Bad Vampire

by Lauren Dawes

“His name is Skeen. He’s some sort of elemental.”

  “Elemental?”

  The succubus touched me lightly on the shoulder and laughed. “I keep forgetting you still don’t know a lot about us. He’s a fae who can control the elements, but he specializes in fire.”

  “Good to know,” I replied. I would not freak out. I would not freak out.

  She looked over my shoulder and smiled, and holy shit, that smile was mesmerizing. I peered over at what she was looking at.

  “Friends of yours?” she asked.

  “Classmates, I guess.” I watched her for a little longer. “Are you feeding off them?”My question snapped her gaze back to mine, and she grimaced, then shrugged. “Maybe a little? I find aggression and sexual energy to be tightly entwined, so hitting up gyms like this gives me a nice little pick me up.”

  “How often do you have to feed?”

  “A few times a day.”

  “What if you can’t find food?”

  She laughed lightly, although I could hear the strain. “There’s always food around.”

  “What if you were stuck in a lesbian convention all day that had a strict no-dick policy?”

  That comment got a more genuine laugh, and I much preferred it to that fake shit she was laying on before. “You know what? I like you, Cat McKenzie.”

  I didn’t say it, but I liked her too. I didn’t want to, though. She was one of the monsters I feared so much. They weren’t supposed to be likeable, or even approachable.

  “How do you feed?” My question caught her off guard. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

  She waved away my concern, then turned when a guy appeared and started barking orders at them all. She shrugged and moved in the direction of the mats, dropping her bag and bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. I leaned against one of the support beams and watched how the lithe muscles in her legs helped her move with a grace that was almost feline. She wasn’t too thin, like most women were these days. Instead, she had sculpted muscles in her arms and shoulders, like she used to be a dancer or something.

  The warm-up began, and where us mere mortals had had to run around in a circle, here they took running leaps that covered the entire mat, or defied gravity itself and ran directly up the walls in a wide arc.

  The longer I watched, the more the opal against my heart heated up. With a sigh, I waved goodbye to Mike, then drove home, stopping for pizza at the joint only a block from my apartment.

  * * *

  I woke with a gasp in the middle of the night. Out of instinct, I reached for the opal, then thought that was stupid. The thing wasn’t a weapon. Honestly, I didn’t even know why it did what it did.

  I jerked at the sound of a fist hammering away at my apartment door, then I cursed whoever it was for waking me up at two in the freaking morning. Didn’t they know I needed my beauty sleep? Tossing back the comforter, I stuck my feet into my unicorn slippers—no, they aren’t just for five-year-old girls—and slipped on the matching robe.

  Whoever had woken me up was still hammering, and at this rate, the whole floor was going to be privy to the screaming I was about to rain down on the sucker.

  “What?” I hissed as I yanked open the door.

  Sawyer pushed past me and into my apartment without so much as a hello. He was still dressed in the black slacks and black button-down he’d worn to work that day…err, yesterday. Had he even gone home?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, shutting the door. “And please, do come in.”

  He threw me an acerbic look.

  “Not a morning person. Noted.” Shuffling into the kitchen, I got the Krups going and leaned back against the counter. “What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “Umm, yeah, because I was asleep.”

  He shook his head. “Crime doesn’t care what time it is.”

  I actually laughed out loud. “Oh my god, how many nineties cop show re-runs have you been watching? Seriously? Crime doesn’t care what time it is,” I mimicked, pulling open an overhead cupboard and pulling out a mug. Sawyer didn’t get a cup of coffee this morning. Grouchy people deserved none.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “It didn’t ring.” I didn’t mean to sound defensive, and I sure as hell didn’t mean to sound petulant, but Sawyer had a way of bringing out the immature side of me. “The battery must have died.”

  His hands curved into fists at his side, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Unbelievable.”

  I arched a brow but continued making my coffee. If he thought he could come into my apartment at two in the morning and berate me, he was living in a fucking alternate universe.

  While I finished making my coffee, he stalked around my living room. “What’s with the unicorns?” he asked, amusement coloring his voice, just like his blood was going to color my walls if he didn’t stop making fun of my unicorn collection.

  “I like ceramic unicorns.”

  “They’re a little childish, aren’t they?”

  “You’re a little childish,” I shot back. Definitely not my best retort, but it was early. Waaaaaay early. Plus, I hadn’t had any caffeine. “What are you doing here? Not to chat. I suck at small talk.”

  “I know,” he replied, lowering himself on my couch. He stretched his arm over the back of the cushions and waited. “I got a phone call thirty minutes ago about a body down by the docks. The human department is down there right now preserving the crime scene.”

  “Why not us?”

  His mouth softened. “Because our department is a team of five and a CSI we do not make. Plus, it’s not within our responsibilities to do that.”

  I poured myself a cup of coffee, then begrudgingly offered it to Sawyer.

  “No, thank you. But we need to hurry. Every minute we waste erodes scent trails.”

  I chugged my coffee, immediately regretting the decision to go without creamer, and placed it into the sink. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be getting any more of that sweet, sweet caffeine jolt anytime soon.

  “Give me five,” I told him, rushing back into my room to get changed. Since Sawyer was in his finest cat-bugler outfit, I decided to forego my uniform and slipped into a pair of black skinny jeans and a black cable-knit sweater. Just as I was sliding my feet into my motorcycle boots, he knocked on the door.

  “Just a sec. I need to do my hair.”

  “Dead girls don’t care about your hair,” he called back.

  “Well they should,” I mumbled under my breath and stood up. Despite Sawyer’s bitching, I pulled my hair up into a messy bun, then met him outside. He gave me an appreciative look, and I could swear his eyes darkened for a split second.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Sure. Do you want to take my truck?”

  “If you don’t want to freeze your ass off on the back of my bike, then yes, I think we should.”

  Scooping up my keys, I looped my badge over my head and put on the gun holster, checking the safety was on and I wasn’t going to accidently shoot myself in the foot. I lead the way down to the street where my truck’s windshield was getting icy. I approached the driver’s side but stopped when Sawyer cleared his throat imperiously.

  I glared at him. “It’s my truck.”

  “You don’t know where you’re going.”

  “You could tell me,” I retorted.

  “This will be faster,” he replied.

  Grumbling, I threw him the keys and walked over to the passenger side. “You’re a control freak.”

  His laughter was sharp in the early morning air, slicing it in two. “Oh, if only you knew.”

  Sullen and cold, I got in and pulled the seatbelt across my body. Sawyer coaxed my truck to life an instant later, no early morning coughs or jerks like normal. Resting my elbow on the door, I leaned my face into my palm and watched the still resting Buxton fly past the window. I didn’t bother asking him any questions about where we were going and wha
t I should expect to find. I’d been living in this town all my life, skirting the edges of the part of town known as Hell.

  It wasn’t that we were poor. My parents had bought a large apartment building due for dereliction downtown back in the late nineties. They’d spent a solid year renovating the whole thing, then began letting out apartments to friends of theirs. They were both archaeologists, but after I was born, my mom stayed at home more and more.

  Until, on her first dig in nearly eleven years, she went missing.

  I assumed she’d been killed, but murder was a hard concept to swallow for a nine-year-old. From then on, it was just me and my dad. He didn’t cut back on work. If anything, he worked even more, and I was left in the care of a neighbor called Mrs. Brown. She would spend more time at our place than she would in her own, and became the woman I went to when I got my period at thirteen and then when I had my heart broken by Chris Pachinko in high school.

  “Cat?”

  I shook my head and turned to Sawyer. “What?”

  He studied me for a moment before returning his attention to the road. “I just asked if you were sleeping.”

  “No, just…thinking.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that statement but didn’t look at me again. Only five minutes later, we entered the docks. Sawyer drove us to a section that was labyrinthine, the giant steel containers stacked into rows which seemed to twist around when I was expecting linear order. I was suddenly glad he did drive.

  Like hell I was going to tell him that though.

  I got out and shivered. In my haste to get out of the apartment, I’d forgotten to grab a jacket.

  “Here,” he said, throwing something at me. It was a navy-blue jacket that had the letters PIG written in yellow on the back. I slid into it, zipped it up, and followed Sawyer down to where yellow tape cordoned off the crime scene. I ducked under the tape behind Sawyer and stood back while he spoke to the responding officers.

  Two large four thousand watt tower lights had been set up to illuminate the scene. Laid out in front of me was hundreds upon hundreds of shipping containers, each ranging from green to red to white and every other shade in between. Some were stacked at least seven stories high. The light that was being cast by the tower lights didn’t reach much beyond fifty feet though, leaving a clear demarcation of artificial day and shadowy night.

  “Come on,” my partner told me, urging me toward a set of three shipping containers stacked one on top of another. The middle one had its doors thrown open, and I tilted my head up to see if I could see anything other than darkness.

  “It’s up there? How in the hell did they find the body?”

  “Anonymous tip,” he replied, scaling the side of the container like it was piece of kids’ playground equipment. When he got to the top, he motioned for me to follow. “Come on.”

  “Um, I’m not part monkey, so I can’t climb up there.”

  I expected him to fight me on it, but he simply shrugged and took out his phone, turning on the flashlight function. “Stay right there then. I’ll take photos so you can study the scene.”

  I mock saluted him and watched him disappear. About thirty feet away, the rest of the cops milled around, not straying farther than the reach of the spotlight. I looked the other way, into the darkness not twenty feet away, and shivered as a wicked breeze blew past me.

  Beneath my sweater and jacket, my necklace began to pulse with heat. Narrowing my eyes, I scanned the shadows around me.

  “Can we get any more light down here?” I called out to one of the responding cops. I thought his name was Smith.

  He shook his head. “There’s something funky going on. We can’t get any closer than this. We tried to set up a light right where you’re standing now, but it wouldn’t turn on.” He jerked his chin in the direction of where the light was now. “This is as close as we got where it would work. There’s some sort of magic in use here. That’s why we called you freaks in.”

  His colleagues laughed at the jibe. The fucker was lucky I was standing where I was and too lazy to walk my ass back up there. Grinding my teeth, I looked at the shadows, then to where Sawyer’s flashlight was bouncing around inside the container. Another sharp gust of wind winged past me, the surrounding containers forming a tunnel. It seemed to call to me, that wind, and I took a step forward, straining my eyes to see who was there.

  Because someone was there.

  With one more furtive glance in Sawyer’s direction, I took a couple of steps into the darkness. I’d maybe only gone about fifteen feet when there was an audible pop and something brushed against my cheeks and neck. I tried not to twitch, because it felt a lot like spiders running over my skin.

  I heard my name again, but this time, I heard it more clearly. Like whoever was there was only just past the next stack of containers. I reached for my side arm and held it down by my thigh. My skin still prickled like hands were running over it, stroking me and urging me farther into the dark.

  “Hello?” I called, wincing when my voice echoed like I was standing inside a large room instead of the open air. Acoustics aside, the containers would have absorbed the sound rather than bounced it.

  The opal burned a little hotter, and I moved it onto the outside of my jacket. The pale blue light it gave off allowed me to see a little more clearly. Now that I was in this sludge of darkness, the moonlight was a little better, although when I looked up in to the dark, starless sky, I couldn’t see the moon. That was tip-off number two that shit was not going well.

  Sliding along the edge of one container, I kept sweeping the area with my gaze, looking for whatever the hell was going to jump out and make me pee my pants.

  “It’s Buxton PD. If you know anything about the crime that’s been committed here, you can come forward.”

  I stiffened when laughter bubbled out of the darkness and the opal glowed more brightly. I was torn between wanting to find out who was there and getting the fuck out of Dodge, because something wasn’t right here. I spun around, intending to leave, when I jerked back a step.

  There was a woman standing before me. An old woman, and not as in a woman who had been weathered by time. This woman looked as if she’d been aged in the sun, her skin thick, black, and leathery. Her eyes were milky white and opaque, so I figured she was blind. But if she was, where did she come from, and why was she out here in the middle of the night… or was it early morning? I guessed it depended on how you looked at it.

  “Hello?” I took another step back. The woman smiled, her jaw unhinging like a snake’s to reveal row after row of razor-sharp teeth. My necklace started to glow even more brightly, and I slid my foot back another step, shuffling away. The old crone watched me, tracking my movements like a hungry wolf, although I was sure her eyesight was gone.

  “Ma’am?” I asked, swallowing. Gagging. Gagging on the smell of dead things and old blood.

  The woman lifted her claw-like hand, complete with fingers double the length of a humans and tipped with inch-long curved blades for nails, and reached for me. I lifted my gun and took aim, squeezing off a round that ricocheted into one of the steel containers behind us and pinged into non-existence.

  I’d shot her in the chest, but it had had no effect. It’d simply gone straight through her chest cavity and exited out of her spine. I took aim again, this time putting three into her—two in the chest and one in the head.

  “What are you?” I asked, even though it was stupid. What was she going to do? Stop and tell me?

  She hissed through her sharp teeth and came at me again. I danced backwards, trying to come up with a plausible explanation for this. I knew crazy shit happened to me, but this was taking it to the next level. I emptied my clip into the woman and swore when she screamed like a banshee and threw herself at me.

  Ducking off to the side, I watched her fly past me, slam into the container, and crumple to the ground. Now I was torn. There was a woman who looked like she was ninety-five years old, in the cold, wearing nothing but a thin
nighty, yet the other half of me—some might say the intelligent part—wanted to kill the bitch with anything at my disposal.

  I staggered backwards, then screamed when something strong closed around my arm. I spun to look at my attacker and actually breathed out a sigh of relief.

  “Oh, thank God, Sawyer.”

  His eyes narrowed on the crumpled heap behind me. “Stay here,” he said, then strode towards the bundle of cheap frills. Crouching down, he pushed the old woman’s hair from her face, then leapt back onto his feet. And about four feet away. At the same time. Really, it was quite a feat.

  “What is it?” I asked, huddling into my borrowed jacket. It was warm, and the smell of sandalwood and something else deeply masculine tickled my nose.

  “Not what,” my partner said, returning to my side but keeping his eyes glued to the old woman. “Who.”

  “Who?”

  “Baba Yaga.”

  “Baba…” My voice trailed off with my thoughts as I tried to recall who that was. I knew the name. I snapped my fingers. “The witch from fairy tales?”

  Sawyer’s expression was grim as he nodded. “The body of that child had been partially devoured.”

  “Can you give a girl a little warning before you say stuff like that?” I told him hotly, resting a hand to my stomach. I was starting to feel a little queasy. That may have had something to do with the goddamn nightmare from children’s stories attacking me though.

  He glanced back over at Baba Yaga, like he was waiting for her…or the Antichrist to rise. Hell, maybe they were the same thing.

  “Is she dead?”

  He shook his head. “Just stunned.”

  My laughter, which I’d tried to contain, came out as a snort. “Yeah, that’s because she brained herself of the corner of a shipping container.”

  “She isn’t known for her intelligence.” He looked down at my gun and frowned. “Those bullets should’ve stopped her though.”

  “They didn’t.” I shrugged.

  He studied me for a minute, then said, “Let’s go. I’ve collected as much evidence from the scene as I can.”

  As we walked, Sawyer stayed close, his hand protectively on the small of my back, but the sensation of spiders crawling all over me came back, and I shivered. I felt Sawyer stare at me but chose not to look. Yup, I was brave like that. My ears were suddenly equalizing, and we stepped back into the pool of light. The cops were still there, but now there was an ambulance and the coroner too.