by J. K. Beck
“Dear God,” she whispered, reaching for her gun. “Shit, Leena, what have you done?”
“He’s not a man,” Leena said, not the least bit perturbed by Alexis’s reaction. “And neither was the monster who killed your sister. It was a vampire.”
“Have your sick fun on someone else’s time,” she said, pulling her weapon. “Now unchain him, and then put your hands against the wall.”
“Shit, Alexis. Do you have to be so goddamn pedantic?”
“Excuse me?” The gun felt heavy in her hand, and she realized that whatever drug had been in the air in the other room was still affecting her.
“Watch. Just watch.” And with a speed that defied Leena’s limp, she lunged forward and shoved a wooden stake into the trapped man’s stomach.
He roared, then flailed against the chain, some pitiful, trapped beast.
But Alexis didn’t feel sorry for him. Not anymore. Because she got a look at his mouth. At his fangs. And then, just when she was about to tell Leena to back off so that she could have a second to think, Leena plunged the stake in a second time—this time into its heart. And the creature in front of them immediately dissolved into a pile of dust.
“Told you,” Leena said. “And now that you know, nothing’s ever going to be the same.”
“Alexis? Hey. Wake up, girl.”
Alexis peeled her eyes open and tried to focus on Leena, who was carefully depositing a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. “Sorry,” Leena said. “That bump on your head makes me nervous. I’m not sure if I should let you sleep.”
“I’m fine,” Alexis said. She’d slid sideways into the chair, and now she righted herself, shaking out her arms to ward off the urge to sleep. “But you really have to tell me the truth. Is he still alive?”
“I swear, I just don’t know.”
Alexis bit back a frustrated groan. “There were two vampires in the alley,” she said. “I know that one of them was the one who killed my sister—you’re the one who told me. So how can you not know if the killer is the one I dusted?”
Leena reached across the table and took her hand. “Alexis. You know why. I’ve already told you how all this works. Or doesn’t work, as the case may be. It’s mysticism, not science. Nothing’s exact.”
“But you have the map. You saw. Can’t you do it again? Can’t you see if he’s still out there?” She looked at her friend’s face, at the pale skin, almost paper-thin from exhaustion, and immediately felt like a total shit. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I know I shouldn’t press. I mean, you told me how much it drains you, but I’m just—”
“Eager?”
“That doesn’t even begin to describe it.” Dear God, this was why she’d come back to Los Angeles: so that she could find and kill the vampire who’d killed Tori. And now she was so close, she could almost touch the truth. Except somehow it kept escaping her.
No matter what else happened, she was eternally grateful to Leena for revealing that horrible truth about Tori’s death. But that wasn’t the only thing for which she owed Leena. Because it turned out that Leena Dumont was descended from a family of vampire hunters who’d made their home in New Orleans. Leena herself was descended from a plantation owner and a slave named Evangeline, who just happened to be the daughter of voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Which pretty much explained how Leena came by the woo-woo, magical stuff: Her family tree was filled with psychics and witches and voodoo and all sorts of mystical whatnots.
After Alexis had gotten her head around that rather freakish reality, she’d asked Leena if she could use her psychic whatever-you-call-it to locate Tori’s killer. Leena had hesitated at first, then agreed to try, but told Alexis not to get her hopes up.
It had been strange to watch Leena pull together an odd variety of herbs and roots, then boil them in a cauldron like something out of Macbeth. They’d sat there in the smoke-filled room, both of them holding a photograph of Tori onto which Alexis had smeared her own blood—the blood she shared with her sister.
Alexis hadn’t really expected anything—the whole situation was just too damn weird. But after a few moments, Leena’s head had shot backward, her eyes had opened wide, and she’d let out a long, strange moan. A moment later she’d fallen over, clutching her head and crying for Alexis to please, please, please turn out all the lights.
Alexis had hurried to comply, then knelt by Leena’s side, not sure if she should touch her or call a doctor or bring her a handful of ibuprofen.
It had passed quickly—according to Leena, the migraines never went away that fast—and when she was herself again, she said that she’d seen a place. The Hollywood sign. The Capitol Records building. The Hollywood Bowl.
Tori’s killer was in Los Angeles—where exactly, Leena couldn’t say. But it was a start. And Alexis had known it was time to come home.
It had been an unusual beginning for a friendship, but a solid one, and after that the two had formed a plan. Alexis had taken Gutierrez’s advice and quit the FBI, and Leena packed up her things and made the trek across the country, too. “My building’s not going anywhere,” Leena had said. “And no offense, but you’re a total noob. Try to do this completely on your own and you’ll get yourself killed before you even have time to go shopping at the Beverly Center. Besides, a psychic opening up a shop in California? How can I go wrong?”
Alexis had argued, but only for form. As selfish as it might be, she longed to have a friend with her who understood what she was facing.
Her parents’ Brentwood house had been sitting empty for the last year—Alexis had been considering selling it after the tenants had moved out. Now she moved back in, grateful for the extent of her parents’ wealth. Since their death, she’d rarely touched her inheritance, choosing to live off her FBI salary rather than what she considered blood money. But upon her return, she spent like Lindsay Lohan on a shopping spree, writing checks left and right to various electronic and hunting/sport supply companies. Let Mom and Dad finance her vendetta against the vampires and her search for Tori’s killer. It was the least they could do considering they’d meted out their own brand of torture.
She turned the massive wine cellar into a combination workout studio and mission control center. The room had been kept locked while the house was rented, since her parents’ wine collection was still there and worth a fortune. But when she’d moved back, Alexis had brought in a representative from Sotheby’s to take the more expensive and rarer bottles away for auction, keeping only a few for herself tucked away in one corner. Everything else in the room was given a full overhaul.
Now the cellar was a technological masterpiece, a command and weapons center that rivaled anything she’d had access to while at the FBI.
Leena had turned down the offer to be her roommate, saying that she was used to living on her own. And even Alexis’s argument that the house was so big, both of them might as well be living alone, hadn’t swayed her. At first, Alexis had been disappointed. She didn’t want to return alone to a house filled with the ghosts of her memories, but once she was settled, she realized it wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. There was something healing about being in complete control of a place where she’d once had to tread softly or else risk getting whipped. Or worse.
Still, she had to admit it was nice that Leena was there now. Her head was throbbing, and if she’d come back to an empty house she would have just sat on the couch and licked her wounds. Now she could sit on the couch and gripe to her friend.
“I’m so sorry,” Leena said, dropping into the chair opposite her. “First it takes me forever to figure out a way to pinpoint the sorry SOB, and then it turns out I didn’t even really manage to do that.”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Alexis said, realizing she was being a complete shit by complaining. “You’ve been amazing. I know how much I owe you.”
“Including for that bump on the head,” Leena said with a frown. “I’m the one who sent you to Hollywood Boulevard.”
; “You’re the one who changed my life. Everything I know about this evil we’re fighting—it’s because of you.”
A smile curled the other woman’s lip. “Just don’t get yourself killed and we’ll call it even.”
“Deal,” she said, then winced as she adjusted the ice pack.
Leena winced too, in sympathy. “I should have the strength to look again tomorrow. It’s not soon enough, I know, but …”
“It’s perfect,” Alexis said firmly. She was lying, of course. She wanted Leena to look now, but that desire came from a selfish place, and she didn’t want her friend exhausted or suffering through more migraines.
At the same time, she knew that she couldn’t do this alone. They’d become a team, she and the psychic—more accurately a witch, she supposed, but somehow calling her friend a witch just rubbed Alexis the wrong way.
After Leena had dusted the vampire in New York, Alexis had been more than a little freaked out. Now, of course, it seemed absurd how blown away she’d been by the realization that not only did vampires exist, but Leena’d had one chained up in her basement. Alexis should have seen the signs—hell, the whole task force should have. But that kind of stuff belonged in the world of dreams and nightmares, not in New York or Los Angeles or Anywhere, USA.
Might not belong, but it was there anyway, and once she got over the shock Alexis had been determined to fight them. Fight them all—but find the one who’d killed Tori.
She’d told Leena the whole story. About her childhood and her big sister and her emotionally distant parents who, as it turned out, hadn’t been quite so distant with Tori. She’d shared her anger at her parents and her hurt that Tori hadn’t been able to suck it up and stay for her benefit. And her guilt for feeling that way, because goddamn her selfish heart, she didn’t really wish that Tori would have just gritted her teeth while her father grunted and sweated and pushed himself into her. Did she?
She’d confessed it all, and Leena had said all the right things, and told her that of course Alexis hadn’t really wanted Tori to suffer, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish she was still there, beside her. Leena’s own mother had been abusive, it turned out, and while she’d gotten the limp fighting vampires, Leena was pretty sure the migraines had started when her mother had beaten her so hard she’d hit her head against the hearth. “I felt different after that,” Leena had said. “And then the headaches started. I didn’t care, though, because my mother died that night. A heart attack, the doctors said, but I didn’t believe it. She didn’t have a heart. Not a real one, anyway. Sometimes she was the best mother you could want, but it would turn on a dime. She’d sort of fade into herself, and then she’d be someone else entirely. Someone vile and mean, and I hated her.”
They’d bonded over their past, and now, together in Los Angeles, they were facing the future together.
Edgar Garvey stamped his feet and shook the rain off his coat as he pushed through the doors of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Before he’d moved to LA twenty-five years ago, he’d been assured that it never rained in Southern California. That would teach him to listen to pop music. He’d thought the city would be dry like his hometown of Phoenix. Hadn’t LA been plunked down in a desert just like the sprawling Arizona metropolis?
“It’s a doozy out there,” Gus said. The white-haired old man worked the reception desk. With its art deco architecture and Beverly Hills location, the station got equal parts cops, criminals, and tourists wandering through the front door. Gus pointed them all in the right direction. “Supposed to clear off within the hour, though.”
“Just hung around long enough to ruin my shoes,” Edgar said. He’d pulled the night shift, and had spent the day at home, listening to the rain patter on his roof. It had cleared up briefly around dinnertime, then started up again right as he was grabbing his keys to head out the door.
He snatched the paper off Gus’s desk and perused the headlines, not in any hurry to get to his desk. When he’d worked Van Nuys, he’d been respected, at least for most of his stint in the field. But here, Edgar knew damn well that the other detectives talked behind his back, silently counting down until his retirement came through in six months.
“So how come you aren’t out there?”
Edgar folded the paper back, his finger marking the page with For Better or For Worse. He got one hell of a kick out of that comic strip. “Thought we already established that. The weather’s a bitch.”
Gus laughed. “Thought we established that it’s gonna clear up. Nah, I’m talking about the body they found over in Franklin Canyon. Aren’t you working with the FBI on that task force?”
Edgar put the paper down, comics forgotten. “What body?”
“All I know is a couple stumbled across a girl with neck injuries. Sanders didn’t tag you?” he asked, referring to Lieutenant Elijah Sanders.
“Musta been an oversight,” Edgar said, already moving away from the desk and pulling out his phone. Shit, shit, shit. He tapped out a text just before he stepped onto the elevator and lost the signal. We may have one. Stand by.
When the elevator opened on the third floor, Edgar was stewing. He didn’t even notice the heads that turned in his direction, then immediately turned away, uninterested. These men weren’t his friends, his buddies. They weren’t watching his back. When he’d first transferred over, that fact had rubbed him raw. He’d been newly married. A flatfoot suddenly hooked up with a Beverly Hills beauty, and a sitcom star to boot. Nobody had understood what she’d seen in a schlub like him, but Gilli had shared his beliefs—his certainty that there was something else out there. The press had called her eccentric. His fellow cops had called him a crackpot.
After the wreck, they’d shut up. Not because they thought he was any less of a freak, but because it seemed untoward to rib a man after his wife drove her convertible over a cliff. By then, Edgar didn’t give a fuck what they called him. Make fun of him, don’t make fun of him. None of it would bring Gilli back.
Today, six-plus years after her death, he still didn’t give a shit. He knew the score—knew what was really going on. More than that, he had a job to do and a new partner to help.
And he wasn’t keen on Sanders mucking up the works.
The door to Lieutenant Sanders’s office was shut tight, and the cheap vinyl blinds that allowed the detective privacy from his squad were down and closed. That usually meant that the lieutenant was in a ripe fury, and when the LT was pissed, it was best to stay out of his way. Not happening. Not today.
Edgar strode right up to his door, ignoring the stares of the other men. Especially ignoring the under-the-breath comments that were just a little too loud. “Guess he thinks that tinfoil hat can protect him from Sanders, too.” “Maybe he’s made a deal and Sanders is going to bite it at the next full moon.”
Shit.
Yeah, he was trying to ignore it. But it pissed him off. Couldn’t help it. And when he burst through Sanders’s door, it was Edgar who was in the ripe fury. Sanders was simply kicked back, feet up, barking orders into the phone.
Two long strides, and Edgar was at his desk. One firm motion, and he’d disconnected his call.
“What the fuck?” Sanders yelled. “Goddammit, Garvey, you just hung up on the mayor.”
“Am I, or am I not, the liaison between this office and the FBI’s task force?” He said it calmly, without raising his voice. Inside, though, he was cursing a blue streak.
“You burst into my office and then have the gall to ask me if I remember your fucking job? How can I forget it with you waving the fed card every time it suits you?”
Edgar ignored the dig. The rivalry between the feds and the local cops was legendary. And that meant that Edgar was now a traitor to his kind. Considering his kind hadn’t ever really wanted him, Edgar was okay with that. “A dead female in Franklin Canyon. Fatal wound to the neck. I talked to Gus on the way up, Sanders, and he knew enough to know that’s got task force written all over it. So why the hell didn’t you cal
l me?”
He knew he was getting worked up, but this was important. For years he’d been labeled a crackpot, but now he finally knew that he’d been right all along. There really were monsters out there in the world, and tinfoil hats weren’t going to keep them away. Ignorant detectives like Sanders weren’t going to, either. “Well?” he demanded. “Or did a federal task force simply slip your memory?”
In front of him, Sanders’s face was cycling through a series of expressions, the changes so fast and furious it was almost comic.
“I have never,” he sputtered, “never kept you or the FBI away from a case. But Penny Martinez has nothing to do with the task force investigation,” he said, referring to the victim by name.
“That isn’t a call you’re authorized to make.”
“And I didn’t. The feds did. Maybe you need to stay in better touch with your team, Garvey.”
“You’re saying the FBI said that the Penny Martinez case has no relevancy to the task force investigation?” Edgar pressed. “That’s insane.”
“Not the FBI,” he said. “Homeland Security.”
Edgar took an involuntary step back, startled. “Homeland?”
“They’re all feds to me,” Sanders was saying, unaware of the effect of his words. “Different injury. Different details.” His brow furrowed, as if he was trying to remember something. Edgar’s heart pounded against his rib cage. He wondered if Sanders could hear it.
After a second, Sanders shook his head. “Anyway, they were very clear. All my officers were sent packing. And a high-ranking agent spoke to me personally. Apparently, this is a matter of national security. What the fuck is wrong with you?” His diatribe ended with narrowed eyes and intense scrutiny. Edgar felt his face heat. He tugged at his collar, trying to catch his breath.
“Indigestion.” Suck it up, Garvey. This isn’t new; it’s just confirmation. He squared his shoulders, trying to gather himself, then pointed a finger at Sanders. “If I find out you’re screwing with me—”