by Erin Embly
The cold was paralyzing, crawling its way up my arms and over my shoulders and down my spine now to my legs.
The vampire’s smile inched closer to my face, fangs long and gleaming, taunting me for whatever grudge she had against me that I’d forgotten. Until she jerked suddenly, blood dripping out from her lips as her grip on me faltered.
The ice held, still pinning me to the brick wall behind me, but the vampire slumped to the ground as a red stain bloomed over the white fabric on her chest.
Behind her, Adrian stepped forward cautiously with his gun held in front of him. His eyes on the vampire, he crouched down to turn her towards him.
Her eyes were the only thing that moved, shifting about in a panic—he had managed to shoot her in the heart, stunning her where my knife and I had failed.
“Adrian,” I croaked, my chilled lungs not allowing me to speak loudly. “Use that . . .” I tried to nudge the long blade I’d dropped with my toe. “Cut off her head before she recovers.”
Not even looking at me, he shook his head, then ripped the vampire’s shirt away from her chest to reveal the wound he’d made. Blood continued to pulse out of it, but I could see the skin was already beginning to heal.
“Hurry!” I yelled, but he still didn’t acknowledge me. Instead, he pulled something out of his pocket, what looked like a small metal disk, and placed it over the vampire’s wound. He pressed down on it, causing her eyes to bulge in shock, and my own shock nearly matched hers when tiny metal legs emerged from the disk to dig themselves into her flesh, stopping both the bleeding and the healing, as far as I could tell.
“What the hell is—”
Adrian’s piercing glare stopped me as he finally turned his head up to face me. I’d never seen him so . . . intense. Was he pissed at me for some reason?
He turned away from me then, taking a few long strides before bending over to pick up the baton the vamp had dropped at the beginning of the fight. He brought it over to me and proceeded to whack me with it—okay, it was probably more accurate to say he was whacking the ice I was trapped in, but it still felt like he was taking out some frustration directed at me.
After enough of the ice had cracked away, he stopped, and I managed to pry myself loose.
I let out an involuntary groan when my right shoulder pulled away from the wall, and when I reached up to touch the area, my fingers came away bloody.
“You’re fine,” Adrian said. “The bullet just grazed you. See?”
I turned my head where he was pointing and saw the bullet in question lodged in the brick wall right at the top of where my shoulder had been.
Thank fuck that vampire had been so much taller than me.
“What is that thing?” I asked, eyes locked on the metal object he’d stuck over the vampire’s wound.
“New trial procedure for immobilizing vamps,” he said. “DSC technology.”
I blinked. “They’re experimenting with new technology?” That was certainly out of character for the department that had been nothing more than a bad joke for the past two decades. I wondered if the Guardians had been doing anything similar. Maybe, and maybe Dirk just thought I was so much of a badass that I didn’t need any super-cool anti-vampire gear to get the job done.
Yeah, probably not.
“They’re experimenting with a lot of new things,” Adrian said. “And now I know why none of them involve partnering with overly violent civilians.”
Frowning, I rolled my shoulders while I tried to process his words. Me, overly violent? Okay, I could maybe give him that.
A civilian, though? It was technically true, but it still stung. “Is that why you waited so long to shoot her? You had that thing all along . . .” I shook my head, gritting my teeth. “She could have killed me nine times in that fight.”
“Nine times? Are you a cat now?”
“You know what I mean.”
Fuming, he took a step back from me and seemed to stand up even taller. “I’m an officer of the law,” he said. “I can’t just attack people preemptively to get myself out of tricky situations, and you can’t either if you’re working with me.”
I fought the urge to cast my eyes down. He had a point, but that didn’t mean he had the right to be scolding me like this.
“You know you’re the one I technically should have shot?” he continued. “You were the aggressor. She was just doing her job, and perfectly legally. So we’d better hope her boss is up to something even shadier than what you just did and won’t want anyone asking questions.”
“I think that’s pretty fucking likely,” I snapped, trying not to yell. “Or I wouldn’t have done it.”
Taking a deep breath in, I calmed myself. Certain emotions had always been easier for me to suppress than others, and anger was one of the others. But as much as it threw me to see Adrian the gentle giant pissed off, neither one of us could afford to let our emotions run wild tonight. Not here. Not while we had a job to do.
“We shouldn’t be discussing this where she can hear,” I said.
Adrian looked down at the vampire, who was still frozen in place except for her wildly shifting eyes. Despite his towering frame and the blood still on his hands, he looked vulnerable all of a sudden. A slight shift in posture, a releasing of tension in the muscles of his neck.
Without another word, he bent over and lifted her in his arms. Her limp body hung over him as he carried her effortlessly over to the other side of the alley, where a few crates were stacked along the wall. He set her down gently, making sure her limbs were straight before arranging the crates around her.
When she was fully hidden from view, he marched back over to me and placed a firm hand on my lower back, guiding me away. We walked past the window and into the shadows, where he took his hand away and faced me.
“I shouldn’t have lost my cool,” Adrian said. But when he looked up at me, I could see the frustration still in his eyes. Somehow, it made my stomach flutter now that my own anger had worn off. “It’s just you’re always doing this—putting me in situations where I’m tempted to break the rules and risk my job. And I can’t afford to do that. Especially when you won’t even give me all the facts.”
Ignoring the jab about my keeping information from him, which was perfectly valid, I glared up at him just as hard as he was glaring at me. “No one’s forcing you to do what I say. You can always say no. Use your own judgment. I won’t blame you.”
“That’s the problem,” he said, taking a step towards me. “You fuck up my judgment. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong half the time when I’m with you.” His face was close to mine now, his breath on my forehead. He reached up with a hand and touched his fingers to a loose strand of my hair, then halted the motion with a jerk.
Disappointment filled me. I wanted him to touch me. Even though he’d just given voice to my own deepest fear, it sounded ridiculous on his lips. I wasn’t using any mind-control magic on him. We were both human adults capable of making our own decisions, regardless of how much I really fucking wanted him to touch me, and apparently regardless of how much he wanted that too.
I reached up and caught his hand before he could lower it, then used it to pull him closer. My other hand snaked up behind his neck as I lifted myself up on my toes to reach his face.
My lips pressed against his, a soft and warm respite from the remnants of melted ice still soaking through my clothes. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he tensed, the hand I’d caught weaving into my hair as his other hand curled around my waist.
He pressed me forward, further into him, and I stumbled because he was too damn tall to be pulling that move. Our lips broke apart and our eyes met, my heart stopping briefly with the new unwelcome fear that this moment might be over before it had even begun.
But then he bent down slightly and slid his hands behind my thighs, lifting me up as I braced my hands on his shoulders. My legs wrapped around his waist as he pressed my back into the brick wall and caught my mouth again with
his.
Heat rushed through me, in a way it hadn’t for a long time. The adrenaline from the fight gave way to a different kind of energy tingling through my nerves. Different and so much better.
I parted my lips to let him in, my hands moving up from his shoulders to his neck. He tasted like coffee and rain, a burning hearth in the middle of a thunderstorm. I forgot everything else, losing myself entirely in the feeling, wanting nothing more but for him to be closer even though he was already pressed against me so hard I could barely breathe.
Something screamed at me from deep inside my brain. As wonderful as this felt, I had a job to do tonight, and I’d kissed this man for a better reason than just that he’d been asking for it. Blinking, I fought my way back to my senses.
Adrian must have felt me tense. He broke his face away from mine but kept it close, still gripping me tightly and not letting me down.
I gasped in air, sharing his breath as I took back control of my frustrated nerves.
“Now,” I said softly once I could speak. “I’d very much like to go chop the head off that vampire you left paralyzed over there before someone finds her. What do you think about that? Right or wrong?”
“Wrong,” he whispered, still in a daze.
I smiled and tapped my palm lightly on his cheek, getting him to refocus his eyes on mine. “Great, see? You’re capable of disagreeing with me no matter how hard your dick is.”
He kissed me again, though not with the same abandon, laughter vibrating in his throat as he eased me back to the ground. His amusement died quickly though, replaced by a look of uncertainty.
“Are you going to kill her anyway?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m capable of compromise.”
He nodded, then turned his head towards the crates hiding the vampire in question.
“Look,” I said, and he turned back to me. “I get that you have to play by the rules. Really, I’ve been there. But reality likes to play dirty, and sometimes you have to take risks if you want to survive. There’s no rulebook that will tell you when that’s the case. If you stop to think, it’ll be too late.” Adrian wasn’t trained in the same way I was. He wasn’t trained to put the mission above the law—he was the law. And while his devotion to coloring in the lines was admirable in a way that made my chest tight to think about, it would get us both killed if he didn’t know when to let it go. “She was about to call for help, and I couldn’t let that happen,” I finished.
He took in a deep breath and shook his head. “She wouldn’t have killed us.”
“But she would have thrown us out. We would have had to abandon Miriam, and I couldn’t live with myself if a child down there died tonight because I wasn’t willing to start a fight.”
“Okay seriously, what aren’t you telling me about these supposed missing childr—”
The clacking of sharp heels on the pavement beside us made him stop. I twisted my neck, half expecting to see the vampire back up again, but instead it was Miriam peering at us with her hands on her hips.
“Very rude,” she said as she stepped forward and reached her hand behind my neck.
I almost laughed when I realized she was going for the tiny squishy I’d forgotten she’d put there earlier, but then she pinched me in her effort to pluck it off.
“Ouch.”
“You deserve it and more,” she said as the squishy reabsorbed into her fingertip. “Making me party to all that.” She waved her hand in a circle that seemed to encompass me and Adrian and everything we had just done. “And while I was doing your dirty work, no less.”
She jiggled a bit in anger, but it was easier for me to not laugh this time. Now that she was back, all I wanted was to get on with what we needed to do.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“Another way in, lucky for you.” Sighing, she walked past us, snatching her coat off Adrian’s shoulder as she went. Heels clacking down the alley, she lifted her hands to pull her loose hair back into a tight bun. “Follow me.”
15
Miriam turned a corner and then stopped right in the middle of a dark backstreet. She adjusted her glasses and tapped a heel on the ground, then turned to beckon us over.
“Here we are.”
It wasn’t until I was standing next to her that I saw the manhole cover on the ground. “There’s a way through the sewers?” I asked.
“They’re in the sewers,” she said. “I found a way in from the club’s basement, near the room you told me about. A trap door. Well hidden, but water calls to me when I’m in my fluid state.”
“You found the kids?” I asked.
“No, I only went far enough to find a way in for you two.”
“Great.” I dropped into a squat on the ground, eying the cover. I’d done a lot of unpleasant nonsense in my days as a bodyguard, but diving into a sewer wasn’t one of them.
Before I could wonder too hard about the logistics, Adrian leaned over in front of me and held out his hand. “Knife,” he said.
Part of me wanted to lecture him for being so presumptuous. I didn’t hand out my knives on demand to just anyone. But then, at this point he wasn’t just anyone. And I didn’t want to waste any more time.
I gave him my dullest knife, the backup of my backup, and watched him use it to pry up the cover so he could get a grip on it.
He lifted it easily as I tucked the knife back in my jacket, making a mental note that while he may not be the quickest in a fight, I had to give him points for brute strength.
I peered down into the dark hole beneath my feet and pulled out my phone, turning on its flashlight. I could see the ladder rungs leading down now, but not the bottom.
Oh well, I’d see it once I got down there.
“I’m going in.”
My boots hit the ground with a splash, and I held my phone up to cast light through the tunnel I found myself in. Red brick walls curved over me, with peeling paint in some spots indicating they’d stood here many years. Probably built with the city itself, centuries ago, and then modified over the generations.
It didn’t smell nearly as bad as I’d expected, all the rain from this evening’s storm having diluted the sewage. Distant drips punctured the silence as water continued to trickle down from above. But when I took a step forward, water rippling out beneath my feet, a familiar peal of laughter overtook all other sound.
With a frown, I turned around to see Adrian get to the bottom of the ladder behind me.
“Hey,” I said to him. “Did you hear that laughter?”
He shook his head. “Seeing anything?”
“Not yet . . .” My eyes fixed on a figure that looked like Noah in the distance. Even now, my heart jumped into my throat before he turned around to show me his hideous face. It’s not Noah, I reminded myself. But I still couldn’t bring myself to tell Adrian how much this evil apparition looked like my kid. When I opened my mouth to try, nothing came out, and instead I said, “Have you come up with any ideas on what we might be dealing with?” I knew Ray was working on it as well, but he hadn’t called me since I’d left his place and he wasn’t here right now.
“Kind of.” Adrian stepped forward to meet me. “I couldn’t find much lore about creatures made of clay, except for golems. I wouldn’t have thought that fit, except the word means ‘body without a soul.’ And you said that’s what it felt like when you touched the shifter, right?”
“Kind of,” I said. “She wasn’t completely empty, but not all there. Maybe like her soul was outside of her body but not gone.”
“So close enough?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said, although I wasn’t sure.
He nodded, easing up next to me into a careful stride through the dark space. “Anyway, I had no idea what anyone could be doing with golems to bring about all this, but there’s a common idea throughout mythology from cultures all over the world—that gods created humans by molding them from clay. So then I thought, what if this is all someone’s experiment to create
a new species?”
“Hmm . . .” I remembered the article I’d seen, the one that had me convinced vampires must be behind all this if they were the only ones unaffected. What would vampires want from a new species? The only thing I could think of was food. If they could have a new source of food separate from human society—Farmed people, I thought with a shiver—it would solve a lot of their problems and allow for nearly limitless growth.
“What are you thinking?” Adrian asked as I heard Miriam come up behind us.
She walked past us without a word, and I told them about my vampire conspiracy theory as we followed her down the tunnel. It all sounded more ridiculous aloud than it had in my head. “It’s kind of a stretch,” I said when I was done. “And if that’s what this is, the experiments are pretty damn inefficient.”
Adrian shook his head. “Maybe they’re trying to create soulless people who can function without going crazy, like living blood bags, and the murders are all just unintended side effects?”
That didn’t feel right to me, but I had no better ideas. “Maybe,” I agreed. “If it is a golem we’re dealing with, how do I kill it?”
“That’s the tough part,” he said. “There are a few stories of them being smashed to pieces with success. But then there are others where you have to find the source of what’s animating them. It’s usually a word of power, carved into the clay or written on a piece of parchment. The only consistency I found is the concept of reversal. Destruction is the reversal of creation—so find out how it was created and reverse that.”
“Like throwing the ring into the fires of Mount Doom,” Miriam said cheerfully in front of us.
I had no idea what she was talking about, and neither did Adrian by the look he gave me. But I got what he was saying. Not that it would help me any. The visions of creepy children I’d been seeing didn’t seem like they were corporeal enough to be smashed to pieces, nor their laughter. And the rest of it was too vague to be of any immediate use.
Miriam held up her hand as we came to an intersection of tunnels, and we stopped behind her. Water settled beneath our still feet and drips echoed through the space.
