by D. N. Hoxa
“I just fill my nostrils with this delicious smell instead.” Frosty once again raised his glass to me. The scent of rust coming off it said that the blood was fresh from a human, no doubt one of the people right outside.
“Quite a crowd you’ve got out there. All willing?” It wouldn’t surprise me if those people were being manipulated into staying and providing blood for Frosty’s vamps. After all, vampires weren’t known to be noble supernaturals.
“Trust me, very willing. We offer them a good deal. Good pay, lots of privileges, and—”
“The promise to be turned into a bloodsucker by the end of their services,” I said, grinning. “That’s if they prove themselves worthy. Am I right?”
Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. The only kind of supernatural that could be made were vampires. The rest had to be born with their powers. Of course people were going to stick to vamps and consider themselves lucky to be able to. The sun just didn’t have too much appeal to people when they had the option of immortality.
“Right as rain,” said Frosty and swallowed a mouthful of blood.
“I get that you’re enjoying your lunch, but I’d rather we got to work. Time’s wasting. Where do we start?”
“Most of my vampires live here in these four buildings. The rest come and go, but never for too long. All thirty vampires were taken from this place.” He waved his index finger around us. “I’m going to show you around the place and point out where the missing vampires were last seen. I haven’t let anybody in those rooms, but I’ve already checked everything and not a trace was left behind. No magic, no nothing.”
No wonder the area was filled with spells. Frosty had no doubt doubled his security, though knowing Samayan, he would be prepared for everything. No spell was going to stop him if he really wanted all the female vampires of this independent coven unless we figured out what he wanted with them.
“I’ve taken most out of here, and the ones that stayed behind are to always be in the company of three males. I’ve taken all the measures I could think of, and there haven’t been any disappearing in the past week.”
You couldn’t exactly call Frosty proud of that statement, but he did look like that made him feel better about himself.
“Sorry to disappoint, but there’s not much you can do to stop him.” Spells could be strong, but they were never indestructible. “Tell me about the first vampire that went missing.”
Frosty nodded. “Mauve. She’s older than me. Her master’s long dead. She’s the strongest female we have. Helped me run this place from day one.”
“So she lived here.”
“Her room is right next to mine. She went up for a change of clothes two weeks ago, and she never came back. No sign of a struggle in her room or anywhere else. This whole room couldn’t take her against her will if they tried, which was what bothered me.”
“A spell,” I said. It was the only explanation.
“I don’t think so. Her mind’s too strong. She would’ve been able to resist any spell easily.”
So the vampire had been really strong. Being able to dodge a spell or resist it required incredible mental power. No other supernatural could do it, not even me. Only vampires. The control they had over their minds was their strongest suit—that is, when they weren’t starving for blood or hunting.
“Poison?”
“Could be,” Frosty said. “Yeah, probably.”
“Take me to her room first,” I said and eyed the still half-filled glass in his hands. We really needed to get to work.
“Like I said, nothing in there.” But Frosty did swallow the rest of the blood in one gulp and jumped to his feet. Finally.
“I’m not looking for signs of struggle. I’m looking for anything that could tell me why she was the first to go.”
He led me back to the blue door, always checking the tinted windows to see if there was any sunshine outside, I guessed.
“Because she was the strongest,” Frosty said.
“And independent. Masterless. Unlikely to cause any trouble, if you knew her as well as you think you do.”
The thing was that people didn’t just get picked. They almost always did something to fall under someone’s radar. If all Mauve did was help Frosty run a coven of independent vampires, she wasn’t important enough to be kidnapped. Samayan had plenty of strong vampires, probably stronger than Mauve. I was almost willing to bet my life that she did something. Possessed something. Was something Frosty knew nothing about, and that made her a target. If I could figure out what that was, I could figure out why she was taken. If I had that information, figuring out where she was being held, if she was even still alive, would be a walk in the park.
“I did know her well enough,” Frosty insisted.
Through the corner of my eye, I could see his jaw clenching. Would you look at that? Seemed like Mauve was more than a partner to Frosty. Which immediately took my mind to Aaron, and my stomach fell. Shit. I should’ve cleared this fucking suspicion before I left. It was like darkness, spreading inside my mind like a plague.
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
He took us inside the third building, right across from the one we were in. The restaurant was pretty much the same, except it was larger. Much larger. The windows were tinted so that even if the sun fell right on them, it wouldn’t get through. Though the space was larger, there wasn’t a single vampire in there. The place was completely deserted, or so I thought.
Until Frosty showed me a hidden set of stairs behind the bar. Turning on my senses was out of the question. I didn’t want to feel like a bloodsucker. I followed him two stories up. The place was a lot bigger than I expected. Each floor had ten doors, which I could only guess opened to rooms. On the second, Frosty took us to the very end of the hallway and unlocked the plain wooden door with a set of golden colored keys.
Did I say plain wooden? It looked like I was mistaken. The door alone had at least three layers, and one of them looked to be pure iron. The other two, I couldn’t figure. I was willing to bet that the walls had the same layers, too.
“Special isolation for our hearing,” Frosty said when he caught me looking.
I’d figured that much. Everybody would have been able to hear everybody else in their rooms, and nobody wanted that. Especially knowing how vampires were about sex.
The room was wide and spacious, tastefully decorated with dark purple. It was obviously a chick’s room. No man would have a large mirror and a pretty white dresser on top of which stood at least thirty bottles of perfume and lots of makeup. The smell in the air was fantastic, too. I could only guess from which of those pretty bottles it had come.
“This is it.” Frosty’s hands were clenched in tight fists as if he was uncomfortable being up there. If he and Mauve were lovers, I could imagine why.
Everything looked in place, except for a pair of leather pants and a nice button up green shirt laid on the king-sized bed to our right. He’d been right: there were no signs of struggle. Not one thing out of its place.
“Windows?” I asked, though he had probably checked.
“All closed and intact. It was like the kidnapper walked in, took her, and walked right out again.”
“Unlikely. Somebody would have seen him. Or them.” If Mauve was as strong as Frosty said she was, a single man wouldn’t have been able to take her out. Unless Samayan himself had come, which was unlikely.
So that led us back to my first theory. Someone had poisoned Mauve.
“I keep thinking, she wasn’t stupid. On the contrary. Even if somebody did poison her, how did they manage to do that?” Frosty said, his eyes to the floor. It pained him to be there, it seemed.
“There are a lot of ways to go about poisoning if you set your mind to it. Can you close the door?” Maybe, if the isolation was good enough, it would prevent me from feeling everyone in the building when I turned my senses on. Frosty did as I asked without a word, and with a deep breath, I opened up to the room.
My senses washed over every inch of the space in seconds. The isolation did wonders, but I could still feel at least four others on the floor with us. Not too much, so I focused on what I could pick up from Mauve’s room.
There was magic in the air, I was certain of it. I just wasn’t sure what kind. It was impossible to pick up on it, so I tried the clothes thrown on the bed. I touched them, even smelled them, in hopes of picking up something. I touched her stuff like a weirdo, but not one thing sent my senses into overdrive or defined the kind of magic that was so obviously contained in the air of the room. Shit. I hated to feel like I’d failed.
“Take me where the last vampire was kidnapped. The traces of the magic have to be stronger there.” And I would probably be able to pick up on something. Anything. Before I began to doubt even my sensing ability…
“The last one was taken from the toilet in the first building. I don’t think you’ll be able to find anything there. Too much traffic”—Frosty flinched—“but the one before is just a floor below.”
I’d already turned for the door when it opened abruptly. It nearly hit me in the face. The vampire in front of me, a male no older than myself, had his eyes wide and his chin quivering. He looked at me for a second before turning to Frosty.
“It-it-it’s Addy and Kirsten,” he said in a breath, his voice breaking.
The next second, Frosty was right in front of him, their noses almost touching. This was not good.
“What about Addy and Kirsten?” the vampire said through gritted teeth.
“They’re here. Outside. On the ground,” the other said.
Frosty turned to me, his eyes silver, his fangs touching his chin. “Let’s go.”
He disappeared before I could ask what the hell was going on. “Goddamn it,” I cursed under my breath and ran down the stairs, ignoring the other vampire who seemed to be stuck by the door.
Once I made it out of the restaurant, it wasn’t hard to figure out where Frosty had gone. The massive crowd that had gathered at the entrance of the alley made me run as fast as I could towards them. When I did, I wished I hadn’t.
Two vampires, almost completely drained of blood, lay on the sidewalk, their limbs broken in weird angles. Everyone could see them, and for whatever reason, I was a hundred percent sure that that’s what Samayan had intended by putting them there.
Everybody stayed back, forming a perfect circle around the bodies. Most of the audience were human, but there were vampires there, too. No matter the species, everyone was terrified, including myself. I’d seen quite a lot in my days and I was sure I’d see a whole lot more, but there was something unnerving about the way these two vampire bodies had been thrown at the sidewalk. Their eyes were open and mouths, too, but they didn’t breathe. Their skins were white as sheets, and every bone in their bodies looked broken. And the air crackled with magic, a kind that gave me the same feeling as the air in Mauve’s room. Unsettling.
Frosty took a step towards the bodies.
“Stop.” I elbowed my way through the crowd to get to him. “There’s magic around them. It can do the same to you.”
To his credit, Frosty stopped in his tracks and didn’t even look at me like I was crazy. Maybe he really trusted that I knew what I was doing. Which I did. That’s why I was going to check on the bodies.
“And you?” the vampire said when he saw me take slow steps forward.
“Do I look like a bloodsucker to you?” The magic used for those two women was meant to harm vampires. If I was right, it wasn’t going to do anything to me. If I was wrong…well, I would figure it out.
The people walking by on the other side of the street didn’t bother to even look our way. The spells that protected Frosty’s zone were strong, thankfully. As I kneeled down on the asphalt and slowly reached out my hand to feel more of what was coming out of the vampire lying closest to me, my stomach dropped. Unease made its way into my bones as my mind went back to the night I’d gone to the Winter Ball to meet Kyahen in Necterram. I’d touched a tree, and it had nearly destroyed my sanity. The energy wasn’t quite the same, but it was similar. Very similar.
I pulled my hand back and stood up.
“I need a second alone,” I said to Frosty.
“What for?”
I narrowed a brow to ask him if he wanted me to take the time to explain. Time we didn’t have. He got the point because he immediately turned to the crowd.
“Get inside and shut the doors. Now,” he said.
Although I already knew that he was the leader and in charge of stuff around there, I hadn’t really thought every last one of the humans and vampires would turn on their heels without a word and disappear inside in mere seconds. The time would come to tell him I was impressed, probably, but for now…
“Kyahen!”
If I had any other fast choice, his royal assness would be the last person I would want to call upon or even talk to, but time was ticking and now that I’d seen those women lying there on the ground, crumpled, more dead than alive, I was going to really use everything I had to figure this out.
The air buzzed with cold energy, the magic of a strong fairy like Kyahen, before I turned around and watched him materialize in front of me, a huge smile on his face. The clothes of midnight blue velvet he wore were fit for royalty and every string of gold knitted on the edges of his shirt, pants and jacket were handmade—knowing Kyahen. He paid no attention to Frosty, who had completely frozen in place, but the fairy did look at the two female vampires lying on the ground. I was almost surprised to see his surprise. He was definitely not expecting it.
“My dear Raven,” he said. “You could have spared me the view.”
“I’d say I was sorry to bother you, but I’m not a liar. The view is exactly why you’re here,” I said.
“I gathered as much. But I do want to remind you that the deal we made offered you my services for troubles with the war. If you’re going to call upon me for every vampire you find dead on the street, I’m afraid you’ll have a lifetime of repaying favors ahead of you.”
It was his smartass way of telling me I was yet again in his debt. I was so going to regret this. I was going to regret ever meeting him, but I would have to cross that bridge when I got there. For now, more important things needed my attention.
“Isn’t that why you come every time I speak your name?” He could play word games with me all he liked, but we both knew he wanted me on his side just as much as I wanted him. And my being in his debt was what he got off on—and I would’ve said as much had Frosty not been standing right behind me.
“You do know me well, Raven. It’s why the deal we made still exists in the first place.” Kyahen’s eyes darted to the bodies by our side every few seconds. Thank God the time for small talk was over.
“They reek of magic, a kind I felt in Necterram at your ball, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
I squatted in front of the vampires, and Kyahen followed. He sniffed hard a couple of times as he took in all the details, the broken bones and the lifeless eyes of the victims. It really was a terrible sight to see.
“What do you feel?” he asked me after a second—the same question I was asking myself.
“Nothingness. It’s like they’ve been stripped of their essence.” Just like the trees in Necterram, but they probably felt different to me because they were trees, not live beings.
“It looks that way,” Kyahen said. “They were used for something until they no longer had anything left to offer.”
“Samayan took them. He has another twenty-eight that he hasn’t returned. Yet.” This seemed to surprise Kyahen even more, so I gave him the full details. “These are independent vampires, masterless. Only the women were kidnapped, leaving no trace behind. They started with the strongest.”
“Independents are of no use to anyone,” Kyahen said under his breath. “Are they…” he finally turned to look at Frosty.
“No, they don’t work with the Council, but they do with
Eleanor every now and then. Which is what throws me off. Why kidnap independents? Why females? He has plenty he could use.”
“More than we can imagine,” Kyahen said, nodding.
“So what can you tell me about this magic? It upsets me. It’s strong but it’s also almost as if it’s not even there.”
Kyahen stood up again, a tight smile stretching his thin lips. “Demon magic,” he said. “This is demon magic.”
Well, fuck me. “Demons can’t really do magic.”
“This isn’t magic. This is possession in its purest form,” Kyahen said. “And, yes, some demons can pull it off, though with difficulty.”
Shit. “Any chance you know which ones?” It would’ve saved me a lot of time.
“I’m sorry, Raven, but that’s all I can tell you. And a piece of advice?”
I nodded, since I was feeling pretty generous.
“Keep away from this. Demons are not creatures you want to entangle yourself with.”
“Neither are fairies,” I said, unfortunately for me.
“Fair point,” Kyahen said. “Let’s chat when you’re back where you should be.”
My mouth opened, but by the time I thought of the most proper way to tell him to go to hell, he was gone.
14
——————————
“That was Kyahen of the Seelie Court,” Frosty stated a few seconds after his royal assness disappeared into thin air with another favor owed by me in his expensive fucking pocket.
“What the hell do demons want with vampires?” That was the question I wanted an answer to. I mean, they could possess, they never died, they were pretty much set for the most part. Despite public opinion, they weren’t the most hunted supernatural species out there—unless you were talking about succubi and incubi. They were lone creatures and never really known to do much in terms of rebellions or wars or anything. They kept to themselves, did their own thing and caused a lot less trouble than one might expect.
“He’s Unseelie, too. The most powerful Unseelie fairy in the Otherworld. Did you know he gave up the throne to go Seelie?” Frosty continued.