Laws of the Blood 2: Partners

by Susan Sizemore

  “This is supposition,” she said, sipped, and put her cup down. “But my theory is that the sorcerer and the demon are on a quest for immortality. If you want immortality, you need a vampire. At least in every recipe for the stuff I’ve ever encountered.”

  His eyes narrowed with more than their usual suspicion, and his curiosity emissions went up by several thousand. Char could anticipate all his questions. She would even like to answer them. She so rarely had anyone to talk shop with. Never, actually. Istvan asked her for research, she hunted up the data for him, but all he wanted was extracted answers, not discussion. Istvan wasn’t much of a talker. Probably too many teeth.

  “You’re going to explain about immortality recipes, right?”

  She’d gone off on one of her mental digressions, hadn’t she? That’s what came of being a fount of knowledge with no one to spout off to. Well, here was the perfect audience, a captive one, so to speak.

  “Okay.” She rubbed her hands together. “Stop me if this gets boring.”

  “I doubt you could ever be boring.”

  She wondered what he meant by that and knew he did, too. They let it go, and she went on. “What I think we’re dealing with here is black magic.”

  “Satanists?”

  “More than likely they’re pulling an angel of light scam, using the young vampire they’ve captured to make slaves that serve their bidding. You think that vampires are bad enough on their own, but believe me, when you bring unscrupulous mortals into the picture, things can get much worse.”

  He nodded. “Add human greed to unnatural evil. That’s an easy complication to imagine. How does this scam work?”

  “The cult members get to have sex with the ‘angel,’ who drinks a bit of their blood, they drink a drop of his.” And she knew that there was at least one of the cult members who’d had enough of Daniel’s blood to develop a companion bond with the youngster. This was very bad for both Daniel and the companion, though she was sure neither of them knew this. She almost shuddered at the memory of the intense insanity of the thin creature that attacked her in Pioneer Square.

  Haven made a gagging noise. “Sex with a vampire?”

  Char refused to indulge in any indication of irony. “The blood connection ensures that the followers do their master’s bidding. Only in this case, it’s the sorcerer who tells the cult members what the master wants them to do. So we’ll probably have to go through the usual mob of rabid fanatics to get to the inner sanctum of this nut cult. Your shotgun will come in very handy, I’m afraid.”

  “How do you know I use a shotgun?”

  “I do very thorough research,” she said, countering his sudden suspicion. She glanced at the digital clock on the microwave. “And I really should explain what the bad guys are up to so we can hit the streets and continue looking for them.”

  “Good point. Go on.”

  “The spell the sorcerer is preparing is ancient and dangerous—”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “Yes. It sounds melodramatic, but the world you and I inhabit is. It’s fraught with dark and dire Gothic nonsense—that can get you killed and damned and cursed.”

  “Fraught.” He tapped a cigarette out of the pack, but rolled it between his fingers instead of lighting it. “That’s a good word. Fraught. That makes us the Fraught Squad.”

  She gave a low and throaty laugh. “Perhaps the reason the vast majority of the world remains oblivious of the supernatural is because it’s just too bloody embarrassing to pay attention to. Pretend paranormal stuff isn’t happening on the bus seat next to you, and you won’t have to cringe in response.”

  “I’d rather die with my eyes open.”

  “I’m sure you will, Mr. Haven.” She wished she hadn’t said that. She couldn’t look him in the face, but she found herself studying his large, capable hands as she went on. “The murders have a lot to do with what the sorcerer’s brewing. It’s not the vampire that’s committing the murders, by the way.”

  She heard his snort of disbelief. “Wrong. I’ve seen one of the bodies. Covered in fang marks. The kid’s mom has a collection of crime scene photos, too. That’s a vampire.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t having sex with the victims, but he isn’t the murderer. He can’t be if this spell is going to work. Magic is a form of energy. The sorcerer is trying to achieve immortality without going through the usual channels—”

  “Usual?”

  She wasn’t about to explain the process of becoming a strigoi to Haven. “Vampires are the only immortal beings I know of, and I’m not even sure vampires are really immortal. They can certainly be killed.”

  “No shit.”

  “Language, Mr. Haven.” She was smiling despite her prim attitude.

  “Fuck that.” When he picked up his coffee mug, he held his pinky out delicately. “Dainty enough, sweetheart?” She gave a gracious nod. “I can see where this sorcerer bastard’s coming from. Who wants to be a vampire?”

  Takes commitment and discipline. Also too many rules and regulations for this magic chanting loser and his pet demon, she thought. Char said, “Not this sorcerer or sorceress. He or she is planning to steal the vampire’s immortality by means of a spell—ritual black magic. The bad guy might be a woman, you know. Point is, he or she is ritually murdering psi-gifted people, using magic to drain the psychic energy from them and storing it to use in a ceremony that will transform him—”

  “Or her.”

  “—and the demon into immortal beings. At least that’s the theory. It’s almost impossible to make a spell like that work. Look what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah, for example.”

  Haven considered this comment for a pregnant moment, with his coffee mug half raised to his lips, then he put the mug down very slowly and said, “Let’s worry about Seattle right now.”

  Char got up, gathered empty dishes, rinsed them, and put them in the dishwasher. He stood as she turned back from the sink, wiping her hands on a towel. “Shall we hit the streets, Mr. Haven?”

  “Since when did we get to be a team?” he asked.

  “Since I still know more about how to counter the magic that’s being thrown at us than you do. I’ll get our coats,” she said without waiting for any more macho protests. “And we can be on our way.”

  Chapter 17

  VAMPIRES, HAVEN THOUGHT, slouched down in the passenger seat of Charlotte’s car. Ritual murders. Demons. Sorcerers. Cults. Ritual magic. Sodom and Gomorrah. No, he didn’t want to go there. “What about the werewolf?” he asked as Charlotte turned a sharp corner.

  Her gaze slid sideways to give him a quick look as she negotiated heavy traffic. Her eyes took on a bright glitter with the reflection from oncoming headlights. That was a reflection, right?

  “You’ve mentioned werewolves before, Mr. Haven, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He knew she was lying but let it go for now. He was always suspicious. Of everyone. No need to telegraph it to Charlotte McCairn. He was getting what he wanted out of her, in more ways than he’d thought he would. As long as she remained useful, he’d back off on some of her secrets. Everybody had secrets, maybe even more in their line of work than in his original profession.

  There was silence for a while as she negotiated narrow streets and sharply angled hills. The intermittent slap of the windshield wipers made the only sound. He found himself unprofessionally thinking about her great legs.

  Then she said, “Werewolves have fur, Mr. Haven. And are prisoners of the moon.”

  She was using her lecture tone, but he heard something else under the coolly spoken words. Like maybe he’d said something to offend her. She was a funny girl. Great legs, though. And ass.

  Thinking back to the night in the forest, he couldn’t remember if the creature’s muzzle had been covered in fur or not. His attention had been on that mouth full of hideous fangs. Maybe it hadn’t been a werewolf. Maybe he’d gotten a glimpse of that demon she’d been talking about.

>   “Demons wear raincoats?” he asked her.

  After a considerable silence she replied, “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Char didn’t like Haven’s silence. It was too considering, too much like there was intelligent thought going on inside his pretty head. She liked to think of him as being more cunning than bright, but that wasn’t particularly realistic of her, especially since she’d been tracking his progress as he moved out of pest control into areas that might make him a threat.

  She knew about his orders from some very specialized bookstores, the Internet searches, the interlibrary loans, and his growing correspondence with other psychic investigators. Most people who investigated the outer fringes of the underneath world were harmless cranks, some ended up tax-paying members of strigoi society. Haven—well, Haven wasn’t harmless, and she doubted he’d ever paid taxes in his life.

  He thought he’d seen a werewolf in the woods, and she knew she shouldn’t take it so personally. It was certainly better for the strigoi to let him believe in werewolves. And what was her problem? Did she expect him to compliment her on all her lovely fangs and the elegant length of her muzzle when she transformed into a Nighthawk? He wasn’t her lover. Besides, even a real mortal lover would most likely be terrified of a Nighthawk’s game face. She thought she might have been repulsed by her darling Jimmy if he had ever made that final step in the transformation of his bloodline. If Jimmy saw her as Char the Enforcer, would he be repulsed? Frightened for his life?

  She shrugged slightly as her hands gripped the steering wheel. Her gaze slid to Haven’s intent profile. At least Jimmy wouldn’t empty a shotgun into her. Mortals were more dangerous to her kind than her kind were to mortals, she reminded herself—if one took the long-term view. Homo sapiens sapiens was a species with a well-deserved reputation for jealously guarding its place on the food chain. Haven was very much a hairy ape, my species right or wrong kind of guy. It would be very hard to make him understand that strigoi and mortals weren’t all that different. They wouldn’t be able to mate and have offspring if they were. Strigoi wouldn’t crave the love of mortals if they weren’t the same; that would just be too sick and weird. Jimmy had been fascinating and maybe a little kinky, but he was certainly a nicer person than Jebel “Mr. Shotgun” Haven.

  She deliberately took her mind off Jimmy and focused her attention on the mortal seated silently beside her. Silence implied thought, and it was her job to make sure his thoughts were squarely on eliminating the demon they were driving around Seattle trying to sniff out. She wasn’t sure where to look, but all her extra senses were alert. Something would turn up.

  “Why did you change?” she asked him, when she should have explained more about demon history and physiology in order to expedite the demon’s execution and Haven’s own.

  Haven remained silent for several minutes. When he did speak, his answer wasn’t what she expected. “I robbed a convenience store. It went bad. I took a hostage, a teenage girl.” His words were terse, tight, acid with bitterness. “Sara Breslow. Sara was just fifteen. Scared I was going to rape and kill her. Might have killed her. Wouldn’t have raped her. Not my style.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that.”

  Char hadn’t meant to speak, to encourage this confession. He already knew she’d researched how he’d become a vampire hunter, but he was sharing the why at her request. Maybe it was because he believed they’d slept together and thought she wanted to get closer. He wouldn’t want that, and the truth was certainly enough to disgust most people. He didn’t mind her sarcasm. In fact, he chuckled. The sound of his laughter was painful to hear. She could tell that he expected—hoped—to shock and repulse her.

  “Go on,” she urged, when she should have changed the subject. Her intent had been to find out why he’d taken it into his head to seek out creatures far more dangerous than the ones he’d been killing in the Southwest. Instead, he thought she was asking about his superhero origins.

  “I took my hostage and ran from the cops. We stopped along the way at a very remote spot out in the desert. Wide place in the road—not very wide. A bar, a few houses. Doubt if there were twenty-five people that lived in this town. The night we blew into the bar, there was a trio of bikers passing through. Then Baker and his partner wandered in. Made ‘em as undercover cops right away. Things got tense. Then the vampires showed up. Everybody in town ended up in the bar that night, fighting and dying together. Sara held her own. She and Baker, Santini and me. It changed us.” He gave his low, painful chuckle again. “Saved us. Killed us—killed Sara a couple years later. She’d turned into quite a monster hunter, but they got her. No going home for her. Or Baker. Ruined Baker’s marriage and career. Gave Santini religion. Gave me—”

  “Purpose?”

  He lit a cigarette. She hated the stench in the close confines of the car, but this was no time to protest.

  “They were my partners from that night on,” he said. “Friends. Family. And yeah,” he agreed reluctantly. “Better to save the world than help it go to hell.”

  “Like you were doing the rest of your life.”

  “Yeah,” he said, grim and tense and quite thoroughly loathing himself.

  Guilt, she thought. Guilt, remorse, and an attempt at redemption. Not bad emotions and goals. Still . . . “It’s easier to fight evil when it wears such obvious faces, isn’t it?”

  He turned in the narrow passenger seat to face her. “What?”

  “Because something doesn’t look human doesn’t necessarily make it a monster,” Char answered.

  “You on their side, sweetheart?”

  “I’m playing devil’s advocate for the moment.”

  “The devil doesn’t need advocates.”

  Char braked for a stoplight. “Demons certainly don’t.”

  Haven could tell that she’d decided not to get into an argument with him. Too bad, he’d like to hear her defense of, say, werewolves. He wanted to ask her how she’d become a vampire hunter, but getting to know people was dangerous. Fucking this woman had been bad enough—in that it had felt too good.

  Haven peered out through the beaded raindrops on the windshield. “We’re driving around in circles. You got a plan for tonight, sweetheart?”

  “Yes.” The light changed, and she put her foot on the gas.

  “Going to tell me about it?”

  “I’m looking for something I can’t see. A place I can’t feel.”

  “I’ve been looking for that place a long time.” He didn’t know what made him say that. It didn’t sound cynical, it sounded like the truth. Sharing the truth with someone was more dangerous than having sex with them. With Charlotte McCairn, he was making every mistake in the book. He might even invent a few more mistakes to pull on her before the hunt for Danny boy was over.

  Char chose to explain what she meant rather than pursue Haven’s comment. She wasn’t here to analyze him or hear his confession. “Remember the building we were in last night? How it didn’t appear to be there but was?”

  Haven caught on fast. “Magical camo. Holes in the city.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Look for something that isn’t there.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I can do that.”

  “You sure this is the way?”

  Haven grinned at her. “No.” He gestured toward the entrance of the alley. “You want to take point or should I?”

  “Chivalry, I see, is dead.”

  “Better chivalry than me, sweetheart.”

  “Good point. Follow me.” Char ignored the stench of rotting garbage and human waste and went in.

  The alley was clogged with overflowing Dumpsters on this end. Farther in she could make out rubble, piles of pipes and bricks and shards of broken glass from the caved-in back wall of a burned-out building. She ignored the ruin and concentrated on the black emptiness at the far end of the narrow alley. Magic was thick all around them, muffling the sound of their steps, muffling their senses a
s well.

  This is a dangerous place, Char thought and reached out to touch a damp brick wall to reassure herself that she was not imagining reality. She encountered cold slime and jerked her hand back to stare at it. Her palm glowed sickly green for a moment, then faded as she fought off the warping of reality.

  “You with me, Charlotte?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Get moving, sweetheart.”

  Not only was this dangerous territory, full of barely structured magic and possible trap spells, but the annoying part was that Jebel Haven had been the one to find it. While she’d driven, with her senses tuned to the rhythm and pulse of her city, Haven had slouched in his seat with his eyes closed and his emotions tuned down to nothing. She’d decided he was napping when he suddenly announced he had something, and they’d followed his internal radar to this area near the docks.

  He had his uses, did this mortal covering her back. He was behind her, right?

  Something was behind her.

  Paranoia blossomed as Char turned to see and cursed herself because she thoughtlessly moved faster than was mortally possible.

  Haven was not behind her. She had a moment’s relief before the worry set in. “Haven?”

  No answer.

  “Jebel?”

  Char put her hands on her hips. Where had the man gone? A noise from inside the burned ruin gave her a clue. A tingle of recognition deep inside her mind sounded a warning. Daniel? She moved toward the blackened hole. She had to step over a pile of rubble to get to the opening. A sharp piece of metal caught the hem of her jeans, slowing her for a moment as she bent down to tug her pant leg free. A foot-long piece of torn and twisted metal came away from the pile and she grabbed it to keep it from falling noisily to the ground.

  With the pipe in one hand, she gazed into the skeleton of the building. The darkness inside the ruin was not as complete as the complete absence of light at the end of the alley, but it was still pretty damn dark. Black soot on every surface added to the interior darkness. Despite the dampness, the smell of old smoke permeated the air.