The happy buzzing downstairs ceased with a sudden, startling rush, the sound disappearing so quickly and completely that my ears rang in the thick silence.
Crixus, Morrison and I all shot out of our chairs and flew down the stairs.
When we reached the bottom, we saw why.
A perfect circle of party guests, their varied faces all wearing identical expressions of shock and disbelief. At the circle’s center, Allan lay on the floor. His face ash gray. Eyes closed. Mouth open. Limbs stiff. Half-smoked cigar still clutched in his bluish fingers.
“I found him in the alley,” a tall, heavily muscular man with cobalt clue hair—Shayla’s side of the family—said.
“Were there others?” I asked, panic rising like acid in my throat.
“No,” he the man said. “Only one.”
My heart dropped into my shoes, my stomach clenched in a sickening twist as I rushed over to them, jumping back when I touched Allan’s cold, waxy skin.
“Is he—” The words refused to leave my mouth.
“Not yet.” A woman with raven black hair and impressive collection of beaded necklaces and bracelets slithered through the shocked crush, coming to kneel at my side. “But he will be if we don’t counter the potion in time.”
“A potion?” I asked, my face feeling like a slab of dumb meat.
“Yes,” she said, already digging into a crocheted handbag. “But the longer we wait to administer this, the more he is to stay this way.”
I stood, finding Crixus’s eyes as he spoke the one word that appeared with perfect clarity in my head.
“Nero.”
Chapter 25
Everything in the room took on an alarming brownish sheen as a cold sweat broke out over the back of my neck as I swayed on my four-inch heels. Crixus managed to snag me before I fell face-first onto the gallery floor, ushering me to one of the tables and easing me into a chair.
Morrison appeared shortly thereafter with a glass of water. “Drink,” he said.
I drank. I swallowed. I stood.
Impatiently gathering the folds of my skirt, and kicking off my heels, I made a beeline for the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Morrison asked, hot on my heels.
“I’m going to go get Mark and Joseph.”
“No,” Crixus and Morrison said in unison.
“Yes,” I said.
“You don’t even know where they are,” Crixus added, not far behind.
“You’re right,” I said, over my shoulder as I clomped up the stairs. “But I’ll bet you do.”
Crixus froze in place for a beat, and I knew I’d hit pay dirt. He caught up to us on the landing as I grabbed my purse, my keys, my Taser (ahh, memories), and Clancy.
“You are out of your fucking mind, lady.” Crixus placed the leathery palms of his warrior’s hands flat on my desk and looked me dead in the eye. “You can’t go up against a horde of angry vampires by yourself.”
“As much as I don’t want to say this, I agree with the demigod,” Morrison said. “Let’s at least get some back-up or—”
“Back-up?” I laughed bitterly. “You gonna call some of your detective friends? Explain the situation?”
Morrison glanced away.
“Anyway,” I continued, “we go busting into Nero’s lair with a rag bunch of werewolves and forget about any kind of negotiation. We’re talking a complete and total bloodbath.”
“But—” Crixus began.
“Did you see Allan downstairs?” Every speck of fear and sadness and desperation I’d been tamping down, exploding into violent life. To my extreme irritation, my throat clenched as tears stung my eyes. “Mark and Joseph are probably frozen and completely helpless somewhere in the clutches of a mad Roman emperor vampire. We don’t have fucking time.”
“Do you think you’re just going to waltz in there and ask Nero politely to give Abernathy and Joseph back to you?” Crixus demanded.
“Nope,” I said. “I’m going to get some of whatever our witch friend is brewing and you’re going to magic me in there. Or however the hell it is you travel from place to place.”
“Why would I do that?” Crixus asked, watching as I gathered anything that even remotely looked like a weapon.
“Because somewhere deep down in that shallow, self-serving heart of yours there’s a slightly less shallow and self-serving heart that wants to do the right thing.”
The closest expression to fear I’d yet seen darkened Crixus’s arrogant, irritatingly handsome face.
“Please.” I looked him in the eye, marshalling every ounce of pleading I could.
“Okay,” he said. “But once I get you in, you’re on your own.”
“Deal.” I reached across the desk and offered him my hand. He stared at it for the briefest second before he took it and squeezed.
“I’m coming with you.” Morrison, who had been strangely quiet during this whole conversation, came to stand at my side. Again, that wave of nostalgia swelled in my heart. He’d been wearing almost the exact same thing as the day I’d rear-ended him on my way to first interview with Abernathy.
The slightly rumpled button-up shirt. The off-the-rack slacks that never fit him quite right but always managed to show off his ass. And his expression. Dogged and determined despite his lightly rumpled golden brown hair and shadowed jaw.
“Why would you do that?” I asked. “You hate Abernathy.”
“Yes.” Morrison turned to me, his hands on my shoulders, his face an odd mixture of tenderness and anger. “But you don’t.”
“Oh God.” Panting, I fell to my knees in the hallway of Nero’s super-secret mountain lair, Morrison moaning at my side in a similar posture.
As it turned out, spontaneous orgasms were a side effect of materializing—Crixus’s method of poofing us from one place another.
After having briefly stopped at Morrison’s house to improve our small arsenal, Crixus had stood in the kitchen, holding his arms out as if hoping for a hug. “All right,” he’d said. “Hop on.”
“Excuse me?” Morrison, various weapons strapped to his body and an expression of horror strapped to his face, looked from me to Crixus and back again.
Not that I was much to look at.
In a pair of Morrison’s drawstring sweatpants, a Kevlar vest, borrowed t-shirt, and an anti-bite collar he had fashioned from scrap leather and duct tape, I looked like I belonged on a street corner with a THE END IS NEAR sign.
“I can’t transport you if I’m not touching you,” Crixus explained. “And the more of you I’m touching, the easier it is for me to do it.”
“I call middle,” I had said, marching to him.
“Actually, it works best if I’m in the middle.” Crixus tugged me over, and tucking me under one powerful arm, pressed me into his side.
Morrison had taken a step backward.
“James,” I snapped, panic washing over me anew. “We’re wasting time. Get your ass over here and spoon this man. We have werewolves to rescue.”
And finally, he had.
“You breathe one word of this to anyone and I’ll—”
But then his words had stopped because time had stopped. Every single cell of my body experienced a simultaneous reorganization. Like when a rollercoaster’s sudden drop sends your stomach lurching upward as the rest of you is coming down, only times a thousand and ending with being pulled through the Universe’s anus.
Backwards.
With a deafening pop, we had tumbled into being in a dark, musty hallway.
And promptly blew our wads.
Well, one of us, anyway.
“Not cool.” Morrison, who had regained his ability to stand, glanced down at the wet spot on the front of his trousers.
“No one’s going to see it,” I said. “It’s too dark in here anyway.”
Or so I hoped.
“Ugh,” I said, tugging at the thick, heavy cowl around my neck. “I fucking hate this thing.”
“Do you hate it more than dying?” Morrison asked.
“No,” I said. “But did you have to rub it down with garlic?” I sniffed at myself and stifled a gag. “I smell like a pesto burp.”
With a hand against the clammy stone wall, I got to my feet, taking in my surroundings. Whether it was my unusual journey, or the torches—yes, actual by God burning tar sticks—lining the walls, I felt like I had spooled back into the middle ages.
The same strange feeling of déjà vu I’d experienced at Castle Abernathy descended over me. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Nero’s summer house.” The flickering light changed Crixus’s face, stripping from it any trace of levity or playfulness. Hardening the angle of his jaw. Turning his eyes to black sapphires.
“But the walls, the torches…” I trailed off.
“He likes to evoke a mood,” Crixus said.
Boy did he ever. He’d captured creepy castle dungeon all the way down to the mysterious dripping noise somewhere beyond sight.
“This way,” Crixus whispered.
Morrison and I exchanged an uncertain look and followed him down the hall. When we reached the dark space between two torches, he reached out and grasped my hand.
Of all the intimacies we had shared, this had never been one of them. Even as fear for Abernathy pierced my heart, I felt the warm strength of Morrison’s grip. His lifeline and mine, so near each other if only for a moment.
His other hand, I was certain, was already on the butt of the gun strapped to his ribs in a well-worn leather holster. I had informed him that the only way to truly kill a vampire was to remove its head, but also that they healed slower than a thorazined sloth.
This information had been the impetus for his bringing the guns in addition to several hastily made stakes he’d fashioned by snapping the handles off several unassuming garden tools.
For my part, I ran a hand over the small pouch tucked neatly into my bra. Within it, the potion promised to unfreeze Abernathy. Even as we had left the gallery, color had begun to return to Allan’s cheeks, if not much else.
Crixus paused at the center of the hallway and pointed to a wide wooden door on giant, rusting hinges. “They’re in there.”
“They?” I asked. My heart beat so hard that I would have sworn I could taste my own pulse. “There was no mention of a they.”
Crixus’s eyes took on a strangely haunted quality. “Nero likes to keep his prisoners in the nursery.”
“The nursery?” At that second, I couldn’t decide which would be scarier. A room full of wailing infants, or neophyte vampires.
“Fledglings,” Crixus said. “But don’t worry. They sleep until midnight when they’re that young.”
I pulled my phone from the pocket of my borrowed sweatpants. 11:45. Fucking fantastic.
“We better get moving,” I said. “Not much time to waste.”
Morrison and I traded one last glance as Crixus reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced a large brass key.
“Nero gave you a key?” I asked.
“It’s my job to clean their coffins,” he answered, turning the key with a deep, metallic click. He looked at me, and I understood that I was to be the one to open the door.
“Wait.” Morrison grasped my wrist and pressed into my hand the thick, cool handle of one of the stakes. “I’m going in first.”
He pushed the door open with his non-dominant hand, it treating us to the customary Vincent Price film slow-motion creak.
Morrison swept in, keeping his back to the wall, aiming his gun first to the right, then to the left, then checking behind the door. Wordlessly, he nodded and motioned me in.
Looking behind me, I discovered Crixus had already vanished, the motherfucker.
I blinked and moved forward, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
Then abruptly, the darkness vanished. Lights bright enough to sear my retinas flooded the room.
I took a step backward, my arm instinctively flying up to cover my eyes.
“What the fuck?” Morrison said.
Dropping my arm down, I blinked away white-blue bursts still flashing behind my eyelids. When I could begin to make out the shapes before me, my jaw dropped to the floor. Glossy black coffins on pedestals, neatly lined up in perfectly calibrated rows. Four across, four deep. Glittery signs at the foot of each bore carefully stenciled numbers, 1 through 16.
On the right side of the room, double stone staircases with ornate wrought iron railing led up to a small landing where a door presumably granted entry to more pleasant places in Nero’s dungeon/castle/chalet/summer house.
Through the door, stepped Joseph Abernathy.
Relief washed over me to see him well and alive but was quickly replaced with hurt and disbelief when I saw the expression on his face.
Disdain. Triumph. Amusement.
“Joseph?” Even as I said his name aloud, some little scrap of hope that people could change, and stories could end happily dissolved permanently.
“Your detective is even more intrepid than I thought,” Joseph said, fixing us with a dazzling grin.
Morrison, gods bless him, said nothing. He only moved closer to me while training his gun straight at Joseph’s chest.
“You…” I stammered. “And Nero? Why?”
“Someone has to rule after the war is over.”
The war.
With these words, something clicked and several windows in my mind aligned. “The dead vampires. The heads. You put them there.”
“Yes,” Joseph said. “It’s only a matter of time before Nero stirs his forces to attack and with you and Mark out of the way—”
Joseph stopped short, coughed and a bright red bubble of blood erupted from his mouth. Shock widening his eyes, he pitched forward over the railing, landing with a terrible crunch on the stone floor several yards to our left, a long silver blade smoking in his back.
“If it isn’t Hanna Hawvey,” a strangely resonant voice boomed. I glanced back up at the landing to find a man standing where Joseph had been seconds earlier.
It only took a moment to convert memories of marble busts into living flesh before me.
Nero.
In the statues I’d studied in my Roman art history classes, Nero had been the original Neckbeard. The man on the landing did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. A wavy strawberry blond mop roosted on his head and made an odd doughnut from his sideburn down below his chin and up the other side. Rounded ears like jug handles sat low at the edge his jaw, his chin sloping inward to the small pouch of a mouth beneath a prominent nose. Acne pocked skin and small, eerily light eyes. Apparently, vampirism had restored him to his most vital state, but couldn’t provide him with the kind of untouchable perfection so often associated with that condition.
He still wore the purple robes of an emperor, but they were covered by dark spatter marks and appeared to have at one point been a moth buffet.
“Sowwy about that,” he said, glancing over the railing at Joseph’s motionless body. “Someone was supposed to dispose of him befowe you awwived.” With this, he cast an irritated glance over his shoulder where Klaud looked, his pale face ghostly in the gloom.
“Apologies, Your Excellency,” Klaud said, bowing.
“Take your pwace,” Nero ordered.
A chastened Klaud hurried down the stairs and across the room.
“Who’s that creepy fuck?” Morrison asked through the side of his mouth.
“Standard henchman,” I whispered back.
“I suppose you’we wondewing what aww this is about,” Nero said, sweeping a small hand grandly over the rows of coffins.
Certain historical accounts suggested that Nero’s congenital defects might have included a speech impediment, but not that he was the oratorical equivalent of a slightly deranged Elmer Fudd. The effect compromised his ability to instill fear considerably.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, flicking a nervous glance at Morrison, who looked exactly as gobsmacked as I felt.
Nero cleared his thr
oat. “I brought you hewe, because I want you to pway a game.”
“A game?” I repeated.
This too, I remembered from my Roman art history seminars. Nero’s love of sport. Toward the beginning of his reign, those games had been mostly athletic in nature. Wrestling matches. Chariot races. Toward the end, the only racing was between two men trying to see who could expose the other’s looping bowels or slippery purple liver to a crowd just as blood-lusty and mad as Nero was.
“What kind of game?” I asked, feeling like I’d drunk a quart of motor oil all of the sudden.
With that, Nero pointed toward the other corner of the room, where, much to my dismay, I discovered Klaud holding a slim dark remote. He depressed it as overly-dramatic TV game show music flooded the room.
“Wewcome to….” Nero paused as riotous lights flew around the now darkened room like a rave. “Deaw, or no Deaw!”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Morrison’s face switched from blue, to green, to magenta, to gold as the strobes circulated. “Why doesn’t he just try to kill us like a normal villain?”
“He loves games,” I said, leaning toward his ear. “Also he’s batshit crazy.”
All at once, the strobing ceased and a single spotlight dropped onto Nero, who held a long, skinny microphone a la 1989 “Price is Right” Bob Barker.
“In one of these coffins,” Nero bellowed into the lollipop-sized mic, “is Mawk Abewnathy.”
Strange how the mere mention of that name made my heart leap in my chest.
“You have thwee guesses to find the coffin he’s in,” Nero continued. “If you guess correctwy, you aww get to weave unharmed! If not…” He trailed off, leaving the insinuation in his wake.
“How do I know you’ll let us go?” I asked, glancing meaningfully at Joseph’s still-smoking body on the floor below Nero’s landing.
“You don’t,” Nero said, glistening lips drawing back to reveal the pearly tips of his elongated canines. “But what awtewnative do you have?”
I looked to Morrison and read the same thought already forming in my head in his eyes.
Nero had a point.
And anyway, if I did guess correctly, at least I’d know which coffin Abernathy was in. I might even be able to get the potion to him in time.
Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Page 25
