12
The stake piercing my spine was starting to draw blood, and I was temporarily thankful to the goth god that black was good for disguising blood stains. Too bad my mesh probably wasn’t machine washable.
“Do you mind ?” I asked, half turning in my seat.
“Move,” the woman behind me hissed.
I sighed dramatically, then cringed since it ground the stake closer to my spinal column.
Bella glanced over at the disturbance, and I took it as a cue to excuse myself before she got wise to what was going on and put herself into harm’s way. Of course, if Bella was my Judas it wouldn’t matter, but I didn’t know and couldn’t risk her.
“Smoothies go right through me,” I explained as I slipped past Bella into the aisle.
She nodded, twitched her legs aside, and turned straight back to the man being mangled onscreen.
Once I was clear, pointy-stick woman grabbed me by the waistband of my jeans in a grip way too intimate for not having bought me dinner first. I hissed, and she poked me again. This woman was so going down, especially if the back of my neck scabbed over and kept me out of pigtails for the foreseeable future. Not that I was really into pigtails, but a girl liked to keep her options open.
I pretended to stumble, to rip myself from her grasp and escape the stake, but the Prickly Princess only tightened her grip on my jeans until it was a damned good thing I didn’t have to breathe.
We were all the way to the exit doors, me mentally calling out to Bobby, hoping he wasn’t in trouble himself and that he’d get Maya a message wherever she might be—which was supposed to be right freakin’ here covering my butt. I ran through my mental catalogue of moves—elbow jab to the solar plexus, stomp on her insole, stop, drop, and roll—but the stake was a wee bit intimidating.
As if she could read my mind, the Prickly Princess moved the point to right between my shoulder blades. I was no science geek, but I was pretty sure that from there it was a straight shot to my heart, assuming no pesky vertebrae got in the way.
“Don’t even think about it,” she hissed in my ear.
“About what?” I asked, a little too loudly now that we were away from my friends, at least some of whom were probably innocent. “My mind’s a blank.” I was hoping to make a commotion, but all we got was a round of “Shhh”s and a crew of prepubescents in the back glancing between us and the screen to see which might become more interesting.
“Move,” she said again, emphasizing her point in a very literal way.
I moved, pulling open the heavy theater door and stepping out into the hallway. I had barely registered Maya in my peripheral vision when she struck—grabbing me by the shirt and ripping me from the Prickly Princess’ grip. She spun me toward the doors that lead out of the theater entirely.
“Go!” she yelled, tossing me a set of keys. Prickly snarled and charged Maya, but was blown back by a snap kick to the face. “Go for the car! Pull it around.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
I bolted for the outer door that led to the parking lot, hoping I’d find the car up front and center, because the lot was jam packed. I cruised the rows, pressing the unlock button every few steps and waiting for the car to beep back at me. I hoped Maya was still winning.
I found the car, planted myself behind the wheel, and laid rubber to the theater entrance, only running over one traffic cone and nearly leaving the undercarriage behind. Maya was in the breezeway between the inner and outer doors, holding a slumped Prickly, Pummelled Princess under the arms like some drunken scarecrow. She seemed a strange choice for a kidnapper or assassin—light brown hair under a silk bandana, big round sunglasses that made her eyes look owlish, a camel-colored sweater, a darker brown full-length skirt and matching boots, and big gold hoops in her ears. She looked like an escapee from a 1970s Nick at Night rerun.
“Sid missed a checkin,” Maya told me as I jumped out of the still-running car to help pour PP into the trunk. My heart contracted, nearly kick-starting again in panic. Sid was supposed to be Bobby’s back-up … and Rick’s. If he’d been put out of commission …
I slammed the trunk down hard over the unconscious Prickly Princess. If she was connected with Bobby’s disappearance … if he’d been hurt in any way … she was dead meat. The kind that didn’t rise again.
“I’ll drive,” Maya said, leaping into the driver’s seat before I could protest. I slammed into the shotgun seat, and she took off before my door was even shut.
“I heard Bobby in my head for a bit,” I told her, holding onto the dash for dear life, my matte black nail polish nearly cracking from the strain. “He just cut off. You don’t think—”
“I don’t speculate,” she said, proving the stick was still firmly lodged up her butt. “We’ll find out soon enough. We’re headed to the morgue now. If we don’t find them there, Rhoda here can tell us where they are.”
“Rhoda?” I asked.
“Old television reference. Never mind, you’re way too young.”
She drove like a bat outta thrift-store hell. It was dark, even darker than it should be at six thirty in the evening, which meant that clouds had moved in while we’d been at the Galleria. No sooner had I thought it than big, fat raindrops started to fall, playing on the roof like Taps. I squashed that thought faster than a cockroach with last year’s clogs … not that I’d be caught dead in a pair of clogs. Anyway, no Taps because Bobby wasn’t dead. I’d know. We had a psychic connection. One that didn’t seem to be operational right now, but still …
Bobby, Bobby, please Bobby, I burbled in my head. Come in, Bobby. If he were anywhere within range of my psychic cell signal, he should answer. Unless … unless it couldn’t go through lead or whatever, like Superman’s vision. I didn’t want to think of him in a lead-lined box. I knew what that meant.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” I asked Maya, even though she was already about to blow the land-speed record.
“Not without hydroplaning.”
“That’s like water surfing right? No traction, no resistance, more speed?” Which only went to show that I was totally not thinking clearly, because it was a night like this one that had ended my first life. Of course, we’d had help then—a little side-swiping and a spin-out into eternity. What didn’t kill you made you stronger, right?
Maya didn’t dignify that with an answer. We were less than a block away from the back entrance of the ME’s office, the one leading toward the morgue, when we spotted Sid’s car and what looked like his body, slumped down in the driver’s seat with his head resting against the window. I heard Maya suck in a breath with a “Dios mia.” It was the first time I’d ever heard her curse. I thought it was a curse, anyway. Beyond nachos, huevos rancheros, and mariachi, my Spanish was pretty nonexistent.
She launched herself out into the pounding rain and circled the front of Sid’s sedan to yank his door open and catch his body as it fell out. I grabbed the plastic laminated road atlas out of her back seat and held it over my head as I followed.
“He’s breathing,” she said when I crowded her, trying to get my head in out of the rain.
Sid flinched like he was having one of those falling dreams and had just suddenly woken up.
“What—?” He stared at us, and his pupils were huge. “How did you get here?”
“Sid,” Maya said urgently, “where are the boys?”
“Boys?” He stiffened up then and his eyes fastened on her with laser focus. “Crap! The boys! I was out?”
“Like a trout,” she answered.
He drew his hand down over his face, now wet from the cold spray bouncing off us from the open door. “It was a setup—the vamps let those bodies be discovered. They must have been waiting for us.”
“Which means this isn’t just some rinky-dink operation, some teen witch messing with the ley lines and unrelated vamp activity.”
“So they’ve got the boys?” Sid asked, apparently slow coming out of his funk.
“It
looks that way, but we’ve got an ace in the hole.” Maya looked back at her trunk.
“You go question your catch,” he said. “I’ll search the scene here and let you know if I turn up any leads on what’s happened or where they’ve gone.”
She didn’t look all that anxious to abandon him. “You’ve got cell signal?”
Sid checked. “Three bars.”
“Good. Keep it close. Check in every half hour.”
“Will do.”
We were drenched when we got back to the car, all except for the very top of my head which had been covered by the road atlas. The rain had blown in sideways and dripped off the atlas until water wasn’t the only thing pouring down. Black dye ran from my never-been-washed T-shirt, covering my arms like blood. I was a vision.
The trunk thumped and the car bucked. Maya cursed.
“Keep it down back there!” she yelled, like the junk in the trunk would pay her any attention.
It seemed like the longest ride of my life. Wet and uncomfortable, calling out to Bobby with no answer coming back. Just waiting until I could get my hands on the Prickly Princess. I was looking forward to trying out my interrogation techniques.
13
I was out of the car before Maya had even shut it down. The automatic garage door was already descending, shutting out whatever we were about to do from the eyes of the world, as if anyone was out to see or care in the pounding rain. It gave me the sense of intense isolation, which was good, because I couldn’t be trusted with our hostage—not when her people had Bobby. My conscience twinged, but it was as obsolete as dial-up Internet. I’d gone vamp. For all I knew, I didn’t even have a soul to worry over any more. But I did have Bobby, and nothing was going to get to him on my watch.
I had to wait for Maya to pop the trunk, which she did via her car key remote thingy, so she was far enough away not to take a boot to the head. And to level a gun at the trunk as it opened. I’d never even seen the gun on her, and I wondered if it was loaded with special bullets or if she was counting on the regular kind to slow the Prickly Princess down for recapture.
Prickly Princess struggled to sit up and then looked around wildly for a way to escape. Just in case Maya’s human reflexes weren’t fast enough on the trigger, I grabbed the trunk lid before it was fully open and clocked PP on the head, part precaution and part payback for Bobby. I was careful not to hit hard enough to knock her out. After all, we still needed answers.
“What did you do with Bobby?” I asked her, my voice so harsh I hardly recognized it as mine.
Her eyes grew hard as radioactive rocks. “They said you’d be the easy one.”
“They lied,” I answered. “Where. Is. Bobby?”
Maya stood beside me, adding the weight of her stare and the barrel of her gun.
Prickly’s bandana had come askew in the trunk and she glared back at us through lost strands of hair, her gaze hot enough to sear, making me think of the Su Surus song “Long Gone Dead”:
Your eyes are like a knife
Stabbing daggers, end my life
But I won’t come home to you
Best believe I have a clue.
It was totally off the topic of torture and interrogation, but sometimes my mind had a soundtrack all its own.
“I could grab a sun lamp and some holy water,” I said to Maya.
“These are wooden bullets filled with birdshot,” she answered. “Either one would hurt like the dickens.” Okay, I got it. She was bad cop.
Prickly Princess blanched and went ballistic. Zero to sixty is no time flat, trying to launch herself out of the trunk at us, but she was hardly in any position for grace and it slowed her. Maya shot her in the shoulder before she could get anywhere, the silencer making it sound more like an air gun than a deadly weapon. If the Prickly Princess hadn’t fallen back into the trunk, whimpering in pain …
My phone chose that second to ring, a ridiculously perky song under the circumstances. I reached for it, hoping against hope that it was Bobby but thinking it was probably Sid, even though I had no idea why he’d call me and not Maya.
“Hello.”
“Hey, it’s Lily.” I was so surprised it took me a sec to process.
“Lily, what’s up?” I tried to sound casual, but I eyed PP as I said it to see if she’d react to the name. No such luck.
“Where are you?” she asked. “The movie ended, like, twenty minutes ago and you never came back from the bathroom.”
It was exactly how I’d expect her to sound if she thought I’d ditched her and the others. I quickly ran through possible excuses.
“Sorry, it’s my parents … one of them sicced a PI on me, who was kind of insistent that we talk. She caught up with me at the theater, and I didn’t want to make a scene, so I bailed.”
“Bailed where?”
Okay, now I was suspicious. “Why?” I asked, eyes narrowing, even though she couldn’t see them over the phone.
“Because we’re at your place and you’re not here.”
“My place?” I asked, voice raised to near screech. Maya winced.
“We were worried about you.”
“Well, don’t be. I needed some alone time.”
“Sounds like you need a restraining order. Or a party. Lucky for you, we’ve already got one started.”
“What?” My voice rose again. Pretty soon I’d shatter glass.
“When you weren’t here, we kind of just let ourselves in.”
I wondered if steam was coming out of my ears.
“Well, let yourselves out.”
“See, that’s the thing—we met up with a bunch of others outside the movie, and we were all pumped up. When I couldn’t reach you, we swung by and Trey Banyon had a few six packs … ”
“What?” I almost roared. I so didn’t have time for this. Bobby was in trouble. All I wanted to do was bleed info out of the Prickly Princess and hunt Bobby down. Save the day. I looked at Maya, who had an eyebrow cocked questioningly at me. “Wild party at my place. Could be a trick to lure me out by myself.”
Maya thought about it a second while Prickly wailed into the silence. Maya twitched the gun menacingly. “I’d like to hear myself think,” she rumbled. “Unless you have something meaningful to say.” PP shut up.
Note to self: Never get on Maya’s bad side. P.S. Find out if she has any other side. Maybe send pound cake.
“You’ve got to go,” Maya said after a beat. “The mixture in the blood is too important to risk. If the wrong people rummage in your fridge and get their hands on it … ” Oh crap. Bad vamps immune to sunlight. So not good for our team.
“Okay,” I answered reluctantly. “I’m out. But you call me the second you have anything.”
Look at me and my bad self, making demands on the lady with the gun.
“I promise,” Maya said.
I nodded and dashed for the door to the house, not willing to open the garage and expose our doings to the world. Behind me I heard Maya say, “Go ahead, make my day.” I hoped she was talking to the Prickly Princess. I ran through the house to the front door and hit the stairs just as Sid was pulling into the driveway. Perfect timing, since it had only just occurred to me that I didn’t have any wheels.
“I need your car,” I called to him. Every sopping second I stood outside was one more our enemies had with Bobby, and potentially with the blood.
He rolled down the passenger-side window. “What?”
“I need wheels!” I wasn’t going to explain the rest standing out in the open. Luckily, he didn’t make me.
I heard the locks pop as he said, “Get in.”
For once, I didn’t hesitate to obey orders. “My place and step on it,” I said, like he was some New York cabby.
He took off. “You going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Kids,” I said, “at my place. All alone with the blood supply.”
He gave it more gas. If we weren’t careful, we’d have a police escort, which, considering that it would cl
ose down the party, probably wouldn’t be the worst that could happen.
“You find anything at the morgue?” I asked while he drove.
“We’ve got two more vamps now. Tyler and Teresa busted their way out of their body vaults. Wonder what the coroner will make of that.”
“Focus here. Rick. Bobby. What about the important stuff?”
“Gone. They put up a fight, that’s clear enough, but there wasn’t much blood. No sign of where they were taken. No calling card or matchbook like in the movies. Nothing.”
Bobby? I called out again mentally. Come in, Bobby. I lo—miss you. I’d almost said the “l” word, that’s how upset I was. Even though I knew it gave guys way too much power. Even though I knew he had to say it first (my mama had raised me right). But, darn it, I did, and if he was too stupid to realize it by now, well, then he was too stupid to live.
I didn’t mean that! I said immediately to the universe at large. If you bring him back to me, I’ll give up mall crawls for a month … except, you know, as my spy gig demands.
The universe, like Bobby, wasn’t answering.
• • •
Visibility was nil, which made Sid’s speed a dangerous thing. A couple of fishtails slowed him down to a semi-sane speed, but it only transferred the insanity to me. I needed to shut down the party and get back to the interrogation, stat.
Cars lined both sides of the street in front of my apartment, and I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. I had Sid let me off around the corner so no one would see me with him, and slogged my way back to the apartment. Within four steps I was a drowned rat in danger of being washed away down the sewer grates. Every gust of wind slapped me in the face with another lash of icy rain. My goose bumps could qualify for their own zip code.
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