Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Madoc pulled himself away from the table. It was habit to register his discomfort, the way he didn’t take a breath to speak until he was as far away from the box as possible in the dining room. Took remembered Madoc’s weight on him in the Aron house as the first Molotov went off, the protective hand on the back of his head.

  Fire. Madoc had never liked fire.

  “Then what was it for?” Madoc asked.

  Took rubbed his fingers along the edge of the box. It was thinner than the rest of the metal, shiny where someone had taken a grinder to it.

  “Have you ever seen people in an evacuation?” he asked. “Hardly anyone takes the designated escape route. They run along routes they know, the rat runs that they think no one else will find.”

  When they were done with him, someone usually dragged him back to the Box. Tonight someone else was screaming. Some old habit made him pick apart the vowels and weigh the consonants, but he couldn’t find the part of his brain that knew how to make sense of that.

  Ruined. Broken.

  The words were in his head, but it wasn’t his voice. It was a liar as well. He was ruined, he knew that, but they hadn’t broken him—not yet. He didn’t know why not, exactly, but he knew.

  “It’s not my fault,” the woman screamed. “I didn’t tell her anything. She never found out from me.”

  The woman’s voice cut off raggedly, like someone had clamped a hand over her mouth. Someone else spoke up….

  The memory fritzed out into static and a dark, cold rage that hung on to something Took couldn’t see.

  Clipped orders echoed up the stairs, and cars revved outside on the street. There was a plan. Took curled up in a ball on the floor and thought about if he could make it downstairs, outside, away.

  A door slammed and he heard THE VOICE snap orders. He shuddered and crawled, his bones ground together like salt under his skin, back into the Box.

  They hurt him to put him in the Box and sometimes they took him out of the Box and hurt him. No one ever hurt him in the Box. It was, right then and right there, the closest thing to safety he could imagine.

  “Well?” Madoc asked. “What’s your point, Bennett?”

  His voice was sharp and expectant, the SSA Madoc who expected you to do your job and have the answers. The hand on the back of Took’s neck was the Madoc who’d taken him to bed, patient in his own way.

  For a second he felt like an idiot as he realized that Madoc would never hurt him. Then the dark sneak of doubt crawled back in, because he’d thought the Box was safe as well, hadn’t he? Took shuddered and pushed himself away from the table as though he could shed the dread like a coat.

  “When someone came to her house and killed her family, Nora didn’t run to her room or try to get out. She went to the Box. It was somewhere she thought was safe, her harbor,” Took said, his voice rough as he stalked out of the room. He didn’t really have anywhere to go, but he couldn’t stay in the room with that metal coffin anymore, not least because he had the obscure compulsion to crawl into it. “You want to know what they kept in the box? It was her.”

  IT WAS light out. All the good little vampires in the world, or the half of it the sun shone on, were tucked up in their coffins. Or at least decamped back to hotel rooms and VINE offices. The only ones left in the house were Took, Pally, and the little girl.

  Took stood in the silent kitchen, tipped two pills into his palm, and washed them down with whiskey. It tasted like nothing much. The back of his throat caught the burn of it, but none of the wood and rye flavor. He’d never been that much of a drinker—honesty floated to the top of a drunk’s bottle—but he missed the taste now he couldn’t indulge.

  Not as much as fried chicken, though.

  His mom had made terrible fried chicken. He still remembered it now—two legs of chicken charred to the color of rust and served with last night’s fries and half a can of beans, the paper plate soaked with grease and thin, orange ketchup. It had been tough as wood to chew and tasted like… hot grease, mostly.

  She’d never been a good cook. Her skills lay elsewhere. In service to the Hounds.

  Took tossed the rest of the whiskey back in one. Even if he couldn’t taste it, muscle memory gave him enough dutch courage to pick up his cell phone. He dialed the number from memory. Over a decade since he’d last punched that number into a phone, and his thumbs still remembered the order of numbers with no help from his conscious mind.

  It rang out the first time. The second as well. Took hesitated as he got ready to press Redial, his thumb pressed against the small, rubber button. It didn’t feel right. He glanced upstairs and wondered if Pally could hear the other end of a phone conversation through the floorboards.

  Took couldn’t, but he’d been spat up as much as made. There were probably plenty of things he couldn’t do that other Anakim could.

  Anakim. Took wondered when he’d started to think of himself like that, even sporadically. Was it a good sign that he had started to come to terms with his situation, or was it some evidence of the corruption of the soul that the priests warned about?

  Call it what you like, and God knew his mother would, but Took supposed it didn’t make any difference.

  From the kitchen counter, he grabbed the stake she’d sent him—the wax-smooth wood blistered his fingertips on contact—and let himself outside. It was muggy out, and love bugs flitted aimlessly across the handkerchief-sized square of courtyard garden. At some point someone had tried their best with it, but the plants had died long ago and the pots had cracked in the weather.

  It was the sort of day his mother loved. She’d strip down to shorts and a cutoff top, arms and legs tanned like teak, and drink flasks of cold tea while she gardened. Sometimes she’d even sing—the long, blessed days of summer she called it, although the tunes she sporadically visited on any listeners were always from the charts.

  Took retreated to the first scrap of shadow he could find, under the overgrown bush of wisteria that hung over the fence. The sickly sweet smell of mulched flowers was heavy in the air.

  He pressed Redial. It rang until he thought it was about to cut off again and he’d have to start from scratch. Just before the last ring—halfway through it, in fact—she picked it up.

  “What?” she said, her voice cold with suspicion over the delay. “Who’s this.”

  Took leaned back against the fence, eyes trained on the top windows of the house for any movement. He relaxed his hold on his vowels and let the northeast Cali drawl slide back into his voice.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “It’s… Luke.”

  That felt strange. He hadn’t introduced himself as that in years, not said his old name at all for months. It didn’t feel right on his tongue anymore.

  Silence on the other end of the phone. Took imagined her—a lean woman with short, bobbed blonde hair and bare feet. It would only be getting light on the West Coast, but she’d have been up for hours. There’d be something on the stove in that old, copper pot she lugged from house to house, and the crossword would be done. For a sentimental moment, Took almost missed her.

  “Have you called to say goodbye?” she asked.

  Took tapped the point of the stake against his thigh. He could feel the point of it sharp through the worn-thin denim.

  “No.”

  “Then call back when you’re ready to do the right thing,” she said briskly. “If you do it yourself, Luke, we’ll bring you home.”

  The point of the stake dug deeper into his leg. He tightened his grip on it and kept up the drumbeat rhythm against his thigh. It ached as a bruise formed, tried halfheartedly and half-fed to heal, and then bruised again.

  “I need to speak to Gabriel.”

  “He doesn’t want to speak to you.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Don’t need to.”

  Jab. Jab. Jab.

  “It’s important.”

  “To the vampires. To you. Not to us.”

  Took was vaguely surprised tha
t she hadn’t resorted to a direct slur to get her point across. Not that she needed to. He understood exactly how she wanted to make him feel.

  The point of the stake hit his thigh hard, and he felt the denim give way under the metal point. It gouged down into the meat—not deep enough to disable, but enough to sting. Blood welled up and wicked away into the denim, a patch of muddy crimson against faded cotton. He grimaced and gingerly pulled it out to wipe on his sleeve.

  “Mom—”

  “My son died. His corpse will realize it needs to follow suit soon,” she said. “Until then—”

  “Do you still visit Granddad every Friday in that nursing home?” he asked. He didn’t need to put any threat in his voice. Like the unspoken slur she hadn’t quite spat out earlier, they both knew where they were. “Still go out of your way to get the lilies Grandma always liked before you go to visit her and your brothers in the graveyard?”

  She was silent, so silent that he thought he could hear the blood in her ears shush down the line.

  “You’d threaten your own grandfather?” she said skeptically. “My son might just be a bag of skin for you, but I don’t believe his soul has rotted out of his head so soon.”

  “You’re right,” Took said. “That’s why I’m not threatening him, I’m threatening you. There are plenty of people who would cross state lines to get their hands on you, Mom. Last I checked, you still had a double handful of warrants on you in nearby states.”

  “I’m not scared of the cops.”

  “Good, because you should probably surrender to them before everyone else you conned, crossed, or condemned turns up for their pound of flesh. Unless you’ve put on weight, there won’t be much left of you once they’re done.”

  A breath hissed between her teeth.

  “I can get in contact with Gabriel. That doesn’t mean he’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Like I said, this is important, so run the same logic past him,” Took said. “I’m the best profiler that VINE has. If I tell them everything I know, how long before someone puts a noose on both of you?”

  “It won’t do you much good either,” she pointed out.

  “I might not be quite ready to kill myself, Mom,” Took said. “But trust me, I haven’t got a whole lot left to lose here. I’m going to be at The Salt in Nevada in two days. Tell Gabriel to meet me there or I tell them everything I know about you both. Got it?”

  She grunted her acknowledgment and scuffled about for a paper and pen. Took flexed his hand around the bloody stake as he waited. He finally gave her his number, reminded her that he would ruin them all, and was about to hang up, when she blurted, “Wait.”

  It wasn’t kindness. There was no sentimentality in Took’s mom’s heart, no inch of her that would waver from her convictions. There came a point in life when you’ve committed too much to something to ever think you’ve been wrong. Forty years was a lot of investment to release as a sunk cost.

  Yet he still felt that hitch in his throat, a child’s pointless faith that this time would be the storybook.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I appreciate that you don’t use my son’s name,” his mom said. “It’s insult enough that you use his body.”

  She hung up. Took slumped back against the fence and tilted his head up to the sun. It wouldn’t kill him, not unless he waited there long enough to grow very old and very weak. The papers had been full of that a few years ago. Archaeologists in Russia had found some ancients asleep under the ice. The photos had shown shadows that had to be ten feet tall caught up a glacier as it crawled down from the mountains, and when they uncovered them, the great bodies had just crumbled to ash in the daylight before they could even get a picture. The public had called the archaeologists murderers, and they’d had to go into hiding.

  But who had that amount of free time these days? Everyone had things to do.

  Took pushed himself off the fence and stalked back into the house. He needed to arrange a flight to Nevada before Liam Waring got the news that his pet wetmouth had been reinstated as a Biter. Took didn’t want to have to talk the man down again.

  He remembered the flash of cold, mad rage in the office, and despite the fever sweat of the sun, a chill ran down his back. Liam might not come out of it alive this time.

  THE OFFENDED scream of a cat cut through the house like a rusty chainsaw. It sounded like something was being murdered. Took tucked his phone between his ear and his shoulder as he ducked out of the office.

  “I’ll be at the airport at nine,” he said to Madoc’s answering machine. “If you don’t approve the use of the VINE jet, I’ll take a commercial flight.”

  He hung up abruptly as he reached the stairs and before he could begin to pad his decision with excuses. It had been a long time since he’d given a crap about the consequences of anything he did—a twinge of guilt for others, sure, but nothing for himself. So why did he care if Madoc was angry about his decision?

  Maybe he’d lied to his mother after all and he did have something to lose.

  It was an awful thought. He shuddered and put it to the back of his head as he followed the offended swears of his cat to the back of the house, to the guest room, as the VINE agent who’d handed over the safe house to him had described the small back room with the narrow bed and solitary chair. This was the first time that anyone had used it. Took didn’t knock. He just barged the door open.

  “What the fuck are you doing to my cat?” he asked sharply. Then he took in the scene and revised the question. “What is my cat doing to you?”

  Blood dripped down Pally’s narrow, pretty face in fat, wet ribbons. His eyebrow was laid open, one ear was freshly pierced, and the scratches ran up his face from lip to forehead in ragged stripes. He wiped blood out of his eyes with a lacerated hand.

  “Cat?” he said. “It’s a demon.”

  “Same thing,” Took said. As though concerned they had forgotten about her, Snack screamed again. She was perched on the bed knob, ears flat and fur bushed out and spiky. Blood stained her paws and muzzle. He reached out, grabbed her under the front legs, and scooped her up. Nine pounds of angry, midsquirm cat dangled from his hand and tried to rabbit kick Pally. “What did you do to piss her off?”

  Pally gave him a sharp look of disbelief as he poked his eyebrow back together. “Me? That hellspawn tried to claw my face off.”

  As though to prove it, Snack twisted her head around and sank her teeth into Took’s thumb. Her fangs punched through his nail and into the meat beneath, the sharp pain an electric jab up his nerves into his armpit. He tossed her back onto the bed with a curse, and Pally dropped his hand long enough to bark out a mocking laugh.

  “See?”

  Snack lashed her tail, hissed at both of them, and slunk up the bed to the dead little girl laid out on the pillows. She pawed at the gossamer fine winding sheet with a bloody paw, her claws extended enough to tug at and pluck the fabric.

  “And see,” Pally said as he jabbed a finger at the bed. “That’s what that hellcat was doing before, and when I tried to stop it, the bastard thing tried to claw my face off. What sort of animal isn’t scared of our ilk?”

  Took shrugged. It was a good question, but he didn’t care. What mattered was that Snack was the only thing that kept something like Luke Bennett alive in that box. Everything else they had picked out of him, gobbets of “him” gone forever, but they couldn’t make him kill the scrap of kitten they had tossed in with him.

  If Snack, now a slightly bigger scrap, wanted to eat Pally’s nose for breakfast, she could have it.

  “Maybe you should have asked what she wanted,” he said.

  Pally snorted. His face was nearly back to pretty again, stitched together seamlessly with only smears of blood to show for his trouble. “Maybe you should have drowned that thing when it would fit in a glass instead of a bucket.”

  A snarl twitched at Took’s mouth before he could throttle it back. He wasn’t used to banter from Pally. The old vampire had
always interacted with him the same way he now did with Lawrence, quietly competent professionalism. That was respect on his part—most humans rarely rose to his immortal notice. The few who did hadn’t ended well.

  But their new friendship didn’t mean he could threaten Took’s cat.

  “She doesn’t know what this is,” Took said. He reached down and pulled the folds of silk away from the child’s face. Snack pulled back and sat down, faded blue eyes fixed on the doll-like perfection. “See? Now leave her be, Snack.”

  Snack tucked her tail around bloody feet and gave a quiet, barely audible mew.

  “Strange animal,” Pally muttered sourly. He grabbed one of the washcloths that Took had, in a vague burst of hospitality, handed to him and wiped his hands. “Where did you get it?”

  “What happened to her?” Took countered. “Blood loss and suffocation isn’t enough to kill a dhampir. Not for long. We both know that.”

  “It didn’t,” Pally said with a sigh. “She was just down there too long, too young. Like the elders who fossify, a sleep as good as death, she just… gave up and stilled. Dammit, that cat—”

  He snatched for the scruff of Snack’s neck, but Took grabbed his wrist before his fingers could make contact. On the bed Snack crawled up onto the little girl’s chest, put her muzzle on the child’s chin, and purred bloodily against white, rosebud lips. Red smeared the dead skin like lip gloss, shone, and slowly sank down under the surface. The pale folds of skin were—maybe—a little less perfectly pallid afterward.

  “She’s a demon, remember,” Took said after a second where nothing else happened. He loosened his grip on Pally’s wrist. “Maybe let her work.”

  Pally pulled his hand away and stepped back. His face was creased into a frown. “What is it doing, Took? What kind of animal is this?”

  “A good cat, I guess,” Took said to the first. “And I don’t know what she’s doing, but what harm can it do to leave her to it? Nora Aron spent too many hours in that box. If she’s just in some unending sleep, then let her hear a cat purr for a while.”