Black. Silent. Stifling.
The rush of blood in his veins just...vanished. The spaces where his pulse should have been beat in his mind, but not his body. The terrifying silence beat...and beat...
And he was back, as if a switch had tripped.
Constance was still leaping toward the spot he had been standing a moment ago. Somehow he had moved a good twenty feet down the corridor. He grabbed the wall, disoriented. Huh, that hasn’t happened in a while.
She stumbled, grabbing nothing but thin air. “You turned to dust!”
Mac shook his head, although he knew it was true. Poofing to an insubstantial black cloud was a demon talent. He had done it fast, too, the way he had when he had been at the top of his game. A cold, greasy unease slithered in his gut.
Constance balled her hands in fury. “You’re a liar; you’re not human at all!”
The words hit with all the subtlety of a city bus. “Never said I was!”
He turned before a weird impulse to apologize could overtake him. I’m sorry I turned out to be a less-than-tasty treat.
“What are you? Vampires know a demon’s stink, and you barely smell!”
He was walking now, not so fast as to excite the predator in her, but not wasting any time, either. He suddenly felt hot, as if he had spiked a fever. “Flattery still won’t get you into my jugular, sweetheart.”
Mac glanced over his shoulder, making sure she wasn’t coming after him. She looked beside herself, eyes round with anger and disappointment, but she wasn’t moving. Maybe that meant she’d given up. Maybe it was because he still clutched the sword. That was one of the bizarre things about the demon-dust-travel thing. Pretty much anything he was touching came with him. Handy, but strange.
Don’t go there. If he was going to keep it together, thinking about what just happened was taboo. He wasn’t supposed to have major demon mojo. That could only mean really bad news, and the last thing he could afford to do was work himself into a panic.
Think happy thoughts. Puppies. Kittens. Beer.
Doggedly, Mac kept striding. He focused on the immediate problem of getting out of the Castle. He worked his way back to the door without passing the spot where he’d flattened Bran—neither of them needed a rerun of that encounter.
The door looked as impenetrable as ever. Mute. Solid. A scar in the endless vista of stone walls. What do I do now? Sit down and wait for someone with a key to come along?
Mac folded his arms, leaning against the wall opposite the door, and settled in to wait. A cold draft slithered over his foot. As always, he wondered where the air currents came from in a world with no sky, no wind, and no weather. Nothing in the prison ever made sense.
Take the wars. The Castle dampened magic, so most of the fighting that went on was pure brute force. Swords. Fists. Guns, if someone had them. But the no-magic rule wasn’t consistent. There were sorcerers that could still throw the odd zap of power. He’d seen werewolves shape-shift now and then. Odd things happened. Magic sometimes slid through the cracks.
He started to pace, walking a few feet to one side of the door, then the other. Slid through the cracks? The phrase nagged at him. There was something he needed to pay attention to. He could feel his cop brain struggling to find a connection.
Why had he been able to dust?
If I’m immune to the anti-magic rules here...
No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t immune. He’d somehow regained power he’d lost. That part of the Castle mojo was working in reverse. If the magic here doesn’t affect me the same way.
In the world outside the Castle, demons didn’t need no stinking keys. They came and they went as they pleased, drifting through tiny cracks and holes in their dust form.
The Castle was different. Here, demons smashed into the doorway portal like a bird into a glass window. But what if he could make it through? Slide through the cracks.
If this goes wrong...
The alternative was sitting by the door for the next millennium, like a dog waiting to go for a walk. Whatever magical blip was making him different might wear off. He could lose this chance.
If I get stuck in the portal or only half of me makes it...
Suck it up. Sometimes the only options available were bad.
Mac reached for the cold place where his rediscovered powers hid. He knew what he was doing. He knew he would regret it.
Cold shot through him with dizzying intensity, as if Jack Frost invaded his bones. The frozen sensation was stronger this time, but slower. In a fleeting glimpse, he saw his hand laced with veins of blackness, a latticework that melded and pooled as he disappeared into nothing. Bit by bit, his sensory awareness fell away as parts of him simply ceased to be.
Disintegration always followed the same sequence: edges first, then his feet, his fingers, his limbs falling away before the core of him blinked out into a smudge of darkness, an afterimage that faded away like errant smoke. This time, he held onto a smidgen of consciousness to guide him through the door. That’s all he was—a thought.
He drifted to the door, then threaded himself into a crack between two of the huge, upright planks of wood. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t a real door at all. It just looked like one. It was a portal made of earth magic.
He had no body, but he could still feel the buzzing energy of the portal, like ants crawling over flesh that wasn’t there. He roiled, the motes of himself spinning in the wild energy, distracted, stirred to a frenzy. Pulling himself into a hard knot of darkness, he willed himself through the force field like a bullet, an image of the alley beyond like a beacon in his mind.
He popped out between two hellhounds, barely missing the elbow of one, and hurtled toward the neon sign of Naughty Nanette’s.
Mac’s laugh whispered in the rustling breeze.
Then it died when he considered what he’d just done.
Chapter 7
October 1, 9:55 p.m. 101.5 FM
“Finally, Dr. Elterland, let’s move on to talking about vampires.”
“To be honest, Errata, I don’t make them part of my study.”
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing there left to learn.”
“I see. How many vampires have you actually met, Dr. Elterland?”
Alessandro Caravelli strode back to the graveyard where he’d parked his car. It was a long walk, but he didn’t mind.
He wanted time to unwind. Enforcing the peace among the supernatural population in Fairview was stressful, and he never took his work home with him if he could help it Holly was a special woman and a powerful witch—the perfect mate for a vampire warrior—but even she had her limits. Decapitation and dismemberment did not make for good pillow talk.
A fitful wind blew garbage along the gutters, making a forlorn rustle. Pedestrians walked in twos and threes toward the parking garages, the early shows at the movie theater over. With his dark-adapted sight, Alessandro could see the street predators waiting in their lairs—an alley, a doorway, a patch of unlit street.
He silently dared one of the lowlifes to jump him, but that would never happen to a vampire with a broadsword. Undeath had its privileges. In fact, the part of town where the supernatural citizens had set up their businesses— some newspaper had called it Spookytown, and the name stuck—was remarkably free of crime. The merchants just ate the troublemakers, and the police rarely complained.
The thought of police took Alessandro back to Macmillan. Mac, as he preferred to be called. They’d never been friends, but there had been mutual respect. The detective had been out of his depth working preternatural crimes, but then, so were all the humans. He’d done better than most, up until the part where Geneva infected him with her demon taint.
And it still eats at him. He struggles, and he will lose.
Yes, magic might have blasted away most of the demon inside Mac, but the infection was like a virulent mold. If there was the tiniest remnant, it would spread and take over, reducing its host to a soul-eating mac
hine, a monster’s monster. It was just a matter of time.
Sad, but now he is a threat like any other. A task to be dealt with. Work.
He would have traded in his right fang for a better solution than a sword or a dungeon. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stand around wringing his hands while Macmillan went evil and ate half the city. That just wasn’t practical.
His cell phone rang, and he answered it.
“Hey,” said Holly. Even that one word sounded tired.
“Hello, love,” he replied, his outlook suddenly changing for the better, as if a projector had clicked to the next slide in the carousel. Do people use those anymore?
“Did you find Mac? Was the tip on the radio good?”
Alessandro sighed. “Yeah, I found him.”
“Crap,” she said softly. “Did you—”
“No. I put him in the Castle.”
“Oh.” Her tone was ambiguous. Holly had liked Mac. She had even dated him once.
There was a long silence. Alessandro kept walking, but his mind was with Holly, imagining her cradling the phone under her chin in that peculiar way. She was in the kitchen. He could hear the tick of the wall clock.
She finally spoke. “The Castle. Sweet Hecate, I don’t know which is worse. That place or ... death.” There was no criticism in her tone. It was an honest question.
“I don’t know, either. He’s still infected.”
“Goddess.” Another long pause while she digested that. “When’re you coming home?”
“Now.”
“Good. I need company.”
With no more warning than that, she hung up. The night was suddenly emptier. Alessandro quickened his pace. He never liked leaving Holly home by herself, even if she was a powerful witch. She meant too much to him not to worry.
There was a lot to worry about. For one thing, the hellhounds had to stop wandering away from their post at the Castle door. He was going to call Lore, their alpha, and have a word. Alessandro didn’t pay the Baskervilles to take kibble breaks whenever they felt like it.
Not with Holly home alone. Of course, all thoughts eventually led to her.
He finally reached the street beside the graveyard where his T-Bird was parked. The sight of her—the car was the other woman in his life—made his spirits rise. She was a sixties red two-door with custom chrome and smoked windows. He’d bought her new and kept her up himself. It was a point of pride that he never locked the doors. No one dared to mess with his car—except, of course, the occasional bird. Nature kept everyone humble, even vampires.
A cold wind whispered in the cedar trees as he threw the broadsword in the trunk and got behind the wheel. He wondered whether Holly had finished studying for the night, or if he’d have to coax her away from her books and over to the couch, where they could talk or watch television until other ideas pleasantly interfered. The ugliness of the night is done, and I’m going home to the girl I love, he thought, and he smiled. In all his long centuries of existence, this last year had been the first time he had been able to say that night after night.
He didn’t mind. Holly had been worth the wait.
As he sped into the driveway, the first thing he saw was a strange motorcycle at the curb. He parked and got out of the T-Bird, looking first at the house. Holly’s family home—where he lived now, too—was an 1880s painted lady with an ocean view. The usual lights were on in the kitchen and front room. He could see Kibs, the cat, staring out of the study window. Except for the motorcycle, everything looked normal.
But in the last few minutes, Holly had grown upset. He could feel it the way he could feel all of her strong emotions, as clearly as if she had spoken in his ear. Trouble had arrived.
He got the sword out of the trunk.
No doubt the trouble had ridden in on the bike. He turned and paused long enough to take in the red trellis design of a Ducati Monster. It was dirty, as if their visitor had ridden a long way.
Alessandro ran up the steps, mind scrambling for clues as to who this invader might be.
If this guy meant harm, he shouldn’t have made it over the threshold. The house should have kept him out. Witch houses were semi-sentient and self-repairing, sustained by the ambient magic that surrounded their families. They were also able to work basic protection spells, so why hadn’t it stopped this motorcycle-riding intruder?
The front door opened for Alessandro before he reached for the knob. He swept inside, noticing an unfamiliar red and white helmet on the front hall table. This guy had left it there like he owned the place. A sudden wave of territoriality made Alessandro clench his teeth.
He could sense Holly in the kitchen. She was always at the table these days, studying for her university midterms. The last thing she needed was an outsider disrupting her work. Alessandro went to confront the stranger, letting his boots fall ominously on the polished oak floors. A sharp, bitter smell hung in the air, as if Holly had forgotten to turn off the coffeemaker.
When he reached the kitchen, his eyes went first to her. His Holly was dark-haired and beautiful, but slowly surrendering to the wild-eyed, disheveled look of a full-time student. She sat surrounded by textbooks, dirty mugs, a laptop, pencils, and two complicated calculators, neither of which Alessandro could figure out.
“Hi,” he said. “What’s going on?”
As she turned around to greet him, he could see Holly’s huge green eyes were too wide, like she’d been shell-shocked. Frowning, he turned to the figure sitting in the chair next to Holly.
Then frowned some more. The motorcycle rider was not male.
The woman in riding gear was a bit taller than Holly, blonder, but had the same startling green eyes—which were riveted on him. She was grubby, her hair flat from the helmet and a hard set to her jaw. Alessandro knew the type—they swore hard, drank hard, and picked their teeth with a sharpened stake—just before they drove it through, some unfortunate vampire’s heart.
Which was just unhygienic.
No one said anything. The tap dripped in the kitchen sink. He held the scabbard of his broadsword casually, but doubted he was done with it for the night.
“Hey,” said Holly.
“What’s going on?” he repeated, looking pointedly at Kick-Ass Gal.
“This is my sister, Ashe.”
“The vampire slayer,” Ashe added in a voice like filthy snow.
Oh, great.
Holly’s expression was projecting a version of don’t-blame-me-I-didn’t-invite-her. He tried to smile but could feel it sagging into a grimace. He liked Holly’s grandmother. Holly’s parents were dead. That had been the sum total of his thoughts about his de facto in-laws.
Except, I know this is the in-law who tried out major magic, destroyed her own power, almost destroyed her sister’s power, accidentally killed both their parents, then ran away to live on the streets. Yeah, let’s have her come and stay for a few weeks.
Then he remembered Ashe owned half the house. He was technically the guest here.
This just gets better.
Alessandro sank into a chair across from Ashe, setting the sword down close at hand. Her expression made him wonder whether that and the three knives he was carrying were defense enough.
“So, you’re Alessandro Caravelli, the vampire queen’s renowned champion warrior.”
Ashe narrowed her eyes. He knew she was eight years older than Holly, which put her somewhere in her middle thirties. The hard lines in her face made her look older.
“I no longer work for the queen,” he replied stiffly. “I work alone.”
“I didn’t think vampires did that.”
“I’m hard to work with.” The truth was, he worked with and for the entire supernatural community in Fairview, keeping order much as he had when he served the queen. That wasn’t the point. “Why do you want to know?”
“You’re with my baby sister. You’re a vampire. What do you think?”
“I think you’re leaping to conclusions.”
“About wh
at? The sex or the fangs?” She shoved one of the textbooks hard, sending it flying across the table toward a mug full of coffee.
With superhuman speed, he slammed his hand on the book, stopping it cold. With one simple act, she’d made him show his inhumanity. Show he was one of the Undead. Rough anger slid over him, scraping like coarse wool.
“Wait a damned minute,” said Holly, clutching at one of the pencils and stabbing the notebook in front of her. “How’d you find out about us?”
“Grandma’s letters finally caught up with me. I tried calling her from Calgary, but she’d already left for the family reunion in Waikiki. Maybe you should have taken lover boy there for some fun in the sun.”
Holly gave Ashe an unfriendly look. “You said you were here to see me. What you really meant was you came all this way from ... wherever to save me from Alessandro?”
“I was in Calgary,” Ashe replied. “Doing a job.”
“Killing vampires?” Alessandro asked, letting a little menace slide into his voice.
“Yep, and the guy paid me well. See the bike outside? That was just the bonus.”
Alessandro stifled a laugh. Well, the sister had guts, saying that to his face. He had to give her that much.
Holly’s face went white and she stopped staking her notes. “This is such BS. You walked out when I was a child. You never wrote, you never phoned. Why the hell do you care now?”
Ashe folded her arms. “I had other problems back then.”
Holly’s mouth trembled for a moment and she bit it. Alessandro was half out of the chair, ready to solve this sister problem, before Holly held up her hand. “Stop. Just stop.”
He stopped. He sat.
Ashe looked at her sister, her eyes narrowed. “Stop what?”
Holly’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t come in here and start threatening me and my partner.”
“She doesn’t frighten me,” Alessandro put in.
Ashe’s eyes focused on him like twin crossbows. “Consider it an intervention, Holly. For your own good.”
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