Dead Heat (Taz Bell Book 1)

by Sharon Green

  "My brother and I apologize for that, but we honestly thought Adele would have a better chance at rapport with you," Jaril said. "Most humans respond to her in a more positive way than they do to us, and it hasn't been all that long since you were fully human."

  "And yes, what you're probably thinking right now is true," Grail put in with the kind of smile you'd expect your date to show when he walks you to your door. "Jaril and I are actually the ones in charge of this task force, and Adele is director in name only. Humans are a majority in the government and probably always will be, and they feel more comfortable with one of their own in charge."

  "But that doesn't mean she'll be free to give you a hard time," Jaril said, taking his turn again. "Our field operatives have to be able to work without a lot of orders and direction because that's the position they usually find themselves in. There are still too few of us and the number of rogues keeps growing."

  "If you two aren't human, then what are you?" Freemont put in before I could point out that I'd already refused their job. "Normally I have no trouble telling, but for some reason things are a bit cloudy tonight."

  "That's my fault, but don't expect me to apologize," Jaril said with a grin that looked very natural to him. "If I hadn't blocked your talent you would certainly have picked up on what Detective Wilson was doing. If all of you had left to avoid a fight we would have had to chase after you again, and we really don't have that kind of time to waste."

  "So you're able to do some kind of magic," George said to Jaril, his tone musing. "You must be powerful if you're able to block Freemont, but you weren't powerful enough to save your brother. Or didn't your brother want to be saved? Some people don't."

  "Save his brother from what?" Freemont asked, leaning forward in his chair to look at George.

  "Save his brother from becoming a vampire," I said, having picked up on the point just the way George had in spite of the makeup Grail wore to make him look human. "Grail is a vampire, and Jaril is a powerful magic user of some kind. And they both deal in blood because I can smell it on them."

  "Stop right there," Jaril said, pointing a finger at me as Freemont paled. "I don't do black magic of any kind, and I won't have someone even hinting that I do. And it wasn't Grail's idea to become a vampire any more than it was your choice to become a shapeshifter, Taz. At the time I wasn't strong enough to protect him, so we had to make do with what we had."

  "At the time," George echoed, frowning. "How much time are we talking about, and what about the blood Taz smells on you? If you aren't doing black magic, then why the blood?"

  "Some very ordinary spells require blood, just not human blood," Jaril answered after a small hesitation. "I don't usually mention the point because most people think the way you do: if there's blood involved, it has to be black magic. Believe me, I've come up against black magic and there's no comparison. If you're very unlucky, you'll find out what I mean."

  George was starting to look cautiously interested so I said, "Why don't you take George and Freemont to your car to continue the recruiting pitch? It's been a long day so I'd like to take a shower and go to bed."

  "They're not the only ones we want to recruit, Taz," Grail said at once while Jaril brought his complete attention back to me. "We need you badly enough that we aren't prepared to take no for an answer. Especially since you're not saying no for the reason you want us and your partners to believe."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" I demanded, very aware of the way Freemont and George were now also looking at me. I didn't like what Grail was hinting at, not when he couldn't really know. Jaril glanced at his brother as if he didn't completely approve of what Grail had said, then he just shrugged a little.

  "All right, I suppose it is time we brought up the point," Jaril allowed. His light eyes made me feel as if he could see inside my head, and I didn't like the feeling. "We have other shapeshifters working with us, Taz, but no one like you because as far as we know there is no one like you. It may be selfish of us to say so, but we can't afford to let you continue trying to get yourself killed."

  Two pairs of light, changeable eyes stared at me while Freemont and George threw outraged questions in all directions. Outraged and frightened questions.

  "You're not saying anything, Taz," Jaril pointed out mildly as soon as some of the noise died down. "Don't you want to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about?"

  "All right, you don't know what you're talking about," I obliged. "Are you happy now?"

  "Not very," Jaril came back without hesitation. "Your friends may have noticed the same thing Grail and I did, but they just didn't want to see the truth. For instance, instead of waiting for the police to arrive, you went into that warehouse alone to face four ghouls. You could have just kept an eye on them, gotten the license number of the truck, then helped the police to stop them on the road. Instead you faced them alone, hoping they'd be able to kill you. Do I have to ask how many other times you've done the same kind of thing?"

  "It's not as if we don't understand, Taz," Grail said, but instead of sounding compassionate he suddenly looked … alien and cold and almost … scary. "I felt the same when I woke up to find that I'd been made into a vampire. That was at a time before vampires demanded and got their rights as citizens in most countries of the world. I'd been made into an outcast, a disgusting thing, and killing the one who had done that to me didn't help as much as I thought it would. Killing my attacker didn't turn me human again, and all I wanted was to die."

  George and Freemont had stopped making noise by now. Freemont sat bent over with his hands over his eyes, and George was by the window again with his back to us.

  "But my brother couldn't bring himself to take his own life," Jaril said. "Instead he began to go after other vampires who thought it was funny to make unwilling 'children.' He shouldn't have been strong enough to best all those others not to mention his own 'sire,' but for some reason he seemed to be different. We're all a bit different on the task force, Taz, some more than others. But we do have one thing in common: we want to do everything we can to save innocent people from having to face the pain we had to. Why don't you try it for a short while before you decide you'd rather go your own way to oblivion?"

  I didn't have to turn my head toward Freemont to know that he was now staring at me. The stare I could feel said the same thing Jaril had, asking me to change my mind about putting an end to the pain. I hated the way these strangers who had come into our lives felt free to intrude in what was very much a private matter, but before I could say so we were all handed a distraction.

  "There are … beings of some kind out there in the dark," George announced. "I can see them sliding through the shadows and they seem to be getting ready to attack the limo."

  That brought us all to our feet, and the next second our guests were moving toward the door so fast that to blink was to miss seeing them. I headed for the forms case on the table by the door, where I kept one of my spare guns, before following the twins at a dead run. Although why I was bothering I didn't really know.

  It had finally come to me that the time Grail had been talking about, the time when he'd been made a vampire, wasn't just a few years ago. Vampires had gotten their rights almost five hundred years earlier, and Jaril was Grail's twin but still supposedly human. That meant Jaril had found a way to stay alive, but not, so he claimed, by using black magic. The idea of that much power made my insides twist, and not in a way that was fun.

  So who could possibly be stupid enough to attack them?

  Chapter Three

  By the time I got outside the action had already started. One of the twins was fighting with three dark shapes while the other just stood still with his hands held up in front of him. The back door of the limo was badly buckled, looking like one good pull would get it off its hinges and out of the way, but the unmoving form on the ground near the door wasn't in any shape to do the pulling.

  Then two really fast shapes jumped on Jaril and knocked him to the groun
d while a third form came at me. I fired directly into the oncoming form and it hissed in pain but didn't so much stop as slow down just a little. A .45 has a lot of stopping power, and that doesn't go only for humans. Two more bullets in the face, and the vampire coming at me changed his mind and took off into the dark. Whether he meant to come back again once he'd gotten rid of the bullets was a question I didn't have the time to ask.

  Jaril was somehow holding off his two attackers, so I turned just a little and shot one of them in the head. It was something of a surprise to see the female vampire collapse from being shot only once, but the way the second vampire, a male, screamed even before I pulled the trigger again almost made me jump. The scream went on for a good ten seconds before it cut off very abruptly, and then Jaril was getting back to his feet while his attackers lay without moving.

  I didn't know what had happened to stop the two vampires so easily and I didn't want to know. Instead I turned and peered through the dark at the last of our number who was under attack, but Grail wasn't still under attack. One of the three shapes that had jumped him lay stretched out on the ground, and the other two knelt in front of Grail with their heads down. Damned if it didn't look like the two survivors had gone submissive, but I didn't know how that could happen. There was a lot I didn't understand, and even more that I didn't like.

  It looked like the fight was over so I lowered my gun as I glanced around. No one official had come running over to find out what was happening, and that might not be very good. If Wilson had sent some of his people to make sure I didn't "get away," they should have come over as soon as I appeared. Or at least as soon as the trouble started. No appearance might mean no cops left alive, and that really set my insides to twisting. I turned toward Jaril to find out who had sent all these vampires against him and his brother, and that was when the next wave hit.

  But this time it wasn't vampires who were attacking. I didn't know that right at first; all I knew was that someone was jumping straight at me like swimming through the air, and then reflex took over. I bent into a half crouch as my left hand went up, and the swimmer was shoved past me and on the way into the ground behind me head first. As I straightened up again I started to bring the gun around, quietly cursing myself for forgetting I was holding the weapon, and that's when another figure slammed into me.

  Hitting the paved parking lot would have hurt even without a heavy body riding me down. I tried to use the seconds of falling to shoot whoever had slammed into me, but one of the man's hands had closed around my wrist. It wasn't possible to aim the gun at him, and then all thoughts of fighting disappeared behind a blaze of pain. As if being knocked into the ground wasn't bad enough, the man also punched me hard in the side.

  I'd been pretending that the slash in my side from the fight with the ghoul wasn't hurting, but healing faster than normal doesn't mean no pain. Adding to what I'd already been feeling made my vision swim for a few seconds, but even before sight came back I knew what was happening. Two hands had closed around my throat and started to squeeze hard, and if I'd still been human I would have been very quickly dead.

  But I wasn't still human. The gun was gone from my hand, but the hand still worked just the way it was supposed to. The fool trying to snap my neck was bent forward with his effort, so I pushed past all the pain and dizziness also riding me and shoved my palm into his face with all the strength I had left.

  The man screamed as his nose broke and his hands left my throat to protect his face, but he still straddled my body. If he'd been human he probably would have died, but he was also a shapeshifter and that meant he'd be back to his attack as soon as he got over the shock of being hurt. George hovered just behind him, waiting for him to drop his hands and open his eyes, and then he would swirl around the man the way he'd done with the human in the warehouse. But I knew damned well that swirling wasn't going to help this time. My strength was coming back, only not fast enough to do any good.

  And then a large form suddenly appeared next to the shapeshifter straddling me, and even through the haze of pain I knew it was Grail. His lips peeled back from his teeth and fangs in a silent snarl as he reached for the shapeshifter, taking him by the neck in almost the same way the shifter had done to me. The next instant the shifter was off me, and then I heard a snap followed by a sound like a heavy bag of trash being thrown to the ground.

  I heard all those things but I couldn't quite see them. My eyes had closed against the pain as I curled into a ball, a stupid thing to do in the middle of a fight but I couldn't seem to help it. All of me hurt, but my side felt like burning talons were tearing through my flesh.

  Then I felt a hand touch my face, and it seemed like easing flowed out of that hand into and through my body. I thought of the sensation as easing, but the feeling was a lot more complex than that. If I hadn't been wrapped in pain the flow would have felt more than just good, more than an effort to keep me from passing out. What that more would have been I was in no condition to think about, and then the hand left my face and touched my arm instead.

  "Taz, are you all right?" Grail's voice asked. "Can you sit up?"

  I wasn't sure I could sit up, but the hand on my arm was helping so I tried it. I felt more pain than I had earlier in the day, but the easing or whatever it had been made it possible to push the pain back to where it belonged.

  "Is she all right?" the same voice with a very slight difference asked as I took a careful deep breath. "I saw the shifter hit her in the left side, but with two of my own to contend with I couldn't do anything about it."

  "I used my two new servants to handle the shifters who came at me," Grail answered. "She took care of the first shifter who jumped at her, but the second blind-sided her. As soon as I saw she was down I headed over here, but if she hadn't distracted the shifter on top of her I wouldn't have made it in time."

  "Distracted," Jaril said with laugh. "Yes, he was distracted, all right. I can feel some of our people at the very fringes of my spell, so Adele must have called for help when this first started. We ought to have the mess cleaned up in just a little while."

  "What kind of a name is Jaril?" I asked, something I'd wanted to know ever since I first heard the name. Sitting up didn't mean I was ready to stand, but maybe some idle conversation would waste enough time to change that.

  "Originally my name was Garil, with a hard g like in Grail," he answered, now sounding even more amused. "Using an anagram of Grail was our parents' way of giving us the same name, but I never liked the choice. As soon as I could I changed the name to Jaril, which was almost the same idea but seemed to suit me better."

  "Who the hell were those bastards?" I asked, finally looking up to see the two men crouched next to me. Their handsome, masculine faces wore the same expression of concern, an observation helped some by the illumination coming from a nearby lightpole. George hovered behind them, and he gave me an encouraging smile when he saw me looking his way. "And what about the police you said were deployed around here to keep me from running away?" I added. "Are they dead?"

  "No, the police aren't dead," Jaril answered from his place on the right. "The same spell that blindfolded your friend Freemont is keeping the police stationed in the area from knowing anything at all is happening. As far as they're concerned it's a quiet night, without limousines and without attackers."

  "As for why we were attacked, we're not really sure," Grail said. "We have a lot of investigations going on, but none of them suggested an organization large enough to throw these kinds of numbers at us. It's possible we'll get some answers from my new servants, but only if they actually know anything. If they're the equivalent of hired muscle we'll have nothing but a dead end."

  "That's the second time you talked about your 'new servants,'" I said. "I saw the two vampires kneeling in front of you, but I still don't understand how or why."

  "My brother is strong enough to take over the minds of lesser vampires," Jaril said while Grail smiled in a distant, shadowy way. "He has the choice of m
aking them his servants or ending them, and I don't know why he ended one instead of making all three his servants."

  "The third one was insane," Grail supplied, completely unbothered by any of it. "Holding his mind would have been like holding a handful of the grub-infested flesh of a body that was days dead."

  "Couldn't you have just said it was unpleasant?" I asked with one hand to my middle, fighting to keep the Chinese food I'd eaten from coming back up. Heavy pain tends to weaken you in more than one way, a fact I was now learning much too well.

  "I think Taz needs to go back to her room and lie down," Jaril said, and the glance he sent his brother wasn't exactly brotherly. "I'll see her to her door, and by then the others should be close to arriving."

  "I'll stay here and wait for them." Grail didn't look or sound too happy about that, but he obviously wasn't ready to start an argument about it. "Do you need help standing up, Taz?"

  By now I didn't need help, and I proved it by getting to my feet alone. Standing up wasn't fun, but as long as it was possible I decided not to complain. The brothers had straightened up a lot more easily, and Jaril moved a few steps away to pick up my gun and bring it back to hand to me. I took the gun with a nod of thanks, then turned back to the way into the motel.

  I wouldn't have been disappointed if Jaril changed his mind about coming with me, but he didn't. He played silent shadow up the stairs and over to my room, where Freemont waited in the doorway again. Freemont was smart enough to know his limitations, which means he never tried to jump into a serious fight. That was supposed to be my job, but I hadn't done much to cover myself with glory this time.

  "Thank you for your help, Taz," Jaril said as Freemont moved aside to let me in the door. "And thank you, George, for that timely warning. If any of you need to get in touch with us, you can call the number on this card."