A Vampire Bundle

by Alexandra Ivy

  Everything looked okay when we got there. The security guard at his station recognized Arnold and me, giving us a nod. That gave me some hope for Sara’s sister, at least. We hustled past him to Janine’s door, which fortunately wasn’t locked.

  Janine was sitting on a couch with the remote in her hand, glancing up from channel surfing when the three of us stumbled in. She sat up abruptly, confusion and fright contorting her pale china doll features. “Shiarra? What’s going on? Who’s this?” She gestured at Chaz.

  I paused to steady my breathing, and watched poor Arnold brace his hands on his knees and lower his head. That Janine was okay, at least, was a blessing, and he seemed almost as relieved as I did. “Something’s happened. Did Sara come back here?”

  She shook her head, her panic rising. “What happened? Where is she?”

  I closed my eyes, cursing the stupidity that led to us splitting up. From everything that happened the last couple of days, I thought I was the target. Stupid as it was, I never would’ve credited a bad guy with trying to use Sara to get to me. Not like this.

  Janine really wasn’t going to like this. Steeling myself to the inevitable breakdown, I swallowed my grief and anger to explain, “Sara’s been kidnapped. I’ll—I don’t know exactly who did it, but I’ll find out. Tonight. I’ll get her back.” Before she can get torn apart like Veronica and Allison. Please, God.

  Janine jumped about three feet in the air. “Oh, God! We have to do something! Call the police, the…somebody—you have to do something!” Her hysteria made Chaz and Arnold shift uncomfortably, looking anywhere but at her.

  I moved closer and placed a hand on her shoulder, urging her to sit back down. “Don’t worry, we’ll save her.” I prayed I wasn’t just mouthing platitudes. God, how I hoped. “Don’t drag the police into this. Whoever took her might kill her out of hand if I don’t do what they asked me to. We’ll figure out a way to get her out of there.”

  “Oh, no,” she moaned, wringing her hands and gradually, tensely lowering back down to the couch. She shot a fearful look at the men, tears glimmering in her eyes making me vow not to let mine fall. One of us had to be strong here, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Janine. I could dissolve into a puddle of misery later, after I saved Sara. For now, I focused on the anger, clinging to it, using it to keep from driving myself into despair over increasingly overwhelming odds. Those responsible would pay dearly for causing so much pain and misery.

  “How could this have happened?” Janine said, wiping at her tears.

  I shared a helpless look with Arnold before shaking my head and running my hands through my curls, getting some of the sweat-plastered strings off my forehead and out of my eyes. I wanted to shake my fist at the sky, shout and scream against the holder of that thrice-damned focus, throw and destroy things and beat them into submission. I wanted to hunt them down like the cowardly curs they were, let them know what it felt like to be hounded and hunted and harassed. When I got my hands on them, I would make sure they felt every last indignity, bruise, cut, and abrasion they put Sara and me through.

  If they didn’t keep their word, if they did the unthinkable and killed her, I don’t know what I would do. Whatever it was wouldn’t be pretty.

  But it would all have to wait until after sunset.

  “I’ll let Arnold and Chaz fill you in. I need to get ready to fight this thing.”

  With that, I turned and stomped off to the guest bedroom. I’d be damned if whoever was doing this caught me unprepared again. The next minion I met was going to get a bullet between the eyes, contract or no contract.

  Chapter 37

  Chaz let out a low whistle when I strode back into the living room in the armor, belt, and holster. The guns weren’t going to be out of easy reach until the holder of the focus was dead, no matter how many times I forgot and jabbed myself in the ribs by folding my arms. The sweet scent of cloves and cinnamon also clung to me, as I’d applied some more of the Amber Kiss perfume, just in case. I put the trench coat on, slung the duffel over my shoulder, and headed for the door.

  “Let’s go, guys.”

  Chaz and Arnold stood and started to follow me, but I paused at the door and looked back over my shoulder. “Janine, I’m sorry, but I’d recommend you go lay low somewhere else for a couple of days.”

  She looked up when I spoke, her eyes red from her tears. What surprised me was the anger there, glinting in the icy blue depths so like Sara’s. I’d never seen her anything but a neurotic, nervous wreck before, so the sudden intense animosity was unexpected.

  “You find her. You get her out of this mess. If you don’t, I’ll—I’ll do something. Something bad. You won’t like it.”

  “Janine.” I hesitated in the face of her anger. “You know I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. She’s my best friend. I swear, I’ll do everything in my power to save her, to get her back.”

  She continued to glare at me from her seat. The two men were awkwardly shuffling their feet and trying to back away as inconspicuously as possible. “Do it. I swear to God, Shiarra, if she gets hurt because of this mess you dragged her into, I will do everything I can to make your life miserable.” I might have taken offense if the angry look hadn’t suddenly crumbled into helpless despair. She lowered her head into her hands, hiding her tears.

  “Janine, I promise, I’ll do everything I can to get her back.”

  She didn’t turn in my direction when I spoke, not that I could blame her. All she did was nod in response.

  I felt bad, but with everything else going on, I didn’t have any time to sit and hold her hand. There was too much work to do. I had come up with the semblance of a plan while getting dressed and scrubbing the worst of the sweat off my face. My hair needed a wash, but I didn’t have time, finger combing it instead and using water to slick the curls back out of my face as much as possible.

  As the three of us stepped out into the noonday sun, I waited until there were no pedestrians nearby and then said, “Arnold, you were talking about familiars last night. Mage familiars.”

  “Yeah. What about them?”

  “Does every mage have one?”

  “No.”

  Crap. That was disappointing. But he wasn’t finished.

  “Newer magi fresh out of the Academy generally don’t. Neither do some of the less well off or not very powerful ones. Generally any practicing mage has one, though, particularly if you’re part of a coven and expected to be casting on a regular basis. Why?”

  I grinned. Maybe something was finally going right after all. “Does that mean Veronica had a familiar?”

  After a moment, recognition dawned and he started grinning right back at me. Chaz was looking at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were. “Yes. Yes, she did. A cat.”

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “Excellent. Do you think there’s any way we can get into her apartment to find it? Without alerting the cops?”

  He looked thoughtfully at me, then frowned as his gaze slid to Chaz. “No.” An awkward, hesitant expression crossed his face, which reminded me of what he was like when I first met him. All he would need to complete the look were the coke-bottle lenses. “I guess we can go back to my place and I can summon it. I’d need equipment anyway to be able to speak with it and see what it knows.”

  Chaz’s brows rose. “Summon it? You can do that?”

  “Yeah. Familiars are planar beings. Technically, it’s considered rude to call someone else’s familiar uninvited, but since Veronica is dead, I don’t have to worry about the consequences quite so much.”

  “And you can talk to it, right? Find out what it knows, the way you do with…uhh…” I asked, fumbling for the name of the mouse he’d shown me. “Bob?”

  “Sort of. Enough that I can maybe figure out who was there when she died. If we’re lucky, maybe the holder of the focus was there and the familiar saw it.”

  Chaz’s brows finally unfurrowed as understanding dawned. “You think somehow the person who had the focus wa
s using Others to kill a mage?”

  Guess he didn’t read the Sunday paper.

  “Yeah. It’s kind of a long story,” Arnold said. “Let’s get going, I’ll explain in the car.”

  We hurried to Arnold’s car, parked in a guest spot at Janine’s building. I let Chaz sit shotgun since the tiny sports car would have forced him to tuck his knees under his chin just to fit in the back.

  Arnold efficiently wove through traffic heading downtown. Finally he turned onto a side street in the Village and pulled into a gated garage below a small, new-but-made-to-look-old, red brick apartment building. The majority of the cars parked down there were trendy sports models like his. No minivans or broken-down junkers here. He pulled into a numbered parking space and Chaz, ever the gentleman, helped me clamber out of the back and shouldered my duffel.

  Arnold led us to his apartment, which was open and spacious, with large windows offering a great view of the street and a park down the block. The floors were a clean, shiny hardwood, and rather than the expected geekdom or magic paraphernalia, he had some nice electronics and plush, comfortable-looking furniture. There was a stereo, a large flatscreen TV, and a bank of four computers lined up against one wall, along with more movies than you could watch in a year shelved in floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  I left my duffel next to the door and shrugged out of my jacket, tossing it over the back of a couch as Arnold led the way down a short hall. I managed to catch a peek into his bedroom, a bunch of bookshelves lining the walls and a laptop sitting open on the rumpled blue and white sheets. Arnold shut the door before I could get a good look at all the figurines and gaming books on the shelves, but I still saw enough to be amused.

  We moved on to the next room, and as Arnold flicked on the light switch, it only took one look for me to know without a doubt that this was where the magic was done.

  Chapter 38

  My first thought was that his landlord probably wasn’t going to like it that he’d etched—no, on closer inspection, burned—a very large pentagram into the center of the room, right into the nice hardwood floor. It wasn’t the usual star and circle that I’d seen a thousand times in movies and on book covers and magazines. There were dozens of other symbols inside the circle, mostly outside of the star, none of them familiar to me.

  There were white candles set at each of the five points of the star, just inside the line that made up the circle. I noticed a number of bookshelves here, too, though none with gaming manuals. Nothing but arcane texts, spellbooks, books on herbs, and surprisingly, a couple of shelves devoted to books on physics, languages, and history. Tucked away in a corner was an altar holding dried flowers, crystals and stones, a small silver knife, a mirror, and a chalice.

  It smelled mostly like dusty books and dried flowers, but there was an undertone of ozone or something that made the air positively crackle with energy. I noted distantly that Chaz’s nostrils were flared and the hair on his arms had risen. Guess he didn’t like the feeling any more than I did.

  Arnold waved us back to the door, heading over to a chest of drawers beneath heavily draped windows. “You guys can stay if you want, but it might be better if you waited outside. I need quiet and concentration for this.”

  “No,” I said, “I’d like to see what you do. I’ll stay.”

  “Me, too,” Chaz said, folding his arms and leaning against the wall. I sat on the floor facing the windows, carefully adjusting the holster and belt so I wouldn’t jab myself in the process.

  Arnold pulled some things out of the dresser and set them on top. I watched with interest as he flicked through some files, selecting a small packet out of one, then pulling out and neatly arranging on a silver tray a piece of quartz, a plain wooden disk, two silver bowls, a few pieces of twine braided into a circle, a bottle of spring water, and a lump of what looked like sculptor’s clay.

  One by one, he moved the items into the circle. He put one of the bowls in the center of the star. The quartz, twine, clay, remaining bowl, and disk were each put inside one of the triangles that made up the points of the star. Next he poured some of the water into the bowl that was in a point. Lastly, with two deft fingers he plucked something too small for me to make out from the packet and dropped it into the bowl in the center, resealing the packet and returning it to its file in the drawer.

  After that, he walked over to the shelves, perused the titles briefly, then took down a thin, unlabeled volume. Skimming through the pages, he moved around the outside of the circle, plucking up the small dagger and moving back to the center. Without looking up from the book, he absently pricked his finger with the dagger, letting a couple of drops of blood drip into the bowl before moving to stand before one of the points.

  Chaz and I exchanged mystified looks. It was odd seeing Arnold, the nerd in jeans and a rumpled button-down, performing this arcane ritual and muttering over the pages of an ancient book.

  Eventually he found what he was searching for and looked up, holding the book open with one hand, the dagger in front of him with the other. “Luminare. Jungere!” he said, and Chaz and I jerked back slightly as the candles all simultaneously lit themselves and a haze shimmered in the air, enclosing the circle in a huge sphere.

  Arnold started in on a rapid, fluid litany of unintelligible words. Every now and then he threw in a word that sounded almost, but not quite, familiar. Maybe it was Latin or Greek, or some heretofore-unknown tongue. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Speak to us. Do you know what happened to your mistress?” he finally said, in such a normal tone of voice that I almost missed it. I glanced in the circle, surprised to see that a small black cat was now sitting on its haunches in the center, next to the bowl. The clay and water from the points of the star were now gone.

  The cat pricked its ears forward, bright yellow eyes drifting over to look at Chaz, tail twitching slightly as it did so. My jaw dropped open as it turned back to Arnold and spoke in a soft, hissing voice. “A vampire and a werewolf worked together to kill Veronica Wright. I take it I was summoned for information rather than a new binding?”

  “That’s right,” he said, snapping the book shut and regarding the cat with a touch of wariness. I wondered why. Despite the fact that it was talking, in all other ways it looked like a normal cat to me. “You will not be bound as a familiar; I only ask for your assistance to find the ones responsible for Veronica Wright’s death, and in return will call any hold you have on this plane by The Circle void. You will never be summoned by one of us again.”

  “Spare me the platitudes,” the creature hissed, flexing its claws. “You cannot enforce that trade. I have another offer.”

  A slight twitch like a nervous tic started under one of Arnold’s eyes, and I watched in fascination as he spoke, his voice carefully controlled in a way I’d never heard out of him before. “What do you want in return?”

  It looked directly at me. “I want information. A piece of data or insight from each person in this room. No more.”

  A chill washed over me for no reason I could readily put my finger on. What was so bad about that? Arnold didn’t seem to like the idea. “Three pieces of information from me. I am your summoner, not them.”

  “You called me in the presence of witnesses, mage.” It yawned as though bored, rising to walk slowly around the inside perimeter of the circle, never quite touching the edges of the haze. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I can’t speak for them.” He shot a look at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he didn’t want us to talk to it, but at this point I didn’t see much of a choice.

  “Will you tell us everything you know about Veronica’s death, who killed her and who was involved if we agree?” I asked it. Arnold looked like he wanted to throttle me.

  The cat made an eerie sound that was half-laugh, half-purr. “Of course.”

  “I agree, then,” I said, looking to Chaz.

  After a brief hesitation, he shrugged and nodded. “Me, too.”

  Arnold swore
softly under his breath before agreeing as well. “Information only. What do you want to know?”

  It looked all too pleased. “No time limit was imposed. I reserve my question for the girl and the wolf for another time.”

  “No!” Arnold cried, desperate. “That was not part of the agreement. I’m not resummoning you later just so you can ask them questions.”

  “I didn’t ask to be resummoned, mage. I will collect from them when I am ready.” It lifted a paw to delicately lick at it, carefully splaying razor-sharp claws before making a big production out of cleaning its face. “My question for you is a simple one. What do you think to gain by taking control of the focus when you know full well that any who wield it are destined to have its power turned against them?”

  My gaze shot from the cat to Arnold, who was very carefully avoiding my gaze. The cat was asking the very question I’d been pondering since he’d mentioned that he was helping me for his own reasons. Not that I hadn’t figured out by then that he wanted the focus for himself, but it was still a bit disturbing to hear it from a talking cat instead of straight from him.

  “I want to restore balance to the—”

  “No!” it hissed. “Information, I said. Not, as you might say, ‘PR’ bullshit.”

  He took a deep breath, his fingers tightening around the dagger and book at his sides. His green eyes narrowed to thin slivers, anger filtering through his voice. “Like I was saying, I want to restore balance to the Other community. If I can accomplish that, my standing in the coven will rise, and open the way for me to lead when Alexandra steps down.”