by Ava Benton
“Yes, but he will soon enough.” Elias turned to my mother. “Did anyone ever find out where Kristoff hid in those days? Any of your kind, I mean?”
She shook her head. “Most likely outside the city limits, but that was the best any of us could discover. Somewhere he wouldn’t be noticed, certainly.”
“All right.” He looked at me.
I nodded. It was time to get moving.
“Where are you going?” My mother turned as I hurried across the room to the door.
“We have to start looking. We need to find where he is.” I looked back at her and tried to smile. “I promise, we’re going to find her. No matter what it takes.”
Her chin quivered. “Please, be careful.”
It wasn’t me I was worried about being careful.
It was everyone we would come up against.
10
Elias
I waited across the street from the club with one hand clenched tight in the pocket of my coat and the other resting on the handle of my dagger.
The blood lust had lessened in my head from a deafening roar to a subtle thumping, like the beginnings of a headache. I used to get terrible headaches when I was human. The pain was one of the few things I remembered clearly.
Looking back, knowing what I knew hundreds of years later, there might have been a serious problem with my eyes or even my brain. When I was turned, all of that disappeared—along with everything else that made me who I was back then.
What was taking Mariya so long? It was getting late, and judging by the number of people walking into the club, the place was bound to be packed.
What were the odds that the two warlocks would return?
As Mariya had pointed out, it was better than nothing. If they didn’t come in, perhaps someone who knew them would. That was our best chance at finding out where Kristoff did his filthy business.
I pictured him in my mind.
Tall, imperious, with snow-white hair despite his relatively young age. As though something had shocked him terribly and turned it white in an instant, without a hint of color left behind. Eyes as black as midnight. Evil eyes. Eyes belonging to a creature with no understanding of right and wrong. The only thing he responded to was that which would benefit him in some way, never caring what it meant to those he used.
I remembered that witch who was flayed. Henrietta. A beautiful thing. She had no skin when they found her, her mouth still open in a silent scream.
I had never experienced agony like that. I couldn’t imagine it. And I didn’t want to.
I pulled up the collar of my coat against the mist which wouldn’t stop blowing around. It had been an ugly sort of day all around. At least I blended into the shadows well—the people hurrying back and forth down the sidewalks weren’t in the mood to notice the things around them in their haste, but that was the normal way of life in the fast-paced century in which I’d found myself.
I wondered if they knew what an ugly world they lived in, whether they had a clue what went on behind some of the many windows facing out onto the street. How much filth and evil there really was, the sort of evil that didn’t get newspaper coverage or time on the television. I had seen too much of it to pretend it would ever go away. It only took different forms as time marched on.
The sight of Mariya emerging from the club was something like the first rays of sun after a long storm.
She was one of the only good, decent people I had met in my most recent assignment. I had to admit to myself that her sister outshone her. So did her mother.
I hadn’t paid much attention to her over the several years spent guarding her sister. As she jogged across the street, glowing with energy, I wished I had.
“All right. Julius agrees to help us.”
“What a prince,” I snarled.
“Hey. We need all the help we can get right now. I don’t need your shitty attitude getting in the way.” She craned her neck, looking up and down the street. “They don’t normally come in for at least another hour, though. According to Julius, anyway.”
“What do we do in the meantime?”
“I had a few ideas about that. Come with me. I only live two blocks from here.”
“We’re going to your apartment?”
“Yes. Hence my telling you that I live so close.” She sighed. “What? Is there some spell I’m not aware of that makes it impossible for you to step foot in any apartment other than Vanessa’s?”
“No, of course not,” I spat. “You’re working out the steps in your mind, but not sharing the plan with me.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She blushed. “I guess I need to calm down.”
I waved it off. “Come on. What’s the plan?”
“Let’s walk and talk.”
We left the alley I’d been hiding in and made a right, then another right at the first corner.
As we walked—heads dipped low, hands in our pockets—she said, “I figured I would go in and get a look at these two for myself, but I don’t exactly look club ready at the moment. I look like a drowned rat.”
“You don’t think you’ll stand out?”
“I think I would stand out more looking the way I do now,” she snorted.
“I didn’t mean it that way. You and Vanessa look so much alike. You don’t think they’ll notice you, recognize the relationship?”
We stopped at a red light, and she looked up at me, her mouth open. “Of course! And if they do recognize me and make it obvious that they do, we’ll know we’re on the right track! You’re a genius.”
I shook my head. “Not exactly where I was going with that.”
She seemed to be ignoring my comment. “Then we work well together,” she suggested, thencleared her throat loudly and switched gears as we continued across the street. “At any rate, I have to spruce up a little, so I’ll blend in with the others. You could probably use a few minutes out of this nasty weather.”
“The weather doesn’t affect me,” I scowled, pushing ahead.
“Don’t you feel anything? Ever?”
“Rarely.”
She shrugged and made a quick turn up the stairs of an unassuming brownstone building, one like so many others around it.
“You live here?” I asked, looking at our surroundings.
She was at the top of the stairs already and turned to look at me. “Where did you expect? A cave?”
“No. I expected something…”
“Nicer. Yes. I’m sure.”
She waved me up the stairs, and I followed, keeping my eyes open the whole way for any suspicious movement in the deep shadows.
I couldn’t understand how she moved so freely and casually when she knew what horrors life held. Especially when she’d heard her mother’s stories.
I followed her up three flights of stairs and into her apartment. Compared to her sister’s, it was a closet. One small room with a few pieces of furniture—no television, I noted, which was another way in which she and her sister differed.
Vanessa lived to watch TV. A small kitchen to the right of the front door with a bedroom beyond. Another bedroom to the left, and I assumed a bathroom just off that.
“Why do you live this way?” I asked, turning in a slow circle as I took in the plants, the art on the walls, and the dozens of books. Maybe hundreds. They drew my eye, stretching from one end of the living room wall to the other.
“Live this way? You make it sound pretty dire,” she grumbled as she marched to her room and closed the door.
My sensitive ears could still pick up every move she made. The sound of her shoes hitting the floor. The heavy, wet coat joining them. The zipper on her jeans as she lowered it.
“I only wonder when your mother and sister live so differently.” I picked up one of the books at random. A biography of George Washington. Another of Abraham Lincoln. I had read about both of them—granted, I remembered when Washington was still alive though I had missed the Revolutionary War. Asleep far beneath the ground.
More books. Art, history,
fiction. A lot of fiction. Hemingway, Austen, Fitzgerald, Morrison. She had broad tastes.
“I enjoy your literary collection,” I called out, flipping through the Washington biography.
“Oh. Thanks. You read?”
“I need some way to fill my evenings.”
“Right. I forgot. You don’t sleep.”
“Correct.”
“I’m going to get in the shower, but it won’t take long.”
Moments later, the sound of running water.
I replaced the book and went to the windows. There were three in a row, all facing the street.
Rain rolled down the panes and dripped from the leaves still on the trees. Mostly, the dead leaves collected in gutters, stuck to the sidewalk. They stunk of death and rot, even from where I stood with the windows closed against the stench that only I and the few stray animals roaming the street could detect.
From inside, surrounded by books and plants and flowers, it was almost difficult to imagine it being so bleak out there. I never had a problem imagining it in Vanessa’s penthouse. One would assume the opposite would have been true, surrounded by luxury the way Vanessa was, looking out at the park and the tall, glistening buildings surrounding it.
Most of the time, when I could see out the windows, I would imagine all the crime that was taking place down there. The muggings and beatings and rapes.
In a city the size of New York, in a place with plenty of seclusion, if one knew where to look, it was natural. Humans couldn’t help themselves.
One of the many things Charlotte and I used to talk about on our walks. I wondered what she would think if she could see the world as it was a century after her death. We thought it was bad back then, and it did have its negative points. But nothing compared to the present. No, she was too good for this time. It was better for her to lie in a crypt I had never been able to visit.
“It’s a shame you don’t have dry clothes,” Mariya called out from behind her closed door.
“I won’t catch cold,” I reminded her. “And I don’t feel the weather.”
“You don’t feel anything?” she asked.
I was almost surprised that she sounded surprised.
“Weren’t you ever acquainted with Cressida’s Nightwarden?” I turned away from the window.
She was rubbing a towel over her body; I could hear the terry cloth sliding over her skin.
My mouth went dry, and I licked my lips at the thought of what was under the clothes she had worn in the alley. When I crushed her body to mine. I could just imagine her slim waist and full hips, a firm derrière to go with the breasts I had come so close to touching.
Desire unfurled deep in my core, the sort of desire I hadn’t experienced in forever.
“Not very well. It’s not as if you’re allowed to get very personal with your charges, is it?”
No, but there’s no rule about the sister of my charge.
I swallowed hard and tried to blot out the dark, seething lust bubbling up in me, blotting out all rational thought.
“Are you still out there?” she asked.
“Yes. I am.”
And I’m going to kick that door down and throw you to the floor and take you until you lose consciousness.
I dug my claws into my palms until I hissed at the breaking of my skin. But it didn’t do much to calm my hunger.
It had been so long since I felt a warm, writhing body beneath mine and the tight, wet heat around my thrusting cock. For once, I needed to taste something other than blood.
Like her skin, her lips.
I turned back toward the window and willed myself to fight it off. There was far too much at stake for me to lose control at the worst possible moment. Vanessa must be terrified, wondering if I or anybody else would ever come for her.
Who knew what Kristoff was doing? What he was taunting her with? Or whether he’d bothered to inform her what his plans were at all. Maybe he was saving it for a surprise. I forced myself to picture Henrietta and her skinless, silent scream. It helped.
And at just the right moment, too, since Mariya stepped out of her bedroom.
I watched her in the reflection in the windows.
The short, black dress. The knee-high boots. She shrugged into a denim jacket which somehow was the perfect touch. She wore her long, black hair in a knot on top of her head and there was much more makeup on her face than I was used to seeing. It brought out her eyes, her high cheekbones, the creaminess of her skin. And when she slicked a shiny lipstick on her pouty lips, I almost groaned.
She was nothing short of stunning.
She turned her wide, innocent eyes on me and I could’ve sworn a jolt of electric current ran through me.
“You ready?” she asked, standing by the door.
For the first time in forever, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was.
11
Elias
She’d been in there for far too long. At least two hours. What was the problem? Hadn’t they come in yet? Granted, I hadn’t seen anybody who looked remotely threatening walk in or out, but then again, I didn’t find many creatures to be a threat.
What did a dark warlock look like? It wasn’t as though I spent time with any. I supposed they could blend in.
I imagined her in there and wondered about the effect she was having on the men.
Were they looking at her the way I had? Envisioning the same things I had? Wondering what it would be like to…
I shook my head.
Get a hold of yourself. What was it that humans did to clear their minds when they couldn’t stop thinking about sex? A cold shower?
I chuckled darkly. I had been under a cold shower almost all day long, but it hadn’t helped a bit. What else was there?
It didn’t matter. Not when I saw the club doors open and watched two men stumble out, laughing loud enough to wake the dead. They were flying high, for sure, and very full of themselves. I wondered if it could be them. There was a nasty, angry note to their laughter that carried across the street to my waiting ears. No wonder they left with only each other to keep them company. I pitied the woman desperate enough to spend time with them, and I didn’t know the first thing about them.
Until Mariya left the club just behind them and locked eyes with me.
I waited until they were roughly halfway down the block before crossing the street and falling into step behind her.
“Yes?” I muttered, never taking my eyes from them.
“Yes.” She practically ground her teeth together.
“Did you hear anything in there?”
“Everything I needed to hear.” There was real rage in her voice.
She wanted to slaughter them as badly as I did.
But we needed them. Once we had the information, we were looking for, however…
We didn’t exchange another word as we trailed them.
I listened hard to their conversation but couldn’t catch much to give an indication of where they were going.
In an ideal situation, they would lead us straight to Kristoff. I had long since stopped being naïve enough to think they would make things that easy. All I wanted was a little time alone with them.
“They sense us,” Mariya whispered.
“How do you know?”
“I feel it. See the way their body language has changed.”
Sure enough, neither of them strutted and stumbled as they had when they first left the club. They walked like men struggling to shake off a drunken binge because they knew there was trouble heading for them. Like they were expecting us to pick their pockets.
“Can you put a spell on them?” I asked as an idea dawned on me. “Control them, I mean?”
“And make them do what?”
“Make them do what we want. So I can put them in a cab and take us someplace a little more intimate.”
“Elias…” she warned.
“What? You just sounded like you wanted to slice them open and rub salt in their wounds,” I reminded her.
“This isn’t the time for half-measures. You’re in, or you’re out.”
“You know I’m in.”
“Well?”
She made a small, frightened sound. Like an animal who knows it’s cornered and wishes it wasn’t.
“Mind control is extremely taxing. I don’t know how much help I can be once we have them where you want them.”
“Don’t worry,” I snarled, watching the two warlocks as they did everything they could to look casual. “I won’t need your help after that.”
“All right. Here goes.” She stopped in her tracks and raised both arms until they were straight in front of her, palms up. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, humming low in the back of her throat.
I looked ahead of us, to the warlocks.
They didn’t react at first, and I wondered if she wasn’t as good as she thought she was.
Then, they slowed down. Almost as though they’d forgotten where they were going. Or like they had forgotten everything.
When they stopped, I knew they were under her control.
She opened her eyes. “Let’s go.” Her voice sounded different. Strained. Like she was doing too many things at once.
Mind control was taxing—and she was controlling two minds. Some instinct told me to take her arm and lead her the rest of the way to where the warlocks waited.
“Let’s get a cab,” I suggested, raising my free arm.
Up close, the two warlocks weren’t any more impressive than they were from far away. Probably what made them so potentially dangerous.
On the surface, they blended in. Nothing special about either of them. It was when they opened their mouths and let their vile beliefs spew out that it was easier to pick them out of a crowd. Not like Kristoff. Something about the look of him automatically inspired distrust.
I opened the back door to the first cab that pulled up to the curb and assisted the two helpless creatures into the back seat.
Mariya sat beside them, while I sat in front with the driver. I didn’t want her next to them, but I understood the reason. She’d control them better when she was closer to them.
