by Gary Jonas
“You used me,” I said.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You had Windsor give me a number. That number was for the real Victor Pavlenco.”
Laughter on the other end. He hesitated, probably weighing whether or not to keep up the charade. Finally, he said, “And it worked too.”
“What?” Chantelle said.
“Hush, girl. We almost got him, but he was too quick.”
“He set you up,” I said.
“He thinks he did, but we have him on the run now. First time this century. And thanks to technology, we’ll be able to keep up with him, but on the off chance that we don’t, I’m going to keep you alive, Miss Chan.”
“He let you find that death spell,” I said. “You gave it to Chantelle.”
“And she’ll die from it tomorrow night.”
“You knew it was a true death spell,” I said.
“Of course. I’m not an idiot.”
“You need to remove it before it kills her.”
“I don’t need to do anything unless you help us corner Victor before tomorrow night. I’ll have Geoffrey get in touch with you tomorrow to work out the details. Or you can let poor little Chantelle die. You have fun now, you hear?”
And he hung up.
I hit redial, but he let it go to voice mail.
“This is Kelly Chan,” I said into the phone. “If you let Chantelle die, I will hunt you down and kill you.”
I hung up.
Amanda frowned. “Whoever he is, he now has a recording of you threatening to kill him.”
“So?”
“You can go to jail for that,” Chantelle said.
I gave her a dismissive look. “Show me a policeman who could arrest me.”
Amanda shook her head. “There are a few wizards who might be willing to help the police.”
“That means I can kill a few wizards too. I’d call that the bonus plan.”
“He’s going to let me die,” Chantelle said.
Amanda and I looked at her. She looked almost relieved, but that didn’t make sense. Could it be resignation?
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Amanda said.
I didn’t like being forced into helping, but Amanda was a friend. She didn’t have to ask. I nodded. “We’ll handle this,” I said. “You sure you don’t know where to find this guy?”
“Somewhere in the shadows,” she said.
“That’s not much help.”
Amanda met my gaze, and I saw fear in her eyes. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” she said.
I waved her off. “You didn’t know.”
Amanda turned back to Chantelle. “Did they want Kelly involved in this?”
“Nobody said anything to me about Kelly until after I called you.” She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “He’s actually going to let me die.”
Something in her tone made me give her another look. It wasn’t resignation, and it wasn’t worry. I was right the first time. “You sound relieved,” I said. “If you’re actually looking to die, that changes our options.” If she was willing to die, it meant I didn’t have to work for unknown forces tracking down a vampire for unknown reasons. I was not a fan of unknowns.
“Kelly!” Amanda said. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she kept them in check.
“I don’t like being blackmailed,” I said.
“Who does? But Chantelle needs our help.”
I shook my head. “You’re misunderstanding me.”
“You’re saying you don’t care whether my sister lives or dies.”
“Granted, I really don’t care beyond the fact that it would bother you. I don’t like her. But that’s not—”
“I can’t believe you just said that!”
“Let me finish.”
“You unfeeling bitch!” Amanda yelled. “I thought you were my friend!”
“Amanda, shut up,” Chantelle said, softly.
Amanda leaned back, surprised. “What?”
“I said shut up. Kelly doesn’t like me. At least she’s honest about it. You can’t stand me either, but you won’t admit it.” Chantelle nodded to me. “You’re right. I am relieved.”
“This is what you want?”
She nodded, and looked as though a great weight had been lifted.
Amanda fumed and folded her arms. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Chantelle pointed at me. “I’d rather she tells you.”
Amanda turned her face toward mine, and by the time our eyes met, her expression shifted from surprised to glaring.
I kept my face neutral. “You seriously don’t get it?”
“Get what?”
“Chantelle wants to die.”
“No she doesn’t!”
“She does, and it works to our advantage.”
“No! We have to save her.”
“That’s not what she wants.”
“You’d put a vampire’s existence ahead of my sister’s life?”
“Your sister is an idiot, and we’re all being played here. I don’t know what they want. If they tracked Pavlenco, they can find a way to get to him and kill him. They don’t need us for that. They can travel through shadows.”
“Maybe Pavlenco can do the same.”
“Maybe,” I said. “My point is that they must want something else from him aside from his death. They’re afraid to get too close, so they’re using Chantelle to get to us.”
“How could they have known I’d call you?”
“I suspect they wanted you because of your skills with witchcraft and magic. I’m just a windfall they lucked into, so they’re using it to their advantage.”
“Either way,” Amanda said, much calmer now, “we have to save her.” She spoke it like it was her new mantra.
“Fine. I’m just going to warn you that if I see a way to take out the asshole pulling the strings, I’m willing to sacrifice your sister to get him. If you want my help—and you need my help—you’ll accept my terms.”
“She’s right,” Chantelle said. “Victor, or whoever he really is, tricked me. Let me die if you can take that son of a bitch out. I’ve already made my peace with it, and while I know Kelly understands, you’re still not seeing the full picture.”
“Come clean,” I said.
“Can’t you tell her?”
I shook my head. “She needs to hear it from you.”
Chantelle looked at her sister, closed her eyes and just let the words tumble from her lips. “When I say he tricked me, I mean it.” She pulled up her sleeves and bared her wrists. “Look,” she said.
Her wrists were laced with test cuts.
“I tried to kill myself, and I couldn’t do it,” she said. “When I went to the vampire, I begged him to kill me, and he tricked me by not letting me die.”
“You went to him to die?” Amanda asked, her voice small as the truth sank in.
Chantelle nodded. “I couldn’t do it myself. I went to visit Dad because he has all those guns, and I read that suicide attempts with guns have an eighty-five percent success rate. I was afraid I’d fall into the fifteen percent. I didn’t want to drown. I didn’t want to take pills and have someone find me. I didn’t want to jump in front of a train or a car. The driver would feel responsible. So I did some research, and one thing that seemed to be a one hundred percent success rate was to go offer yourself to a vampire.”
“What kind of bullshit research did you do?” I asked. Her story sounded crazy to me. There were plenty of surefire ways to commit suicide, and none of them had a damn thing to do with hunting down supernatural bloodsuckers. I’d seen plenty of women depressed to the point of suicide. Chantelle had too much energy to fit that mold so I didn’t trust her.
Amanda stared at her, unable to speak.
Chantelle sighed, and buried her face in her hands.
“What about Geoffrey Windsor?” Amanda asked.
“I was playing the part they told me to,” Chantelle said, looking up aga
in. “They said if I played along, they’d give me the choice of immortality or the final death.” She bowed her head. “I’m sorry I called you, Amanda. You were always Mom and Dad’s favorite. I thought I could get back at you a bit, but here you are willing to risk your life to save me.”
“You’re my sister.”
“Your total fuck-up of a sister.”
Amanda shook her head. “You’ve made questionable choices, but I love you. Mom and Dad love you. I don’t want you to die.”
“Even if that’s what I want?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Chantelle sighed. “You’re seeing it from your perspective, as always. I was never good enough. You’re a natural witch. I can’t cast a spell without it backfiring. And I need spells and hex bags and other crap because I have no magic. You don’t need any of that. You were always the perfect one. I was always the mistake.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
“Don’t say that.” Amanda rose and moved to embrace her sister, but Chantelle pushed her away.
It was getting uncomfortable, and I don’t do emotional scenes when I can avoid them. I started to get up.
“Don’t go,” Chantelle said. She kept her hand out to keep Amanda from getting closer.
I stopped. “This is getting a bit too personal for me,” I admitted.
“But you understand where I’m coming from. I can see it in your eyes.”
I nodded.
“You understand this?” Amanda asked. “She wants to kill herself!” Her voice broke on the word kill.
“She can’t bring herself to do it, so she expects someone else to do it for her.”
“I get that, but I don’t understand.”
“You’ve never felt that way,” I said.
“And you have?”
“I felt something similar,” I said. “Let’s just say my childhood was less than ideal.”
“But look at you now.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I don’t feel that way anymore. But I do remember it.”
Amanda couldn’t wrap her brain around it, but that wasn’t my problem. My situation was different. When I was a little girl, my parents sold me to the wizards at Dragon Gate Industries for whatever experiments they wanted to perform. For months, I would lie awake in bed wishing I could die. My parents didn’t want me, and the wizards were beyond cruel. I tried to kill myself three times, but each time the wizards wouldn’t let me die. Then they killed me ten times in one day just to show me that they could always bring me back no matter what I did. I was eight.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “We have Watchers coming to visit tomorrow and I don’t want to talk about any of this right now.”
That night I dreamt of the tortures and the fear and the loneliness.
Torture no longer worked on me because when I turned eighteen, the wizards turned off the pain receptors in my body.
Fear no longer worked on me because the few things I feared I faced every single day.
I woke in the night, and the heavy loneliness that always dragged its claws through me twisted around a bit to remind me that there were some pains that went beyond the physical. I acknowledged them, embraced them, then went back to sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Geoffrey Windsor arrived at 4:00 right as I finished my final class of the day. Amanda, who had been pacing for hours and checking her watch every five minutes, practically raced over to him. Chantelle hadn’t come down from my upstairs apartment.
Geoffrey wore an old fashioned suit with polished shoes, and he had two men with him. One was bald while the other had a crew cut. I’d never seen either of them before, but I took it for granted they were Watchers. Amanda pulled up short when the two men stepped in front of Geoffrey and each held up a hand, palm out.
“Keep your distance, Miss West,” the bald men said.
“It’s already four o’clock,” Amanda said. “Chantelle is running out of time!”
“She has six hours and forty-three minutes,” Geoffrey said from behind the men. “Give or take.”
I put the last of the rubber knives back into the cabinet then walked behind my register and counter.
“Keeping your distance, Miss Chan?” the bald man asked.
I smiled at him, and plugged in a set of lamps I’d arranged that morning. Six small desk lamps purchased at Walmart sat on the floor, three in front of my counter and three behind the Watchers along the wall, all with their bulbs aimed upward. As soon as I plugged them in, bright light angled up at the three men bathing them in light and casting shadows only on the ceiling where they couldn’t reach them.
“Welcome to the funhouse,” I said, and grabbed a gun from the shelf beneath the register. “You will all remain in the light.”
Geoffrey smiled. “Clever,” he said.
I hopped onto the counter and swung my legs over to sit where I could keep the gun trained on them with no problem.
“Why are you so late?” Amanda asked.
“As you must have realized by now, my employer is a vampire,” Geoffrey said. “And as we need you two to help capture another vampire, it wouldn’t be productive to venture out in the morning or even the early afternoon.”
“The sun is still up,” Amanda said.
“And that gives us time to get into position in spite of rush hour traffic.”
In Denver, afternoon rush hour was a misnomer. It started at three and didn’t end until seven.
“We’re going to have a little chat before we do anything,” I said.
“We can chat on the way.”
“I’m not inclined to help capture Pavlenco.”
“Then Chantelle will die.”
I shrugged. “Everybody dies.”
“She will die tonight.”
“And as she wants to die, I don’t see that you have any leverage here.”
Geoffrey smiled and pointed at Amanda. “Would you like your sister to die?” he asked.
Amanda shook her head.
“I thought not,” Geoffrey said. “Perhaps you should talk your friend into doing the proper thing. Why should she protect an evil vampire when she can save a human life?”
“How do we know Pavlenco is evil?” I asked.
“He’s a vampire.”
“Your boss is a vampire too.”
He shrugged. “Lesser of two evils?”
“Right. Because someone willing to kill in order to get what they want must be the lesser of the two evils.”
He smirked and gave me a shrug.
“Let’s start with a name,” I said. “Who is your employer?”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.”
I shot the bald man in the head.
He collapsed.
“What the hell?” Geoffrey said, jumping back.
Crew Cut tried to keep himself in front of Geoffrey, but I could see he wanted to launch himself at me.
“Let’s try that again,” I said. “What is your employer’s name?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Geoffrey said.
I put my finger on the trigger with the gun aimed at Crew Cut. “Fine,” I said and pulled the trigger.
Crew Cut tried to dodge, but he wasn’t as fast as the bullet. He collapsed in a heap at Geoffrey’s feet.
I sighed and aimed at Geoffrey’s head. “Last chance,” I said.
Amanda’s eyes widened. “You can’t shoot him!” she said. “We need him to save Chantelle.”
“You should listen to Miss West,” Geoffrey said. His eyes darted around looking for a shadow, but with the angle of the lights, he had two choices: the floor behind the dead men or the ceiling. Neither was practical while I had the gun trained on him.
“Amanda forgets that Chantelle wants to die. Your boss put her in this position to keep her from dying long enough to drag us into this. By my way of thinking, I’m doing her a favor if I kill you because then she can finally shuffle off this mortal coil. As that’s her biggest desire, I get to
help her the way she wants to be helped.”
Geoffrey must have seen by the look in my eyes that I wasn’t bluffing. As if the two dead men at his feet suggested otherwise. He held up his hands. “Very well. You win. My employer’s name is William Chambers.”
I grinned. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
“Depends on whether or not he kills me for telling you.”
“I would have killed you if you hadn’t.”
“And that, my dear Ms. Chan, is why I told you.”
“With the same end result here, I’d like to know why William Chambers wants Victor Pavlenco so badly.”
“He doesn’t want Victor,” Geoffrey said. “He wants the Ring of Aten.”
“The Ring of what?”
“Aten, the Egyptian god of the sun.”
“I thought that was Ra.”
“Are you familiar with Akhenaten?”
“The heretic pharaoh,” I said. “Sure.”
“For twenty years, Egypt went from being polytheistic to monotheistic.”
I laughed. “Akhenaten established the religion, but that doesn’t mean the priests went along with it in private. He wasn’t particularly popular.”
“Yes, well, he commissioned his vizier to create a ring to hold sunlight.”
“A vizier is an advisor,” Amanda said. “How would an advisor create a magic ring?”
“Vizier is the root word from which we get the term wizard. The viziers were all very powerful wizards, and Akhenaten’s vizier, Aye, was one of the best. He ruled as pharaoh himself after first serving as the vizier for Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhamun.”
“Name dropping pharaohs who died thousands of years ago doesn’t impress me. Your salient point is that there’s a solar powered ring,” I said. “What of it?”
“It’s far more than that. A vampire who wears the Ring of Aten can walk in the sunlight as a normal human.”
“And your boss wants it.”
Geoffrey nodded.
“And Victor has it.”
“He keeps it on his person, but doesn’t use it. He claims that the user is known to the Men of Anubis, and that is a bad thing.”
“Never heard of them.”
“They were an ancient family in Egypt who oversaw the mummification of the kings, but who also discovered the secret to eternal life. Throughout history, they’ve interfered in the affairs of men, gods, and creatures.”
