“Go on. It’s your turn to be the bait,” Katsue had said, eyes alight with glee. She barely restrained laughter as her partner’s face twisted into a grimace. She delighted in his discomfort. “I’ll wait outside, and don’t sweat it. If you strike out, then I’ll have a go at her.” With a wink, she melted into the shifting crowd.
Troy exhaled heavily, staring at the sandy blonde with obvious reluctance. About five-five, slender and attractive, she dressed in blue jeans, an orange baby doll tee shirt, and white Nikes. She wore her hair loose to the shoulders, and it curled outward with a cute little flip.
Deliberately, Troy got into line. Standing three people behind the blonde, he watched her without being too obvious about it. She ordered a Vanilla Latte, Grande, and told the girl at the register her name was Cheryl.
Troy waited his turn and ordered a Venti Tazo Chai Crème, distractedly giving the girl at the register his name and money. He motioned to the tip jar, not wanting to wait for his change, then stuffed his wallet back into his pants and headed directly to the drink waiting area.
His best chance of hooking up with the vampire was while she waited for her drink which didn’t leave him much time to work. Taking long strides, he juggled potential pickup lines on the short trip from the register. The vampire stood next to the Hear Music rack, holding a Blues compilation CD. Troy tensed with a rush of excitement, seeing the perfect opening.
“That’s a great CD,” he said, approaching her with a winning smile. Once into the role, his nervousness dropped away, and he was ready for action.
She glanced up, looked him over, and then smiled as she tilted her head up to his face. “Yeah?”
Troy could feel her eyes on his throat, no doubt sizing him up for a bite.
“I’ll confess, I’m not much of a Blues fan. Bit before my time,” she said with a giggle. “It was just something to look at while I wait.”
She started to put the CD back, but he intercepted it, turning it over so he could scan the back. “The Blues are more than just music. It’s about savagery and suffering and the triumph of the human soul.”
“Wow, that’s really beautiful.” Her hazel eyes were wide and moist, greed and interest glimmering in their depths. She wasn’t smart enough to really understand what he meant, but he had her hooked anyway.
The vampire gave him the once over, her gaze lingering along his lengthy form, and her appreciation increased with each passing second. The more she saw, the more she liked. Eventually, she noticed his ring, as so many people did, because the remarkable sapphire was big and brilliant.
“That’s a gorgeous ring,” she said.
“Thanks. My father gave it to me,” Troy replied with a bland, practiced smile.
“It’s really pretty.” Her gaze coveted the ring, and he speculated that she planned to take it from his corpse after she fed.
“Cheryl.” One of the Starbuck’s employees called her name and set the Vanilla Latte on the counter.
“That’s me.” The vampire hesitated, torn between grabbing her drink and risking the loss of her prospective meal. Her transparent expression betrayed her thoughts so thoroughly that he might as well have been a mind reader.
Luckily, at that moment Troy’s drink appeared on the counter, and they called his name. “And that’s me,” he said with an easy smile. “Want to grab a table?”
“Sure! That sounds great.” The vampire bounced on the balls of her feet with a perky smile and a swish of her hair. She moved to fetch her latte, and while her back was turned, Troy peered out the store glass windows.
He spotted Katsue watching them from a pay phone across the street while she pretended to make a call. Their gazes locked, and Katsue used sign language to acknowledge him. Katsue wore a bland, bored expression, but he could sense her amusement at his expense. She knew hitting on women made him uncomfortable, even when it was only professional role-play.
He resented her smugness, and if he could have reversed the situation, purely for the sake of revenge, he would have, but Katsue demonstrated the same sexual ease with women that she did with men. There would have been no point.
Resigned, he returned his attention to the vampire, adopting an easy smile to cover the grim determination he gave to his task.
Katsue held the receiver of the pay phone tucked against her shoulder and mimicked the sounds of a real conversation, occasionally pretending to listen to the non-existent person on the other end. A middle class businessman had been waiting for five minutes to use the phone. He impatiently shifted and used body language to show his irritation.
“Hurry up,” he finally snapped.
“Get a cell phone like everyone else in this City, you loser!” Katsue retorted, tossing her waist-length black hair and turning her back to him. She switched to Japanese and sang the lyrics to a popular pop song.
Finally, the man gave up and marched off in a huff.
“Took you long enough,” Katsue muttered. “Jerk.”
She scowled and returned her attention to Troy and their quarry. From her vantage point, she watched the pair make their way to a table. It looked like they were hitting it off, talking and laughing. The girl had the look of a real Rhodes Scholar. Oh yeah, Katsue could see the intelligence gage straining toward the triple digits with this one.
Katsue wore tight red leather pants and a matching leather corset laced in the back. Her black knee-high boots, tucked beneath her pants, had a three-inch heel. Her tight fitting outfit left little to the imagination, and the few weapons she carried had been concealed with difficulty.
Her favored weapons were knives—slender, balanced throwing blades which she wore concealed about her body. She practiced Jujitsu and the Niten’ichi-ryu style of katana fighting. She routinely only carried a couple weapons on her person. At the moment, she had a pair of matched throwing knives tucked into her boots and a compact pistol nestled against the small of her back. A trade off in safety versus utility, but like she always told Troy: “When killing’s done right, it doesn’t take more than one weapon.”
Settling in to wait, Katsue drummed her fingers in boredom and annoyance. Troy always operated much slower and more carefully than necessary in her opinion. He had a cautious nature, but also he disliked propositioning women. Ironically, his laid back “nice guy” approach seemed to make him all that much more attractive to the females of the species. Women ate it up, even if they were members of the living-challenged.
Katsue preferred a hard, fast come-on and rarely found a vampire resistant to her wiles. The undead simply lacked inhibitions. Demons possessed absolutely no concept of mortality or empathy. Most of them welcomed an over-eager, easy victim without question and didn’t realize anything was amiss until she had her weapon pointed at their head or heart.
The better part of an hour meandered past while Troy indulged in an intense heart-to-heart talk with the vampire he was supposed to be setting up for some good old fashioned slaying. If Katsue hadn’t known so well that Troy liked boys, she’d have been worried.
Finally, finally, Troy and the blonde vampire vacated their table and left the coffee house. They were still deeply engaged in conversation, each no doubt plotting the death of the other. Katsue gave them a thirty-second head start and then followed.
“This seems like a pretty dangerous area. Are you sure it’s this way?” Troy asked, just barely managing to keep the dark irony out of his voice as Cheryl led him down a dark alley to where her car was supposedly parked.
“It’s right up ahead,” the blonde assured him, perhaps sensing his suspicion.
“Kay,” he mumbled, striving for a suitably neutral tone.
The vampire had her back to him with absolutely no one around, so he had a perfect opportunity to take a shot. A clean kill, exactly the kind the Alastors were trained to make when the opportunity arose.
He already had his hand buried in his jacket pocket, fingers wrapped around his gun. The compact Kahr MK40 felt small in his massive hands, but the gun
itself, which held five .40 S&W rounds plus one in the chamber, packed a potent punch for such a small, easily concealed weapon.
Heart or head? The destruction of either organ destroyed a vampire. Alastors drilled in the catch phrase until it became a mantra—heart or head. The explosive capacity of bullets could obliterate both and the more traditional methods of a stake to the heart or decapitation worked just as well.
Troy knew he was violating his training and procedure, but his hesitation dragged on minute after minute, and the decision got harder the longer he waited. His palms were clammy, and his gut churned, a morass of acid reflux. He couldn’t help it. Cheryl seemed too human.
He and Katsue spent a week trailing Cheryl before they’d positively identified her as a vampire. She appeared so human that only the tiniest telling traits had given her true nature away, her pale complexion and her nocturnal habits. Both were traits that any human might’ve possessed, and she showed none of the typical signs of decay that usually marked the undead for what they were. It wasn’t until they’d observed her purchasing black market blood from a Red Cross employee that Troy had finally accepted that she was a vampire.
Even then, the circumstances troubled him. Why had she been buying blood instead of hunting? For the week they had watched her, they never saw her kill. Her exact species of undead was unknown to them, but she passed so completely for human that they suspected she might be a new breed. Troy had never seen anything like her before, and he hoped he never would again.
Katsue had wanted to move in for the kill much sooner, but Troy had insisted that they wait to be sure. His impatient, impulsive partner had chafed at the restraint, but he’d insisted, remaining staunchly immovable.
Alastors existed to destroy demons and were the front line of defense in the Watcher’s war. A good hunter quickly developed an almost preternatural affinity for spotting undead. However, sometimes mistakes were made, ghastly errors or terrible lapses of judgment that destroyed lives.
It occurred during Troy’s first year, his first kill, and he had sworn it would never happen again. Before Katsue, he’d been assigned to work with Thrash who’d acted as mentor and partner, teaching the new guy the ropes. Young and eager to prove himself, Troy acted without Thrash’s go-ahead. Troy had identified a vampire at a club, an anemic Goth girl with a blood fetish. He lured her away and took the kill, stabbing her through the belly with a wooden stake, angled upward so that the tip hit her heart.
She’d been human, barely older than a child, and Troy had inherited a legacy of guilt that influenced every future decision he’d ever make. And rightly so.
Thrash had covered for him, and to this day, they were the only witnesses to an innocent person’s death.
The memory of her falling over, grasping at the stake embedded in her chest, shock and accusation in her eyes—it haunted him. Troy still woke up, shaking and drenched in sweat, the young Goth girl’s ghost imprisoned forever in his nightmares. Never again.
Abruptly, Cheryl swung around to face him, and Troy tensed. This was it. She’d attack. Only he wasn’t ready. His trip down memory lane had left him shaken with slowed reactions.
Instead of launching at him, Cheryl leaned against the side of a battered blue Chevy, and Troy belatedly realized that they’d reached her car. “You know, I just want to be sure that you don’t have the wrong idea about me,” she babbled. “I don’t normally meet strange, but really cute and smart men, in coffee shops and just leave with them.” She winked and smiled at him, flirting. “But I have a good feeling about you. It’s like I can trust you.”
“You can,” Troy assured her. He was completely trustworthy. It was he who couldn’t trust her.
Cheryl smiled, a warm spontaneous grin that displayed all of her even white teeth without the slightest hint of fang or pronged tongue. She rushed forward, and Troy tensed against her tackle, then her lips pressed against his. The unexpected kiss was sweet and pleasurable, and her scent filled his nostrils—the faint aroma of roses.
The kiss created a sense of connection between them, a sense of sharing and rightness, and a pleasant buzz robbed him of his suspicion and fear. Amazingly, Troy’s body responded to the feminine form pressed against him. He wrapped her in his arms and increased the pressure of the kiss, making hungry demands on her mouth.
A gunshot thundered through the alley, and blood exploded from the side of Cheryl’s head, splattering Troy’s face and shirtfront. Cheryl went limp in his arms, and he released her body and allowed it to fall to the ground. Shocked and shaken, Troy stared down at his bloody hands in blank horror, trying to understand what had happened.
Katsue stepped out of the shadows and fired her gun again, emptying her weapon into the vampire’s head. Katsue’s gun was loaded with hollow point bullets, which inflicted a massive amount of damage, creating small entry wounds and gaping exit points.
On the fifth shot the remnants of Cheryl’s skull exploded, sending a shower of bone and brain matter outward. Both Katsue and Troy ducked simultaneously, shielding their faces with their arms. The body was consumed from within, rapid decay reducing it to a small pile of ash and bone within seconds.
“I can’t believe you could be so stupid!” Katsue exclaimed.
“Why the hell did you do that?” Troy demanded, rounding on Katsue. “I had her.”
“You did not,” Katsue retorted. “You were kissing it! Troy, get real. It’s the number one rule of hunting: don’t identify with them. They’re not people. They’re demons. And you sure as hell never let one get close enough to make intimate contact!”
Troy’s jaw snapped shut with an audible crack of gnashing teeth. He glared, but had no reply. He shook his head hard, trying to free his mind of the cajoling spell that the bloodsucker had used to enthrall him.
Katsue was right. He’d messed up. Calling it a she was a mistake. Cheryl had been nothing more than an animated corpse, a dead husk inhabited by a demon. The girl she’d once been was long gone. That sort of erroneous thinking had gotten more than one good Alastor killed.
In the dark alley, Katsue fell silent, watching him with eyes full of recrimination. His partner had the sense not to harangue the subject to death, but he could sense her worry.
“Fine, you’re right,” Troy admitted with a grudging grunt. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to spend an hour talking to one and then execute them.”
“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” Katsue said, choosing to let the matter drop. “I just fired a gun. We shouldn’t linger in case the cops show up.” The discussion, for the moment, was over.
A scraping noise from the far end of the alley made both of them stop and look. Tensing, they reached for their weapons. Background illumination made it possible to make out the shady outlines of objects. They weren’t blinded, but the setting wasn’t ideal for an unplanned confrontation.
A man, clad in dark clothing, walked toward them. Even in the dim light, the shock of bleached blonde hair and the pale face made him instantly recognizable.
“Thrash! Where the hell have you been, man?” Troy called out with a relieved grin. He released his hold on the gun in his pocket and moved toward his fellow Alastor.
“What’s he doing here?” Katsue hissed. She held back, suspiciously keeping her hands on her weapons. “How’d he find us?”
Good question. Determined to find the answer, Troy gave a little shake of his head. “Let’s see what he has to say,” Troy answered. They often frequented Starbucks while hunting. It wasn’t inconceivable that Thrash had tailed them from the coffee shop.
“Father Matthew and Professor Leromenos have had us searching high and low for you,” Troy continued, sizing Thrash up as he approached.
The other man’s movements were relaxed and lolloping, a lazy glide. His hands were open and empty, dangling at his sides. “I’ve been busy,” Thrash answered, voice just loud enough to carry. “Why, what’s the fuss? Can’t a fellow take a little R&R without you guys going ‘In Search Of’ on my ass?�
� He gave an easy laugh.
“What was so important that you disappeared for weeks on end without a word to anyone?” Troy asked as they came to a halt about three feet apart, facing one another like dueling fun fighters.
“It’s a long story, but to sum up, I bought an antique sword from Xavier’s, and it wound up being more trouble than I’d bargained for. I’ve had a demon on my ass ever since.”
Xavier Hunter was a private dealer who operated an exclusive shop on Staten Island, dealing exclusively in antique weapons.
“What sort of demon?” Troy asked, catching improbable movement out of the corner of his eye that made him blink and look harder. His attention shot to the area behind the Albino where an impenetrable darkness, a mass of shadow with writhing edges, filled the alley.
The whole situation suddenly felt dead wrong, and Troy’s internal alarms went haywire. He started to withdraw, jerking back too late.
“Troy!” Katsue shouted in warning.
The darkness rushed forward, following on the Albino’s heel like a cloak.
Acting on reflex, Troy lunged backward while reaching for his gun. He only had time to register a wall of inky blackness towering over him before it crashed over his head, engulfing him completely in an eternal agony of imprisonment.
Troy’s last conscious and separate thought before the darkness absorbed him—he’d been sucked into hell.
“Troy!” Katsue leapt, charging several feet forward before a knee-jerk survival instinct made her stop. She stared disbelieving at the place he’d been standing. Troy and Thrash were both gone, and all that remained were gently undulating shadows.
The viscous surface rippled, and a protrusion rose, gaining mass and form until it took on the shape of a man. Stunned, Katsue watched Thrash reform from the liquid, and for once, her reflexes failed. She did nothing but stare with open-mouthed horror as the blackness drained out of him, from his platinum blue-tipped hair to his shiny black leather boots.
Phoenix Contract: Part Three (Fallen Angel Watchers) Page 3
