A Darker Crimson

by Carolyn Jewel

  She moved her head and nausea crashed over her. She rolled to the left and would have screamed if she hadn’t been barfing. Back on her haunches, she swiped her good arm across her mouth. The earlier sense of comfort receded to nothing before flowing back, lapping at the edges of her consciousness. She fought a double set of sensations: hers and her head’s. She swiveled her neck, even touched the back bulge of her skull, feeling for a wound. Nothing. No cut or bump, not even a suggestion of pain. But Jaise had shot her. She knew it. She’d seen him do it. With the memory burned into her head, that fact seemed pretty much incontrovertible. Matthew Jaise, B-Ops commander, and the man who’d spent at least three weeks asking her, with charming bluntness, to sleep with him, had shot her. More than that, actually. He’d tried to kill her.

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. It wasn’t like him to miss. Anger rushed through her like a tidal wave, hot fury. Her head buzzed, filled with something alien. Jeez, how hard had she whacked her head?

  Thwip.

  She didn’t usually have this much trouble maintaining mental quietude. She hung her head and concentrated on mastering her breathing. Well, whatever the hell had happened at the construction site, she wasn’t dead. And neither was the demon or whatever it was. Because if Jaise and rest of the B-Ops patrol had cleaned up after her and taken care of the demon, she wouldn’t be here. Wherever here happened to be. No, she’d be dead or in the I.C.U., and she appeared to be neither. She lurched to her feet. Her brain felt like it detached itself from her spine and started bouncing off her cranium.

  When her vertigo cleared, she stood clutching the edge of a white counter. She thought hard and the pieces came together. A bathroom? Yes. She was in a bathroom. Slowly, she moved her head. The worst of the nausea passed. She hit her comm band. Not even a chirp. A firewall? That wasn’t something that boded well for her continued safety. Was she in prison? Fear stabbed through her. Was she about to be wiped?

  She grabbed a towel from the wall rack and threw it over the puke on the floor. The toilet was white as a cloud. She must have been looking at it when she’d first opened her eyes. There was a fresh roll of toilet paper with both corners tucked into a point. The counter and sink were both carved from white marble shot through with tiny veins of grey. Prison this wasn’t. Not even Jaise could afford this kind of luxury, and word was he came from money. She wondered if a vamp had her. That wasn’t an idea that made much sense, but there you were. It was possible, though. She remembered seeing that un-human leap from building to building beside the lot just before B-Ops arrived.

  She gathered in a little more resilience. She’d been worse off than this. Much, much worse. Jeez, all this white made her eyes hurt. Four cups in a soldierly row below the mirror wore little paper hats over their mouths, like they couldn’t be trusted not to gobble up all the toothpaste or hand lotion. There was a toothbrush. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. She looked like hell. Her right shoulder was bloody, her shirt a tattered mess, and her hair, which she’d let grow after being so sensibly short while she was in the Academy was singed off level with her chin.

  All in all, she’d prefer to be blonde. But the maintenance struck her as too much trouble and besides, she couldn’t afford a salon on her salary, so brown her hair stayed. Her eyes were still brown, and she was still shorter than she wanted to be. Oh, well. The bright side to her personal disorder was that instead of lying dead in the dirt, where, no doubt, Los Cazadores would have retrieved her body and sold it to some werewolf desperate for black market human meat, she was alive in a painfully white bathroom someplace else. And that was a good thing. Never let it be said Claudia Donovan wasn’t an optimist.

  She turned the tap on the sink. Water streamed out in a wide, transparent rush of liquid. A quick wash of her face improved her mood if not her appearance, even if it was hard to manage with just one functioning arm. Then, she brushed her teeth. She stripped the wrapper off one of the glasses and drank about a gallon of water. For the hell of it, she let the water run. Ten, eleven, twelve… At thirteen, she couldn’t stand the guilt. She closed the tap. Her new apartment had plumbing and faucets with an unbelievably long auto shut-off. No one was going to backhand her for letting the water run too long, but she still expected it. Holly had a choice of shower or bath and couldn’t remember a time when it was different.

  She retrieved her P.D.-issue pack from behind the toilet. In the medicine cabinet she found a full container of dental floss. That went into her pants pocket. Too handy to pass up that stuff. A big, lovely bottle of pain reliever. She swallowed five and put the bottle in her pack. She daubed her shoulder with QuikSeal to stop the blood oozing from her shoulder and stuffed the contents of the medicine cabinet into the many pockets of her pack. If vamps had her, she’d better not be bleeding.

  She faced the shower stall. It was posh. Big enough for three people, easy, with a real glass door and a white marble surface. Through the glass she could see a bar of white soap with a convex top and rounded edges, untouched by any hand. Three bottles sat on a marble shelf, and beneath that hung a washcloth with a crease along the folded edge. There were chrome fixtures and an adjustable shower head. Anyone who took a shower in there could stand under a spray of hot water and reach for the washcloth in leisurely fashion, make lather with the soap and then rinse it off with as much hot water as she wanted. No shut-off, she’d bet money on it. Now that was decadent. Truly Upper. Living the vamp life.

  With the ache in her shoulder a muffled dullness thanks to the painkillers, she gave the room a thorough look. White marble was everywhere, rarest of the rare. Before she’d got up the nerve to apply to college—she’d been secretly studying for months—during down times, she and her fellow Lowers had loved to describe the palace they’d live in when they got out and were living in luxury. Even though they’d none of them ever seen marble in their lives, a marble bathtub always made the top ten must-haves. In the Upper, they would live like vamps, girl. Oh, yes. In the Lower, if narco didn’t kill you, or you didn’t die in a drive-by, you either converted or you got rounded up for some rogue vamp or werewolf who paid for fresh meat. Vamps who ventured into the Lower came hungry, because they liked the edge it gave them. And the wolves just liked the chase. The City and B-Ops both denied it, but the fact was, the Lower was a favorite hunting ground for all kinds of predators. If you had the money, you got whatever you wanted. Claudia ran her fingers over the marble. Cool and smooth. To her knowledge, she was the only one of her group who’d made it out. All the rest were dead.

  There was no window in the bathroom. In the ceiling she saw only the light fixture and a vent about four inches square. She considered stripping the light for the electrical wires, but decided not to, since if she was stuck here, she didn’t fancy sitting in the dark. Which observation brought out the interesting fact that whoever had put her in here hadn’t turned off the light, and had also left her things untouched. That made the vamp idea likelier: they tended to be a wasteful lot, the fangs did, not being particularly worried about how to pay the energy bill. Claudia considered the outlet again. Maybe later. In the last wall was the door; white, of course. It was the only way out.

  She jumped up on the sink and unfastened the casing around the fan. Most bot networks worked on the simple principle that as long as a minimum threshold of juice flowed in, the bot was okay, and she knew there’d be a bot up there. All you had to do to disable a maintenance bot was reroute the circuit and the sysoper never noticed. She checked the cabling. It was twisted pair, not fiber, which was to be expected; fibernets were for intelligence recon. She rerouted the circuit and detached the maintenance bot from its seat.

  With the network wires stripped, Claudia sat cross-legged on the countertop and went to work. She reseated the bot in a mobile cage she carried around just in case. This was another one of her skills she’d decided the L.A.P.D. was better off not knowing about. Using the memory stick in her pack, only half a terabyte, but sufficient for her limit
ed purpose, she sent a wifi-worm into the bot’s flash-ROM to set the device listening on the same port as her comm. She counted to ten, then rebooted. A second later, a light on her comm flashed too. Excellent. She put her headset in place and flicked down the eyepiece so she could monitor the bot’s video output.

  She slipped her pack back on. Her shoulder hardly hurt at all now. On a whim, what the heck, she opened the shower and took the soap, the bottles and the washcloth, plus the little plastic cap for ladies with expensive do’s. At the door, she listened. There was no webcaster that she could hear. No music, no conversation. Just deep silence. A comfortable, watchful, lazy silence. She checked her thigh holster and loosened the spare Glock she carried because a girl just never could be too careful. She was glad it was still there.

  Then, she cracked open the door, set the reconfigured bot on the floor and sent it on its way.

  Chapter Four

  Claudia kept a hand close to her comm unit. It was an illegal configuration, naturally, but no self-respecting cop went with the default. Everyone assigned to a beat altered their standard issue comm the second they were in hand; the devices came with warnings descriptive enough to make all the necessary illegal changes in about twenty minutes even if you were clueless, and she’d been doing reconfigs a whole lot deadlier than this since she was nine. After she’d snapped home the last required circuit in less than five minutes at the Academy, realizing no one else was close to being done, she’d bent over the device and re-rigged it way it would do the most good. She prayed her assumptions then would be correct. That was what she was using to control the bot.

  Back flat against the bathroom wall, she watched her spy’s data stream across her field of vision. According to the bot, it was in another room about four hundred feet square. There were no fluctuations in air pressure or temperature. Since only a fool relied on technology alone, Claudia tried to slip into what she liked to call her hyper-concentration mode, but the fuzz in her brain interfered. She must have hit her head hard. Just the thought of her last memory made her dizzy. She was lucky to be alive. Boiling blue eyes, pale as glass…Her heart thudded hard in her chest. Get a grip. With a shake of her head, she cleared out the memory and concentrated on her breath until, at last, she could focus.

  There. Much, much better. She cracked the door a bit more and peeked out. Not a sound. Her nose twitched; the room smelled hollow. She sensed nothing living beyond. She tapped the spare holster tucked along the indentation of her spine, then her thigh holster. Her Glock slipped into her waiting hand. Knees bent, spare Glock ready, she stepped into the room and scooped up her bot…She stood in an empty bedroom. There wasn’t a lot of furniture, just a big bed, not recently slept in judging from the fact you could bounce a Panamanian peso off the bedspread, two chairs, a webcaster, black and silent, and a small refrigerator. Not even when her family was alive could Claudia have imagined living in this kind of luxury. She shook off the memory.

  Further investigation of the room turned up nothing but empty closets and drawers and the room service menu. The Hilton. Well, okay. Swankiest hotel in Los Angeles. Upper-upper, as they said in the Lower. And there weren’t even a pair of anyone else’s undies to be found. To the right was a dark wooden door. Claudia walked to it.

  Concentrating on the silence, she used the tip of a finger to open the door wide enough to set down her bot. Through the narrow crack, she saw in the room beyond a blood-red carpet, a portion of a black leather couch, and the edge of another webcaster. Vamp colors. Vamp posh. Then a flash of light blinded her, and even her teeth felt it. Sensation crashed through her. Something screamed. The sound keyed up into an animal howl. Then came silence, unnerving silence. Claudia pressed her back against the wall and slid down to the floor, ice sluicing along her spine.

  Output streamed across her vision as she stared at the bot’s transmission. Crimson droplets arced through the air. A hand, fingers dripping red, red-tinted steam, a hot, deep smell. She felt rather than heard the implosion of mechanical parts. Her bot’s data-stream died.

  The jolt snapped her out of her paralysis. Protect and serve. Right. She pushed to her feet and stepped through the door. Her pulse went into triple time because she knew what was out there. Mayhem. Nothing alive. She slipped through the door, but kept her back against the wall. She was right. There was nothing alive.

  A pale man sprawled face-up on the floor, one arm twisted behind his back, the other flopped out to the side. From mid-ulna to fingers he was nothing but ashes and bits of bone already turning to dust. One leg and part of his belly had suffered a like fate. He had to be a vamp. Only a vamp died like that. Her bot had caught the tail end of the vamp’s demise.

  Her head snapped up, eyes raking the room. Blood rushed through her ears like traffic in a tunnel. She moved past the deceased vamp, sliding her gaze over the body long enough to see his gaping, empty chest and the remains of an extremely expensive suit. His heart was gone. About a foot from the ashes of his arm, what looked like a lump of desiccated charcoal smoked in a pool of crumbling ashes. She shifted to get a look at the dead fang’s face. Not Korzha. The dead vamp wasn’t Korzha. No time to wonder why she cared.

  There was another body, too. A bulky man lay half on the couch, half on the floor, but he was upside down, head and shoulders on the carpet, legs on the seat cushions. Across his chest, a half-healed scar ripened into a still wet wound. The smell of blood, ozone and burnt air made her dizzy. She shook her head but the sensation of fullness remained.

  The vamp she didn’t recognize, but she knew this man. He was a werewolf: a high-beta rogue from the Middlesex clan who hunted in the Lower. Sometimes the freak paid for his meat but most times he just took it. Uninvited. No one could prove he hunted illegally, and since he made a point of paying the Cazadores or else did a few extra-curricular chores for them, the cops somehow never got notified. Brad, that was his name. If memory served, and she knew it did, Brad wasn’t the sort of werewolf you could push around. The guy was an asshole dog. Whatever had got him had to have been one mean son-of-a-bitch, because his sort was hard to kill.

  A salver sat on the coffee table near Brad’s body. It held rare lamb and still-bloody beef tips; untouched. There was coffee in a pewter pot; the polite beverage to offer when entertaining those of the preternatural persuasion. Shards from a shattered porcelain saucer appeared to be the only damage in the room, aside from the bodies, of course. Claudia glanced at the suite phone and shook her head. Given the circumstances, calling anywhere on an unsecured line was suicidal: for sure there was fiber VoIP to the phone and every word would end up on a B-Ops server.

  Claudia shook her head again. Vamps and werewolves were like the Bloods and the Crips. The Hatfields and the McCoys. The Lower and the Upper. Tomaytoes and tomahtoes. What were they doing together? She stared at Brad. Even though she thought nobody deserved to die, she couldn’t summon much pity except for his folks. She hoped she wasn’t the one who had to do the notification. Out loud, she said, “What the hell kind of meeting were you boys having?”

  Nobody answered. But since there were real live demons in Crimson City now, she had a kind of sickening feeling she knew.

  Two more bodies lay near the windows in a brilliant pool of light from a wall lamp. The first body was naked, perfectly naked. There wasn’t a mark on him. Claudia caught her breath because, Jeez-Louise, he was beautiful. White-blonde hair fell away from his face, and even from here she could count the ridges of his abs. He was her age, she thought; twenty-five or six tops. He had hardly any body hair, none on his face or chest. His eyes were closed, his face turned toward the light. He looked too healthy and pink to be a vamp. Most fangs took on a faintly chalky complexion unless they’d just fed. Possibly he was a werewolf. Likely, in fact. He must have healed faster than the late, unlamented Brad. Which meant two things: he was an alpha dog, and he might not be dead.

  She moved closer for a better look at the other body. Her heart raced. From the clothes she knew he had to
be B-Ops. He was dressed in black cargo pants, black boots, and black tee-shirt with sleeves that ended just above the bulges of his biceps. A sick feeling shot through her when she got close enough to see the man’s face. Matthew Jaise.

  Matthew Jaise.

  “Hey,” She kept her voice down. “Jaise. You all right?”

  She got no response from either of the two men. She hit her comm band again and got nothing but static. Damn, because she needed a medic here. Fast.

  She approached the bodies, her fingers curled on the trigger of her Glock. There was no sign of a wound on either of them. The naked man had no scars, which made Claudia wonder if he was a werewolf after all, because all but the newest of them had more than a few scars. If he was strong enough to have healed before Brad, then he ought to have a few scars on that perfect body of his. And there was no sign of death agony. In fact, except for the part about not breathing, he looked like he was simply sleeping.

  On the far side of Jaise’s torso, near the window, a bit of metal glittered. Claudia moved closer. The fuzziness in her head thickened, almost as if someone were stirring up a pond so she couldn’t see the bottom. With effort, she blocked the sensation. Light glinted off the metal. Heart sinking into her toes, she recognized at last what it was; the remains of a silver-coated bullet. Several more melted bullets spattered the floor.

  The demon had been here. Now that she was close to the bullets, the air reeked of saltpeter. Dollars to doughnuts, it had been the same monster who nearly killed her. Jeez. Four people he’d killed like it was nothing, two paranormal, possibly three, and one human. Quite possibly, this gorgeous wolf had died of fright. That happened sometimes. She crouched between the two bodies and touched Jaise’s throat, two fingers to his pulse point. “Please don’t be dead,” she whispered. “Don’t be dead. I want you to tell me what the hell happened here.”