re ridiculously juvenile,” I said. Shaking my head, I turned away. Since he clearly wasn’t leaving, I needed to get clothes on.

  After grabbing my gear, I ducked into the bathroom.

  “You’re sure you didn’t leave any signs behind?”

  “Justin…I’m not new at this.” Dressing in short order, I moved out of the bathroom to find him at the window. He was staring outside, arms crossed over his chest. “Don’t worry so much.”

  “It’s my job,” he said easily. Then he turned around. “So…speaking of jobs…”

  “Disappearances.”

  My gut clenched as I said it. Sometimes Justin came to me with jobs that were just a walk down easy street. Other times, they fell into the what the bloody hell category.

  We were in the bloody hell zone. I knew it without asking even a single question.

  We were no longer alone in my apartment.

  Padraig, a witch both Justin and I knew, had joined us and he sat on my sofa, his dreamy blue eyes cold and hard as he stared back at me. “Aye, a fair amount of them, too.”

  “Are they…” I hesitated, choosing the words carefully. Over the past couple of months, there had been some odd happenings. One small wolf pack had been all but eradicated and the survivors claimed they’d been attacked by friends—by their own Alpha, one who’d gone missing some months earlier.

  There were rumors of several small Houses—witches who worked and lived and trained together—facing similar attacks. One house—a strong one, though somewhat small—was gone. Every witch who’d lived inside the walls of that House had disappeared.

  I rubbed my temple and met Justin’s gaze.

  His eyes were hard and flat and his face was haggard.

  “You’re still digging into things about the hospital,” I said. “Is this connected or is it something different?” My mind veered down a particular road…something different. It left me cold. I’d worked a something different before.

  Damon’s adoptive son, Doyle had been kidnapped. That was how we’d met, when he’d hired me to find the boy. We’d found him, but I still saw the echoes of nightmares in Doyle’s eyes.

  We hadn’t been able to save everybody, though. And they’d been kids. Teenagers, most of them Doyle’s age.

  “We don’t know,” Paddy said in response to my question. “These disappearances, there are no reports of violent echoes, like what was discovered in the Clearwater House.”

  I looked away as he spoke. Clearwater had been the home of that one House. A House they now called silent. No surviving witches.

  “These are all random disappearances, too,” Justin said. “No connections.”

  “How many?”

  “A fair number, I’m afraid. I know two witches personally,” Paddy said, leaning in. “One was a mate of mine. The other…I didn’t know her, but I knew of her. She wasn’t the sort to just disappear and she’s gone. Both of them, just gone. I’ve heard of others, though. Clearwater, then this…it’s enough to make a man worry, Kit.”

  “Are we talking five? Ten?”

  Padraig sighed and reached up, rubbing at his face. For a moment, he pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyelids, hard. “I talked to an old friend at Banner. They’ve been watching, although watching is all they are doing. They’ve had thirty reports…of witches.”

  “What aren’t you saying?”

  When Paddy didn’t answer, Justin did. “Other NHs have gone missing. This is some of the information I’ve been tracking. Lone shifters, they just disappear. One small pack in Alabama—it’s like Roanoke. No survivors. I’ve even heard tales of a few vampires here and there.”

  He hesitated and then added, “The most recent vampire disappearances have been from here. One of them was Roberto Whittier.”

  I tensed.

  Justin looked down at his hands, palms facing each other, fingertips pressed together. “I heard you two almost rubbed shoulders not too long ago.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” I said softly. “He was trying to stare me down at the Assembly’s Halloween thing. It didn’t go very far. He was asked to leave and…” I shrugged. Blowing out my breath through my teeth, I shoved my hands into my pockets. “He’s missing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Somebody is nabbing vampires?

  “How is that even possible?” I stared hard at them. “Vampires have that whole hive-mind thing going.”

  Justin smiled. “It’s not a hive-mind thing, Kit.”

  “Close enough.” Wrapping my arms around my middle, I looked away. Vampires were connected to every member of their blood family. It was a distant connection, but if they chose to reach out, they could. If one of them was in a blood frenzy or maybe out trying to turn an entire town into their personal feeding ground, the family, as a whole, could, and sometimes had, worked together as unit to bring the lone vampire down. Nature’s—or maybe Pandora’s—protection against that particular species wiping out too much of its food supply and therefore going extinct itself.

  Vampires weren’t a compassionate race, but they were a cunning one. Sometimes they had bad eggs. Bad eggs didn’t bode well for them. Sadly, their idea of a bad egg and everybody else’s idea of bad egg didn’t exactly align.

  “We have a…contact,” Justin said. “He doesn’t exactly work for Banner, but he’s been known to take on contracts and he gets good intel. I’ve spoken to him.”

  Without turning my head, I slid my gaze back to him. “A vampire.”

  He didn’t answer that, just continued on with what he was saying. “He’s in the line of one of the missing bloodsuckers. He says there’s just a disconnect.”

  I shook my head and frowned. “A disconnect?”

  “Yep.” He looked around and then grabbed the notepad on the corner of my coffee table. “Here.”

  Justin sketched out a series of circles, connecting them by lines. It reminded me of…well, of a chemical formula more than anything else. Inside the circles, instead of elements, he’d scrawled names. A few of them, I recognized. Most of them didn’t cause much reaction, other than my now-instinctive dislike of vampires, but others would have made my heart lurch in fear, if I had allowed it.

  “This is the direct line and the closest relations for my contact.”

  I saw the name. Immediately, my spine stiffened. Allerton.

  Abraham Allerton.

  “I know him,” I said softly.

  Paddy looked up as Justin continued his sketch. “D’ ya now? He’s not a bad man to have at your back in a fight.”

  “I’d rather stick a knife in my own back,” I muttered.

  Justin looked up and met my gaze then. Jamming my hands into my pockets, I averted my eyes. It took another thirty seconds before I was sure I had the wild fear inside me under control, but thirty seconds was better than thirty minutes—and I hadn’t even broken out into a sweat or had a panic attack this time.

  “I’m waiting on the lecture, Professor,” I said, my tone coming off more caustic than normal.

  Justin just
nodded after moment. “This. It’s the direct line,” he said again, and then he drew a circle around Abraham’s name. “I’ve known Abraham for going on…I guess fifteen years now. One of the first vampires I ever had more than a five second conversation with—most of them, I’d just as soon shove wood through, but he’s not a bad one.”

  Maybe one day I’d get over the dislike and fear Jude had bred into me. Today wasn’t that day.

  I continued to stare at the lines and circles and names, so hard they started to blur together. Paddy crouched down next to Justin and reached out. “This is the missing vampire,” he said as Justin continued to watch me. “His name is Icarus. He’s two generations ahead of Abraham.”

  Justin looked back down, watched as Paddy tapped another name on the sheet of paper before him. The name went red, standing out from the rest of the ink. “This is Jedidiah Allerton—he was the first of the Allerton line to settle here.”

  The way vampire ‘families’ worked was confusing as hell. Some decided to adopt a new name when they came over—that seemed especially common if they’d been leaving a particularly pathetic or sickly life, or if they’d just had a really lame name—but one thing all of them did was adopt a second surname. They took on the name of the familial line who’d sired them.

  It was their protection, their status, their identification in their world.

  The Allerton vampire family went back centuries and they had sects in several places in North America and the United Kingdom. They weren’t a large sect here in Florida, but their name was a powerful one. Powerful enough that I didn’t see people fucking with them just to fuck with them. Maybe they weren’t on par with the Amund family, but they weren’t small fish, either.

  I studied Jedidiah’s name as I riffled through my mental file, trying to figure out if there was anything else I knew about them. Well, other than the fact that Damon had offed somebody in the line before.

  “Jedidiah was sired about the same time as this woman—Ruth.” Padraig tapped another name and the woman’s name flared and became a paler, less vibrant shade red and then, slowly, the line lit up and it trailed its way down to Icarus—the name Justin had initially pointed out.

  “So, from Icarus, up through all the vampires between him and Ruth, then to Jedidiah, then down from him and all the vampires made between him and Abraham,” I said slowly.

  Paddy winked at me. “Remember—the connection between Ruth and Jedidiah is that they were created by the same vampire—not sure, but I think his name might have been Charles. But, yeah…that’s the connection.”

  “I’ve got a headache just thinking about it.” I rubbed my temple. “How do they live with everybody in their heads all the time?”

  “It’s a matter of shuttin’ the doors,” Paddy said with a shrug. “Remember, this is a species that loses bits and pieces of their souls over time. The connection to the younger ones helps the older ones stay grounded, while the control from the older ones helps the younger not to get lost in the blood frenzy. Truly, if they weren’t made like this, think of the slaughter they’d do. It’s what keeps them sane—or as close to sane as we can expect them to be.”

  But too many of them weren’t sane—that was the problem. Paddy was busy staring at the diagram and didn’t see me as I reached up, rubbed the scars hidden under the ink on my neck.

  Justin did, though.

  Curling my hand into a fist, I lowered it back to my side. “So, about Icarus?” I asked.

  Justin reached out and stroked a finger over Icarus’ name.

  The lines connecting him to everybody else vanished. His name was still there, but he was cut adrift.

  “There’s a disconnect,” he said again, but the words seemed…grimmer. And I studied the diagram. There had been lines and links and connections under him. The ones that were higher up remained solid. But there were a few, farther down, that were fainter—and the very bottom line of names were vibrating. As I watched, Paddy flipped the diagram, so that the older, stronger vampires were the ones on the bottom of the odd little family tree. “Once a vampire has a few decades on him—or her—they’re old enough and strong enough for that feedback to start supporting the young ones. Usually, the smaller lines are the ones where you tend to see more…trouble children.”

  I flicked him a look.

  That was such a polite term for psychotic killer. But he was right. If a newly turned vamp was going to go batshit, more often than not, it happened with the smaller houses—this made sense. I knew this, in general, but the why of it? I’d only speculated.

  “So they all actually need each other for survival—or at least sanity,” I said softly.

  “That or a fresh supply of warm bodies,” Paddy said. I think he liked vampires about as much as I do. “Blood, they can get by on synthetic, but they need that other mental connection. Now, Icarus was how they originally noticed their problem. Even though all vampires can make other vampires, some are just better suited. They are stronger and can anchor a new one better—few people outside the families know it, but that’s what they call the better ones—anchors. See how some of these names will have a few offspring, while others have double or triple? The ones with the higher numbers are anchors. Icarus was an anchor. When he disappeared, the youngest in his line lost stability.” Padraig tapped what I assumed was a younger vamp—he was at the far end of the spectrum from old Jedidiah himself—the father of the local Allerton house.

  “This boy.” A sneer curled his lips. “He decided he wanted to be called Spike.”

  Slowly, I looked up. “Spike.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “You have to admit, it’s better than Vlad.”

  “Is he at least blond and hot?”

  “As you’re my version of blonde and hot, love, I’m not a good judge.” Paddy grinned.

  Justin chuckled.

  Paddy ignored my dark look and went back to his explanation. “Now, our boy Spike won’t be watching Buffy or anything else for a good long while, assuming that’s where he picked out his name, assuming he survives. Assuming anything. Back to Spike and Icarus—Icarus was pretty choosy about who he brought over, but his offspring, less so and it devolved from there. It’s not uncommon.”

  He looked up at me. “During the war, vampires were hit hard—they won’t give up numbers, but some estimate they lost hundreds of thousands at the minimum. Population estimates are hard to pinpoint. Roughly, we figure the world population of vampires, before the war was about two million. The war wiped out a quarter of that, at least. Vampires hunt alone, but they rarely travel or live alone. So as things settled down, they went about rebuilding their numbers fast.”

  It made sense. In a way. “So they were looking for quantity over quality?”

  “In a sense.” Paddy looked back at his sketch. “Spike had only been dead about thirty years, would have been among the first to be brought over. He’s quiet, low key. A drone, basically. Then he loses it. Was driving through Orlando and apparently the hunger hit him. He went after a woman—mortal—and the only reason the she’s alive and Spike doesn’t have an EOS on his ass is because there was a shifter in the same area. The wolf—one of Dair’s—grabbed him before Spike could lock his teeth on the girl and he threw him through a plate glass window. Then he gave chase and ran him back across the boundary into East Orlando.”

  I rubbed my brow, wondering when all of this had gone down. Well, since the EOS—execute on sight—hadn’t gone out, Allerton House had probably been able to keep it contained.

  Justin cut in. “For his trouble, the wolf had to spend a day in custody and he was fined for destroying the window. The girl intervened on his behalf, though. She’s with that activist group, TAP2. I think the cops let him out just to shut her up.”

  TAP2—I wanted to groan. The group was a pain in the ass—granted more for human authorities and the anti-NH groups out there than for us, but sometimes they just got in the way. TAP2 was short for They Are People, Too—and guess who the they is?


  I don’t guess anybody bothered to explain to them how insulting that was, but what can you do?

  “Okay. Dair’s wolf got let out, Spike is on the run, Abraham went after him, and…?”

  “Spike is under lock and key.” Padraig’s voice was grim. “From what I’m hearing, nobody can reach him. If they can’t find Icarus, it could be years before he’s stable enough on his own.”

  “Years?” I hissed out a breath, my gut twisting as a wave of nausea hit me. Years? Held as a prisoner? Memories tried to assault me, but I shoved them back. Spike’s confinement was for different reasons—and he hadn’t been brought in solely for some psychotic asshole’s amusement. Still…

  Softly, I said, “He’d be better off dead.”

  “He chose to get bitten. He had inoperable brain cancer—one thing humans still can’t fix. He had a fifteen percent chance of surviving the bite and according the information I read up on him, the drugs were making him sicker every day.” Justin shrugged. “Death isn’t an option for some people. Now…”

  The word trailed off and we all looked at his name.

  Abruptly, Justin grabbed the sheet of paper and wadded it up. He threw it into the kitchen and I heard the recycler kick on, chewing up the bit of paper. “Nice aim,” I said absently. “So this guy loses it and they figure it out then?”

  “Basically.” He shrugged. “It’s all about that door—the one Paddy told you about. Vampires keep their mental doors closed. The feedback they need from each other is subconscious. They have to actively seek each other out otherwise. When they started tracking up this guy’s line to find out why he went unstable, they couldn’t find Icarus.”

  “Nobody reported him missing?”

  “Nope.” Justin settled back on the couch, his face grim. “Apparently, he’s known to go into seclusion for short periods. The vamps he’s closest to, his servants, they all assumed he’d taken some me time.”

  Puffing up my cheeks, I blew out a breath. “Okay.” I thought back to what Justin had said just a minute or so back. Death isn’t an option for some. Blocking back the fear that tried to build up inside, I stared hard at the name of the missing vamp. “So this…anchor is gone. How do they know he’s not dead?”