“You will die, woman,” Kramer hissed. I thought he was talking to me, but I didn’t see his cloudy, disgusting form in either the crashed-in wall or the normal entrance to the bathroom. Then a thwacking sound coincided with Denise’s yelp.
“Denise!” Spade roared.
“Stay back, you know he can’t kill me!” she shouted, her voice more shrill from pain.
Bones and I burst back into the bedroom, holding up our hunks of countertops to ward off the volley of knives that immediately flew our way. Multiple explosions of pain blasted through me as the silver pierced my legs and arms, but I kept my heart protected, and everything else would heal.
Denise was on the opposite end of the room, crimson soaking her hair from a head wound and several smaller cuts darkening her clothes with blood. I hesitated, fighting my urge to run in front of her. If I did, I’d only be sending more knives her way, because Kramer was after me and Bones. Denise had just dared to interfere with his plans for us.
“Denise, try to get out,” I whispered.
“I’m the safest person in this room,” she countered.
Kramer spun to face us, giving Bones and me just a second to raise our marble barriers before more knives came hurtling at us.
“Stop it!” Denise yelled.
The ghost ignored her. “You try to defeat me?” Kramer hissed in our direction. “I will destroy you.”
Bones replied something in German. I didn’t know enough of the language to translate, but whatever he said made the ghost howl with outrage. More knives went flying, but only aimed at him this time.
“Hurry up with that sage,” I called out desperately. Spade had been kind enough to supply us with a lot of weapons for our trip home, but now that meant Kramer had more ammunition against us. Plus, he would reuse the knives, flinging them as fast as they could drop or bounce off our shields.
The ghost’s powers seemed even greater than before. Was it because of the closer proximity to Halloween, or because he was still really, really pissed over our attempt to trap him in the cave? We ducked under another barrage of silver, trying to make it to some sage lying on the far side of the demolished room. We couldn’t afford to let our attention wander from the knives that seemed to come at us from all sides. Or the ghost who could pop up anywhere around us in a blink, bashing our bodies with what felt like painful bursts of energy. Even with how fast we moved, we didn’t know which direction the next attack would come from. All Kramer needed was one lucky strike with a silver blade, and Bones or I would be shriveled.
“You need to get the fuck out of my house,” Denise snarled.
I hadn’t taken my attention off the hornet’s nest of silver knives around us or the ghost who could somehow amass enough energy to make me feel like I was going ten rounds with an undead Mike Tyson, but then something large and dark filled my peripheral vision. I glanced over where Denise had been—and stared.
Bones yanked me down just in time to avoid a silver knife headed right for my cheek. It landed in the wall behind us instead, but I still couldn’t quit glancing back at the other side of the room. Helsing let out a frightened hiss and tried harder to hide in the bed and furniture pile.
“Bones, she’s . . . she’s . . .”
I didn’t say more, but pointed. His gaze flicked over, and then widened as even his finely honed defensive instinct couldn’t cause him to look away from what was now an incredibly fast-growing mass. Almost absently, he held up his shield at the new influx of knives thrown his way.
Cracking sounds of the ceiling giving way alerted Kramer into turning around. When he did, the knives he’d levitated for imminent attack fell to the ground, and the ghost froze like he’d magically been welded to the spot.
“Drache,” he managed to croak.
The bottom half of a huge creature now took up the majority of the once-spacious room, part of its neck and all of its head disappeared into the hole it had made of the ceiling. Curved scales that looked tougher than crocodile skin formed a green-and-black design over the creature’s body, darkening in color as they reached its quad-runner-sized legs. A tail wider than my torso whipped out, knocking over the broken bits of furniture scattered about the room before settling in front of me and Bones like a living, flexible barricade. Two thick, horned humps unfurled from the creature’s back, revealing dark green wings that took up what was left of the room even though they were only half extended. Their spiked, clubbed ends stabbed holes in the carpet as the creature appeared to use them to balance its great body. Then more wood and plaster rained down, and a new, larger hole appeared, quickly being filled by a massive, elongated head punching through the ceiling. Its jaws were as big as the bed, saucer-sized crimson eyes glaring right at the transfixed ghost while scales like a headdress flared out behind it.
“Denise, you have outdone yourself,” Bones murmured in astonishment.
I still couldn’t form words yet. Yes, I’d seen Denise shapeshift before, once into a cat and once into an exact replica of me when she acted as my decoy. But I had no idea that she could manifest something of this magnitude. Not ten feet in front of me was what could only be described as a large dragon. One that looked straight out of the movie Reign of Fire—only slightly smaller, because this dragon seemed to be only about two stories tall and I think the one from the film was double that size.
If she manages to breathe fire, I thought in numbing awe, I might actually pass out.
Kramer remained frozen where he stood, almost as if he thought staying still would render him invisible. He seemed to have forgotten that he had the ability to poof away, because from his expression, he didn’t want to be anywhere near the enormous dragon glaring down at him with rows of teeth gleaming from a snarling mouth. Yet, with the creature’s tremendous girth, Kramer was practically in the dragon’s lap.
Glass exploded outward as a piece of porch furniture hurtled through the bedroom window. It didn’t go far, bouncing off the dragon’s hind leg and almost flattening my cat, who huddled in terror behind the remains of the bed.
“Room service!” Ian sang out, appearing in the smashed-open window. He had lit sage overflowing both hands, but when he saw the dragon, he froze just like Kramer had, his fanged mouth dropping open.
“Bugger me blind and bowlegged!”
“Don’t just stand there, throw the sage,” Bones ground out.
Ian shook his head as if to clear it, then he threw the sage at the ghost, who howled as he finally tried to whoosh out of the way.
More plaster and wood showered the room in the next instant. Then Spade appeared in the huge hole he’d made in the wall by the blocked-off bedroom door. I scrambled to protect my cat just in time, grabbing Helsing before the bed-and-furniture barricade collapsed on top of him. Spade, too, was packing sage, and between the huge snapping dragon that Kramer didn’t seem to want to poltergeist through, and the two vampires throwing lighted greenery his way, Kramer couldn’t dodge the flying plant missiles fast enough. With a spate of harsh-sounding German, he disappeared.
“What in the holy hell is that?”
Tyler peeked around Spade’s bulk, more smoldering sage in his hands, to gape in disbelief at the dragon. His thoughts careened from disbelief, to fear, to fascination as the dragon’s form wavered, began to shrink, then finally culminated in Denise wearing nothing but a few spatters of blood.
Ian appeared to have recovered from his surprise. He gave Spade an almost accusatory look.
“You’re shagging a woman who can turn into a dragon? Blast you, Charles, I am sick with envy!”
“Not now,” Spade muttered, pulling off his shirt and placing it over Denise. I tried to yank the blanket off the remains of the bed, but it was too tightly wedged in with the other furniture, and I only ended up tearing off a long piece.
“Kitten, this first,” Bones said. Then he began to pull the knives out of me where Kramer’s blades had found their mark. I winced at each sharp, efficient tug, the silver feeling like it tried t
o take hunks of my flesh along with it.
“Tyler, grab a blanket from the next room?” I suggested, turning my attention to the silver still embedded in Bones’s body. His mouth tightened as I began to pull multiples blades out of him, but he made no sound even though I knew it hurt him as much as what he did pained me.
Tyler went to get the blanket, mumbling under his breath that this was the craziest shit he’d ever seen. Spade cradled Denise, who looked a little woozier than normal after a shift. Maybe it was the blood loss from her wounds, though they’d already healed. Or maybe it was her body taking a minute to recover after briefly becoming a thousand-pound mythical creature that looked so intimidating, it had even scared the pants off a homicidal ghost.
Tyler coughed as he came back in and passed a blanket to Denise. Smoke filled the room from the many lit plants, combined with the carpet starting to smolder from the burning piles of sage thrown onto it.
“Fire,” I noted, brushing off Bones’s attempts to get the last of the silver out of me. I was already done desilvering him, he apparently being able to dodge the blades more efficiently than I. I ran into the bathroom, quickly soaked several towels under the shower, then threw them over the worst of the burning spots. Bones, Spade, Denise, and Ian were stamping out the smaller places. Soon all the fire was out, leaving only some sage burning on nonflammable surfaces, like twisted metal segments of the bed frame and the hunks of the bathroom countertop that had served as my and Bones’s temporary shields.
I looked around at the destroyed furniture, broken glass, holes in the ceiling, wall, and bathroom, multiple silver knives strewn about or embedded where they’d landed, and the charred carpet before shaking my head.
“Spade, you should never, ever let us stay with you again. This is twice now that we’ve ended up trashing one of your rooms.”
He shrugged, seeming more concerned with making sure we had enough sage burning in safe places than in the disrepair of his house.
I heard a car pull up in the driveway. Looked like my mother was back. Sure enough, a few seconds later she was standing in the large hole in the bedroom wall, her expression a mixture of shock and concern as she took in the damage.
“Catherine, what happened?”
“Is everyone all right?” Fabian called out from what sounded like the yard. I went over to the ruined window, seeing him and Elisabeth floating well outside the cloud of sage smoke drifting out.
“What happened?” Bones repeated, his voice hard as he joined me at the window. He stared at the ghosts, his eyes glinting emerald. “What happened is the two of you were followed.”
Twenty-one
I wrinkled my nose as I set the pet carrier down in the small living room of the town house. The former occupants must have been smokers. A lingering scent of tobacco permeated the walls and carpet, but it was better than the garlicky ganja aroma we’d surrounded ourselves with at Spade’s. Not that it had done any good. Kramer was obviously too powerful for that to be a deterrent. But, since I was supposed to be looking on the bright side, last night meant we didn’t have to start looking for Italian chefs and drug dealers in order to layer up this place with a bunch of garlic and weed. How was that for a Glass-Half-Full perspective?
The first thing I did even before letting my kitty out was start lighting sage and putting it on some of the many incense burners and glass jars we’d acquired on our trip from St. Louis to Sioux City. We hadn’t gotten any sleep between the drive, picking up supplies, and arranging for our accommodations here, but catching some winks at Spade’s had been out of the question after Kramer’s visit. Spade and Denise packed up just as quickly as the rest of us. Guilt stabbed me that they couldn’t return unless we managed to capture Kramer. Otherwise, who knew if—or when—Kramer might decide to pop back in for another extremely hostile visit. After all, they couldn’t burn sage in every room of their house for the rest of their lives. Or until we caught him, whichever came first.
I knew that Tyler was coming with us, and I expected my mother to tag along as well, but I was surprised when Denise and Spade insisted on coming to Sioux City, too. My question of why was met with pointed stares. Guess Kramer had made two new enemies in his raid, but I didn’t know if Denise’s dragon metamorphosis would work to terrify the ghost a second time. Even a dragon couldn’t harm Kramer, and once he got over his initial terror at seeing one, he’d remember that.
Ian also came along with the comment that he had nothing better to do, and he wanted to see Denise do another “shapeshifter trick,” as he called it. In spite of my personal dislike of him, Ian was crafty, powerful, and practically fearless in a fight. Too bad all that came wrapped up with the conscience of a barracuda, but he was loyal in his own way to Bones and Spade. Ian might claim he was here only because of boredom or the chance to see Denise shape shift into something unusual, but I knew better. The Inquisitor had fucked up when he tried to kill Bones. That, Ian cared about.
Absent from our group were Fabian and Elisabeth. The ghosts had taken their own form of transportation in the form of ley lines. Even though both of them swore that they were careful, and Kramer hadn’t followed them back to Spade’s, it seemed too big a coincidence. This was twice now that Kramer found us, and my borrowed powers were gone, so that wasn’t the smoking gun. In Ohio, I’d blamed it on chance because the state was a supernatural hotspot that naturally drew a lot of ghosts, but St. Louis wasn’t, and I doubted Kramer had gotten extremely lucky in the ley lines he rode last night.
Thus, we were in the Morningside section of Sioux City, but we’d rented an apartment for Fabian and Elisabeth just outside Kelly Park. It was necessary to give them their own place because we’d arranged for a new method for communicating with them, and we couldn’t risk its getting stolen. The ghosts didn’t need furniture or kitchen appliances, so the apartment was empty save for one very important item: a cell phone. Elisabeth could manifest into solid flesh long enough to use it, and who said you couldn’t teach an old ghost new technology? After a few lessons, Elisabeth learned how to send a text since her voice would only sound like white noise if she called me. I’d programmed her phone so it would forward any text she sent to me to all of our shiny new cells. This way, Elisabeth and Fabian could follow Kramer without worrying about leading him back to us when they needed to relay information. In an emergency, they could poof up where we were staying, but unless things got dire, they’d reach us in the new old-fashioned way.
“Got your mum settled in with Ian,” Bones remarked, coming into the town house.
Spade and Denise were staying together for obvious reasons, and I didn’t trust Ian to fully be invested in protecting Tyler if Kramer found us and managed to brave the sage. That left Tyler with us and Ian with my mom. Bones was going to arrange for another vampire to stay at our cabin in case my uncle showed up with important news, but my mom could fill that position. The prospect of cooling her heels at the cabin shut her up . . . right until it was time to go in the rented town house with Ian, and then I’d done the most practical thing I could: I sicced Bones on her.
“I swear, that woman’s got a mouth on her worse than you do,” Tyler commented, following in after Bones. “Ian gave her the tiniest smack on the rear when she walked by, and she told him to—”
“Ian smacked my mother on the ass?” I cut him off. At Tyler’s nod, I stopped lighting sage and grabbed a silver knife, feeling my fangs pop out of their own accord. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Bones blocked my path to the door. “I have it sorted, luv. He won’t do anything like that again, promise.”
I stood there for a moment, debating whether to push past Bones so I could slice and dice Ian before stringing him up by the silver rings he had pierced through his parts, when Bones raised his brow.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I trust you, not him,” I muttered.
He grasped my shoulders. “Then if you trust me, believe that it’s sorted. If he proves me wrong, I vo
w I’ll hold him down and let you stab him as many times as you please.”
That image brought a smile to my face. Talk about looking on the bright side! Bones chuckled.
“Then it’s settled. Now, I’ll get us unpacked. Why don’t you go back to lighting enough sage to make sure that ghostly sod gets a proper welcome if he pops up on us again?”
I’d like to believe that wouldn’t happen, but there were two ways Kramer could indeed drop by for an unwelcome visit. One was if he’d returned to Spade’s before we left last night and followed us all the way from St. Louis to here. We’d tried to prevent that by leaving very quickly and having Elisabeth and Fabian keep a lookout the first hundred or so miles, but if the ghost was sly, he could’ve managed it.
The second possibility was more likely, and it sucked on many levels.
“You realize we might need more than sage if Kramer overheard us talking last night about how we were planning to trap him,” I stated.
“Aw, hell. I didn’t think of that,” Tyler muttered.
“I did,” Bones said with a grim glance at me. His voice lowered until it would be impossible for anyone eavesdropping to overhear him. “Means we need to center our attention on his intended victims instead of the accomplice. Elisabeth said he never wavered once he picked his targets. That will work to our advantage.”
My eyes widened, but I made sure to speak as quietly as he despite my surprise. “How, unless we use those women as bait?”
“I hate it when you two whisper like that,” Tyler muttered. “Makes me antsy.”
“That’s precisely what we’ll do,” Bones replied, holding up a finger to Tyler in the universal gesture for wait. “If Kramer expects us to concentrate on finding and mesmerizing his accomplice, he’ll either be extremely zealous in concealing that bloke’s identity, and we’ll never discover who he is. Or he’ll lie to the accomplice about where he’s intending to hold the bonfire, sending us on a wild-goose chase while he’s off somewhere else having his spot of gruesome fun. Either way, he avoids our trap.”
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