Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  “We need to be absolutely certain Julius was taken against his will,” Kathleen said. “At present we are merely guessing.”

  “We’ve got some pretty damning evidence,” Jaxon said.

  “But we do need to be certain,” I said. “Kathleen and I are going back to check his house. Jaxon and Novak, I want you to collect Tennyson—”

  “I do not need to be collected,” the vamp in question said. Every one of us jumped and jerked, startled by Tennyson’s sudden appearance within the circle. Jaxon had a silver blade out and within inches of Tennyson’s neck before I could tell him to stop.

  “Do not sneak up on us like that,” I said.

  “My apologies,” Tennyson replied, taking a sideways step away from Jaxon’s weapon. He wrinkled his nose at the glinting silver, then gave a half bow to our group. “Thank you for agreeing to this course of action.”

  I nodded. “You’re trusting us with the fate of your entire line, and that’s not a small thing. So many disappearing vamps and wolves isn’t a coincidence.” To Novak, I said, “Debrief him fully and feed the info to K.I.M. We need names, dates, locations, everything he has on those who’ve been taken, so she can collate and give us any patterns.”

  Jaxon snorted softly. “You sure you want to use the word debrief around an incubus?”

  The joke earned him a sour look from Tennyson, while Novak roared with laughter. “Vamp’s got no clean soul to steal,” the incubus in question said between guffaws. “Wouldn’t be my type on or off the clock, anyway. I like a little tan on my meat.”

  Now that conjured up all kinds of mental images I didn’t need. Not that Novak stole souls through sex anymore. Kicked out of Hell, remember? “Kathleen, let’s go,” I said. “And if anyone happens to hear from Julius . . . ?”

  “We’ll call,” Jaxon said. “You meeting us back here?”

  “Depends on what we find.” We couldn’t take Tennyson to our headquarters. Even with our security measures in place, he’d have too much access. With any luck, we’d get a lead in the meantime and meet elsewhere.

  Kathleen and I broke from the group, heading back toward the helicopter. Halfway there, Tennyson’s voice thundered through my head: Watch your back.

  I had no reason to think he could hear me, but I mustered what I could and shot back a hearty: Get out of my godsdamned head!

  His distant laughter rose above the strengthening whir of the helicopter’s blades.

  Chapter 3

  I fiddled with my phone for the bulk of our return trip, alternately checking for calls I hadn’t missed and willing it to ring. I should have been more specific with the willing, because when it finally did ring six minutes from HQ, the caller wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear.

  “You back yet?” Novak asked, even though he had to hear the roar of the chopper.

  “Nearly there. What do you have?”

  Kathleen leaned closer to listen, her enhanced senses still probably straining to catch words in the noisy helicopter. I switched it to speaker mode for her benefit.

  “Your pal Tennyson is strongly suggesting the other Masters are calling their lines together like he did,” Novak said.

  I frowned. “Strongly suggesting?”

  “Some sort of honor code won’t let him tattle on his friends, but he’s not being subtle.”

  “Great, so should we expect a few more hostile trailer park takeovers in the near future?”

  “Says he doesn’t know their plans and he, in turn, didn’t tell anyone what he was doing tonight. His own people only knew to meet in a field half a mile away, tonight at dusk, so it couldn’t be leaked.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “He’s a vampire.” Novak said the last word as he might invoke a blasphemous curse. “He’s built for deception, Shi.”

  “Yeah, and so are demons.”

  Silence. It was a familiar jab, part of our regular routine. Jaxon and I were the only people he tolerated making fun of his fallen incubus status, so I couldn’t have hurt his feelings. Other voices crackled over his end of the line. The security lights around our HQ glittered to life over the tops of a hundred oaks, maples, and loblolly pines. Almost back.

  “Novak?” I asked.

  He let out a sharp breath. “The vampire seems sincere.”

  I could only imagine how much it pained him to admit such a thing. He’d surely prefer rolling naked on broken glass over paying Tennyson any sort of direct compliment. I almost hated not being there to witness the interaction.

  “How’s K.I.M. doing with our information?” I asked.

  “Working through it as we give it to her. She’s preparing a global map so we can see where all of the missing vamps and wolves came from, and where they were last seen. I’ll send it to you when it’s ready.”

  “Thanks. Look, we’re landing. I’ll call you if we find anything at Julius’s house.” I hung up and pocketed the phone.

  We landed at HQ, and in under seven minutes, Kathleen was careening into Julius’s driveway, slamming her foot down on the brakes of one of our “company cars.” Kathleen had claimed this particular silver-blue, and she actually bared her fangs at anyone else who tried driving it. I was more comfortable behind the wheel of an Expedition, so I never objected to her possessiveness over the sports car. I only objected to her driving skills.

  Julius lived in a small, quiet suburb, surrounded by identical Cape Cods with identical landscaping, and painted varying shades of tan. Still half an hour from sunrise, the neighborhood was asleep, windows dark of prying eyes. Even Julius’s house looked put to bed, the potted plants on his front steps silent sentinels.

  I unlocked the front door with the spare key our boss kept under one of his plants. Kathleen stepped into the foyer first, and I followed her in, my gun out and the safety off. Just in case. I gave her room to do her thing. Her eyes glowed faintly red as she drew on her finely tuned senses of smell and hearing.

  She took three steps toward the staircase. Paused. Tilted her head a few degrees to the left. Her back was to me, her exact expression turned away. But I could imagine pursed lips, puckered brows—her favored look of intense concentration.

  “I hear only our heartbeats within the house,” she said after a few moments’ pause. “Yours and mine. Jaxon’s scent lingers on the porch but he didn’t come inside.”

  Jaxon had mentioned driving by to check on Julius.

  “Anyone else’s scent?” I asked.

  “Julius, of course.” She veered to the left, through an archway and into the living room. Three matching leather armchairs and a love seat dominated the space, broken up by a few oak tables and brass floor lamps—typical bachelor furniture. Julius had once bragged about walking into a Furniture Emporium, pointing at one of their showrooms and telling them to wrap it all up. Looking at the watercolor prints on his walls and brown-on-beige color scheme, I believed him.

  Through the living room, I trailed Kathleen past a hewn oak dining table and matching sideboard, and into the very modern kitchen. Chrome appliances, faux-marble countertops, and an overfilled hanging pot rack weren’t the things that made my stomach quiver—it was the cloying odor of old soy sauce and spoiling spring rolls. Four open takeout cartons, a pair of soiled chopsticks, and a half-drunk bottle of beer decorated the center island.

  Nothing else was out of place.

  “That’s not normal.” I wasn’t sure why I whispered, since Kathleen had verified we were alone. The house was utterly silent.

  Kathleen leaned over the containers, food illuminated by the faint red glow of her eyes, and sniffed. Her nostrils flared. “I detect no toxins or drugging agents, but the food should be tested.”

  “Julius doesn’t waste food like that.”

  “I know.” She straightened, turning her headlights on me. “I still smell no one else in the house recently.”

  “Let’s check upstairs.”

  We searched the second story—master bedroom and bath, second bath, two bedrooms, and a
linen closet. All clean, no other scents. Nothing was broken or seemed missing, no sign of a struggle. The ancient army duffel Julius used on long-term assignments was neatly tucked in the closet.

  “Garage,” I said as we returned to the stairs. “Let’s see if his car is here.”

  It was. I saw the long, finned shape of his 1956 Chevy in the dim glow of Kathleen’s eyes before I flipped on the garage light. It sat right where Julius had last parked it, carefully waxed once a month, the only car he drove while off duty. He never left it in the driveway, choosing instead to keep it ensconced in the garage.

  “This is truly puzzling,” Kathleen said.

  “You think?”

  “It’s possible Julius was called away on a personal emergency and picked up by someone else.”

  “An emergency so personal he couldn’t bother picking up the phone and telling one of us?” I snorted loudly. “Sure, and it’s just as possible monkeys are going to fly out of my butt.”

  She gave me a withering look. “The only other explanation is someone with practiced mind control compelled him to leave his home and go with them.”

  “Or do something else.” My attention snagged on an object in the far corner of the garage—a freestanding, top-loading freezer. We’d all been to his house at one time or another, famished after a long case, and the first place we always stopped was this freezer. He kept it stocked with steaks, frozen meatballs, and pizzas. Stuff he liked and could keep stored, but still make quickly if the mood hit him. The sight of it sent a chill wiggling down my spine. Bile scorched the back of my throat as old memories clawed toward the surface.

  Memories of the first dead body I’d ever seen, stuffed in an old refrigerator. I was eight.

  “Shiloh?”

  I stopped an arm’s length from the freezer, my hand extended toward the handle. It was irrational, thinking Julius was in the freezer, but I saw it clearly in my mind—the blue, frosted body of my boss folded next to an eight-pack of pork chops.

  The body in that old refrigerator hadn’t been frozen. He’s been half-eaten, preserved in the sealed environment so I could tell he was just a teenager and had died with his eyes wide open. I’d had nightmares for two years.

  My fingers found the freezer’s handle. Stomach sloshing and hands trembling, I pulled up. The door hissed as I broke the seal. Cold air drifted up in a mist.

  A sea of frosty meat products stared back at me, unaffected by the deep sigh I heaved. Or of the relieved tears stinging my eyes. I let the lid drop back down, and it fell with a resounding thud.

  “Hungry?” Kathleen asked.

  Ducking my head to hide my blush, I brushed past her mumbling “never mind.” My refrigerator psychosis was my own, not shared with my team. We all had histories and past traumas, and they weren’t things we bonded over with tequila shots.

  Our searched concluded in the backyard with only questions to show for our time and trouble.

  “Okay,” I said as we rounded the east side of the house, heading back toward the driveway. “So who could do what you said? Who could get into a man’s head and make him walk out of his house?”

  “Human telepaths, obviously,” Kathleen said. “A few witches have been known to possess a man’s mind for brief periods. A demon—”

  “Not a demon. Possession is violent, no matter the rider. We’d have seen signs of it somewhere in the house.”

  “All right then, not a demon rider. A siren’s call?”

  I almost laughed at the absurdity of her statement. “Do you see a body of water nearby?”

  We rounded to the front of the house. Sunlight was slowly touching the eastern sky with a bright red paintbrush, making me wonder if we were in for rain later.

  “There is one obvious choice,” she said. With her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants and eyes no longer glowing red, she seemed younger. Uncomfortable. “We just came from someone who could do this.”

  I stopped in the middle of Julius’s sod lawn, gripping my gun in one hand and clenching my other hand into an aching fist. “I thought we ruled out Tennyson.”

  “Yes, but not any other Master. Only four have lost vampires, and there are rumors of at least eight at a comparable level to the strongest of them. This could be part of a personal agenda. We may not wish to be stuck in the middle.”

  “Something tells me we’re stuck now, no matter what.”

  “True.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. Another downside of my strange, mixed heritage—adrenaline surges always ended in headaches. Their longevity depended on the strength of my adrenaline rush. This one had been relatively small. A particularly terrifying encounter with a manticore three years ago had ended with a two-day migraine.

  “I’ll inform Novak,” Kathleen said quietly. She palmed her phone as she strode toward the car.

  I loitered on the lawn a moment, urging the pressure between my eyes to go away and leave me alone. Hard to believe only six hours ago, I’d been in bed with my naked boyfriend, intent on some toe-curling sex. I drifted back to the not-quite-a-fight I’d had with Vincent. I wanted to call and make him tell me what was so stressful at work. I’d never wanted to do that before—call my boyfriend while in the middle of a case.

  Keep it casual, Shi, keep it casual.

  Kathleen’s voice drifted over the lawn. I realized my Raspberry was in my hand, my thumb hovering. Vincent was number six on my speed dial. I could not let our relationship affect me like this at work. It was one of the reasons I rarely dated, and one of the biggest reasons I’d initially avoided Vincent’s advances. Relationships complicated things, especially when I couldn’t tell him what I really was, or why I disappeared twenty days out of the month. He occasionally mentioned something about his construction work, but I couldn’t tell him anything about my work. It left us unbalanced, in a way.

  And this time I had disappeared on a bad note, and it bothered me . . . and that bothered me. I’d caused an avoidable quarrel with Vincent, and I couldn’t blame it on my pheromone. Not this time.

  Get it together, Shi.

  Vincent later. Job now.

  Kathleen waved; I jogged over.

  “K.I.M. found no relevant patterns in the vampires taken,” she reported, the phone still close to her ear. “However, she may have a pattern in the werewolves. They were not simply fourteen random wolves from each of the two Packs. They were all mated pairs.”

  I boggled that one for a moment. “Theories on why mated werewolves?”

  Kathleen screwed her mouth and forehead into a disgusted face and translated the sounds from the other end of the line. “Novak’s theory is reproductive testing, as only mated werewolves reproduce.”

  My expression mirrored hers. “That could explain the wolves being taken, sure, but the vampires?”

  More translating: “The average age of the vampires taken is ninety-one. The youngest was six months turned, the eldest three hundred and eleven years as a vampire. If the interest is research, those forty-six will display a wide range of power and abilities.”

  Was that really possible? Someone was going around the country kidnapping werewolves and vampires for research subjects? Rumors of such things had floated around for decades. In the six years since the Para-Marshals were formed, our two Paranormal Investigations units had broken up at least a dozen operations—usually small-time criminals who were too dumb for the crimes they were attempting. Nothing on this scale.

  Whoever was behind this had managed to mobilize an entire vampire line—out of fear. Fear and the instinct to protect his people.

  It took a lot to scare a vampire.

  And that scared me more than a little bit.

  I plucked Kathleen’s phone from her hand and barked, “Put Tennyson on the phone,” to whomever she’d been speaking with.

  The line crackled, then, “Yes, Ms. Harrison?”

  His cold fury gave me the willies, even from fifty miles away. “Our boss is missing, just up and plucked out of his house l
ike a phantom. How many vampires could make a man with twenty years of military training leave with them without a fight?”

  “More than would make you comfortable,” he replied. “Ask me what is truly on your mind.”

  “Fine—which Masters could do it?”

  Kathleen’s eyes widened. Tennyson’s position and power intimidated her. Hell, it intimidated me, but I would never give a vampire the satisfaction of knowing it. My dad would never forgive me for showing such a weakness.

  If he was angered, though, Tennyson didn’t sound it—or, at least, the chill in his voice didn’t have an added edge as he said, “Not I, if that eases your mind at all. I could name three Masters with such an ability, but protocol forbids it. Many in their lines, those with the most years, would also possess the ability in a more limited form.”

  “How do I bypass protocol and get those names from you?”

  His laughter turned my willies into full-on chills that rocketed down my spine. Heaven and Hell, he needed to quit laughing. “You have little power to compel me into such a betrayal to my people, young djinn. However, I admire your forthrightness.”

  He’d admire it better when I put a silver bullet in his heart. “Okay, try answering another question. Of these three Masters you can’t name, would any of them have a reason to kidnap our boss?” Silence so complete I checked the phone display to make sure I hadn’t disconnected. “Well?”

  “Perhaps,” he said slowly, drawing out the word. “I can tell you that of those three, only one has had his people taken.”

  “So far.”

  “Yes, so far.” Kathleen whispered something to me, which I repeated. “Of those other two Masters, are either of them your enemy?”

  Tennyson made a rude noise. “Both would, I believe, rejoice in my death and the splintering of my line. However, neither possesses the strength to move against so many of us at once. As interesting as this conversation is, your inference that either Master is orchestrating this, or that they have taken your man as insurance against your interference, is unlikely.”