Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Pally’s face softened with an emotion that almost reached pity, but pulled up just short—for the little girl, or that’s what Took chose to believe.

  “When I was a boy, they said cats stole the breath of babies,” he said. “But what need does a dead child have of breath. Very well, as long as the creature does no harm, I will leave it to its business.”

  “Speaking of which,” Took said. “Do you plan to do anything with…. Nora… in the next few days? As long as Madoc lets me use it, I need to use the VINE jet to go over to California.”

  Pally paused as he glanced toward Took’s throat and then away. “I think Madoc would allow you a lot.”

  For a blank second, Took didn’t remember. Then he reached up and rubbed his throat. He’d healed faster than usual from the burns. The tight skin on his hands and the scorch in his throat was already gone, but the bite lingered.

  “I don’t…. it wasn’t exactly planned,” he said. “It’s not why he asked me back.”

  Pally slapped him on the shoulder. “When I was young, human resources were what we threw into the grinding machine of a war,” he said. “I don’t plan to question your life. I’m just glad that whatever made you pull away from us is undone now.”

  “I don’t know that it is,” Took admitted. “I just…. Did you ever wonder who took me, Pally?”

  He got a sharp side-eye for that. “No,” Pally said with a dry bite to his voice. “That never occurred to anyone.”

  “Jokes now?” Took asked. “Fangs really make me so different?”

  Pally tilted his head in acknowledgment but switched back to the previous question. “It was someone in VINE, someone you knew,” he said confidently. “Human or not, you were well trained and had a native paranoia that served you well before. It had to be someone you trusted enough to let them get close to you.”

  “Like a Biter?”

  “No,” Pally said. “We were questioned, our whereabouts pinned down and dissected. We know you were taken from the parking garage, you flashed your pass when you drove in but never made it upstairs, and none of us could have gotten there and back to our stations in time. None of us could have done this to you, Took.”

  That didn’t make sense. Took rubbed his throat as he swallowed hard, the dull ache of the half-healed bite sharp in his head. West had told him that the Biters had obstructed the case, refused to cooperate, and that they’d focused outside VINE. That it could have happened anywhere, anytime. Took didn’t remember the parking garage that day. His life as a linear thing ended the night before and started again with Madoc’s arms on him. Everything in between was scattershot and disorganized, like a broken Magic 8 Ball.

  “Not even Madoc?” he asked in tight, raw voice. “Where was he?”

  A flash of anger tightened Pally’s jaw, a touch of contempt sharp as a knife in his eyes.

  “That question is unworthy of you both,” he said coldly. “Do you really think that Madoc, of all of us, would ever have hurt you?”

  No. Yes.

  “Sometimes.”

  Blood had dried to a scab on Pally’s lip. He picked it off and flicked it away. “Then I will answer you, so that you don’t wound him with this. How could Madoc have done this, when he had left for New York the night before? He was with the Senate when you were taken. Even dhampirs cannot occupy two spaces at once.”

  New York? Took could feel the blank space in his head, the ache of it where he thought he knew the boundaries.

  “That was… after… the weekend,” he said. “I was taken on Friday? After Kip’s party, when I told you all I’d moved in with West?”

  The coldness lingered on Pally’s face, but the pity was definitely for Took now. He put his hand on Took’s shoulder.

  “I wasn’t there, but I recall. Madoc was dour, but you weren’t the first to reject him. He weathered it, went to New York, and before you could change your mind, you were taken.”

  Took made himself take a breath and let it out. He needed something internal to concentrate on, something he could count. West had lied to him. It didn’t make sense. Took had told West about his suspicions, and he’d had to fight to convince him to listen when it sounded crazy.

  The pressure in his head made it feel like the stitches in his brain were going to rip. Maybe his answers were down there with all the crud he’d forgotten, but he didn’t think he could live with them.

  A switch flicked. The hot panic in his head that made his body feel heavy and unwieldy wasn’t helpful. So he turned it off. All that was left was hard logic and the scratch of that old, cold anger as it whispered, “See.” He might not remember why he was angry, or at whom, but the anger didn’t care.

  “Like I said, I need the jet,” Took said as he stepped back from Pally. “If Madoc needs me, he knows where I’ll be.”

  Pally frowned but let Took take his leave.

  As the door closed behind him, Snack was still on the bed, purring her bloody breath into the dead child’s mouth.

  Chapter Fourteen

  QUICK WAS slouched on a bench outside the airport, tapping assiduously at his computer when Madoc got there. A game probably. The Anakim all found something to flex their brains as they aged, like Madoc and the Biters. Quick was young, turned just a few decades before, but his sire had been old and senescent, so he feared it more than most.

  Madoc jumped out of the Viper before it came to a full stop at the drop-off curb. The VINE driver behind the wheel blurted something that could have been “Good trip” or “Go to hell.” The doors slammed behind Madoc before he could catch the end of the sentiment. He stalked across the pavement toward the entrance.

  Quick looked up from his game and cracked a grin as Madoc approached him. He pulled the earbuds out of his ear—a zap of weaponry and tinny insults squawked out of them—and opened his mouth to stay something.

  He swallowed it as Madoc stalked past him without a break in his stride.

  “Shit,” Quick muttered.

  A minute later he loped up alongside Madoc, laptop tucked under his arm and bag slung over the opposite shoulder.

  “Late night?” he asked. “You and Bennett finally get down to brass tacks, huh?”

  Madoc stopped abruptly and grabbed Quick by the collar of his shirt to yank him back a step and up onto his toes. “You have something to say?” he asked.

  Behind the horn-rimmed glasses he didn’t actually need, Quick blinked and then laughed.

  “I just meant about the humorless bastard coming back,” he said. “But you and he actually got down to brass tacks and bare asses, huh? Good for you, boss.”

  Madoc thinned his lips over his teeth, the prick of his fangs against the tender skin a reminder that he wasn’t some callow boy who flashed fang at neck every ten minutes.

  “Wind in your tongue,” he warned. “I may be more lenient than some, but push me again, and I’ll remind you I was the one who made your sire piss himself.”

  “And it did not go well,” Quick said with an agreeable nod. “Point taken. Lip zipped.”

  He mimed a key-lock gesture in front of pursed lips instead and flicked the imaginary key away. It was the closest to good behavior Madoc would get from him. The attitude, as much as the horn-rimmed glasses and the hoodie that made him look slighter, was the defense he hid behind, much like Took’s need to demonstrate he was smarter than everyone else in the room.

  “It’s not a good time for levity,” he warned as he let go of Quick’s collar. “Although you’re free to try it on Pally if you think it will charm.”

  Quick had fed last night. Or this morning. Recently enough or well enough that he had enough blood in his system to bleed into his throat and over his cheekbones.

  “Is he coming with us?”

  “No, and if you can brief me before we reach the runway,” Madoc said, “you won’t have to either.”

  Quick straightened his hoodie over his shoulders and preened. He smoothed one hand back over his sandy hair to tuck the collar-length str
ands behind his ears.

  “You make it sound like a reward,” he said. “I’ll have you know I always planned to go to Cali one day. I mean, I’ll enjoy the sun a lot less now… but still.”

  Madoc snorted and started to walk again. His heavy boots scuffed over the floor as he strode through the security check. He didn’t even need to flash his badge. The uniform and his face were enough. It shouldn’t be, but Madoc would make his opinion on that known once he was off the ground.

  “We aren’t going to Cali,” Madoc said bluntly. “It’s Nevada. We’re going under The Salt. You can enjoy the heat there if you still want to come.”

  The borrowed blood drained from Quick’s face, and he pulled his laptop out from under his elbow. He balanced it on his forearm and typed unsteadily away as he briskly worked his way through the annotated summary of what he’d found about the Aron-led missions.

  Trips to Europe. Dead children. Squashed sexual-harassment complaints. A rotation of canons and embezzlement complaints.

  Madoc would look over the files when he got on the jet, but so far it sounded like what he’d expect in the hacked records of a Proverbial church’s evangelical mission to Russia.

  “Anything about the Arons personally?” he asked as they stepped outside.

  The sun’s glare scraped at Madoc’s eyes and bleached the world down to flare white and hints of color. He winced and pulled his shades out of his pocket to slide them on. The purple glass cooled the world back down, although his eyes still stung.

  In thin sneakers, Quick hotfooted it along a step behind Madoc as he juggled his laptop from one forearm to the other and flicked through windows.

  “Not much. They tithed, they led missions, they kept to themselves,” Quick said. “There was a complaint from a girl a few years back. Jesus, she was sixteen, but apparently she already had a husband.”

  “It’s legal,” Madoc said as he stopped at the stairs up onto the plane. He cocked his foot back to brace the heel against the step as he waited for Quick to get to the point.

  “It’s gross. Anyhow, she claimed that her husband had managed to get in touch with her and told her he’d found something out—he didn’t get a chance to say what—about the Arons and they’d deliberately left him behind. There was a bit of an outcry in the Church, but by the time the canon found him, the boy had been turned, so….”

  “So.”

  Quick bared his teeth in a humorless smile as he shrugged that away like it hadn’t caught him on the raw. His parents hadn’t been Proverbials, or even particularly religious, but they’d still iced him out the first time he went back to see them. Quick had claimed, with brittle humor, that the whole story was just too sordid for them.

  “Anyhow, it went nowhere. I did get the feeling that the canon and the local session would have preferred it had. When you read between the lines, they didn’t seem to actually like the Arons that much. A few little comments about how they were still ‘so kindly disposed to their old church’ and a disciplinary that told them that, unlike their old parish, the Charleston Proverbial church abided by the reform Book of the Confessionals, whatever that is. If Took is still talking to you, you should ask him.”

  “And their old church?”

  Quick grinned like the next words out of his mouth would be “I was hoping you’d ask that!” Instead it was simply the answer that Madoc expected. “Appleberg.”

  Of course it was.

  “Anything else?” Madoc asked as he glanced back over his shoulder to gesture “a minute more” at the pilot who hovered at the door.

  Quick jabbed a finger down against his keyboard. “If there is, it’s all in your cloud. So can I…?” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the airport and raised his eyebrows hopefully.

  “Go,” Madoc told him. “I’ll call you from Nevada if I need anything.”

  Relief flashed raw over Quick’s face as he backed away, but after a few steps, he hesitated.

  “If you see… him,” he said and then choked on whatever words came next. Even without putting a name to him, the unstable presence of his sire hung over Quick. The agent’s expression was a miserable tangle of fear, love, and hatred.

  “I won’t,” Madoc said. “No one does anymore.”

  Quick nodded. “I guess,” he muttered and turned away. He waved a hand blindly behind him as he jogged away over the tarmac. Madoc watched him go for a second and then climbed up into the plane. “Let’s go,” he told the pilot as he reached the top.

  “Sir,” the woman nodded.

  As she whistled for the ground crew to pull the stairs away, Madoc walked down the narrow aisle. He braced against the seat for balance as the plane started to move. In the back row, Took looked up from his tablet and blinked in surprise as Madoc dropped into the seat opposite him.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked suspiciously.

  “It is my jet,” Madoc pointed out. He swallowed hard as the engines grumbled to life, and it took him a second before he could finish. “And my prison.”

  There was no arguing with that.

  A STORM had rolled in. It buffeted the plane unsteadily and turned the air under them lumpen and dark. Madoc breathed in the taste of smoke and looked past the mundane into the gray world. On the other side of reality, a bird made of electricity and smokeless flame hung in the air beside the plane, wings canted as though it could soar forever. The eye it turned on the inhabitants of the metal tube, with the same lazy interest a man considered a can of ham, was the size of a small car. Behind it, through it, shadows with sharp teeth and tiny, screaming eyes dipped and spun as they tore apart blind gulls of white, drifting material that Madoc worried might be souls.

  “I don’t need my hand held,” Took said sharply. “If that’s why you’re here.”

  “That’s not what you told me,” Madoc said as he blinked smoke out of his eyes to focus on the solid world, where they merely roared through empty air in a heavy, metal dart piloted by a mortal woman who could keel over suddenly for any reason. Flight, except by wing if you were lucky enough to have your blood run that way, was clearly unnatural. It also put Madoc on edge enough that he welcomed the opportunity to bicker. “Not ready to come back. That was your stance the other day.”

  Took pulled a face. “I don’t want to get anyone killed,” he said. There was a glass of water on the table in front of him. He fiddled absently with it as he talked. “I can still interview a suspect. Just because the shrinks think I’m not ready to have your back doesn’t mean my brain’s broken. Just my nerve.”

  The bitterness in his voice was sharp as lime. Madoc paused long enough to shelve the petty desire to jab at him for distraction and studied Took for a moment.

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “Are you ready to come back? I can make this permanent if you want.”

  The last time Madoc had seen such raw hunger in someone’s face, he’d had Took’s cock in his ass. It was only for a second, and then Took wedged it down out of sight and shrugged as he glanced out the small window.

  “It’s not up to me.”

  “If it were?”

  Took looked away from the window. “It’s not,” he said harshly. “I can’t sleep during the day, ’cause I don’t want Him, whoever he is, to win. I can’t sleep at night because I’m scared the fucker knows where I am. You know why I had to take the Waring case? I’m broke. VINE health insurance covered my medical care, got me back on my feet, but most nights I go to a hotel. Sometimes I drive a couple of hours and just stop at a random motel on the road. That eats into your savings pretty damn quick, Madoc. I’m scared, and the only thing you call a scared Biter is retired. But you know what? I’d still take your hand off if it was up to me. Sick, scared, and suspicious as I am, I’d be back out there because it’s the only thing that feels like me anymore. And then I’d get someone killed or….”

  He stopped and clenched his teeth, as if the words would squeeze out, given a chance.

  “It’s not up to me,�
�� he said. “I’ll do this, and then… whatever. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back to Cali. It’s home. I could go and see my mother. She’s probably got another gift for me.”

  There was a stack of letters in Madoc’s desk in Philly, half of them still crumpled from where he retrieved them from the trash and smoothed them back out, that used 90 percent of the same words, maybe even 95. They had just been tweaked and rearranged enough so that they said something very different from Took’s reluctant acceptance of someone else’s decision.

  Madoc swallowed the harsh question, or maybe it was an accusation, in his throat. He needed to ask some other questions first, the ones that he would have already asked and demanded answers for—if he hadn’t been so desperate to respect Took’s decisions. Instead he just reached over the low table and grabbed Took’s hand in a cool clasp.

  “I hate flying,” he said as Took gave him an odd look.

  He knew the statistics. Most flights were safe as long as they stayed overland or skirted close to the coast. It didn’t matter. Immortality loaned the Anakim a sense of control. They could die, but they always had some influence over how and when. Not up here.

  It was why there were still only a few flights per day, despite how convenient it made long-distance travel.

  “No one asked you to come,” Took muttered, but he didn’t move his hand.

  Madoc blinked and peered back into the gray through the window, as a hand constructed of twig bones and strung together with strips of bloody sinew stretched out from somewhere and snatched one of the hungry, darting shadows out of the air. When it squeezed, the shadow exploded, its essence bled out into the sky like ink, and its brethren shot in to pick it apart.

  “You took the jet to come get me,” Took said. “In Appleberg. I appreciate it.”

  Madoc looked at him and wondered if he was really that dense. Although he supposed that was a stupid question. For someone who unstitched emotion and motivation for his career, Took had always been blind when it came to how people saw him.