The Glitch exploded. Energy pulsed, and shreds of slimy purple gunk flew everywhere. A sizzle of blue energy flared up where the demon had lain, then burned itself out.
The plane cruised smoothly through the sky.
I rose to my feet, shaking, as passengers clapped, cheered, and stomped their feet. I thanked the guy who had helped me. His face was dotted with exploded Glitch, like a bad case of purple acne. “Better wash that off.” I explained about Glitch venom.
I turned to thank my other helper and saw who it was: Kane. Somehow, he’d avoided getting Glitch goop all over him. I was glad. I’d hate to see clumps of purple gumming up that beautiful silver mane. I touched my own Glitch-gunked hair.
Kane caught my wrist and gently pulled my hand away, then kissed it. He raised his gray eyes to meet mine.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said.
Yeah, right. I was scratched and burned and streaked with purple. Ready for my photo shoot as cover girl of Demon Slayer Monthly.
“So this is what you do for a living?” he asked.
“Yup.”
He grinned and shook his head. “I think I’ll stick with lawyering.”
He lifted me off my feet and held me close. His mouth found mine, I wrapped myself around him, and we kissed. Again, the plane erupted in applause.
34
THE PLANE MADE AN EMERGENCY LANDING IN REYKJAVIK. The moment we touched down, a lot of things happened fast: Passengers rocketed from their seats, emergency doors flew open, and everyone stampeded to the nearest exit.
A flight attendant guarded the rear exit, directing people down the inflatable slide. She tried to tell me to leave my duffel bag on the plane and take off my boots, but I elbowed past her and jumped, clutching my bag in both arms, keeping my feet up so my heels wouldn’t puncture the slide. I didn’t give a damn about proper exit procedure. I needed my bag. And those were my favorite boots.
Airport workers herded us toward the terminal, and suddenly I realized that I hadn’t felt a twitch from Hellforged since the Glitch infested the plane. Panic shot through me; I stopped and bent over to check its sheath. Someone bumped me from behind, and I nearly sprawled onto the tarmac, but I staggered forward a couple of steps and kept my balance. I felt through the leg of my jeans. Hellforged was there, calm and still like an ordinary dagger. Breathing a huge sigh of relief, I followed everyone into the terminal.
Kane and I got separated. I was escorted, solo, to a room where I answered endless questions—from airport officials, airline representatives, an Icelandic paranormal investigation team. I even did a conference call with some U.S. military brass who wanted to hire me to get rid of a Glitch in their prototype combat helicopter. I don’t know whether they wrote down the brand of hairspray I recommended, but the call ended pretty fast after that.
I’d always wanted to visit Iceland, but the trip I imagined didn’t include being stuck in a windowless room deep in the bowels of the airport. By the time they gave me a boarding pass and said I was free to go, I was more than ready to get home.
IT WAS A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE SUNRISE WHEN I CAUGHT a cab outside Logan Airport. The werewolf driver didn’t glance twice at my sticky purple hair. The streets of human-controlled Boston were empty, and we made good time through the tunnel and across the city. As soon as we passed through the first checkpoint, into the New Combat Zone, things got livelier. The bars were closing, and customers spilled onto the sidewalks: humans turning toward their part of the city, PAs heading to Deadtown. The door of Creature Comforts opened, and Axel tossed a vampire junkie onto the pavement. The guy landed on his ass, rubbed his head, and then scrambled to his feet and staggered toward a blonde vampire waiting in line at the checkpoint. Good to see Axel back in business.
Throughout the Zone and Deadtown itself, dozens of posters, plastered over every surface, advertised the free Paranormal Appreciation Day concert by Monster Paul and the Zombie Freak Show. The posters had black text on an orange background, along with a huge picture of Monster Paul’s snarling face. The concert was set for tomorrow night—tonight, now—at seven o’clock on Tremont Street in front of the Granary Burying Ground, one of Boston’s oldest cemeteries.
Zombies would be dancing, no question. And I had no idea how to find Pryce and stop him before they did.
In my building, Clyde was on duty. “Ah. Welcome back, Ms. Vaughn.” He raised both eyebrows as he took in the Glitch spit, assorted bruises, and the condition of my clothes. “Perhaps I won’t inquire whether you had a pleasant trip.”
“Good thought, Clyde, because I don’t want to talk about it.” I crossed the lobby, shuddering as I passed the spot where the cleaning crew had mopped up what was left of Gary. I had to make sure that didn’t happen to another zombie—let alone hundreds.
The other problem nagging at my mind nagged a little louder. I turned around and went to Clyde’s desk. “Is Juliet back?”
“I’m afraid not. I haven’t seen Ms. Capulet for a week. Mr. Kane came by to inquire about her, as well.”
“Yes, he told me. Did anyone else ask about her?”
“Three different pairs of JHP officers.” He looked at me so sourly I felt like I was supposed to apologize for being a bad influence on my roommate.
“Did they go upstairs?”
“Not while I was on duty.”
Good. A homecoming was never all that homey when your place had been torn apart by cops in the interim. “So that was it?”
“As far as I can recall. I didn’t realize anything was amiss until Mr. Kane came by.” He wrinkled his pitted, gray-green brow and tapped a finger against his chin. “There may have been a vampire,” he said, mostly to himself. He shuffled some papers on his desk. “Yes. His name was unusual, so I wrote it down. It’s embarrassing when you call upstairs and can’t recall a visitor’s name after they just gave it to you. If I didn’t discard the paper … Here it is. Piotr.”
He showed me the paper.
“That’s it? No last name?”
“That’s all he gave me. You know how it is with vampires. So many of them use only a single name. It’s an affectation, really.”
I pictured the skeletal, hooded figure who’d stood over Juliet in our living room. “What did this Piotr look like? Was he tall?”
“No, I’d say he was slightly below average in height. Five-eight, perhaps? Dark hair, slicked back. Slavic features—you know, high cheekbones. Quite a handsome man, except he was terribly thin.”
I couldn’t recall meeting anyone who fit that description, but I didn’t know all of Juliet’s friends. She’d had several centuries to make them before I was born.
Clyde continued his chin-tapping, like it could jog his memory. “Yes, quite thin. If he were human, I’d be concerned he was ill. And his manner was odd, as I recall. At first I thought it was because he was foreign. Piotr is a Polish name, I believe. But that wasn’t it. He seemed … vacant. As though he were extremely tired, but it was only an hour or two past dark. Perhaps he hadn’t fed yet; he did look pale.” Tap, tap, tap. “But there was more to it than that. Talking to him was like conversing with a robot. There was interaction, but little meaning was exchanged.”
“The lights were on but no one was home, huh?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” he agreed. “If you specify that the lights were of extremely low wattage.”
This vampire didn’t sound like someone Juliet would hang out with. She preferred life-of-the-party types.
“What day did he come by?”
“I’m not entirely certain. I know it was before Mr. Kane inquired. The day before, I believe.” He shrugged. “So many people come by, it all blurs together.”
For a norm, any one of the visitors to our building would generate nightmares for months. For Clyde, vampires, zombies, werewolves, whatever—it was all in a night’s work.
Upstairs, I paused in front of my apartment door, listening. I half-expected to hear Juliet’s TV blaring. For once, I would’ve welcomed it, knowing she was home
and all right. And not involved in an attempt to frame Kane for murder.
I turned the key and went inside. The silent TV greeted me with a blank, sixty-three-inch expanse of gray.
I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and listened. I reached out with all my senses, staying on this side of the demon plane. The apartment was empty. Nothing waited here—living, dead, or demonic.
I went down the hall to Juliet’s bedroom. The door was open, the bedroom still and silent. Juliet’s ebony coffin, lined with red satin and holding two lace-trimmed, heart-shaped pillows, lay open on its trestles. Her closet door was open, too.
Black clothes on hangers were pushed to the left and right, leaving a gap in the middle, like she’d grabbed a handful of clothing without paying attention to what it was. Or like someone had looked in the closet, pushing clothes aside and not caring whether anyone noticed they were out of place.
There was no way to tell what the gap in her closet meant. Probably nothing.
I went back through the living room, picking up my duffel bag on the way. I was worried about Juliet, yes, but I’d have to save that worry for later. She’d taken care of herself for more than six hundred years. Still, I wished I could hear her explanation of why she went to D.C. and what the hell those creatures were that had attacked Kane.
In my bedroom, I hoisted the duffel bag to drop it on the bed, then stopped. A book lay open on the comforter. The book wasn’t mine. I didn’t do much bedtime reading—usually I just collapsed and tried to pull up the comforter as far as my chin before sleep grabbed me. And I didn’t own a book that thick.
I put my bag on the floor and turned the book toward me. Across the top of the left-hand page was the book’s title: The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare. Facing that, across the top of the right-hand page, was Antony and Cleopatra.
My pulse sped up. This was a message from Juliet. She was playing her Shakespeare game, like she always did at Creature Comforts. Somewhere on these two pages was a clue about what was going on.
I’d never read Antony and Cleopatra, not in school and not with Mab. I didn’t much feel like reading it now, but I skimmed the pages that lay open. Nothing made sense; the archaic language and twisted sentences were hard to follow. It was a scene from Act III, well past the middle of the play. Cleopatra was getting some sort of message from Caesar and Marc Antony was having somebody whipped—no clue why. Maybe the guy was just kinky. Even if I could make sense of the language, trying to read the play was like walking into a movie after you’d missed the first hour.
I sighed with frustration. With Pryce on the loose in Boston—and a critical mass of Morfran that might be big enough and strong enough to attack without me—I didn’t have time to play Juliet’s game. I’d have to puzzle it out later. I checked my pockets for a slip of paper, found my boarding pass stub, and lay it on the page to mark the place.
As I was closing the book, a couple of lines jumped out at me:
’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp
Than with an old one dying.
An old one dying. Something in that phrase rang a bell. A whole bunch of bells—my head was clanging like a hundred trolleys on a collision course. The Old Ones. Juliet said something once about the Old Ones—what was it?
I thought back. An image arose of Juliet, sitting at the bar, stirring a Bloody Mary. It was at Creature Comforts, before that vampire junkie pointed Norden and Sykes her way.
The Old Ones—the really ancient ones, I mean—prefer to keep the old ways.
At the time, I wondered who might be so old that Juliet would consider them ancient. Now I wondered if the creatures Kane and I had seen—cold, skeletal, looking and smelling like old, old death—could be these Old Ones.
Somehow, Juliet was mixed up with them. When I’d heard her chanting in the living room, she’d sounded like a robot. Clyde said that Piotr, the strange vampire who’d come looking for Juliet, acted like a robot, too. The thought made me queasy. What if these Old Ones were somehow controlling her?
If they were, maybe she was involved in their plot to frame Kane.
But if the Old Ones sent someone to ask about Juliet, that meant they didn’t know where she was. Juliet had left me a message—a warning?—about the Old Ones through the Shakespeare book. Maybe she was resisting them; maybe Juliet wasn’t so easy to control.
But I still didn’t know where she was or how to start looking for her.
I CALLED KANE, GOT HIS VOICE MAIL, AND LEFT A MESSAGE I was home. I was about to get undressed for a shower when the phone rang. Expecting Kane, I picked up. The voice spluttering on the other end turned out to be Clyde’s.
“That … that Tina person is on her way up,” he said, once he’d calmed down enough to form actual words. “She wouldn’t wait, she just ran across—”
Pounding erupted on the door.
“It’s okay, Clyde. I’ll yell at her for you.”
He spluttered some more and hung up. Meanwhile, the door threatened to jump off its hinges. “C’mon, Vicky, let me in! I know you’re home. Come on. It’s important!”
I yanked the door open and almost got my face knocked on; Tina’s knuckles stopped an inch short. She squeezed past me, a dry cleaner’s bag slung over her shoulder.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back? I’ve been waiting forever to show you this.”
“I wasn’t gone forever. I’ve been home all of ten minutes. How did you know I was home, anyway?”
“Jenna saw you in a taxi at the checkpoint. She texted me. I was picking this up”—she draped the bag over the back of the sofa—“and I came right over.”
“You upset Clyde.”
“Why, ’cause I didn’t stop? He knows who I am, and I only ever come here to see you. He’s smart enough to figure it out. Anyway, celebrities get certain privileges.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulders.
“So you’re a celebrity now? That was fast. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t give you a right to be rude to my doorman.” I did not have the energy for this right now. Any of it.
“Okay, I’ll say sorry or whatever on the way out. But I wanted—” She cut herself off and stared at me openmouthed. “What did you do to your hair?”
“Nothing. That’s Glitch spit. There was a Glitch on the plane.”
“That’s a relief. I thought you’d gone punk or something. That look would be, like, so wrong for you.”
“Actually, I was about to take a shower. You know how important it is to wash this stuff out.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. I mean, I’m glad you weren’t in the shower when I came over, because then you wouldn’t have answered the door and I would’ve thought you were mad at me or something.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Patience. “Tina, I woke up in Wales this morning—yesterday morning now. My plane almost crashed, and Juliet is missing. I’m really, really tired. And besides all that, I’m kind of busy right now.” Trying to stop a demi-demon from unleashing the Morfran on Boston.
She shot me a withering look. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Her scowl changed to a grin as she pulled a heap of sparkles out of the dry cleaner’s bag. “Look at this! Isn’t this, like, the most amazing thing you ever saw?” She held up two pieces against her: a push-up bra and a pair of boy shorts—emphasis on short—made of sparkly silver material.
“Why are you showing me your underwear?”
“Ha, ha. It’s my costume. You know, for the concert.”
Suddenly, it hit me how vulnerable Tina would be, up there on a stage when the Morfran attacked. “Tina, you can’t go onstage—”
“Wearing this? Oh, please. Stop sounding like my mother. Or, you know, how my mother would sound if she gave a damn about me.”
“No, you don’t understand. You can’t go onstage at all. You’ve got to tell Monster Paul to cancel the concert.” It was so simple, I almost laughed. To stop Pryce, all we had to do was mess up the prophecy. No dancing dead, no chance for t
he Brenin wannabe to make his move.
Tina stared at me. “Did you get Glitch spit in your brain or something? This concert is my big chance. We’re gonna be on TV and everything. Plus we’ve been rehearsing for, like, a whole week.”
I gripped her arm, trying to convey how important this was. “If the concert goes ahead, there’ll be an attack to make what happened at the Halloween parade look like a Sunday picnic.”
“A demon attack—is that all?” She shook me off and waved her hand dismissively. “You can handle that. I’ll have Paul put you on security. Just bring, you know, some extra weapons. If you need help, I’ll jump in.” Her eyes widened. “Ooh, bring that big sword, the one I borrowed at Halloween. That was awesome.”
She was talking about the Sword of Saint Michael, and stole was a more accurate word than borrowed, but I didn’t argue the point. I needed to figure out how to prevent the concert. That would give me time to find Pryce, kill him, and put the Morfran back into its slate prison. If I could handle the ritual.
“It’s almost sunrise,” I said. Tina wasn’t bundled up in protective clothing. “Shouldn’t you go home before it gets light?”
“Yikes, you’re right. This would be, like, the worst time ever to get a sunburn.” She pulled the plastic over her costume. “Come see me before the concert. I’ll put you on the guest list so you can get backstage. The show starts at seven, but I’ll be in my dressing room by sunset.”
After Tina left, I got busy making phone calls. I tried Kane first—if anyone would know who to call and what to say, it would be Kane. But I got his voice mail again. My message explained the situation and asked him to call whoever he could think of with authority to cancel the concert.
Sunrise was the wrong time of day to call anyone—too late for Deadtown’s zombies and too early for Boston’s norms. I tried Monster Paul’s recording studio. I tried all the talent agents in the Yellow Pages to see if I could reach him that way. But all I got was one voice mail system after another. I left the same message: “Tell Monster Paul he has to cancel tonight’s concert. If he’ll call me back, I’ll explain why,” giving my name and phone number. By the third time I’d said it, I realized how much I sounded like a complete crackpot, even to myself.
Hellforged d-2 Page 30
