“Oh. Well, the potions I took did a pretty good job of healing me, but I’m still rather sore, and it will take a while for all the bruises to fade. But if it wasn’t for Blair, I have no idea where I’d be, or what condition I would be in.”
“Well,” Frankie said, “I got that information on missing persons that you asked Blair about. Starting around four or five months ago, there has been a spike in reports, and it’s not getting better. So, why did you ask about it?”
I told them about my theory that the vampire contenders for control of the city were recruiting and turning new vampires.
“I’m willing to bet that a lot of those people who went missing tended to hang out either at The Devil’s Den or at Necropolis,” I said. “I’m rather curious as to what you do if a person is reported missing, and they later turn up sporting a new set of fangs. Do you arrest the vamp who turned them for murder?”
“I wish,” Mackle said.
Frankie shook her head. “Technically, they aren’t dead, since vampires don’t exist. There isn’t anything in our laws forbidding what they do, unless we can catch them during the first three days. And then the case would fall apart when the new vamp rises. We just hope they don’t go munching on their old family and friends.”
“Does anyone know how many vampires there are in this area?” I asked.
Mackle shook her head. “A year ago, someone estimated about five hundred. I don’t know where he got that number. We had forty or fifty attacks reported last year. But we’ve had over two thousand attacks in the past five months, and you know that most of those were by the newly-turned.”
Trevor came in later that night. He said he’d been by the bar a couple of times while I slept, but Sam wouldn’t let anyone disturb me.
He hinted around asking me for a date, as he sometimes did, and I put him off again, as I always did. I liked him a lot, but my attraction for Harry Gallagher had me confused. I had no problem turning down Flynn’s advances, so why did Gallagher affect me so much? The only man I’d actually been on a date with was Lieutenant Blair, but I had held him at arm’s length after that.
But Trevor was funny and interesting, and we sometimes went out for pizza together. He had found out that Jolene was giving me spell-casting lessons, and just happened to drop by her place when I was there. And she kept pushing me to go out with him. But as much as I was drawn to him, in the back of my mind I was afraid. Suppose it didn’t work out with us and I lost him as a friend?
I talked to him about the vampires ‘recruiting’ new members and what Mackle had said about the ramp-up in attacks.
“She’s just talking about attacks on norms,” he said. “There are gangs of vamps giving the shifters a lot of grief, and those don’t get reported. The three major shifter packs here are talking about coordinating and doing something about it.”
“Lizzy told me once that the Fae are concerned about the chaos,” I said. Trevor was one of the few people I could talk to about the Fae. He and Lizzy had been a couple at university, and he knew her family.
His head jerked, and he stared at me. “That’s not good.”
“I know.”
Despite some of the Fae looking like people and the fact that they could even interbreed with people, their thinking was very different. People talked about vampires being immortal, but few were even a thousand years old. A lot of the Fae still held personal grudges against Jesus for starting a new religion that encroached on their sovereignty. They didn’t think the way we did, and their motivations were a complete mystery to most other thinking creatures.
Chapter 8
I talked to Sam the following morning, and we decided that until the whole vampire mess settled down, I should just stay at the apartment over the bar. I called Trevor, and he drove over to help me move.
It wasn’t like I had a lot of stuff, but I did have more clothes than when I arrived in Westport with one suitcase, a small backpack, and my purse. I also packed some of my dishes and emptied my refrigerator. The dishes in Sam’s apartment were obviously his mother’s, and I was afraid to touch her fine eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain. My magic couldn’t patch that sort of thing back together.
While I had shed my weapons when I left the Illuminati, I had kept my tool belt, with all its pockets and attachments. When I killed the Hunter who stalked me the month before, I stripped him of his weapons. His sword had broken, but his secondary weapon and dart gun I kept as I thought they might come in handy with all the vampire activity going on. His second blade was an eighteen-inch long knife, or short sword, often called a main gauche or parrying dagger. Spell-forged, it was capable of cutting through a personal shield and decapitating a person if you could get close enough.
The Hunters hadn’t taught me to cook or use a smartphone, but a Hunter in the field had to be her own armorer, and I knew how to sew, both cloth and leather. Using pieces of the Hunter’s tool belt and harness, I had created a sling for the sword’s scabbard and sewed it inside my coat so the sword hung under my left armpit. When I put on the coat and looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t tell the sword was there.
While Trevor took a box down to the car, I retrieved the weapons from my closet. He came back as I was finishing, and I turned to face him.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Beautiful.”
“No, silly, I’m not fishing for compliments. The coat. Does it look natural?”
His brow furrowed, and he watched as I turned one way and then the other.
“I give up,” he said. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
I opened the coat so he could see the weapons hidden there, and he grinned.
“Nicely done,” he said. “Where did you get that pig sticker?”
Holding my finger to my lips, I whispered, “From the Hunter, but nobody knows I have it.”
“And you trust me?”
I pulled him into a hug and kissed his cheek. “Yes, I trust you.”
When I dropped by the office to tell my landlady what I was doing, Eleanor asked, “Is this a permanent move?”
“Oh, no. Just temporary until things are safe. Sam never mentioned me living there long term. Besides, I don’t want to spend my whole life in a bar.”
She nodded. “Well, that’s good. I will say that before you moved in, the most I had to worry about was tenants not paying their rent and throwing loud parties. You’re the first one who entertains herself with mage battles and exploding cars.”
I felt my face flame, but she had a twinkle in her eye, and one corner of her mouth twitched a little. Eleanor was a witch and a long-time friend of Sam’s. She had barely blinked at having to clean up after the Hunter left a vampire’s head bleeding in the hallway outside my door.
After we loaded my stuff in Trevor’s car, I recast the wards on my apartment. No one was going to get in there without a nuclear bomb.
Trevor and I traipsed down the stairs the final time and stepped out into the parking lot. For November, it was sunny, but there was a cold breeze. Without thinking, I pulled some ley line magic to warm me up.
Then I re-directed that energy into my personal shield when several men with guns appeared from around the side of the building and from behind parked cars.
“You’re right, Erin. This neighborhood has definitely gone downhill,” Trevor said.
“Don’t do anything stupid, and no one will get hurt,” one of the men said. “Now, you, little lady, just walk slowly toward me and keep your hands in sight.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll be good.” I shuffled closer to him, wondering who was stupid enough to send men with guns after me.
Trevor choked, trying to suppress a laugh.
I stopped a couple of feet away from his pistol and said, “Who sent you? You’re not going to ravish me and tarnish my honor, are you?”
My companion lost it, and everyone’s eyes turned to him as he burst out laughing. I took the opportunity to disarm the m
an in front of me, crushing his wrist and taking his gun. Throwing an arm bar across his neck, I forced him to his knees and slammed the muzzle of the pistol against his head. The move took about two seconds.
“Now, gentlemen, please put down your weapons, or I’ll blow his brains out and then kill the rest of you after I torture you for the information I want,” I said in a conversational tone of voice. They all stared at me.
One guy, either braver or dumber than the others, snapped off a shot, which deflected off my shield. Trevor hit him with a small bolt of lightning, and the guy was blown ten feet through the air. He didn’t move after he landed, and his wide-eyed stare didn’t bode well for his ever moving again.
The rest of them dropped their weapons.
“On the ground, face down, hands clasped behind your head!” I snapped in my best imitation of my trainers. They all complied, including the guy I held, once I let him go.
Eleanor stepped out of the office and shouted, “Who do you want me to call?”
“The cops,” Trevor yelled back, and Eleanor nodded, ducking back inside.
“Now,” I said, putting the pistol against the back of the nearest idiot’s head, “assuming that you want to be still alive when the police arrive, kindly tell me who paid you to kidnap me.”
He shivered, and I could see he was scared, but he didn’t say anything. Grabbing his collar, I ripped off his shirt. Trevor strolled over and stood looking down at us. The bite marks on the guy were obviously recent, and the bruising was probably from old bites. The man was a vampire’s thrall. As I looked around at the six men, I could see that all of them were well under thirty.
“Barclay is getting more insane by the day,” I said. “I can’t imagine why he thought this would work.”
The police showed up and took the thugs and their pistols into custody.
“What happened?” a police sergeant asked.
“These guys tried to hold us up,” Trevor said. “We just came out to get in my car, and they pulled guns on us.”
“And then what happened?” the cop pressed.
“I took the gun away from one of them,” I said. Pointing to the dead guy, I continued, “Then he took a shot at me and missed.”
“Yeah?” the cop nodded. “What happened to him?”
“He was hit by lightning. That’s when the rest of them dropped their guns and got down on their knees to pray.”
He stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “Hit by lightning?”
I nodded, trying to look very sincere.
That’s when Frankie showed up and took charge, saving both the cop and me from continuing our conversation.
“This might help you clear up some of your missing persons’ cases,” I told her.
She gave me a startled look, then said, “Yeah, you might be right. They haven’t been turned, but I doubt their families know what happened to them.”
Trevor and I finally got in the car and headed back to Rosie’s a couple of hours later than we’d planned.
“You’ve had military training,” Trevor commented as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Uh, well, sort of, but not exactly,” I said. “I was part of a private security force.” That wasn’t a lie. The Hunters’ Guild was the Illuminati’s private army, and it was probably stronger than some countries’ armies. We didn’t have an air force, though, unless you counted what aeromancers could do.
“You never talk about your past,” he said.
“Bad memories I’d rather not revisit.” That was my standard answer. “It’s better to think about the future.”
He didn’t press which was one of the things I liked about Trevor. He was really laid back and sweet, but he also knew how to kick ass when it was necessary. I glanced over at him, and his face was relaxed. He hadn’t taken any offense to my comments. I had an urge to reach over and touch him, but I controlled it. I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Hell, I wasn’t sure what the right idea was.
I treated Trevor to a late lunch at Rosie’s for helping me move. We sat at the table in the corner where I had sat the first night I wandered in off the street. I liked sitting there because I could see the whole main room.
“Have you heard about the bounties?” Trevor asked as we waited for our food.
“No. What bounties?”
He twisted in his seat and nodded to four men sitting at a table. One of them was the first guy who had asked me about vampire bounties.
“Word is that a few wealthy mages have put out bounties on vampires. Two thousand dollars a head,” Trevor said.
“Doesn’t seem worthwhile to put your life on the line,” I said. “How many can you expect to catch before they catch you?”
Trevor shrugged. “You could make a good living killing one a week. I don’t think our intrepid bounty hunters over there are used to fine china and white tablecloths. They’re staying at the Huntsman.”
I chuckled. “That figures.” The Huntsman Hotel was across the alley from Rosie’s. I had stayed there one night, and it wasn’t terrible. Better than the flophouses down the street in the red-light district, and it was clean, if shabby. It was also cheap.
“Still,” I said, “I would hold out for a lot more than two thousand. The people paying the bounties are getting off cheap.”
Trevor raised an eyebrow. “If it was five thousand, would you consider it?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not right. Attacking innocents isn’t right, either, but vamps are thinking, feeling beings. Unless they’re actively preying on people, they should be left alone.”
He nodded. “Sort of the way I feel. What really worries me is there’s a bounty on shifters as well. Five hundred dollars. Someone is trying to clean up Westport, and I have to ask myself why. It’s not like the vamps and shifters are harming the rich guys putting up the money.”
“Yeah. I can understand being concerned that the war between vampire factions might spill out into public view, but the shifters aren’t causing any trouble that I’ve heard of.”
It was close to midnight that evening when George Flynn walked in, looking as dapper as ever. Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Deadly drew the eyes of every woman in the place. He sat at the bar and ordered our most expensive whisky.
“I hear you’ve had some problems recently,” he said when I gave him his change.
“I’ve heard the same about you. How badly was the club damaged?”
Flynn shook his head. “I talked to the insurance agent tonight, and I think we’ll end up razing the place and building from scratch.” He took a sip of his whisky, then his eyes zeroed in on me with an intensity he rarely displayed. “I can’t believe Barclay attacked Jordan Blair. The man truly has gone off the rails.”
“I doubt the young vamps he sent to kidnap me knew who Blair was. It’s not as though Barclay gets his hands dirty.”
“You’ve taken additional precautions, I hope.”
“Yeah, I have.” Considering Gallagher’s reaction to the question I was about to ask, I shielded. “I asked this of Harry Gallagher, and he got upset and didn’t answer me. I read somewhere that vampires build their forces for a war by turning a lot of young people. Is that true? It seems there are a lot of very young vampires running around getting into trouble.”
Flynn’s eyes narrowed, then he heaved a sigh and leaned back in his chair.
“Yes, I’ll bet that did set Harry off. And yes, you are correct. But Harry and Rodrick started adding to their entourages even before Lord Carleton’s unfortunate encounter with the Hunter. They hate each other, you see, and Rodrick was trying to turn Lord Carleton against Harry.”
I perked up my ears. “Why? Do you know?” Outsiders rarely got insights into the vampires’ world, especially the interactions between older vamps.
“Rodrick considers Harry’s breeding program an abomination. And Harry considers some of Rodrick’s predilections indelicate, to say the least. This feud has been building for over a century.”
I tried to
wrap my mind around what Flynn had just said. Vampires were sterile.
“Breeding program?”
He took a large sip of his drink, then said, “Yes. When a vampire is first turned, a male vampire may still be fertile for a short time until his sperm die. The resulting child of a union with a human woman is a dhampir. Harry breeds for them, and he had seventeen the last time I checked. The oldest, Michaela, is his daughter.” He took another sip of whisky. “Harry was very much in love with his wife, a truly beautiful girl. Unfortunately, a dhampir’s mother never survives the birth.”
“I thought they were a myth,” I said.
“About as rare as Hunters tending bar, I would say,” he said with a grin.
I snorted. “Now you are talking myths.”
Chapter 9
Sam was working behind the bar when I went down for breakfast the following morning. I asked him about dhampir, but he knew less than I did before I talked with Flynn.
When Lizzy came in to ask me if I wanted to join her and Jolene for lunch, she surprised me when I mentioned the subject.
We were driving toward the harbor, and Lizzy said, “Yeah, dhampir are very interesting. People also call them daywalkers. They have the speed and strength of a vampire, but they don’t have the sun allergy, and they only live a few hundred years, at most. They don’t regenerate the way a vampire does, either, though they heal fast.”
“Are they bloodsuckers?” I asked.
“They can live on blood or on normal food.”
“Have you met any?”
“I don’t know. If I have, I didn’t know it. As far as I know, they don’t have anything that really distinguishes them from other people. Which is pretty handy, I guess. Legend says that vampire lords use them as spies and assassins.”
“Can they breed?”
“Ah, now that is an interesting question,” Lizzy said with a laugh. “What I’ve been told is that all dhampir are females and sterile, but I’ve also heard that disputed. Question unresolved at this point.”
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