by Tanya Huff
Shoving a zippered canvas bag filled with musty fabric off her face, Claire sucked a shallow, dust-laden breath through her teeth, then took inventory. Her left elbow hurt a lot, and she seemed to have landed on something that squashed. “Where’s Austin?”
“Right here.” He leaped up into her line of sight, balancing effortlessly on a teetering commode. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re just saying that, aren’t you?” Jacques drifted toward her, wearing an expression of poignant concern. “I wish I had hands to help you up, arms to carry you, to comfort, lips to kiss away the hurt.”
His eyes were dark, and Claire found herself thinking of Sasha Moore. “I wish you did, too.”
“You could make it so.”
Austin snorted. “Does she look like Jean Luc Picard?”
“Who?”
The cat sighed. “I have so much to teach you, Grasshopper.”
“What?”
Reflecting how nothing could spoil the moment like a cat, Claire got her legs free, rolled onto her side, and noticed, right at eye level, a stack of ten-inch baseboards. As far as she could tell, given her position, they’d been taken from the wall in ten- or twelve-foot lengths. “This is great!”
“Falling?”
“Baseboards.” Scrambling to her feet, she retrieved her flashlight from a pile of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books—part of the obligatory attic door—and headed for the stairs. “They were probably taken off when they replaced the plaster and lathe with drywall. Come on. I’ve got to measure the walls in the dining room because I think baseboards go on before the wallpaper.”
Happily working out a renovation schedule that would keep Dean busy for the next six or seven lifetimes, Claire raced down the attic stairs, along the third floor hall, and down to the second floor where she stopped cold. There was a man at the other end of the hall; at the door to room four.
Instinct overwhelmed cognitive function and she ran toward him. “Hey!”
When he spun around, she saw it was the deliveryman—no big surprise—and that he was picking the lock.
So much for the simple solutions. “Get away from there!”
“Don’t try and stop me.” The clichéd warning made his voice sound harsher than it had, the voice of a man barely clinging to sanity.
One hand searching her clothing for a thread, Claire reached for power, touched seepage, and hesitated.
The intruder dove toward her, grabbed her upper arms, and threw her against the wall. He was stronger, much stronger than he looked; madness lending strength.
“Why?” he demanded, smashing her head against the wall on every other word. “Why are you protecting that undead, bloodsucking, soulless creature?”
Limp in his grasp, unable to concentrate enough to use even the seepage, Claire was only vaguely aware of being dragged toward the storage cupboard. Through a gray haze and strangely shifting world view, she saw Jacques swoop down from the ceiling, shrieking and howling and having no effect at all.
Oh, swell, she thought, as the cupboard door swung open. He believes in vampires but not in ghosts. A heartbeat later, the implications of that sank in and she began to struggle weakly.
She hit the floor beside the mop bucket, barely managing to keep her head from bouncing, and collapsed entirely when a heart-stopping screech set the bottles of cleanser vibrating.
A deeper howl of pain rose over the noise the cat was making; then, just as Claire attempted to sit up again, the door slammed shut and Austin landed on the one thing guaranteed to break his fall.
For a moment, the need to breathe outweighed other considerations; then, lying in the dark listening to Austin hiss and spit, she grabbed for the first power she could reach and used it to clear her head. Sucking up seepage had just become a minor problem. “I understand how you feel, Austin, but shut up. We haven’t time for this.”
A whiskered face pressed into her cheek. “Are you all right?”
“No. But I’m fixing it.” Anger burned away the damage, power riding in on her rage to replace what she spent. At the moment, it didn’t matter where that power came from. With all body parts more-or-less back under her control, she stood and flung herself at the door. The impact hurt—a lot—and bounced her onto her butt. The door didn’t budge.
He’d done something to hold it in place.
“Calm down!” the cat snarled. “You nearly landed on top of me!”
“Calm?” Claire struggled back onto her feet. “What do you think a murder in this building will do to the pentagram’s seals?” Breathing deeply, once, twice, she placed her hands on the wood and blew the door off its hinges.
Staggering slightly, she raced down the hall, through Jacques, and into room four.
He was standing over the bed, a sharpened stake in an upraised hand.
There was no seepage left, blowing the door had wiped it clean. Sagging against the wall, Claire reached into the possibilities, knowing she wouldn’t be in time.
A black-and-white streak landed on his back as the stake came down.
Pulling Austin clear with one hand, Claire tossed her bit of thread with the other. As the deliveryman stiffened, she shoved him behind her to fall, shrieking, wrapped in invisible bonds, onto the floor of the outer room.
The stake protruded from Sasha Moore’s chest just below the collarbone. At first, in the forty-watt glow of the bedside lamp, Claire thought it was all over, then she realized that he’d missed the heart by three full inches. Either he had a poor understanding of biology or Austin’s leap had misdirected the blow.
“She is Nosferatu! She must die!” The crazed voice echoed in the closed room. “Those who protect her have made a covenant with evil!”
“Hey! Don’t tell me about evil,” Claire snapped at him over her shoulder. “I’m a trained professional.” She spread her fingers and one of the bonds expanded to cover his mouth.
His tail still twice its normal size, Austin panted as he looked from the stake to Claire. “Now what?”
“Now we pull it out.” There was a pop of displaced air as the first-aid kit from the kitchen appeared on the bedside table. “And we bandage the wound and see what happens when she wakes up.”
“I’m guessing she’ll be hungry.”
Claire glanced toward the man thrashing impotently about and grunting in. inarticulate rage. “I think we can find her a bite of something.”
AT THIS RATE, THE DAMPENING FIELD WILL NEVER GO DOWN. SHE BARELY CLEARED THE WAY FOR FURTHER SEEPAGE. THE COUSIN DID MUCH MORE DAMAGE WITH HIS TOYS AND DIVERSIONS.
PATIENCE.
PATIENCE…The word sounded as though it had been ground out through shards of broken glass…. IS A VIRTUE!
The ruddy light reflected in the copper hood grew brighter, as though Hell itself blushed. SORRY.
SEVEN
SUNSET WAS AT SEVEN-FORTY-ONE. Claire called the local radio station for the exact time and, while she had them on the line, asked them to play “Welcome to My Nightmare.” The song, discovered on one of her parents’ old albums, had meant a lot to her during the earliest years of her sister’s training and the events of the afternoon had made her nostalgic for those simpler, albeit equally dangerous, times.
At seven-thirty, she started up the stairs.
At seven-thirty-five, she unlocked the door to room four, passed the man lying in the dressing room, who stirred restlessly in his involuntary sleep, and entered the cubicle holding the bed and the wounded Sasha Moore. In the dim light of the bedside lamp, she stood by the wall and waited for sunset.
At seven-forty-six, either the radio station or her watch off by the longest five minutes in recorded history, she saw the vampire’s lips, pale without their customary sheen of artificial color, slowly part and draw in the first breath of the night. Ebony brows dipped in as both wound and bandage pulled with the movement of the narrow chest. Muscles tensed beneath the ivory skin. Eyes snapped open. A dark gaze swept over the red-brown st
ains along the left side of the bed and then locked on Claire’s face.
“Spill, Keeper,” Sasha Moore snarled. “What the fuck is going on here?”
At seven-fifty-two, as the newly awakened vampire-slayer began to whimper, Claire stepped out into the hall and locked the door to room four behind her.
“How did you know I wouldn’t kill him when he had every intention of killing me?”
“He’s crazy, you’re not,” Claire answered calmly. “You’ve lived too long to risk exposure by modern forensics.” She turned her attention to the glassy-eyed man, who swayed where he stood, oblivious to his surroundings. Centuries of arriving at accident sites after the inevitable, and invariably messy, cause and effect had already taken place, had given Keepers a distinctly fatalistic, some might even say unsympathetic attitude toward people who played with matches. A Keeper’s responsibility involved keeping the whole metaphorical forest from going up, and they figured the more people who got their fingers burned, the less likely that was to happen. Claire shuddered to think of what might have occurred had she stayed in the attic a few moments longer. “How much will you allow him to remember?”
A spark of cruel amusement gleamed in the shadowed eyes. “Let’s put it this way: He’s going to piss himself whenever he’s outside after the sun goes down and he’s not going to know why.”
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
“What? For trying to kill me?” Sasha tossed her head disdainfully. “I think not. Besides, it’s nothing a few dozen years of therapy won’t clear up.” Silver bracelets chiming softly, she stroked the velvet length of Austin’s back. “Imagine living two hundred and twenty-seven years only to die at the hands of yet another amateur van Helsing. What a frigging waste.”
“Yet another amateur van Helsing?” Austin rolled so she could reach his stomach. “This has happened before?”
“Once or twice; the nutballs come out every time we get trendy.” Crimson nail polish glistened like drops of blood against the white fur. “But this…” Her other hand lightly touched the bandage under her clothes. “This is as close as anyone’s ever come.” When she lifted her gaze from the cat, Claire realized that for the first time since the other woman had arrived at the hotel, her eyes neither threatened nor promised. “Thank you for my life, Keeper.”
“You’re welcome. But it was no more or less than I would have done for anyone. Murder creates the very holes the lineage exists to seal.”
The vampire sighed, a fringe of sable hair dancing as she shook her head. “You really lean toward the sanctimonious, you know that?”
“I’m a Keeper,” Claire began defensively, but cool fingers tapping the curve of her cheek cut her off.
“My point exactly. Try to get over it.”
Speechless, Claire watched as Sasha turned her would-be executioner unresistingly toward the door and, when she opened it, finally gave up trying to put together a sufficiently scathing response, settling for: “What are you going to do with him now?”
Pausing on the threshold, the night spreading out behind her like great, dark wings, Sasha locked one hand around her captive’s wrist to prevent him from moving on and turned back toward the guest house. “I’m going to take him to his car and release him.”
“But the sun’s down.”
White teeth flashed between carmine lips. “Obviously.”
“And people complain about the way cats play with their food,” Austin snorted as the door swung shut.
“I’m not sanctimonious, am I?”
“You’re asking me?”
Claire’s eyes narrowed. “Is there anyone else around?”
“Just the dead guy on the stairs.”
Jacques gave the cat a scathing look as he materialized. “I only arrive this moment, and if he says I am here all along, he lies.”
“Cats never lie,” Austin told him, leaping from the counter to the desk to the chair to the floor. “There’s not much point is there, not when the truth can be so much more irritating. If you two will excuse me, I have things to do.”
“What sorts of things?” Claire asked suspiciously as he started down the hall.
The black tail flicked sideways twice. “Cat things.”
Elbows still propped on the counter, Claire let her head drop forward into her hands. Cat things could cover everything from a nap on top of the fridge to the continuing attempt to twist Baby’s already precarious psyche into still tighter knots. If it was the former, she didn’t need to know. If the latter, she didn’t want to.
“I thought,” Jacques said softly, “that there were no more secrets between us.”
Without lifting her head, Claire sighed. “No more secrets that concern you. This doesn’t.”
“You think it does not concern us that Sasha Moore is Nosferatu?”
“No.” She wondered when Jacques and Dean had become an us and whether it would last longer than this conversation. “You’re dead. Dean is off limits.”
“But you get hurt defending her and, if we knew, we could be there.”
“You were there.”
“Ah. Oui.” His face fell. “And I could do nothing to save you. But I am dead.” The realization perked him up. “What can a dead man do? And besides, my failure does, not change your silence. You do not tell me. You do not tell Dean—which is, of course, of not so great a consequence.”
“It wasn’t my secret. If she wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”
“And yet, now I know.”
Claire straightened, both hands gripping the edge of the counter. “Now you know,” she agreed. “Now what?”
He grinned. “Well, I am thinking; you do not want Dean to know so, if I do not tell Dean, tu me does un recompense.”
“I owe you for not telling Dean?”
“Oui.”
“And what do I owe you?”
His grin warmed and his eyes grew heated under half-lowered lids as he leaned so close his breath, had he been breathing, would have stroked her cheek. “Flesh, for one night.”
“Just one night?”
“One night,” he told her, his voice low and promising, “is all I ask for. After that one night, I no longer need to ask.”
She turned so she was facing him. He was a comfortable amount taller than she was, unlike Dean who loomed over her, and it would only take a tilt of her head to bring their mouths together. She wanted to push his hair back off his face, run her thumbs down the stubble-rough sides of his jaw, watch everything he felt dance across his expression as she slid her arms up under his sweater. She didn’t understand the attraction, but she couldn’t deny it. “Think highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“Not without reason.”
Someone, or something giggled. She frowned, stepped back, and almost saw a flash of purple disappear beneath the shelf.
“Claire?”
“Forget it, Jacques.” Squatting down, she peered at the imp trap. It had been moved from across the mouse hole leaving a tiny opening clear on the left side.
“Then not a night” He dropped down beside her, his knees making no impact with the floor. “An hour. An hour only and I can convince you.”
“No, not a night not an hour.” The miniature marshmallows were missing. “Not ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes would not be worth the effort. I have no interest in a quick and frenzied pawing.”
That drew Claire’s attention away from the imp trap. She turned to face the ghost, both brows lifted almost to her hairline.
“D’accord. I will take a quick and frenzied pawing if it is all I can get. But to be truly intimate with a woman requires a little more time. Give me that time, cherie, and you will be like plaster in my hands.”
“Putty.”
“Pardon?”
Even though she knew he’d take it the wrong way, Claire couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “Like putty in your hands.”
“Oui. Putty.” His accent softened the word, made it malleable. He lean
ed close again. “Are you afraid that if we become lovers, it will hold you here?”
“What will hold me here?”
“Passion. Pleasure. Complete…” The pause lingered on the edge of being too long, preparing the way for the presentation of each separate syllable. “…satisfaction.”
Claire blinked.
“Just give me a chance, cherie.”
“A chance to do what?”
Feeling as though she’d been caught by her father in a clinch on the rec-room couch, hoping her ears weren’t as red as they felt, Claire straightened and noticed for the first time that Jacques floated high enough off the floor so that he looked Dean—who was a good four inches taller—directly in the eye. “He wants me to give him flesh.”
Dean shrugged. “If it’ll help, there’s a leftover pork chop in the fridge.”
“Not that kind of flesh!” The ghost looked appalled.
“Beef? Chicken? Fish?”
The suggestions emerged too close together for Jacques to reply, but with each he grew more and more indignant.
“Sausage?”
His image began to flicker. “Mon Dieu! Are you so irritating on purpose?”
“Difficult to be that irritating by accident,” Claire murmured. The ridiculous list had banished embarrassment. Suddenly realizing that might have been his intent, she took a closer look at Dean and found his expression of solid helpfulness offset by a distinct twinkle behind the glasses.
“I thought you might want to know that Austin’s outside,” he said. “I opened the back door for him about five minutes ago.”
“Any response from Baby?”
“Not yet”
“So you thought she wanted to know, and now she is told.” Folding his arms, Jacques regained control of his definition. “You may go now, Anglais. The Keeper and I, we have a private conversation.”
“About giving you flesh?”
A finger, fully opaque in the artificial light of the lobby, jabbed at the air inches from Dean’s chest. “Do not start that again!”
