by Jess Haines
“If it appears you are in need of it, then it will be returned to you. Now do your jobs. I’m not paying you to question me.”
I bit my tongue to keep from saying something sarcastic in reply. My refuge in snarky humor might help keep me sane in terrifying situations, but right now didn’t seem to be the best time to bait Clyde.
As much as I wanted to go running back to hide under the covers of my borrowed bed, we needed to get this over with. And while I had every intention of meeting the rival vampire ruler, Jimmy Thrane, my first order of business would be to introduce myself to the local White Hats.
If anyone might have a burning desire to get rid of Clyde, it would be the White Hats. If I was lucky, they might know who in the supernatural community was after him, too.
Chapter 10
Trinity didn’t say a thing when I told her we wanted to go to the nearest known White Hat hideout. She led us to a waiting car, then took her place behind the wheel. Sara and I sat in the back together, making note of the routes she took, comparing them against one of the maps Sara had tucked away in one of her jeans pockets.
We took expressways I had only heard of in movies—the 405 and 101—that were packed with an ungodly amount of traffic. Somehow we kept moving at a decent clip, and it took a little under an hour to reach North Hollywood.
Sad as it was to say, this part of town reminded me more of home. The apartment buildings and businesses were not as polished and pristine as the ones in Santa Monica. Here and there, streetlights were out. There appeared to be an uncommon number of auto repair shops and liquor stores in relation to the few apartments and homes we passed along the way. The only greenery was provided by scrubby-looking bushes or the occasional scraggly palm tree.
The heat made it hard to breathe. I hadn’t noticed it right away, but now that I was outside, the dry air made my skin feel tight and my nose feel like it was on the verge of a bleed.
Trinity pulled into a small parking lot, then twisted in the driver’s seat to regard us. She did not appear amused, her tone flat and bored. “Obviously, I can’t follow you two inside. How long would you like me to wait before I assume they’ve killed you so I can head back?”
I blinked. Sara made a little coughing noise.
“Um,” I said.
The vampire grinned, exposing extended canines that gleamed in the meager streetlight, matching the flicker of red in her eyes. “Just a little joke.” Sure. Judging by the look in her eye, our sudden, stark fear was the source of her amusement. “If you do not return in, say, half an hour, I will come inside looking for you.”
I did not envy any White Hats who might try getting in her way if it came down to that.
“Thanks,” Sara muttered, opening her door and stepping out with the kind of swift grace that bespoke her discomfort. She could move fast when she had good reason.
Following her out, I ran a nervous hand through my hair, brushing some stray curls out of my face as I took in the club. It didn’t look like much: a rundown hole-in-the-wall with a flickering neon sign and some incongruously cheerful country-and-western music spilling out to mingle with the sounds of traffic on the night air. I might not have thought anything of The Brand except that it had a white neon cowboy hat flashing under the name. To advertise their presence so obviously, either these guys had bigger balls than the hunters in New York or they were horrifically stupid.
I was willing to bet on the latter, though I kept that thought to myself.
A guy in a wifebeater, jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and a leather vest leaned against the wall next to the entrance. He watched us approach with interest.
“Hola. ¿Cómo está?”
“Muy bien, gracias,” Sara replied. “Me llamo Sara.”
He gave her a wide grin, his teeth a white slash against dark skin. “Mucho gusto. Encantado. Me llamo Jesus.” He glanced at me, then abruptly shifted to English with only the barest trace of an accent. “I take it you two aren’t from around here.”
Sara shook her head. “In town on a visit. We’re here for business.”
“Who are you here to see?”
She looked at me, and I shrugged before pointing a single finger at the sign over our heads. “I guess that depends on whether your sign is advertising a certain type of business.”
Jesus frowned and pushed off the wall. “You two shouldn’t involve yourselves in White Hat business. It’s not a game.”
“We never said it was,” I replied. He towered over me, but I held my ground, tilting my head back to meet and hold his gaze. My nose was about level with the shoulder holster not very well hidden by his vest. “There’s something bad going on in this town. We thought some of your people might know who’s behind it.”
“What kind of bad? What are you talking about?”
I didn’t give an inch, not even when his chest brushed up against mine. “Someone’s using a forbidden type of magic. Messing with the dead. Who might know about that?”
He stared down at me, dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners as they narrowed, his frown deepening. Eventually, he turned his head away and spat. “Sí. Los muertos and the brujo—I have heard of this magic. Go into the back room and speak with the man in the red jacket. He might know who is behind it.”
Though I didn’t understand it all, I was glad he was giving us a pass. I gave a last glance to the car, dark and mostly hidden in the shadows at the back of the lot, before moving inside.
Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the front door, I took in all there was to see. The place looked like a real rat trap. The scarred bar was being manned by a guy who looked like he could most likely wipe the floor with anyone, human or no, who tried to mess with the patrons. A couple of guys in biker leathers gave us bleary-eyed leers over their shoulders, as we edged past the bar and a stage taking up a good portion of the floor to an unmarked door that presumably led to where the White Hats gathered.
Nobody said anything or tried to stop us, but it was a bit strange to have the suspicious stares of everyone in the room on us while Shania Twain poured out of the stage speakers. It didn’t seem like the right kind of music for a place like this, but then again, it wasn’t my place to be pointing out the inconsistencies.
Sara led the way into the back room, which, unlike the bar, was comfortable. Overstuffed chairs and couches were spread in a loose circle around the room, laptops and other gadgets mixed with the papers and guns spread over the low table in the middle of the room.
About half a dozen of those seats were occupied, and the people sitting in them looked up sharply on our entrance, two or three of them reaching for guns as Sara and I both raised our hands and jerked back.
“Don’t shoot! We’re unarmed!”
Though the guns had drawn my attention before I could register any details about the hunters, the flash of red as one of the men stood up caught my eye. “Shiarra? What the hell are you doing here?”
My mouth dropped open. “Devon? What the—wait, what are you doing here?”
He laughed and stepped around the table, waving at the other hunters to put their weapons away before sweeping me up in a tight hug. I was too shocked to do anything to reciprocate right away, and he’d done a pretty good job of pinning my arms.
“I thought you were dead! After what happened to Jack and the rest—”
“No way,” I squeaked out, short of air thanks to his grip. “I thought maybe you were dead since you—”
“—and all those werewolves! And the stuff in the paper, and—”
“Yo! My man, you mind letting her loose long enough for me to say hello, too?”
I grinned up at Tiny, who had slipped behind Devon while we were babbling at each other. Almost the moment Devon let me go, Tiny swept me up in a hug that made my feet leave the ground and ribs twinge in protest. Meanwhile Devon greeted Sara with a bit more decorum, shaking her hand.
The two hunters had disappeared sometime after I allowed Royce to bind me to him by blood. They had
n’t liked the idea, though they both had known that I didn’t have much of a choice at the time. It was either take the vampire’s blood, or risk being called to that psychotic prick, Max Carlyle, against my will. Max had slipped me some of his own blood during one of my bouts of unconsciousness as his prisoner. Thanks to being bitten against my will, unconsciousness had been frequent enough that I sometimes wondered if all my bad decisions of late had stemmed from brain damage related to lack of oxygen from the blood loss.
Planting a wet kiss on my cheek, Tiny squeezed all the air out of my lungs and then set me back on my feet, careful to help me catch my balance before he let me go. Devon clapped me lightly on the back, facing the rest of the room. “Guys, you’ll never believe who this is. You remember the chick I told you about who was working with Jack and that leech in New York?”
The other people in the room gave tentative waves, though they looked more bemused than unwelcoming. I was sure my expression betrayed just how baffled I was, too. Devon and Tiny had never told me where they were going, and this was one of the last places I had expected to run into them.
Trinity was waiting for Sara and me outside. We couldn’t afford to dawdle. As much as I wanted to catch up with the hunters, I didn’t think it would be wise to let Clyde know I had ties to them, or vice versa.
“It’s really great to see you two, but we don’t have a lot of time. We’re actually here on a job, and we have a couple of other places we need to check out tonight, too.”
Devon and Tiny exchanged a look I couldn’t quite decipher before Tiny answered me. “Let me guess. Something to do with Clyde Seabreeze and the vampires who have been showing up dead, and the zombies shuffling around town?”
Sara coughed. “Well, yes. Should we even bother asking how you know?”
Tiny gave a derisive snort, pulling away to collapse into one of the bigger couches, sending up a puff of dust. “It’s our job to know. There’s some new big bad in town, and he doesn’t play by the same rules as the others.”
Well, this was an interesting development. I thought about some of the places bodies had been found, dredging my memory for names of unfamiliar streets.
“Do you guys know anything else about him? Where we can find him? We were going to check out some place off of Magnolia in Burbank next—”
Devon shook his head and gestured for Sara and me to take seats. Though I didn’t want to offend the White Hats, we didn’t have enough time to hang around and play nice. Not unless I ran out to tell Trinity to wait for us a little longer. I didn’t like the idea of annoying her, so maybe we’d come back here some other night—without our vampiric babysitter.
“You’re not going to find him there,” Devon said. “I can see you guys don’t have much time to talk. The short story is that he’s not from around here. He showed up in the last week or so, and zombies have been sighted all over LA County. We’re pretty sure he’s been storing them in the Angeles Crest, but it’s impossible to say for sure. The guy comes and goes seemingly at random. We’ve run into him a couple of times when we were out looking for particular targets at known vampire haunts. I’d call it luck that we happened to see him at all, but it’s not going to do you much good.”
“Why’s that?”
One of the other White Hats responded, leaning forward as he toyed with the safety on his gun. “He’s one of those magi who can fade. Looks like most any other guy on the street, and you forget what he looks like as soon as you walk away. The harder you try to recall the details, the faster they slip away.”
“Yeah, we’ve all seen him at least once, and none of us can agree on a solid description,” one of the others chipped in.
“We just know he’s a guy who’s sometimes surrounded by zombies. Aside from that? Can’t tell you much. We can’t decide if he has dark skin or pale, what color his hair is—nothing.”
Fading. That was a new term to me, but I could see where it could come in handy for a mage. Must be some kind of defensive mechanism some of them had developed to blend in. Considering what type of magic this guy did, it made a whole lot of sense for him to use some sort of passive forgetting spell that made peoples’ memories of him fade like that. Too bad it would fall under the category of black enchant, since it directly messed with an unwilling subject’s mind, and was therefore even more illegal than raising the zombies.
At least we knew we were looking for a man. That narrowed it down, if only by roughly fifty percent of the population of greater Los Angeles. Sigh.
The charm I was wearing might assist me in spotting and remembering the mage if we ran into him, but unless Arnold gave her something to counter that kind of magic, Sara wouldn’t know if she was looking at him. Even if she did, later on she wouldn’t know which guy I was talking about. This would be a heck of a manhunt.
Biting back a frustrated growl, I turned to Devon. “I do want to catch up with you, but our ride is waiting outside, and I don’t want her to come in with guns blazing. Can we meet up later? I’d like to talk and maybe see if I can help you remember some details about this mage.”
If Devon was disappointed, he hid it well. His smile was sweet and sincere, and he reached out to give my shoulder another squeeze, which this time felt more intimate than a simple expression of platonic friendship thanks to the way his thumb brushed over my collarbone.
I gathered the twinkle in his eye was from the knowledge that his touch was making me blush.
“Yeah. Seeing as you’re in town, we’ll have to make some time to get together.”
Coulda-woulda-shoulda’s rang dim alarm bells in the back of my head. The hunter had previously expressed some interest in seeing me as more than a friend. Since I was technically seeing Royce now, it wouldn’t be kosher to lead Devon on.
Luckily, I was saved from having to say something awkward about my love life in this room full of staring, judgmental hunters by Tiny’s booming voice. “Yes, we will. Let me give you a number. . . . Hold on. . . . Here.” He thrust a scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled on it at me. “Call us when you’re ready to get together.”
“We will,” Sara promised, me nodding as she pushed me toward the door. “Thank you for your help!”
“Yes, thanks!”
“Anytime,” Devon said, watching us go with hooded eyes.
Chapter 11
Trinity didn’t say anything until Sara and I were both back in the car. She glanced at us in the rearview, the reflection of red in her eyes hinting at her agitation with something—maybe us? Or was it the proximity of the White Hat hideout?
“Good to see you’re still alive. Were the White Hats not home, or did you get what you came for? ”
“We got what we needed,” Sara said, her tone carefully neutral.
Trinity turned her attention ahead, the glitter of crimson no longer visible from my angle in the backseat. “That’s good. I’m sure Clyde will be thrilled to hear all about it.” The not-so-veiled threat in what she didn’t say made me glad we’d cut things short with Devon and Tiny. If Sara and I had hung around much longer, Trinity or Clyde might have grown suspicious that we were plotting against him. “What’s next on your agenda, hmm?”
“Can you take us to any of the places where these attacks took place?” I asked.
“You sure that’s what you want? They’ve all been cleaned up, so you won’t see much.”
“Yeah. You never know. You guys might have missed something.”
Trinity made a derisive sound in her throat and started the car. “I sincerely doubt that, but if that’s what you want, then that’s where we’ll go. Did you have a particular destination in mind?”
Sara and I looked at each other, then simultaneously shrugged, never mind that Trinity couldn’t see it. “How about the one in Sun Valley? That’s close to here, isn’t it?”
She made another sound, this time more like a choked laugh. “Interesting choice. Buckle your seat belts. It won’t take long to get there.”
Though she was righ
t, the area seemed to go from bad to still bad to oh-God-where’s-my-pepper-spray territory. Graffiti was sprayed on a number of the walls, shards of broken beer bottles scattered on the blacktop of empty parking lots shone with the glitter of fallen stars, and most of the windows on the houses and apartments were protected by iron bars—in some cases, even on the second and third floors.
When Trinity stopped at the side of the road in front of a 24-hour Laundromat, for a long moment, I wasn’t sure why. Then she tilted her head to look at us, her braid sliding across the slick leather of the seat.
“Well? What are you waiting for? I don’t want to be here all night. Go take a look. It happened over there.”
I took a look where she was pointing. There was a sign for a . . . carnicería? Whatever that was. Judging by the signs in the window, it must have been the Spanish term for a deli or butcher shop.
It felt like Trinity’s eyes were boring holes in my back as I slid out of the car and started walking toward the shop. I was sure she must have known how uncomfortable she was making me, but she was staying in the car and out of our way. That would have to be enough.
Sara came around until she was beside me, the two of us moving in tandem as we approached the shop. The hours posted in the window said it should have been open now, but the lights were off and a “Closed” sign was visible behind the streaks on the glass front door. Though I hadn’t made any special effort to breathe through my nose, the scent of dead things—worse than old, congealed blood, much worse—instantly coated my throat and tongue.
Sara stopped as I did, her brow wrinkling with concern. “You okay?”
I coughed and spat, trying to get the taste out. “Cripes, you don’t smell that?”
She sniffed, then lifted her shoulders. “Smells like you’d expect this close to a butcher shop. Maybe something went bad?”
“Really bad.”
We tried the door on the off chance someone might have left it open, but of course the thing was locked. Both of us cupped the glass and peered inside, trying to see past the coat of dust and glare from a nearby streetlight.
