by Jenn Burke
But imps had appeared everywhere else I’d used magic.
“Oh fuck,” I breathed.
* * *
I didn’t share my suspicion—my fear—with Evan. We blended into the crowd gathered outside the frat house, then rushed back to the office. The lights were off at Caballero Investigations and the blinds drawn, so I assumed that Iskander and Hudson would be upstairs. Or out on assignment. Either option worked for me right now. We headed around to the back entrance, rather than stomping through the office itself, and went upstairs.
Iskander and Hudson were in the living room, huddled over the coffee table and working on something. They looked up as we entered, and I held up a hand to forestall any questions. “I need a minute.”
“Hudson’s room,” Iskander said, nodding his head in the direction of the hallway next to the kitchen.
It was the second door on the right—it felt just like him. I slipped inside and sat heavily on the bed, leaning forward to cup my head in my hands. I wasn’t a praying kind of guy—I didn’t believe in God—but right then, I was tempted to send up a plea that what I was thinking was wrong, wrong, wrong.
After a minute or two of my brain-wheels spinning without any traction, I looked up. “Michael?” I called softly. I didn’t know if he’d hear me, or if he was around, or if he was even real. But if anyone would have answers...
I stood. “Michael, please. I need your help.”
He flickered into sight, as glitchy and weird as ever. “Wes—”
“Is it me? My magic? Is that what’s causing the tears and the imps and shit?”
His nod was jerky. “Ye—”
It felt like someone had socked me in the gut. I bent over, trying to catch my breath. “Fuck!”
“You s—fuck a lot—than you used to.”
“It’s the twenty-first century. Fuck is practically a punctuation mark.” I stopped my pacing and pressed my forefinger and thumb into my closed eyes, hiding for a moment in the sparks dancing in my vision as a result of the pressure. “How do I fix it?”
Michael glitched from the opposite side of the bed to the foot of it. “—can’t—”
“No, there has to be—”
A knock on the door cut me off and it popped open. “Everything okay?” Hudson asked.
For a second, I just took in the sight of him. It felt like it had been weeks since I’d seen him, and at that moment, I wanted nothing more than his arms wrapped around me so I could feel safe and secure again. And maybe shove these stupid suspicions aside until I could convince myself they weren’t real.
“Yeah, I’m...” I glanced back at Michael, who was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Resignation, maybe. Like he was expecting me to deny his presence and continue on with the little lies and omissions that had colored my life for the past few months.
I let out a sigh. “I’m arguing with Michael.”
Hudson frowned. “Michael? Who’s Michael?”
“You know. Michael.”
His frown deepened, then his expression shattered into a combination of shock and anger. “Wait—Michael? The Michael? He’s here?” His eyes sparked gold and his fangs started to drop. “Show yourself, you asshole.”
Michael opened his mouth and disappeared, as though someone had flipped a switch.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“Why was he here?”
“In general? I have no idea. I thought I was hallucinating the first time I saw him.”
Hudson moved farther into the room, closed the door behind him, and crossed his arms. “When was that?”
“About a month after—after the crown.”
He leaned against the door and let his head thunk back on it. “You didn’t think that was something I should know?”
“At the time? No.” I swept a hand through my hair. “You were getting started on your courses and I—” I sucked in a huge breath and let it out slowly. “Look, the point is that he’s been trying to tell me something, and I think I know what it is now.”
“What?”
“I’m—” Fuck. “I’m the cause of the holes in the otherplane that the imps and...things are coming through.”
He pushed off the door and frowned at me. “No, you can’t—How? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, it does.” I swallowed past a tight and dry throat and nodded as I sat on the bed. “I’m the reason Bhavana had to close her café, and why—why you lost your fucking house.” I swept the back of my hand across my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Hud. I didn’t know. I swear.”
He joined me on the bed, his knee bent like mine so they were touching—then reached out and entwined our fingers. God, I’d missed his touch. “Okay. Break it down for me. The Candra Café.”
“I stopped someone from slipping on a spill of coffee. I didn’t want Bhavana to get sued.”
“Okay. Hospital.”
“I tried to heal Lexi. It didn’t work.”
“My house.”
“Sometimes the magic has to come out.”
“Where else?”
“Iskander’s mom’s house.”
“I’ll tell him to get Rosanna out there to make sure everything’s okay. Anywhere else?”
“Aurora House. I was playing with it there—nothing big. Making a nail float, for Christ’s sake.”
“No imps there.”
“No, but there are more ghosts than there should be, so I don’t know. Maybe the holes are smaller and that’s all that can squeeze through.” I scrubbed at my face. “I’ve used it at my apartment and the office too, but they’re both protected. I think that’s maybe why nothing has happened there.”
“Maybe.” He had his cop face on, the blank expression he wore when he was puzzling stuff out, but he shed it to offer me a quick smile. “We’ll solve this.”
I bit my lip. “We will?”
“Yeah. Of course we.” Hudson looked at our intertwined fingers—he hadn’t let go, and neither had I. Letting out a sigh, he said softly, “You hurt me, Wes.”
“I know, I’m sorry—”
“Let me finish.” He squeezed my hand. “I understand being afraid to reveal a secret in case you get rejected.”
Oh...yeah, I guess he would. “You didn’t want me to know you were a vampire.”
“Exactly. So I...I get that. But I thought when we agreed to try this again, we’d turned a corner. We’d started to build a new foundation.”
Oh Hudson, he of the mixed metaphors. I kept my smile to myself, but seriously, his awkward heart-to-heart communications skills were one of the things I adored about him.
“But...yeah.” He let out a long breath. “Come with me.”
I stood when he did. “Where?”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You’ll see.”
Chapter Sixteen
I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got into Hudson’s rental—a black SUV totally unlike his beloved red muscle car beast—but heading into the darkness north of TO wasn’t it. I cast more than one questioning glance in Hudson’s direction, but all he said was “Be patient.”
Uh-huh. He did know me, right?
Away from the overwhelming brightness of the city’s lights, the sky was beautiful. I’d forgotten how rich the stars were—it was clear, and cold enough to freeze my balls off, but the stars twinkled like happy, shiny beacons of possibility. Some of the weight on my shoulders eased. It didn’t go away—there was no escaping the fact that I had somehow caused the tears that were letting creatures from the beyond through to the living plane. But regardless of the purpose behind bringing me out here, Hudson had done me a favor by giving me some space to breathe.
He was good at that, though I hadn’t realized until well after our few impromptu camping trips to Algonquin Park that they’d been as much for my benefit as his. At
that thought, I turned around to scope out the back of the SUV.
“What are you looking for?”
“Camping gear.”
“Yeah? Want to head up to the park?”
I squinted at him. “It’s January.”
“I bet we could get a great deal on a campsite.”
Despite the events of the past few days, I found myself smiling. “Pass.” Thinking about Hudson and cars reminded me, though... “Uh, so. You know Evan and I went back to your place tonight, right?”
“Iskander filled me in.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but...your car didn’t make it.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Shame.”
He glanced at me. “What did you do?”
“Nothing! Well...not much. The fridge already took it out.”
“The—Wes.”
“The garage collapsed. But your car was already dead, I swear.” I paused. “On the plus side, we retrieved the not-lamp.”
He grunted. All right, maybe that wasn’t such a plus side.
After about an hour of driving, Hudson pulled into a dark parking lot next to a rowdy bar at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t look like Hudson’s kind of place. He liked pubs—dark, quiet places to unwind after a long day. This place? Music flowed into the night whenever someone opened the door, and it was covered in neon liquor signs and other lit-up advertising. A larger sign in lime-green neon illuminated the name THE NIGHT LIFE letter by letter before flashing obnoxiously. It reminded me of the old-time taverns from my youth—only a lot louder and way more gaudy.
“You sure know how to show a guy a good time,” I said dryly.
His crooked half smile made an appearance, but he didn’t say anything.
“So what are we doing here? I mean, I assume there’s something more to this place than meets the eye, because if you wanted to go bar hopping, we didn’t need to come all the way out here.” I squinted. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”
“A bit south of Zephyr.”
“Huh.” That didn’t help—I hadn’t even known there was a town named Zephyr around here.
Hudson tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “My errands lately?” He nodded at the bar. “Nash, Pike’s lieutenant, bought this place a couple of months ago. It’s a vamp bar.”
My back stiffened at those two names. Pike was Hudson’s sadistic sire, the vampire who’d turned him against his will while he was working undercover twenty years ago. And Nash... “The guy you’ve been tracking since you killed Pike’s band?”
“Yeah.” He let out a breath. “Okay. I know I implied I was done searching for him. But then one of my leads panned out, and I got another, and another and—” He gestured at the bar. “I couldn’t let it go.”
“Why not?”
He stared at the building, but I don’t think he was seeing it. “They stole my life from me. They made me into—into this.”
Carefully, cautiously, I laid my hand on his arm, hoping he wouldn’t pull away. “I know.”
He shook his head, but he didn’t try to dislodge my touch. “You know what I’ve told you. You don’t know—” His voice broke. “You don’t know what it’s like to know—to know—that you are not the same person you used to be. Everyone changes, everyone...grows up, evolves, I guess, but to have a change forced on you...to know that you’ve done things you can’t remember and to be—be glad you can’t remember because the flashes you get are bad enough—”
My throat ached and I clutched at his arm. “Hud—”
“He was a part of that.” His voice was strangled as he nodded at the bar.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve come out here a few times and sat right here, watching, trying to figure out if going in would be a good idea or the worst.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He let out a huff of a chuckle. “Because I was pretty sure you’d tell me to give it up. Let go.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d never thought his obsession with Nash was healthy, and I could see now, clear as day, that the conclusion of Hudson’s search was tearing him up. But that’s not what he needed to hear. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know.”
“No—think about it. What do you need? Not want.” Because I was pretty sure part of him—the animalistic part he insisted lived inside him, but which I’d never feared—wanted to rush in there and challenge Nash. Demand some sort of payment for everything he’d stolen from Hudson. But was that what he needed?
“I need—” He paused. “I need to see him. To know it’s him. And... I need him to see me, to know that he and Pike and the others didn’t break me.”
“Okay.” I gave a decisive nod. “Let’s do it.”
“What—now?”
“We’re here. Might as well.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, swiping his palms on his pants. “O-okay. Yeah. I can do this.”
“Damned straight you can.”
Before he could think twice, I popped open my door and hopped to the ground. An icy wind whipped through the parking lot, bringing with it a hint of pot smoke, and I hunched my shoulders. Hudson appeared at my side in short order, and his broader frame blocked some of the wind. We marched up to the door, and I caught his gaze as we reached it, a silent Good to go?
He nodded.
The interior of the bar was as boisterous as the exterior had suggested. Country-rock music blasted through it, a buzz of conversation underneath. And laughter. As I looked around the place, the thing that hit me hardest was that everyone seemed to be having fun. Joyful, happy, unwinding kind of fun. People were dancing and drinking, but eating too. Clearly this wasn’t a drink-and-be-broody place. My single previous experience with a vampire bar hadn’t prepared me for this. Mind you, that one had been a dark-and-dingy dive in the middle of Toronto’s Little Italy, not this country-style hot spot in the middle of the woods.
We checked our coats and headed for the bar. When Hudson got the attention of the bartender, he ordered a beer for himself and a white wine for me—it was a small gesture, but one that warmed me. I drank beer, but I preferred wine, and the fact that he remembered that when he was so wound up...
Once we had our drinks, we turned to examine the rest of the bar. I spotted tables in the back—the stand-up type. They were all taken, without exception, by smiling, laughing people. The dance floor in front of us was bouncing, and it presented the one clue that at least some of the patrons weren’t completely what they appeared to be. In among the enthusiastic line dancers—this was a country bar, after all—and the more modern jiggle-and-sway sort of dancers, a few pairs were spinning in steps that I hadn’t seen since I was a child.
But the vibes—the vibes were incredible. This was a good place.
Hudson sipped his beer slowly as he took in everything I had—more, probably, since he was the trained investigator and all. “This is...not what I expected.”
“Understatement.”
“Pike’s place—it was never like this. None of the vamp bars I’ve visited have been.”
“That’s because they were all shitholes, Havoc.”
We spun at the soft voice spoken almost in our ears, from behind the bar. The man standing there—well, I guessed immediately he wasn’t human. There was a grace in him, an assurance that Hudson often had, something that originated in his predatory nature. He was tall, at least as tall as Hudson, but not nearly so wide. Still muscular, but leaner. His hair was long on top and shaved on the sides, and dyed fire-engine red, though the stubble above his pierced ears was coming in black. His hooded eyes were amber, a shade or two darker than vampire gold. He had a tawny complexion, with a sharp jaw and the cheekbones of a male model, and his nose was a tad too st
rong, a tad too large for his face. It made his beauty human.
“Nash,” Hudson growled.
“Last year, maybe. That name got old. I thought it was time to reclaim myself.” He held out a hand. “Ren Oshiro.” When Hudson scowled at him, Ren laughed. “Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it, Havoc?”
“You know that’s not my name.”
“I kind of like it, though. You ended up living up to it.” He slapped his hands against the bar in a quick drum pattern, his smile never dimming, and ended with a decisive smack. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
“Here’s fine.”
“Not unless you want everyone knowing your business.” Ren smirked. “This place is filled with nosy-ass bastard vamps who are listening to every word we say.”
I noticed a few heads turn away when Ren said that. Hudson must have too, since his scowl deepened and he agreed.
Ren waved us over to the end of the bar, then lifted the pass-through. “My office is in the back.”
We passed a bustling kitchen and Ren called out to someone working the grill. Thumbs-ups were exchanged and we kept moving. Eventually we reached a narrow set of stairs leading up to a closed door. Behind it was a nicely furnished, modern-looking office. No dark, ornate wood desk or massive leather chairs. The room was painted in a light gray, with a shiny white desk that looked more like acrylic than wood. A shaggy ivory carpet covered the wood floor between a set of lime-green leather chairs and a yellow couch.
“Colorful,” Hudson quipped as we entered.
“I like to bring the outside in,” Ren said over his shoulder. “Have a seat, make yourselves comfortable. Can I get you anything else to drink? I’ve got a nice vintage—”
“No.”
“—sauvignon blanc,” Ren finished with a chuckle. “What did you think I was going to offer?”
Ren was smooth, and smart, and too friendly to be real. I had no doubt he had originally been going to offer Hudson blood, but switched tactics midsentence. The fact that he’d done so seamlessly made me notch his danger level upward. The happy demeanor had to be a façade.