The Mortal Touch

by Naomi Clark

  Pain shot through my fingers, and I glanced down to realize I’d dug my nails so hard into the wooden tabletop that they’d all broken. I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep, uneven breath. When I opened them again, I was still furious, but I was slightly more in control of myself, enough so that I managed to walk out of the coffee shop without murdering Ezra.

  Out on the street, I leaned against a lamp post and tilted my head up to the blazing sun. Eyes squeezed shut, I soaked up the heat of the day, grounding myself with it. The burble of people around me talking. The wails of seagulls overhead. The cinnamon scent of funnel cakes from a stand on the corner. Normal, normal, normal. I chanted it to myself over and over as my rage faded and my fangs did the same.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, trembling and counting my breaths. By the time my fangs were gone, I was on the verge of tears, and I hated Ezra for setting me off. The temptation to go back inside Espresso Express and punch him anyway was strong.

  Instead I walked down to the beach. Evening was drawing in and watching the sun set over the ocean would be soothing in a way that beating Ezra to a pulp couldn’t be. Probably.

  The tide was going out and the beach was packed with families and dog-walkers. I found a quiet spot down by the water, stripping off my boots and socks and letting the cool waves ripple over my bare feet. I sank my toes deep into the wet sand, ignoring the water seeping into my jeans. Saltwater is cleansing. There’s a reason it destroys vampires. As I sat and stared out across the distant gray waters, I felt my anguish wash away with each ripple of the tide.

  I couldn’t let Ezra get under my skin. And I shouldn’t forget to carry the damn kyanite. He might say he was useless, but no telepath was ever harmless in my opinion. I didn’t intend to spend any time with him once this was all over, but until then I had to remember to protect myself. I made a note to go back to Moon and Hare and see if they could turn the kyanite into a pendant for me.

  My phone buzzed and I fished it out of my pocket to find a message from one Jesse Suarez. He was hyped at the idea of talking to a journalist, based on his rambling, punctuation-free message. I figured there was no time like the present and invited him for a drink at the Alice Rose in an hour. Maybe he just liked the thought of making the news, but maybe he had a story to tell that I needed to hear. There was only one way to find out.

  The hour gave me a chance to walk up and down the beach until my jeans dried out. The Alice Rose was humming with the usual summer mix of families, fishermen, and obvious out-of-town tourists when I got there. I elbowed my way to the bar and waited for Dinah to get to me, half-listening to the chatter and laughter around me.

  Dinah, a curvy redhead who dressed like a Victorian landlady expecting Jack the Ripper to roll in any minute, had owned and run the Alice Rose forever, if you believed local gossip. She was beautifully ageless and utterly charming, and there was a constant flock of hopeful young men crowding the bar, trying to get her attention.

  She handled them deftly, managing to run the bar single-handed while fending off her prospective lovers with tact and grace. By the time she got to me, I’d already seen her decline several invites for a more intimate drink later.

  “How do you do it?” I asked with genuine admiration. There was no way I could ever have worked in the service industry. I’d have killed someone.

  I guess it wouldn’t have been that much different from being a bounty hunter, actually.

  “Decades of practice,” she said, flashing me a sweet smile. “What can I get ya? Bea joining you tonight?”

  I shook my head. “A pink lemonade,” I said. “I’m flying solo tonight.”

  “Shame,” Dinah said. She poured my drink, grabbed my cash and moved on to the next admirer.

  I found a table by the door and sat people-watching for a while. The lemonade was tart and sweet, the ice cubes clinking in the tall glass a perfect summer sound. Despite the chaos around me as people jostled at the bar and jukebox, and yelled over each other or their kids, I felt calmer than I had all day. Probably all week. I could almost pretend Mr. Cold and his dead vampires didn’t exist.

  Right up until Jesse Suarez found me, that was. He threw himself into the chair opposite me and leaned across the table, a massive grin on his handsome, sun-tanned face.

  “So you’re the journalist, right? You wanna here my vampire story?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I sipped my lemonade and tried not to react as I looked Jesse over. He looked young and dumb, with a big athletic frame that screamed high-school-football-stud, and a big goofy grin that was ridiculously endearing. He put me in mind of a Labrador, with a mop of sandy blond hair to complete the look.

  “Vampire story?” I repeated, keeping my tone neutral.

  “Yeah! It’s wild! Wait a minute, lemme go grab a beer.” He leapt up and disappeared into the throng at the bar.

  He returned ten minutes later with a pint of dark beer and launched straight into his story without any prompting from me.

  “So I’m at the club, okay, me and a few guys, and there’s this chick, she’s hot, and she offers me a drink, and I say, sure, so she gets me this drink and the guy at the bar is like, this is our new signature cocktail and the girl designed it herself, so that was cool. Anyway, she ghosts me after that, but then this other chick starts hitting on me and she’s wild, like, all over me, like, I know porn isn’t real, but it was like porn.”

  He paused for a breath and a mouthful of beer. I decided to save my questions until the end.

  “So we’re in my car and we’re making out and I’m totally hammered from those cocktails, so it’s a little fuzzy, but she starts biting my neck, like really going for it, and I’m like, that’s not normally my jam, but she’s this hot older woman, okay? So I let her do it, but I think she overdid it, because suddenly I’m all fuzzy and I don’t think it’s the alcohol, because I can definitely handle my alcohol. But then she starts crying or something, and this guy’s pulling her out of the car, and I was gonna punch him out, but I couldn’t, like coordinate myself? Which is weird, because I’m actually a Brazilian ju-jitsu white belt?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said encouragingly when he gave me an expectant look.

  “That’s good,” he added.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, it’s just the first belt. But a lot of people don’t even get that far.”

  “You’re exceptional,” I said. “What happened next?”

  “Oh, I don’t really remember. I woke up in the ER and this cute nurse told me I should be dead.”

  “Wow,” I said, trying to pick through the stream of consciousness for anything useful. “What club was this?”

  “You know Obsidian? It’s trash, but Mason likes the music, and the goth chicks are kinda cool.”

  “Wow. Can I see your neck?”

  He pulled his t-shirt collar down low enough for me to see his collarbone. It was free of bite-marks. That wasn’t unexpected. Vampire bites heal fast – something in the saliva. I guessed Bea would probably have said if she’d noticed patients coming in with puncture wounds.

  “Do you remember what the woman or the guy looked like? I’m guessing you didn’t get any names,” I asked, changing tack. I’d have to ask someone – not Ezra – what Viviana and Hugo looked like.

  He made some vague, female-shaped gestured with his hands. “I dunno, she was older than me and hot. Dark hair. Dark red lipstick. I don’t remember what the dude looked like. I was pretty out of it by then.”

  “And you’re feeling good now? No problems or health issues? Nothing the doctors said you should look out for?”

  “No, but Mason says you can get gangrene from blood poisoning. I don’t think that’s true, but he’s pre-med so I guess I should keep an eye out for it.” He touched his neck with a slight frown. “Do you wanna take my picture? For the paper?”

  He gave me that bright, Labrador smile and I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him, so I snapped a couple of pictures of him
with my phone.

  “When’s this gonna run? I wanna tell my mom I’m gonna be in the paper!”

  “I still have a lot of research to do,” I hedged, finishing my drink.

  His face fell. “Oh, I get it. I guess being a journalist is pretty hard work, huh?”

  “A lot harder than I thought it would be.” I stood, offering him my hand.

  He shook it hard, making me promise to let him know when the article was out. I assured him he’d be the first to know and escaped the Alice Rose. Jesse was the kind of non-stop extrovert who made me feel like I’d run a marathon. I wanted a hot bath and a nap, but it just wasn’t going to happen.

  I had to go to Obsidian.

  I WENT HOME FIRST, and I admit I did check my bus to see if Kinley was in there. He wasn’t. I reluctantly shrugged off my uneasiness and went into the house. Elijah was waiting for me in the kitchen, and started scolding me loudly.

  “One of us has to work for a living,” I said, rummaging through the fridge for crow treats. I found some peppers that I certainly wouldn’t be cooking any time soon and started chopping them up for him. “I hate to admit it, Elijah, but I think Mr. Cold is right. There’s a warlock or a witch at the heart of all this.”

  He hopped onto the sideboard, watching me dice the peppers greedily, and cawed. Doubtless he was encouraging me to chop faster, but I chose to interpret it as encouraging me to keep talking and unspooled my theory for him.

  “It’s the drink, okay? This signature cocktail. There’s something in it that’s deadly to vampires, but safe for humans. Or – okay, not safe, but there are no lasting effects. The humans drink it, the vampires feed on the humans, and they die. The humans recover, so they don’t dwell on it too much, and there’s nothing to lead back to the club. Maybe some people stop going, but plenty more people keep going, so the cycle just continues. What do you think?”

  He reached a talon out and hooked a chunk of pepper with a triumphant cackle.

  “Right. And of course, not every person is drinking these cocktails, and not every vampire is feeding on someone who does, so it’s a slow process. It avoids attracting too much suspicion, unless some idiot like me looks too hard. So what now?”

  He fluttered onto my shoulder and began preening my hair.

  “Proof, right? Mr. Cold probably isn’t going to just take my word for it. And if I’m wrong and I sic him on whoever owns Obsidian, there could be a bloodbath for no reason. So I’ve got to go check it out.”

  Whatever reply Elijah might have given was drowned out by the doorbell ringing. He took to the air, croaking in annoyance. I stiffened, my grasp on the kitchen knife tightening. I don’t get a lot of callers, and right now I wasn’t feeling too friendly. With the knife behind my back, I went to answer the door.

  I peered through the spyhole and exhaled in relief when I saw Mr. Holland’s wrinkled face.

  “Is everything okay, Mr. Holland?” I asked, cracking the door open.

  “Oh, I think so, mostly, Georgia. Molly and me are just out for our evening stroll.” Molly the chihuahua danced at his feet, mercifully restrained by her leash, but straining to bite my ankles anyway.

  “Great, it’s a nice evening,” I said, keeping one eye on her. Molly probably didn’t weigh much more than Elijah, but like most small dogs, she firmly believed she was a giant.

  “Real nice, and we noticed there’s a strange smell coming from your shed, and we wondered if you had a rat problem or something? Because Molly’s real good at cleaning up little critters if you need her.”

  Ah, fuck. The draugr. Somehow, I’d managed to forget about the dismembered sea zombie in the shed. “Oh, no, no, no,” I said quickly. “I...found a dead racoon in there, but I haven’t had time to do anything about it yet. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Make sure you do, because it’ll attract all kinds of pests!” He wagged his finger at me and moved on, dragging Molly with him. “And you still haven’t fixed your window!” he added over his shoulder.

  “It’s been a hell of a week,” I called by way of explanation.

  He said something I didn’t catch about young people and waved goodbye. I shut the door and slumped against it with a groan. There was a reason Elijah and I had lived on the road for so long, and I think it was because I never wanted neighbors.

  I WASN’T TOTALLY SURPRISED to find Obsidian still closed when I arrived. I also wasn’t totally convinced a burst water pipe was the issue. If I had managed to connect the blood poisoned kids back to the club, someone else could too. Maybe whoever was responsible wanted to lay low for a while, just in case.

  Well, maybe a closed club was better for my purposes. It was much easier to sneak around a place when it was empty.

  I went down the side alley between Obsidian and the burger joint next door, and round to the back of the club. The back entrance was small and tidy, and well-lit. A scrawny tortoiseshell cat watched from the fire escape stairs as I considered my options. The back door was out of the question – I’d need a crowbar and probably three other people to pry it open. There was a small window to the right of the door that would be the perfect size for Kinley to squeeze through, but I guessed with some annoyance that anyone with breasts would end up stuck.

  Halfway up the fire escape, there was a door with a frosted glass pane. I jogged up, scaring the cat away, to check if it was a better option. It was difficult to be sure, of course. All I could tell for certain was that there were no lights on inside whatever room the door led to. It could be something residential – an apartment for the club’s owner seemed likely. It could also be alarmed.

  I chewed a thumb nail, weighing it up. I could see two security cameras round here, and they were both pointed at the back door. If I broke in and let off an alarm, I thought I was fast enough to leave the scene before anyone responded. Probably. I had nothing like the cardio I had when I was vampire-hunting full time, and I was seven years older.

  Let’s be honest: breaking and entering is a stupid game and it usually nets you a stupid prize. So I’m not going to claim that I was thinking very far ahead when I muttered, “fuck it” and smashed the glass pane with my elbow.

  I did take the time to wrap my arm in my flannel shirt first, at least. And to my pleasant surprise, no alarms went off. The only sound was the shattering of glass, followed by the yowl of a frightened cat.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, because apparently, I’d talk to any animal now on the assumption that it might be a human under a spell.

  I waited a couple of breaths to make sure nobody was going to come running to investigate the noise. Once it was clear it was just me and the cat, I quickly knocked out the last few jagged pieces of glass from the frame. Memories, most of them unpleasant, rushed in. Countless dens, lairs, and hideouts broken into, each one home to something dangerous and usually inhuman. Stupid games, stupid prizes.

  “Cat,” I whispered, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  I clambered through.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw I was in a storage room. It was full of the kind of things I’d expect for a night club – old DJ equipment, rolls of sun-faded promotional posters, a busted-looking fog machine, other bits of tech I couldn’t name. The room was dusty and still, with the kind of pervasive silence that comes with disuse and lack of care.

  I picked my way across the small room, stirring up dust. How long had Obsidian been operating as Obsidian, I wondered? Because it felt like nobody had been in here for months. I tried to remember the brief web search I’d done. A couple of years maybe, since Kaminski bought it? I guess it wasn’t improbable that a new owner would shift unwanted junk into a storage room and forget about it. I’d done it with my spare room, after all.

  I tried the door handle, expecting to find it locked. Luckily for me, it wasn’t, and I crept out into a dark hallway. To my left was another closed door. To my right was a staircase heading down. I figured that was my best bet – I wanted to
avoid walking into someone’s bedroom. There was a chance nobody was here, if nobody had reacted to the sound of smashing glass, but I wasn’t going to take any more stupid risks than I already had.

  Downstairs I found another storage room, this one full of alcohol and dried snacks. Walking through there brought me out behind the bar in the main club.

  Everyone I’d spoken to about it so far had described Obsidian as a dive bar, so I hadn’t been expecting much. But actually, I kind of liked Obsidian’s vibe. The bar was decked out in strings of LEDs and polaroid photos, clearly taken here at the club. They showed customers dancing, hugging, screaming into the camera, mugging it up with bar staff. Stickers had been slapped over every free surface, depicting band logos and ads for local businesses. A chalkboard behind the bar listed the house special cocktails in graffiti-style text, and the shelves were loaded with bottles of colorful liquors.

  Neon signs lined the walls around the small dance floor and stage. They were all switched off now, but I could make out the shapes of martini glasses, crosses, and vintage cars. Tattered old concert posters covered the stage wall, advertising bands that had probably been dead and gone for decades before Obsidian ever opened. I wasn’t much of a nightclub or bar person, the Alice Rose being my regular exception, but Elijah would have loved a place like this.

  Sighing, I began looking for a light switch. Dhampir night-sight is good, but not on a par with a vampire’s, and I wasn’t going to find much in the dark. I found a switch under the bar and flipped it, turning on the LEDs. Suddenly the room was bathed in bright white, highlighting the scuffs and scars on the bar top and the sticky patches on the floor.

  I scanned the cocktail menu, remembering Jesse’s story. Ante Mortem. Felix Iecit. Nox. Magia Potum. All Latin. Interesting choice, but it didn’t tell me anything. None of them were flagged as signature or special drinks. I turned my attention to the rows of bottles, but I didn’t see anything untoward there either. I wasn’t even sure I’d know if I did. Sure, maybe you could make vampire poison out of tomato juice and tequila, but how the hell would I know?