Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  Jaxon possessed the sort of exuberant personality that attracted people like moths to light and made it impossible to stay angry with him. He wasn’t handsome—his eyes were set too close, his nose was a little too long for his short face, and he constantly dyed his hair too blond for his coloring—but his wide, easygoing smile made you forget that right away. Hazel eyes always sparkled with mischief, and his laughter was infectious. His smile and laugh were what had attracted me to him in the first place.

  When I’d asked him once what had first attracted him to me, he had gotten very quiet, very serious. Then he said, “You have a fabulous ass.”

  I’d smacked him upside the head for that.

  Looking at Jaxon, no one would ever guess he could turn into a two-hundred-pound, seven-point stag.

  “You just roll out of bed?” Jaxon asked. He tossed back a palm full of dry-roasted peanuts from a can in his lap, relaxed like this was a friendly visit and not work related.

  “Why, do I have bed-head?” I raked one hand through my thick, brown-black hair, seeking tangles and finding none. It hung a few inches past my shoulders and lived in a strange place between straight and wavy that required little in the way of product management. A brush and a blow-dryer were my only styling tools.

  He swallowed his nuts and grinned. “Nope, but you’ve got a hickey on your neck that looks fresh and you didn’t bother covering it with makeup.”

  I clenched my fingers to keep from touching my throat. This day kept getting worse. I made myself feel better by flipping him off with no real ire in the gesture.

  I sensed Novak entering the room before he asked, “You and Vincent must have had quite an evening.”

  I turned to face him, crossing my arms over my chest, suddenly wishing I’d taken five minutes for a quick shower. The former incubus could smell sex on a person, and judging by the flare of his nostrils and wide eyes, he smelled more on me than just the slight arousal that had teleported me here.

  Novak lived close by, although I’d never been invited to his house—okay by me, because I had no desire to invite him into mine. He was an effective teammate, but that’s all he was to me. Sure, he was built like a professional linebacker—six-feet-two of thick muscles and smooth ebony skin he liked showing off beneath an ever-changing wardrobe of designer jeans and tight t-shirts. And unlike Jaxon, Novak was hot and he knew it—another incubus bonus feature. Also unlike Jaxon, Novak was scary when he smiled. Everything about Novak exuded sex and intent, even though he no longer hunted souls for Hell.

  He may have been changed, but he was still an asshole.

  Instead of letting Novak get to me, I tossed him a saucy grin and lied. “We did, actually, several times.”

  His jaw tightened.

  “Are we it?” I asked.

  “Kathleen will meet us there,” Novak said.

  “Julius here yet?” I asked Jaxon. Our leader lived a couple miles away in a bungalow he shared with half a dozen stray cats that he left food for a couple times a week.

  “He’s not answering his Raspberry,” Jaxon replied. He was staring into the open can of peanuts, as if debating the merits of eating more. “I drove by his house, too, but he’s not home.”

  A tiny knot of worry tightened my stomach. “That’s not like him.” The impromptu nature of our job necessitated keeping our specially-designed-from-stolen-technology cell phones with us at all times. Jaxon was the first one to start calling our phones by fruit names, mostly to annoy Novak, but eventually Raspberry stuck. We all kind of liked the pun.

  What I didn’t like was that in the six years I’d known Julius, he’d never been out of touch unless required by an assignment.

  “No, it isn’t,” Novak said. “But he knows where the assignment is, and vampires holding humans hostage is too urgent a matter to waste time here.” The statement held a small amount of challenge in it.

  As second-in-command, I was currently the ranking member of the team. If I said to move out and hope Julius caught up later, they’d do it. I’d run ops before, just not on something quite as grand as this. The idea of heading negotiations with hostage-holding vampires without Julius at my side was daunting.

  Daunting and a tiny bit terrifying.

  But what choice did I have? A familiar whirring sound crept over the hum of computers and crunch of Jaxon’s peanuts. The helicopter was warming up out back on what had once been a private tennis court. One of the nice things about working for the Marshals’ Office was technology and transportation. Sometimes they needed us to get places fast. We even had a private jet on retainer at a small airport ten miles away.

  “Let’s go, then,” I said. “And bring the peanuts.”

  The guys were weaponed-up and ready, so we made our way out the back door without any stops. The rear of the house had a long, white porch that looked out over an expansive lawn that Jaxon mowed once a week, regardless of the weather. Julius and I liked to tease him about grazing.

  Fifty yards beyond it was a split-post fence and, just past it, the tennis court and our waiting custom helicopter. Its rotating blades created a gentle breeze that grew steadily louder as we walked across the lawn.

  “Do we have details on this standoff?” I asked.

  “Not a lot,” Novak replied. “Mostly info on the trailer park itself. Whoever’s in charge of the vamps hasn’t made any demands yet, but they’ve cut off phone lines, cable, internet, and supposedly confiscated every cell phone and radio in town.”

  “This was planned.” An obvious statement. No one commented. They knew I liked to think out loud. “Vamps don’t like drawing attention to themselves, especially negative, so what the hell’s got them pulling something like this?”

  “Remind me to ask them when we see them.”

  Vampires have been known—truly known, not just as boogeymen to scare children—to the world at-large for the last sixty or so years, the second species to announce their presence to human beings (werewolves being the first). To say it didn’t go over well is an understatement, but tempers and tensions had cooled considerably in the last couple of decades.

  When we first learned about werewolves, it was eighty years ago as a publicity stunt during America’s early involvement in World War II. They returned from the War among other revered heroes, and many, many myths were dispelled (the hunger for human flesh, for instance), and a few were proven true (such as the need to change under the full moon). In the golden post-War years, few seemed to mind them. Publicly.

  However, when vampires came out ten years later, things got ugly. The public could handle people who turned into wolves once a month and lived with their Pack, secluded from the bulk of society. They couldn’t seem to handle the idea of bloodsuckers living next door, buying blood from willing donors, and generally proving that yes, some things really do go bump in the night. Not even assurances of the control Masters had over their lines, or the care taken in choosing and turning new vampires, seemed to assuage the bulk of folks—especially the religious ones.

  Vampires were vilified. Then they were crucified—literally. Humans were killed in retaliation. It all came to a nasty head in Little Rock, Arkansas about forty years ago. Half the city burned down in the riot started by humans, fueled by hatred, and spread by malice. When it was finally over, the news networks took great delight in airing and re-airing footage of two vampires saving a family of six from a burning apartment building.

  Seconds after ushering the family to safety, they were dusted by two local cops.

  A lot’s changed in forty years. Vampires keep to themselves, many returning to a life underground and out of the public eye. Every state with a werewolf Pack was granted several thousand acres of protected land, and many werewolves went to live there. Some stayed in cities, but were still subject to Pack laws and the call of their Alpha. The Para-Marshals were there to deal with the occasional issue stemming from non-Pack werewolves, and to handle the things no one else could explain—the species humans didn’t know existed ri
ght beneath their noses.

  Like me.

  After all that, no other magical race I’ve met will come clean again. If human beings got so lathered up over vampires, discovering the existence of demons would signal the end of days.

  Right now, though, I needed to figure out how to end our current predicament with the vampires without bloodshed on either side.

  We stopped talking as we neared the fence and the roar of the helicopter took over. After we strapped into our seats, I pulled out my Raspberry and sent K.I.M. a request for the layout of Myrtle’s Acres.

  One hundred and twenty was our rough hostage count, give or take folks out of town for whatever reason. It was a stereotypical trailer park, with one road in that split left and right at the entrance. Four rows of trailers at least thirty years old lined the two streets, small parking lots every two trailers, and lots of tall trees and shrubs, which made getting aerial satellite shots difficult. It was a half mile deep, and about a quarter mile wide, with thick forest on all three sides. A cornfield marked the fourth side, opposite the country road leading to Myrtle’s Acres. The flat land gave us no tactical advantage. No single trailer in the park was large enough to hold everyone, so the hostages were divided, likely in the two central rows of trailers.

  Our only advantage lay in our adversaries. Contrary to popular myth, vampires don’t fall “dead” during the day. They are, however, nocturnal creatures and therefore weaker during daylight hours. Not to mention sunlight-adverse. No one had invented an SPF-400 yet, so vamps still had to avoid direct sunlight if they were out and about after sunrise. If the vampire hostage-takers were standing guard in the open, they’d be weaker in roughly three and a half hours.

  I snacked on Jaxon’s peanuts and tried Julius’s cell phone three more times during our thirty-minute flight. Straight to voice mail each time, with no response to my texts or pages. Each attempt raised my anxiety level a notch. We were running close to an hour without word from our leader, which wasn’t SOP. Novak and Jaxon reflected my tension in their stiff postures and stony silence.

  We had our pilot do a flyover of the trailer park. It was almost perfectly dark, every light source extinguished, individual trailers barely visible in the glow of the crescent moon and reflection of the state patrol’s base camp. They had set up roadblocks on the country road, and were set up at the west end. Two patrol cars were parked on the east side, the patrolmen sitting quietly. Nothing moved below. It was . . . peaceful.

  Early April in corn country meant the fields were still being turned and fertilized. Instead of landing on a bed of green stalks, the helicopter set down on dark brown earth that reeked of animal shit. The heavy, rotting odor turned my stomach.

  “That’s just disgusting,” Jaxon said. Novak climbed out last and concurred with the assessment by coughing loudly.

  We didn’t linger, running across the field at a diagonal from the trailer park, leaving the pilot behind to power down the helicopter. He’d stay there until we needed him, like a good little soldier. The state patrol had three cars and an ambulance huddled by the western roadblock, about thirty yards from the entrance. Battery-operated floodlights provided daylight-strength illumination. Six patrolmen and two EMTs were waiting for us, along with a familiar blonde.

  Kathleen Allard frowned as we got closer, her wide green eyes narrowing. She looked like an angry ghost beneath those glaring lights, harsh against her pale skin. Even though our resident dhampir looked twenty-one, she was closer to sixty years old. She wasn’t immortal like her vampire father had been, but she would live a very long time thanks to his genetic legacy.

  “Where’s Julius?” she asked. She still carried hints of the French accent she’d acquired during her childhood, but her clothes betrayed a newfound love of everything Seattle-grunge. She didn’t seem to mind she’d missed the fashion statement by at least two decades.

  “MIA,” Novak said. “Shi’s got point on this.”

  “Lovely.”

  I rolled my eyes. Not my fault I was thirty years younger and still outranked her. “Who’s in charge of the locals?” I asked.

  “Lieutenant Foster, the one with the handlebar mustache,” Kathleen said, pointing.

  The patrolman in question was nearly as bear-sized as Novak. His red mustache matched the thick, auburn hair on his head and the smattering of freckles on his nose and cheeks. He approached us with a question in his eyes and disdain on his face. It was a look we received often from law enforcement unhappy to turn control of a situation over to our agency—even if they knew they were out of their league. Lieutenant Foster seemed to be no exception.

  “Shiloh Harrison, Para-Marshal’s Office,” I said, extending my hand.

  Foster had a strong grip as he shook. “Lieutenant Abraham Foster. Thanks for coming out, Marshal Harrison.”

  “How could I resist? It’s not every day vampires take a trailer park hostage.” I smiled, trying to put him at ease. Being known and semi-common in most states doesn’t stop regular folks from fearing vampires.

  Foster’s expression didn’t change, though, so I hunkered down to business. “Any idea what the numbers on our vampires are?” I asked.

  “Only three have made themselves visible,” he replied, “but they’d need more to watch so many people.”

  “That depends on the age and abilities of the vampires involved,” Kathleen said. “Many Master vampires possess psychic abilities.”

  Foster’s eyes widened. Yeah, this guy was going to be a treat.

  “What about communication?” I asked, cutting off whatever the next thing he was going to say. “Our intel says they’d cut all landlines. Have they made contact?”

  “Not since the first phone call telling us about the takeover, no,” he said. “I’ve got people in the woods, keeping a perimeter of fifty feet from the property line. They’ve seen their eyes in the distance, so we know the vampires are watching us, too.”

  Vampires maintain the same eye color as in their previous life, but when a vamp is angry or hungry, they glow red. A scary, bloodred. I’ve heard they flash blue and green for other emotions, but my interaction was limited to pissed vamps or calm, colorless vamps. Even as a half vampire, Kathleen could control her color-change and used it to great effect when it suited her.

  “They have to know we’d be called in,” Novak said.

  I was counting on it.

  A man’s disembodied voice shot through my head like an iron spike, sharp and agonizing. I stumbled under the strength of it. Someone caught my elbow and steadied me.

  “Shi? You okay?” Jaxon was in my face, his hazel eyes reflecting silver in the glare of the floodlights. Eyeshine gone wild.

  “You didn’t hear that?” I asked. With my bearings back, I gently pulled my elbow out of his bruising grip.

  “Hear what?”

  They only hear me if I wish it. More thunder in my head. Colorful spots danced in front of my eyes. “Stop that!” I shouted. “Get out of my head!”

  It pissed me off, being violated like that. And that “if I wish it” line wasn’t funny, either.

  My teammates stared at me curiously, but Foster just looked terrified. I shouldered past them and stalked toward the barricade of patrol cars. A pale line of tiki torches and a nauseatingly retro Myrtle’s Acres sign loomed in front of me, flanked by a wall of monstrous shadows. From the darkness near the sign, a figure emerged.

  He stood in the middle of the road, long hair glinting in the meager moonlight, first white-blond, then black, then auburn. It never seemed to settle on one shade. Shadows cast sharp angles on his pale face, and even from a distance I could tell he was handsome.

  Behind me, the sound of leather creaking and snaps popping caught my attention. The patrolmen were reaching for their weapons.

  “No one draws on him,” I said sharply.

  Come halfway so we may speak more comfortably.

  If he didn’t stop doing that, my brain was going to liquefy and leak out of my ears. I licked
dry lips. “Novak, I’m going out to talk to him.” I then called his Raspberry, turned it on to speaker, and put it in my pocket. At least they’d be able to listen in.

  “Do not turn your back on him,” Kathleen said, her voice holding a small amount of awe—not directed at me. “But do not meet his eyes until he gives you his name. To do so before is a challenge. I can sense him from here, Shiloh. He’s powerful.”

  “Yeah, the booming voice in my head sort of clued me in.” My sharp retort rolled right off her.

  “Be careful, Shi,” Jaxon said.

  “As careful as I can.”

  I inhaled deeply, held it, then started walking on the exhale. Tension at my boss’s absence was compounded by the sight in front of me. A Master vampire was walking toward me on a dark street, his long cloak swirling around him like a storm cloud. He could be hiding an arsenal beneath that thing. Vampire mind control doesn’t work on djinn, and our blood is distasteful to them, but I could still be shot or stabbed if he got twitchy.

  Step by step, we drew closer and I began to sense the power Kathleen had already warned me about. It sizzled and popped like water meeting hot grease and made me strangely giddy. I struggled to keep calm when the djinn half of me demanded I turn and flee. Our kinds do not get along. At all. It made me wonder: Was he in my head just to torment me?

  As requested, we met halfway, each stopping an arm’s reach from the other. He was even more handsome up close, as the sharp lines of his jaw and chin came into focus. His color-changing hair hung perfectly straight to mid-back, further paling his porcelain complexion. Upon closer inspection, I realized his hair wasn’t changing color, it actually was multicolored—every imaginable shade of brown, black, red, copper, gold, blond, silver, and white separating the individual strands. If it was a dye job, it had taken days to affect, but something told me it was natural. Or naturally occurring via magic.

  The effect was ethereal, mesmerizing.

  Kathleen’s warning came back, and I halted my appraisal at his straight slash of a nose, careful not to meet his eyes.