Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Edith screamed something in a language Kim did not know and moved to intervene, but the smiling man from the roof sailed through the air like a cannonball and locked taloned hands onto her face. The musty, cold non-smell of dead blood seeped into the air.

  A shot rang out to Kim’s right, and from the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of recoil rippling up Zeb’s arms. Lisa’s head burst in a spray of gore, and she dropped. Bernice was up in an instant, her chest and face ravaged, and she and Tony pried Edith and her attacker apart.

  “It was a pretty good plan,” an accented voice whispered in Kim’s ear. It was smooth and low and warm. She relaxed. Something was happening, she knew, but it didn’t seem as important as she had thought it would be. It felt natural, and it felt very, very good.

  “Someone forgot that you don’t just go up against me. You go up against me and everyone I can touch.”

  Cool fingertips brushed the back of her neck, raising goosebumps down her arms. That felt good, too.

  “Go make chaos,” Duran whispered. Kim had to admit that it sounded like a fun idea. Her skin was numb, anyway; it wasn’t as though she could get hurt.

  But something buzzed past her like a missile and hit the man behind her with a report as sharp as Zeb’s gunfire. She turned and saw the Aztec, his knife-sharp features contorted in a feral snarl, his hands buried to the wrists in Duran’s belly. He sank his teeth into Duran’s shoulder and tore away a chunk of flesh and cloth, pulled one hand out of his victim’s innards, and raked glistening claws across his face. Tears streaked his weathered cheeks.

  So she shot him. She didn’t have Zeb’s precision, but her target was a foot away, and she shoved the barrel of her gun up under his arm and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash was bizarrely bright, and the bullet burned through him, leaving smoldering holes in his shirt. He staggered, and Duran’s elbow caught him in the face just as Coyote’s cane caught Kim in the back of the head. The world went bright for a moment, and without quite knowing how, she found herself on her knees with her gun gone and her right hand smarting.

  The smiling man was still smiling, eyes wide and empty. He had Bernice by the throat and was smashing her head over and over into the asphalt. Her glass eye had come out and rolled a few feet away. It burned like a green ember.

  Dave the coach was missing a leg, but he had Tony in a headlock. Edith, her face slick with dark blood, appeared behind the coach and snapped his neck neatly. Bernice grabbed her attacker by the face and slid her other hand into his abdomen, up through his ribcage, gripping his heart. He froze long enough for Edith to kick him in the head, and he went down, but only for a moment. He scrambled to get up again, and Bernice squeezed, and he crumbled into ash.

  Kim touched the back of her head gingerly.

  “Sorry,” she muttered.

  The ruddy light in the west hadn’t gotten any dimmer. That had taken all of sixty seconds. Duran was gone.

  Suddenly, there was a thin, hard face inches away from Kim’s. He thrust a hand out, and she flinched, expecting retribution for that burning bullet, but his fist was full of blood-soaked black hair.

  “Find him,” he hissed. His voice was cold and harsh, and there was a warning of frenzy in it, an edge of incipient madness. And something else. Anguish.

  “Find him,” he said again, shaking the fistful of hair. He added a tiny push to the command, so small Kim doubted he even knew he was doing it. She took the offering and nodded.

  “We’ll get the bastard,” she said. “We’ll hit him hard.”

  He nodded back, stood, and went to kneel by the teenager’s corpse. There wasn’t much left, but he peeled off his shirt and began to scoop up her ashes. His shoulders quaked.

  Kim struggled from her knees to her feet and went after him. She hugged him from behind, and he didn’t kill her for that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He laid a gory hand on the side of her face. His claws hadn’t yet been put away, and the razor tips dimpled her cheek.

  “Find him,” he said once more, and he went back to his funeral preparations.

  Zeb helped Bernice to stand.

  Coyote examined the damage to Lisa’s head.

  “Son of a gun,” he observed. “Took out four of us without ever raising a hand. Is he gone?”

  “He wouldn’t stick around,” Tony whispered. His throat was black with bruising. “Itzli got him good. You okay, Itzli?”

  Itzli hissed and threw a sharp grimace over his shoulder but said nothing about the cauterized bullet hole through his lungs.

  Kim found her gun up against the tire of an SUV, where Zeb had kicked it out of her hand. The word chaos drifted through her mind when she picked it up, and she imagined the last six rounds in the magazine getting the action started again, but the notion was too weak to be called a compulsion. She stuck the gun back in her kidney holster, sucked in a deep breath, and held it until her lungs ached. When she breathed out, she imagined all of Duran’s crap blowing away with the spent air, out of her head and into the night, and she felt better.

  But not by much.

  The door to the room at the end of the block still loomed open.

  “Somebody cover me,” Kim called, not much caring who came, and she trudged across the parking lot to go in, shoving the handful of Duran’s hair into her jacket pocket.

  It was pitch black inside, except for the glowing orange light switch by the door. She flicked the lights on and leapt back, because if it had been up to her, she would have laid any booby traps right where a human would reach first. Nothing jumped out at her or exploded or came swinging out of the ceiling, but Duran was a subtle bastard. Kim stretched out her senses, feeling for magic or hotspots of potential energy. Nothing.

  “We did surprise him,” she said aloud, just in case someone actually did have her back. “Well, maybe not surprise him, surprise him, but he wasn’t waiting for us. Wasn’t prepared or anything. I bet he was just out and came back and saw us there.”

  There was blood on one of the dingy pillowcases, bright red and human, but not more than might accumulate if a motel guest suffered a nosebleed. Duran was a tidy eater, if nothing else.

  “Disposing of a body, probably. Or out picking up dessert.”

  She glanced back to find Itzli regarding her impassively, supporting Bernice. Bernice popped her glass eye back in and blinked a few times.

  “If that’s the kind of fight he puts up unprepared,” she said. She trailed off, frowning.

  Kim nodded her agreement and stepped into the room, over the downed door. An open duffel bag sat on the foot of the single bed. There was a jumble of clothes inside, what looked like a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts, one sock hanging out of the bag. An electric razor sat beside the sink, toothbrush and toothpaste nearby. Other than the blood on the pillow, there was nothing to show the kind of person who had stayed there.

  There was also no sign of Rocky. Nothing moved or made a sound.

  “Honey?” Kim called. She made up her mind to find out his name as soon as possible. Someone had to know something, if only she could figure out who to ask.

  She crept further into the room to peer around the other side of the bed. Nothing. She checked in the closet and under the bed. Nothing. There was, however, a shadow on the other side of the shower curtain.

  He sat perfectly still, curled up in the bottom of the bathtub, still wearing the rumpled sweats he’d had on when he was taken. His right arm hung limp, all of the joints at strange angles, and there was dead blood on his collar and on the cuffs of his sleeves. His eyes stared ahead, flaming red and devoid of consciousness, the pupils huge. He was deathly pale.

  She touched his shoulder, and his fangs ran out in involuntary response, but he didn’t move.

  She turned to go get some help and jumped when she found Itzli there by her shoulder.

  “Are you going to take him?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Fix him up. This isn’t right.”

/>   “No,” he agreed. Then, “He might know where Duran would run.”

  “Maybe, but there’s no telling how long it’ll take to get him talking again.”

  Itzli nodded and shouldered Kim out of the way. He bent and scooped Rocky out of the tub and carried him out to Zeb’s pickup truck. Kim pulled some of Zeb’s moving blankets out of the toolbox and started to build a nest around the vampire in the back seat. She had a few second thoughts about having him in the cab for a long ride, but he didn’t twitch a muscle, just sat as she positioned him, staring.

  Itzli crouched in the bed of the truck and watched the darkening streets. Then he stiffened, head cocked to one side, and vanished. The others were gone, too, some bearing the injured. A moment later, Kim heard approaching sirens.

  “Move,” she said quietly. Zeb leapt into the driver’s seat and reached over to help haul Coyote up. Kim slammed her door and rolled into Rocky’s motionless form as Zeb peeled out of the parking lot, drove a few blocks away, and stopped. He killed the engine, shut off the lights, and they waited. Red and blue flashed over the tops of the houses. Kim counted up slowly. When she had reached five hundred and twelve, Zeb started up the truck again and went back the way they had come, moving at a snail’s pace past the motel. Not one officer looked twice at the truck. After all, they were going in the wrong direction to be running away. He stuck to the speed limit through town, onto the expressway, and all the way back to Austin.

  Kim held Rocky’s hand. He didn’t look at her, didn’t respond.

  So, Saint Anthony, it’s me again. I found who I was looking for. But I think he’s still lost.

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS STILL too early to guarantee an empty foyer in Kim’s apartment building, so Coyote went in as a scout. He hobbled across the lobby on his cane and gestured for the others to follow, then hobbled up the stairs to man the elevator doors. Zeb wrapped Rocky in moving blankets and threw the bundle over his shoulder so it looked about like a roll of rugs. With a little help from Kim, they toted him inside and into the elevator.

  “Barely weighs a thing,” he commented. “Duran musta sucked ‘im out again.”

  “Their inertia’s tied to their strength,” Kim told him wearily. “When they’re weak, they don’t interact with the world as well. All the blood in the body only weighs about twelve pounds, so if he’s light, it’s because he’s so out of it. Mass is still there, but the gravity’s not acting on it. He’s less real right now.”

  “So when they lose all their strength…”

  “Cells fall apart. Molecules lose cohesion. Everything falls apart. Dust. Poof.”

  “And their heart…”

  “I have no freaking clue, Zeb, don’t look at me. I don’t know everything, okay?”

  The doors pinged open, and they scurried across the hallway into Kim’s apartment.

  “You guys look like crap,” Vickie told them, but she didn’t sound particularly concerned. Zeb dropped his bundle onto the couch, through Vickie’s lap, and the ghost squealed and disappeared.

  “Buttwipe,” said her disembodied voice.

  Kim ignored her roommate and closed and locked the door.

  “You think you can snap him out of it?” she asked Coyote, who shook his head.

  “I’m afraid he’d pull me down instead of me pulling him back up,” he said. He fell into a chair and propped his cane against his knee. “You said it wears off. I’ll see what I can do then. In the mean time, I say none of us stays alone until we hear from Tony and Edith that they’ve got tabs on Duran.”

  “Oh, right. I was hoping maybe you could help with that, too.” She pulled the fistful of hair out of her jacket and laid it on the coffee table.

  “That’ll work,” he said. He snatched it up and shoved it into his jeans pocket. “Gotta go home and get my materials. Maybe in the morning. We can all go, ‘less we hear something before then.”

  Two voices rose in argument from outside and retreated down the hall.

  “Should probably get some sleep,” Zeb muttered. He dug his knuckles into his eyes and shoved his hand through his hair.

  “Y’all go ahead and take the bed,” Kim told them. “I kinda got a little nap earlier, so I’ll take first watch. Besides, someone’s gotta keep an eye on Rocky, in case he starts to come around.”

  She dragged a pile of pillows and blankets in beside the couch and built herself a pallet, threw the electric over the vampire and plugged it in. His eyes were open, unblinking, and he didn’t seem to see her. She reached over and very, very carefully smoothed them closed.

  Zeb and Coyote disappeared into Kim’s room and the door shut. Coyote complained in a low grumble, the bedsprings squeaked, and Kim distinctly heard Zeb’s reply: “Oh, grow up, y’old fart.”

  She flicked off the overheads and turned on a lamp, kicked her shoes off, stowed her pistol under her pillow, and curled up on her pallet to read. It started to rain again. A few fat drops splatted against the kitchen window.

  Somewhere, she knew, there had to be a book that could help with all of this. She had surrounded herself with books – some new and glossy, some old and fragile, some handwritten, some that were nothing but stacks of typescript held together with ring clips or rubber bands. Every one of them was filled with knowledge, things the mundanes would have regarded as fantasy or superstition. She had skimmed through most of them, selecting tidbits to add to Ainslie’s growing index of accurate magical references in literature, and somewhere, she prayed, there had to be something she could use. Sebastian Duran could not be unique in history. Another like him must have cropped up at some point, a vampire who broke the Rules, who could force his will on his own species instead of only on humans.

  But instead, she found herself looking for references to the Broken, the Uszkodzone. The word was Polish, she knew, which led her to believe that if such creatures existed at all, the majority or at least the oldest of them were to be found in Poland. Rocky hadn’t struck her as foreign. He had no accent she could detect, and she doubted that the stutter was intended to disguise one. In fact, he talked like a news anchor – bland, featureless pronunciation that might have come from anywhere in America.

  He also seemed young, though she supposed that could just have been a result of vulnerability and fear. When she stopped to think about it, she wasn’t even sure how old he looked, let alone how old he might actually be. She propped herself up on her elbows to dart a glance at the man on the couch, but that was no help; as sick as he looked, eyes sunken, skin pallid and grayish, he might have been anything between twenty and forty. It would be impossible to tell until he was healthy again.

  There was still packaged blood in her refrigerator. She thought about grabbing a bag and a funnel and trying to get some in him while he was still quasi-unconscious and couldn’t object much to being force fed. It had to be less traumatic than being held down. But if he did struggle, there was no way she could manage him on her own.

  She went back to her reading.

  “What is his deal?” a voice hissed in her ear.

  Kim jumped and threw an elbow at – and through – Vickie’s face.

  “Crap,” she whispered back, “don’t do that.”

  Vickie crouched in the middle of the coffee table and ignored her. “Seriously,” she said. “He stares. Doesn’t matter what I’m doing, he’s always staring at me. It’s weird.”

  Kim twisted to look over her shoulder. The man on the couch was staring. Or at least, his eyes were open again and blindly pointed in Vickie’s direction.

  “Give him a break,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s kind of been going through a lot, if you hadn’t noticed. He can stare if he freaking wants to.”

  “Wants to?” Vickie retorted. “Pssh. It’s like he can’t not. He’s out cold, and he’s still staring.”

  She stood, flipping her ponytail, and walked through the couch in an expression of ultimate disdain. At least, she tried. Her legs hit the vampire and she tripped, falling forward acr
oss him.

  His face tightened, forehead wrinkling like he was trying hard to wake up but couldn’t.

  “The hell!” Vickie whispered shrilly. “He touched me! How did he freaking touch me?!” She shot upright and left the floor behind, eyes huge, and then she fled. His blank eyes followed her until she was gone, then drifted closed again.

  It was Kim’s turn to stare.

  “Rocky,” she murmured. “Hey, honey. You awake?” She touched his hand gently. He didn’t respond.

  “Oh, sweetie. I’m gonna need some help, here. Tony and Edith’ll be back to find out what you know, and honey, if you’ve got freaky extras, I can’t guarantee they’ll be any nicer to you than that bastard was. I mean, that’s kinda why they’re after him in the first place, ‘cause he can do stuff he shouldn’t.”

  She gave his hand a little squeeze, then tucked it up under the electric blanket because it was ice-cold.

  She almost didn’t hear the tap on the window; it sounded just like the rain.

  The tap came again, and Rocky sucked in a sharp little breath. His eyes opened a crack, slivers of red visible beneath white lids. Kim froze.

  Once more, a tap on the glass. She made herself look, keeping her gaze firmly on the kitchen cabinets instead of directly at the window, because if she met his eyes, she would be hosed.

  It was hard to tell from peripheral vision only, but it looked as though Duran had patched himself up with plastic wrap. There was a band of something shiny around his midsection, holding in the bits Itzli had tried to tear out. He clung to the wall like a spider, dangling there outside her second-story window.

  There was a thwack as he slapped a small piece of wet paper up against the window and grinned. The rain adhered it to the glass. Then he was gone.

  Kim pushed herself up to her knees and crept closer.

  I KNOW WHEN I’M BEATEN, it said in dark, bold strokes of permanent marker. CAN’T BLAME ME FOR NOT WANTING TO GO DOWN ALONE. I’M GUESSING “LET HIM GO” WOULD HAVE BEEN NEXT ON YOUR AGENDA. CONSIDER IT DONE.