by TA Moore
The small show of bleak humor unexpectedly amused Took. He let the feeling wash away as he pushed two doors open and peered into the small, cell-like rooms that hid behind them. Both looked as though they’d been in use recently, with stained sheets tangled on the bed and the smell of old sex thick in the air.
Every time some delusional fangbanger with bite tats and fear-pheromone perfume tried to play vampires off as romantic monsters, Took wanted to take them on a tour of a trap house. It had as much class as a frat house after a homicide.
He let the doors creak shut and walked toward the last door. It had a Staff Only sign fastened to it at eye level. Kitchen or infirmary, Took supposed. Over his head he heard something scrape over the floor. He paused midstep to look up, his eyes on the lumpy plaster as he tried to imagine the layout upstairs.
“What are you waiting for?” Willie interrupted him. “An invitation?”
He laughed at his own joke. Took took his eyes off the ceiling and pushed the last door open. He’d been right, it was a kitchen. Pots hung from racks on the ceiling and a clock shaped like a coffee cup was stopped exactly at 10:00 a.m. forever.
Willie stood on the other side of the stove with his arm crooked around Allan’s throat. The point of the knife dug into the tender skin behind her ear, deeply enough that more blood dribbled onto her no-longer-stiff collar.
“Help’s on the way, Deputy,” Took said as he met her gaze. “Stay calm.”
She rolled her deep brown eyes toward the corner of the room. “We aren’t alone.”
Willie jabbed the knife deeper and twisted it. “Shut up,” he hissed. “Stupid cow.”
“I see him,” Took said.
The pale, naked—he’d never met a vampire that slept in pajamas—figure dangled in the periphery of his vision. Someone had hung him from a meat hook for the day, the point of it jammed into his back and threaded up under his shoulder blade. Lines of black ichor stained the white skin and dripped down into pans laid out under his feet. His eyes were open, but it was a reptile sort of alertness, slow and cold. He’d gorged—his stomach was distended with too much blood, and he needed to digest before what passed for a person could come back.
He wouldn’t react unless someone got too close to him.
“Let Allan go,” Took repeated calmly as he lifted the gun. “All I want is to get her out of here. Then you and your master can try and get away before they burn this place.”
Willie’s laugh showed rotted teeth and a white coating of pus on his tongue. Pride glittered in his eyes, which were still unexpectedly pretty despite the drugs and the ichor. He pulled himself up straight.
“Him?” He spat in the direction of the hung vampire. “I don’t work for him. Not anymore. He works for me now.”
Allan dug her fingers into his arm. “You’re going straight to hell for this, Daly,” she spat out. “The sheriff will track you down and gut you if you touch me, and for what?”
“I damned myself years ago,” Willie said flatly. He licked the blood off Allan’s neck, and she grimaced in disgust, but the knife at her throat kept her still. Willie lifted his head, spit and blood smeared around his mouth, and smiled widely. “Might as well enjoy the ride. And once I prove myself, I’ll get to enjoy it for a long, fucking time, maybe even longer than the sheriff is around. He’s an old man. Things happen to old men, and young ones take over.”
Behind Took, on the other side of the door, the stairs creaked.
Time was up. Took swung the gun away from Willie and fired two shots straight into the vampire’s bloated stomach. It burst in a welter of clotted blood and a tangle of wet intestine that squirmed and dripped bile into the blood bowls. The vampire screamed itself out of his torpor and thrashed blindly on the hooks as they tore through muscle and meat. As it ripped itself free, Took tossed his gun into the sink.
Allan yelped and tried to bolt, but Willie dragged her back. He tightened his grip on her arm as he backed away from the vampire.
“It was him,” Willie yelled, his voice pitched to cut through the eerie, off-timbre screech that vibrated out of the vampire’s throat. He pulled the knife away from Allan’s throat and jabbed the bloodied point toward Took. “He did it. He shot you, Matthew!”
The vampire dropped to the ground with a thud. Its bare feet slapped against the tiles as it lunged at Willie—the only one in the room with a weapon. It slapped Allan out of the way with an almost dismissive backhand that sent her flying.
“You hurt meee,” Matthew mangled out through two sets of fully extended fangs as it grabbed Willie’s wrist. The bone snapped with a matchstick-brittle sound as Matthew tightened his fingers and lifted him off the ground. “Little liar.”
“No!” Willie writhed like a fish on the hook. He dropped the knife from bruise-purpled fingers and caught it in his other hand. “Not me. You know me! Goddammit, not me! It was him!”
Matthew didn’t listen. It latched onto Willie’s neck with dagger-sharp teeth and tore it out. The gush of blood splashed over Matthew’s face and throat, and it gulped it out of the air like water from a fountain. Pain wrung a cry out of Willie, but the one advantage of being a Goat was resilience. He punched his knife up through Matthew’s chin with a quick, brutal stroke and twisted the blade.
With a shriek of garbled offense, tongue pinned to the roof of his mouth, Matthew flung Willie away from him.
“Come on,” Took hissed as he grabbed Allan’s collar and pulled her up. “We need to go.”
She scrambled unsteadily to her feet. Her eyes were unfocused and her lips split.
“I… I…. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Allan shook her head and blinked hard. Her gaze shifted over Took’s shoulder and widened in dismay. “Look out!”
Took ducked and a pretty blonde girl missed his throat by half a foot. Matted hair flapped in filthy elflocks as she flew past. She tried to twist in midair, enough to give Took a glimpse of her pale, half-made-up face, but didn’t quite pull it off. She hit the ground and tumbled head over heels into the wall.
“Go,” Took snapped at Allan as he shoved her toward the door. “Think later.”
He dragged her with him down the vandalized hall of past clients. Three photos down and Allan pulled herself together, the stumble gone from her steps as she pulled even with Took.
“There’s others,” she said. “They’re in the garage. Willie told them to wait until he got Ma… the vampire. We have to stop them.”
Took laughed at her. “I dropped my gun. You’ve lost yours,” he said. “What are we going to do, order pizza and breathe garlic at them? Just move.”
She looked reluctant but did as she was told. They burst through the doorway into the hall, and the pale gray man in the pale gray suit swung a crowbar in a short, brutal arc at Took’s head. There was no time or space to duck.
Took caught the crowbar. The metal hook jarred against his palm and stopped. Slow, dull surprise crossed the gray man’s face. Took bared his fangs and growled as he wrenched the crowbar out of the Goat’s suddenly slack grip. He jabbed it into the man’s stomach, buried the shaft inches deep in soft flesh, and doubled him over in a spray of vomit.
“You’re one of them,” Allan spluttered. Her voice was threaded with desperate, raw panic as she tried to pull away from him. “What is this, a game? A trick?”
Took reeled her in and shoved her at the door. “Yes,” he said—still, two years in, sorta lisped—as he stepped over the groaning gray man. “We’re pranking you. Just get outside. I called the sheriff. He should be here soon.”
It didn’t work to calm Allan down. It had been one shock too many, and she was caught up in her fear. She stumbled forward at his prod, but the muttered round of accusation and plea continued under her breath.
“I don’t want to be a vampire. Mary, Mother of God, be with me now. Kill me. Kill me, don’t damn me. It should have been… not Gatlin. It was meant to be—”
Took fumbled the door open and both of them fell out into
the evening sunlight. He lost his grip on Allan and she lurched away from him, her feet tangling as she staggered down the stairs. He swore and went after her.
It felt like a punch at his back. Took didn’t realize what had happened at first. It was only when he crashed into Allan, both of them blown off their feet and his back hot and itchy from fire and splinters, that he registered the crackle of fire behind him.
Allan sprawled under him on the ground, unmoving but still breathing. After a shaken second, Took rolled onto his raw back. Chunks of bricks and glass slid off him as he moved, and he stared at the old house as it went up in flames. Curtains flared with the eagerness of polyester blends, and the closed-off windows darkened and cracked.
Someone screamed. It would be Matthew, Took knew. Vampires were hard to kill, but he couldn’t work up the energy past his ringing ears to care. He stared at the fire for a few moments longer and then let the blow to his head drag him down into oblivion.
Chapter Two
APPLETON WORE the tragedy of the last twenty-four hours with the self-satisfied anger of someone who’d wanted an excuse for a while. Handwritten signs were tacked up in shop windows to announce “living only” and “no heartbeat, no service.” The schools were closed, and pickup trucks, packed like clown cars with sullen, armed men, drove in slow circuits around the streets.
“Small-town hospitality,” Madoc drawled as he watched through the heavily tinted window of the Jeep as one of the pickups drove past. It would be so easy to just reach out and grab one of them and drag them in through the window so he could open their throat. He felt the dull itch in the back of his fangs, but he resisted the urge. It wouldn’t make his job any easier, and the car would smell like takeout for the rest of the trip. “That’s one thing that never changes.”
On the seat next to him, Lawrence looked up from her tablet, over the smudged lenses of her glasses, and sneered at the tail end of the pickup. “Idiots. What good do they think that will do against us?”
She’d only had her first bite—the scar was still livid on her throat over the scooped collar of her new shirt—and there was no sign that it had taken yet. It didn’t matter. Lawrence was VINE born and bred. Her father had died in the line of duty during the Humans Only terror attack in Savannah, her first taste of blood had been as she nursed at her freshly turned mother’s breast as Director Lawrence gave a press conference condemning the violence, and she’d just married into one of the oldest vampire families in Philadelphia.
It would be “us” even if she never grew fangs.
She was a good agent, but that wasn’t why Madoc had requested her as his partner. Sometimes he needed a reminder that not every human reached for the pitchforks at the first opportunity. There were many reasons to remember other things about them.
“Why has this incident been such a flashpoint for the community?” he asked.
Lawrence pursed her lips at him. They both knew he was well aware of the answer, but he leaned back against the leather seats and waited.
“Peanuts,” Lawrence said, with a flash of sharp humor. “This used to be a dry county, officially human only, but then the local peanut farm went belly-up. There was a mining company interested in opening a pit here, but that fell under the Sojourner rule.”
Madoc nodded as the Jeep pulled up outside the sheriff’s office. “If you don’t want to associate with vampires, don’t associate with vampires,” he said. “So the town ceded their dry status?”
“Technically,” Lawrence said. She unbuckled herself from the seat belt and scooted forward as she reached for the door handle. “It’s still a predominantly breathing area, the only blood bank is in the hospital, and even before the recent increase in Hunter activity in this area, the neighborhood’s been good recruiting territory for the Hunters for years.”
As she opened the door, the muffled sound of voices outside resolved into the thundered cadence of fire-and-brimstone prayer. The group of faithful were clustered on the small patch of green outside the sheriff’s office, small candles and photocopies of the not-quite-dead deputy’s staff photo clutched in their hands.
Madoc tilted his head as he tried to identify the scripture the preacher had picked apart so he could shove his own anger between the words.
“They walk among so, sit with us, sup with us,” the preacher ranted. “But they have the fangs of a wolf, not the teeth of a sheep, and their meat is carved from the flank of a child, a teacher, a—”
Proverbs, then. A bit on the nose for Madoc’s taste, but he’d grown up with the compass and fury of the Welsh Methodist church at its most impassioned. It was a lot to expect for Appleberg’s resident rabble-rouser to live up to that.
Lawrence reached up to her throat. “Should I—”
“No need,” Madoc said as he pulled his sunglasses out of his breast pocket and slid them on. He could have done without it. The purple-toned dusk light was low enough that even his eyes could tolerate it, but why not give them a show. That was what they were here for. He gave Lawrence a sly, sharp smile. “They’ll have other things on their minds.”
He didn’t bother to look at the prayer group as he got out of the car and stalked toward the main doors of the sheriff’s office. There was no need. The silence that fell over the prayer group, the rote amens strangled in people’s throats told him his appearance had the expected impact. People rarely mistook Madoc for human in his civilian clothes. In the midnight black of his VINE tactical uniform, stark against his pallid coloring, it was obvious what he was.
To anyone with the slightest interest in vampire politics, it was obvious who he was as well. There still weren’t that many dhampirs in the US, and even fewer of Madoc’s… vintage. His peers had died out decades ago—frequently at his hands—and most of the next generation had barely cut their fangs. He was memorable.
A low, shocked whisper came from the crowd. “Biter.” Someone laughed, a nervous titter of sound, and then fell quiet again. When VINE’s elite response team had first hit the papers—in Boston, Madoc thought, ninety years ago—they had been the Bloodcrimes Tactical Response. BTR. Some Hunter-friendly local affiliate out West had coined “Biters” as a mockery for the then all-vampire team.
Madoc had taken it as their own. Legends needed a name, not an acronym. These days no one found the old joke funny for long.
The priest, a short bull of a man with close-cropped, cotton-white hair and small, mean eyes, stepped in front of Madoc.
“God bless you,” the priest said as he marked the cross over his breast with heavy, scar-knuckled hands. His lips were wet with the expectation of God’s intercession. “And keep you from bringing harm to the innocent.”
Madoc could feel the tension in the air as twenty people bated their breath to see what happened next. He reached up to his collar and hooked the medal from under his shirt, the silver faintly warm from his skin when he pressed his lips to it. It stung. It always did. He accepted that.
“From your lips to His ears, Father,” he said as he let the chain slide through his fingers. It hung bright against his chest, the bas-relief of Michael worn down nearly smooth after years of being worried at. “Now get out of my way, or do you want to see if you’re innocent enough to warrant God’s protection?”
For a second, the priest held his ground. Then he stepped back out of Madoc’s path. The sound of released breath from the prayer group sounded a lot like a disappointed sigh. The priest stole a quick, nervous glance over his shoulder and then puffed himself up with bluster.
“A God-fearing man doesn’t test God,” he said, his voice pitched to carry. “God tests him.”
Madoc smirked and walked away. As he approached, the heavy glass doors of the sheriff’s office were pushed open by a nervous young deputy, his throat flushed raw with razor burn.
“Cardinal Madoc,” the young man said, his voice half-strangled in his throat. “We didn’t realize that VINE would send—”
“Agent,” Madoc corrected him. “Or SES M
adoc. Either is appropriate.”
The deputy’s brain caught up with his mouth, and he blanched. He looked like he wanted to swallow his own tongue and reel the words back in.
“Agent. Of course. That’s what I—”
Madoc left him to babble and stepped to the side to let Lawrence in through the door. The deputy glanced at her with a flash of obvious relief at her blood-pinked skin and lack of history.
“Ma’am.” He bobbed his head at her.
“Agent,” Lawrence corrected him with a hint of tart disapproval. The man’s face fell as he nodded.
“Of course. Ma’am,” he said. “Sorry. Ah, I’m afraid that Sheriff Anderson is still at the hospital. We weren’t expecting you to make such good time.”
“The dead ride fast,” Madoc said.
The deputy nodded sagely like the old quote explained anything beyond Madoc’s fondness for the ballads of his youth. That made things easier. It had taken the privilege of rank to fast-track clearance and a flight plan for the VINE jet, and a very old favor cashed in to make people turn a blind eye to a section chief’s inappropriate involvement. Madoc didn’t want to justify that to himself, never mind a jug-eared deputy who looked as though his balls hadn’t dropped yet.
“We’ve booked rooms for you in Old Pelican Farm,” the deputy said. He turned and scrambled over to his desk. A quick search among the scattered sheets of paper and dog-eared folders came up with a glossy trifold leaflet that he thrust toward Madoc. “It’s a B and B. If you want to drop your bags off, I can call you when the sheriff gets back.”
Madoc ignored the leaflet. “What I want,” he said, “is to see my agent.”