“Well, that was interesting,” Sam said. “Are you two all right?”
Josh dissolved his shield, and the flames disappeared. I noted there were scorch marks on the floor where he had stepped. “Yeah, I’m fine. Erin?” He knelt down beside me.
“Just the leg. It really hurts.”
“Did you pull any stitches?” Sam asked, coming to join us. “Let me see.”
My modesty was the last thing I was worried about. “I don’t think so,” I said, as I undid my belt and pulled my jeans down so he could see my leg. He pulled the gauze off, which showed the leg was swollen around the wound and seeping a little, but the stitches held.
“Let me get something for you,” Sam said, rising and walking around behind the bar.
Once there, he stopped, hands on hips, and surveyed the damage I had done. “Oh, my. That bar is a hundred and forty years old, and pfft! Gone in an instant.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. At a hundred dollars a week out of your check, you should be able to pay it off by the time you’re a grandmother.”
The look on my face was evidently priceless, because Sam and Josh broke out laughing.
Sam came back around the bar holding a little jar of cream and a vial. “Of course, if you can dream up a lie my insurance company will swallow, I’ll let you off the hook.”
He handed me the vial, and I sucked down its contents as he began dabbing the cream on my leg.
I motioned toward Schottner’s body. “We’ll blame it on the thief with the big sword.”
“Aye, that will probably work.”
“And after he damaged the bar, he cut off his own leg,” Josh said. “Man was deranged.”
Sam called the police. We covered Schottner’s body with a sheet from upstairs, then Sam let our employees and a few of the customers waiting outside in to collect their belongings. Then he hung a ‘closed’ sign on the front door, the first time he had done that in my four months in Westport.
“You know, Sam, she didn’t break the rules,” Josh said, pointing to the sign hanging at one end of the bar. “He didn’t order anything, let alone pay.”
Sam chuckled. “Being the owner, I have some discretion on enforcing the rules, but you’re right, he wasn’t a paying customer.”
Dan Bailey and Cindy Mackle showed up about five minutes after the crowd outside disbursed. Other than the kitchen staff, who were performing the unaccustomed task of turning everything off and putting everything away, only Sam, Josh, and I were left to receive them. Frankie Jones arrived ten minutes later.
“That’s the guy from Winslow’s,” Bailey said. “The one your friend showed us in her projection. You’re lucky he didn’t bring all his friends.”
Josh shrugged. “We had it covered. He messed with the wrong people. I had a full circle of mages augmenting my shields, and there was a full circle of witches outside at each exit waiting for him if he escaped.”
“Wet, cold witches,” Sam said. “Believe me, he got off easy.”
A search of Schottner’s body turned up a Minnesota driver’s license—not in Fritz Schottner’s name, although the picture was him—a cell phone, a set of keys to a rental car, and a keycard for a local hotel.
“If all of his buddies are staying there, you might have a fight on your hands if you try to search the place,” I said.
Frankie looked thoughtful. “I wish your mages and witches had stuck around.”
“We can put together a force if you need it,” Sam said. “It would be better if we plan it for tomorrow. Have all our ducks in a row and get the right people together.”
“Just like that?” Frankie asked.
Steve Dworkin stuck his head out of the kitchen, a scowl on his face. “This is a safe place, and no one screws with that and gets away with it.”
Josh gave me a ride home. His dhampir girlfriend Arabella had waited around for him, and the three of us walked to the parking lot of the nightclub down the street to get his car.
“I heard that you might join the police force,” I said as I got in his car.
“Considering it. Why?”
“I think you have just what they need. Josh Carpenter, you are a total badass.”
He beamed. “Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment. What about you? Did Frankie tempt you with a truckload of money?”
I shook my head. “I turned her down. I really don’t want to spend my life fighting and killing people. I want to travel and have a quiet little house with a white picket fence to come home to.”
“Family? Kids?” Arabella asked, and I thought I detected a wistful note in her voice. Dhampir were genetic mules, and she would never have children. She and Josh had been dating since they first met, and seemed to be very happy with each other. I was still trying to get all the names, faces, and hair colors of the dhampir matched and settled in my mind. Arabella was a redhead, like Josh, and actually looked more likely to be his sister than Jolene did, with her dark auburn hair and short stature.
The question embarrassed me, and I wasn’t sure why. “I don’t know. Maybe someday. I’ve never really thought about it.” Seeing as how I had zero experience or understanding of what a family was, I didn’t know if I wanted one or not. I’d never even held a baby.
Josh pulled up in front of my apartment building, “Get some sleep. We’ll call you when we get together to organize things.”
As I got ready for bed, my phone rang. It was Shawna, and I wondered if having a vampire friend was a good thing. She was just getting off work and heading out to have fun when I was going to sleep.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Heard you had some excitement at Rosie’s.”
“Nothing major,” I said. “One of our local Hunters stopped in and tried to cut my head off. How about you? Anything new?”
I heard her laugh through the phone. “Damn, you have all the luck. The most exciting thing that happens to me at work is when someone actually leaves a tip.”
That reminded me of Frankie. “Do I hear a note of discouragement with your present lot in life?” I asked. “Interested in finding a more exciting job?”
“Why? Looking for help at Rosie’s?” she responded. “I’m not sure the clientele would be very welcoming of a bloodsucking waitress.”
“Naw, more exciting, better pay. Assistant DA Francis Jones is looking for investigators. All paranormals and supernaturals welcome to apply.”
Her laugh was much louder than before. “A vampire cop? That would be a first.”
“Give her a call. Probably better in the early evening.” I gave her Frankie’s phone number.
There was a pause, then, “You’re serious?”
“Tell her you’re my friend from Willard’s Green. Use Detective Sergeant Dan Bailey as a reference.”
A longer pause. “You are crazy, you know that?”
“The possibility has occurred to me.”
Chapter 21
Expecting to have a busy and dangerous day, I showered, braided my hair, and dressed in my Hunter’s clothes. Instead of a balaclava or a cowl with a veil, I tied a red scarf over my hair and put on a pink belt. I didn’t want to be mistaken for the enemy.
Lizzy had given me the belt as a joke. I once asked her if she really liked pink, a color I had always avoided.
“Do you like black?” she asked in response. “If you don’t, you can always pour a gallon of peroxide on your hair, bleach it out, and then color it any color you like. Hair dye rolls off my hair like water from a duck. So, I’m kind of stuck. I can either shoot myself or love pink. And suicide would deprive the world of my talent, my wit, and my joie de vivre.”
“Gotcha. Pink,” I said.
“You betcha. Pink.”
I figured I was guaranteed to be the only person wearing pink, so if I got hit by friendly fire, it would be on purpose.
But after I finished tucking away my weapons, it wasn’t Josh but Sam who came by to pick me up. He showed up at the do
or downstairs, and I buzzed him in.
“Coffee or tea?” I asked when he reached my apartment.
“Ah, a cuppa tea would be nice. Wanted to talk to you before we launch ourselves into a perilous situation.”
I fixed us each a cup of tea and brought the cups into the living room.
“Josh said that the gentleman last night recognized you, that you knew each other.”
I sat down and said, “Yes. Fritz Schottner, known as Bear. I’ve known him since I was fourteen. He was a ley line mage, like me, like Liam. He was one of my primary trainers when I first came to the Illuminati, teaching me how to control and contain my magic.”
“But you weren’t friends.” Sam stated that, not as a question.
“No. Schottner was an old-school Hunter, well over a hundred years old. And I’m just a girl, not suited to be one of his mates. He was an enforcer for Master Rudolf, who was second-in-command of the Hunters’ Guild. And Rudolf never liked me.”
I stood up and walked to the sliding glass door of the balcony and looked out over the creek and the park below. The next part was hard, something I’d never told anyone, and never really thought about until I left the Illuminati.
“Fritz was one of the men who took my virginity. I was sixteen, and they told me it was part of my training. He continued to train me in his own unique way until I reached eighteen and could tell him no.”
“One of the men?” I could hear an incredulous note in Sam’s voice.
“There were three of them. I don’t know which one was first. It was a long night, and I guess I’ve sort of blocked the memory.”
I turned around to face him, not knowing what I would find in his face. I saw anger rather than disgust, and I relaxed a bit.
“Well, I guess that answers the question of why you’re so choosy about men,” Sam said. “I didn’t know if it was because the Illuminati were prudes or something else.”
He caught me off guard, and I barked out a laugh. “No, they definitely weren’t prudes, and they didn’t have any taboos concerning a girl’s age. Or a boy’s, for that matter. We were expected to accommodate the masters. Trainees were basically servants, and we provided any service they asked. Now, Schottner wasn’t a master, but it would have been dangerous to piss him off. Easier to go along. Training accidents were all too common.”
Sam shook his head and sipped his tea. I sat back down and sipped mine.
“You mentioned a Master Rudolf. Is he still alive?”
“So I’ve been told. I don’t know if he’s here in Westport. When Gabriel Laurent killed Rodrick Barclay, he told me Rudolf was in Washington, D.C. Then David Cunningham said that Rudolf killed his sister in Washington not too long ago, but that was before all these Hunters started showing up in Westport. If we take out the men he sent here…” I shrugged. “There’s too much we don’t know. What I can tell you is that Rudolf is far more dangerous than the rest of them put together.”
“How so?”
“Rudolf, like most of the other members of the Illuminati Council, is a blood mage. He’s more than three hundred years old and doesn’t look half that age. They extended their lives through rituals involving human sacrifice. I have no idea what it would be like to face a mage that powerful in battle.” I realized what I’d just said and figured I should clarify. “Sam, I didn’t know about the blood magic and the sacrifices. Finding out about that was part of what prompted me to leave.”
We finished our tea, and I took the cups to the kitchen and washed them. “So, what are we doing?”
Sam, Josh, Jolene and I, along with a dozen witches and mages, joined Dan Bailey and the cops of the Paranormal Crimes Unit for a planning session. I recognized about half of the people from Rosie’s, but they all seemed to know each other.
The PCU had determined that Fritz Schottner had a room at the Western Star Hotel on the edge of downtown and put the hotel under surveillance.
“As far as we can tell,” Bailey told us, “no one else who might fit the descriptions of the Hunters we know about is staying at the hotel. Some of the hotel personnel recognized Schottner’s photo, but Cindy talked to several of the maids, and they said his bed wasn’t always slept in.”
That made sense to me. I’d been trained to avoid patterns of behavior during an active operation that could be used to find me or predict my movements. As I’d told Lizzy, the Illuminati were paranoid.
In addition to the hotel, they were also watching Harland Hall, Feldman’s residence, and an old country club property a couple of miles from Michaela’s sword and golf club. But the PCU was stretched, and the cops were pleased to have mages volunteering to help with their surveillance.
We brainstormed ideas for more than three hours. Even Josh, who had a tendency to be a hothead, wasn’t in favor of ending up dead. Once we agreed that we had two things on our side—magic and numbers—a plan started to come together.
I was impressed with the way Bailey took charge, and how he organized things. He showed everyone a map and the floorplan of the hotel and gave each team a keycard to the hotel’s entrances and Schottner’s room.
The final plan was something I hadn’t considered when people first started talking about taking the Hunters down. I figured we were going to storm in, fireballs a blazing, and fight them toe to toe. We knew that might still be what would happen, but a smarter, less violent approach appealed to me.
According to the plan, Sam, Josh, Jolene, and I drew the watch on the hotel later that evening along with a couple of PCU detectives I didn’t know.
We arrived at the hotel as the sun was setting over the horizon in the west. It was cold and clear with a bone-chilling breeze coming in off the ocean. We went in to talk to the day shift and to relieve them.
“We just saw a man who resembled one of the photos we were given,” one of the dayshift cops said. “He went in and took the elevator to the tenth floor. We’ve already called Sergeant Bailey.” He showed us some surveillance pictures, and I recognized Gavin Edmundson right away.
The hotel sat next to a small park, with other tall buildings on the other three sides. The front entrance faced a busy street with a number of office buildings. I had been in it before, when I rescued Jolene from Gabriel Laurent after David kidnapped her, so it was easy for me to visualize the inside of Schottner’s suite when Bailey showed us the layout at the meeting.
We circled around the hotel, and when we got to the corner of the building below Schottner’s suite, Sam lifted off and drifted upward along the hotel’s outside wall. I didn’t know he could fly. Once again, I found myself envious of other mages having an affinity. I wondered if Frankie could fly, too.
Josh chuckled. “He looks like a mini blimp.”
Jolene and I lost it, laughing so hard that it brought tears to my eyes. Sam was a large man, in all directions, and the description was so apt.
“Isn’t that a sight?” Dan Bailey said. “I wonder if we’ll get any UFO reports?” I turned to see him approaching with a couple of other cops and a couple of civilian witches, one of whom Sam had told me was a healer.
After ten minutes, Sam settled back to earth and reported to Bailey and the rest of us.
“Edmundson is in the room on this corner,” Sam said, pointing to the right side of the building. “He’s searching the place and packing things up. My guess is that someone tipped him off that Schottner isn’t coming back.”
We entered the hotel through a side door and started up the stairs. After we passed, the PCU cops blocked off the stairwells and elevators. By the time we hit the fifth-floor landing, my leg was aching, and I wished Schottner had skipped a room with a view.
When we arrived on the tenth floor and caught our breaths, Sam reported over a police radio that Edmundson was still in the room. The people in charge discussed things and made the decision to open the room and surprise him.
Nine years of living with the Illuminati had taught me not only caution but paranoia. As confident as I was in dealing with a v
ampire, or even other mages, I had a healthy respect for how much damage a Hunter could do in a very short amount of time. Without Josh, I wasn’t sure I could have taken Schottner, and I’d failed to best Edmundson in our previous encounter.
My shield powered to the max, I nodded to Bailey. He slipped the keycard into its slot, the lock clicked, and I pushed the door open with my foot.
The room was empty within my line of sight. The shades were drawn back, and through the windows, I could see the sun setting into the ocean in a spectacular light show.
A mini tornado hit me and blew me backwards through the closed door of the room behind me. Stunned, I lay there on a crushed table amid the door’s splinters and shards. If not for my shield, my bones would have been just as broken.
There was a lot of noise in the hall, and I heard a crashing sound. When I tried to sit up, my head spun, and the contents of my stomach threatened to come up, so I lay back down. I knew from experience that a shield would protect my body from outward harm, but not from my brain bouncing around inside my skull. It had been a while since I had a concussion, but the symptoms were all too familiar.
I heard movement in the room I was in, and when I raised my head, I saw the healer crawling toward me, his image blurry and shifting. I slowly let my head fall back and let my shield go.
He peeled back one of my eyelids, then the other. “Are you conscious?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Head.”
“Do you hurt anywhere else?”
“No.”
“Do you feel nauseous?”
“Yes.”
He placed his hands on either side of my head, and I felt cool seep into my head. Like the feeling when I walked into an air-conditioned room from outside on a hot day. I hadn’t really noticed that I had a headache. A massive headache. But I did notice it go away.
After a few minutes, he took his hands away, then put one hand under my head and lifted it.
Dark Dancer (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 3) Page 16