“Baby, I don’t think that’s gonna work.” Dean chuckled.
“Well, I can only think of one other way and that doesn’t help us right now,” I barked, frustration and arousal mixing into a frenzy in my gut. The image of sucking Patrick’s cock into my mouth until he was awake made my heart race and flushed my skin.
“Probably not,” Dean said. Coughing back his laughter, he understood exactly where my thoughts had gone.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“First,” he said, tugging a T-shirt over his bald head. “If you’re going to lollygag, we should shut the blinds before he gets sunburned. That’ll be hard to explain.”
I brushed a strand of coarse black hair from Patrick’s forehead, skimming my fingers across his cool skin. “I know you’re in there,” I whispered.
The constant heat of Dean behind me and the chill of Patrick in front of me wrapped around my body, a heavy fog of magic that was familiar and comforting. Their energies mixed together and filled the room but didn’t frighten me anymore. They were part of me, as my energy was part of them. Sliding my hands over his back and stroking the muscles sculpting his long lithe frame, I pressed my palms flat between his shoulders. Feeling our energies mixing and twisting together into a single entity, I shoved all the power I could harness down the metaphysical line connecting Patrick and I. If he used his own power for daylight hours, I would give him mine.
Patrick, Honey, wake up. We need you, I whispered in my mind.
From somewhere far away and through a long tunnel of darkness, I could feel him tugging on me, searching for me in the bleak loneliness of where he was.
Dahlia? Patrick called back from a far off distance. His words desperate and happy all at the same time.
I couldn’t change what he was but a part of me never wanted to let him come to this solitary and empty place again.
Trust me. You’re gonna wanna see this, I teased as I shoved more of my power down through his being. With a jolt of energy, the oppressive darkness lifted. In its place was Patrick, standing tall and elegant in the middle of an epic void that stretched on farther than my eyes could see. With a quick wink, his essence shot by me, roaring back into consciousness.
His muscles tensed beneath my fingers and his arms slid out from underneath the pillow. He turned, his hands sliding up my thigh and his dark eyes boring into me. Deep in my gut, my body tightened and a fire burned as if sucking all the oxygen from the room.
“Hi,” I said with a smirk.
“Hello.” Patrick’s dark eyes focused on me, staring in awe.
“Damn,” Dean breathed behind us.
“You alluded to something I needed to see,” Patrick grinned.
“Nifty,” I said, smiling down at him. “I didn’t know we could do that.”
“Neither did I.” Patrick answered with a dashing glint in his gaze.
My skin tingled with anticipation of what that gleam promised.
Dean cleared his throat, reminding me we didn’t have time for that.
“Did you turn the heat on?” Patrick asked, not realizing the sun was streaming across his skin.
“No,” I said, nodding over him toward the open window.
Turning, he peered through the open shades and realized the sun was up, filling the room with warmth. Patrick jumped from the bed, quicker than lighting, and cowered in the corner. Hiding in the only shadow left in the room, he hissed. The sound crossing his lips was otherworldly and screeched in my ears to the point of pain.
“Pat!” Dean called.
I stood and strolled across the bed, hopping down to the floor in front of Patrick. Still naked, I noticed that his gaze swept over my body and ignored the gleaming sun streaming in through the window. I slid my hands up the length of his arms, feeling the cool skin tremble beneath my fingers. I crouched down to meet his gaze. His pupils were the size of pins, flooding his frightened glare with dark intensity.
“Patrick,” I whispered, soothing the tremor riddling his body, “you’re not burning.”
Patrick slid into a creepy stillness that only the undead could perfect. His body was rigid and his shoulders a broad expanse of danger. He raised his gaze, staring beyond me into the bright sunlight. He brought his hand up, shielding his eyes from the harsh rays of the sun as he slowly got to his feet.
“How?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said, standing beside him. I strode over to the bed and grabbed the black silk robe, tying the waist tight.
“Fertiri bond?” Dean grumbled, sounding more unsure than I’d ever heard him.
“You think?” I asked, hoping.
Patrick inched toward the window with cautious, light steps, still shielding his eyes from the glare. His muscles were taut with tension as he forced his arm forward into the sliver of light contrary to his very instincts to survive.
“There are so many colors,” he muttered.
“What do we do now?” I asked, hearing the naked anticipation and anxiety in my voice.
“Right now?” Dean said, plopping down on the edge of the bed. “Nothing.”
“If a Fertiri could bring vampires out of the night into daylight, why would the board ever execute them?” Patrick mumbled, still shielding his eyes as he stared at the bright, colorful world beyond.
“Pat, we don’t know if the colony can follow you into the sun,” Dean warned.
“Or if it’s permanent,” I added, running my hand up Patrick’s back. At my touch, his entire body relaxed but his gaze never left the window. “Do we say anything?”
“No!” Patrick snapped, spinning to meet my gaze. “Until we know more, I do not want to give them false hope.”
“Pat, if this gets out—” Dean warned.
“Along with Dahlia’s ability to keep the wolf at bay, enabling your Pack to procreate . . .”
“What? What is it?” I asked meeting the devilish smirk in Patrick’s cold stare.
Glancing over at Dean still on the bed, Patrick sunk his fingers into my hair. He cupped my face in his hands and peered down at me with excitement turning up the corners of his delectable mouth. “There won’t be a vampire council, board, or Pack on the planet that could stop us.”
Chapter 24
My eyes watered at the pungent scent of ammonia and death filling the long narrow corridor. The walls were an ugly burnt orange that seemed like it was first painted in the late 1960’s and the city just never changed the color. Two swivel, metal doors stood at the end of the hall and Derek led me directly to them. The morgue was not a fun place to hang out and when he asked, Hey, Kid, you wanna do somethin’ with me this afternoon? this was not what I had in mind.
We burst through the double doors side-by-side and a wall of refrigeration units greeted us, four high and ten wide.
“We’re ready when you are, Doc,” Derek called, schmoozing the County Coroner still filling out paperwork at her desk in the corner.
She glanced up at Derek’s grinning face and scowled, knowing full well he was trying to work one over on her.
The coroner was tall. As she shoved back from the desk, her long, white lab coat hit her knees as she circled around the desk. Her heels clicked on the cold tile floor, making her steps sound ominous. Her midnight black skin, shimmered in the fluorescent lighting, giving her an ethereal glow. She gave him an once-over that made me grin. She wasn’t buying his crap, and I choked back my laughter.
“Detective Hamlin, this is highly irregular,” she scolded him. She was probably old enough to be his mother too but I couldn’t tell. She talked to him like she had children and I knew better than to open my mouth.
“I just need a few minutes,” Derek begged, sounding more like a teenager than the cocky Detective I’d walked in with a few minutes ago. Oh, this was going to be f
un.
“You have five. Make them count,” she said, all business and stormed out of the double doors.
Derek strode to one of the refrigeration doors, second one down, fourth row over from the left. Jerking on the door handle, the refrigeration unit swung open. He gripped the bar and yanked, sliding the tray and body out into the fresh air. The smell hit me first, refrigerated death, sealed in plastic to keep the decomp at a minimum. Derek probably didn’t smell anything over the ammonia. Over all the other scents floating around; the acrid stench of ammonia, Derek’s Old Spice shower gel, the stark scent of fresh plastic, and the soft floral perfume of the coroner that lingered even after she’d gone, my nostrils filled with the soft rot of flesh and the foul stench of methane as the bowls broke down in the confined space of the plastic body bag.
“The bodies are piling up, Kid,” he said, staring down at the mangled mess of flesh lying on the slab.
The corpse was torn to bits, mangled and mounds of so much gore. Bones shone through ripped muscle and tissue, gleaming white under the sickening bright white florescent lights bouncing off the orange walls.
“Yeah,” I agreed, evaluating the flesh around the dead woman’s neck. “But most of them were already dead.” I added, knowing the instant it came from my mouth it was a bad joke.
“Doesn’t make the brass upstairs feel any better.”
“The attack last night was—” I broke off. What could I say, stupid, brazen, a death wish? Yeah, it was all three. All I could come up with was, “Unexpected.”
“Do you expect more?” he growled.
“I expect this to get much worse before it gets better,” I mumbled. I was no closer to locating the vampire’s whereabouts who’d raised these damned zombies than I was three days ago. The problem was finding him and stopping him before any more innocent victims ended up on a slab like this poor woman, dead or alive.
“I might need to move then,” Derek said, the humor gone from his voice.
“Don’t even joke about that,” I snarled. “What are we looking at?” I asked, getting back on track.
He stepped up to the next drawer over and slid the slab out. Revealing a much more decayed body, twice the length of the woman next to it, Derek stepped back and waited for me.
“This is Hubert Schaffner, died 1868,” Derek said. “That was Melissa Nguyen, died yesterday.”
Hubert Schaffner was in pieces, his flesh was dry and sallow, eaten through in spots and appearing every bit as dead as a 150 year old corpse should seem. His head lay beside the rest of his body where someone had ripped it off. I got all warm and fuzzy inside thinking either Patrick or Dean had taken down this zombie—for me. It was better than flowers.
“Okay,” I said.
“This is not how he came in last night.”
“You mean he wasn’t in two pieces,” I asked.
“No, I mean he looked better. We took pictures of all of them when they came in. Once the coroner noticed the differences, she started taking pictures every hour.”
Derek tossed a stack of glossy photos on the body. Some of them slid in my direction and I grasped them before any of them could hit the floor. Flipping through them, I realized what he meant. There was a general progression of deterioration in the body. The first couple of photos, seemed as if the body was maybe a decade old—very little decay but the blush of life had definitely faded. As I flipped through the photos, the body degenerated to the crusty heap of aged dead flesh lying on the slab before me.
“Can I take these?” I asked.
“They’re yours.”
“Thanks,” I said, turning to leave. Jade needed to see these. Hell, everyone needed to see these photos. What kind of power did this vampire have?
“Dahlia?” Derek called, catching my attention. He never called me by my actual name. The sound of it and the gravel making his voice harsh stopped me cold.
“Yeah?” I asked, turning back to face him. I felt the itch in my fingertips, the burning of adrenaline churning in my system.
“I heard about Jade,” he muttered.
Ah, shit! I did not want to have this conversation with him. I didn’t want to be anywhere near this clusterfuck of a painful, twisted relationship between he and Jade. Derek was my friend. Jade and Kurt were my friends. I didn’t want to be in the middle of this triangle.
Once upon a time, Derek had been semi in love with Jade. Hell, everyone who met the woman loved her but Derek had put in time. It hadn’t worked out and I’d thought he was over it. Apparently not.
“It would’ve been nice to get a heads-up?”
“Wasn’t my place,” I said with an apologetic shrug. Honestly, the whole thing had slipped my mind with Connie and the baby, the new vamps in town, and Patrick being able to walk in the sun and everything. I had kinda forgot about how Derek would take Jade’s engagement. But I would never, EVER say out loud that I had forgotten about Jade and let it get back to her. If she ever thought that she didn’t take center stage, I’d be first on the shit list. I didn’t have a death wish.
Glancing at Derek, his hunched shoulders, his hands digging in his pockets for something to grab onto, and his eyes darting from me to the body and back again, I knew I had been a bad friend. I should have gone out of my way to break it to him easier.
“Is she happy?”
“Yeah, Derek, she is. Really happy. You should get to know Kurt. I think you’d like him.”
He shook his head. “It’s enough to know she’s happy,” he said with a sigh. He shook whatever he was feeling off, literally and put back on the façade of the strong cop. It was disturbing to see someone else do that. Now I knew how Patrick and Dean must feel to watch me reel my monster back in.
“All right, Kid,” he said, “I’ll call you later if I find anything.”
“Same here,” I said and patted his shoulder. With the photos in my hand, I swung open the double doors and headed back down the hall. Jade was waiting.
“What did you find?” I asked, plopping down in the overstuffed, black leather club chair across from her desk.
Jade’s house was immaculate and a tribute to any restoration hardware catalog. Since Kurt had been spending more time there, her place seemed more lived in, homey even. It wasn’t apparent but there were little signs, here and there that Jade was no longer alone—a pair of shoes here, the dark German beer in the fridge, and the faint scent of male lingering in this room more than the others.
“The box truck was a dead end. I tracked the sale to a small lot over on the west side but the guy had paid in cash and the owner was the ‘discreet’ type,” she said, flipping through a giant book with a disappointed expression furrowing her chestnut brows.
“Stolen?” I asked.
“Probably, but he gave me a description and it’s definitely our guy.”
“Well, I guess that’s something. Is there anything else?”
“Necromancy is some sick stuff. Do you like this?” Jade asked, shoving the giant binder into my lap as she pointed a perfectly manicured finger at the wedding invitation plastered against the black page.
“Pretentious,” I said, flipping to the next page. Hopefully, I’d closed the door to the gold vellum invitation for something a little more simple, elegant.
“You’re right,” she huffed, slumping back in the club chair next to me. “Anyway, the magic is dark, death magic. It requires blood to actually raise something and a lot of magic to go with it.”
“So what you’re saying is that not anyone can stride up to a cemetery and raise some bodies,” I snorted, secretly thankful.
“Correct, but you’re missing the point.”
“What am I missing?”
“The blood,” she whispered.
I gazed at her, knowing full well what she’d meant but I didn’t w
ant to say it out loud. I’d seen too many dead bodies piling up lately for me not to understand.
“A life for a life?” I mumbled, flipping through another page of invitations.
“Maybe not. It depends on the practitioner and how much of a boost they need. What about this one?”
“Too frilly. Is that lace?” I cringed.
“Argh! It is.” She sighed. “This is hopeless.” She grumbled. “So anyway, I talked to Oz,” Jade said, peering over my shoulder as I turned the page.
“Oz, I haven’t heard that name in a while.”
When I’d first met Jade, she’d been dabbling in witchcraft to piss her Dad and his Executive Assistant off. Since the assistant paid Jade’s Dad’s bills it was just icing on the cake to get attention, even negative attention. Oz was the owner of the New Age shop where Jade bought all her creepy crawly items and the creepier the better. That woman had spotted me on sight as different which had set my teeth on edge. I’d steered clear of the covens since then but evidently, Jade hadn’t.
“Her coven and some of the other covens in the area she referred me to, said it took serious power to raise and maintain as many zombies as we’ve had coming at us. But the zombies look pretty bad so whoever this guy is, is probably expending a lot of energy and magic just to raise them, let alone maintain them.”
Tossing the pictures from the morgue down on her lap, I closed the book of invitations. She picked them up, sliding one behind another as she gazed down at the glossy prints.
“What’s this?” she asked. Her pert little nose scrunched up in disgust as the photographs progressed. “Is this the same body?”
Emerald Fire (A Blushing Death Novel Book 6) Page 17
