Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Madoc plucked his sunglasses off, folded the legs, and tucked them back into his pocket. His smile was cold. The deputy’s eyes flicked from Madoc’s pale eyes to his mouth and then flinched away and down to one well-tailored shoulder.

  “I understand that disappointment has never killed anyone,” Madoc told him. “My agent. Now.”

  The deputy folded as easily as the bit of paper he’d just mangled.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Right away.”

  WITH THICK walls and oversized, reinforced windows to flood the small, square space with the sun, the cell had been designed to hold vampires. It was implemented cruelty, but Madoc couldn’t help the flash of appreciation as he saw Took sprawled out on the narrow cot. The sun picked out threads of gold in the cropped, sandy hair and gilded the sprawl of lean muscle with the memory of a golden tan.

  At least it did between the scars.

  There was something about Took Bennett that even now, after two years as a vampire, belonged to the daytime. Madoc didn’t know if he should resent that or be glad that he wasn’t the only one who’d tried and failed to claim the man.

  An off note of guilt was added to the familiar tincture of hunger and frustration that Madoc associated with Took. It was a dark thought, even for Madoc, to imagine himself in lustful harness with the monster who’d nearly killed his old partner.

  Not unprecedented—Madoc had never been able to boast about the purity of his thoughts—but still dark.

  “Bennett,” he said.

  Took lifted his elbow and squinted out from under it. There was a scabbed burn on his cheekbone and the faded remnants of a bruise around one of his pale gray eyes. When he saw Madoc, something shifted behind his face, quick and sharp, but it was locked back before Madoc could pin down what it was.

  “Get me out of here,” Took told him.

  Irritation flicked at the back of Madoc’s throat, salty as blood. Took had always been too familiar—not disrespectful but not impressed either. But that had been before, when he had Madoc’s back and still called himself Luke, not when it had been a year since they’d seen each other—more than that, some embarrassing tally-keeper fragment of Madoc’s brain reminded him, since they’d actually spoken—and Madoc had traveled through the day to get Took’s ass out of the fire.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Madoc said. He rapped his knuckle against one of the bars. It rang solid and he could feel the faint itch of the silver core against his skin. “At least if you’re in here, it will be easy to keep track of you. I thought you weren’t fit for active duty, Bennett, so you can imagine my surprise when I was notified one of my agents had stormed a trap house on his own.”

  Took dropped his elbow so his eyes were hidden again. The corner of his mouth twisted up in a bitter smile as he added a dry postscript to Madoc’s statement. “Unsuccessfully.”

  “Maybe you’ve lost your edge,” Madoc said. The snort of disagreement he expected from Took didn’t come. “The sheriff thinks you were involved, Bennett. Were you?”

  There was a pause, and then Took finally moved his arm. He rolled off the bed in one loose, easy movement. The sheets under him were stained black with blood, and Madoc felt something in his chest crack as though he’d taken a blow. Took stalked over to the bars and glared at him.

  “Do you really need me to answer that?” Took asked. The tension in his voice was drawn tight between the old, affronted anger and a new, brittle fear that maybe people did need to ask.

  “For the record, yes,” Madoc said with cold precision. Then he let the edge soften on his voice. “Personally? I know you better than that.”

  A bitter smile curved Took’s mouth, and he braced his hands against the bars. Muscle bunched and tightened under his pale skin, the faded scatter of freckles pale as nutmeg. “No,” he said. “Not anymore, you don’t. Look, I’ll tell you what happened. Just get me out of here first, okay?”

  The urge to be cruel was familiar, almost as instinctive as the need to blink. Madoc didn’t want to fight it. The reduction of their relationship to tit-for-tat favors offended him, and he wanted to return that weight and measure.

  Before he could let out the aged poison under his tongue, Took closed his eyes. He rasped one word through clenched teeth. “Please.”

  It was unexpected enough to put Madoc back on his heels. He stared at Took’s tight, set face for a moment, and the memory rose up through his mind as though he’d hooked it on a line.

  Hope had died six months before. What was left was anger.

  Madoc slammed one of the Goats, feral and ruined by blood addiction, against the wall. The man bared yellow, chisel-edged teeth and swung the broken edge of a butcher’s knife at Madoc’s face. It skimmed over Madoc’s jaw—a cold kiss with a hot lick at the end of it. The Goat’s eyes caught hungrily on the bead of blood, and in the moment of distraction, Madoc unceremoniously snapped his neck.

  The chatter in his earpiece rose and fell in ragged cadence as the rest of the team cleared the house—Lawrence and Pally’s clipped professionalism, Kit’s ragged, off-kilter humor, and the silence that should have been a body at Madoc’s back. It nearly drowned out the sound of a door as it slammed upstairs. Not quite, though. Madoc tossed the dead Goat aside and took the stairs two at a time. He shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs and hit a wall of stench that was almost solid. It stung his eyes and stuck greasily to his tongue—rancid meat and something sour underneath it.

  In the corner of the room, a tall, half-turned woman, her throat one ragged scab from overlapped bites, tried to drag something out of a splintered wooden box as a little gray cat, grubby and leggy, swore at her as it chewed on her leg.

  “Get off. Get out,” she screamed as she struggled with whatever was in the crate. “He’ll come back for you. If I have you—”

  Madoc pulled his gun and blew her head off. Her face splattered over the window, and her body pitched gracelessly to the floor. The cat screeched as it leaped free and shot across the room and under the neatly made white bed. There was a man in the box, filthy and raw. He stared at Madoc with pale, lost eyes and then cracked a surprisingly familiar smile.

  “W… was just about to do that,” he said in a rusty, disused voice. “Always… always gotta hog the glory.”

  There were cuffs on his wrists and a collar around his throat—heavy links of iron coated with silver. Someone had worked magic into the metal as well. It was sticky and painful as hot tar against Madoc’s hands as he snapped the locks. His fingertips blistered and peeled, the raw meat underneath turned dry where the curse touched it until he could see bone as he worked.

  Took—not that anyone called him that yet—clung to Madoc. He was all wasted arms and sour breath—broken and ruined. Then he laughed, a crazy sound in that horrible room, and swore that he knew Madoc would come for him.

  That was the moment that Madoc realized two things—that he would slowly kill whoever had done this and that Madoc had been in love with the man in his arms for a while.

  Three days later Took turned Madoc away from the hospital and refused to see him or even talk to him.

  That day was still vivid and raw for Madoc, but Took probably remembered it as the best day in a year’s worth of raw-meat memories. Seen from the wrong side of the bars, the narrow little cell was just a better-ventilated box.

  “Half an hour,” Madoc said. He reached through the bars and cupped his hand around the back of Took’s neck. The long straps of muscle were set like stone under his fingers, too cold to the touch. It would be too much to expect, he supposed, for the sheriff to fetch his prisoner lunch from the blood bank. “I’ll get you out. Can you hang on?”

  Took coughed out a ragged laugh and leaned forward to rest his forehead against the bars. The skin pinked where the silver irritated it, but Took ignored it.

  “What are you going to do if I say no?” Took asked. He slid his arms through the bars and let them dangle, as though the fact that part of him was
on the right side of freedom would make it easier. “Rip the door off the hinges?”

  They both knew he could. Madoc knew that he would. Maybe one day he’d tell Took that, but not while all that was left of their friendship was reluctant civility.

  “Yell at them faster,” he said instead as he drew his hand back. “Hang in there, Bennett.”

  He turned to leave. As he banged the door to get the deputy to let him out, Took called after him. “You know, I don’t work for you anymore, Madoc. You could just use my name.”

  Madoc didn’t look around. The door rattled and creaked as the deputy unlocked it. “It’s not your name,” he said. “It’s what was done to you.”

  SHERIFF ANDERSON looked like a strip of rawhide dressed up like a man. His weathered, darkly tanned skin was pulled tight over wiry muscles and long bones. The backs of his hands were flecked with liver spots, and his knuckles jutted up through his skin like tombstones.

  “Ain’t never had any problems with your lot here,” Anderson said bluntly as he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves back. Black, blunt crosses were inked onto the backs of his forearms. The ink didn’t injure Madoc—it wasn’t so easy to package divinity; even a pure heart and a real threat weren’t enough sometimes—but it was an open insult to flash it at Madoc. That was telling. “Then people start disappearing, your friend turns up with all the answers and some patter about being VINE, and now I got two deputies in jail and that hotshot human consultant? Well, it turns out he’s a wetmouth with no official reason to be here.”

  The slur dropped ripe and casual into the room. It wasn’t clear if Anderson knew it wasn’t something to say in polite company or if he just didn’t give a damn. Madoc chose to ignore it. He’d been called worse.

  “No official reason that you need to know about,” Madoc said coldly. “I want my agent out of that cell.”

  Anderson picked something out of his teeth with his thumbnail. As his thumb pushed his lip up, he flashed a black hollow where his incisor should be. It made Madoc’s skin crawl, and he licked his tongue over the back of his own teeth, the edges of his fangs still sharp enough to draw a drop of blood. The crosses on Anderson’s arms weren’t just superstition, then. There was real piety behind them. Even most of the Hunter cells balked at yanking their own eyeteeth out, if only because the Embrace would bestow fangs on a mewling infant or gummy elder if anyone was ill-advised enough to turn them. Only a few of the more extreme Pentecostal sects—the Levites, the Proverbials—still unfanged their children with regularity.

  “Your agent,” Anderson said. He rolled the word around his mouth as he said that. “Yeah, Gunnar said you looked real… close… down in the cells. Real cozy. Tell me, VINE going to approve of you pulling rank to get your—”

  Madoc’s temper slipped. He reached over the desk and grabbed Anderson’s arm. He smiled wide enough to flash fang and dug his fingers down into the inked skin until Anderson blanched. The gray smoke of anger wriggled in his throat and swam across the back of his eyes. There was a faint sweetness to it, like an applewood bonfire.

  Experience told Madoc there was much he could do from inside the smoke, when he let the part of him that had never been human out to play unfettered, and he wouldn’t really regret it. He might say he did, mouth the right words and make the right face, but he’d never feel it. He could rip Anderson’s fucking, cross-scrawled arm off, see if God cared as he beat the man to death with it, and never care about the screams.

  He choked it back, for the moment, and kept the smile on his face.

  “Mind your tongue,” he said pleasantly. “Or I’ll take it with me to Philadelphia, slice it up thin, and let every member of VINE have a taste so they know why your poison flicked my temper.”

  Anderson writhed in his chair, and pain pinched the high color out of his face, but it hadn’t touched his arrogance yet. The scent of him, hot and bitter as adrenaline sweated out of his pores, was sharp and aggressive.

  “You can’t touch me,” Anderson spat through clenched teeth. “This isn’t the old country. You can’t just do what you want. You can’t take what you want.”

  Madoc leaned in, his weight braced on Anderson’s arm, and murmured the correction in his ear. “Shouldn’t, Sheriff Anderson. I shouldn’t do those things. For four hundred years, I served the Haza directly. There is very little I cannot do. Remember that.”

  Madoc let go and stepped back in one smooth, slightly too-fast movement. Anderson sucked in a startled breath as his hand spasmed uncomfortably where the blood rushed back into it. His fingers stuttered against the use-scarred wood until he clenched them into a fist.

  “You think you can threaten me into cutting your agent loose?” he asked as he rubbed roughly at the red mark that oozed out from under his ink. “Maybe I can’t put you on your heels, but your Haza will if you cross the line. If they don’t administer the Accord, even the vampires in the Senate will have to call for censure.”

  That was true. The cry today was usually that the Accord gave VINE, or Skazanie as they’d previously been known, too long a leash. What they didn’t understand was that before the Accord—that unprecedented constitutional agreement between the Living and the DEAD—there hadn’t even been a collar. Like trusted dogs, the Haza had let them range free over their blood-parishes… which then had run from the East Coast and around the mud-thick Mississippi until it faltered at the Rocky Mountains.

  Now there were checks and balances to VINE’s remit—oversight and external authority. But Anderson’s problem wasn’t his understanding of constitutional law. It was the idea that Madoc would care about the consequences if Anderson’s hateful mouth caught his temper again.

  “You mistake me,” he said. Anderson looked smug as he thought he saw Madoc backpedal his threat. “I expect you to let my agent go because you have no evidence he was involved, other than his fangs. If you continue to hold him, I will pursue every legal avenue to extract satisfaction, even if I have to move here.”

  Anderson scowled as he realized that, not only had he not won, but that Madoc had a threat up his sleeve that couldn’t be countered with the Accord. Pettiness, for an immortal, could be an art form. Some vampires had methodically ruined whole families over decades, generations even. Anderson absently rubbed his arm as he considered Madoc’s point. It was hard to tell if it was the bruise that preoccupied him or the tattoo.

  “Fine,” Anderson said finally. “Agent Bennett is still a person of interest, but I’ll release him to your recognizance… on the proviso that he stays in town but doesn’t interfere in my case. Last thing I need is some interested bystander in the way of my deputies, especially after he put two of them in the hospital.”

  “He’ll stay in the state,” Madoc countered. The last time he’d checked—obsessively and protectively—Took had still been resident in Charleston. It was only an hour on the freeway.

  Anderson accepted that with a shrug. “As long as I can reel him back in if any evidence turns up,” he said. “In that case, he’s all yours. Do what you like to him.”

  Madoc waited while Anderson signed the forms and made the call to the cell. He picked at a burr in his mirror-polish-manicured thumbnail as Anderson growled instructions to the deputy.

  “See?” Anderson said with mock solicitousness. “You get more flies with honey than vinegar, Agent Madoc.”

  Madoc looked up from his nail and gave a humorless smile. “I never said I wouldn’t kill you, Sheriff Anderson,” he said, “just that I didn’t need to, to get Bennett out of jail. If you want to know what will inspire me to rip your tongue out at the root, flap it some more.”

  Anderson lifted his chin, a muscle tight under his jaw, and curled his lip into a sneer. “I don’t like your kind, Agent Madoc. I’m a fair man, so that won’t influence my investigation, but I want to make sure we’re clear. I don’t like you, and if your agent was involved in this or you get in my way, I’ll put you both down like you were rabid dogs.”

  “There we
go,” Madoc said pleasantly as he opened the office door. “On the same page at last.”

  Chapter Three

  THE DEPUTIES hadn’t been particularly careful when they tossed Took’s room at the B and B. His bed had been roughly stripped, the mattress tipped off the bed, and his clothes dumped out of his overnight case in the corner of the room. Nothing had been destroyed, just turned inside out and tossed aside.

  Took had done it often enough himself—latex gloves dry against his knuckles as he stripped a Goat’s bed and checked in the mattress for syringes of hidden blood—so turnabout was fair play, he supposed. He still wanted to gather up everything they’d pawed over and torch it. It felt like hands on his skin, not on his old jeans.

  “Did they take anything?” Madoc asked as he looked over Took’s shoulder. “Laptop? The rest of your clothes?”

  Took waited for a second. It was the sort of question that usually left him off balance, unsure how to justify his pared-down life without any real explanation. Old habits kicked in with Madoc and he snorted instead. “We don’t all travel with an eighteenth-century dandy’s wardrobe.”

  “To be fair,” Madoc drawled. “I was an eighteenth-century dandy, and I own a plane, so I do what I like.”

  Took laughed and stepped into the ruined room. “I didn’t plan to stay this long,” he said. “All I wanted to do was look over the files, see if I was right about the links to my case.”

  “Uh-huh,” Madoc drawled. “We still need to talk about that.”

  A white plastic pill bottle lay on the floor at the end of the bed. Took tapped it with one booted toe. It was empty. He hoped whatever cop pocketed them had taken down the brand name. Otherwise the poor bastard would have a bad day.

  They had not found anything else. There was nothing to find. Took hadn’t set up the ambush at the trap house, so there was nothing to incriminate him. As for embarrassing… well, anyone who wanted to know anything about his life—his pay scale, his scars, the size of his fucking fangs—just had to look it up online. If one of the reputable papers hadn’t posted it, then you could bet a gossip rag had. They had his pills until he could get the script refilled, and they had his collar size.