by Amie Gibbons
“A demon,” he said. “A group of them. After the thing with the Fae, and Milo and I needed some time, I came out to the middle of bumfuck nowhere and found I liked it. But there was a demon. It found me. I had to call in reinforcements. And then, well, then things got interesting. There were a few of them. Each was assigned to kill one of us.”
“Wait!” I looked around.
Outside of the side room we were in was a huge bar, with enough room for tables and dancing.
Take away the animal heads, beer bottles and steins, and the tables and such, and I knew this place.
“This was from that vision,” I said. “The one I got from Milo. There was a demon and these time travelers.”
Carvi blinked.
Surprised?
“You saw this?” he asked.
“Yeah, but the place was already all empty and kinda trashed lookin’. There was a demon who was there to kill one of you, but said something about taking out the rest of you anyway, and you got a silver spike in your head. Blanche and Milo were here and the vamp he was after that got killed. Blanche took over his city after that.”
“Ohhhh,” he said. “You saw the end of that little drama. There was more. That was us finally beating the thing back. Fae called them, sicced them on our group. Before that though, they killed practically everyone in the bar. I called in the reinforcements, held the line until they made it here. The kid I was rooming with over the bar, Marine, always said ‘hold the line.’ He died holding that line. But we kept the demon from getting out and killing more people. The bar had already been through a lot by then. It was sold and being torn down when we finally got the demons’ summoners and went after them.”
“What about the time travelers?” I asked.
He grinned. “Oh man. Witches. There was this hot little one, acted so tough, but blushed at the littlest sexual comment. Well, she was trying to help early on in the attacks, and the demon grabbed her. Her boyfriend and the guy who wanted to be her boyfriend from what I could smell showed up to rescue her. They had to go into the Other Side to save her. Never did learn what happened to all of them. That girl though? If she died, she died fighting.”
I picked up the next cocktail, a Lime Rickey, and tried it. Little tart to be mixed with bourbon, but hey.
“Milo could sense I’d made that my home,” Carvi continued. “I would’ve stayed there for years if I could have. Everyone needs a break every now and again. That day, after we got a friend in to suck out the silver and I healed, was the first time I attempted time travel myself.”
My jaw dropped.
He shrugged. “I knew it was possible because the witches let it slip, and I wanted my home back. I wanted all those people back. They did nothing wrong. Nothing to deserve that, save for be around me. We had small town waitresses, an owner trying to stay afloat, good folk hitting the bar after work, bikers who protected the town from gangs sitting shoulder to shoulder with the local cops. Even had a weekly poker game in the back room. I was some crazy guy passing through with a bike and knives and they took me in. Let me call this place home. And they were slaughtered for it.”
He took the glass of straight bourbon and shot it.
“Anyway, yeah, I tried time travel after that. Milo tried to stop me. He said he’d already tried it a few hundred years ago, over some girl or another. But I wouldn’t listen. Someone owed me a favor and I went back.”
“Wait, you actually time traveled!” I said. “That’s awesome.”
“Not really. You don’t realize the kind of energy and concentration you need for that, and what you can fuck up. I went back too far, tried leaving a note and everything, didn’t make a difference. I came back and everything was the same.”
He held up a finger. “Except there’d been some random power mad dick in the White House that fucked everything up years before who hadn’t been there before.”
I burst out laughing. “Wait, wait, wait, which one?”
He grinned. “The seventies were bad, and I owe America my sincerest apologies for them. Hell, for disco alone.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you messing with me?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Carvi, is there a point to all this, beside trying to make me laugh?”
“Trying to get you to relax, lea,” he said. “Trying to show you why I don’t trust people anymore. You see, someone I thought was a friend then ended up being Fae. She was working undercover to get past the wards I’d put on the town. She got those down, got me to trust her, and stabbed me in the back. The only reason I lived was my Marine roommate was damn fast and had good ears. Ran into the bedroom when he realized those weren’t my usual sex noises.”
So he meant someone who was more than a friend.
He took out another cigarette and I stepped forward, taking it from him. “Nervous habit?”
“It calms me down.” He took it back and lit it, takin’ a long puff. “I need to calm down. Do you know why I attacked you?”
“I pissed you off?” I shrugged.
“No, because when I was trying to dig into Jade and you were trying to stop me, I thought, just for a moment, that you were a plant. That you were working with her and I’d been duped again.”
My lips parted and my heart ached. “Carvi, I’m just me. I was tryin’ to stop you cuz you were torturing someone.”
“Because that’s who you are.” He nodded.
“Trusting… her, not realizing what she was, that mistake cost the town hundreds of lives,” he said, “and I swore I’d never make it again. The only reason it wasn’t worse was because it’s a rural town in the South so everyone had weapons and even then... Weapons only work if the Fae don’t have shields, or you can beat them down.”
He shook his head. “The time travelers jumped in, and they were some damn powerful witches, and even they had a hard time holding off the hordes of Fae that closed in on us. I’ve had to watch my back since then, wondering when and if the Fae were going to come after me like that again. We killed hundreds of them too, and they don’t forgive.”
“Did they attack again?” I asked.
He met my eyes. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
I shook my head.
“They haven’t attacked, until this weekend, lea.”
My mouth fell open.
“Fae can not enter the hotel. There is a ward that blocks anyone with more than a fourth of Fae blood. They could get a human to walk a bomb or something in, but I have spells to protect against the mundane threats as well. But vampires can walk in, and if something was buried far enough inside one?”
I shook my head. “Sooooo?”
“What did you think I was saying when I said I had to break their spell? I wasn’t just breaking Jade for fun. I was trying to beat the spell out of her. All of this, the passion spell, the dead waiter, whatever else may happen, it’s the Fae. I just couldn’t smell it until I grabbed it out of Jade. Those smaller spells were definitely human, so they’re working with humans, but that thing in Jade reeked of Fae.”
“She’s using Fae magic?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s using her. It got smuggled in through her today. And now, it’s loose inside the barriers I have in place.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means after we get out of here specifically, we have to come back to the mental world to track the magic before it does whatever it was set free to do. And we’re going to need Jade alive to do that. It means we’re all in danger. And it means those gangsters we talked to probably know something.”
“All these leaders in one place,” I said. “If the Fae are like terrorists, which is kinda how you’re makin’ it sound, then…” I shrugged. “Then I think we’re looking at a bomb, or the magical equivalent.”
He nodded. “So do I.”
“So why are we wastin’ time in here?” I asked.
“We’re not. I told you, time in here is slower. We can try to track, but once we’re out of this safe area insi
de my head, we’ll be out there. And we won’t have time to brainstorm then.”
“And what is out there?”
“The mental world is what most people call the astral plane. We’re outside our bodies, so to speak, and when we are, we are vulnerable. The astral plane lies between ours and the Other Side. If there are any cracks, we could fall through. To track the Fae, we’re going to have to go further into the astral plane than I have ever taken you, which means closer to the Other Side, with more risk of falling through. That’s what I meant before about the line. The line between our world, and theirs. We’ve always stayed in the range of visions, where you’re as safe as you are in the solid world. This is a step beyond that.”
I licked my lips. “When did you figure out it was Fae magic?”
“When I was burning Jade. I could see it. Took a while to pry the trace out of her. She’d already released the actual magic, probably when she first came for the summit.”
“You were burning her, torturing her, for the fun of it then?”
His eyes went hard. “I was doing that as punishment. To deal back to her what she dealt to my brother. That was for a reason, it just happened to reveal she’s worse than we thought.”
“How so?”
“You can’t get a spell like that that deep into a vampire without consent,” he said. “Just as a vampire can not enter a home without an invitation, an uncast spell can not enter a nonconsenting host. She came in here with that spell, and she worked with our sworn enemies to do it. Beings who actively kill vampires and breed like bunnies specifically to try to poison our food source and grow their ranks so they have more to fight us with. They don’t care if they die, as long as it’s in pursuit of the mission. And that is to wipe us all out.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would any vampire do that?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, resting it in his hands after a moment.
“Why,” he said through the hands, “does someone like that do anything.”
He dropped his hands to stare at me.
“Power, lea. If she kills practically every vampire leader in America, she’ll have more than she knows what to do with. She doesn’t care that the Fae will kill her too, figures that’s tomorrow’s problem.”
“Next question,” I said. “If that magic thing is the bomb, whatever kind, where’s the trigger?”
He nodded. “Jade didn’t know. While you were in the holding area I put you in with the fake Grant, I tried getting that out of her, if she knew, she’d tell.”
I shuddered.
Carvi didn’t smirk or anything. Maybe he really was a real boy in here.
“She does know it will go off tonight,” he said. “And that she was told to get out before it did if she wanted to live.”
“Did she say when it’d go off?”
“Nope. But she was supposed to get out by eleven.”
I reached for my hip before remembering I didn’t have a purse or cell phone in here. “What time is it?”
“About ten.”
“Less than an hour,” I said.
“Worse,” he said. “That’s assuming they were telling her the truth and weren’t going to go earlier to kill her too.”
Chapter eleven
“Everyone,” Carvi said as we walked back into the room, waving at them to sit back down and be quiet.
Grant looked up from his post in the back and sighed.
I grabbed my purse and checked my phone. It was twelve past ten.
Who knew how long we had.
Or how bad it’d be.
What if it was a bomb and it took out the whole hotel?
Besides the vamps here, they had their entourages, most of whom were staying in the hotel, not to mention the random humans staying here because it was a nice hotel in Miami during tourist season, and then whoever was outside and near enough to be in the blast zone or hit by debris.
With five hundred rooms, most of which seemed to be filled, we were talkin’ easily a thousand people.
Carvi got everyone to shut up after about a minute and he stood at the front of the room.
He looked at me and I shrugged.
I didn’t know what you were supposed to say in a situation like this.
But something told me he should’ve.
I mean, didn’t things like this happen in the vamp world all the time?
“We have a problem,” Carvi said. “I do not want anyone to panic, but Jade smuggled a magical item from the Fae into our meeting. It has been released and will go off at eleven according to her.”
The room erupted.
I heard everything from shouts of terror to accusations towards Jade’s group to screams at Carvi for not catching it on the way in.
“Silence!” rang across the room and everyone shut up like magic.
Maybe it was.
“We will track it,” Carvi said, “but just in case, I would like all of you to exit calmly. We will run the fire alarm to get the other guests out in a timely manner. Stay in touch, stay close, and we will contact you after we find this thing.”
“What if you don’t?” a female voice yelled from somewhere in the middle of the room.
“Then at least no more than a few of us will be taken by the spell.”
Someone stood on a chair and it took me a moment to place her since she’d cut her hair since I saw her over a month ago.
Blanche.
The vampire queen of North Carolina, Carvi and Milo’s protégé, and Milo’s ex.
“What do you think the spell is going to do?” she asked.
Yep, definitely the woman who spoke before.
“I think it will either blow up the hotel, or release a poison to kill vampires and possibly humans,” Carvi said. “Which is why you will all evacuate right now.”
He didn’t have to tell them twice. The vamps headed towards the doors, rushing a bit more than you’d like in a crowded room, but it didn’t look like anyone was going down, so hey.
“Blanche,” Carvi said over the noises of hundreds of fleeing vamps.
“No,” she shouted, crossing her arms.
“Get out. That’s an order.”
“You’re not my maker and you’re not my king. Bite me.”
“I’ll do worse than that.”
She glared at him. “You’re going to need someone to guard you while you’re on the astral plane, so I repeat, bite my fine little ass, you arrogant prick.”
Pretty harsh sounding considerin’ she was literally risking her life to protect us.
Maybe that’s just how these two related.
In visions I’d had of her interacting with Carvi in the past, it seemed like they didn’t get along great, but would die to protect the other.
They both had loved Milo, and I think that gave them the glue to stick together.
The vamps finished filing out as Carvi called his security.
A moment later the fire alarm went off.
I clamped my hands over my ears.
It was really loud.
Grant and Blanche walked over to us once the crowd was down to the dead (no pun intended) last vamps leaving.
The security guards parked at the doors stood their ground, giving us blank faces.
“Make sure everyone is cleared out of the hotel, and leave,” Carvi said loud enough to be heard over the screaming siren. “All of you. That’s an order.”
The security guards walked out, quick, sharp steps clear and calm.
“Professional,” I said, nodding to Carvi.
“I only hire the best,” he said, giving me a look.
“I’m not the best, Carvi,” I said. “I’m not even close. You said so yourself, I have the control of a fifteen-year-old.”
“And the power of a vampire,” he said. “I can be the control factor. But it’s you that’s going to be powering this.”
“How will we know when everyone’s out?” I asked.
“Hammond!” Carvi bellowed.
T
he last guard in the line to leave stopped and turned with military precision, stopping at attention. It took a moment to realize it was a girl. She was easily as tall as Grant and dressed in the same solid black uniform and steel toed boots as the boys, but had an obviously feminine face.
“Yes, sir?” she asked.
“Make sure everyone’s out,” Carvi said.
“Down to the last cat, sir,” she said with a salute, marching out.
Grant cleared his throat.
“She’s the only guard on duty who can sense life forces,” Carvi said.
Blanche made a face.
“What?” I asked.
“Grant was signaling his disapproval at Carvi having a female do it and Carvi felt bad enough about it that he had to justify it. Fucking chauvinists.”
I snorted.
“She thinks it’s still the seventies and she has to fight over every little thing,” Carvi said. “We’ll be in there for a short time, watch our backs.”
“Close your eyes,” Carvi said, taking my hand. “And sit down. Bodies don’t stay standing well without a spirt to hold them up.”
We sat next to the wall, still holding hands, and I closed my eyes.
I opened them in the same bar we were in before, but it looked like it had in my vision from Milo, after it was destroyed and gutted.
“Sorry, Carvi,” I said, looking around at the sad state of the once thriving homey place.
He shrugged. “Just don’t betray me too.”
“I won’t let you hurt innocent people, and I’ll balk at hurting ones that even deserve it sometimes, but I’ve got your back, long as you have mine.”
He nodded and pulled me towards the door.
“This is… dangerous,” he said as he touched the door hanging off its hinges. “Stay with me. And don’t go off anywhere no matter what you see. Got it?”
I nodded and he pushed the door open.
We stepped into a typical hotel lobby, too standard and plain to be one of Carvi’s hotels. More like a general Courtyard Marriot.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said, letting my hand go. “But have a weapon up.”
“But this is the astral plane,” I said.
“Yes, and you saw people can still feel stuff in here. We don’t know what the Fae are planning or what they hope to accomplish, but they know me. They know I’d check the astral plane for them once I caught their scent. They could be waiting to ambush us.”
