by W. J. May
The bartender nodded, the lights from the club making the large fake diamond in his left ear gleam under them. Tristan spied the comb in his back pocket as the bartender turned around to pour his drinks and laughed.
As Tristan headed back in Lauren’s direction, he caught Quinn’s eye once again, willing himself to look away. Yeah, he’d love to hit that, but it wasn’t worth it, he had to tell himself.
He reached Lauren at the dark table and set her club soda on the table. “I think she knows we’re watching her,” he said flatly.
Lauren took a long drag from the little black straw and nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure she does know. But whatever. Hopefully she thinks we’re swingers or something and not cops.”
“So what happens after she takes this dude’s soul... or whatever it is she does?” Tristan asked, feeling stupid for even asking. He couldn’t believe that was even possible, it sounded so ludicrous.
“Well, in about seven days, he turns into a vampire,” Lauren replied matter-of-factly.
Tristan spit Coke out, then wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“What!”
“Seriously.”
He looked around to see if anyone saw him, then lowered his voice even more. “We have to get that kid out of there then!”
She nodded. “I agree.” She paused and stared at the young, blonde man, who was now running kisses up Quinn’s neck. She had her head back, appearing to be completely enjoying herself. “Although, if he kills her, he won’t turn into one.”
Tristan stared at her in shock. “You’re screwing with me, right?”
“You’re such a rookie, Ellis.”
* * *
Chapter 12
SAC Sheila Morris read over the report as the two agents were once again seated in her office. Sheila’s color of the day was green, and her dress, fingernails, and shoes – even her eye shadow – boasted the bright green shade.
“Your report says they were kissing. Did you observe anything else?” she asked, flipping her dark eyes between the two agents.
Tristan looked at Lauren, then back at his boss. “At one point she had both her hands on either side of his face and was staring into his eyes, but I don’t know if that is significant.”
Sheila nodded. “It is. They only require physical contact. It doesn’t have to be sexual intercourse. It doesn’t even have to be highly sexual. They can just kiss intently, and we do know it has to do with locking eyes. Did you get close enough to see if her eyes changed colors?”
Lauren shook her head. “No, we were across the club. Their eyes change color?”
Sheila blew out a breath and pulled a nail file from the drawer. “Did you two ya-hoos pay any attention at the academy? I mean, at all? Yes, all vampires, their eyes turn pure black – no whites at all – when they feed.”
Tristan was getting both angry and a bit uncomfortable with the conversation. “We know vampires’ eyes turn black, but this is a succubus.”
Sheila tapped the nail file against the edge of the desk after blowing nail dust from it. “Succubae are vampires. Their eyes turn black when they feed, and in their case, off the soul, not blood.”
“So noted,” Lauren muttered.
“Back to the club, both of you. That poor kid is probably gonna be our latest bloodsucker soon. Yet another damned vampire we’re going to have to monitor,” Sheila said, shoving the nail file back in the drawer and pulling out a pen, jotting notes into a notebook.
“Is it true if he kills her, he won’t turn into one?” Tristan asked.
Sheila’s pen paused mid-scrawl. “We don’t know that for a fact, but hey, if you two can prove it, I’ll promote you both.”
Lauren’s eyebrows rose. “Are you serious?”
Sheila went back to writing and chuckled. “No, I’m not serious. But for real, if you find that out, I will be very impressed.”
A heavy silence hung in the air as the agents sat in their chairs and stared at their boss.
“You two, get the hell out of here. I have work to do.”
They both left her office and closed the wood door behind them.
As they reached their cubicles, Tristan looked at Lauren. “You gonna wear the skirt again?”
She scowled at him. “Piss off, Ellis.”
∞∞∞
Tristan and Lauren were in line in front of Club Muse in the French Quarter. It was now Saturday night and they had ignored their boss’s orders to go on Friday night. They knew Saturday night would be much more busy, and that’s what they wanted – a busy club with lots of distractions so they could watch the succubus in question – and in action.
They knew they were taking a chance – if succubae were like vampires, they only needed to feed about once a week, but by the look of this particular succubus, they knew she’d be back for more. Tristan could tell she was cocky and confident, and could feed from whomever and whenever she wanted.
Lauren, feeling a bit more confident tonight in a slightly longer pencil skirt, but a tight-fitting pink ruffled tank top, strolled in with Tristan, who decided to wear a T-shirt with some parachute pants and shiny tasseled loafers. “All you’re missing is a high-top fade,” Lauren said, suppressing a laugh at his outfit.
He stared at her in disbelief. “What do you know about high-top fades?”
She put her hands on her slender hips. “Hey, I watch MTV, you know. I’m not as stuffy as you think I am.”
Truth was, Priscilla always had it on in the apartment but Lauren never purposely watched. Sometimes it was just unavoidable. Like trying to look away from a train wreck.
Tristan smiled at her. “Oh yeah? Well then I want you to be all over me tonight. Pretend I’m your pimp and you’re my hoe.”
She gasped. “Never!”
He threw his head back. “That’s what I thought, hooka!”
She shook her head and paid the five-dollar cover charge to get inside, strolling into the massive club, which was definitely busy.
“The Bureau better be reimbursing us for these charges,” Tristan said, shoving his wallet into his back pocket.
She nodded. “Yeah, just put it on your monthly expense report.”
Both of them looked toward the corner of the club where they had seen Quinn previously, and sure enough, she was there, surrounded by an entourage of females and a large white man with a bald head wearing a tight white T-shirt.
Security.
“Wonder what a powerful succubus like her needs security for?” Tristan said, jutting his chin toward Quinn’s location.
Lauren looked. “I don’t know, but I think we need to approach her tonight. Since apparently they only feed off males, you get to be tonight’s bait.”
Tristan’s mouth kicked up in a grin. “Oh, the way you treat me.”
She looked at him and laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be very painful.”
They walked toward the area Quinn was sitting at, and Tristan went to try to sit next to her, but the bouncer put his arm out. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
Tristan, whose six-foot frame matched the bouncer’s, looked him straight in his blue eyes. “I’d like to talk to the pretty lady. Is that okay?” He flicked his eyes toward Quinn, who was smiling invitingly.
The bouncer looked at Quinn, who briefly met his eyes and nodded, then back to Tristan.
The bouncer lowered his arm and Tristan went to sit next to her on the small sofa perched in the corner of the dark club.
“Hi, I’m Tristan. I couldn’t help but notice you across the club. You’re way too beautiful not to notice.”
“Quinn. Nice to meet you, dark stranger,” she purred, her voice both feminine and raspy.
Tristan thought this comment was odd, but continued. “This is my friend, Lauren. We’d like to get to know you better.”
Lauren had to hand it to him – he was a smooth talker for sure.
Quinn measured Lauren with an intense stare. As tough as Lauren thought she was, she admitted to hers
elf that Quinn’s icy blue stare made her a bit uncomfortable. There was something behind those cold eyes that Lauren found creepy, almost frightening. She stole a glance at Tristan, who seemed to be enjoying the female’s attention, and quickly realized why succubae only chose male victims – they were the only ones who fell for their charms. While Lauren’s hackles were raised and she felt on full alert at the eeriness of this woman – this creature – Tristan seemed to be completely smitten with her.
And that scared Lauren even more than Quinn did.
Truth was, the cold stare reminded her of her father’s when she was young. He was an iron fist in her household; it was his way or the highway. She and her two sisters – and especially their mother – all cowered under her father’s controlling ways. He drank too much, which made his belligerence even worse. Lauren was the oldest of three and as soon as she graduated high school, she bolted from home to attend the University of Florida. She was glad her sisters had each other, and was happy they’d be leaving home in two more years, as they were twins and would both be turning eighteen. Lauren felt being under her father’s thumb had led to her being so tightly wound herself, and tried every day to relax, but wasn’t having much luck.
She was happy she’d been placed in New Orleans after graduating from the academy. Being from Tampa, it wasn’t a huge adjustment for her, but it was far enough away to ward off the guilt trips her parents would most likely make about her not visiting enough if she lived closer. She was only twenty-four and had secured first a place in the FBI, then a slot in the BSI when one opened.
Not that she had applied for the BSI.
The unsolved case of a voodoo priestess had sealed it for her. The woman was found unresponsive in her tarot card shop, called in by a customer, and when Special Agent Lauren Clark arrived, she could see the victim lying face-up with a buck knife protruding from her chest. What was odd, though, was that the victim also had a lot of dried blood smeared around her mouth.
That, and she was completely naked.
After the voodoo priestess was transported to the morgue, Lauren waited for a report of cause of death. The next day she received a call from the medical examiner. “You wanna meet me down here while I do the autopsy?” he’d asked Lauren over the phone.
She shuddered at his question. She normally would not. But her boss had encouraged her to sit in on a few and had told the M.E. to call her for the next one. She walked the two blocks to the medical examiner’s office and headed straight for the room she hated the most. Just part of the job, she’d tell herself every time she walked through the doors of the smelly, sterile room.
“Hey, Miss Clark. I’ve got her in drawer three,” the young man said, setting his tools down in neat rows on the gleaming metal table he’d prepared for the autopsy. Dr. Erick Collins had only been on the job two years so he was still excitable as he talked about the cases. Lauren thought it was cute. He even flirted with her when she was there.
But he was still creepy. I mean, who chooses to do this for a living anyway?
M.E. Collins pulled drawer number three open and flipped back the sheet. Lauren was surprised to see the body looking normal and not sullen and ashen like most African-American people started to look as they decomposed. She chalked it up to it having only been about twenty-four hours since death.
Erick began chatting about a new restaurant in the Quarter as they were getting ready to move her to a rolling gurney when, seemingly at the same time, both the special agent and the medical examiner noticed there was no stab wound in her chest any longer. They each opened their mouths to say something to the other, when suddenly the voodoo woman sat up and screamed bloody murder.
They both backed up and Lauren went for the door of the morgue to call for help when, before their eyes, the naked woman looked at the scene before her and quickly shifted into a large reddish-brown wolf. It snarled at them both, then bolted through the open door. The police never caught it, and Lauren never saw Dr. Erick Collins again.
A shudder trickled down her spine again as the DJ of Club Muse made an announcement about people bogging him down with song requests and it bolted her out of her memories. Her eyes shot over to Tristan, whose eyes were entirely too close to Quinn’s – whose own eyes were now jet-black – and she leapt over the sofa they were sitting at and right onto Tristan.
∞∞∞
They had parked in an alley about five blocks away and had to walk and not talk all the way there. Both were now exploding.
Lauren slammed the car door and started up the sedan. “What in God’s name is your problem?” she yelled at Tristan.
“Woman, you are way too demanding for a Saturday night,” he replied, slamming his own door and looking at his partner with disdain.
She stared at him incredulously. “Are you shitting me, Ellis? That was a damn succubus. She almost had you!”
“I had it under control! You didn’t have to drag me off like that. You made me look like some whipped little bitch!”
Lauren put the car in drive and peeled out into traffic, barely missing an oncoming car.
“No more. I can’t do this again. It’s not going to happen again,” she seethed.
Tristan had his arms folded. “I’m your partner! You don’t trust me?”
“It’s her I don’t trust! You’re male, Tristan. Don’t you get it? It’s not your fault. You were perfectly comfortable in her presence while I felt like peeling off my own skin every time she looked at me. She made me physically sick. She’s evil.”
Tristan calmed down a little and studied Lauren’s face and could see genuine sincerity there. “Huh. I didn’t get that from her at all.”
“See!”
“You sure you’re not exaggerating?”
She snorted and rolled down her window to get some fresh air, even though the air conditioning was on in the car. “No, I’m not.”
There was more silence as she pulled up to his apartment. He went to open the door and looked at her. “Look, I’m sorry, Clark. I really didn’t mean to scare you. I can handle myself, though.”
She shook her head. “I know your intentions are good, but you know what they say about good intentions...”
“The road to hell is paved with them,” Tristan finished.
“See you Monday. Stay inside the rest of the weekend,” she ordered.
He looked at her long and hard, then nodded, closing the car door behind him.
* * *
Chapter 13
Ace Malone was watching the cemetery from his car. He tapped his long fingers on the door through the open window.
“So how was Island Duty?” he asked Erick.
Erick looked up from the book he was reading and glared at his new boss, the head of the New Orleans Immortal coven. “It pretty much sucked, but isn’t that what they all say after playing corrections officer to a bunch of incarcerated vamps and shifters on the island for two years? Eight years of medical school and I was doing something a trained monkey could be hired to do.”
Ace laughed. “Yes, well you may not see it now, but what you learned over there will come in handy one of these days.”
Erick closed the book. “Like sitting in a car in front of a very dark, old cemetery waiting for the dead to rise?”
Ace looked past him and into the cemetery again. A large, thick black iron gate surrounded it and he thought how irreverent it was that they didn’t put solid fences around where the dead were resting. It seemed that it was this way all around the South. Ace scrubbed a hand over his light blonde buzz cut and then over his light five o’clock shadow. “We’re not exactly waiting for the dead to rise. The undead, more like it.”
Erick snorted. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“Well did you at least learn to get a better grasp on your gift?”
Erick’s face lit up with a cocky grin. “Would you like me to get out and lift up the car with you in it so I can demonstrate?”
Ace laughed. “No, that won’t be necessary. B
esides,” he said, looking up at the sky which was bloated with clouds, “it looks like rain. I’d hate to see you try to lift this thing when it’s soaking wet and slippery.”
“Well that’s where you’ll come in handy. You’ll just have to keep the rain off me,” Erick answered.
“Hey... I can manipulate the elements to a certain extent, but I’m not Mother Nature.”
Their super-sensitive hearing picked up a noise in the cemetery. They whipped their heads around to see someone slinking through the gravestones and stop at the one they were watching.
“Is that him?” Erick whispered.
Ace nodded, holding binoculars up to his face. “Yes, that’s definitely Elias. Beautiful bastard that he is.”
Erick motioned for the binoculars and Ace handed them over. Erick let out a whistle through his teeth. “I see what you mean. Looks like he belongs in a magazine or something.”
Elias De la Cruz was a two-hundred-year-old vampire who stood over six feet tall and had long, curly black hair and haunting brown bedroom eyes. Erick wondered if his skin had once been a warm caramel, because now it was quite pale. Not as pale as other vampires he’d seen, but definitely lacking that warm Spanish hue.
Elias was bent over a grave, staring at it intently as if waiting for something to happen.
“Where’d you get this tip from anyway?” Ace asked, taking a swig of Pepsi from a can.
“We had a vampire on the island who was about a year out from release. He somehow found out I was from Louisiana and offered up some information about the vampire clan here in Na’wlins.”
Ace laughed. “Somehow found out, huh? Couldn’t have been that strong New Orleans drawl of yours? The accents of the natives are unmistakable around here.”
“Yeah, well anyway so we told this vamp he could get out early if his information panned out. Turns out he was right. He said the head of the clan was named Elias and he was looking for a mate. Was turning young girls, trying to find the right one. Destroying them if they didn’t please him after the turning.”