The Mother had bound every Supernatural with a set of guidelines that over time had become known as the covenant. It was essentially a promise not to abuse the gift of magic she had given them. The covenant bound all Supernaturals to act only within certain boundaries. And of all the Otherkind races the Elementals policed, it was the witches that most often strayed outside those lines.
Logan had delivered her message to the witches in style, but there had been a running argument since that their youngest sister might be a teensy bit reckless. Her “warning” had landed several of the male witches in the hospital. The junior Elemental tried to manipulate her ability in ways that taxed her level of skill and control.
“Yeah, just be careful with the blow-back,” Serin said.
Logan’s blasts did sometimes get away from her.
“Okay, mom,” Logan said, but she didn’t sound annoyed.
They all knew Serin couldn’t help but mother them.
“Well, I need to get going,” Serin said. “I’ll keep you posted on the situation once I know what is going on. Good luck in Boston, Di.”
They could feel her withdrawal along the aether as she departed.
“I should go, too,” Gia said. “I have some tracking to do tonight.”
“Be careful,” Diana couldn’t help saying, even though she knew it was unnecessary.
Gia was the senior Elemental—the strongest and perhaps the wisest. But Diana always worried about her. It was Gia who had found Diana and told her she was an Elemental and at the back of her mind she feared Gia would disappear on her one day the way her own mother had.
“I always am,” Gia assured her. “And…if you need to talk about anything at all, just call. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Gia withdrew.
“Finally!” Logan breathed once she was gone. “I thought they were never going to go.”
“So you heard something?” Diana asked, her heart sinking slightly.
“There are whispers in the wind about the little girl.” Logan’s voice was sympathetic.
It was one of the benefits to being the Air Elemental. The wind sometimes whispered useful things in your ear, but it wasn’t exactly a reliable source of information. The echoes and fragments Logan heard were open to interpretation. But this time she sounded sure.
“What do you hear?” Diana felt both vindicated and chilled.
“Not too much, other than you were right. Katie’s gone missing. . .again. No one has seen her in the last few weeks.”
“What does the mother say?”
“She’s missing now, too. But the little girl disappeared first. None of their acquaintances seem to know where they are, but they think the mother went in search of the little one.”
“Any ideas of where to start looking?”
“There is a lead, but tread carefully on this one.”
“Why?”
“Because, the winds speak of vampires.”
Well crap, Diana thought.
* * *
Diana lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Logan’s warning gave her a bad feeling about Boston. Not about the case of corporate malfeasance she’d been sent to investigate. But the other case, the one both Serin and Gia had said was over.
It had to be freaking vampires. Ugh. It was more than enough to keep her awake.
Little Katie should have been safe. Diana had made sure. Last year, she’d been sent on a monster hunt, much like the one she’d just finished. It was ironic that the ones she and her sisters called monsters were, more often than not, the completely human ones.
Diana sighed and shifted in bed. Sometimes the Supernaturals were far easier to stomach. At least one knew what to expect from them.
A child molester, a very prolific one, had taken Katie. He liked to keep his little girls for a long time, letting them get used to him. And once he’d earned their trust, he would strip it away, abusing them to the point of catatonia. Diana could still see Katie’s haunted eyes, the light starting to bleed out of them. Diana remembered that look well. It happened to children who’d learned in the worst possible way that adults weren’t always there to protect them.
Something inside Diana had broken after that case. The Mother had charged their kind with punishing those so evil they shifted the balance to the dark. But that was the crux of the matter. There had to be a dark side.
An Elemental wasn’t a savior. They could track a killer to the ends of the Earth, but they didn’t have the ability to identify a potential victim. The best they could do was track those peripherally involved in their cases. But that was only if they were among one of the Supernatural races. It didn’t work with humans. Not unless they had done something bad enough to mark themselves.
Diana was sick of her inability to save the innocent. Intellectually, she knew she made a difference to the future victims a killer would’ve taken, but it had been cold comfort when she’d found that little girl.
There had been too many others that she hadn’t been able to save.
Katie’s mother, Brenda, had been so relieved to get her baby back. She had sworn she would never let the little girl out of her sight ever again. And Diana had believed her. The little girl’s father hadn’t been in the picture, only an aunt who had been very quiet in her presence. At the time, Diana had chalked it up to the FBI badge she flashed at them when she took Katie home. It was a useful tool in cases like those, when an Elemental had to mix with humans.
Diana shifted on the lumpy mattress and gave up rehashing the past, focusing on her plans instead. She would have to go inside the Boston vampire coven blind. She had no idea what connection they had to Katie’s latest disappearance, but she knew enough about them to expect trouble.
The Broussards were the oldest and most powerful clan of vampires in the new world. They even outstripped most of the clans in the old world these days.
Normally she had no scruples over busting in and knocking heads, but the Mother hadn’t exactly sanctioned this investigation. Her kind were supposed to be the clean-up crew.
Well, not this time, she decided.
And really, a little head busting is often the most effective approach.
3
Boston was hot and sticky.
Too sticky, Diana thought. She loved hot weather but hated the humidity. It felt as if she was swimming through the crowded Boston Gardens.
Am I near that Cheers bar? A drink would have been welcome.
Well, maybe next time. On impulse, she stopped for a piece of fried dough. She gobbled it down and ordered a second without a shred of remorse. Maintaining her firepower at optimum levels required consuming high quantities of calories. And she was going to need it tonight. In fact, she was going to have to add a few bread bowls of clam chowder at Faneuil Hall in the name of preparedness.
A couple of hours later, Diana was loitering in Louisburg Square’s fenced-in park. She had spent the afternoon trying to track down Brenda, Katie’s mom. But there had been no trace of her, and Diana wasn’t willing to drop her current lead to hunt her down. Especially if Katie wasn’t with her.
From her vantage point in the park, Diana could see the coven’s townhouse. Most of the family homes in this area had been converted to apartments and condos, but the huge house was inhabited solely by the coven. Members often chose to take lodgings outside of the coven house, but many still chose to live inside with their brothers and sisters.
She would never understand why vampires and Weres chose to live piled on top of each other like that. Didn’t they find themselves as insufferable as she did?
Apparently not, since they all vied to stay close to one another.
Even young vampires were irritating as shit. They made the mistake of believing their own hype, always dressing lavishly, throwing endless parties and employing humans to serve them in daylight. And the human servants delighted in their domestic drudgery! Though most of them did it for the status, a few really believed they would be made vampires if they succeeded
in pleasing their masters.
On rare occasions, a human with some sensitivity to magic was turned, but it didn’t happen often enough to justify the years of servitude.
It was enough of a challenge to turn a human from one of the vampire lineages. It took an amazingly skilled practitioner to wrap magic around a normal person and mold them into their own image. Of course, vampires didn’t see it that way. To them, turning a human was a mystical act of creation unique to their kind. They couldn’t see the parallels to the other groups of Supernaturals because it contradicted their mythos. And to vamps that was all that really mattered.
Vampires could breed a potential vampire the normal way, but only in the days before they turned. While still mostly human, a member of a vampiric line could mate to produce children. But they didn’t do so as frequently as Weres and humans. And not all of their children were capable of being turned, a detail she was grateful for. More vampires meant more headaches for her.
Diana sighed and headed out of the square. Later that night would be a more appropriate time to visit the coven house. She needed to question its members about Katie’s disappearance, and it would be better to do it before they dispersed to the city’s Underlife, the network of shops and nightclubs that passed for civilization to Supernaturals.
She was almost out of the square when a prickling awareness at the back of her neck made her pause. Diana was being watched, and not by some stray human.
Despite the fact vampires didn’t come out in daylight, she pulled her hood up and moved back to casually walk around the square. There was no one in sight that could have gotten her spidey senses tingling like that. And given the bright sunlight, it couldn’t be a vampire.
Unless…
Most vampires conveniently burst into flames when they stepped into sunlight. To avoid smoldering, they kept to the night hours. Staying in the shadows wasn’t enough since they were blinded by natural light, even reflected sunlight. It took a rare and unusually confident vampire to see past their kind’s myths and long history to manipulate the magic around them enough to allow exposure to the sun. That didn’t stop the vast majority of them from seeking out meaningless ritual after ritual that promised to turn them into Daywalkers.
Daywalkers were scarcer than Elementals, with a total of six confirmed in all of history. The last had been beheaded by an Elemental five centuries ago. So it wasn’t likely there was one in this coven.
She was probably just too keyed up over Katie’s disappearance and had imagined the sensation of being watched. Turning around, Diana shrugged off her suspicions and headed back to the waterfront.
* * *
Across the square, Alec released a shaky breath. He’d flattened himself against a far side of a brown truck. It was big and square, but still he felt exposed.
Damn, he thought, looking up to see the surprised and confused expression on the UPS driver’s face. He slowly raised his head over the hood of the truck, but she was gone. Whoever she was. Whatever she was.
Smiling to the driver as if nothing strange had happened, Alec took out his phone for the special map application he’d had made to track the coven’s servants. Noting a clear path through the front door, he slipped inside undetected.
Knowing where the servants were at all times helped. With vampiric speed, he moved upstairs and into his old room. He hadn’t been back to Boston in years, but this room looked the same. Despite the fact he kept separate quarters near the waterfront, his mother insisted on keeping it exactly as it was. Except for the embroidered pillows he knocked off the bed when he sat down. Those seemed to have multiplied in his absence.
He’d never liked this room, with its blood red walls and black velvet accents. It looked like a damn bordello. But that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be here much longer—not unless he found a lead in the disappearance of Pedro’s son. He’d hit a dead end in his investigation, and he would have to move on soon, despite his concern for the boy.
Alec had been buried knee-deep in dusty books in a back room of an Oxford library when his informant in Boston had gotten in touch. The son of a long time retainer had disappeared under suspicious circumstances a little over a week ago.
Pedro had served the family faithfully for many years, but the coven heads, his parents Alden and Elva, had done nothing to find out what happened. He’d come home to investigate as soon as he could. But he hadn’t found out anything—no trace of the boy or the people who had taken him. It didn’t look like an inside job.
Small blessings. If he had found evidence that someone in his house was involved, it would have been a huge mess. But finding nothing also meant that he’d been unable to help. And now it looked as if there was nothing more he could do, not personally at least. If one of the other Supernatural groups were responsible, it would be up to them to investigate and met out punishment. The covenants were very clear when it came to dealing with the Otherkind—Supernaturals not of your own race. And it was always possible that the taking of Pedro’s son, Elias, was the act of a human predator.
If he didn’t find anything in another few days, he would have his investigators keep looking after he left, for Pedro’s sake.
Alden and Elva wouldn’t be pleased if he left so soon, but Alec didn’t like staying in one place too long. He chose to keep moving every few years, circumnavigating the globe on his various academic quests.
My long vaunted search for answers. The meaning of life, he mocked himself.
Of course, he hadn’t called it that in the beginning. One search into the ancient world had led to another and so on. His plan had been to unlock the secrets of the ancients. The irony was that he’d been wildly successful..
If the secret of his discovery ever got out, it could shake the foundations of their society. The ability to walk in daylight was the vampire’s holy grail. But his only major discovery hadn’t given him the answers he’d sought.
Why did vampires exist? Had God the Father really turned their back on them? Or was it the Mother? Had they angered her? Was that why they were condemned to live in the dark? And why couldn’t they convert any human they chose? That and other questions had plagued him for as long as he could remember.
All he’d found was more of the circuitous and empty gibberish that was ancient vampire lore.
Well, maybe his life was not supposed to have a deeper meaning. His studies kept him busy. He also had his duty, even if his own parents shirked theirs.
And with that thought, the near constant weight in his chest settled more firmly. He had visited Pedro earlier that day. The little Hispanic man was in terrible shape.
Alec had to look into the local Otherkind before he left. He usually got on well with members of the other Supernatural races, but in this case he didn’t see an easy path ahead. His mind circled back to the girl in the square. He hadn’t seen much, only a flash of white skin and dark red hair.
She’s not a shifter and definitely not a Daywalker.
Once he’d finally been able to walk in daylight, he had wondered if another Daywalker might come out of the woodwork to approach him. But that hadn’t happened.
Maybe the girl was a witch or a shamaness. His kind paid a lot of money to those tricky beings when they needed spells worked. But there hadn’t been that specific vibration he always felt in the presence of one of their kind. All he had felt was a split second impression of immense power, and then a void as it was quickly masked. He debated telling Alden and Elva about it.
I was probably imagining the whole thing. Or it could have been a practitioner on vacation. A tourist even.
No, there was no need to panic everyone needlessly. Not that they would have the good sense to be scared if he sounded the alarm. The elders were in complete self-assurance on the superiority of their kind. But Alec had seen a lot in his travels, enough to wear away the unshakable certainty in vampire infallibility.
A noise behind him alerted him to another presence.
“Hello, Vincent,” he said with
out turning around.
“What I wouldn’t give to know how you do that,” a droll, cultured voice returned.
Alec turned to see Vincent in the doorway. The other vampire was impeccably dressed in a black suit and a gold embroidered vest with a red silk shirt underneath. Not that Alec was a slouch in the wardrobe department. A good, if dramatic, sense of fashion was innate to most vampires he’d met.
Vincent was probably there to gloat. He had been rising earlier in the past few years, earlier than the hour Alec currently pretended to wake—a detail he was quite smug about.
“I didn’t realize I had risen so late,” he lied.
“Not so late,” Vincent said, sounding pleased with himself. “But of course you’re not used to the hours we keep here anymore.” He paused. “I thought you’d like to know some fresh O positive was just delivered, since you didn’t approve our current lineup of donors.”
Alec nodded. “Thank you.”
Blood was truly the only essential when it came to sustenance, but few of his kind admitted that they needed it sparingly, at most every few days for those but the youngest of their kind. Instead, most had blood every day, provided by their human servants or acquired by the local blood bank with a few healthy bribes. Daily intake was more for ritual and pleasure than survival. Killing the host was considered bad form, especially since almost all vampires could ‘call’ blood—control the flow of blood in themselves and their donor to ensure that they only took what was needed.
Alec made it a point to only consume what blood he truly needed, but it wasn’t a popular position among his kind.
“What are you up to tonight?” Vincent asked, eager to report the answers to the elders should they ask.
“I might check out one of the clubs. What’s hot right now?” Alec asked, deciding to take advantage of the other vampire’s presence in his room, away from the many ears of the coven.
“Hmm. Taking an interest in the Underlife?” Vincent sounded intrigued.
His interest was probably justified, Alec reflected. When he lived here last, he wouldn’t set foot in any of the supernatural nightspots for love or money.
Fire: The Elementals Book One Page 2
