Someone was covering their tracks, and doing a very good job of it.
That was more than could be said for the approaching mortal. He’d left the path and was nearly at the clearing. Why was a mortal on this part of the mountainside at this time of night? Criminal returning to the scene of the crime, she hoped. Some other part of the ritual yet to be performed?
Char moved away from the body but kept it in view while she waited for the man to come into the clearing. His mental signature was rather overwhelmingly strong, actually. If he was the killer, he wasn’t using magic to disguise his presence at the moment. But if he wasn’t the killer, how did he know where to find the body?
“Why am I here?” Haven complained as he reached the place where some weird, unwanted premonition had brought him. He tucked the shotgun under one arm and took a small flashlight out of his coat pocket. He began a slow sweep of the clearing with the light.
His intuition told him he was in the right place.
“I’m full of it,” he muttered. He hoped.
He hoped he was wrong, that he was delusional. Not so much because he hated finding an innocent woman’s body, even if he told himself he didn’t care about the fate of innocent women. He just didn’t like what it said about him if it turned out the dream was real. Or what it said about the situation. He was in town to find an FBI agent’s missing kid, not to get involved with the usual supernatural crap.
As much as he hated being blackmailed into tracking down Danny Novak, he’d been thinking of the missing person job as a sort of vacation. He’d been way too intense in his hunt for vampires lately, and he knew it. He was thinking too much. Analyzing. He’d even started reading books and making notes. Who needed that kind of bullshit?
If the woman was here, he thought as he quartered the ground with the thin beam of light, they had the usual sort of ball game on their hands. If she wasn’t here, he was just crazy, and he could live with that.
Char kept very still in her spot on the far side of the clearing as the flashlight beam moved systematically across the ground. Light danced off the twining tendrils of fog, turning them briefly into silver ribbons, then moved on.
Either the man didn’t remember where he’d dumped the body, she reasoned, or he wasn’t the one who’d done the dumping. He muttered under his breath as he searched, obviously not afraid of being overheard. Interesting, she thought, and rubbed her jaw. If he wasn’t the murderer, who was he? How’d he get here? Why?
Then the flashlight stopped by the spot where she’d been standing not long before, and a deep, gruff voice growled, “Shit.”
He moved to stand over the corpse, shining the light directly down on the sprawled body. The light clearly showed what Char already knew: that the woman’s heart was missing, as was much of her skull.
“What the fuck is this?” the rough-voiced man asked.
Good question. It finally occurred to Char that she was fully equipped to ask this intruder anything she wanted and make him answer. She was, after all, an Enforcer.
He, on the other hand, had a shotgun. And almost superhuman reflexes. He dropped the flashlight, brought up the double-barreled weapon, and fired it the instant she moved.
It was steel shot, she noted as the blast hit her. Then the pain drove out thought, and she got angry.
He fired a second time.
A snarling wolf charged out of the darkness from under the trees while the roar of the shotgun blasts still echoed in the clearing. Upright on two feet. Wearing a raincoat.
Haven was not prepared to confront a werewolf. He had no time to reload. He turned and ran for the Jeep.
Char reached for him, claws and fangs at full extension, as he spun away from her. She would have ripped his spinal cord out of his back, too, if she hadn’t forgotten about the body and tripped over it. She landed hard on her knees in the wet undergrowth and caught herself on her hands as she pitched forward. She gave a frustrated howl and dug her claws deep into the soft earth.
Her forehead hit the ground and stayed there while the healing pain burned in her middle. It rolled over and through her and kept her down long enough for her to get her temper under control. At some point she heard the sound of a car engine in the distance. Her attacker getting away. A part of her wanted to get up and chase after him, to rip off the driver’s-side door of his vehicle, pull him out onto the ground, let him take a good look into the face of death, and then have him for dinner.
But such behavior was exactly the sort of thing she most disapproved of in other strigoi, and she wouldn’t let herself give in to the urge.
“Maybe he would be delicious,” Char mumbled as she got to her feet. “But it wouldn’t be a very nice.”
He shot me! A nagging voice in the back of her head reminded her. But I frightened him first, she answered that voice. He probably thought she was the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. But he hurt her, and she still wanted to kill him. Char sighed.
She stood very still and looked up at clouds scudding across the moon for a while, turning herself back into human in physical as well as philosophical ways. When she was as normal as it was possible for one of her kind to be, she checked the damage. Her sweatshirt was bloody and torn, but her open raincoat hadn’t suffered any damage. The numerous ragged wounds from the shotgun blast ached, but they were already raw and tender scars rather than open entry wounds. The internal damage was fixed as well, though she supposed she’d be spitting out steel shot for a few days.
“Better than lead,” she muttered.
She was tired now, too tired to follow her attacker, too weak from healing her own injuries to finish psychically probing for murder clues. All in all, the evening was a bust, and Daniel was no closer to being found. And it wasn’t getting any earlier. It was time to head back to Jimmy’s.
She did wonder, as she started back down the mountain, what sort of person really fired first and asked questions later.
Chapter 7
“HE WON’T EAT. It’s a perfectly good heart. Why won’t he eat it?”
“If he won’t, I will,” the Demon answered the Prophet’s petulant question. “I like hearts.”
“You most certainly will not take the Angel’s heart.”
“He doesn’t want it.”
“Cannibal.”
“Can’t be a cannibal if you don’t eat your own kind,” the Demon countered. “Never been human . . . not like some people.”
The Prophet, of course, rose to this insult and the pair of them kept bickering loudly over in one corner of the room. The Disciple hugged himself tightly, hunched up his thin shoulders, and tried not to listen. He knew the outcome of the argument anyway. He stared at the beautiful creature on the bed and fought to keep from reaching out and touching the marble-smooth flesh he adored.
He was worried about the Angel. Anyone who really looked at the beautiful, perfect angel-boy could tell there was something wrong. The Angel gave and gave of himself, sharing his blood and seed night after night. He bestowed love and immortality, but the Disciple knew the Angel wasn’t getting what He needed. They all worshiped him, but no one loved him.
I love you. He whispered the words deep inside his mind, but the Disciple felt an answering touch in his soul. He was sure that the sleeping Angel heard.
“Your so-called magic taints the meat. That’s the problem.”
“So-called! Need I remind you what my magic has accomplished so far? We wouldn’t have the Angel if it weren’t for me. And without the Angel—”
“Your magic wears off. Someone’s going to come looking for the little bastard. We have to hurry.”
“Of course it won’t wear off. Where’d you hear such nonsense?”
“Demons know about these things.”
“You’re just showing off. No one’s looking for him. And we are proceeding the way the ritual prescribes. I can’t perform the final ritual until Blessing Night. You have to wait until then.”
“There should be a death every ni
ght. I know the rituals, too.”
“Let me give the Angel a new death,” the Vessel said. “I will bring him a heart like no other. The new heart will give him what he needs. I’ll place it before him, and he’ll smile upon me.”
The Demon was sneering. The Prophet sounded petulant. The Disciple paid very little attention until the Vessel spoke up. He turned jealously toward the Vessel.
“This is your fault!” The Demon’s claws grasped him by the shoulders before the Disciple could speak. The Demon shook him hard. “All your fault! You brought us the wrong sacrifice, didn’t you? Maybe I should eat your brain. Or let the Angel take your heart.”
The Angel already had his heart, but not to eat. The Disciple knew the Angel would not take him that way. They were lovers now. He had taken nothing but the Angel’s blood for months. It burned in him, purified him. He was not ready yet. There was much burning left to endure, but he was certain he would not be merely the lowly Disciple forever. The Prophet and the Demon would not control the fate of the Angel forever. The Disciple would save him.
But until then . . .
“I brought the strongest one I could find for the last sacrifice,” he told them with his usual humility. “I did the best I could.”
“Leave him alone. He did what we told him to do,” the Prophet told the Demon. “Maybe that is the problem, she was too strong,” the Prophet added. He ran thick fingers through his beard. It was his way of showing he was thinking deep thoughts. “Perhaps too strong for the link between the Vessel, the Angel, and myself.”
The demon released him. The Disciple was dizzy and aching. He scurried backward, away from the Angel and toward the sanctuary door. “Shall I find another for the Vessel to kill?”
“Yes!” the Demon shouted. He waved his scaly arms excitedly. “Go. Now.”
The Disciple looked to the Prophet, who continued thinking his deep thoughts but nodded eventually. “Yes,” he said. “Take the Vessel with you, and find us a less toxic sacrifice this time.”
There was a hole in the city. Char could see the blank spot in her memory of the landscape when she woke. Then she opened her eyes, and the details faded too quickly as her mind adjusted to being back in the solid world. The point of attempting to dream walk last day had been to find the man who’d shot her. No luck there. No mental trail or trace came to her, either from the man with the shotgun or the dissipated spirit of the murder victim. She found something when she turned her attention to the city, but now she wasn’t sure what it was. All she had was the memory of being thrilled and frightened at some discovery.
The memory of having found something dire didn’t do her much good. Dire was supposed to be SOP for a vampire cop. Or so Marguerite had assured her when she’d taken Char through the change. This was Char’s first exposure to dire, and it left her more confused than energized for the hunt.
She got out of bed, frustrated and grumpy, and went to take a shower. She saw no evidence left of last night’s attack when she checked her naked skin under the hot flow of water. The shower helped wake her up, but fully waking up also made the almost-memories more distant and dreamlike.
She got dressed slowly in wrinkled clothes out of her suitcase and thought about what to do with the night. She needed to find Daniel. She wanted to find her attacker. She wondered about the dead woman and whether the murder, the attacker, and the young vampire were connected. Probably. There didn’t tend to be a lot of coincidences when you dealt with magic.
“Magic.” There was that word again. “Psychic,” she said. “I meant to say psychic.” They were not the same thing, which she knew very well. Then why had she said one when she meant the other? “Because I had a bad day’s sleep and I’m spitting out shotgun shot like they’re hairballs and I’m staying in my old lover’s place in a bed that’s way too big and empty and if I don’t stop talking to myself somebody is going to get the bright idea to put me away and get themselves killed for their trouble!”
Char stopped talking long enough to breathe, then put her hand over her mouth to keep from continuing to rave out her vehemence at the world in general and last twenty-four hours in particular. “Forty-eight,” she corrected. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and admitted, “Actually, it’s been a bad week. Maybe I should have gone to Tucson instead of coming home for the holidays.”
Holidays? That’s right, it was Thanksgiving night, wasn’t it? She’d formed some vague notion about going out for a meal while she was in the shower, but she doubted there would be many places open this time of night. At least anywhere she’d want to eat. She could have been spending a pleasant evening with Marguerite’s nest, but here she was, alone as usual, and she’d probably be eating at a Denny’s.
And why was she feeling sorry for herself while a woman who hadn’t deserved to die was rotting up on a mountainside, with her family and friends worried sick and not having a cheerful holiday at all? And Helene Bourbon’s vampire family was missing a young member and feeling the absence. Char had nothing to feel sorry about and was ashamed of herself as soon as she realized it.
She was an Enforcer. Her job was to enforce! Serve. Protect.
But she wasn’t supposed to get shot at by mortals. She wasn’t supposed to get shot at all. And she certainly shouldn’t have let the man who’d shot her live after he’d seen her transformed into a Nighthawk. She’d seen herself in a mirror the night of her Nighthawk birth—that was part of the ritual—and it was not a pretty sight. She’d been informed there was a fierce beauty in the fanged muzzle and hideous claws that marked her as a killer of vampires, but she didn’t agree. There was elegance and sensuality in the physical changes a vampire made to share blood with a mortal lover. There was a dangerous, predatory glamour about a hunting vampire. But Nighthawks were downright ugly. Fearsome, monstrous, they didn’t bear any resemblance to vampires.
Jimmy Bluecorn had once told her that he didn’t think Enforcers were vampires anymore at all but monsters that fed on monsters. The hypocritical part was that Jimmy, who was so honest about most things, never told her he was a carrier of the Nighthawk mutation. Char knew that she was not the only one of his children that had been reborn into a thing that her beloved Jimmy feared. Nor was blaming him for what she was fair to Jimmy. Not all his children were freaks.
There she was, feeling sorry for herself again. “What’s the matter with me tonight?” Maybe it was the daymare still bugging her. She loved this city, and in the dream she’d searched and searched and found emptiness, streets that faded away, holes where she remembered buildings. She assumed that the violent way the area had been cleared of strigoi might account for the psychic emptiness.
“They deserved it,” she added. One could encounter the aftermath and be sad, but the reasons had been sound.
Now she needed to be out on the street instead of staying home and thinking about the past. She knew full well that the older a vampire got, the harder it was to live in the present. But she hadn’t been a vampire that long, and an Enforcer for hardly any time at all.
Char went out on the balcony, coughed, spat, and heard another piece of steel shot splash into a puddle below. She shook her head. “If I ever find the man who—” She closed her fist around the balcony railing and let her claws come out.
What she needed to do was find Daniel and get out of this haunted town. With no solid clues to rely on and no better way to spend Thanksgiving, she decided to follow the path taken by her dream self during the day and have a look around the heart of the city. The place would be dead on a holiday evening, she reasoned. Dead of night in a dead town: what better time for a vampire to have a look around.
“Irony, someone told me,” she murmured as she went inside for her purse and car keys. “It’s your strongest weapon. Use it wisely.”
He was not quite drunk. Haven never got drunk, though he sometimes let himself get close. This was one of those times. There was a bottle beside him on the seat of the Jeep, his shotgun under the seat, an arsenal
in a locked case in the back and a voice in his head riding him mercilessly as he drove the streets, looking for the creature he was going to kill.
He thought that if he took a few more drinks, the voice would go away. But if he took those drinks, he’d lose his edge, and the voice that told him he was a coward would still be there when he sobered up.
You panicked. You ran. Coward.
“Did you see that thing?” Haven was looking at the reflection of his own eyes in the rearview mirror when he asked the question. He reached for the bottle, then thought better of it.
The anger inside him raged on as a stoplight changed from red to green. Haven drove the Jeep too fast as usual down the steep street. Used to driving rugged mountain roads, he didn’t pay much attention to Seattle’s civilized streets. He did notice the lack of traffic on a Thursday evening and put it down to good luck, for once. He’d gotten a call from Santini. He was on his way to meet him. He hoped the biker had some action lined up for them, because Haven really needed to kill something, preferably supernatural, if only to shut up his own carping inner demon.
He wasn’t a coward. He’d shot the thing, and it still kept coming. He’d never seen anything like it before. He thought it had come to the clearing to feed on the dead woman and figured him for fresh meat. There had been no use hanging around waiting to get torn to shreds when you could live to fight another day.
That made a lot of sense, but it didn’t stop Haven from calling himself a coward. He was glad Santini had telephoned him. Haven needed someone to talk to. That wasn’t easy for him to admit. He always firmly maintained that he didn’t need human contact, but after what he’d seen in the woods . . .
Laws of the Blood 2: Partners Page 6
