“Oh, boohoo, we’ve been on the road all day,” Vic said. “I didn’t tell him to send the welcome wagon.”
“LA is crawling with vampires. Not everyone plays nice like we do.” The newcomer got off his bike. Lean in his denim and leather, he swaggered toward them.
Vic waved his hand as he stood. “Yeah, yeah, we already staked a douchebag in board shorts on our way into town. What’s your name again? Lucas, Ice Pick, maybe Greg?”
“Greg? Really?” The biker took off his helmet to reveal black hair and high cheekbones that models would die for, his skin untouched by the California sun. He had been plucked from the mortal coil in his twenties, before he could lose the boyishness in his handsome face. His lips were full and looked mischievous, but sorrow lingered in his pale gray eyes. The shadows only added more mystery to his handsome features.
Red furrowed her brow, straining to catch his voice. She stared at the vampire, forcing her jaw not to drop. He sounded so familiar. She stood and stepped beside Vic. “Who is he, Vic? Another friend?”
“No, Sid Vicious here is one of Quinn’s.” Vic shrugged as if there was no accounting for taste before grinning. “I’m giving him shit. He’s cool. His real name isn’t Greg.”
The biker stepped from the motorcycle and looked her over from head to toe. His eyes widened before he looked away. His lips gaped open for a moment before he clenched his jaw. “Who’s the bird?”
“My intern.” Vic jerked his thumb at Red. “Red.”
“We don’t need your help.” The biker put his helmet back on and hopped on his bike. “Get her out of the city tonight.” He started the bike and kicked back the stand with a final look at them. The motorcycle spun and sped out of the parking lot.
“What? What about all the sensitive Blood Alliance bullshit? Vampires not playing by the rules. Quinn called in one hell of a favor on this.” Vic waved his hands over his head trying to flag motorcycle down.
“Are we being punk’d?” Red rubbed her arms, staring at the spot where the motorcycle was. “I need to know who that is.”
“That was Lucas Crawford—proof that a soul doesn’t stop you from being a dick. He’s the annoying vampire cousin that Quinn can’t shake off. Works for him sometimes.”
“What’s his deal?”
“He’s a vampire. Enough said.” Vic shrugged and knelt to put away his tools after tightening one last lug on the wheel.
“I recognized him. I think… His voice sounded like one from a dream. At least, I think it was.” Red admitted before describing the flashes and snippets of the dreams she remembered of the granite stone circle. “I was sitting behind these stones. Hard to explain since it's a lot of flashes of images. I think he was trying to help me.”
“You’ve had this dream before.” Vic stared at her, toolbox under his arm. His fatigued eyes narrowed to slits before he shook his head. “This is some Memento shit. Listen, you were a mess when I found you. Then all the scars.” Vic gestured at his neck before looking down. “Maybe you’re remembering something, but maybe not. I’ve seen Lucas in action. If he was going to save you, he’d do it.”
“Well, he was acting all weird.” Red shrugged. “Is that a souled vampire thing?”
All vampires were animated by a demonic instinct, but for the last hundred years, more and more had been bewitched to feel their human conscience. Poetically, they had their souls returned. Technically speaking, they were cursed to feel remorse and empathy. All the facets of the human emotional condition that the demon essence possessing their bodies suppressed. It might not sound like a soul to a human, but after countless nights of murder, that guilt was a karmic bitch. It was meant to be. She’d only met a few on her journey. Traveling the byways on demon hunts, she had found more of the original unsouled and unrepentant kind.
“He’s always weird, but he usually sticks around to make with the banter.” Vic hoisted his toolbox into the van. “We need to get to Quinn. He said that something about this case being different.”
Red hopped into the driver’s seat. She put her hand over her heart, trying to calm it, before she stuck the key into the ignition. The pale gray eyes of a demon flashed in her mind as she drove under the streetlights and billboards, through the City of Angels.
Chapter Three
October 24th, 2018, Night, Quinn Investigations in Culver City, Los Angeles, California, USA
Red stepped through the broken glass door of the office building, following behind Vic to the cracked open door on the first floor. ‘Quinn Investigations’ read the small plaque on the wall beside it. She held a revolver, loaded with wooden bullets, at her side.
Loose papers and turned over file cabinets covered the floor of the small front room. Two men bent over the secretary’s desk.
Skinny and hunched over in a Rick and Morty shirt, the shorter one typed into the desktop computer. His tongue stuck out between through his fangs in concentration. Pale, he looked as if he hadn’t gotten much sun even when he was alive.
Dressed like a bank manager, the taller bald black man glared at the files as if they were stocks going belly up. He looked up, fangs jutting out of his mouth, and hissed.
Vic hit the lights and raised his shotgun. “Wooden tips, cucks.”
“I’ll rip that out of your hands and shove it up your mullet-wearing ass,” the taller vampire said.
Red pulled her cell phone from her pocket and took a picture quickly. “I guess we won’t be appealing to your souls. Let’s try your brains.” She stepped in front of Vic as she put her phone away and tightened her grip on the revolver at her side before raising it. “Bad time to make trouble, boys, what with that fancy vampire summit and all. Quinn has enough connections to make a stink.” Red didn’t know that, actually. He could have been a weirdo loner.
Since he was Vic’s friend, he probably was.
“Come on.” The shorter vampire pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sprinted out the door fast enough to stir Vic’s mullet as he passed.
“Chicken.” The black vampire left behind adjusted his suit jacket lapels and stepped away from the desk. “Hunters, eh? Is that how far the mighty Quinn Byrnes has fallen, to consort with you people?”
"You people?" Vic blew a raspberry.
“I’m a witch, so watch it, pal.” Red lifted her hand, trying to look more confident than she felt as she focused her attention to summon her magic, pleading with the little bit left to listen.
He widened his stance and raised his fists. “I don’t scare easy.”
Red slammed her palm forward, drawing upon the well of energy within as she called to the element of air.
The vampire flew back and hit the window behind him, taking the cheap Venetian blinds with him as he fell through the cracking glass. An alarm sounded, and a floodlight came on outside the building. Grimacing, the vampire brushed off his suit and fled in a blur , his bald head reflecting the light.
“I wanted to shoot that one,” Vic said.
“Yeah, somehow I don’t think your friend wants either dead vampires or gunshots in his office.” Red bent over at the waist and controlled the urge to dry heave. Sweat beaded on the back of her neck. Chills rolled down her spine. That spell had looked cool, but now she felt like she was getting the flu. Too much magic took a toll. She would need to remember to eat or meditate to center her energies. She hoped that a half-melted candy bar in the van would do the trick.
“If he’s still alive.” Vic gritted his teeth, looking around. Fear glimmered in his brown eyes. He stomped past Red to go into the closed door on the left. “He has an apartment in the basement.”
Red nodded before she turned in a circle, surveying the trashed office. She stepped over to one fallen filling cabinet and pushed it upright. Trying to keep the files together, she gathered up the loose papers and folders and placed them at the foot of the cabinet they spewed out from. She found an open safe, ripped from a wall somewhere else, on the floor by the desk.
The safe had been
cracked, its metal front hanging open with files, boxes, and books spilled out of it. She pushed the items back into the safe, trying not to look at them. No cash or jewels, just the ephemera of a very old life. A photo album lay open to reveal a sepia portrait of a light-haired woman in a crown and medieval garb, lounging in a Victorian parlor. She closed the album quickly, feeling like she was spying, and shoved it in the safe.
A torn piece of paper fluttered out. She picked it up. The sketch paper had gone soft with age. She set it on the pile with the others, face up, and frowned as she focused on the scrap of paper and the sketched figure of a reclining blindfolded woman on it.
The paper had been ripped at the bust line, leaving only the face, tensed bare shoulders, and an arm raised over the head. She picked it up again to study the anticipation in the woman’s mouth and jaw under the blindfold. The aged pencil marks had faded, but the lines came together in a forehead, mouth, and chin that resembled the one she saw every day in the mirror.
Hearing the opening of a door, Red pulled out her phone and took a quick picture of the sketch before shoving it back into the photo album and pushing both back into the safe. Red stood and stepped away. Her heart raced even as she tried to tell herself that the sketch didn’t look like her that much.
She was imagining things, just like with Lucas. Had she been looking so hard for clues about herself that she saw them everywhere? Hadn’t she learned anything from that wild goose chase in Nevada?
Vic stepped into the office and opened the door wider, showing a smaller private office behind him. A relieved grin stretched across his face.
A tall, broad-shouldered man, rubbing his hand over his spikey blond hair down to a growing goose egg on his temple, walked behind Vic. He had a rugged masculine look with a strong jaw and brow. A dark V-neck shirt clung to his defined chest in wet patches. His pale skin pegged him as a vampire, but the brooding glint to his brown eyes marked his soul.
“They caught the old man in the shower!” Vic said, chuckling even as he gazed at Quinn like a comic fanboy meeting Stan Lee. “Didn’t even see them.”
Red raised her eyebrows. She could call the vampire a lot of things, but old wasn’t one of them. Whoever had turned him had caught him on the cusp of thirty.
“You don’t need to sound so happy about it.” Quinn glared at Vic without bite in his eyes, his tone droll and quiet, without any change in expression.
“You’re the one who was always going on about vigilance when I was at UCLA.”
“You used to hunt high and end up at In-N-Out Burger,” Quinn said dryly. He looked over at Red, and his stone expression grew stonier. “Who’s this?”
“My intern.” Vic gestured to Red with a deadpan expression. “She keeps up my Twitter.”
Red stepped forward and held out her hand. Vic had told her so much about his adventures with Quinn that she felt like she knew him. She could recite the story of when they fought zombies at In-N-Out, at least. “Pleased to meet you, Quinn. Vic told me more about his college years than you might have wanted him to.”
Quinn looked down at her hand before shaking it, but released it quickly as if it burned. “Vic likes to talk.” He stepped away from her and looked around at his office before his eyes came to the safe. “They were thorough.”
Red said, “I tried to pick up a bit, but you’ll have to see if they stole anything.”
“You said this vamp case was delicate.” Vic gestured to the room. “It looks like the Watergate burglary up in here.”
Red stepped up to the men and held out her phone, swiping to the next-to-last picture. The sideways shot wouldn’t win awards, but it wasn’t too blurry. She held out her phone. “Do you recognize these vampires?”
Quinn stared down at it, shaking his head. “No.”
Red quirked an eyebrow at Vic as she tucked away her phone. He’d said his friend wasn’t a talker, but monosyllabic would’ve been a better description. “Alrighty.”
“Tell us what you have on this case,” Vic said. “We popped a tire, staked a vampire, and crossed states to get here. All you said was a model was found drained on the beach.”
“Staked a vampire? Describe them.” Quinn crossed his arms. “Master or minion?”
Red pursed her lips. The Blood Alliance had changed a lot of traditions, but just like sire and childe, there were some hierarchies that couldn’t disappear. She remembered reading that the old vampire bloodlines each had their own unique definitions of what made a master vampire. The way she saw it, the difference between a master and minion was the power—who took orders and who followed. “Definitely a minion. Tallish, blond, skateboarder. He couldn’t have been more than a year dead. Attacked me in San Bernardino. Ring any bells?”
“He’s not from LA. Or if he is, he’s not on the city list of vampires.” Quinn frowned.
“If he is here for the Summit,” Red said, “he drove a long way for a meal. What sire would let that young a vampire head that far afield to make mischief? Too many old, canny ones around for that.”
Quinn lifted his eyebrows at her observation, then looked down.
“Great, then let’s assume we don’t have to worry about the supreme master or the Blood Alliance coming for us,” Vic said, flapping his hand before turning to the vampire. “What about the reason you made us drive here from Reno?”
“Olivia Greene,” Quinn began. “A jogger found her on Tuesday morning, washed up on a beach.”
“We read the paper.” Vic motioned for him to continue. “Give us some new details.”
“The name is new.” Red pulled up the browser on her phone and plugged the name in. “I found her Instagram. She was represented by DB Models.” She looked up at Quinn. “Have you heard of them?”
Vic tilted his head at Quinn. He blinked slowly, and his mouth curled up like he’d sniffed bad milk. “DB Models? So, that’s what makes this case delicate?”
“What?” Red looked between Vic and Quinn.
“His ex-wife runs the modeling agency,” Vic said. “Delilah Byrnes is the Notorious DB.”
Quinn flicked an annoyed glance at Vic. “It’s more complicated.”
“Yeah, it usually is.” Red said, “Do you need help because you’ll be recognized investigating, or because you don’t know how deep you’ll dig?” She lifted her hands, palms out, with a sympathetic head shake. “I’m not judging you either way.”
“Both.” Quinn looked away.
Vic glanced at her, his eyebrow raised. “Ease up on my bro. It's complicated.”
“No problem. I don’t know either Quinn or Delilah from Adam. It makes sense to bring some new faces around. I just want to know what I’m dealing with.” Red shrugged. She’d follow Vic’s lead, since it was his bromance that lead them here. She might have gotten some wacky stories from Vic about Quinn, but this vampire drama ran deep. It wouldn’t be the first time a hunter gave up a case that hit too close to home. “Give us what you have on the case, and we can start digging into it tomorrow.”
Vic yawned and stretched. “Yup, I’ve got you covered, brother.”
“I need to be kept in the loop,” Quinn said, making eye contact with Vic before hunching his shoulders.
“Your office is headquarters, man.” Vic yawned again.
Red covered her own yawn. “If you need help with filing, let me know. I get the feeling that the break in made your folders more organized.”
Quinn straightened with a small smile. “Lucas does the filing.” He rubbed his fingernails on his chest before looking down. “Sometimes.”
“So, he’s like your secretary?” Red laughed. “Does he answer your phone?” She raised her hands. “Sorry, I met him tonight, and I can’t imagine him in a headset.”
“He saw you?” Quinn’s smile disappeared.
“Yeah, I forgot to mention what a dick he was tonight,” Vic said. “I thought we were mates or chaps or whatever is British for friend.”
“Why doesn’t he want us in town?” Red asked. Sh
e had recognized him tonight, and a part of her could have sworn that he had done the same.
“You’d have to ask him.” Quinn stared at her before looking away as if the sight burned him like a cross. “I told him to check on you. The supreme master has declared that LA will be a model city, but we have new vampires in town for the Summit.”
Vic smiled, nodding, and put his hand in his back pocket. “Stranded out-of-state travelers look like easy pickings. I get it.”
“He checked in, made with the cryptic small talk, then left.” Red said, shrugging. She looked at the safe behind Quinn, remembering the sketch. Lucas wasn’t the only one that was cryptic. Who was that sketch of, and why did every souled vampire want her out of the city?
Vic laughed. “That’s what you get for hiring relatives.”
A Witch Called Red: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Red Witch Chronicles 1) Page 3
