Pray for Dawn

by Jocelynn Drake

  With considerable effort, I turned my head to look at the corpse’s back. Near the shoulders were a set of four circular bruises marring her white skin like fingerprints. Someone had held her still, or held her down.

  “Can you date the bruises?” I demanded, carefully laying the body back down.

  “I’d say same night as her death,” Archie replied.

  “Backdate the bruises in your report by a couple of days,” Mira said with a slight shake of her head. “It will look like she had a fight with her boyfriend.”

  “Mira….” He sighed.

  “We can do this,” Mira said, her voice firm and strong. She was back to exuding her usual confidence, taking control of the situation. “Backdate the bruises. Put down she was killed by a large dog. It’ll be another five weeks before the blood test comes back and the report is ready, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I doubt anything will show up, but if it does, fudge the report. I don’t want anything showing up in her blood but a couple shots of tequila at most.”

  “What about the police? They won’t believe—”

  “I’ll take care of the police. We’ve got to give the press and this girl’s parents something nice and neat to cling to before this mess gets any nastier.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Now get out of here,” she commanded. Her tone hardened to the same consistency as granite and the room grew colder, as if the air conditioner had been kicked into high.

  “But—”

  “Get out,” she bit out through clenched teeth, her hands gripping the edge of the table. I stood still, the palm of my right hand itching slightly from the overwhelming desire to grab one of my knives. “Go take the elevator up to your office. Check your e-mail. Talk to the guard for five minutes and then leave. We’ll be gone before you reach your car.”

  Wisely, Archie just nodded and slipped around the table. His sharp, clipped footsteps echoed through the silent room as he beat a hasty retreat. Mira waited until the double doors were once again closed before she released her hold on the table and walked around to stand where the coroner had been moments before.

  Leaning close to what remained of Abigail’s neck, she took a deep breath through her nose. I could only guess she was checking to see if she could pick up the same scent she got a hint of at the apartment. The vampire suddenly lurched away, taking a few stumbling steps deeper into the room, hunched over and gagging. I froze. I had never seen a vampire gag on anything, especially the scent of a decaying body. I honestly didn’t think anything bothered them. Mira finally dropped to her knees, with one hand pressed to the cool floor while the other was pressed to her chest. A fresh round of dry heaves wracked her thin frame, keeping her partially doubled over.

  “Mira?”

  “I’m okay,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and rough. She held up one hand, warding me off. After another minute, her whole body stilled, her eyes closed in a look of peace. Whatever it was, it had finally passed.

  “How’s your sense of smell?” she asked, slowly pushing off the floor. I was surprised that she didn’t use her power like usual to lift herself to her feet, but the nightwalker had been acting strangely since I first saw her at the hotel. Why should this be any different?

  “Human,” I replied. I had the same sense of smell as a normal human being. Being part bori enhanced only a few aspects of my life.

  “Figures,” she grumbled, walking back over to the corpse.

  “What happened?”

  “I’ve never smelled anything like that before,” she said. Her upper lip curled in disgust. She was now keeping a bit of a distance from the body, as if trying to keep from getting another whiff of whatever she had smelled. “It’s worse than rotting meat left in the noonday sun. It’s more than just the smell of death. And it’s not coming from her. It’s whatever attacked her.”

  “The same as what you smelled in the apartment?”

  “Maybe…” she said slowly, her eyes narrowing on the girl’s throat. “It was just so faint…I don’t know.”

  “Does that rule out vampires then?”

  A frown tugged at Mira’s full lips and creased her brow. For a second, she looked very sad and weighed down by her thoughts. “Unfortunately, no.” The two lonely words were a faint whisper as they tripped from her lips to me. I think she had come here confident that she would find her answers, but ended up with only more questions.

  “We have to go,” I reminded her.

  “Just a minute,” she said, picking up Abigail’s left arm. She turned it, looking at the inside of the bend in her arm. Mira then reached across the body and picked up the right arm, inspecting the interior of the arm. “Look,” she said, running her thumb across a pair of faint white scars. Vampire bites.

  “I thought you preferred the neck,” I said.

  “Her owner would have. It’s the first place we look to see if the human has been tagged,” Mira said, putting the arm down and turning her attention back to the side of the girl’s neck that was untouched. “Someone not her owner must have taken a nibble. Look. Here’s another set.”

  I walked around the table so that I could see the girl’s neck more clearly. There was another set of bite marks on her neck. These looked like they were a week or two old at most, compared to the set on her arm. “So she was bitten on the arm weeks or even a month ago, and her owner bit her a week or so ago. Two vampires fighting over the same piece of flesh. One decides to kill her so the other can’t have her?”

  “Part of that is probably right. The neck wound is only two weeks old and was probably made by her owner, but the wound on her arm is only a few nights old,” Mira began. She lifted up the girl’s arm to the light so that I could clearly see the two marks left by vampire fangs. “The nightwalker tried to heal it but didn’t finish, or botched the job. The wound is closed, but the bruising is still there. For such an aged-looking scar, there shouldn’t be any bruising.”

  “So who are the two vampires?” I inquired.

  Mira leaned close to the girl’s arm. I didn’t even see her take in a breath. She jerked back with a hiss, dropping Abigail’s arm back to the operating table. “We have to go,” she said, her words sharp and crisp as she quickly walked around the table.

  “What?” I demanded, jogging after her. “Who is it? What about the neck wound?”

  Throwing open the double doors, Mira hurried down the hall to the staircase. “I’ll never pick up the scent of the other vampire over the scent coming off the neck wound. It doesn’t matter. I know how to get the information.”

  I followed after her as we silently climbed the stairs and slipped out the back door into the parking lot. Things were exactly as we left them. Mira’s BMW sat all sleek and black next to the white Lexus under the single parking-lot lamp. The Chevy Nova hunkered in one of the far corners, hoping to go unnoticed.

  The second her feet hit the blacktop of the parking lot, a wave of power exploded from Mira. The tidal wave swept out from her body, washing over the city. I nearly stumbled under its unexpected weight. She was searching the city for her prey. And I had no doubt that whoever the culprit was, he or she knew we were coming.

  FOURTEEN

  Anger radiated off the nightwalker as her hand slid along the steering wheel. Mira remained silent, as if words couldn’t squeeze between her clenched teeth. The air in the car had chilled to the point where I expected to see my breath fog if I sighed. Yet this cold would not be cut by a blast of warm air from the heater. She had erected a barrier around her thoughts, keeping me out. But I didn’t need to be in her mind to know that whoever had been involved with Abigail Bradford was toast, literally.

  We had returned to the historic district of the city, quickly stopping at a lonely square near the edge. I had expected us to return to the club district of River Street, where most nightwalkers were known to congregate while in the process of hunting down their prey. Mira whipped the sleek, black BMW into an open parking spot on the stre
et and was out of the car before the engine was completely shut off.

  In the far corner of the square rose an ornate gazebo. Constructed of stone, the architecture had an Old World feel to it, with its odd bits of ironwork. In one of the windows looking out at the small fountain in the center of the square sat a vampire.

  The air was silent except for the crunch of stray gravel beneath our feet. I followed behind her, a knife tightly gripped in my right hand as I searched the area for other vampires. There were a few lurking about a mile off, but after Mira’s brief display of power at the morgue, I doubted any other vampire was going to risk coming close enough to catch her attention.

  I reached the gazebo just a couple seconds behind Mira, who was now standing in the center of the structure. My heart lurched in my chest as my eyes settled on the creature resting on the ledge of the gazebo and I fought the urge to scan the park again for another vampire. I couldn’t stop from blinking twice, convinced that my eyes were lying to me in the darkness.

  “How is it that I find you involved in this?” Mira snarled. The heavy shadows within the gazebo hugged her body, making her little more than a threatening voice in the cool winter night.

  Tristan sat with his back against one of the columns that formed the window. His right leg was bent before him with his foot resting on the ledge and his right wrist balanced on his knee. His left leg hung limp in the air, swaying slightly. The vampire appeared relaxed, and he had yet to look directly at Mira. His gaze was straight ahead as if he was intently watching the fountain in the center of the square. “I didn’t kill her.” His normally soft voice held an underlying edge to it that I had never heard from him before, causing my muscles to clench defensively. It was a warning for Mira to back off.

  “Did you know who she was?” I asked. My deep voice broke between the two in an attempt to put a little distance between them before Mira set him on fire. There was still a good chance that he had some valuable information as to who Abigail Bradford was and with whom she associated. I would prefer to acquire that information before Mira finally lost her tenuous hold on her temper.

  “Yes,” he hissed. Tristan slowly turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, his pale blue eyes seeming to pick up the distant lamplight like a cat’s. “I had seen her around town during the past month. She was the daughter of a prominent official and a fan of our kind.”

  “Why didn’t you contact me immediately when it happened?” Mira snapped, her temper still bubbling to the top.

  The younger vampire’s icy gaze finally reached Mira’s face. “Contact you?” he repeated with a slight tilt of his head. “And how would I have done this? I reached for you, but as far as I could tell, you were as dead as Sadira.”

  “My cell ph—”

  “Cell phone!” he shrieked. In one fluid movement, he unfolded his body and poured to his feet before his mistress. “Call you like a common servant, like Charlotte or Gabriel? Contact you like a human would? You’re my mistress and yet I am to be without your presence.”

  To my surprise, Mira broke eye contact first, pacing away from him. “I’ll not have you mucking around in my mind at all hours.” She slowly circled to her right, moving with the grace of a panther edging closer for the kill. “I’m not Sadira.”

  Tristan moved as well, his hands out at his sides and open like a gunslinger waiting for the first opportunity to reach for his guns. The two vampires were sizing each other up. The younger vampire was greatly outmatched by Mira. Any scuffle between the two would prove to be brief, but even with the odds against him, it didn’t seem to be enough to deter Tristan from wanting her blood.

  “It’s more than that!” he shouted, his voice echoing across the empty park. “You’re not in my thoughts either. Since my arrival in your domain, you have not once dipped into my thoughts, not reached out to make your presence known.”

  “Forgive me. I didn’t realize you needed a babysitter,” she sneered, with a mocking bow. “More than a century of time has slipped before your eyes. You don’t need me there watching over you at all times.”

  Mira’s only warning was a low growl in the back of his throat. The younger vampire lunged at her, knocking her onto her back. He gripped her shoulders tightly, his legs straddling her slim hips. His shoulder-length hair fell like a curtain around his face, making it impossible to determine if he had bared his fangs to his mistress. As a reflex, I took a step forward, trying to decide how to best separate them without getting my own throat ripped open in the process.

  “This has nothing to do with you, hunter,” Mira said with a grunt, pushing Tristan off of her. The young vampire quickly rolled to his feet but remained squatted low, waiting for his mistress to attack. Mira remained seated on the ground, but she had pulled her feet up underneath her body so that she could quickly rise if she needed to.

  “It’s not about needing a caretaker,” Tristan began. His hands were clenched so tight into fists they trembled. “As I’m sure you remember, Sadira provided ample restriction. It’s about compassion. About having a familiar voice in the darkness.”

  “So when I was unavailable, you chose to pursue a girl that could make our lives unbearable? You know the rules. Avoid those that can’t disappear,” Mira argued, but I could feel the anger in her subsiding as her taut shoulders started to slump.

  “The girl was nothing. Just a meal. She belonged to others and was offered to me in a gesture of hospitality.” Tristan straightened, shoving both of his hands through his hair in a frustrated motion.

  Mira stood as well, a soft sigh escaping her parted lips. “I don’t know if I can be what you want, Tristan,” she whispered. “I’m your protector. That is all.”

  “This family might be just the four of us, but it is still a family. You neither seek nor give comfort when we both need it so much. Particularly now, when hunters wait for us to slip.” Tristan’s eyes lifted to settle on my face. Mira turned her head to look at me as well, her hair slipped like a waterfall off of her shoulder. I had thought they had forgotten I was even there, but now the spotlight had shifted to me.

  Standing in the thick darkness with two vampires was not a strange occurrence for me. What was strange was that now I felt like the outsider in a dark world I had inhabited for most of my life. I was the foreign creature that had invaded their domain. I didn’t like the feeling. Clenching my fist, I was surprised to discover that I was still holding my dagger. My eyes fell on the silver blade glinting in the distant lamplight. And maybe I was the only threat standing in that small, circular building. Neither had attacked me or even made a move toward me, and yet I stood ready to cut out the heart of the first creature to look my way.

  Mira walked over and wrapped her arms around Tristan’s shoulders, pulling his left shoulder against her sternum. “No,” Mira murmured with a shake of her head. Her left hand drifted across his face, her thumb grazing his cheek in a caress that drew his eyes from me to her face.

  “But he’s still a hunter,” Tristan said. I could barely make out his expression, but the words sounded like more of a question than a statement. I had a feeling that Mira had said something to him telepathically, but I didn’t pick it up.

  Leaning in, she pressed a gentle kiss to his temple. “Always.” The word had been so soft that it sounded like she had breathed it rather than whispered it. Her gaze returned to me, her glowing lavender eyes coldly weighing me. When she looked at me, I no longer had the feeling that she saw me as the enemy. Like she had said earlier, she saw me as one of them and was determined that I see myself the same way.

  “Enough,” I gruffly said, sliding the dagger back into its sheath. The conversation was starting to grow uncomfortable and it would only result in my grabbing a second dagger. “What about the girl?”

  “I don’t know much.” Tristan shrugged as Mira released her hold on him. “I stopped in the Dark Room more than a month ago. She was there with a group of others. They offered her and I accepted.”

  “What do you m
ean ‘offered her’?” I was already feeling on edge. After the confusion of the First Communion, then the apartment, the morgue, and now this scene, I was ready to call it a night and start fresh tomorrow. Exhaustion was starting to coil in my shoulders, causing the muscles to throb and ache. The night was still young, but I felt the need to sit down and think about what was happening instead of just getting sucked deeper into the chaos that was Mira’s existence.

  “Like a host offering you a bit of wine and cheese upon your arrival at their house,” Mira said lightly, as she strolled over to the far side of the gazebo. She turned and leaned her back against the ledge, crossing her left ankle over her right as she shoved her hands into her jean pockets. “The locals are curious about Tristan, I’m sure. They invited him over for a bit of light conversation. Sharing a pet is a polite gesture.”

  “And she came to you willingly?” I asked, tearing my eyes from Mira to Tristan.

  “Of course.”

  “But that wasn’t the last time you saw her,” Mira prompted. There was no thread of anger or threat in her voice. “The mark on her arm was from you, but it wasn’t a month old.”

  “Four nights ago,” he softly said. His eyes fell to his shoes as his right foot slid along the rough concrete. “I was passing through the club district. It was early and I hadn’t fed. She saw me. We talked for a while and she offered.” Tristan looked up, locking his wide eyes on Mira. “I tried to heal the wound, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  “Who did she belong to?” I demanded, taking a step into the gazebo.

  “Gregor. She was with Gregor’s group,” Tristan said. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked over to lean back against one of the window arches near Mira.

  “Gregor!” Mira cried, running one hand through her hair to push it back from her face. The nightwalker lurched to her feet, pacing toward me. “What possessed you to associate with that pack of mongrels?”

  “Mira…” I sighed.