“How are you feeling about it all?” That concerned look was in his warm brown eyes when I glanced back at him.
“Sick inside.” I straightened in my seat and put my hand on my belly, like that might still the queasiness. “I’ve busted Vamps sucking on norms before, but I’ve never witnessed anything like this.”
His expression was hard to read now. He’d gone from concerned to cop tough to unreadable.
“They were crazed, Adam.” I swallowed back the harsh feeling at the back of my throat. “I’m afraid of what might have happened to norms last night.”
Adam gave a nod to the police radio which I hadn’t even noticed was off. “Too many reports of people being attacked savagely and murdered. Still others missing.”
I held my hand over my mouth before I said, “How many?”
“Reports were still coming in when I pulled up to the diner,” he said. “I turned it off for now so you and I could have a chance to talk.”
“I was so afraid of this.” My words were hardly a whisper. “I knew it was going to happen, but I’d hoped that they wouldn’t kill their victims. I’d hoped that maybe they’d just drink some of their blood.” I rubbed my temples with my thumb and forefinger. “A naïve hope.”
“Not naïve, Nyx.” Adam released my hand and brushed his knuckles over my cheek. “We always have to have hope no longer how bad it looks like it may be.”
“If only this whole thing was just a bunch of Sprites creating chaos.” I reached up and clasped his hand. “I’d take a pink Statue of Liberty over humans being Vampire meals.”
“You and me both.” Adam moved his hand from mine and brushed my hair with his fingers. “What you saw tonight would have been hard for anyone to go through.”
“I’ve always heard Belize is a nice place to go to escape.” I gave him a half-hearted smile. “I’ve never been farther from Manhattan than the Catskills or New Jersey.”
“When this case is over, how about we visit Belize?” Adam said. “I have plenty of vacation coming.”
For just a moment I felt a little lighthearted. Like my mind had taken a brief escape. “I’ve never worn a bathing suit.”
“You sure look great swimming without one, though.” Adam said with a look in his eyes that told me he was thinking about our time together in the Catskills. “Although you would look terrific in a little leopard-skin bikini.”
I lightly punched his arm. “This isn’t the time for thinking about me in a bikini.”
“No. It’s not.” His smile faded. “Nyx … I’m starting to care for you too much. I don’t know—I just don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
I froze in my seat. Adam had showed me affection but he’d never said anything like this before. I wasn’t sure how to process it.
He put both hands on the wheel and focused on driving. “I’ve never cared for anyone this way.” His gaze remained on the road ahead, then he shoved his fingers through his hair. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”
I reached for his hand and clasped it in mine again. He looked at me and I pressed my lips against the back of his hand. “We’ll just have to work on this together because I feel the same way.”
We drove in silence for a while. A comfortable easy silence where we clasped hands and I felt the comfort of his presence. I felt wanted, protected, needed. All of the things I’d pushed aside for so long.
Long before we arrived in Manhattan, I fell asleep with Adam’s hand holding mine to keep me from traveling to dark places my mind didn’t want to go.
* * *
Sunshine did a really poor job of trying to reach me through my bedroom window. The sky was gray but in one spot it looked like the sun was trying to tunnel its way through and it just wasn’t working.
I rolled over onto my stomach and looked at the clock. I had a pretty good internal clock, so I couldn’t believe it when I saw that it was noon. I’d slept four hours and I didn’t feel like I had the luxury of time.
Kali was sitting at the end of the bed, looking regal as ever, and just staring at me.
Purposely I did not think about last night or the wee hours of the morning. I wanted a shred of normalcy, if only for a few moments of make-believe. That everything was going to work out and that no one else was going to be hurt or killed.
“What?” I said to Kali as I scooted up in bed. “I fed you last night before I left.”
She looked down her cat nose at me before lightly bounding off the bed and striding out of my room. I blinked as I saw the shredded panties all over my floor. I groaned and flopped back down on my pillow. Not the panties again.
Urgh.
I climbed out of bed and took a hot shower just because it felt good. Elvin cleansing spells were nice, but sometimes the real thing was better.
Especially after last night. I felt like I had so much slimy gunk on my skin from being around the Vampires and seeing what I had seen.
After Adam took me to the Pit, I had debriefed with Rodán. Adam had wanted to take me straight home, but I’d wanted to get that part over with. He’d headed off to the NYPD and I’d gone into the Pit.
When I’d finished telling Rodán everything that had happened, he ordered me to go home and get some sleep because I’d need it. We had a long day and night ahead of us. He would be calling a meeting this evening and then he and I had to appear before the Paranorm Council.
Once I’d dressed and tossed the scraps of panties into the garbage, I grabbed a cereal bar out of my pantry and a bottle of green tea from my fridge. I chased the cereal bar with the tea, then headed downstairs to the office.
The moment I walked into the office, Olivia said, “Turn your purple ass around and head back out.”
“Excuse me?” I said as I looked at the dead-serious Olivia. “I know I didn’t call, but—”
Olivia turned her large-screen computer monitor toward me. My lips parted and I wanted to take a step back in horror as I read The New York Times’ online headline:
TWENTY-SEVEN MURDERED
CITYWIDE KILLLING SPREE
“That doesn’t count all of the missing people.” Olivia grabbed her sweat jacket. “Twenty-seven is just the number of bodies found around the city.”
I held my hand over my mouth as if that might repress the memories of mere hours ago while trying to pretend I hadn’t read a headline and heard the words that came straight out of nightmares.
“Boyd called.” Olivia took me by my elbow and turned me back around so that I was headed out the front door instead of in. “He wants us at one of the murder scenes at Amsterdam and 114th Street.”
“Columbia University?” I managed to get the words out through my horror as Olivia led me back out into the cold, windy afternoon.
“Five college kids.”
I pressed my hand against my belly. If I had taken out those Vampires somehow. If I had used fire to roast them and force them to have to regenerate, maybe the college students and the others wouldn’t have had to die.
“You couldn’t save them.” Olivia’s voice was stern as I walked with her toward the garage where I kept my black Corvette. “Boyd filled me in on your adventures last night. I’ll kill you later. But for now we need to get to the scene.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, drawing my coat tighter around me. It did nothing for the cold seeping into my bones.
My friend James, a Gorilla Doppler, was a professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. I made a mental note to call him to see how things were being handled at the university level. James kept tabs on everything.
I was really missing my XPhone when Olivia drew a new one out of the pocket of her sweat jacket and handed it to me. “Boyd told me what happened to yours,” she said as I took it. “You’re still going to get your ass kicked, but you might need this at the scene. I set it up and charged it for you while you were resting.”
“Thank you.” I took the phone and slipped it into my handbag. I would have said
how grateful I was, but she might have started kicking my butt right then.
“I even set your ringtone,” she said as she gestured to the phone.
I raised my eyebrows as I looked at her.
“George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone.”
A song played in one of my favorite movies from the eighties, The Terminator.
“I sort of feel like a Terminator right now.” I clenched my teeth. “And I’m not stopping until I terminate every one of those damned Vampires.”
“I’ll be right beside you blowing out Vampire hearts,” she said.
It took only a few minutes to make it from the office to the university. The scene itself wasn’t hard to find. Considering the twenty or so emergency vehicles crowded around.
We had to park so far away we might as well have jogged from our office. All of the flashing emergency lights were enough to cause someone to go into a seizure if they stared at the scene too long.
“This is way too much for one of the Soothsayers to handle.” Olivia’s breath fogged in the air as she spoke.
“A dozen Soothsayers even,” I said
We looked around us at all of the cops and crime scene investigators, news reporters, bystanders, and people who were being interviewed.
I would take Sprite chaos over this horror any day of the week.
“Only because so many people were murdered last night.” I gripped my new phone in my pocket and rubbed my thumb over its smooth surface. “Twenty-seven.” I kept saying the number over and over in my mind because it was so hard to imagine. Even when we fought the Demons we hadn’t lost that many paranorms in one night.
We had to show our PI credentials and shove our way through the crowd and get past the barricade. Olivia called Adam to let him know we’d arrived, and he told us where to meet him.
On the way, we passed a young guy, probably a student, who looked like he’d been up all night drinking. He was sitting on a gurney while paramedics attended to something on his neck and a police officer took notes as he asked the young man questions.
A girl, more than likely a student as well, was on a gurney next to an ambulance, and she was fighting off police officers and ambulance attendants. She was pale, wild-eyed, her whole body shaking. She started screaming for them to let go of her and I turned away as they strapped her to the gurney.
Adam was always all business when we met up on a case. He cocked his head toward a woman who I recognized as police captain Alex Wysocki. I’d met her once and had liked her genuine, forthright personality. Olivia had an altogether different perspective on the captain, but Olivia had a different perspective on lots of things.
“I think you might want to help me try to explain this to Captain Wysocki,” Adam said as he guided us to where the captain stood. “The city is nearly paralyzed,” he said as we walked.
“Twenty-seven,” I repeated, still unable to comprehend the number.
“Yes, and others missing.” Adam’s strides were long and Olivia and I had to jog to keep up with him. He was so focused he likely didn’t realize it. “We’ve got a citywide panic with national attention. This morning we thought it was only a few, but bodies keep turning up. Mostly in groups,” he added as he gestured toward two body bags being loaded into ambulances.
My stomach ached and my heart hurt as I saw bags disappear into the interiors. “Did those two see it happen? Were they hurt?” I asked as I gestured to the young man and then the young woman. The woman’s gurney was being lifted into the ambulance while she screamed.
Adam lowered his voice. “The girl has been hysterical from the moment help arrived and almost incoherent. Every now and then she stops screaming long enough to say a woman with fangs bit her, but there are no marks on her neck.”
He gave a short nod to the guy. “That student has two puncture wounds, the wounds still bleeding when we got here.”
“The Vampires could have started the process to turn those two.” I looked from one student to the other. “I think it only takes two bites. They may plan to find these students again. From what I’ve learned in the past, once Vampires bite a human, there’s some kind of connection that lets them find the human again.”
“Shit.” Adam scrubbed his hand over his face. “On top of that, five students, dead. Three appear to have been drained completely of blood, another victim’s throat was gouged out, and one”—he looked at me like he didn’t want to say the rest—“one torn apart.”
I swallowed back the desire to throw up. If only I could have destroyed them last night, this would never have happened. None of this.
“What’s up, Boyd?” Wysocki said to Adam after acknowledging Olivia and me with a nod.
The police captain was tall and slender, her blond hair short and smooth. She was feminine in appearance but her voice was hard, a seasoned officer who didn’t put up with anyone’s bullshit, as Olivia would say.
“Got any damned thing for me? You said on the phone you knew something about this,” Wysocki added.
“You’re not going to find this easy to get down.” Adam looked at Olivia and me as we stood close to her. He looked back to the chief, his features hard, tense.
“Vampires, Captain Wysocki,” he said. “We’re dealing with honest-to-God Vampires.”
NINETEEN
Captain Wysocki stared at Adam, an even harder look on her features than before. “I don’t have time for this, Boyd. I’ve got thirty-one confirmed dead now. Sixteen missing.”
Thirty-one dead? My whole body wanted to convulse. Sixteen missing?
“He’s telling the truth.” I stepped forward trying to control my shaking. “I’ve dealt with them before.”
“Before? Bullshit.” The way the captain looked at me I could tell that my words meant nothing to her. After all, I was a PI, not a police officer.
The captain’s attention snapped to Olivia when my partner raised her voice and said, “Boyd and Nyx aren’t imagining things and they’re not making shit up.”
Wysocki took her gaze from Olivia to Adam and back, not even looking at me. I didn’t care, I just wanted her to believe us.
“DeSantos, I’ve never known you or Boyd to be delusional.” Wysocki gave a sharp nod to one of the officers who called to her before she returned her attention to us. “But right now I want to know what you’ve been smoking.”
“You may not believe us now,” I said, “but when you see more bodies turn up like this, you’re going to wonder if we’re right about what we’re telling you.
“That girl.” I pointed to where the student’s ambulance was just starting to leave. “There are no marks, but she probably was bitten. Vampires have healing power in their saliva. All they have to do is lick a wound and it heals.”
The captain looked ready to draw the Glock beneath her jacket and shoot us. “I’m going to have all of your asses—”
“The others,” Olivia interrupted, “bite marks, mutilation, things no human being should be able to do. Vampires are powerful and vicious.”
“I think the Vampires let those two live as a message,” I said. “They want people to know it was them, that they’re back and they think they can do whatever they want to.”
I continued, “You might not want to hear it but if those students get bitten a second time and become fully infected, it would be better for both of them, and for all of us, if they were dead.”
“What the hell?” Wysocki looked at Adam. “Get these two out of here, Boyd, before I put you on involuntary leave.”
“We need you need to listen.” Adam held his ground without giving an inch. “Give us five minutes.”
The captain narrowed her eyes. “I’ll give you three minutes to convince me why I should believe you.”
Adam dragged his hand down his face in a frustrated movement.
Olivia returned Wysocki’s hard look. “That’s not enough time but we’ll give you the best summary we can.”
“There’s a whole paranormal world that hardly anyone is aware of
,” Adam said. “Those of us who do—we’re sworn to secrecy. It’s the only way the paranorms will let us help protect norms—I mean our citizens.”
“Paranorms. Norms. Right.” I heard the sarcasm in her voice when she stared at me. “Okay, so you say we have Vampires to blame. How about giving every officer a few cloves of garlic, some holy water, and a cross?”
“The Vampires will just feel a little sick,” I said. “Those things don’t actually stop them. Don’t come close to stopping them.”
“We’re serious, Captain,” Adam said.
“What Boyd’s trying to say is that there’s shit out there you can’t begin to imagine,” Olivia cut in. “We don’t have enough time to explain, and honestly, you don’t have time to listen to it all. We’re telling you because you need to know what in the hell is happening.”
The hardass captain looked conflicted. It was in her eyes, something I’d never have believed before.
“Vampires were defeated in a paranorm rebellion in the eighteen-hundreds,” I said, hoping that I was helping, not making things worse. “We thought we had them under control until now.”
I think the only reason why the captain looked like she was even considering what I had to say was because Adam and Olivia had started speaking first.
“Long story,” Adam said. “But the Vampires have possession of something that makes it damn near impossible for paranorms to control them anymore.”
“No,” I said. “It makes it completely impossible for us to control them.”
“Us?” Wysocki frowned at me. “ ‘Us’ as in ‘us paranorms’?” She didn’t miss anything, did she.
I didn’t answer and Adam said, “The paranorms are working on a way to stop the Vampires. Because they’re supernatural beings, it’s not going to be easy.”
“Supernatural beings.” The captain shook her head. “If I did believe you, what could the NYPD do?”
“Figure out a way to keep people off the streets at night,” Adam said.
“By telling the people of Manhattan that Vampires are responsible for all of the attacks and missing persons?” Wysocki looked even more grim. “That’s not going to fly.”
Vampires Not Invited: A Night Tracker Novel Page 19
