I smirk and then nod slowly. “Not regular bullets, huh?”
“Nope. I know how to take down vamps,” she says grimly. “You know how it goes, being a paranormal hunter.”
“You never attended the academy, did you?”
“No.”
“Might want to find an angel… and a demon—a decent one—which means not my dad—to mentor you so you can use your powers.”
“Who says I don’t have an angel mentor?” she asks coolly.
“You don’t have a demonic one, do you? Since a demon can’t enter your city.”
“Touché. Your dad’s not a good one, huh?”
“Well, maybe better than most? Maybe not, if he’s… I’ll find out what he’s doing.”
She hands me a card. "Keep me informed, please. Allentown might not be my judication, but that doesn’t mean I want the people there to suffer.”
I shove her card into my purse and back out of there. I'm not sure how Dad will handle the news that Bethlehem is off-limits, but I can tell why he might've wanted to be as close to the city as he can handle. Bethlehem might be a human town, the detective aside, but there’s magic there. Even I can sense it.
5
When I return to Dad’s house, I hesitate in the car, trying to think about how to handle all of this. I’m still not sure when I force myself out of the car and up and into the house, the door again creepily opening for me and shutting behind me this time.
The scent of something sweet and possibly Italian, given the spices I'm smelling, draws me to the kitchen. A woman is cooking, and she takes one look at me and points through the door. I enter the dining room to see my dad and boyfriend sitting there, talking, playing a card game.
Seriously? That's how he entertained Clover? I guess I should be happy about that. Could've been much worse.
“Clover, why don’t you head into the cellar there and pick out a bottle of wine for us to imbibe with our meal?”
“Of course. Calli.” Clover grins at me and squeezes my shoulder as he walks past me.
The moment he’s out of sight, Dad rushes over to me. He can move as fast as a vampire can, maybe even faster. “Well?” he demands.
Sometimes, honesty is the best policy.
“Demons can’t enter the city,” I murmur.
“But you can,” he presses.
“Yes. It seems like a nice city. A bit boring. Why would a demon even want to go there?”
His nostrils flare. “You—”
“Especially when the demon can do as he pleases here when there’s no one but humans all around. Dad, why are you even here? What do you want? This isn’t like you.”
“Do you even know what I’m like anymore?” he grumbles. “I give you gifts all the time, and you spurn them all.”
“Not all of them,” I protest.
“Ah, yes, the car. The one normal, traditional, boring gift. That’s the only one you appreciate when I have given you some potions that take years to make.”
“Years?”
“That one I gave you that will kill all of your enemies? That’s all of them. Even future ones.”
“You mean…”
He nods. “They won’t even be born.”
Oh, man. I’m going to be sick.
6
Somehow, despite my churning stomach, I’m able to enjoy the meal, various Italian dishes. Given that I’m a living vampire, I can eat, but I don’t require a lot, and Dad has himself and Clover drink the wine my boyfriend picked out, but for my drink, he makes a blood mimosa. It’s delicious, the drink and the food.
Afterward, we retire to a parlor, and Dad begins to tell all kinds of stories, most of which I don’t prefer to hear. He then excuses himself for the night, and I grab Clover’s hand.
“I don’t think we—” he starts.
“I need you to distract my dad.”
“Why?”
“Please? I’ll make it worth your while.”
“You’ll babysit my sisters with me? My parents have been asking, and—”
“Of course.”
I almost laugh. He’s so easy to please sometimes. He could’ve asked for anything, and I would’ve agreed. I’m not desperate. And that’s all he wants.
Clover goes to kiss me and then only presses his lips to my forehead.
He’s utterly ridiculous. I do laugh as he leaves, and I wait until I can hear my dad and boyfriend talking to start to make my move. Clover, the genius that he is, is asking Dad for a tour of the outside of the house. It’s dark out, as it’s winter, but Clover’s a dryad. He can see by pulling the light from within trees and nature, and demons can see in the dark. Who knows? Maybe they can see better in the dark than during the day.
Once I hear the back door latch shut, I race to Dad’s study. Considering he brought me in here before, I’m not sure if there’s anything of note to find. Or maybe hubris would’ve had him delighted to have me in there when there was damaging information about him lurking about? Who knows?
But I find nothing at all, and I’m about ready to see if he has an office or another study considering how many rooms this place must have when the door bangs open, thudding against the wall.
“What are you doing?” my dad booms, his voice rolling like thunder.
“I…”
“Out!” he roars.
Clover looks at me apologetically from just to the right of Dad’s shoulder, and then, I’m whisked away.
Dad banished me.
I’m standing in front of HEX Unite.
Not Hell, at least.
Clover’s beside me, and I glance over to the parking lot. Dad even sent my car back.
Well, there’s that, but if Dad thinks I’m going to be so easily corralled, he doesn’t know his precious little girl at all.
I turn to Clover with a wide smile. “Clover, dear, I need to go back. Now.”
“Calli, I have no idea what’s going on, but… ah… Your dad doesn’t want us around.”
“Oh, we aren’t going to see him,” I assure Clover.
At least, the plan is to not see my dad.
“Then why go back?” Clover asks, clearly baffled. “You need to start explaining things.”
“My dad’s an incubus,” I remind him. “He’s a specific kind of demon, but he’s a demon, and he’s up to no good in Allentown. It’s a human city. You know it is.”
“Yes, but…”
“The people there are innocent, and if Dad’s doing anything to hurt them…”
“Don’t you trust HEX Unite to handle things like this? Do you really want to take down your dad?”
“I would rather do it myself than let someone else do it. If you won’t go with me—”
“I don’t think this is the smartest idea,” Clover says firmly, “but I won’t let you go alone.”
“Well, I wasn’t sure that seeing my dad in the first place was the smartest of ideas.”
Clover draws back, obviously hurt. “I wanted to meet your father. You didn’t want to take me to ever meet your parents, did you?”
“Clover, honey.” I take his hands into mine, but he yanks his hands free.
“You can’t take anything seriously, can you?”
I laugh, amused, not injured at all by what some might perceive as a slight. "Clover, we've been on how many assignments together? You know that's not true. Just because I'm choosing to make the innocent people of Allentown, Pennsylvania a priority doesn't mean that I don't also choose you. It's my parents I didn't get to choose. Sometimes, family isn't all lovey-dovey, gooey, and all that jazz. It’s complicated and messy and even bloody at times. Your parents are married. They had many kids. My parents? Yeah… Most of the time, they don’t even like each other. It’s a good thing they never married.”
He’s silent.
“I wanted to protect you from them. My parents aren’t normal. Not even in the paranormal sense of things.”
Clover nods curtly.
“We, ah, need to use fairy dust to get back,” I mur
mur.
“Great.”
"And we'll need…" I fish in my purse. I have some witchy friends, including one of the most powerful witches on the earth—Mirella Sharpe—and she's given me plenty of stuff over the years that I actually use, including this.
I brandish a potion and sprinkle it over us. Now, no one, not even my dad or any demon, will be able to tell that we aren’t human, not even if they’re standing right in front of us.
“Just what are we going to be doing?” Clover asks. “Do I even want to know?”
“Trust me, darlin’,” I drawl. “You really don’t want to know.”
Two days. That’s all the time it takes me to put the pieces together.
My dad's a demon, all right. I've known that, but when you think of incubus, you think of a particular urging, right? You don't think they would be into other demonic-type things like lust for power and craving influence and all of that fangtastic stuff.
But Dad’s no different from the rest of them. There’s a huge paranormal contingent in Allentown despite it being a human city, and I manage to ensnare a very young, nearly turned vampire away from his nest to twist some secrets out of him. No, not by using any tricks an incubus would teach his daughter. Just by making him fall for me. Maybe using a bit of influence too. Vampires can compel humans to do things for them, control them a bit. Well, to some extent, the more powerful living vampires can do the same thing over bitten vampires, and that’s what I leverage.
And that’s when I realize that my greatest fear has come true. Combining that now-dead vampire’s stories with the little bit that I gleaned from what I saw in my dad's study leave me with one conclusion.
My dad is basically the head of a paranormal mafia.
7
The realization has me turning to Clover. “It all fits, doesn’t it?” I demand.
“Well…”
"Come on. You're logical. That's all you are. I mean, you're part tree. You have to be logical. You see roots. You can follow them along to the tree. Doesn't matter how long the roots have grown away from the trunk.”
“Your father distinctly doesn’t have any roots,” he points out.
I huff a sigh. We’re in an alley in the poorer section of the city. That’s where the paranormal activity of Allentown has been. It’s not a shock. Dad is going to want the stuff to occur farther away from him, but I don’t know what exactly he’s after or what he’s aiming to have.
“What do you think we should do?” I murmur to Clover.
“We should return to HEX Unite. Maybe your father wants to be stopped. Maybe that’s why he sent—”
“No. I bet he doesn’t know where I live currently, so he couldn’t send me home.” I shake my head.
“Why doesn’t he know where you live?”
I just give him a look.
“Right,” he mumbles.
“Look, it’s getting late. Why don’t you head on over to that restaurant you were eyeing earlier today?”
“You noticed that?” he asks.
“I don’t miss much.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Why do are you making it sound like that’s a bad thing?”
“Maybe because it’s indeterminate whether or not that is favorable.”
I huff a sigh. “Sometimes, you frustrate me.”
“As if you’re wanting to be here and sneak around like this when we’re supposed to be on vacation…”
“We were supposed to be meeting my dad,” I say, trying to temper my rising anger.
“We did meet him.”
“And we uncovered that he’s a mafia leader!” I hiss in the loudest whisper ever. “Do you really want us to just abandon—”
“I never once said we should abandon them. I said we should go to HEX Unite—”
“Clearly, the oracles haven’t noticed what my dad is up to, or else maybe they’re waiting for him to kill someone. I don’t know, but do you really want to wait until something that drastic happens? Seriously, Clover, if you’re willing to just walk away—”
“I never said I wanted to walk away!” he fumes.
It takes a lot to anger a dryad. Normally, it involves trees or the forest or something with nature.
I take a deep breath. “Clover, I just—”
"I do care about the people. For this, it's far too personal for you, Calli. You can't see reason. Your father has moved how many vampires to Allentown? We don’t know why, and—”
“That’s just it. If we can find out why—”
“You shouldn’t have called that vampire.” Clover glares at me.
“I could tell that Dad was influencing the vampire, just like I was, and if Dad found out… We can’t make a move against him if he suspects that something is amiss. I didn’t want to kill him, but by his own admission, he committed enough crimes even before my dad recruited him that the higher-ups at HEX Unite wouldn’t bat an eye that he was dead.”
"They would've sent a paranormal slayer at the most. Most likely hunters," he argues.
“A slayer would’ve had to kill him. He would’ve resisted.”
“Like he resisted your influence?” Clover’s tone is cool.
I lick my lips and nod a few times. “You should maybe take a walk, yeah?”
“Fine.”
He storms off, and I close my eyes and lean against the concrete building. I can’t believe we’re fighting, that we aren’t on the same page. I mean, yes, I realize this is dangerous, but our work, our field, everything we do is dangerous. There have been paranormal hunters who have died in the field. This situation is terrible.
Oh, I just thought of a point to make to Clover. This is a human city. Maybe the oracles aren’t looking at human cities as closely as paranormal ones. That might explain why all of this has been overlooked.
I rub a hand down my face. I should go and see Clover, apologize, make amends. We aren’t going to get through this if we don’t stay together.
But this is Allentown. Right when I’m about to use my vampire speed to take off after him, I recall this fact and sigh and take one step when all around me, a fog descends.
They creep out of the shadows, the vampires. Bright red, inhumane eyes stare at me, and they don’t hesitate to launch themselves at me, snarling, fangs ready.
But I’m a vampire, one with serious training. I grab the nearest vampire by the throat and slam his body to the side to knock over the next one. With my other hand, I yank out a short silver-bladed poignard, reverse grip, blade out that I slice against the next one's throat. Blood oozes out. He hasn't fed recently, or else he would have more blood. Clearly a turned vampire rather than a living one.
I flip up the poignard, changing the grip to hammer, and I stab before flipping it again to saber in time to ward off a dagger thrust. The lightweight thrusting knife slices through their skin easily, but for the most part, I’m only making superficial wounds that they’re healing from.
Should’ve coated it in juniper. The poison would’ve helped to slow them down and made it easier to kill them.
Two go down and stay down, but four more join the fight. There's almost ten, no a dozen. A full dozen is fighting me, and I'm furious. My dad, did he send them?
But I don’t ask. I don’t want to know. I just slice and attack and even use my fangs when I have to. By the time I’m done, they’re all dead, and I’m the only one left standing.
From my purse, I remove a small vial Mirella made for me. I kick and shove the dead vampire bodies together and then slam the vial onto the back of the topmost vampire.
Blue and purple flames engulf the bodies. Within a few minutes, the bodies will be entirely gone. Human forensics will find nothing at all.
Seriously. When will people learn you don’t mess with Calli Cruorem?
8
After cleaning my blade and tucking it away and brushing my hands through my hair, I check my appearance, using my cell’s camera as a mirror. Humans shouldn’t react to
the sight of me, and although I can still smell blood, none is visible on my person.
With a sigh, I leave the alley and head toward that restaurant I mentioned to Clover. If he’s not there, I’ll call him, but as I approach, he leaves, holding a large bag.
“Hungry?” he asks, lifting the bag.
“Thirsty actually,” I murmur, licking my lips.
He grimaces.
“I’m sorry, but a… Yeah.”
“I know,” he mumbles.
Wordlessly, we head to the rundown motel we're staying in. It's cheap, which is what I need. My dad's a demon, yes, and he's flush with cash, but I'm not. I wouldn't say I'm poor. Paranormal hunters make decent money, but slayers make a lot more, and executioners, by far, make the most.
From the motel room fridge, I remove a bag of blood. It’s not from a blood bank. We can’t drink that blood. I think it’s because of the preservatives they add. This blood is from a person who I found bleeding in an alley a few days ago. I helped myself and took some for later before healing the person, wiping their memory before letting them go. I don’t prefer to do things that way. The drinking blood thing is something I wish I didn’t have to deal with, but I can’t fight what I am, and if that disgusts Clover, then we won’t work out for the long haul.
After I drink, I end up having some of the food. Whenever I open my mouth to apologize to Clover, I instead shove another bite into my mouth. Cowardly? Maybe, but I wasn’t entirely in the wrong.
Maybe he wasn’t either.
The food—a wonderful variety of Chinese confections that are all delicious and tantalizing—is more than enough food to last us a week. As I start to pack up the leftovers, Clover sniffs.
“Calli…”
“Yes?”
“What happened?”
“We have to deal with Dad.”
“So you say but…”
I wait until I put everything in the fridge and turn to face him. “Vampires attacked me.”
His look can only be summed up as wait wut.
“I’m fine, and they’re dead.” I shrug one shoulder. “I did what I had to do.”
Supernatural Syndicate: A Limited Edition Collection of Magical Mafia Stories Page 16