by Tanya Huff
“There.” She pointed with her free hand, giving Ren a little shake to focus her. “We need to get those two up and moving and into that building. What are their names?”
“I don’t…”
“What? You don’t know?”
“Of course I know!” A hint of the girl who’d faced them in the tomb emerged in response to Vicki’s mocking tone. Vicki gave herself a mental high five; anger wouldn’t hobble action the way fear would. “Their names are Gavin and Star.”
“Star? Seriously?”
“What’s wrong with Star?” Ren demanded, jerking her shoulder out from under Vicki’s hand. “It’s her name, and it’s better than the dumbass name her mother gave her!”
Vicki didn’t care who gave her the name, as long as she answered to it.
Gavin had a long, oozing cut along the top of his forehead, and she let the scent of fresh blood block the stink coming from the creature’s corpse as unfamiliar internal organs were exposed. The kid’s eyes were squeezed shut, and he had both arms wrapped around Star. Star’s eyes were open, her pupils so dilated the blue was no more than a pale halo around the black. Calling their names had little effect.
Vicki could feel terror rising off them like smoke.
Given what a joy this place had been so far, if she could feel it, so could other things.
She could work with terror if she had to. When she snarled, Star blinked and focused on her face. Gavin opened his eyes. As she pulled her lips back off her teeth, she could hear their hearts begin to pound faster and faster as adrenaline flooded their system. She was a terror they understood. Hauling them onto their feet, she pointed them the right way and growled, “Run.”
Hindbrains took over.
Stumbling and crying, they ran.
Ren shot her a look that promised retribution, and raced to catch up.
*
“So a teenage girl opened a portal to another reality on the wall of a mausoleum, went through with her friends, and Vicki followed them, then the portal closed. Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you bullshitting me?”
“Why the fuck would I joke about something like that?” Mike growled into his phone.
Thousands of kilometres away in Vancouver, Tony Foster sighed. “Yeah. Good point. Okay, it’s eleven now, if I can get on the first plane out in the morning, I won’t be there until around three in the afternoon, given the time difference, so…”
“Too long.” Over the years, Mike had heard more screaming than he was happy admitting to. The kid on the other side of the portal had been screaming in pain, not fear. Not under threat; under attack. And Vicki had landed right into the middle of it. “You need to reopen that thing, now.”
“Over the phone?”
“Now,” Mike repeated. Years ago, Tony Foster had been Vicki’s best set of eyes and ears on the street, then Henry fucking Fitzroy had gotten his bloodsucking undead self wrapped up in the kid’s life and Tony’d headed out west with them while Henry taught Vicki how to handle the change. After Vicki’d come home, Tony’d stayed with Henry. Next thing Mike knew, Tony’d actually had the balls to walk away and make a life for himself—a life that included a job, a relationship, and magic. Real magic. Not rabbits out of a hat magic, that much Mike knew but not much more. In all honesty, he hadn’t asked too many questions. Vicki was about all the it’s a weird, new, wonderful world he could cope with.
Tonight, his ability to cope with the fact Tony had gone all Harry Potter was moot. He needed to get Vicki and the kids back. Tony was the only one he knew who might be able to do it.
Who could do it.
“All right.” On the other end of the phone, Tony took a deep breath. “Was one of them a sixty-year-old Asian dude?”
“No, I told you…”
“I know what you told me, but I had to check. That means the girl who opened the portal wasn’t actually a wizard; she just found a spell and had enough will power and need to make it work. So all you have to do is repeat exactly what she did.”
Mike glanced around the mausoleum at the bowl and the candles and the chalked circles. “All I have to do?”
“Send me pictures of everything she used. As much detail as you can. Doesn’t matter how small or insignificant. I’ll run it through my database and see if I can identify the verbal portion.”
“You have a database for this sort of shit?”
“Yeah, well, I like my shit organized.”
“She burned a dead mouse.”
“She probably killed it first. Send me the pictures then go looking for a mouse of your own.”
A mouse of his own? “Tony, where the fuck am I going to find a live mouse in Toronto at one in the morning?”
“No idea. You may have to use your badge and go all fake official business on a pet store owner.”
“I can’t…” He rubbed at his temples and sighed. “Yeah. Maybe. Pictures are on their way…”
*
The ruins were dry and didn’t smell too bad, and if something skittered away while Vicki checked the first floor, well, it was skittering away. Good enough. She let Ren maneuver her friends through the partially blocked entrance while she kept watch, then slipped in behind them.
The gaping windows threw patches of grey against the marble floor. Ren tucked the other two into the angle where the grey met a pile of fallen masonry. Hands clasped, knees drawn up to their chests, they stared out into the darkness and shuddered at every sound.
As Vicki moved past her, Ren grabbed her arm and snarled, “Leave them alone!”
The scent of blood was still too strong for Vicki to push the Hunger completely back, but she damped it down as far as she could before she turned. Not quite far enough, if Ren’s reaction was any indication, but in spite of a surge of fear so intense Vicki could all but taste it, the girl maintained her grip and repeated, “Leave them alone!”
“I’m not going to hurt them.”
Ren snorted. “Yeah, right.” She tipped her head to one side, exposing her throat. “Come on then. If you’re going to do it, do me.”
Tempting.
“Let’s table that offer until I have to feed,” Vicki sighed. If she hadn’t fed before meeting Mike at the cemetery, she doubted she’d have been able to tear her gaze away from the pulse throbbing humming-bird fast under the pale and slightly grubby skin. As it was, she glanced down at the fingers still clutching her arm and said, “Let go. I’m only going to put them to sleep. Give them a bit of a break from this place.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’m asking you to, when I could be telling you to.”
“Oh. Right.”
When Ren released her, Vicki ignored the way the girl’s fingers trembled, nodded once, and moved to deal with the other two. A command to “Sleep. Dream of pleasant things.” wasn’t the way she’d been trained to deal with shock, but, hey, whatever worked. Star’s hoodie was back in the mausoleum, so she shrugged out of her jacket and spread it over them before straightening and returning to Ren’s side.
“So how was it supposed to be?” she asked from just behind the girl’s left shoulder.
Ren flinched, but kept her gaze locked on the road outside the entrance to their shelter. “How was what supposed to be?”
“This. You told me that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. So…?”
“It was supposed to be…” She swiped at her cheek with the palm of her left hand. “I thought it said this was the home we always wanted.”
Vicki waited.
“My grandma died,” Ren continued after a moment. “I hadn’t seen her since we moved to Toronto, like, four years ago, but she wanted me to have her bible. My mom, she checked to make sure there wasn’t any money in it, but totally missed this piece of stuff like leather that had writing on it. Probably because it was in Greek, and my mom never learned to read Greek. My grandma taught me when I was little.” She paused to swallow a sob and rub her nose again
st her sleeve before repeating, “I thought it said this was the home we always wanted.”
“What was wrong with the homes you had?” The look Ren shot her suggested she not be an idiot as clearly as if the girl had said the words out loud. “So no one cared that you were sneaking out at night?” None of the kids looked like they’d been starved or beaten, but Vicki knew that didn’t have to mean anything as far as indicators of abuse went. “And no one’s going to care if you never make it back?”
Ren snorted. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Actually…” Vicki didn’t bother finishing, and Ren clearly didn’t need her to.
“This my fault. I told them about this. I convinced them to come.”
“You didn’t force them to come here.”
“I didn’t tell them we were coming here.”
“True.”
“You’re not very comforting.”
“Not my…”
The skittering returned.
Pulling Mike’s Glock from where she’d tucked it up against the small of her back, Vicki whirled and blew the head off something that looked like a cross between a rat and a Rottweiler seconds before it took a bite out of Star’s leg.
“…job,” she finished, ignoring Ren’s scream in favour of grabbing the rat thing by the tail, carrying it outside, and whipping it about forty metres back toward the flock of scavengers. On her way back inside, she scooped up a double handful of grey sand from where the building met the road.
She could feel Ren watching her as she scattered the sand over the blood and brain spatter on the floor.
“You have a gun. What kind of vampire carries a gun?”
“One that’d like to keep us all alive until morning.” Vicki told her, rejoining her at the door. With any luck the bang had scared off the rat things and hadn’t attracted anything else. “The gun’s Detective Celluci’s. He must’ve tossed it through as the portal was closing.”
They turned together to face back down the road, where the arc of ribs, stripped clean of flesh, gleamed in the spaces between the black birds.
Vicki could hear Ren’s heartbeat and breathing speed up. “We’re never going back, are we?”
“Please.” Given the light levels, Vicki made sure the eye-roll could be heard in her tone as she stretched the truth a bit. “This isn’t our first portal; Mike’ll work it out.”
“The cop?”
“He’s got resources.” He’d probably been on the phone to Tony before Vicki’d hit the ground on the other side, and Tony’d know how to fix this. Tony had to know how to fix this.
“But he’s a real cop?”
“He is.”
“And you’re a real vampire?”
“I am.”
“Oh man, that’s totally like a bad romance novel!” And this time, Vicki could hear the eye-roll in Ren’s voice.
She grinned, thinking of Henry. “Kid, you don’t know the half of it.”
Something skittered in the background, but didn’t come close enough to shoot. Ren’s shoulder pressed up against hers, although Vicki doubted the girl had consciously sought out the contact. “You’re a vampire, right? And given the whole non-sparkling, lack-of-emo thing, I’m guessing you’re like a traditional vampire?”
Vicki frowned, decided not to bother translating the teen speak, and shrugged. “Traditional enough, I guess. Why?”
“If there’s like even a sun here, what happens to you when it rises?”
*
“All right, I’ve got the mouse.” It was in a little, green plastic carrying cage, and Mike felt like shit every time he looked in at it. He’d had to drive out to the Super Walmart at Eglinton and Warden to get it, and that went on the growing list of experiences he never wanted to repeat.
“What colour is it?”
“What fucking difference does the colour make?”
“It’s probably safest if we keep as close to the original ritual as possible.”
Setting the cage on the crypt, Mike took a deep breath and reminded himself that he—and more importantly, Vicki—needed Tony. “Probably?”
“Well, magic is mostly a matter of will, so you should be able to bull through any minor variations, but…”
There was a whole wealth of things Tony clearly didn’t want to say in that but. That was fine. Mike didn’t want to hear them. He shone his flashlight down into the bowl and scowled. “I can’t tell what colour it was, it’s too burned. She must have used an accelerant.”
“That was the spell working. Is there dirt in the bowl? Toss it out and get fresh,” Tony instructed when Mike grunted an affirmative. “I’ve sent you the symbol you have to draw in the middle of the circles.”
“That’s not what was there before.” Mike squinted down at his screen. “It’s, I don’t know, backwards.”
“It’s supposed to be. The original was a cut-rate gate; one way only. This is the inbound symbol.”
He found a broken piece of sidewalk chalk, no doubt tossed aside by the idiot teenager who’d gotten them all into this mess. “I’ll call you back when I’m done.”
“Don’t take too long, remember…”
“You don’t have to fucking remind me about the time,” Mike snapped and hung up. Sunrise hadn’t been his friend for some years now.
*
Returning from disposing of another rat thing’s body, Vicki glanced up at the sky where the stars were definitely a little dimmer. Clearly it had been too much to hope that this shit-hole would be a shit-hole without a dawn. Sitting down next to Ren, she sighed. “Okay, I didn’t want to do this, but can you shoot?”
“A gun? Eww, no. Guns are stupid.”
“Guns are dangerous. People are stupid. And we don’t have time for that lecture right now.” Vicki pulled out Mike’s weapon and held it resting across her palms. “If I shut off at dawn, you’re going to have to keep us all alive until sunset.”
Ren shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Kid, you opened a portal between worlds. In my book, that says there’s not a lot you can’t do if it comes down to it. Hopefully, it won’t come down to it, but if it does…”
“I don’t even like first-person-shooter games!”
Vicki ignored the protest and held up the Glock. “How much can you see?”
“What?”
“I can see in the dark. How much can you see?”
Frowning, Ren leaned away from the gun. “It’s not as dark as it was.”
Not an answer, but it would have to do. “Okay, these are the sights—ramped front sight and a notched rear sight with white contrast. You aim with them, but I’ll use some wreckage to build a shelter with a limited access, so all you’ll have to do is point and shoot. Now the Glock has a triple safety system to prevent accidental discharge, but once you’ve released the external safety, here, the two internal safeties automatically disengage when the trigger is pulled.”
“Forget it!” Ren shoved at Vicki’s arm. “I’m not going to shoot anything!”
“Would you rather be eaten by a giant rat?”
“No, but…”
“Then pay attention.”
*
“It’s arunda-ay!”
“It’s nonsense!” Mike protested. “It doesn’t mean shit!”
On the other end of the phone, Tony sighed. “It means we get Vicki back,” he said quietly. “Try it again from the top.”
One hand gripping the edge of crypt, Mike glanced over at the square of sky he could see through the grille, took a deep breath, and started again.
And then again.
One more time before Tony muttered, “Close enough.”
“Close enough?”
“Look, like I said before, it’s mostly a matter of will. The rest is just a way to focus power.”
“I don’t have that kind of power.”
“How badly do you want Vicki back?” The phone casing cracked in Mike’s grip, and although he couldn’t have heard it, Tony snorted. “Th
at’s plenty of power, trust me. Light the candles and get the mouse.”
The mouse seemed oblivious to its fate. Mike thanked heaven for small mercies. He couldn’t have coped with a terrified animal. “Why…?”
“Its death symbolizes the journey from one world to another. I don’t like this either, but I don’t think you can skip it. Put it in the bowl and cut its throat then set it on fire and start the chant. When you finish, the gate should open.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“I’ll be on the first plane to Toronto. Don’t hang up, just set the phone down. I’ll chant with you.”
“Will that help?”
“It can’t hurt.”
The silver knife was surprisingly sharp. The mouse’s head came right off. It helped, a little, that it didn’t have time to suffer. Its fur had just started to smoulder when Mike began the chant.
*
The rat things were getting bolder. She’d killed two more and had just given thanks that they didn’t hunt in packs when she saw a large shadow moving through the building across the road. Back home, a lot of predators hunted at dusk and dawn. It figured, Vicki noted silently, that would hold true here as well.
No, not moving through the building. Slithering.
All things considered, she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by giant snakes. “And no fucking sign of Samuel Jackson when I could really use him,” she muttered, rubbing the back of her neck. She could feel the dawn approaching. The shelter she’d built would give Ren and the kids a chance against the rat things, but giant snakes were a whole different ballgame.
“What are you looking at?”
Vicki glanced down the road to where the portal wasn’t and shook her head. “Nothing.”