Tempted by Blood

by Laurie London

  He waited as Mitch brushed past him into the crowd and moved out of earshot. Then he turned back to the bouncer. “Hey, that gal I was with? Make sure her friends know she’s crashed back there.”

  Rocky nodded. “You wore her out?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  He caught up with Mitch threading his way through the dance floor. “Yo, wait up. What’s the hurry.”

  “Come on. We gotta go.”

  “I’m not ready to leave yet.”

  “Seriously, man.” Mitch flicked his arm with the back of his hand. “Don’t you think you should call Dom first? He’s gonna rip you a new one if he doesn’t hear from you.”

  When you know something’s inevitable, why rush it? He considered the list of sweetbloods he still needed to do drive-bys on. Two here in town, one up north and one in an Eastside suburb. Then there was the girl. Mitch was right. He didn’t have time to do it all if he stayed much longer. He’d probably just lose track of time again.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll call him from the road.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  INTERVIEWING BLAKE AND HIS brother had been a colossal waste of time and now Arianna was late picking up her cousin. She should’ve insisted on meeting Blake at the Devil’s Backbone rather than his house. But because the site was difficult to find and was surrounded by private property, you had to know someone to take you in. Instead, she’d spent the evening trying to pry verbal information from a couple of boys who clearly were better at texting than talking in person.

  She glanced at the glowing hands of the clock on the Caddy’s dashboard. Almost midnight.

  “Come on, Krystal,” she mumbled to herself as she waited in the car parked outside the apartment building. What kind of teenager studied on a Friday night, anyway?

  Warily, she watched the fog advancing off the sound a few blocks away as it searched for low-lying spots in which to settle. In the light from the overhead streetlamps, it took on a gray-green color and, if you blinked once or twice, it was suddenly thicker. There hadn’t been a trace of fog over at Blake’s house. She worried if she had to wait too much longer, visibility would be so bad that she’d have to drive away inch by inch because her piece-of-crap car didn’t have working fog lights.

  The two-story apartment building sat at the end of a long narrow driveway less than a mile from where Arianna lived—too far for her cousin to walk home, though she did try to convince Arianna it was no big deal. Maybe Krystal’s mother would’ve been okay with that, but this wasn’t a tiny farm town in eastern Washington and Arianna didn’t have substance-abuse problems. This was the big city and no one walked home in the dark around here.

  Her fingers twitched with the urge to blast the horn, but the neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate that. She definitely wanted to avoid running up to the door—shadows were everywhere. Along the shrubs at the base of the windows, underneath the spindly birch tree in the front yard, next to the minivan parked in the driveway. In an argument repeated for years, her sensible self said this fear was unreasonable, but the memories of her five-year-old self were ingrained too deeply to forget. Most of the time, she was able to push past it—you couldn’t exactly be afraid of the dark and run a blog like Paranormalish. But tonight she felt on edge for some reason.

  She texted Krystal again: I’m still waiting. Where are you?

  Comingggggg.

  U said that already. Hurry. I’m tired.

  K. Grabbing backpack now.

  Yeah, right. Krystal texted that ten minutes ago, too.

  To kill time, Arianna opened her camera phone and flipped through the pictures she’d taken at Blake’s. Two teenage boys sitting on a couch with their grandmother’s colorful afghan behind them. Blake looking scared. His brother looking confused. She deleted some, keeping only a few of the best ones to post on her blog. Then she watched part of the video she’d taken. One boy talking. The other boy listening. Arianna asking questions off camera. Boring with a capital B. The whole interview was. So much for interesting blog content.

  She hit Delete and was about to set the phone down, when she remembered that videos were automatically saved to her cloud account, too. Carter had set it up for her in order to save memory on her phone and make them easier for her to access later. Once, when she’d been having all sorts of technical trouble with her website that she attributed to OSPRA, she took a chance and asked for Carter’s help. Since he was always bitching about Xtark—sometimes she wondered why he even stayed on with the company—she’d turned to him, trusting that he wouldn’t rat her out to corporate, and he didn’t.

  “Don’t let these bastards dictate your personal life,” he’d said. “You need to maintain some sort of control. If you want to keep something private, then you shouldn’t have to feel you’ve got to turn over your passwords or tell them about your blog.”

  “But I don’t want to lose my job.”

  He’d rolled his eyes. “Please.”

  “Carter, if they find out, I’m toast. And I kinda need this job. My bank account needs this job.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t lose it.”

  Then he’d set up something called a proxy account, which supposedly hid her identity from snoops, as well as a cloud account. Thanks to him, she didn’t have to worry about running out of memory any longer.

  From her phone, she accessed the cloud online and deleted the boring pictures and video there, as well. With that housekeeping done, she settled back in her seat, again wishing they had explored the sanitarium, instead. Although the charred remains of the building were almost completely hidden, supposedly the ravine where they dumped the bodies of residents who had mysteriously died was haunted. Thirteen steps were carved into the side of the hill, leading to the bottom, thus the Devil’s Backbone. That place would’ve given her plenty of interesting images. Local legend said that when you got to the bottom and turned around, you could see straight into hell. Now, that would’ve been something interesting to post. But at the last minute, Blake had freaked out and didn’t want to go back.

  What did that leave her with? Zilch.

  When she met Blake, she couldn’t help noticing that he looked a lot like that kid on YouTube who’d signed a big record deal recently. Maybe she could leverage that. Tag the singer’s name, or something. She pictured the blog title: Friend of Tai Simmons Look-alike Gone Missing. That’d garner a few hits on an otherwise boring post, wouldn’t it?

  “Ari,” she said to herself, “you’re really stretching it this time.”

  She was about to set the phone down when two sets of lights blazed in her eyes, illuminating the interior of the Caddy for a moment, virtually blinding her. She held a hand up to block the light. A jacked-up vehicle with its high beams on, including large yellow fog lights, had just turned onto the street. The driver probably had no clue how obnoxious that was. Or maybe he did. Guys who drove rigs like that dug the attention—good and bad. It was swagger on wheels.

  Something darted out in front of her car. A cat. It paused in the middle of the road, staring at the oncoming vehicle.

  “Move, little kitty.”

  But it didn’t. Not one inch. The poor thing was paralyzed in place, its body a dark silhouette against the lights.

  Oh, no, the fog’s too thick.

  The Jeep probably couldn’t see it. She jumped out of the car to shoo the cat away, but before she could, the vehicle seemed to speed up, its engine revving louder. At the last moment, the cat shot into the bushes at the side of the road, narrowly avoiding becoming roadkill.

  Anger surged inside her. Clearly, those jerks had seen the cat. What kind of idiot would purposely try to run over an animal? She glared into the windows of the Jeep as it drove past, wishing her eyes were daggers. She expected to see a car full of joyriding losers—hats turned backward, liquor b
ottles being guzzled, but instead she saw two guys in the front seat wearing sunglasses—what the hell?—and staring straight ahead.

  They even looked like assholes. Identical ones. There should be a law against trying to run over someone’s pet. She should report them to…to…someone. Remembering the camera phone in her hand, she took a few pictures as the vehicle’s red taillights disappeared into the fog. Like that would make any difference.

  Assholes Almost Run Over Garfield

  Men in Black Attempt Kitty Killing

  Making up ridiculous blog titles for imaginary posts always gave her a small sense of power over circumstances beyond her control. In fact, she had a monthly feature where readers would vote for their favorite outlandish blog-post title. Unfortunately, it hadn’t won her many friends with the other paranormal bloggers. Seemed OSPRA was always on the list. Hell, she’d make her own list with those ridiculous titles.

  She sighed and climbed back into the car. Everything always came back to her blog. Maybe she’d skip a day or rerun an old article. People did that all the time. Other than a little ad revenue, it wasn’t as if she was getting paid to do it. She was the boss and if she decided to skip a day, well, then she should be able to do so and not feel guilty.

  A slash of light from the apartment building on the other side of the road cut through the darkness. She looked up to see Krystal stepping onto the porch. The teen waved goodbye to her friend, slung her backpack over one shoulder and skipped down the steps.

  Finally.

  Arianna reached over to unlock the passenger door then opened her camera phone. She couldn’t wait to show Krystal that one picture of Blake. Would she think he looked like—

  Movement behind Krystal drew her attention. Two shadows she hadn’t seen before seemed to separate from the darkness alongside the building. Confused, she scanned the area, but saw no one. Just shadows.

  Was the fog playing tricks on her? She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision. Then the shadows began to advance. Straight toward her cousin.

  Arianna’s throat tightened, strangling her airways. She wanted to scream at Krystal, tell her to run, but the sound was stuck in her throat. Just like what happened with her mother twenty-two years ago when the shadows had come alive. But she couldn’t move a muscle—she was frozen. Just like that stupid cat in the road.

  The dark forms got to the minivan parked in the driveway and split up, with one going around to the other side. Then, at precisely the same time, they took shape. Gone were the shapeless, shadowy figures. These were flesh-and-blood men.

  With their hands in their pockets concealing God knows what, they wore long, dark trench coats that grazed the tops of their boots and although the muted light from a streetlamp cast angular shadows on their faces, their identical expressions were devoid of any emotion. A pair of macabre robots on a mission, just like the two who took her mother.

  Something inside her snapped, jerking her to action, and Arianna jumped from the car. “Run, Krystal!” Her voice cracked like a prepubescent frog’s.

  “What are you talking about?” Her cousin had been about to step off the curb, but instead, she skittered sideways, looking at her feet as if expecting to see a snake.

  “Those men. Behind you. Come on.”

  Krystal spun around, dropping her backpack in the process. “What men? Ari, you’re freaking me out.”

  How could she not see them? They were less than twenty feet away, coming toward her from both sides of that van.

  Arianna felt helpless again. That same little girl hiding under a skirted table at the street fair.

  One of the men spun a finger in the air, signifying a wrap-up, and the other nodded. They’d obviously done this sort of thing before. In a flash, they were on Krystal like a pair of jackals, lifting her off her feet and whisking her down the sidewalk.

  Arianna tried to scream—surely someone would hear and come help—but she couldn’t catch her breath. It felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. They moved faster than humanly possible, their trench coats billowing behind them. Her cousin struggled, arched her back, but it was no use. A ninety-pound girl was no match against two men.

  And neither was a five-year-old girl.

  Something stirred inside. She couldn’t just stand here and watch her cousin being taken away by the men from shadows the way she had with her mother. “Put her down!”

  In unison, they snapped their heads in her direction as if they were just now noticing they had a witness, but it didn’t halt their stride. She fumbled with her phone, attempted to dial 911, but the picture app was still displayed on the screen, and she ended up pressing the wrong buttons. Shit, shit, shit.

  They rounded the corner and disappeared behind a sprawling cedar, its lower branches stretching out across the sidewalk.

  Without thinking, she sprinted down her side of the street, past a few parked cars. She thought about going for help, but she didn’t want Krystal out of her sight. If she waited for the police to come or banged on the doors of any of the buildings on this block to get help, no one would believe her when she told them what happened, and her cousin would be long gone. Her only hope was to get some photographic evidence of the vehicle and license plate then call for help. When she got to the corner, she saw them trying to stuff Krystal into the back of the Jeep.

  Her cousin managed to kick the shorter one in the face. Arianna heard him grunt. Krystal braced both hands on the door frame, but the other one came up behind her and easily pushed her inside.

  She couldn’t just let them take Krystal away without doing a single thing to stop them. Though she’d taken a few martial-arts classes, she now realized, she’d focused too much on self-defense. She’d never thought she’d need to know how to attack someone.

  Standing from her crouched position, she wished she had a gun or something. She cursed herself for being too afraid to even hold one, let alone learn to fire one. If she could, she’d step into the roadway right now and shoot them. Just like in the movies.

  Bam, bam, bam!

  It was what she’d have done if she had the chance twenty-two years ago. She’d replayed it in her mind hundreds of times. Like a gunfighter, she’d stand unafraid in the middle of the road as the crowd of people scrambled to get away from her. They’d hide behind lampposts, cars. Duck into doorways and shops. She’d jerk the gun from her holster, boldly take aim and fire. Two quick shots that would echo off the buildings and change the course of her future. The shadowy men would crumple to the ground and her mother would be safe.

  Instead, as the Jeep’s engine fired to life, she aimed her camera and snapped a few quick photos before switching it to video mode. Seeing things through that tiny screen made real life seem a little less real. She stepped out into the road to get a better view of the license plate and was so focused that she almost didn’t see the movement to her left.

  She snapped her head up just in time to see another man emerge from the shadows.

  Ten feet away.

  The overhead streetlight illuminated bronze hair that reached to his chin, the top portion held back away from his face by a small ponytail. He was big—much bigger than the other two men. At well over six feet tall, he had linebacker shoulders underneath his leather coat and a formidable presence that seemed to suck the oxygen from the air.

  His gaze burned into her before he made a noise that sounded like a growl. He covered the distance between them in two commanding steps.

  She wanted to pinch her eyes shut, block out the nightmare, but for some reason, she didn’t. Up this close, she noticed that his hair was streaked with green and blue highlights. She was vaguely disturbed that she noticed this innocuous detail about him when the thing that should be first and foremost on her mind was that he’d stepped from the shadows.

  Obsidian irises were ringed
by an iridescent green color so captivating that if she had any breath left to gasp with, she would have. Her legs could no longer support her weight and she felt herself slip. An energy charge snapped in the air when he steadied her, snaking invisible fingers around her body. She caught the faint smell of alcohol on his breath and noted that his square jaw was peppered with stubble. A small scar interrupted the slash of his dark eyebrow, similar to one she had from hitting her chin on the windowsill as a child.

  All very humanlike—yes—but she knew what she’d seen. He’d morphed from a shadow, just like those men in the Jeep and just like the men who took her mother.

  She staggered backward and caught herself on the hood of a car, setting off a high-pitched alarm that cut through the night air.

  She’d never been so thankful for that shrill sound.

  Until he banged once on the hood and the siren quieted.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said, staring at his hands before giving her a quick head to toe.

  Who am I? My God, that’s a question I should be asking him.

  She shook off that strange, electric sensation and pointed. “They…those two men took my cousin.”

  He glanced at the Jeep. “Yes, they did, didn’t they. Get back, sweetheart, and try not to look.”

  She blinked once, twice, zeroing in on the fangs that were hanging from his mouth like twin daggers.

  This time she had no trouble screaming.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JACKSON LEFT THE WOMAN BEHIND him and sprinted down the street, cursing himself for sending Mitch back to the field office. He could’ve used the guy’s help. This was just supposed to be a routine task that he’d check off his to-do list. Hell, if he thought he’d run into more Darkbloods tonight…