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

by Rebecca Hamilton

  But if he didn’t, Lenny was not about to point it out.

  “’Kay. Sounds… sound fun. Yeah.” More fun than staying in the motel room, at least.

  Lenny took the clothes – probably also stolen; they smelled more like person than like superstore, fortunately not stained by death – and shuffled into the tiny bathroom. He ran the water until it was hot, but the thought of stripping naked with Sebastian in the other room made his throat close and his chest jump in senseless fear, so he left his shoes by the door and stood under the scalding spray fully-clothed, hoping that maybe some of the stains would wash out of his shirt. They didn’t, even though he used all of the shampoo in the little tube.

  The water heaters in the place must have been impressive, though, because the water never did go cold. Lenny stood in the shower until his skin was red and most of him felt warm, at least on the surface, then let himself drip while the steam began to thin. The shirt was beyond salvage, so it went in a wad into the trashcan. His pants were in better condition, so those went over the curtain rod to dry. He toweled himself off with frantic haste and shoved himself into Sebastian’s offerings, not sure whether to be pleased or horrified that they were approximately the right size.

  When he emerged, Sebastian was spread-eagled on one of the beds, face-down and shirtless on top of the scratchy acrylic duvet. Lenny stood still and watched the other man’s back until he was sure Sebastian was not breathing. Asleep, maybe, or faking to see what Lenny would do.

  It didn’t much matter either way. Running would get him hurt, would get Mara and her daughters hurt. Hurting Sebastian, incapacitating him, was out of the question for a medium and a pacifist. It couldn’t be done, and he didn’t try.

  Instead, he turned out the light and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. It was easier for him to see in the dark anyway, more comfortable, and he felt very slightly less likely to run into things or trip over flat ground. He crept over to the other bed, failing to be silent. He would not be able to sleep, he knew, but he could rest, and rest was going to be essential. But as he peeled back the covers, something slid off the bed and hit the hard industrial carpet with a faint, clear tone. He froze, glancing nervously to see whether the sound had woken Sebastian, and when half a minute had ticked past without incident, he bent to pick the object up.

  His ring. There was little enough light in the room, but the battered gold shone. The atoms were heavy, and the miniscule vibrations between them were slow, but he was still very much aware of the echoes coded within them, the faint imprint of Kate.

  He could not remember taking it off, would never have taken it off without a safe place to put it, would never have risked losing it. But at the same time, it had been so many years since he had worn it, so many years getting used to it not being on his finger, the only possibility was that it had slipped off without him noticing. He could not remember when, exactly, but there was quite a lot he still could not remember, like grappling with an angry horse that probably would have trampled him if Sebastian had not been near.

  Sebastian, who saw a ring fall and picked it up to return it later? Or who noticed a ring missing and went back to find it?

  Lenny put the ring back on and climbed into bed, troubled. He did not intend to sleep, but he was drawn down anyway, into a dream of running away from something inside his own head.

  * * *

  THE WOMAN WITH the cleft forehead and the mismatched eyes was in his head. He could feel Her and Her hate for him. And because he was part of her now, he hated himself, too.

  It was only a dream, Sebastian’s dream, but it felt so real. Lenny struggled to get out, to wake up.

  She steered him like a puppet up a long, winding road. Not like a puppet. What Sebastian had done to him was like puppeteering. What She had done to Sebastian was steadier, more natural. He was part of Her. She guided him as easily as She guided Her own body, and he had no choice but to go. The sensation was familiar to Lenny. He had been part of someone, once, but that had been something sacred and beautiful. This was a horror.

  At the end of the road was a house, something between a mansion and a castle. She sent him spidering up the wall, fingertips finding purchase in the tiny crevices between the stones. Because She wanted him to hurt, She let him keep his mind while She controlled the rest of him, let him fight futilely until he had exhausted himself.

  Still he climbed. Above him was a lighted window, and he knew who sat on the other side of the heavy oaken shutters. The man in there was cruel, but he was family, and he did not deserve what She had planned for him.

  Maybe he wouldn’t be able. Maybe She couldn’t make him do it. He had fought her before and failed, but the man inside was family, a brother. The blood they shared was truer than the blood She had stolen. If anything could protect him…

  He rapped once on the shutter and heard movement from within. “Iaceo,” he called. “It’s cold out here. Let me in.” He would have bitten his tongue off if he could, anything to stop talking, anything to keep his brother inside and safe. He could feel Her grin, horrible and gaping.

  But the shutter flew open and he seized the hand that emerged, pulling the man out beyond the threshold, and together they fell.

  Lenny choked on the memory of death and wrenched himself out of the dream.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, Sebastian was gone, and he stayed gone until late in the evening. Lenny watched the local news, grateful for every second the traffic report did not switch over to a sudden ghastly murder.

  “You’re still here,” Sebastian observed with a touch of surprise when he strode back through the door, camera on a strap around his neck.

  “I t-told you I wasn’t g-going anywhere.”

  “Yeah. Guess you did, didn’t you?”

  “Thanks for finding my ring.”

  “Oh, you saw it there? Good.” He stood there waiting, but Lenny did not know what else he was supposed to say, and Sebastian joined him watching the news.

  The next day was the same, as were the ones that followed. Sebastian left. Lenny watched television. Sebastian came back. They sat in silence until one or the other decided to go to sleep. Lenny slipped out once and discovered that there were whitetail deer deep inside the city limits, living between the live oaks as though they owned the place. He also discovered that deer hooves are smaller and sharper than horse hooves, but he was back in the motel room before nightfall.

  A week passed that way, until Sebastian came back with a big manila envelope and a red Marks-A-Lot and showed Lenny the photos he’d had developed.

  In most of them, there was no sign of Daniel Leland, but in a few, there were strange, elongated blurs that Lenny thought might have been the result of a vampire in the shot. There were three other people in evidence. One of them was a young man with white-blond hair, impossibly fresh looking. It had to have been his first year teaching, because there was no way he was much older than twenty. In fact, with his awkward, gawky frame and peach-fuzz face, he could easily have been taken for a teenager, if not for the school ID on a lanyard around his neck. The second was a lovely woman with olive skin and tilted eyes, broad around the middle and round in the cheeks, who wore her collar standing up instead of lying flat and obviously knew very well that she looked fantastic. The third was not a teacher, Lenny thought. Maybe the receptionist. She had the sharp, penetrating gaze of someone long used to deciding which visitors were to be granted admission, and which deserved a discreet call to the police. Despite the season, she wore an expertly hand-knitted Fair Isle sweater.

  Sebastian scratched a thick, scarlet X over the receptionist’s face.

  “I’ll put ‘em in his mailbox,” he said. “One a day for, oh, maybe a week. Write on the last one for him to meet us… Where do you think? Somewhere out of the way.”

  “I d-dunno,” Lenny said. “Don’t know San Antonio real w-well.” Another week sitting in one place. If anyone was coming, two weeks should be plenty of time for them to catch up. No one
came.

  The next morning, Sebastian slept in and left only when he was reasonably certain that Daniel Leland would be at work. Lenny turned on the news, as had become his habit, but Sebastian was back within an hour, grinning like mad.

  “Wish I could stick around to see his face,” he crowed. “Damn, I wish I could. Don’t want the bastard to shoot me, though. I bet he would. Sort of twitchy.” He pulled a paperback western out of his back pocket and sat down to read.

  He left to deliver another photograph the following day, then another and another. Lenny watched him get more and more excited, almost frantic by the time he scrawled the message on the back of the last photograph, inch-high letters in blood-red marker.

  PARKING LOT AT THE ALAMO DOME, he wrote. MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE.

  He held it up for Lenny to admire and then vanished. When he came back, he was flushed and breathing hard. “This is going to be good,” he muttered to himself, over and over. “This is going to be good. This is going to be good.”

  Lenny stayed as far back as the walls would allow and finally lay down and pretended to be asleep, even when he felt Sebastian’s hand on his waist.

  They were in the parking lot a half hour before midnight. The lots were closed, so they left the car and walked. Lenny had wanted to stay behind. He wanted to stay in the motel room, but was not allowed. He wanted to stay in the car, but was not allowed. So he stood beside Sebastian in the gray-orange light of a city at night and chewed his thumbnail down to the quick. It hurt. Everything hurt.

  Twenty minutes. Somewhere nearby, sirens screamed toward them, passed, and dopplered into silence. A breeze picked up.

  Sebastian had not seemed to take into account that a man so comfortable with a pistol might be equally comfortable with a rifle, and not even Sebastian could be quick enough to dodge a bullet travelling more than twice the speed of sound. Still, Lenny chose to watch the darkness for Zeb or even Itzli – it wouldn’t be Kim; he could feel her half a hemisphere away, far beyond San Antonio – rather than scanning the skyline for a sniper. He watched for ghosts. He halfheartedly watched for Daniel Leland’s lanky form to come striding out of the night. He watched for bats, for vagrants, for cops, but he did not look at Sebastian. He fingered his ring and felt out Kate’s echo, focusing on it until he could halfway see a watery shade, golden-beautiful, superimposed over his vision, but he did not look at Sebastian.

  Ten minutes. Sebastian stood like a rock, utterly motionless, not even breathing. The breeze ruffled his hair and flapped the tails of the black blazer he had picked up somewhere, but he did not shift, did not flex, only stood. Perhaps he was listening.

  Five minutes. Lenny fidgeted. He pulled his sleeves down to cover his hands and wished there was some other piece of clothing he could pull up to cover his face. He felt exposed. There was no one around, but he felt as though everyone in the world could see his scars. They had actually begun to fade, but fresh punctures crowned the collection, and they burned. He tucked his chin to his chest and watched his shoes.

  Three minutes. Sebastian moved. He tapped out the seconds with his toe. Slow, steady pace. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four.

  One minute. Please, somebody. I’m here, I’m waiting. Please, Kim, send somebody. Please, Daniel, figure it out, know I’m trapped, come help me. Please, God, Kim, someone. Kate…The memory was nearby, the pattern he knew well, sealed forever in ectoplasm, but it was only an echo, not a ghost, not really Kate, and there was nothing it could do. He pleaded with it anyway, touched on the Veil and tried to will some mass into the image, make it into something that could touch, that could take him away, but that’s not what a medium does. The power slipped away from him.

  Sebastian leaned forward eagerly on the balls of his feet. “Come on, come on.”

  Midnight.

  * * *

  KIM HAD COPIED, cross-referenced, collected, and collated. Research was her strength. She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.

  She was aware that Zeb and Coyote had been hanging around, though neither had been allowed near her. That made sense, really. Coyote was one of the few people who could verify, beyond any doubt, that no one was tampering with Kim’s mind, but Cynthia Reed, for personal reasons, was dead-set against believing anything Deaf Coyote ever said. Kim suspected that the animosity had its roots in the tattoo Coyote had removed from his arm and possibly in the fact that the United States Postal Service was certain that his name was actually Norman Goldfarb. It didn’t matter much to Kim either way; she was very much accustomed to people’s strange quirks. This time, though, it was getting in her way.

  She made a few unsubtle attempts to find out where the men had been staying, but was diverted every time. She asked more directly whether any of Edith and Tony’s gang were with them, and was laughed at. The undead actually inside the compound? Don’t be ridiculous.

  No one talked to her about what was going on outside. No one talked to her about Lenny or Duran. But she did hear whispering.

  “Something’s wrong. It should have worn off by now, without a new command for so long.”

  “Unless there’s nothing to wear off. She keeps insisting the leech isn’t compelling her, that he’s different… some sort of subspecies.”

  “But she just keeps reading. She’s determined to prove that she’s acting autonomously, but she’s still trying to get back to him. He must be summoning her somehow.”

  “It’s not natural. He must be immensely powerful.”

  That had made her laugh, but then it made her wonder. She could not believe that Lenny would ever force his will on someone intentionally, not after what he had been through, but it could be unintentional, the same way he had broadcast his feelings into her head or let her know when he needed comfort. He was living a nightmare, tied to a monster without hope of escape, and the person who had promised to keep him safe had not come to rescue him. He had more than enough motivation.

  And it didn’t matter, she decided, because if he was pulling on her, it was only to do something she would have done anyway. Kimberly Michelle Reed did not abandon her friends.

  Her stack of notes slowly grew into a compelling case, and when she was done, she went looking for someone in charge. Bea was the one tailing her again, and the older woman had some trouble keeping up.

  “Who exactly are you looking for?” Bea puffed. She was a thin woman, but horribly out of shape.

  “Mom, preferably.”

  “Oh. But your grandpa’s back. If you need, ah, arbitration, you should probably go see him first.”

  Kim froze. It wasn’t that her grandfather scared her. Jeremiah Reed was a fair man. He was honorable and affectionate. He was even open-minded, provided the issue was to do with human beings. There were photos – and he had been an old man even then – of him marching in civil rights demonstrations, back when brown people were still strung up from trees for that kind of heresy. But where Cynthia Reed was cautious around anything Other, her father was militant.

  Kim’s mind churned. There were laws, her grandpa often said, which were the only thing standing in the way of chaos. It was hard enough to regulate North America’s wizards, and harder still to negotiate a reasonable agreement with the Other, one that somehow managed to protect his family, protect the wizards, protect the mundanes, and still be enforceable. Once the delicate balance was struck, no exceptions could be made. The system in place was the only thing that kept the world from exploding into magical conflict. It had never been and would never be feasible to forbid vampires from attacking or even killing humans, but wizards were off-limits, and the Reed family doubly so. Kim had been horrified when she had first heard that. She had called her grandfather a racist. She had pointed to his old photos and called him a hypocrite. He had sat her down and explained, as carefully as he could, that it had nothing to do with superiority. It was a practical matter, and sometimes practicality was cruel. A human would fight back and die. A wizard would fight back and the fallo
ut could be catastrophic. Bystanders could be hurt. A dying wizard, slinging magic around without means to control it, could level a small town. It had happened before. There could be no exceptions.

  Lenny had attacked a Reed. Not of his own volition, and Kim would make sure everyone knew that there had been no intent to cause harm, but it might only make the difference between a death sentence and a very, very long imprisonment, and that assumed that someone – anyone – believed that he would not take advantage of the foothold he had in Kim’s mind.

  Kim half-turned, biting her lip. It might almost be better if she went quietly back to her room and hoped everyone forgot why she was there. But a militant was better than a sadist, and Lenny was trapped already. If he was trapped nearby, she could at least make sure he was comfortable, adequately fed, and not abused. That would be better. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes.

  Bea patted her niece’s shoulder awkwardly. “I’m just following you, Kimmy,” she said. “Take your time.”

  Kim took her time. All the research she had gathered had been selected with her mother in mind. Her grandfather was an entirely different ball of wax. To convince Cynthia, Kim had set out to prove that the Uszkodzone were real, that there were documented instances of the undead acting with human conscience. She had no way to prove that Lenny was one of them, in fact wasn’t even certain that he was, but it was a starting place. Convincing Jeremiah would require a more legal angle. He wouldn’t care if Lenny was undead, uszkodzony, or the adopted son of the Easter Bunny; the law was the law, and there could be no exceptions.

  She debated, dithered, and finally kept walking. Trying and failing would be terrible, but not trying at all would be worse.

  Jeremiah Reed spent most of his time at home in his study, the only room in the top storey of the largest and oldest house in the compound, the one Salem Reed had built when he immigrated to the Americas. Let’s see, that would have been… 1859? Kim knew the founder of her Circle had left India in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny and had brought his Bengali wife, Ashapoorna, and their fifteen children with him. In fact, Jeremiah was the eldest of those fifteen. The house reflected Ashapoorna’s style much more than it did Salem’s, and Ashapoorna had fallen in love with the Georgian homes of New England. Salem, the English Indophile, had insisted on arched doorways and bright colors inside, but from the outside, the house may as well have belonged to one of America’s Founding Fathers.