“I don’t understand,” Keomany said, turning to Octavian. “How is it possible that an operation of that size can exist without Task Force Victor finding out about them?”
Octavian pushed his coffee mug away. He’d lost interest. Charlotte’s story weighed heavily on him. Task Force Victor was a joint United Nations operation. Allison Vigeant—one of Octavian’s closest allies, one of his shadows—had once hunted vampires for them. If TFV knew about this “Cortez,” the group would have been wiped out, which meant they did not know. But someone had to. That many people disappearing, that many new vampires being created. Someone had to know.
“Is this Cortez connected to what’s happening here in Hawthorne?” Octavian asked.
“What?” Charlotte said, frowning. “No. I took off months ago. Cortez wanted us all to be killers, to be what he called ‘real vampires.’ We were forced to . . . to feed.” She shuddered. “I’m not a killer. I get hungry, yeah. But I’m young and pretty enough that if I want blood, I never have to force a guy to give me some, y’know?”
Octavian nodded. He could imagine that, especially in a world that knew vampires were real, it would be a simple enough matter for a girl as lovely as Charlotte to persuade a young man to part with some of his blood.
“All of us were supposed to hunt, eventually. They sent me out with two others who had been recently turned. But we’d talked in advance and agreed we weren’t going to kill to feed ourselves, and we sure as hell weren’t going to kill for Cortez. We had a babysitter, of course—one of Cortez’s faithful, who was there in case something went wrong, or one of us decided to run. He wasn’t ready for all three of us trying to run. It turned ugly fast. Ugly and bloody.”
Charlotte shrugged. “But here I am. I don’t know if Cortez is looking for me. I’m gonna guess no. His operation’s too ambitious for him to chase down one girl from Pacific Beach. Anyway, I made my way east—wanting to put as much distance between myself and him as possible—and ended up in New York.”
“You’re not in New York,” Octavian reminded her.
“I was. And that’s the weird thing,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been living in New York. I work in a theatre on Forty-fourth Street. This morning I was going to an acting class, and halfway there I felt this compulsion. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It didn’t feel like something was driving me, but luring me. The savage part of me . . . the demon taint, right?” She nodded at Octavian. “It reacted. I felt like a sailor in some old myth, like the sirens were singing and I had no choice but to come to them.”
“And when you got here?” Keomany asked, sipping at her coffee and making a face, as though the cream in it had spoiled.
Charlotte threw up her hands. “Nothing. I felt it under my skin. Felt it rattling around my skull. But once I got into town, I had no direction. I’m hugely on edge, ready for a fight. Hell, I want one. I feel like I just want to hurt someone.”
She smiled, but it turned into something resembling a snarl. All through their time in the café, she had been fighting the hunger that gnawed at her, and Octavian thought she had been struggling to rein in the irritation the chaos around them was causing . . . the aggression growing in all of them. And now she’d put it into words.
“I wouldn’t, though,” Charlotte said. “Not without a reason.”
Attempting a smile again, she picked up a fork and dug into the cheesecake, popping a bite into her mouth.
“Maybe not,” Octavian said. “But you’ll understand if we want to keep an eye on you.”
“Absolutely,” Charlotte replied over a mouthful of cheesecake. “Hell, I want you to. The feeling isn’t gone. It’s still buzzing in my head, so I can’t exactly leave here. I tried to, before I went to the club, but it’s like I can’t make myself. The dark part of me wants to be here. But if I’m going to be here, then I want to help you. And when it’s all done, show me where to sign, and I’m totally on board with the Covenant. I never wanted to be a rogue.”
“What about this Cortez?” Keomany asked.
Octavian had been wondering the same thing. “It doesn’t sound like his operation is connected to what’s happening here. So we’ll deal with Hawthorne first, then we’ll worry about this impostor pretending to be Hernando Cortez.”
“Assuming we survive,” Keomany said drily.
Charlotte stared at her, upset by the words, and then she laughed. “Aren’t you a ray of fucking sunshine? I thought you Wicca-chick earth mommies were supposed to be all sweetness and light.”
Octavian couldn’t help smiling. The girl might be a vampire, and she might be bristling with unspent violence, but he liked her.
“Absolutely,” Keomany said. “Sweetness and light. Until dark magic starts messing with our goddess. Then we’re all business.”
“Good to know,” Charlotte replied.
Octavian saw the corners of Keomany’s mouth twitch as she fought a smile. Her instincts probably told her not to, but it was obvious that she, too, had been charmed by the vampire girl.
“All right,” Keomany said, turning to Octavian. “Assuming Charlotte here isn’t going to rip my throat out in the next sixty seconds, what’s the plan?”
Her voice had a tired rasp and Octavian could see she was exhausted. A glance at the clock confirmed that midnight had come and gone, the hands ticking toward 1 A.M. Though Octavian was flesh and blood—technically human, and mortal—he had acquired such magic that he could go without sleep or sustenance for long periods, if circumstances required it. Keomany might be a powerful earthwitch with a direct line to Gaea, but she had never mastered the kinds of magic that Octavian had spent a thousand years in Hell perfecting.
“You’re not going to like it,” he warned her.
“Try me,” Keomany said.
Octavian glanced at Charlotte, then back to Keomany. “If you can’t pinpoint the source of all of this, then more traditional methods are called for. That means poking and prodding, asking the wrong people the right questions, sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong. With all the years I spent playing private detective, I have a little more experience in that area than you do.”
“Granted,” Keomany said.
“You’re going to head over to the hotel. You can check us in—”
“Bullshit—”
“—I’m going to have a look at your hand, try to dispel whatever’s troubling you, and then you’re going to head over there and get some rest,” Octavian continued, ignoring her interruption. “It’s the only rational thing to do, Kem. You might not be bleeding, but you’re injured. If I find any decent leads, anything to direct us to the source, I’ll come and wake you. But if this thing is still raging tomorrow—and we both know it will be, unless I get lucky tonight—I’m going to need you sharp and focused in the morning.”
He saw that she was reluctant, but she couldn’t argue his logic, especially given how hard she was rubbing her numb hand.
“What about Little Orphan Charlie?” Keomany asked, nodding toward the vampire girl.
“Shit, really?” Charlotte said, smirking. “I’m right here. I can hear you.”
“I’ll take her with me,” Octavian replied. “It’ll keep her out of trouble. And it never hurts to have a shadow on your side.”
Charlotte ate another forkful of cheesecake. “Is that what I am? I’m a shadow now?”
Keomany slid the plate of cheesecake back in front of her and picked up a fork. “They’re the same thing, honey. But the ones who want to be called vampires . . . they’re still the monsters the old stories made them out to be. If you want to be something else, that’s going to be up to you.”
THE Sea Foam Hotel looked closed, not for the night, but forever. Aside from a single security light that shone into the parking lot, the place was dark. Some of the guests must have had lights on in their rooms, up reading or watching television, but Keomany assumed that they had drawn the shades against the eventual sunrise, because as she approached the entrance, she thought the plac
e looked completely abandoned. Still, when she tugged the door, it swung open, and now that she was out of the rain—standing under the hotel’s dripping awning—she saw that dim lights burned within the lobby.
For a moment she hesitated, afraid to go inside on her own. It wasn’t the hotel that frightened her so much as the prospect of being alone on a night, and in a town, that bristled with dark chaos magic. Anything might happen. The ground might split open and swallow the Sea Foam Hotel and its outdated stucco façade in the blink of an eye, and she didn’t want to die alone.
Keomany took a deep breath. You’ve been alone against dark magic before, she reminded herself. You can hold your own. Sometimes she forgot just how powerful an earthwitch she was. That didn’t mean she had nothing to fear, only that she had the magic to fight back.
She turned and gave Octavian a wave. He nodded and put the car into gear, pulling out of the parking lot. In the passenger seat, Charlotte raised one hand in a small salute, and Keomany wondered if they were making a terrible mistake. The girl had charm and she had told her story convincingly, but they really knew nothing about her. Still, it seemed absurd to worry. If Charlotte betrayed him, Octavian would incinerate her in a heartbeat. Most people had no idea just how deadly powerful a mage he was, and would be terrified if they ever witnessed that power in action. Charlotte posed no threat to Octavian, and perhaps the vampire would turn out to be helpful.
It felt strange, though, watching them drive away, off to patrol the darkened city like some kind of magical vigilantes. She ought to have been with them.
She flexed her fingers. Already the unnerving cold and the ache that she’d felt from the moment the wraith had slashed her with that strange black knife—the blade passing right through her arm—had begun to abate. Her skin prickled as though her hand had fallen asleep and the blood had just started flowing again. But Octavian had insisted that if she wanted to be sure his spell would do its work, she needed at least a few hours of sleep. Reluctantly, she had agreed.
Weary and troubled, she hitched up the strap of her travel bag and entered the hotel, striding across the lobby. She thought she might have to make a ruckus to get service, considering the lateness of the hour, but before she had even reached the desk a twentyish guy with patchy skin and leftover baby fat emerged from a door behind it.
“Help you?” the clerk grunted.
Keomany was too tired to even get irritated by his attitude. “I called ahead. Adjoining rooms. The name is Shaw.”
The guy typed something into a computer, scanning the screen with a sigh. “Yeah, here you are. Kee-o-menny. What kind of name is that?”
She let out a breath. “Can I just get my key? I need sleep.”
“Huh? Yeah, sure.” He banged at the keyboard a bit—tak, tak, tak—and then pulled out a plastic key card, slipping it into a machine to be coded. “You’ll be in 325. Mr. Octavian will be in 327 when he arrives.”
“Give me his key as well, please. You can put both rooms on my card for now.”
The guy had been a bit brusque and his social skills left something to be desired, but he wasn’t a complete moron. He could see that he had annoyed her, and he gave her Octavian’s key without further inquiry.
“Here you go,” he said, sliding both room keys across the counter to her. “Just FYI, the Internet’s down for some reason.”
Like her cell phone. And probably everyone else’s, she thought. Keomany shivered, then forced herself to smile. “Must be the storm.”
“I guess,” the clerk said, not sounding convinced.
She rode the elevator in silence. Walking down the third-floor hallway, she heard a baby crying loudly from one room and a woman pleading with the infant to be quiet. From another room came the sounds of a couple fighting. At the door to her own room, as she slipped the key card into the lock, she overheard hysterical laughter coming from Room 323, next door. Despite the lack of lights visible inside those rooms from the outside, many of the guests were up late tonight. The chaos magic surging through the storm had begun to seep into everyone.
In her room, she experimented with her cell phone, but it remained frustratingly uncooperative. Even out on the balcony, she could not get a flicker of a signal. Locking herself in, she washed up in the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and then threw herself into bed, burying her head under a pillow to keep out the sounds of fragile people beginning to shatter. She wanted to help them, and that meant locating the source of the chaos. Tired as she was, and despite the remaining numbness in her hand and Octavian’s insistence, lying in some hotel room while the town fell apart seemed wrong.
On the other hand, as ugly as some of the things happening in Hawthorne were, the town was not quite unraveling. Not yet. She would do more good after a few hours’ sleep, with the daylight driving away some of the shadows. It might be easier to pinpoint the source then, as well.
You’re here, she told herself. The useful thing to do is get some sleep.
Eyes closed, curled in a fetal position, she forced herself to relax. Her breathing evened out and she felt the heaviness of her weariness begin to drag her down. As she did most nights, she reached out like a child for a favorite stuffed bear, but instead of using her hands, Keomany reached out with her spirit. She wanted to touch her goddess, to feel the comforting presence of Gaea, to tap into the current of energy that ran through all of nature. As it had earlier in the day, that current proved difficult to find, but eventually she sensed it—and Gaea—just out of reach. Something tickled at the back of her mind. She could feel the goddess, and she had the sense that Gaea might be focused on her, trying to tell her something, to give her some message that she was not in any position to receive. She thought of her cell phone, and the hotel’s wireless Internet, and she understood how completely cut off they were from the outside world.
You could leave, she thought. Get out of Hawthorne right now, before it becomes so dangerous that escape is impossible. Before the magic insinuating itself throughout the town became powerful enough to trap her here.
It was an idle thought, but still she felt guilty. She would never abandon these people to the twisted magic that had begun to envelop their homes and lives.
Drifting toward sleep again, Keomany reached out and touched the ocean. It had a taint of the chaos that had touched Hawthorne, but could not be fully infected by it. The ocean was too powerful, an engine of natural forces at work. But that taint she had sensed earlier—though faded—remained. And now as she felt heavier, surrendering to sleep, she realized that she sensed that same taint elsewhere in Hawthorne, not just a generalized malaise, but the specific dark taint that lingered just offshore. But this smear of chaos on the natural order of things was not at sea . . . it was on land, just a few miles away. For a frustrating quarter hour, she fought the pull of sleep as she tried to pinpoint the location of that taint. But she could not get a fix on its position, only the general direction in which she might find it if she set out in pursuit.
I’ll tell Octavian, she thought. But without cell phone service, she had no choice other than to wait for Octavian to return. Next door, the laughter had ceased, and down the hall, the baby had stopped screaming, though whether that boded well or ill, she refused to speculate.
Sometime in the small hours of the morning, without Octavian ever having turned up to retrieve his room key, Keomany at last surrendered to sleep.
CHIEF Kramer stood on top of his patrol car in the rain, gun warm in his hand, uniform plastered to his body. The wind gusted nearly hard enough to topple him off the car, and as he fought to keep his balance, three more dogs came bounding and snarling from out of the storm. One came from beneath the car, the others from a cobblestoned alley beside the Enchantment Bakery.
Kramer shot a German shepherd in the head, blowing it back into a puddle, dark matter spilling out of its shattered skull. The other two continued to growl, splitting off from each other, one headed for the front of the patrol car and one to the rear. Kramer forced himse
lf to stand up straighter, trying to keep his balance in spite of the vicious dog bite on the calf of his left leg. Blood streamed down into his shoe, soaking through his cotton sock.
“Fuck this,” a voice crackled on the chief’s radio.
Kramer didn’t have time to snatch up the radio to reply.
“Don’t do it, Jim!” he shouted, as the black Labrador leaped up onto the trunk of his car.
The chief put two bullets into the black Lab and the dog’s bloody carcass flipped backward off the trunk and hit the rain-slick pavement. The third dog snarled behind him and he spun, finger on the trigger, only to see the mutt scrabbling at the fender with its teeth bared, unable to make the jump onto the hood of the patrol car.
Officer Connelly had never been the best cop when it came to taking orders. Maybe that came from knowing one another so long, or maybe Jim just didn’t think anyone should be able to tell him what to do, even the chief of police. He popped open the door to his own patrol car—Connelly and his partner, Tony Moschitto, had arrived on the scene only seconds after Chief Kramer—and climbed out into the rain, weapon drawn.
“Get back in the fucking car!” Kramer called.
From inside Connelly’s patrol car, Moschitto shouted at him as well. Connelly had no intention of listening. If anything, Moschitto had only made him more determined. He held his gun out in front of him in both hands, imitating countless television cops, and aimed it at the mutt.
“That’s an order, Jim! Get in the car!”
“It’s just a damn dog, Chief,” Connelly snapped.
The mutt turned on Connelly, growling as it rushed at him. Chief Kramer and Connelly both fired at it, and at least one of them hit it, because the dog whimpered and sprawled to the ground, twitching and bleeding. Counting the shepherd and the Lab, there were half a dozen dead dogs scattered around the two police cars, all of them shot in the mere minutes since Kramer had first pulled up to the curb and gotten out of his vehicle, responding to a 911 call the dispatcher had patched through to him.
Waking Nightmares Page 17
