by Faith Hunter
The flashbang went off with a massive thump, the concussion and intense wattage muted by the thick walls of the cold room, and followed almost instantly by the pealing, nearly ultrasonic screams of vamps in agony. I jerked the door open again and took out three revenants while Eli took three more. I had no idea where the sixth one had come from. Maybe newly risen since the last time I peeked.
Even though I could practically feel Sylvia’s disapproval, which I ignored, I took pics of the cold room and each of the vamps—or what was left of them—and then left the gore-spattered place and took more pics of the other true-dead. Proof for payment. When I was done, Sylvia handed me the child and started making calls. Lots of calls. Carrying the little girl, I walked outside and sat in the SUV. I turned on the engine and the heater, wrapped the child in a blanket I took from Eli’s emergency supplies, and cradled her on my lap.
Beast sighed at me, murmuring, Kit. Love kit. She lay her head on her paws and looked up at me, her eyes lonely. Want kits. Too long since I suckled kits. She blew out a breath and twitched her ears, smelling the child. Want kits.
Her desire for family stormed up through me, bringing tears to my eyes, tears that rolled down my face and dripped onto Eli’s blanket. I wiped them off, my palm rough on my skin, pulling, hurting, my breathing loud in the SUV. I couldn’t give her kits without being in Beast skin for a long, long time. I couldn’t have a child without staying in human form for a long, long time. There was no easy answer to her need.
Minutes ticked by as I murmured endearments to the little girl. She fell asleep, her breathing soft and regular. She was so exhausted that she didn’t stir when the parking lot filled with emergency vehicles, sirens sounding, lights flashing. Uniformed men and women ran for the building, and most came back out, anger in their postures, faces hard. Their comrades had fallen and there was nothing left to kill. I understood the need for vengeance, and the impotence produced when that was denied.
The SUV was warm by the time Rick drove up, a woman from social services following him. The two stood in the chill night air, talking about the girl, from what I could make out. I turned off the SUV and let the silence cover me as my arms involuntarily tightened on the sleeping bundle in my lap. I was glad I was hidden in the vehicle, so no one could see the anguish I felt over giving her up.
I/we saved her, Beast thought at me, her voice a low growl. She is ours.
“She has a family,” I whispered. “We have to let her go.”
They were not here to protect her.
The security guard protected her, I thought. That makes him family. And his family her family. She isn’t ours.
Molly’s kits are ours. Angie Baby is ours.
“No,” I whispered aloud. “Not anymore.”
Beast growled and paced away to hide deep in my mind, her eyes slit in displeasure.
The girl was asleep in my arms when the social worker came toward the vehicle. I opened the door and turned in the seat, letting my boots hit the parking lot. The woman was short, stout, and motherly. And took the little girl away. I watched the social worker carry her to her car and drive away, my arms feeling heavy and empty. The darkness I’d been hiding from for days rose in me like a storm cloud, looking for something or someone to take out my fury and despondency on.
Instead of a revenant I could kill, Sylvia spotted me sitting in the dark and walked over, her hand on her gun butt, that angry-cop look lurking in her eyes. She said. “Cops are dead in there, and you were taking pictures. So you could get paid.”
She was right. What could I say? It was a stupid waste of time, but I tried logic. “You take crime-scene pictures. So do I. And, like you, I study them later to see what I missed, what I could have done differently. And, like you, I get paid because of those pictures.”
“Don’t compare us,” she snarled.
And I realized what she really wanted. I smiled, showing teeth, and reared back in the bucket seat, half in and half out of the vehicle, crossing my boots at the ankles. I laced my fingers across my midsection, going for irritating snark in both expression and body language. From the way her mouth tightened, I’d say I’d succeeded.
“Why not? You’d stay on the job if the county said you had to serve for free?” I asked.
“It isn’t the same thing.”
“No? If our country was attacked and our marines were cut off from supplies and pay, they would keep fighting, no matter what. They take an oath. You were elected,” I goaded. “Pay stops, I bet you’d stop doing the job too.”
“You don’t know me well enough to insult me.”
“Back atcha, Syl.”
It took a moment for her eyes to register her understanding, and when they did, her mouth turned down as if she’d sucked on a lemon. Then she sighed and sat down on the curb, almost as if she were showing submission, but I figured it was really just exhaustion. “Guess I deserved that.”
“You wanted a fight. I thought about giving it to you. I came close.”
“Eli says you’d win.” She didn’t sound happy about it.
“I’d wipe the floor with you,” I said happily.
Sylvia Turpin snorted. “I can’t decide if I like you or not.”
“Two alphas in the same city. Makes it hard.”
“Long as you stay away from Eli,” she said, “I guess I can live with it.” I started laughing, and Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Okay. That sounded like a high school girl laying claim to the cute boy in class. I’m an idiot. But—” She came to an abrupt stop, clearly floundering with whatever she wanted to communicate.
“But you never met anyone like him, and it worries you that we share a house?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Friends and family. That’s all, Sheriff.”
“Yeah?” She thought about that a bit, her eyes on the parking lot at her feet. “Okay. I can live with that.” She stood and held out her hand, which trembled slightly. We shook. She didn’t release my hand, but held me in place and searched my face. After what felt like way too many seconds, she nodded and stepped back. “Okay. Later, Jane Yellowrock.”
“Later, Sylvia Turpin.”
• • •
It was after two a.m. when Eli and I drove into the historic Top of the Hill district of downtown to check out several addresses the Kid thought looked promising for containing vamp lairs. Some had basements, one had newly installed vamp shutters, and three had belonged to vamps on the kill list.
Like many old Deep South towns, the rich and hoity-toity lived close to the poor and down-and-out, sometimes only one block away or even one yard down. The socioeconomic distribution had been designed in a time when transportation was a major problem and the poor had to walk to work as servants at the rich people’s big houses and in town businesses and cotton mills and industry.
High Street was no exception to the rich-house/poor-house rule, and the address we turned in to was way off the street, little more than a shack, maybe six hundred square feet, with a tiny, off-kilter front porch, some kind of brick-printed sheeting hanging loose over rotting boards, and boarded-up windows. Eli put the SUV into neutral and we studied the small place in the headlights. “Looks abandoned,” I said.
“Yeah. We can hope.” Eli executed a fast three-point turn so were facing the street for a quick getaway. “Let’s check it out.” He cut the SUV engine, pulled on a baseball hat and a low-light vision scope over it, adjusted the aim of the device, and grunted. “Nothing.” Next he tried a handheld passive infrared system and grunted again. “Still nothing.”
It started to rain, drops hitting the windshield with heavy splats of sound and tiny little ice crystals in the middle of the dollops of rain. Eli handed me a superbright, 2,200-lumen flashlight and cut the motor. The night descended on us, silent and chill. The cold hit my face as I opened the door, a long-delayed weather front bringing the early stages of sleet with it. A slow, icy wind coursed along the ground, wisps of fog scudding around my legs. Something about the half-melted
sleet, slow breeze, and the odd fog made me feel as if I were being watched, so I turned, setting my feet deliberately in a full circle, taking in the dark with Beast senses, breathing with my mouth open, scenting, before turning on the flash. Though I held it carefully before me, it still stole my night vision, so I closed my left eye to preserve what I could.
Leaving his door pushed closed but unlatched, Eli moved out from the SUV and toward the house. Bike riders don’t have to think about stuff like getting a car door open for a fast getaway. I copied him and fell in, walking so I could keep an eye behind us, the light illuminating the old street, moss hanging from trees, winter-burned gardens, tilled earth and mulch and lots of brown dead stems, and the shimmer of falling rain. No green plants meant no earth witches, not like Under the Hill, with its lush greenery and tingle of magics.
The dead plants seemed significant somehow, and the feel of emptiness settled on me, featherlight and ominous. The sound of rain intensified and icy drops ran down my face and neck and into my collar. I shivered once, bracing my shoulders against the cold.
Eli stepped onto the front porch, the boards creaking under his weight, and secured his flash to his weapon, so it moved where the gun pointed. With his free hand, he tried the door. It was open. The little hairs lifted on my neck. He glanced at me and I nodded once. He opened the door and moved inside to the left, graceful as a wraith. I followed, moving to the right and setting my back against the interior wall.
The front room was empty except for a bare mattress and drug paraphernalia—needles, syringes, metal spoons, burned matches, stubby candles, a broken glass bong and several that were made out of cola cans, the old scent of marijuana, and the fainter smell of chemical-laced drugs, probably crack and cocaine. The drugs could be cut with so many different products with diverse chemical makeups that they never smelled the same to me. I’d need to be a dog or even in Beast form to detect them well. The dank house smelled of black mold and dead mice and human urine, but it hadn’t been used as a drug house recently. And there was no fresh scent of anything, no old-school vamps, no new spidey vamps, no nothing.
We checked the back rooms anyway. Still nothing but broken furniture and food wrappers and used condoms, the stuff of romance for street people.
Eli was silent throughout the search, his face impassive the few times that reflected light bounced onto him. I was just glad to be out of the rain. I wasn’t sure that Eli had noticed any discomfort.
When we had determined there was nothing of interest here, I followed him to the SUV, wondering how he got to be point man but not really caring. Macho man protecting the little lady, no matter that I was as tall as he and could kick butt just as well. Better, even.
With rain alternating between sputters and downpours, we inspected six other places, addresses that the Kid had sent us. We found more of the same: empty lots, houses with families sleeping inside, empty houses with FOR SALE signs out front. There were no people on the street, human or otherwise; the city had been deserted, less because of the hour than because of fear of being kidnapped and eaten.
All in all, it was disappointing, and we headed home before dawn with only the kills from the morgue to show for our trouble. But hunting vamps was like that. A lot of records work followed by useless footwork, and then by either blood and gore or disappointment. Tonight we had both, and as we rode home, I e-mailed the kills to the MOC with instructions for electronic deposit into my account. Despite what Sylvia had said, money was money.
• • •
When we got home to Esmee’s, I sat in the SUV after Eli went inside, feeling at loose ends and not knowing what direction to take this investigation. I hadn’t discovered who was in charge of the spidey vamps, and I hadn’t found a single insight into where Misha was. I was a failure, and understood that I was creeping up on invisible deadlines that meant I might never find and save Mish, and more humans were dying at the fangs of vamps.
Sleepy, cranky, and angry at myself, I headed inside, not wanting any human interaction. So when Bobby greeted me at the foot of the stairs, sitting on the bottom step with his arms around his knees, I had to smother my irritation. “Bobby? What are you doing up?” I asked, managing to sound unruffled.
He yawned, and that made me more crabby. I wanted my bed. “Jane, I had a dream. It was about a lion.”
I had no idea what to do next. How was I supposed to react to that? Bobby stood and took my hand, pulling me into the breakfast room, where the lights blazed and Eli sat, his weapons on the table before him, one disassembled. He was fieldstripping and cleaning the guns, a nine-millimeter semi in parts and pieces laid out on a bamboo tray and a layer of old linen napkins probably provided by Jameson. Bobby pushed me into a seat, and I sat. I mean, really. What was I supposed to do?
“It was a mountain lion. I think it was you.”
Eli snorted softly without looking up.
“Misha says my dreams are symbic. She says that what I see isn’t always what the dreams mean.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling better now that I had an out. “Most people’s dreams are symbolic.”
“That’s the word,” he said, pleased.
“What happened in yours?” I asked.
Eli glanced up from his weapons and raised his brows. I grimaced at him and turned my attention back to Bobby.
“You got shot.”
I went still, shock sizzling through me. Eli pushed a tray to me that held a universal gun-cleaning kit, and, with nothing else to do after that announcement, I began to disarm, setting my weapons on the table, mags out, chambers open, barrels pointing at an exterior wall and away from people. Like Eli, I kept one close at hand and ready to fire. More than one gunman had been caught with his pants down and all his weapons broken down, and had ended up dead because of it.
“I got shot?” I said. The M4 required no tools to break it down, and I started fieldstripping the weapon by muscle memory and habit.
“With a dart,” Bobby said. “It made you trip over your own feet and fall asleep. And some men came and got you and carried you away.”
“Hmmm,” I said. Deep inside, Beast crouched and hissed, showing her canines, which was strange. I remembered a few things from the big-cat’s memories and I said casually, “Did they put her in a cage? The lion in your dream?”
Eli looked up at that and focused on me, but I was watching my hands while studying Bobby with my peripheral vision. He was upset.
“Yes. And they took your blood,” he said. “And then it got nighttime, and you turned into Jane and you opened the cage and ran away. But you were . . . you were naked.” Bobby was red-faced and watching my hands on the weapons.
“It’s okay, Bobby,” I said gently. “Thank you. I needed to hear that.”
He looked up and then back down. “We aren’t supposed to look at porn. It’s bad.”
“It wasn’t porn, Bobby. It was just a dream. We can’t control our dreams.”
Bobby shrugged, lifting one shoulder, his eyes still on my hands on the weapon. I pulled back the bolt and unscrewed the nut at the top of the barrel on the Benelli, letting my old friend get over the embarrassment. My hands were sure, and the stink of lube formula was strong in the room that usually smelled of bread and bacon and roast. I began to relax at the familiar activity of weapon care and yawned hugely, which made Bobby smile and relax too. “You used to yawn like that at school,” he said, “and then you’d growl, low in your throat. Mostly to make people stop picking on me.” He looked at Eli. “Jane was my protector. There was this big group of bullies and they were mean all the time when the housemothers and counselors weren’t looking. But then Jane saw them being mean one day and she beat them up.”
Eli’s brows went up. “All of them?”
Bobby nodded, his face lit with some emotion I couldn’t name, but might have been perilously close to hero worship. “All of them at once. And after that, whenever she saw them, she’d yawn and show her teeth and growl and it was so cool. They didn
’t bother me anymore after that.”
I pursed my lips and concentrated on my shotgun. The M4 was good for twenty-five thousand rounds of continuous firing, so it didn’t usually need much in the way of maintenance. This time, there was some blood and brain blowback from the spidey vamp who had died while trying to suck the weapon. From the kitchen came the smell of strong coffee—espresso, the way Eli liked it.
I remembered the gang Bobby was talking about, the loosely organized pack that roamed the grounds of Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home and . . . My hands stilled. Loosely organized.
Vamps were never loosely organized. They were kept in line by blood sharing and bindings and physical and emotional trauma, and that organization always included the heir and spare. I thought back to the meeting of the clans at the warehouse in Under the Hill. “Eli? Did we ever meet Lotus? The MOC’s heir?”
The Ranger was watching me. “Not that I recall. Why?”
“We should have met Lotus.” I tried to remember all the faces I’d seen. According to her original dossier, provided by Reach, Lotus was Asian and slight, with long black hair. She should have been introduced to me by now. “She wasn’t at the reception when we first got here. I vaguely remember Big H’s sons, the Daffodil and the Life.”
“Narkis and Zoltar, respectively,” Eli said, amusement lurking in his eyes as he reassembled a second handgun, the sounds ringing through the silent house. “Though I’ll pay money if you’ll call them that to their faces.” He reached into the kit and removed a small screwdriver, replacing it with another at the same time. He was neatness personified.
I was betting money that Sylvia was a slob, which would have made me grin had my brain not been otherwise occupied. “Lotus wasn’t in Big H’s lair when we gave out the doses of antibody, either,” I said. “So we haven’t met her.” I pulled out my phone and scrolled down to Big H’s primo blood-servant and hit CALL. When he answered, I said, “Where’s Lotus?”
The man didn’t answer. I racked my brain and came up with the primo’s name. “Clark? Where. Is. Lotus?”
