Vampire Innocent (Book 9): An Introduction To Paranormal Diplomacy

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Argh. Whatever. ‘Crime against humanity’ is a good way to describe what I’m going to do to those mystics for kidnapping Sophia… twice. I’ve got another minor problem though… Heathrow airport is like all the way across London from the mystics’ bookstore. Flying has become so second nature, not being able to do it at the moment leaves me standing there feeling clueless, staring at a strange building across the street. It’s four stories tall, and each successive story upward is wider than the one below it, like an upside-down ziggurat. Expecting police to show up at any minute, I hoof it to the left, heading east past a bus stop.

  After passing a few large buildings, I follow the sidewalk as it curves left around a massive arrangement of bushes, and keep going into an office park or some such thing. Long, rectangular brick buildings with teal-framed windows surround me on both sides. I go right again at the first opportunity and end up stuck at a dead end due to a metal gate blocking the way into a car park.

  Grr.

  I head to the right, jogging across a parking lot, then slip through bushes and end up back on the same street our hotel was on, only farther down in front of a Radisson hotel. There’s a Marriot then a Sheraton all in a row, then some smaller building surrounded by trees and a round Holiday Inn.

  It’s going to take me forever to get to the bookstore on foot. The only reason I’m not thoroughly going nuts is knowing the mystics aren’t actively trying to hurt Sophia. They’re not exactly protecting her either, but their goal isn’t to harm her. Giving a kid the magical version of a handgun and sending them into a paranormal warzone falls somewhere between child endangerment and ‘wtf is wrong with you?’ Still, they don’t want her to get hurt. I only need to find her before she makes an error, not before someone alive does something horrible to her.

  If the police get me, I’ll feed them a bogus story about someone grabbing me from behind with chloroform or something and waking up in London not knowing how I got here. Wait, no. They’ll go all ‘kicked hornet nest’ trying to figure out who did it. Maybe staying silent and trying to call the Persons In Black would be my best bet.

  Yeah, I’ll try that if I get picked up by the cops.

  Not sure why the idea of police scares me so much. I haven’t done anything wrong… except enter a country without a passport.

  Think, Sarah, think.

  I’m out in the daytime and need to go all the way across London. Don’t have enough cash for a taxi. Hmm. Do they have Uber in London?

  Out comes my phone.

  Wow, they do!

  Sorry, Mom. Gotta use the account.

  Hold on while I use the power of the internet to summon a total stranger, who I will then get in the car with. Should be completely safe, right? Damn. I hate being scared again. At the moment, I’m no more dangerous than a slightly undersized teenager. If the Universe decides to send me a total creep, I could be in big trouble. But Sophia’s in danger. No choice but to roll those dice. My mind races over all the stuff I used to read about how to survive as a young woman alone. Scream. Make noise. Go for the eyes. Creeps are looking for easy targets. If the Uber driver does anything shady, I’ll go thermonuclear.

  A minute or so later, I get a pop up on my phone from the Uber app—it’s a photo of a skinny blonde guy with a huge smile. Trevor. He looks maybe twenty-three, and I’d bet money he’s not going to be interested in me at all. Just a feeling from looking at him.

  Cool.

  I hit the button to confirm I still need a ride.

  Maybe fifteen minutes later, a little green car matching the photo rolls up. Trevor’s behind the wheel. I run over and hop in the passenger seat—which feels like the driver’s side.

  “Hi, Trevor?” I show him the Uber app on my screen.

  “Aye. Allison?”

  “No, Sarah. Account’s in my mom’s name.”

  “You’re American?”

  “Yeah. Obvious, huh?”

  “Little bit. Least ya didn’t try to open my door. Last Yank I had got in behind the wheel while I loaded ’her bags in the back.”

  I chuckle.

  “Only, she kept sitting there, like she didn’t know what to do.” He pulls out into traffic. “Had this look on ’er like, blimey, there’s this giant round thing in my face, no idea what the bloody hell it is. Just ignore it.”

  “Hah. So what did you do?”

  “Got in on your side, waited. Lady looks at me, so’s I say whenever you’re ready. Key’s already in it. She looks at me, looks at the wheel, back at me. Then goes, ‘your car’s broken.’”

  I laugh in spite of my worries over Sophia.

  “Somethin’ wrong? Ya look out of sorts.”

  “My story is too crazy to believe. I’m not a morning person. Real ditzy and groggy if I have to get out of bed too early. So I’m at the airport. I get on the wrong plane. Fall asleep. Wake up halfway across the ocean.”

  “Wow. They not scan your ticket?”

  “No, I just kinda walked with the crowd. Maybe they assumed the guy next to me was my father or something. It’s like a total freak series of events. My parents know the guy who owns this bookstore. I’m gonna spend the night there and fly home in the morning. Sorry if I’m a little freaked out. Not used to being so far from home.”

  “Gotta be rough. What’re ya bout seventeen?”

  I blink at him. Holy crap. He’s like the first person in the world not to assume I’m fourteen-to-sixteen. Maybe because we’re sitting next to each other in a car and about the same height. Or, he’s not looking at me the way most guys do. He still de-aged me by a year, but pff. What’s one year? Either way, points for Trevor.

  We talk on the ride, him telling me about his post-grad studies working toward becoming a dentist. The guy’s certainly personable enough. Except for the reason I’m here and all the supernatural stuff, I share some honest information about my school plans, classes, and lack of a social life.

  Finally, he pulls over in a familiar street next to the dry cleaner’s place. I thank him for the ride, click in a decent tip on the app, and get out of the car, standing there until he drives away. Then, I glare at the bookstore.

  It’s open at this hour, but doesn’t appear to have any customers. Perfect.

  I walk in, heading right for the back room. Asher blindsides me, seemingly appearing from thin air out of a gap between shelves on my right. His sudden appearance startles me to a halt. The look on his face says he wasn’t expecting to see me either.

  “Where is she?!” I yell, and attempt to slam him into the nearest shelf.

  Attempt being the operative word.

  Hello, Universe. I’m an ordinary person right now.

  He braces a hand on the shelf, largely ignoring my two-fisted grip of his orangey-brown turtleneck. Furious, I keep trying to fling him to the floor without success while screaming various things like ‘where is she,’ ‘what did you do with my sister,’ and several other less polite phrasings. He spins me around, my back to his chest, and scoops me off my feet, pinning my arms against my chest. I grunt, straining to escape his hold as he carries me toward the back room. I haven’t been manhandled like this in a while.

  The last time a tall, muscular guy carried me somewhere against my will, I’d been kinda laughing about it. One of Michelle’s non-romantic guy friends from high school helped her insist I join them at a party. He jokingly carried me out to the car.

  Asher, however, isn’t joking.

  And wait… no. The last time someone carried me somewhere against my will, I ended up handcuffed in a dungeon cell under a night club. Dammit! I’m pinned too tight to bite his arm. Too close for my feet or knees to find his balls, and he’s got my wrists pinned together against my chest. I keep growling and demanding to know what they did to Sophia all the way into the back room and down to the basement.

  Boy, did he just screw up.

  Unlike Abaddon, this building does not have windows in the basement.

  The instant we’re far enough away from daylight
for me to come online, I overpower his hold on me and spin, grabbing him one-handed by the throat and shoving him against the wall. Red light from my glowing eyes tints the cinderblocks on either side of his head. While I could lift him off his feet, doing so would prevent him from speaking.

  “Where. Is. Sophia?” His mind is still closed off from me, which only infuriates me into growling again, but now I sound like an angry mountain lion, not a harmless kid.

  “She’s not here.”

  I increase pressure on his throat. “Where did you send her?”

  “We haven’t done anything other than facilitate your initial arrival.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Asher closes his eyes in the expression of a resigned sigh.

  The redhead woman and the Indian guy run into view at the end of the short corridor, staring at us. Both start raising their hands like wizards about to throw fireballs, but Asher waves them off.

  “Sophia vanished out of a locked hotel room. She did not wander off in her nightgown. Like twenty minutes later, her clothes disappeared off the chair. You expect me to believe you didn’t grab her again?”

  Asher holds his left hand up, showing off a wide dark copper ring engraved with an intricate weave of black lines. Appropriately enough, it’s on his middle finger. “Nothing I say will change your mind, so you’ll need to look for yourself.”

  “Nice try, but you know I can’t see into your head.”

  “A moment.” He removes the ring, though it takes a bit of twisting before it slips off. “Try now.”

  I hang my head for a second and sigh. “Seriously. Does everyone have mind-shielding trinkets?”

  He offers a faint smile. “Its primary purpose is not against your kind, but darker spirits. A coincidence their means of exploiting the mental faculties of mortals so mirrors yours. Many within the Aurora Aurea seek to shield themselves from such invasion.”

  Hmm. The guys back in Seattle don’t have magic rings.

  I peer into his head, this time having no difficulty. The foremost concept rattling around his prefrontal cortex is the recent death of Martin Collier—the tall guy with the tall face who’d been among the eight when they dragged us through the portal. A shawarma cart went rolling downhill out of control after its handle snapped off in the owner’s grip. It managed not to strike a whole bunch of other pedestrians, bounced down a stairwell into a subway station, caromed off a wall, and crashed into Martin, hurling him forward into the path of an oncoming train.

  Street meat went everywhere.

  “Wow… I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “To what exactly?” asks Asher.

  The redhead and the Indian man—Anna Riordan and Keval Patel according to Asher’s thoughts—walk closer, looking at me like a pair of cops about to attempt their first hostage negotiation.

  “Martin…”

  “Oh. Yes. You see what sort of situation we’re in. Have you found anything about your sister?”

  I focus again on his head. He’s thoroughly convinced Sophia can destroy the spirit he calls Fletcher Maltby. He, too, is alarmed at her disappearing, and really didn’t have anything to do with magical abduction number two.

  “Damn…” I let go of his neck. The red light in my eyes fades along with my anger at him. “Sorry.”

  The face of Martin Collier hangs in my mind. Ironically, I remember him protesting their grabbing Sophia without warning or asking. The one person among them who voiced an objection to them forcibly relocating my kid sister to London is dead. Maybe he wouldn’t have died if not for me dragging Sophia out of here and trying to go home. I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. No reasonable person with a younger sibling to take care of would’ve been like, ‘oh sure, let’s take this child and charge head-first into a dangerous situation.’

  I shouldn’t feel guilty… but I kinda do.

  Anna and Keval relax now that their leader’s no longer in the potentially fatal grip of an angry vampire. Asher puts his ring back on.

  To distract myself from Martin’s death and Sophia being lost without any trace, I half-ass a humorous tone. “Great. So everyone gets a mind block item. Mystics… vampire hunters. Makes my life difficult.”

  “The hunter you speak of likely has a more specific artifact focused solely on your kind. Our warding magic is a general protection spell. Older vampires can often penetrate it.” Asher puts a hand on my shoulder. “We are responsible for Sophia being in whatever situation she’s in. I and my lodge mates will do everything we can to find her.”

  It’s easy to think ‘yeah, sure you will,’ but they do have a strong motivation to locate her. I just know if they’re able to find her and get her back, it’s going to turn into a guilt leverage situation. Would it make me a bitch to still refuse to let her go after this spirit after they find her? If they find her. I’m getting ahead of myself, but I really don’t want to think about any other potential ending to Sophia missing.

  “If you guys didn’t grab her this time, where the heck did she go?”

  “We can’t answer that yet.” Anna nudges me with a plastic bag. “We need to locate her first.”

  I glance down at the bag dangling from two of her fingers. “What’s this?”

  “Her things.”

  “What?” I take the bag and peer into it. Clothes, shoes, earrings, a fabric anklet. “Oh.”

  Anna grimaces. “Apologies for any awkwardness it caused. We had not intended to steal all her possessions.”

  “I know. You wanted to steal her. She was in the bathroom at school when it happened. It took her a while to stop freaking out enough to think of creating an illusion of an outfit.”

  Asher blinks, looking impressed. “I take by your tone this illusion was indistinguishable from real clothing?”

  “Other than it leaving her freezing all day, yeah.”

  “Amazing,” whispers Keval. “It took me six years of study to be able to conjure illusions without them glowing or being transparent.”

  “Umm, yeah. Soph had some pretty strong motivation to get it right.”

  “Come…” Asher gestures down the hall, then walks off.

  I follow them into the same room where we first appeared.

  The others pause in their work at the long tables along the walls on either side to look at us. Asher introduces the white-haired teen as Mindy Carlin, the Chinese guy as Wing Tang, the man I mistook for Hispanic as Rafi Ismail, and the ‘schoolteacher’ woman as Leslie Elliot. Mindy’s still giving off fear vibes, but also some new hostility. Since I know she doesn’t have a brain condom on, we lock stares. Yeah, she blames me for Martin’s death. Guess she’s still an apprentice or whatever and hasn’t earned her warding ring yet. Leslie also appears to blame me for Martin, but doesn’t give me an accusing stare. She glances away, head bowed, trying to make my guilt worse.

  Wing and Rafi, at least if I’m reading their body language right, don’t hold wanting to protect Sophia against me.

  “I’m sorry about Martin,” I say, my voice quiet. “Sophia’s only ten. She didn’t even know magic existed until two months ago. Something tries to kidnap her from school, then weird light things attack us at home… then we’re sucked through her closet into a ring of people in black robes. Maybe it is true her link to the soul jar gives her the ability to control this spirit, but I hope you can understand why I tried to protect her.”

  Leslie closes her eyes, sighing out her nose.

  “Yes.” Wing sets a beaker of green liquid on the table and walks up to me. “Martin was right. We should not have taken it upon ourselves to bring her here without asking.”

  “You want us to consider your reaction from your point of view…” Mandy shifts her weight back, away from me. “Think about it from ours. This thing is hunting us. We can’t do anything to stop it. We’ve tried. Used ta be fourteen of us. Now seven. We figure out what’s happening, and know the one who opened the soul jar can bugger this thing off easy as pie, what would you do in our place?”
>
  “Maybe easy as pie for you, but she’s a kid.” I rake my hands up over my head, close to ripping my hair out from anxiety and frustration.

  “A child who, mere weeks after discovering she has the gift, creates an illusion stable enough to fool people in close proximity—and keep it going for hours,” says Asher.

  “You can Obi-Wan all you like about how special she is, but she’s still a child. She’s never once used magic to hurt or attack anything.” I flail my arms. “What is she supposed to even do?”

  “We would teach her how to banish spirits. It is not terribly advanced.” He exhales hard. “Alas, we must focus on finding her first.”

  “What?” asks Mandy. “Where’d she go?”

  “Unknown.” Asher glances at me.

  I re-explain waking up to find her gone, searching for a while, then noticing her clothing vanished. “Someone or something took her the same way you guys tried to at the school. Only, they didn’t miss.”

  “We will attempt to divine her location.” Anna Riordan jogs over to one of the huge tables and begins collecting bowls and jars. “This will take a little while.”

  “Great,” I whisper. “All I’ve got is time.”

  I spend the next forty minutes or so upstairs in the bookstore on the phone with my parents.

  Dad’s ready to drive Mom to Boeing, steal a plane, and head straight to London. His plan has two major problems aside from the closest he’s ever come to being a pilot is playing flight simulator video games as a teenager. One, Sierra and Sam can’t be left home alone. Two, if he somehow managed to steal an airplane, get it off the ground with enough fuel to make it here, and did so, he’d certainly be arrested the instant he landed.

  I’m three minutes into trying to talk him out of the idea when he starts shouting over me about not being serious. Wow, I’m beside myself with anxiety. Somehow, I manage not to fall to pieces and cry. Maybe the magical element to her disappearance twists it enough not to seem as real or as serious.

  While he’s not going to steal an airplane, Dad does plan to go interrogate Darren Anderson and the other mystics at the Brass Tap. He might try to make contact with Glim again, too. Shadows have a way when it comes to gathering information. Mom is scarily calm. Her lack of shouting or crying when told I’ve lost track of Sophia tells me she’s gone into focus mode. Usually when she gets like this, opposing counsel ends up with a drinking problem, insomnia, or both.