by Rob Cornell
I nodded.
A grin broke across her face. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged. “You’re growing up so fast,” she said. Which would sound funny to the average mortal, but comparatively speaking, I was still in my adolescence as a sorcerer.
I hugged her back. We held that way for a moment. When we parted, she tilted her head toward the stairwell. “Do you want to clear the rest and see who’s left below?”
Part of me did. Another part wanted me to walk away and never look back. When I did considering leaving, some outside force kept me from moving.
At first I thought Able or one of his people was responsible. But when I turned toward the stairwell, I had no trouble stepping forward.
“Pah.” I chuckled.
“What?” Mom asked.
“Odi’s down there, alive and well. Toft, too, for that matter.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because my blood oath won’t let me leave him down there.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Between the two of us, it didn’t take long to clear the debris enough to get downstairs. Only half the ceiling in the living room had collapsed, but considering that it was underground, that amounted to a great deal of concrete along with the plaster and wood. We created more of a tunnel through it than actually removing it.
Odi had managed to climb free of the cave-in and lay on the Victorian style sofa with a shard of wood the size of a baseball bat through his throat. One of his legs was bent backward at the knee. His shirt had ripped wide open to reveal his pale chest, and it looked like his chest had caved slightly.
His eyes were open. He stared blankly at the intact part of the ceiling above him. He lay entirely still. But that didn’t mean anything. If he were dead, his ashes would have blended in with the rest of the dust carpeting the floor.
I didn’t see any sign of Toft, the Ministry goons, or the primal vamp, and hadn’t run into any remains as we’d tunneled our way in. Of course, if Toft or Beastvamp had perished, their dust would have also been indistinguishable in the wreckage. And Toft had to be alive, otherwise my oath would have expired along with him.
I had hoped to find Able’s head crushed under a slab of concrete. No such luck so far.
I approached Odi slowly. If he hadn’t noticed us breaking through the destruction, he might spook if I suddenly came upon him. Badly injured vampires tended to lash out. He was still in vamp form. I didn’t need him tearing a hole in my neck with his fangs. Been there. Done that.
Halfway to him, I saw him blink a few times as if coming out of a deep sleep. He turned his head toward me. The wood through his neck caught and widened the wound, giving me a glimpse of his trachea. Blood pulsed out of the hole.
Then he tried to say something. More blood sprayed out his mouth. He made a sound like kek kek kek, but nothing close to words.
I stopped suddenly. I had intended to go over and help him. Then the image of Mom’s arm sticking out of the wreckage passed across my mind’s eye. My face heated up. My fingers curled stiffly with the urge to choke Odi. Or yank that makeshift stake out of his throat and jam it through his fucking heart.
I tried to take another step toward him, but couldn’t. The blood oath again, keeping me at bay, keeping me from dusting the little fucker.
“Kek kek,” Odi said.
I couldn’t turn around and leave. I couldn’t approach him. I would have to get a hold of my anger, or end up stuck in this spot forever. I inhaled through my nose. Exhaled out my mouth. I ran through the same series of techniques I had to calm myself enough to magically finesse the air. Apparently it did the trick, because I was able to take another step forward.
Odi looked at me pleadingly. “Kek.”
I moved over to him and stared down as if he lay on a hospital gurney, slowly dying. And there was still a chance he could. I doubted a young vamp like him could recover quickly enough from his extensive injuries before he bled out. It would take an excruciatingly long time for him to turn to dust.
Even after what he had done, I didn’t want that for him, blood oath or not.
“Kek.”
I gripped the wooden shaft sticking out his neck and yanked it free.
A geyser of black blood gushed from the hole. Odi’s eyes went wide. “Kek kek keh kuh kek.” His voice was soaked in his own blood. The wet gurgle turned my stomach.
“We need to stanch that bleeding or he’s gone,” Mom said.
I looked over my shoulder at her, surprised she advised on how to save his life rather than grabbing the wood shard from my hand and staking him herself.
She must have seen that surprise on my face. “He didn’t intend for this,” she said. “And I’m fine.”
I looked down at the bloodstained wooden shaft in my clutch. I dropped it, turned to Odi, and clapped my hand over the hole in his throat. “This is going to hurt,” I said. Before he had a chance to brace himself, I lit up my hand. The smell of his cooking flesh rose up and gagged me. He tried to scream, making the blood bubble in his throat like a boiling kettle.
I held on until the wound, on this side at least, had cauterized.
I turned him on his side and did the same for the exit wound through the back of his neck.
By that point, he had fallen limp from shock.
I rolled him onto his back and stepped away. His cracked chest and broken leg would heal on their own in time. The important thing had been to stop the bleeding. He would also have to feed as soon as he was able. Without Toft, I wasn’t sure who would find the kid a meal. Sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.
Unless the damn blood oath forced my hand on that front as well.
Hopefully, Toft was still in that mess somewhere and I could get him out before it came to that.
I told Mom as much, and we prepared to get to work.
“Kek uhk kik.”
I looked at the kid. He had already broke free from shock and seemed desperate to tell me something. With his throat wrecked like it was, I couldn’t imagine how he could, though.
I crouched beside him and watched his lips carefully, hoping I could read them.
The noises he made didn’t make any more sense than they had before, but he made sure to form the words with his mouth as clearly as possible. And I got it. Three words.
They are gone.
“Gone? Gone how?”
Odi waggled his fingers in the air in the universal gesture of magical woo-woo.
“All of them?”
He nodded.
“They took Toft?”
He nodded again, more emphatically.
So they had escaped with what they’d come for—Detroit’s elder vampire.
Which left me with a frightening question.
Why?
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Jesus Christ, this is heavy!”
Sly’s face had gone pink while struggling to carry his end of Odi’s coffin out the front door of the Black Rose. I had used some wind power to get the thing, with Odi inside, through the trench Mom and I had made in the remains of Toft’s underground living room. But I couldn’t very well float it clear out to the panel truck Sly had rented in the middle of the day. Any witnesses would make that awkward, and the last thing I needed to do right now was commit an infraction against Ministry Law, no matter how slight.
In fact, I needed to stay far, far away from the Ministry until I knew if this thing went any deeper than Able and his two companions. They couldn’t all be involved. The fact that the guy who had barfed over the panther remains the night before had volunteered personal information on Ira Glass told me as much. He wouldn’t have given me Glass’s address if he was a part of…whatever the fuck was going on.
Some bad actors within the Ministry I could swallow. Politics, whether magical or mortal, made for a good corruptor. But that beast vamp? That shit was crazy. Smuggling that thing across international borders was probably a severe enough crime to win a Ministry contract on your head. Aligning oneself
with such a creature didn’t even make sense. I mean, hadn’t these idiots just escaped the clutches of a nest of hungry vamps? I would have thought they’d avoid contact with any kind of vampire after that, especially one that ugly.
The priority at the moment, though, was to smuggle Odi someplace safe. Much to Sly’s chagrin, we had decided his basement would work best. When I suggested the idea, Sly said, “This damn kid’s committed to ruining my basement.” But we didn’t have many options, and the thing about Sly, you could always count on him—even if he did bitch about it.
I used a little wind to ease the load for Sly, and we got Odi loaded into the back of the van without any trouble. I didn’t see anyone on the street watching. That didn’t mean someone wasn’t peering out a window at us. I hope no one got so freaked out by the sight that they called the cops.
I thanked Sly for his help, and he drove off with my nearly dead apprentice in a coffin. Green was waiting at Sly’s house to help get the kid inside. While he’d quit the shop, apparently Green hadn’t sworn off his uncle altogether. Maybe he’d come around on the shop in time. Where else could he smoke weed while on the job?
I’d left Odi to them, because Mom and I had something else that needed doing. We had to check out Ira Glass’s place. Maybe there was something there that could give us some idea of what he and his cronies were involved with.
I should have known better.
Glass lived in a one bedroom apartment in a complex off Hall Road, not far from Lakeside Mall. It was easy enough to find. I barely needed to consult the GPS on my phone. This complex had separate outside entrances for each of its units, so we didn’t need to get buzzed in. Just climb a flight of stairs to the second story.
I found his door partially open, but couldn’t see any signs of tampering. I also felt a faint magical crackle. It felt the same as what I’d felt in Toft’s basement, and I knew it belonged to Able. I pushed the door wide and stepped inside.
The place was gutted. It looked like no one lived there, like the apartment was ready for the next renter.
Able had cleaned house.
Chapter Thirty-Five
We were already there, so I figured we’d take a look in case they had missed something, left some clue behind. But I didn’t have my hopes up.
I closed the door and turned the bolt. I didn’t anticipate anyone showing up—why would they if they’d already gotten the job done?—but I wanted to play it safe. Besides, in our condition, all covered in plaster dust, bruised, and clothes ratty, we’d raise some eyebrows if someone like the landlord swung by and found us inside.
The paint looked and smelled fresh, a clean white coat on all the walls. The surfaces of the apartment’s included appliances were polished to a snowy shine. I had no idea how they managed to get a stovetop to look so clean, but these were magical practitioners, after all. Maybe one of them had a super scrubber spell. Aside from Able, who I felt pretty certain was a sorcerer, I didn’t know how the two ladies practiced the arts. They could have been anything from witches, to druids, to demigods for all I freakin’ knew.
As we strolled through the modest apartment, I asked Mom if she sensed anything.
“I’m not a bloodhound, Sebastian. Or a Jedi.”
I cracked a smile and gave her hand a squeeze. “You nerd.”
“Oh, look who’s talking.”
We filed into the single bedroom. More fresh paint, the smell thicker in the enclosed space. The closet had accordion style doors which hung wide open. A single wire hanger dangled from the rod. I turned away from the closet and scanned the bedroom floor. The beige carpet looked like it had been vacuumed, but I could see stains, many of them concentrated around the entry, probably from foot traffic. I also saw four divots in the carpet, impressions made by the wheels of a bed frame.
Plenty of daylight streamed through the window since the shades were rolled up, and no curtains were hung. I flicked the light switch anyway. A single dome light in the center of the ceiling turned on. A section of the far wall reflected the new light. A wet streak of paint.
I must have looked at it funny, because Mom asked, “You see something?”
I pointed. “The paint is still wet there.” I scrunched up my nose. “This is super recent.”
“I can see why they would take all his things, but why paint? Seems like wasted effort.”
I folded my arms and stared at the moist paint as if it might tell me something. “Unless they needed to cover something.”
“On the walls? Like what?”
“One way to find out.”
I pulled off my coat and nearly cried to see the back had an ugly black streak down the center, scorched from Odi’s explosion. But it made what I did next easier. I carried my coat over to the wet spot and used one sleeve to start wiping. The paint was wet enough to smear, but I couldn’t do much else. As I scrubbed, I realized how ridiculous I must have looked. Even if there was something important under the layer of paint, using my coat sleeve wasn’t going to reveal it.
I threw my coat down and cursed. “This is pointless. I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“Answers.”
“Answers to what, Mom? Some Ministry officers wanted Toft. They took him. If not for Odi, that wouldn’t be any of my business.”
“Someone tried to kill you.”
I threw my hands out. I felt breathless, lightheaded. “So what? I killed him instead. Does that count as some grand conspiracy?”
She folded her arms. “Is this making you feel any better?”
“No.” My voice buzzed in the corners of the empty room, like an echo in fast-forward. “It’s making me feel a whole bunch worse.”
One corner of her mouth curled up. I saw the laugh in her eyes before it broke loose. “You are too much, son.”
I ran my hands through my hair, which was all chunked up from sweat and plaster. “You raised me.”
“And I did a wonderful job, even if I do say so myself.” She came over to me, took both of my hands in hers, and gave them a little shake. “We have to think this through…”
“I am—”
“…calmly.”
Calm seemed impossible. But I did my best. I focused on the facts. All of them, not just the most recent.
“Goulet and his crew wanted you for something. That has to tie in somehow.”
“Because of my missing memories,” Mom said, and it felt dead on.
“Okay. Next bit. Vamps start going nuts in the streets.”
“And most of those vampires were gathered in a large nest.”
I nodded. “With six Ministry members hung up for snacks. At least four of which are involved in…” I pulled my hands free from Mom’s grasp and started pacing. I shrugged. “Involved in something that requires Toft.”
“Who,” Mom said slowly, “took the place as Detroit’s Elder after you killed Goulet.”
A buzz of excitement started humming at the back of my brain. I felt this leading somewhere, though I still couldn’t fathom what. “They need an old vamp. And they need you.” I stopped pacing, thoughts coming to a wall. “Why didn’t Able and company try to take you along with Toft?”
“Kidnapping an elder vampire is tricky enough,” Mom said. “They weren’t prepared for my presence.”
It made sense. It also bothered the hell out of me because it meant they might try to grab her again. I tried not to dwell on that, though. We still had unanswered questions that needed some damn quick answers.
“The panther tried to kill me. Whoever’s behind this has been trying to kill me all along. They want me out of the way. Make it easier to get to you. Plus, I guess I’ve pissed them off because I put a kink in things when I took Goulet off the board.”
“What about the rioting?”
Goulet’s dying words came back to me yet again.
If you let me die, you will set off the largest supernatural war this city has ever seen.
“The Ministry, or at least those involved in th
is, must have made some deal with the vamps. I can’t see any other reason why they would align themselves with an institution that’s been picking them off for centuries.”
Mom pursed her lips. Worry lines deepened around her eyes and mouth.
“Goulet told me his death would trigger a war. Having six Ministry captives was deliberate. A message.”
“You think they blame the Ministry for Goulet’s death?”
“I think Goulet was the only one keeping their arrangement intact. Without his lead, the vamps have no reason to trust the Ministry, no one to keep them loyal.”
Mom drew a hand down over her mouth. “This is the war.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“I feel like we should just let them tear each other apart,” I said.
I had gotten used to the paint smell, but I could still feel it making me sick to my stomach. The pieces of the ugly puzzle Mom and I were putting together didn’t help.
“Except I doubt it will be that easy,” Mom said.
“Nothing ever is.”
I wandered to the window. It was situated up high, the bottom edge even with my chest. Staring out, the sunlight, washed out by the gray sky, hurt my eyes as if I were a vampire. I had to wonder if the vamp blood inside of me could create weird traits like that even though it couldn’t fully turn me with my magic holding it at bay.
I decided to believe the light hurt because my eyes were tired.
I squinted, which helped a little.
The window faced a court yard behind the apartment complex. Plastic playground equipment formed a cluster in the center, the grass around it worn away from heavy use. No kids played on it now. The spritz of water on the window explained why. At some point since we’d entered the apartment, it had started raining.
“The fact remains, Glass must have had something of value here. Something Able did not want us to find.” I turned away from the window to see the mess I’d made of the paint with my coat. I couldn’t make out anything underneath. And what had I expected to find. Hieroglyphs? A secret map?