Falling Dark

by Christine Pope

  To my surprise, though, Silas cut past the crowd and went on inside, while I trailed in his wake, wondering exactly what he had planned. He paused at the hostess station, where the girl on duty, who barely looked old enough to be in high school, smiled at him, and said something in Japanese. I was even more surprised when I heard him reply in the same language. Then the girl gathered up two menus and led us through the packed restaurant to a small table set up against the back wall.

  As we sat down, I murmured to Silas, “What, do you own part of this place or something?”

  His eyes glinted with amusement. “No. I did a favor for the owner a few years ago, however, and so he repays me with a table that’s always available — as long as I call or text to give them a heads-up. So I called while you were getting ready.”

  It was good to have friends in high places. There were several restaurants in Pasadena where my parents could walk in at any hour and get an awesome table. I always struggled with the concept, just because I didn’t think it was fair to people who had reservations or who were waiting to be seated that someone else could breeze right past them. Unfortunately, money talked. At least in Silas’ case, he was being granted these favors because he’d done a good turn for the owner.

  The menu was printed in both English and Japanese. Since my Japanese was nonexistent — just where the heck had Silas learned to speak Japanese, anyway? — I glanced over the English side of the bill of fare.

  “The albacore tataki is very good,” Silas said. “Do you want to start with that?”

  “Sure,” I replied. I’d never had tataki, so I had no idea what I was signing up for, but this was not the time for food cowardice. Anyway, I’d had sushi and sashimi, so I wasn’t a total novice. All the same, I was probably going to get a combo plate for my main meal, one with some tempura included, just so it wasn’t all raw fish, all the time.

  We placed our orders, and Silas ordered a bottle of sake as well. Fine by me; if it helped to loosen things up a bit, then maybe I would get to stay over tonight. Was that rushing things? For the old me, maybe. But it had been a very long time, and my body’s response to his slightest touch was enough to tell me that I thought this was right. What was the point in delaying things?

  Unless he put on the brakes when we got back to his loft, in which case I’d have to go along with his wishes. Right then I was having a hard time reading him. Mixed signals for sure, kissing me one minute, drawing back the next. I still couldn’t figure out what had him so conflicted, but I knew better than to pressure him into confidences he wasn’t willing to give. I’d learned from Travis that the best way to start a full-blown argument was to keep poking when a man clearly wanted to be left alone.

  The place was loud, filled with both couples and large groups out to enjoy their Saturday night, and all of them apparently chattering away all at once. It wasn’t the sort of atmosphere that was conducive to sharing confidences, and so Silas and I talked about harmless things — house hunting, and dealing with contractors while making home improvements. The possibility of it being a wet spring. We didn’t bring up vampires, or their half-living slaves, or anything we might worry about having overheard.

  Despite the care we took to keep the topics light, the conversation moved along easily, and I found myself relaxing, letting myself enjoy the different flavors and textures of the food, the delicate tang of yellowfin, the buttery, comforting taste of the acorn squash tempura. Plates were brought and taken away, and the people at the tables that surrounded ours changed as one group finished their meals and others came in to begin theirs.

  At last, though, we were done, and Silas had paid the bill. I’d tried to reach for it when it arrived, but he just shook his head at me. “This was my idea,” he said.

  “Coming to this restaurant, but not going out tonight,” I protested.

  “Still. You took care of lunch. Let me take care of this.”

  Since I didn’t want to have an argument there in front of everyone, I subsided. Luckily, the restaurant wasn’t overly expensive. Not cheap, either, but it wasn’t like he’d had to drop a couple hundred bucks to pay for the two of us.

  We emerged from the restaurant to find that the rain had stopped, although the streets and the sidewalks shone slick and wet. A gibbous moon peeked out from a bank of clouds before being obscured again. I stood on the sidewalk and breathed in the damp air, relishing the scent of the rain and the gleaming asphalt. It wasn’t even that cold, now that the rain had cleared out.

  “Let’s walk,” I said, and Silas lifted an eyebrow.

  “Walk where? We drove here.”

  “Just walk. Stretch our legs a little. It’s safe to walk around here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, as long as we don’t stray too far off the main streets.”

  “Okay. Then let’s walk for a few blocks, then come back and get the truck. I don’t want to waste all this nice fresh air.”

  He lifted his head into the breeze, inhaled deeply, and nodded. “It’s true — you can’t even smell any exhaust right now.”

  “Well, then.”

  Silas looped his arm in mine and began to head south on Alameda, although he turned onto a smaller street not long afterward — 4th Place, read the street sign. However, even though it wasn’t the main drag, there were obvious signs of life here. Cars lined the street, and lights glowed from storefronts, even if the stores themselves had been closed for the night.

  From a building down toward the end of the side street, right before it jogged to the right, I heard music playing. Not pounding hip-hop, or deafening electronica, but something hard-edged and bluesy, the kind of thing I would have expected to hear coming from a honky-tonk deep in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Then again, this was L.A. You got a little bit of everything here.

  “Let’s go,” I told Silas, tilting my head toward the source of the music.

  “To that bar?” he asked, not looking terribly thrilled by my suggestion.

  “Sure. The music sounds great.”

  He hesitated. “We can go look.”

  It wasn’t exactly a rousing response, but at least he hadn’t said no. As we approached the bar, I saw that it had a neon sign over the entrance proclaiming it to be the Spirit Lounge. That also sounded very New Orleans-y, and I wondered if the owners might be transplants who wanted to bring a little of their hometown to the City of Angels. The music was louder here, but still not overwhelming. You could sit and listen to it and still be able to hear yourself think.

  Silas stopped right outside the door, expression wary. “I’m not sure we should go in.”

  “Why not?” I asked, trying not to let my annoyance show in my tone. “It’s a public place. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have left the door open…or be advertising a cover charge.”

  Because there was a sign next to the door, one that stated the cover was $10 Monday through Thursday and $15 on Friday and Saturday nights. That sounded reasonable enough to me.

  “I can pay it,” I added. “This was my idea.”

  But he’d already pulled out his wallet and was handing over a ten and a twenty to the large customer who guarded the front door. Judging by his impressive size and the jet-black hair he had pulled into a ponytail at the back of his neck, I guessed he was probably Samoan.

  “Thanks, man,” said the bouncer, who stepped out of the way so we could enter the bar.

  Luckily, my eyes were already adjusted to darkness, or I would have had a hard time seeing clearly inside the place. Pendant lamps hung overhead, but they’d been dimmed down to almost nothing. Most of the illumination came from the neon Pacifico and Budweiser signs placed above the bar, with the remainder provided by the spotlights focused on the stage. A trio played there, two guys on lead guitar and standing bass who looked like ZZ Top’s long-lost brothers, with gray beards and gray hair worn in ponytails, while the drummer was a woman who might have been in her forties. It was hard to tell for sure, due to the lighting, but it seemed to me that her face was weather
ed in a way you didn’t see much in Los Angeles, lines deep as scars bracketing her mouth. The one on lead guitar sang as well, in a hoarse whiskey-roughened voice that suited the blues-tinged music they played. I didn’t recognize the song; I didn’t need to.

  Silas and I went up to the bar. He ordered beers for both of us; this was obviously not the kind of place where you ordered chardonnay or sake. While he was handling the transaction, I shot a surreptitious look around the room. There were four or five small tables, all of them occupied, some by people who looked as if they might have wandered in off Skid Row, and others around my age or a little younger, hipsters who were trying to find the latest cool thing that no one had heard of.

  Since there wasn’t any place left to sit, Silas and I took our beers and retreated to the far end of the bar, closer to the stage. It was too loud to talk, so I swallowed some beer and listened to the music, to tales of back roads and rundown towns and secrets buried too long. All exotic to me, so far from where we stood now, from anything I’d ever known or experienced.

  Then a trio entered the bar, two men and a woman. I noticed them because they looked far too perfect to be in that kind of a dive, the men in long black trench coats, dark-haired, model-handsome. The woman was flaxen blonde, wearing a black patent leather motorcycle jacket, tight jeans, and black over-the-knee boots.

  “Someone’s out slumming,” I murmured to Silas, knowing full well that a lot of people probably would have said the same thing about the two of us.

  He shifted so he could see past me…and stiffened, his whole body going rigid. At the same time, the man in the lead of the little group locked eyes with Silas. A small, mocking smile touched the stranger’s lips, and he began to walk straight toward us.

  Under his breath, Silas told me, “Let me do the talking.”

  Startled and suddenly off-balance, I stared up at him. “Do you know them?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “They’re Lucius Montfort’s fellow vampires.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I froze, the little bit of a buzz I’d gotten from the sake at dinner evaporating as if it had never existed. Beside me, Silas was as tense as I’d ever seen him, his jaw set, eyes going to slits as he watched the trio of vampires approach. They sauntered up to us, the leader still wearing that little smirk of a smile, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The three of them stopped a few feet away. To someone who didn’t know better, they probably looked like people who’d just spotted a pair of acquaintances and so were going to talk to them. But they certainly weren’t friend of ours. Hell, no.

  The vampire who stood in front of the other two surveyed me for a moment. His smile broadened. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Silas?”

  “You know very well who she is,” Silas replied, voice tight, gaze locked on the otherworldly creatures who stood in front of him.

  “Oh, of course.” The vampire chuckled and directed his gaze toward me. Unlike Lucius Montfort, whose eyes might have been chips of ice, this particular specimen had eyes that looked — in that bad lighting, anyway — like they’d been carved from jet. “How are you, Ms. Quinn? Since it seems that your friend here doesn’t want to make the introductions, allow me to do so. I’m Michael St. John, and this is Tristan McVey and Leticia Carver.”

  The two other vampires barely inclined their heads. But I could feel their eyes locked on me, cold, hungry. Did I look like a particularly juicy piece of steak to them? I really had no idea how a vampire’s mind worked.

  “Charmed,” I muttered, and Michael laughed.

  “Oh, I doubt you are. But — ”

  “What do you want, St. John?” Silas broke in.

  “‘Want’?” Michael St. John repeated, as if such a concept was completely foreign to him. “Why should I ‘want’ anything? As your pretty little psychic said earlier, this is a public place.”

  My mouth dropped open. He smiled — a smile that revealed the same slightly sharp canines I’d noticed in Lucius Montfort.

  “Didn’t Silas tell you? Our kind have very good hearing.”

  “Apparently,” I said, forcing myself to stare right back at him, even though I wanted nothing more than to find the back entrance to the bar and run right through it.

  Silas crossed his arms. “I’m surprised to see you here, St. John. I would have taken you more for a smooth jazz man.”

  The female vampire — Leticia Carver — almost appeared as if she wanted to snigger, but then her features smoothed themselves back into supermodel perfection, complete with a blank stare off to somewhere in the middle distance. The third vampire, the one called Tristan McVey, didn’t seem to react at all, his gaze fixed on us, unblinking.

  “Well, we are creatures of the night,” Michael St. John said. “So we’re out for a little nightlife. Sometimes one must seek out the more esoteric entertainments” — for some reason, his gaze flicked to me for a moment before returning to Silas — “when the usual amusements pall.”

  “I see,” Silas replied. “In which case, we’ll leave you to your ‘amusements.’ If that’s all right with you, Serena.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” I said. Yes, I’d only had three swallows of my beer at the most, but right then I thought I might throw up all the lovely sashimi I’d eaten earlier if I tried to drink any more. It wasn’t the beer’s fault; it was just hard to keep it together with three vampires staring at you if you should have been on the buffet. “I’m ready to go.”

  Silas put his hand on my arm and guided me past the trio of vampires. I avoided making eye contact, although I couldn’t help but hear Michael St. John laugh as the two of us moved away. The whole time, I kept waiting for them to leap out and attack us, but for some reason they didn’t move, and instead allowed Silas and me to safely exit the bar and begin walking down the rain-slick sidewalk. A thin, miserable drizzle had started to fall, but I ignored it. Who cared if my hair turned into a frizzed-out mess? All I wanted was to get to Silas’ truck and out of there, back to the safety of his loft.

  “Are you all right?” he asked in an undertone.

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “A little shaky, but okay. It was just…they’re kind of overwhelming, aren’t they?”

  “They can be. Usually they don’t move in groups like that. Two at a time, possibly, but three?” He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, as if he expected to see them emerge from the club and follow us, but the sidewalks remained empty, the damp clearly driving any casual pedestrians inside.

  “So what were they up to?”

  “I don’t know.” In the uncertain light from the street lamps, his expression was hard to read, but I could still see the tension in his jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders. “And that’s what bothers me. Perhaps their only motivation was to put us off balance, but — ”

  He stopped there, his hand clamping down on my arm. Under other circumstances, I might have protested such treatment, but not then. Not when I saw what was ahead of us on the sidewalk.

  A group of men, of various heights and ages and builds. I counted nine, maybe ten. It was hard to tell because of the way they were milling around. But then they all stopped, their dead eyes fixed on Silas and me.

  And I realized who they were. What they were. A pack of semivives. Maybe all that Lucius Montfort had in his arsenal; I couldn’t say for sure. Not that it really mattered at that point. I knew Silas was tough and competent, but I honestly didn’t see how he could possibly prevail when he was outnumbered ten to one.

  “Get behind me,” he said, his tone low but cutting.

  “Silas, I — ”

  “Get behind me.”

  I did as I was told, even though I still didn’t see what he could do to protect me. Not when faced with those odds. No wonder Michael St. John had been smiling at me in such a malevolent way. He and his cohorts could keep their hands clean, because their master had sent his half-living army to take us out.

  The semivives advanced. They were a motley group, some i
n jeans and T-shirts, some in bedraggled-looking business suits. None of them seemed to pay any attention to the drizzle, which had now turned into a light, stinging rain.

  Silas faced them, his chin up, shoulders squared. Very slowly, he reached into his pockets and pulled out a pair of long knives. How he’d managed to keep them hidden, when they seemed far too big to be concealed by a set of jeans pockets, I had no idea. The knives glinted in the ghastly pinkish-orange glare of the streetlights, gleaming, deadly.

  “You can’t win,” said the semivive in the lead, a stocky man wearing the remnants of what originally looked to have been a thousand-dollar bespoke business suit.

  “Try me,” Silas replied.

  The semivive ran at him. Snick! went the knives, and the possessed man fell in a heap to the ground, his head rolling away from his body. I put my hand to my mouth, but there wasn’t enough time for me to even gasp, because, just like the first semivive Silas had dispatched on that Monday which seemed so long ago now, the corpse shivered down into a pale, oily substance before disappearing entirely.

  Instead of discouraging the remaining members of the horde, the loss of one of their own just seemed to enrage them. Faces contorted with fury, they rushed at Silas in silence, as if they knew that to cry out would only attract attention. He struck out again with the knives, felling another of them, but there were so many, and he was doing all he could to shield me with his body, so his blows weren’t landing as often as he needed them to.

  Then a cold hand grabbed me by the arm, and I screamed. At once Silas whirled and began to move toward me, but the pack of semivives crowded around him, blocking him from getting any closer. Even though I knew my own puny strength wasn’t enough to prevail against my attacker, I struck at him as best I could, swinging my heavy purse so it connected with his jaw in a heavy crunch, then stomping down on one foot with the high, blocky heel of the boot I was wearing.