Marcel bounded out and scampered to me. He clambered up my leg, then arm and wound himself around my neck, chittering excitedly.
Sue glared at me over Charles’ head. Yeah, I don’t think Charles had anything to worry about on that score anymore. Not that he ever had, but the insecure jerk would never have figured it out on his own.
The wooden door slammed shut, cutting me off from them.
Not that I’d ever be free of them, so long as they lived so close. The curse of a psychic.
When I turned around, Dev was looking at me like I’d dropped off the bottom of his boot after a swagger through the cow paddock. Erin actually had her gun out. Pressed to her side, but in her hand.
“Jesus,” I muttered as I headed into my house, “anyone would think you though I was going to kill him.”
Erin gave a short, strangled gasp.
Somewhat warily, they both came inside after me. Not until Erin had held Dev back and had a whispered conference by the car, though. Did she really think I wouldn’t pick up on the intent, if not the actual words?
As if, even acting together, they could get me into Mercy’s cage and lock me in.
“Matt,” Erin said. “What was that all about?”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “That was about someone finally giving Charles a wakeup call. Trust me, he’s been begging for one for a long time now. He treats Sue like shit and she deserves better than that.”
Woops. Wrong thing to say.
Erin stared at me, wide-eyed and understanding. She put the gun away and secured it. “How long?”
I swallowed hard. “Since the sun set.”
She nodded. “Did you know?”
“Maybe. Suspected.” I patted Marcel, who was content to groom my hair in silence. Had I still been Evil Matt, I’m sure the little man wouldn’t have even bothered flinging anything my way, much less sit calmly on my shoulder.
Erin just shook her head at me. “So you decided to pretend to still be… bad, and give him the talking to.” Clearly, she wasn’t at all impressed.
Dev sighed. “Suspected what?”
From Mercy’s room came a rattle of bars. “Matt!”
“That,” I said to Dev. Which didn’t help him understand, just made him frown deeper. “Come on.” I waved him after me. “Let’s see how this goes.”
I went to Mercy’s room. Dev followed, Erin trailing.
“Hang back a bit,” I said. “I’m not sure how she’ll react to a sorcerer.”
Inside her cage, Mercy was up and at the bars. The neck brace was discarded on the floor and she looked to be in fine fettle.
“Matt! Look, all good!” She bounced, happily tossing her head around to show me how hale and hearty she was. Which made Marcel bounce on my shoulder and clap, chattering right back at her.
“Why’s she in a cage?” Dev asked, bringing himself to Mercy’s attention.
In an instant, she went from happy to homicidal. She was at the bars of the cage in the blink of a terrified eye, snarling at Dev and rattling two inch thick steel bolted into a cement base.
“Well,” I said as the vampire went bonkers, “this is just swell.”
Chapter 46
“It’s a vampire!”
Hawkins grabbed Dev’s arm and hauled him out of the room. “Yeah, very observant. Get out before she actually breaks through the bars.”
Dev went willingly enough, but his sorcery was building. A purely instinctive response to the very clear threat in the other room.
A vampire.
Holy fucking Christ on a stick.
The monkey bounded off Hawkins’ shoulder and scampered into the kitchen, chittering as it went, tail high.
As Hawkins turned and went back in to the room with the vampire, closing the door behind him, it all began to make a creepy kind of sense. No wonder Aurum was interested in Hawkins.
That in there wasn’t just a wild vampire, caught behind bars. It had reacted happily to seeing Hawkins, had laughed and danced. In those few seconds before it went crazy, Dev had felt the thick thread of connection between them. Same as he felt between Aurum and his few Gold vampires, between any of the Primals and their scions.
All the oddities Dev had noted the past couple of days—the unusually strong psychic talents; his ability to detect sorcery; that predator gleam to his eyes when he went berserk; the partner everyone went to great lengths to cover for (night shift, right); Hawkins’ sudden reversal when the sun went down—now made bright, crystal clear sense.
Except for one thing.
“Hawkins is human.”
Erin, hovering by the door to the vampire room, glanced at him. “Pardon?”
“I don’t get it,” Dev said, trying to puzzle his way through it. He felt like he’d been caught in a gully washer, everything dumped on him all at once. “He’s human, but that vampire… is his.”
“Yes,” Erin said carefully. “They have a link.”
“No. Well, yes, there’s a link. But it’s more than that. He’s its Primal.”
Erin blinked at him. Okay. Clearly something she hadn’t known.
Before she could say anything, the door opened and Hawkins slipped out. The din from the creature had settled down, but Dev could feel it, in there, seething. It made the potential inside him leap in response.
“How is she?” Erin asked Hawkins, some uncertainty in her tone.
“Hungry.”
That step backwards of Erin’s was telling in so many ways, as was the flinch in Hawkins’ expression. Dev was ready to step in when Hawkins continued.
“A bag is all she needs. She’s healed now. Just needs the volume, I guess.” He fished out his keys and handed them to Erin.
She took them gratefully. “Right.” With a wry glance at the closed door, she said, “I thought yesterday’s… feed was supposed to modulate the behaviour.”
Hawkins grimaced. “Yeah, but she’s burned through that already. Besides, him.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder in Dev’s direction. “She’s wary with new people, regardless.”
Dev snorted. Wary? Codswallop.
Erin nodded and went into what appeared to be the kitchen, where the monkey began chattering at her insistently and she replied with soothing tones. While she was gone, Hawkins came over to Dev. He looked… uncomfortable.
“Sorry about Mercy. Is it… a sorcerer thing? Like between you and ghouls? Or between vampires and demons?”
Yet another thing Hawkins had no clue about.
“There’s no hostility between sorcerers and vampires, either socially, as with the ghouls, or genetically, as with demons. Unless you upset a Primal, there’s no animosity between sorcerers and vampires.” He shrugged. “Well, apart from the fact most vampires are dumber than a bag of hammers.”
Hawkins nodded. “Right, and you being best buds with Aurum could only work in your favour. So, something personal with you? Merce is a bit skittish around new people, but not usually like that.”
“Nothing I can think of.” Except that it wasn’t a regular vampire in that room. It felt… altered.
“All right. I’ll talk to her. See if I can get her to come around.”
Erin caught the last of the conversation as she came back, a donation bag of blood dangling from one hand. She handed it to Hawkins. “What if the problem’s not Mercy’s?”
“What do you mean?” Hawkins tucked the blood into his armpit.
With a patented men! eye-roll, Erin explained. “What she feels, you feel. What you feel, she feels. Think about it, Matt. You’ve been sparking off Dev since he arrived. All that alpha male bullshit. Mercy’s got to have picked up on it, and now, he—” She gestured at Dev. “—walks in right as she’s just healed from a very serious injury. She probably feels incredibly threatened.”
Alpha male bullshit? Dev cocked an eyebrow.
“Jeez, Erin,” Hawkins muttered, but didn’t refute it. Instead, with a sigh, he trudged back to the vampire’s room and slipped in.
“It’s
like talking to a child, some days,” she said to the closed door, then turn to Dev. “Want a drink?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, perhaps a bit too desperately.
“Come on, there’s beer in the fridge.”
They went into the kitchen and Erin pulled out two beers. Sitting at the table, she nodded him into a chair opposite. The monkey sat on the table, bunch of grapes in front of him. He held a small fruit in his hands, chewing through it with a distracted air as he tilted his head from Erin, to Dev and back again.
“It’s a long story,” Erin began then took a long drink. “I don’t know it all, and it’s up to Matt to tell you. But yes, they’re… bonded.”
Dev had a drink. The cold beer felt so good on his rough throat, thick and soothing. “Bonded, yes, but it’s more than that.”
“I’m not sure about the Primal thing,” she conceded. “But Mercy, she’s not normally like this. I’ve seen her go… full on vamp a couple of times, but that’s different to this. When she vamps out, it’s intense. She gets focused to the exclusion of everything else. There was a demon running around here a couple of months back and it was, God, like she was a guided missile or something. What’s happening lately, it’s just random. One moment, she’s fine, the next, she’s being a brat.”
“Or angry without real cause.”
They looked up. Matt stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning on the frame, arms crossed.
“Or flipping out because some ugly little goblin looked at her wrong.” He smirked. “She stole Charles’ boat the other week.”
“Why did she do it?” Erin asked with morbid interest.
“Because she didn’t want to drive the Monster Mobile. She could have walked or run, but no, it was by water or not at all.” He sat down and took a couple of the monkey’s grapes, which the little critter allowed after a few hisses. “At first, I thought it was the age she’s at, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
Dev had another drink, then shook his head. “You really don’t know, do you.”
Hawkins looked at him, and there was some of Evil Matt in the look, and a lot of plain old irritation, too. “Can you explain it, Mr Fucking Know It All?”
The insult slid off Dev’s weary shoulders with barely a hitch. “I can give it a go. You feed her those little plastic bags of blood?” He tilted the neck of his beer bottle in the general direction of the vampire.
“You’d rather I let her loose on the population?”
There was challenge in the tone, which was a bit harder to ignore, but Dev did his best. Still, his answer came out a little gruff.
“No, but those bags probably aren’t doing her much good, in the long run. Blood is essential to a vampire’s existence, but it’s not everything. There’s one big defining feature of each caste of vampires and that’s what she’s most likely missing.”
Hawkins closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “The aura.”
“The aura,” Dev confirmed. “They get some off their sire, but not enough to live on. The rest, they get from—”
“Their food.” Hawkins stood and spun, slamming a fist into the wall. “Fuck it!”
Erin jerked back. The monkey bounded off the far end of the table and swung off a set of wall cabinets, scorning them with his chatter.
Draining his drink, Dev waited while Hawkins calmed down, then asked, “Aurum didn’t tell you any of this?”
“No.” Hawkins flexed his fingers and shook them out. “I didn’t really give him the chance.” He stalked out of the kitchen.
Ah. So maybe this was why Aurum had sent Dev here. Or, part of why. Aurum was the very definition of ‘two birds, one stone’. Though maybe he’d miscalculated by sending Dev. He and Hawkins hadn’t exactly started out with trust and respect.
The monkey jumped back to the table, looked at Erin, then scampered off after Matt.
“So,” Erin said, “the cure is to let Mercy feed off humans?”
Dev shrugged. “I’m guessing here. Educated guesses, but still. And it would only be a cure for the vampire’s issues, nothin’ else.”
“Great.” Erin finished her beer. “One problem at a time. Matt’s seems the more dire of the two. So, hopefully he can get Mercy’s head on straight and then we can go find Feeble.”
“My head’s straight!”
Now she wasn’t bouncing or caterwauling, Dev got a good look at the vampire as she prowled into the kitchen. Small, slender, head of thick, black curls and a pretty face, pale and big-eyed. She wore jeans and t-shirt that said, ‘Due to budget cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has been cut off’. With a toss of her hair, she exposed her neck to Erin.
“See, no breaks, all healed.”
Flashing a fang filled, humourless grin that appended her words with, ‘So I’m more than capable of taking both of you out, should you need it’, she swept out again.
Dev shivered at the wave of cold electricity she left behind.
Erin gestured after the whirlwind as if it explained everything.
Matt popped his head in next. “Should we get this train on the wrong tracks? She’s all good and I’m feeling… myself, but I can’t guarantee how long either will last.”
“How did you want to do this?” Erin asked, following him out.
“I’m not riding in a car with the monkey,” Mercy announced stridently. “It smells!” She had a bright pink helmet under one arm.
The monkey in question, perched on Matt’s shoulder, chittered sternly back at her. She hissed and it all but fell off Matt trying to get away.
“Play nice,” Matt said to both of them. “But for the sake of all our sanity, we should take two cars. Me and Merce in mine—”
“I’m taking the bike,” the vampire snapped.
“We don’t need to take the bike,” Matt snapped right back.
Mercy bristled and the skin on Dev’s neck crawled. Beside him, Erin reached for her gun with slow movements, so as not to alert the vampire.
“I’m taking,” the tiny terror bit out low and forceful, “the bike.”
Mouth open with another objection, Matt barely got a sound out before Mercy snarled. The monkey squeaked and tumble-climbed down Matt’s back and scampered over to Erin.
“No, Matthew.” Dark eyes flashed to silver in an instant. “Not this time. For once you’re not going to tell me what to do.”
Dev’s sorcery sparked into life at the threat in the vampire’s tone. Clearly, by the disbelief in Matt’s expression and the small sound of shock from Erin, this hadn’t happened before.
After a long, tense moment, Matt schooled his expression into something less surprised. “Fine,” he said evenly. “You take the bike. I’ll take my car and Marcel. Erin, you should probably take yours, as well.” The ‘just in case I go off the rails again’ was blatantly implied.
Given her way, the vampire stalked out into the garage.
With her gone, the monkey reappeared from behind Erin’s legs and cautiously went to Matt. With a flick of his hand, he signalled the varmint up to his shoulder.
“Why do we need the monkey?” Dev asked.
“Peace offering,” Matt said. “Hopefully it’ll get Feeble to talk.”
While Matt and Erin made sure they had everything they’d need, Dev took the chance to check his reserves of power. After the adventures of the previous night and today, he’d burned through quite of a bit of potential. Still, he could probably manage a few tricks, a couple extra if he pushed it.
He just hoped he wouldn’t have to use any of them on their allies, ensorcelled berserker and vampire both.
Erin’s phone rang as they were heading out to the cars. She held back to answer it. The garage door opened and the vampire rolled the Moto Guzzi out. Matt managed to get the monkey into his car without too much hassle, then they waited for Erin.
“Thanks for that. We’ll be there as soon as we can be. Just hang in there.”
“Razor?” Matt asked as Erin hung up.
“Yeah. Chop and Feebl
e are back. Chop’s in a foul mood, apparently. From the sounds of it, Chop and Feeble got picked up by the police today.”
Dev’s stomach flipped. “Because of what happened yesterday?” If Aurum hadn’t fixed things and this abusive prick pointed the finger at him, he’d be in all sorts of visa trouble.
“No,” Erin said, as if it was a surprise to her as well. She turned to Matt. “Apparently, Chop’s a known associate of Sean Carey.”
Chapter 47
Mercy led the cavalcade out. She popped a wheelie, of course, and then roared off, all the defiant anger in the world evident in the speed with which she took the corner. Settling into the red leather seat of the Monaro, I chased her. Marcel, tucked under the seatbelt in the passenger seat, chirruped and fussed. Behind us, Erin and Dev tried to keep up while more or less following the road rules.
It felt good to be back in my car. Familiar and comfortable. Welcome amidst all the swirling confusion and worry.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was scared.
Now I was, sort of, back in full command of my faculties, I realised just how compromised I’d been. How compromised I still was. Yeah, right now I was operating on a shared circuit with Mercy, meaning what functionality she had was stretched between us. It flowed from her to me as if under osmotic pressure. There wasn’t much, and that’s not because Mercy’s… impaired, because she’s not. She’s just different, and compromised, as well.
I should have known. Should have worked it out on my own. Should probably have stopped and listened to Aurum when he’d been willing to help. At least now I knew how to help her.
We just had to deal with this rogue sorcerer first.
And then I had to work out how to make sure Mercy would be all right after I… became incapable of helping her anymore.
As the flow between us evened out, my fears faded under an influx of Mercy’s simmering irritation. Some of it was a spill over from me, toward Dev and mixed up with that alpha-male garbage Erin might just have a point about. A good portion of it was directed toward the rogue sorcerer, for damaging me, for making her feel all those empty places inside me—empty places that felt like the empty places inside her. Those little pockets I couldn’t fill because she was so hollow and I was a limited source of life.
Rock Paper Sorcery Page 34
