I looked May in the eyes and gave her a sad smile. She returned it with one of her own, so I knew she’d gotten the message: Thank you.
We were well into darkness now, and approaching the warehouse in Brooklyn. I pulled over. Rob Haney had parked closer to the building that morning, but without the backup of the sun, I wasn’t as confident.
“Oh—” May said before we got out of the car. “I almost forgot. I got you a present. Call it a ‘welcome back’ thing.” She reached into the backseat and took out the bag she’d carried with her from Guinevere. From inside she took a brown-paper-wrapped package and handed it to me.
There was no tape or string holding the paper in place, so the package came apart easily. I sucked in a breath as a beauty of a combat knife fell into my hand. From the end of the black plastic handle to the tip of the hawk’s-beak blade, it was about a foot long. The sheath was black nylon, and it had a clip so it could be attached to a belt. I drew the knife. The blade was shiny steel. There was a small sapphire embedded in the blade, near the hilt.
“Is that—”
“A sword-gem?” May asked. “Yeah, I had the Swordmakers whip it up special for you. It’s not as powerful as a sword, but it’s been specially tailored for you.”
“How?” I asked.
She pointed at the still-red cut on her neck. “This is the knife that the kid in Bucharest was using. The gem’s been baptized with the blood of someone you love. The Swordmakers say it will work.”
“Wait a minute—someone I love?”
She grinned sheepishly. “Well, I hope it will work.”
“You know I love you, right?” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah. You, too.”
“So how about it?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not saying right now, but maybe after the war...”
Her smile faded. “I’m leaving the Round Table after the war, Dave. I already talked to Bill about it. You were right: this war’s changed me, and I don’t like it. I started this, so I’ll see it through, but then I’m done. There’s a small magic school outside of San Francisco that’s offered me a position. I’m gonna move out there and just...live peacefully for a while.”
“Hell, May,” I said. “If anyone understands that, it’s me.”
“Maybe after the war we can revisit this conversation,” May said. She forced a smile. “Besides, if we don’t win the war all of this will be moot.”
“That’s true,” I said. “So let’s make sure we win.”
Flavian had gotten smarter since my last visit. He’d replaced the venom-addled watchpeople with a couple of burly, serious-faced men in long, dark coats. Both of them were in their late thirties and might as well have been wearing buttons that read “I am a mercenary.”
Mercs were the fourth type of human that vampires tended to employ, after thralls, junkies, and groupies, and typically the most dangerous. They were the most experienced and usually the best equipped at causing trouble for well meaning knights. Subtlety—or lack thereof—aside, these guys presented a problem. They were guarding the only entrance to the warehouse. We’d have to find a way to get past them. I wasn’t afraid of mercenaries, but it never pays to underestimate a professional killer. A bullet will kill you just as dead as a set of fangs. And these guys were definitely packing, in flagrant violation of New York State’s concealed carry laws. Those coats were long and thick enough to have been hiding submachine guns. Flavian wasn’t taking any chances.
I don’t like killing humans—I’ve only done it seven times in my career with the Table—but sometimes you don’t have a choice. If the alternative was letting these guys ventilate me, I’d put them down. Fortunately, though, the mercs that vampires hire aren’t usually the coldest ice cubes in the tray. They’re often susceptible to distraction.
And few people can be more distracting than a talented witch.
There was a little bodega across the street from the warehouse. From the looks of it, it had been abandoned for weeks, if not longer. So the guards were surprised when the door opened and a young man stepped out.
He was dressed in a black canvas jumpsuit. His hair was longish but not unruly. He was clean and had a strong jaw and a slightly crooked nose. If I say so, he was extremely handsome. From his hip, he drew a medieval-style arming sword and waved it over his head like a runway flagger.
The mercs blinked at each other for a moment. Then they produced automatic pistols from under their coats and opened fire at the young man. He turned and ran. The knight—who, I must say, had a debonairness that should have served him very well with the ladies—flung himself to the ground and covered his head with his arms.
The air rattled with the aftershocks of the automatic gunfire. After a moment the knight climbed to his feet, picked up a broken piece of brick, and flung it across the street at the two guards. It didn’t come close to making contact, but it served another purpose: it pissed them off. They slammed new clips into their guns and raised the weapons. The young swordsman turned around and...well, he mooned them. The mercs fired.
He took off at a waddle/sprint down the dark street, away from the warehouse. One of the mercs took off after him. The other one remained behind while first the swordsman, then the gunman disappeared into the murky Brooklyn darkness. His eyes scanned the streets, but for up to thirty seconds at a time, he stared after his buddy. Moron.
May and I sprang from our hiding place in an alley and sprinted down the street towards the gunman. As we ran, May lifted her hand, and the merc was yanked off of his feet and slammed into the wall, hard enough to knock him unconscious. Even working that kind of magic May reached the downed guard before I did. She picked up the gun, waved a hand over it, and the weapon melted down into silvery water. She worked another spell over the guard, and he started snoring.
Panting, I jerked my head after my incorporeal doppelgänger and asked, “How long will the illusion last?”
“Glamour, Dave,” May said with a patient smile. “It’s called a glamour. An illusion is something a stage magician does for money. And about fifteen minutes, give or take.”
I nodded down the road again. “Is that how you still see me?”
She shrugged. “I always liked you with the shorter hair and without the beard.”
“I notice you still have a pretty good image of my ass.”
May laughed, her eyes sparkling. “Some things you never forget.”
“So fifteen minutes?”
“Long enough for this guy’s buddy to be distracted, but not long enough for him to cause much trouble.”
“Speaking of trouble...” I said, and drew my sword. I brought the blade down on the padlocked door. The lock fell away with a shower of sapphire sparks. I picked up the handle of the door and pushed it up. Then, together, May and I entered the lair of the vampires.
Chapter 15
As much as Flavian’s warehouse had given me the willies during the day, it was a dozen times scarier at night. There were no lights on inside, and more importantly the sun wasn’t at my back—there was nothing to stop a vampire from rushing out.
Fortunately, May was prepared. She drew a piece of thin wood from a loop on her belt, pointed it at the vaulted ceiling, and snapped a word in a language that was so dead there was nothing left of it but bones. A ball of fire burst from the tip of the wand and rose into the air. It oscillated in color from scarlet to magenta to orange, casting the darkness inside the warehouse in a strangely slow-moving strobe.
Five vampires stood in the circle of the shade-of-red light, snarling. That was much fewer than had been here when I talked to Flavian earlier in the day. I guessed the rest were out hunting. They made no pretense of hiding their vampireness—their skin was withered, their eyes were black, and their teeth were sharp—and they stared at us in astonishment. It would have been funny if their expressions of shock weren't changing into something aggressive, something angry. Such inexpressible hatred that it would have been impossible for a human face to replicate it. (And trust me, humans are pretty g
ood at hating.)
Two vampires nearest the door suddenly pounced, hissing like threatened tomcats. I snarled a curse. May aimed her wand, casual as you please, said another dead word, and one of the vampires reversed direction in midair. He slammed into a rusty old shelf with a loud crack of bone breaking, hit the ground, and didn’t move. I took a sidestep, and the other attacking vampire sailed harmlessly past me out to the sidewalk. As he went by I swung the sword down. The magically-enhanced steel hummed as it cut through dead skin, muscle, and bone. The vampire sprawled to the ground. His right leg ended just below the knee. He curled up in a ball, clutching at the stump of his leg and whimpering.
I stood over the wounded vampire and put the point of the sword at the side of his neck. He winced as the blade scraped his gray skin. Once a vampire’s gone black-eyes it’s hard to make out details about his appearance, but I recognized this guy from earlier. He had a hawkish nose and a slicked-back greasy pompadour.
Blood trickled out onto the floor—slowly, since the vampire didn’t have a heartbeat to pump it faster—and shone black under the light of May’s fireball spell, like an oil spill. I stepped over the vampire’s wounded form to avoid getting any of the nasty stuff on my boots.
Slick the vampire’s three friends took a couple of steps forward. I drew the knife that May had given to me and pointed it at them, warning them, stopping them dead in their tracks. Looked like the knife was gonna be getting its first taste of blood sooner than I’d thought.
May shifted the aim of her wand so it was pointing at the spot between the lead vamp’s eyes, and she said, “Easy, boys.”
“I want to talk to Flavian,” I said. The vampire at my feet swiped weakly. I avoided the blow and pushed the sword into his neck, hard enough that drops of black blood welled up on his skin. “You heard the lady, Slick. Nobody moves. That means you, too.”
May pointed her wand at the fireball in the ceiling and said, “Luxiperf,” which I was pretty sure was nonsense. Brightly colored sparks began dropping from the fireball like hailstones. They pelted the vampires and the air filled with the smell of burned meat and singed cloth and hair. After a few moments of taking this abuse, the vampires that were still standing retreated deeper into the warehouse so they were outside the line of fire. The rain of sparks continued, forming a fence between the vampires and us.
“Relax, fellas,” I said. “We’re just here to pick your boss’s brain. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if somebody makes a move I don’t like Slick here loses his head.”
“I’ve already told you everything I know about Jack McCreary’s death, Captain Carver.” Flavian’s voice echoed oddly from somewhere in the back of the warehouse. “The first time that you rudely barged into my home.”
He stood on the top step of the staircase to the foreman’s office along the back wall. I could just barely make him out among the gloomy shadows and behind the old metal. As he started down the stairs, something moved in the office and the door slowly closed. Though the vampire’s words and tone were nothing but polite, there was something dangerous in his body language that made me hesitate.
Screw it. I was dangerous, too.
“That was before another one of my people turned up dead.”
“I told you this morning, Captain: I have no interest in harming you or your people.” Flavian stepped into the light afforded by May’s fireworks show. The black in his eyes was retreating to the edges of his pupils. He was getting his anger under control.
“Well, Ambassador,” I said, “I guess I don’t believe you.”
“And what evidence leads you to this skepticism?”
I grinned and pointed the knife at him, through the shower of Technicolor sparks. “Call it a hunch. You know more than you’re saying, and I want to know what that is. So spill.”
“And how do you propose to make me talk?” He smiled, and as he did his teeth began to grow and sharpen. The bastard thought he could unnerve me by showing a little fang.
I dug the sword a little harder into the vampire’s throat. “I don’t expect you care too much about this guy. But you do care about your power and appearances. I wonder how the rest of the supe community will see it if you let one of your people get killed in your own base of operations. Right. Under. Your nose. Tell me, Flave, how do you think your rivals would react to that kind of weakness?”
Flavian’s smile evaporated. “You don’t have to do this, Carver. I am not your enemy. You don’t want to make me your enemy.”
“The way I see it,” I said, “we are enemies. Your people are at war with mine. Vampires have tried to kill me—twice—in the last twenty-four hours, give or take. As far as I’m concerned it’s time to start returning the favor. So talk, or Slick gets a really short haircut.”
“Let him up.” For the first time, panic had crept into the edges of Flavian’s voice. “Please.”
“Absolutely. Just as soon as you tell me who murdered Jack McCreary and Kim Larsen.”
Flavian glared.
“Last chance,” I said. “I’ll count to five. If you haven’t started talking by the time I get there...well, I bet you can figure out what’ll happen. One.”
At my feet, Slick howled in terror. Flavian licked his lips with an abnormally long tongue. “I’ve been telling you the truth. Why can’t you see that?”
“Two.”
“I’ve already told you all I know.”
I was undeterred. He was a vampire. Lying was part of the job description: drink blood at night, sleep during the day, and in between, lie as much as possible.
“Three.”
Flavian looked at Slick now. The wounded vampire howled. (Honestly, if he wasn’t a vampire, I’d almost have felt sorry for him.) The ambassador shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to Slick.
“Four.”
“You’ll regret this,” said Flavian. Then he closed his eyes.
“Five.”
I cut off Slick’s head. The bloodstained blade hit the floor, sending up a shower of blue sparks. The head rolled away and bumped against my boot. Slick’s empty eyes stared up at me for a moment. And then Father Time came a-calling. First the vampire’s skin and greasy hair withered away at an unimaginable rate. Then the muscles shriveled and vanished, like a piece of paper in a fire. The nerves and the tendons followed, until all that remained was cloth and bone.
The immediate silence made my ears ache. No one moved. No one spoke. I could feel every eye in the warehouse burning into me.
As Slick’s death scream faded away, the rest of the vampires began to hiss. Blue lips pulled away from yellow fangs. Black eyes stared unblinking. Even Flavian’s face took on a tinge of grayness.
May pointed her wand at the ceiling once more. The sparks began falling faster and brighter, causing little fires wherever they hit the ground. The vampires slowed, hesitated.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Flavian said, his voice little more than a cough. “We don’t have to be enemies.”
“You’re a vampire,” I said. “You eat people. We really, really do.”
He shook his head, like a professor disappointed with a favorite student. “You short-sighted ape! I want this war to end peacefully.”
“See, that’s your problem,” I said. “I don’t. I want it to end with every single one of you bloodsucking sons of bitches in embers. As long as your people want to treat mine like cattle, there can’t be peace.”
“I didn’t want it to be like this.”
I shrugged as casually as I could while holding a bloodstained sword in one hand and a hunting dagger in the other. “I did. Think about it Flava Flave. Maybe you’ll remember something.”
“I’ll be seeing you soon, Captain.”
“Come on, May,” I said.
Together, the two of us backed out of the warehouse, the falling sparks the only thing covering our escape.
Chapter 16
“What the hell was that?” May’s vo
ice cracked, as I sped through the empty street of Brooklyn. Adrenaline was making me step too hard on the gas pedal, and I let up a bit. “You just killed an innocent—”
“Innocent?” I snarled. “May, he was a vampire. He wasn’t an innocent anything.”
“We’re not at war with Flavian,” she said. “Or at least we weren’t. Now...I don’t know what happens.”
“Do you seriously believe that? That Flavian and his merry band of hippie vampires just want to make love not war? Come on, May, it’s bull and you know it.”
“I don’t know that,” May said. “And if it was true, you just gave him the push he needed to go back to the Elders.”
I glowered out at the beam of the headlights, my hands tight on the wheel. “You saw his eyes. He’s as much a monster as any of them. He hides it with that scholarly exterior, but that’s all it is. A mask.”
“Maybe. But if you’re wrong, you just exposed the Table to another war.” She shook her head. “Take it from me, that doesn’t exactly get you a seat at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.”
“I exposed a flaw in his armor. He’s gonna be too busy fighting off challengers to his turf to come after us.” I grinned a little, savoring the image of Flavian snarling and slashing as a few of his followers circled him like a pack of wild dogs.
“But we could have used him, Dave,” May said. “That’s what I’m saying. He could have been an asset to the Table.”
“Oh.” Maybe she was right about that. The whole “keep your enemies closer” thing. Yeah, that could have worked.
May chuckled. “Not so good at diplomacy yet, are you?”
I scowled. “Guess not.”
I drove in silence for a while, anger bubbling inside me like an overcooked soup. May was the one who’d dragged me into this mess, and now she was questioning the way I was doing things? She knew me—she should have known that I wasn’t gonna play along with Flavian’s pretensions of diplomacy and ambassadorship.
As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t feel bad about killing a vampire. I hated them. After everything they’d done to me, I thought that hatred was justified.
Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood Page 10
