Charlaine Harris

by Must Love Hellhounds

  “She withdrew her membership three days ago.”

  According to Raphael, that was Alex Doulos’s date of death. It could be a coincidence, but I highly doubted it.

  “She also purchased several vampires out of her stable,” Ghastek volunteered.

  “How many can she pilot at once?” Raphael asked.

  “Three,” Ghastek said. “Up to four on a good day. Her control becomes shaky after that.”

  “Why did she leave?” I asked.

  “She became disillusioned. We all seek to attain our goals. Some are willing to wait and others, like Lynn, lose their patience.”

  “How would you describe her?”

  Ghastek sighed. “Precise, ruthless, single-minded. She was neither liked nor disliked. She did her job well and required little attention.”

  “What caused her to leave the People, in your opinion?”

  “I don’t know. But it was deeply profound. One doesn’t walk away from fifteen years of hard work without a reason.”

  I rose. “Thank you very much for your time.”

  Ghastek nodded. “Thank you. When I made the agreement with Kate, I never imagined the restitution would be so easy. Let me see you out.” The vampire moved by the door. “A word of caution: if Lynn Morriss has decided to make her new home in the Scratches, I would advise you to stay away from it. Lynn is a formidable opponent.”

  “Do the People plan to take any action against her?”

  “No,” Ghastek said with a small smile. “There is no need.”

  Outside I hopped into our vehicle, the taint of vampiric magic clinging to me like greasy smoke. “I feel soiled.”

  “Like walking into a room after a day of work, falling into bed, and realizing the sheets are covered in cold K-Y jelly,” Raphael said.

  I just stared at him.

  “With a funky smell,” he added.

  My Order conditioning failed me. “Ew.”

  Raphael grinned.

  “I’m not even going to ask if that’s happened to you.” I started the vehicle. “Has that happened to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Ew. “Where?”

  “In the bouda house.”

  Ew!

  “I was really tired and you’ve seen that place: everything smells like sex . . .”

  “I don’t want to know.” I peeled out of the parking lot.

  “So where are we going?”

  “To Spider Lynn’s house. We’re going to dig through her trash, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll do some breaking and entering.”

  Raphael frowned. “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Yes. I memorized the addresses of all the Masters of the Dead in the city. I have a lot of time on my hands.”

  He squinted at me, looking remarkably like a gentleman pirate from my favorite romance novels. “What else do you store in your head?”

  “This and that. I remember the first thing you ever said to me. You know, when you carried me from the cart into the tub so your mother could fix me.”

  “I imagine it was something very romantic,” he said. “Something along the lines of ‘I’ve got you’ or ‘I won’t let you die.’”

  “I was bleeding in the bathtub, trying to realign my bones, and my hyena glands voided from the pain. You said, ‘Don’t worry, we have an excellent filtration system.’”

  The look on his face was priceless.

  “That can’t be the first thing.”

  “It was.”

  We drove in silence. “About the K-Y,” Raphael said.

  “I don’t want to know!’

  “Once I washed it out of my hair—”

  “Raphael, why are you doing this?”

  “I want to make you go ‘Ew’ again.”

  “Why in the world would you want to do that?”

  “It’s an irrepressible male impulse. It just has to be done. As I was saying, once I washed it out—”

  “Raphael!”

  “No, wait, you’ll like the next part.”

  By the time we reached Spider Lynn’s house, my endurance had been tested to its limits.

  Her place was a small ranch-style house, set way back from the road and hidden by a six-foot-tall wooden fence. I opened the trash can. A cloud of rancid stink hit me. Filthy but empty.

  Raphael examined the fence, took a running start, and sailed over it, flipping in the air like a vault gymnast. I did it the old-fashioned way: I ran, jumped, gripping the edge, and pulled myself up and over. Raphael pulled out a couple of lock picks and inserted them into the lock. The door clicked and we entered a dark, empty garage. I blinked a couple of times, adjusting to the gloom, and then my night vision kicked in. Some people’s garages resembled a yard sale postbombing. Spider Lynn’s was orderly and precise, a collection of tools and cleaning utensils carefully hung on hooks. The floor was freshly swept. If I had a garage, mine would look just like it.

  The door leading from the garage to the house was predictably locked and took ten seconds to be sprung by Raphael. Inside was an upscale suburban kitchen with stainless steel appliances and brand-new furniture. Perfectly clean sink. No odor of rot from the garbage disposal.

  The scent signatures were old. She hadn’t been in the house for two days, at least.

  “Interesting,” Raphael said.

  I came to stand by him.

  A large dent marred the living room wall just below a painting of some geometric shapes. A stain spread about it. Below, shards of broken glass glinted, weakly catching the daylight from the windows, among shriveled green stems. Someone had thrown a vase against the wall.

  “How tall is she?” Raphael asked.

  “Two inches taller than me.”

  “It might have been her then. I’d hit a lot higher.”

  We look at the stain. “She was angry,” I said.

  “Very.”

  “Not a lover.”

  Raphael nodded. “White flowers.”

  I inhaled, sorting the pollen aroma: barely noticeable scent of white lilies, light perfume of carnations, sweet fragrance of snapdragons, dryness of baby’s breath . . .

  “Sympathy arrangement,” we both said at the same time.

  I crouched by the pile of stems and dug through it. My fingers slid against a damp rectangle. I pulled it free: a small card with a logo, a snake coiling around a wineglass. The letters under it said, “Bright Light Hospital, Thaumaturgy College of Atlanta.”

  I opened the card and read it out loud. “I am so sorry. Ben Rodney, MD, CMM.” Doctor of Medicine and Certified Medical Mage.

  Raphael bent down and tapped the card. “Alex was a patient there. I know what this is: when there is nothing more they can do, they send you the ‘set your affairs in order’ flowers.”

  “She was dying.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “At least we’ve established the connection between her and Alex.” I looked at the card.

  We searched the rest of the house. In the office we found a filing cabinet full of medical records. Spider Lynn was diagnosed with Niemann-Pick disease, type C. A progressive, incurable disease, it affected her spleen and liver and damaged her brain. Simple things like walking and swallowing had become increasingly difficult. She had trouble looking up and down. Her vision and hearing were fading. Soon she would be a prisoner in her own body, and then she would die.

  “Come see this,” Raphael called.

  I followed him to the library. Open books covered the floor. Raphael picked up one. “And so Hades seized Persephone and bore her away in his chariot to the depths of the bleak realm of the dead. In vain her mother, the generous Demeter, searched for her daughter. Alone the Goddess of Harvest wandered the world, clothed in rags, like a common woman, and in her sorrow she had forgotten to tend to the soil and cultivate plants. Denied her precious gifts, the flowers withered on their stalks, the trees shed their leaves in mourning, and everything that had been green and alive shriveled and died. Winter had come upon the world and t
he people wailed in hunger. Even the golden apples in Hera’s orchard had fallen off the bare branches of the sacred tree.”

  “Cheery.” I checked a couple of other books. “Same thing.”

  “This one is in Greek.” Raphael held up a huge, dusty tome and pointed to the page. On it was a picture of an apple.

  “So she is obsessed with Hades and apples. What do we know about these apples?” I looked through the book.

  “Here’s one,” Raphael said. “‘Eris, the Goddess of Discord, alone was not invited to attend the wedding. Quietly she sulked until, consumed by her need for revenge, she picked a golden apple, wrote “Kallistri,” meaning “To the Fairest,” upon its golden skin, and tossed it in the midst of the celebrating Olym pians. And thus began the Trojan War . . .’”

  “Well, that was slick, but it doesn’t help us any.” I searched through my book. “Here is the eleventh labor of Hercules. He needs to get the golden apples of immortality from Hera’s orchard.” I stopped and looked at Raphael.

  “Immortality apples,” he said. “How about that.”

  I tapped the book. “What do we know so far? Spider Lynn is terminally ill. She’s obsessed with apples of immortality, probably because she thinks they can cure her. She’s holding the shade of Alex Doulos hostage for unknown purposes. Alex was the priest of Hades.”

  “Hades stole Persephone, who was the daughter of Demeter, Goddess of Harvest, who controlled the seasons, which affected Hera’s apples of immortality. It’s like playing six degrees of separation.” Raphael flipped through his book. “It says here that apples are the food of the gods. They and ambrosia keep the gods young and immortal. What do you suppose happens if that bitch eats them?”

  “Nothing good.” We had both dealt with two wannabe gods during the flare. I still had nightmares. I could tell by Raphael’s face that he didn’t care to repeat the experience either.

  “We’re going to have to break into that house.”

  “Yes.” Raphael’s face was grim.

  A house guarded by a giant hellhound, surrounded by an electric fence and a strong ward, and hiding at least three vampires, piloted by a woman overcome by anger and terrified of death.

  It’s good that I had Boom Baby.

  We stood leaning against the Jeep, on the very edge of Cerberus’s territory, waiting for the magic to drain from the world. Raphael leaned next to me, still engrossed in the book of Greek myths. He read, playing with a small knife, flipping it absent mindedly with his left hand, his fingers catching whichever end happened to point down. Tip, handle, tip, handle. The sun set, bleeding orange blood onto the pale sky. I sampled the evening breeze and petted my giant gun.

  Being a professional meant you nurtured your fear. You struggled with your terror until you tamed it and made it serve you. It made you sharper and helped you stay alive. But no matter how tame your fear became, it still gnawed on your soul. I didn’t want to go into the house full of vampires. I didn’t want Raphael to be hurt.

  I had fought so hard not to fall for him, but I had anyway, and now, having been with him, having woken up next to him, I knew we had something. It was a very small, fragile something, and I would rip through a hundred vampires to keep it safe.

  “You’re my Artemis,” Raphael said.

  I blinked.

  “Fierce, prickly, beautiful huntress, forever pure and uncompromising.”

  Prickly? More like bitchy. “I’m not that pure.”

  He leaned over. His hand brushed the back of my neck and I felt the light press of teeth on skin. Every nerve in my body tingled. My nipples went tight, and a slow, hungry heat blossomed below my stomach.

  Raphael’s voice was a smooth whispery seduction in my ear. “There is nobody to see us for miles and miles, but you’re blushing. How is that not pure?”

  His smile was pure sin. I shifted closer to him and leaned against his chest, resting my head on his shoulder. He stiffened, surprised, and I snuggled closer, soaking up the warmth of his body with my back. He raised his arm and put it around my shoulders. I concentrated and heard the steady beating of his heart, strong and a little too fast. He was anxious, too.

  “If we get out of this mess alive and undamaged, would you like to spend the night in my apartment or do you want me to stay with you?”

  “Either way will work,” he said softly.

  The six-month storming of my castle had put a definite dent in Raphael’s body armor. It would take me a long time to convince him that he didn’t have to be charming, witty, and sexy around me twenty-four-seven. Some part of me had hoped that once we had sex, everything would smooth itself out. But in the end, he was still insecure and I was still broken. Sex was simple. Being together was a lot more complicated.

  We stood together and watched the sunset.

  The magic crashed.

  “Time to pry Doulos’s shade from that bitch,” Raphael said.

  “You realize that if we’re right and Cerberus is after his corpse, he will follow Doulos wherever we take him?”

  “Yes. But my mother deserves to say her good-byes.”

  He took off his clothes, stood still for a moment, the breeze fanning his perfect form, and opened his mouth. A groan broke free, deepening into a hair-raising growl, as his body stretched and thickened, hard muscle encasing it. Fur sheathed him. He glanced at me and his eyes were completely wild.

  I lifted Boom Baby. Raphael picked up a six-foot metal pole he’d wrenched from the slope on the way here. We headed down through the ravines to the house.

  “Those bullets are the size of a dollar bill,” Raphael said.

  “They are Silver Hawks: armor-piercing, incendiary, explosive, silver-load cartridges. They slice through armor, set things on fire, and explode inside the target, delivering a load of extremely potent silver pellets. Boom Baby fires two hundred of these per minute.”

  An excited snarl rolled ahead of us. The ground trembled in sync with the beat of the giant paws.

  “Can they handle the dog?” he asked.

  “We’re about to find out.” I raised Boom Baby. “Here, Fido . . . Here, boy . . .”

  Ahead, Cerberus rounded the curve and charged us.

  I squeezed the trigger. A high-pitched whine of bullet flurry ripped through the air. Boom Baby bucked in my hands, the recoil hitting me hard. The bullets bit into Cerberus’s chest, punching through the muscle to the heart. Blood flew. The great hellhound ran three more steps, not realizing the lethal swarm had already shredded his life, stumbled, and fell, paws over head. He rolled and slid to a stop five feet from me in a smoking ruin.

  “Nice gun,” Raphael said.

  Five minutes later we reached the electric fence. Raphael braided the fingers of his hands together and offered them to me like a stepping stool. I stepped, pushing hard, and he threw me, adding his strength to my jump. I shot over the fence, flipped in the air, and landed in the dirt. Boom Baby came flying next. I caught it and gently lowered it to the ground. In the cramped quarters inside the house, it would restrict my movements too much. I pulled out my P226s, the familiar weight of the twin firearms reassuring in my hands. Raphael took a running start, pole in hand, and vaulted over the fence, landing gracefully next to me. There were times when Lyc-V came in handy.

  We jogged to the house and I pressed against the side. Raphael hammered a single kick to the door and it flew off its hinges, crashing into the darkness. I cleared the doorway and stepped into the gloom. The door led to a narrow foyer. On the right, stairs led to the second floor. Straight ahead lay a hallway and past it, through a doorway, a sitting room waited steeped in the twilight, the dark bulky shapes of furniture like the spines of sleeping beasts.

  The nauseating stench of undead flesh laced my nostrils. It clung to the floor, permeating the carpets. If smell had color, this reek would drip from the draft in oily, fat drops of black. It was impossible to tell where it came from.

  A moment later I caught another scent entirely: the bitter, clinical scent o
f embalming fluid. A human body waited for us somewhere in the house.

  My eyes adjusted to the low light. We padded through the foyer on silent feet, cleared the doorway, and emerged into the hallway.

  Slow and steady, room by room. An undead waited at the end of this race, and I had a feeling it would find us before we found it.

  Two small, musty rooms later, we stepped into the family room. The old furniture had been haphazardly piled at the walls. In the center of the room, on the filthy old rug, lay the corpse of Alex Doulos. A huge chain caught the body’s ankle, binding it to a rod driven into the floor.

  Two red-hot eyes sparked in the heap of furniture at the opposite wall.

  I fired. The first two bullets punched the bloodsucker’s head.

  The vampire leapt.

  My guns spat thunder and bullets in a lethal rhythm, trailing the bloodsucker as it hurtled through the air.

  Raphael lunged from the left, and I raised the guns’ barrels up a fraction of a second before he fell onto the vamp from behind. The bloodsucker went limp in his hands. My bullets had chewed its skull to mush. Raphael grasped the vamp’s chin, exposing the neck; his knife flashed, and the head went flying across the room.

  I reloaded. The bloodsucker had been unpiloted. Its eyes had been too crazed and it attacked me straight on, without any consideration for the fact that there were two of us. Spider Lynn was gone. She had left the vampire to us as a present.

  It took us ten minutes to search the rest of the house. Empty as expected. I didn’t think she would sacrifice another vampire. We did find the generator and I shut it off, cutting the power to the fence.

  We returned to the body. Alex lay on his side, thrown on the floor like a dirty rag. Death had robbed him of warmth, but his features still kept hints of his personality: a network of laugh lines around the eyes; strong chin; wide, tall forehead. His hair was pure white and worn long enough to reach his shoulders. A small green object lay by him. I picked it up. A little toy car. How odd. I tucked the car into my pocket.

  We had to take him out of this terrible place. Raphael touched the chain securing Alex’s ankle and jerked his hand away. A silver-steel alloy.