by Cat Adams
I concentrated on Kevin. Beaten, battered, and unable to protect himself. Yes, he was an ass, and yes, I was furious at him. But that didn’t mean I’d let some demon hag cut off his limbs. Kevin. C’mon, buddy. Hear me. Wake up.
There was a smooth, blank wall of quiet inside his head. This wasn’t just from being knocked unconscious. This took drugs and lots of them. Kevin. Wake up. Amy needs you.
Thankfully a werewolf metabolism is an amazing thing. The more I called his name, the thinner the wall in his head got. I don’t know how I could feel it, but I could.
Kev—ahhh! It was the scream that finally woke him. I tend to react unfavorably to bullet wounds. My whole body spun around when the bullet entered my shoulder and I found myself on the ground staring up at a lot more people than had been there when I’d started to contact Kevin. The pain was intense and caused a reaction I should have expected. The vamp inside totally came out and I leapt on my nearest enemy before I could stop myself.
But that tiny bit of me that was still human refused to slam fangs into the man’s neck, despite the scent of blood that filled the air.… Instead, I grabbed the rifle and ripped it from his hands and used it like a club across his jaw. He went down like a rock and lay still. The glowing red eyes I’d glimpsed before he fell told me that the nurse wasn’t the only possessed person here. I slid my blackened knife from its sheath and laid the flat of the blade on the man’s chest. Even unconscious, he screamed—silently. Hopefully I had just sent the demon back to hell where it belonged.
Sound returned just then and my ears were assaulted by screams, shouts, sirens, and gunfire. Louder than all that was a howl of pure rage and pain from above. As I put the knife back in the sheath, I looked up to see Kevin at the window, his hair whipping from Vicki’s storm. The guards looked up also and aimed their weapons in his direction.
No. They would not shoot him. That I could prevent. I leapt into the nearest guard just in time. The guard’s shot went into the cinder block a foot away from Kevin.
We went down in a tangle of limbs that made my shoulder erupt into intense pain. I struggled to keep from screaming a second time. Edgar jumped on the guard directly to my left before he could pull the trigger. He perched on the man like a spider, holding down each limb, hissing, fangs bared. I turned away just as Edgar’s head thrust downward and the man screamed.
A different movement caught my eye. Kevin had decided not to stick around long enough for anyone to get off another shot. He’d jumped from the window. A human might break his legs, hitting the ground from three stories up. But Kevin just landed in a crouch, his face contorted into a snarl of fury.
A hand grabbed my wrist and pulled. It was my bad arm, so I hissed in pain and reacted, my fist sizzling toward whoever was attached to the hand. Jones is nimble; I’ll give him that. He shifted his head so that my fist sailed past his ear.
“Time to go.” He raised his other hand and his eyes blazed with power.
Air pressed against my head until I thought it would explode, and then the world dissolved to white.
5
“Y’know, vampire healing isn’t your friend in a gunfight.” The voice, male and pure Jersey, brought me back to consciousness. My eyes popped open as I recognized the speaker. Gaetano, a medic who’d patched me up before, shook his head and cut deep into my shoulder with a scalpel. Thankfully I couldn’t feel anything other than pressure, which probably meant I’d been treated with a combination of morphine and a sedative spell.
“You healed right over the bullet. If I don’t get it out, it’ll sting every time you move your arm.”
“I’ll take healing over the alternative, thanks.” My tongue felt thick and unresponsive and it was impossible to keep my head straight. Good thing Gaetano was one of the good guys—or at least less bad than those who had shot me. Of course, I had been breaking out a prisoner, so maybe I was a bad guy and so was Gaetano. “By the way, are we the good guys or the bad guys?”
He smiled then and let out a snort. “Depends on the day, Graves. Today we were the good guys.” I remembered the glowing eyes of the nurse, who’d smiled with a saw in her hands, and agreed with a shudder. Gaetano’s hands pushed my shoulder down harder on the bed. The click of metal on metal said he’d probably reached the bullet. A weird sensation in my shoulder told me I was starting to metabolize the drugs. It was going to hurt soon, maybe before he finished. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on something else.
I was in a bed. The softness and the sheets gave it away. But whose bed, and when did I get there? Without moving my head, I looked around. I seemed to be in the basement of a house. A hot-water heater stood in a corner and I could see the back of a staircase beyond Gaetano’s muscular arm. “Where are we?” The direct approach is often the best.
“Safe house.” His voice held concentration. “Quit talking. It makes the drugs wear off. You’re starting to flinch.”
Yeah. “Should you give me more?”
His brown eyes flicked my way. Pretty. There was frustration mingled with amazement in his expression. “I’ve already given you enough to kill a full human, Graves. If you just relax and don’t think, they’ll work fine.”
“Celia.”
He stopped again. “What?”
“Celia, not Graves. I’m not a soldier.”
Another snort and a shake of his head. “Then you’re hanging out with the wrong people.” He put bloodstained gloved fingers on my eyebrows. “Now relax and let me finish, okay?” He closed my eyes.
* * *
There was a warm, vibrating weight on my chest that moved when I did. My eyes opened slowly, enjoying the sensation of heat and movement. Orange and white fur was all I could see. Why was our office cat, Minnie the Mouser, in the safe house?
Then I realized she wasn’t. I was in my office, lying on the couch. What the hell? I put a hand on the cat and gave her a stroke or two. She responded with extra purring. Then I gently lifted her up and put her on the floor. The purring stopped and she gave me an annoyed look with wide green eyes before walking into the nearest sunbeam on the carpet to begin bathing her face with one paw. I sat up and immediately regretted it. I’d been through a battle, and from the way my shoulder moved I was betting there was a bandage underneath my shirt, which was actually a button-down shirt and not a black turtleneck with a hole in the shoulder. Oh, crap. That meant my shirt had been off while Gaetano had been operating on me. Logical, and it shouldn’t bother me. Except it did.
My vest, clothing, and wrist sheaths, with knives, were neatly stacked on my desk. My first thought was to check the safe. The lock was still red, but I wouldn’t know if they’d used my palm to deactivate the magical part of the locking system until I looked inside. I was hoping not, but I wouldn’t put much past Jones.
I spun on the couch and sat up. The sound of crinkling paper had me looking around and then groping in the pockets of my bloodstained jeans. I hoped they’d been dry when I’d been laid on the couch. A folded slip of paper came out after a second of tugging.
I don’t date soldiers or coworkers, but you’re not either. Call me.
Gaetano
A phone number followed, and not surprisingly, it was local. How else would he have been around to swoop in, medical kit in tow, twice in a month?
Feast or famine. That’s nearly always how it worked with me. For five years, I couldn’t get a date on a bet. Now I’d attracted a growing flock of men, milling like the birds that were undoubtedly outside my office.
The problem was that everything I’d heard and experienced told me it was all frosting, no cake. Having a date who is magically compelled to worship the ground you walk on isn’t quite the same to me as earning his respect and him liking me as a person. It didn’t matter whether I could help it or not. I didn’t want to wind up like some of the starlets who abound in Hollywood and complain nobody respects their minds while on their way to the plastic surgeon to add a cup size. Maybe I needed to get a whole bunch of those anti-sir
en charms made up and hand them out to everyone I met.
I stood up and went to the desk, automatically checking each and every pocket of my vest. The place where the bullet had pierced the vest was obvious—the fabric covering the strips of Kevlar was frayed and slightly charred. Jeez! Were they using tracer rounds or something? I could fit my ring finger into the hole. It felt like a .30-06 to me, except that a hunting round would probably have gone right through me. Maybe I would call Gaetano sometime, just to ask what he’d pulled out of my shoulder.
Nothing was missing from the pockets except what I knew I’d used in the fight. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. Damn my paranoia anyway. I could think of a thousand hideous spells that could be contained in seemingly innocuous ceramic disks. I might think I was throwing a mudder and wind up choking to death from a lack of oxygen around my head.
I sighed. Better safe than sorry. Part of my weapons safe has a containment unit where I store unknown stuff until I can take it to experts who can tell me what it is. All my disks would have to go there.
I put my palm on the sensor of the lock mechanism, then entered the code. There was a long pause. I’ve gotten used to the pause. It used to open right up, but that was before the vampire bite. The tech people got it to work for me after my DNA altered by telling it I was pregnant. Nobody knows what’s going to happen at the nine-month mark. I needed to add a note to my computer calendar to remind me of my “birthday” so I could clean the safe out the day before. I’d hate to not be able to get to my stuff just because I forgot. Finally it let out a confirming beep and the reassuring clunk of the lock that I’d been told could be heard everywhere in the building. I opened the door. Everything looked just as I’d left it, which made me feel better.
I’d stowed my now-unreliable tools and was just finishing putting replacement charms in the vest pockets when there was a light tap at the door. Minnie and I looked up at the same moment and her questioning mew coincided with my, “Yes?”
It was both creepy and endearingly cute.
“You okay in there?” Dawna poked in her head with Dottie right at her heels in an odd contrast of personalities and visuals. “We heard the safe open.”
Dawna is our receptionist. She’s my age, Vietnamese American, and was the epitome of high fashion in a cherry red skirt and blazer and sleek patent-leather heels. Dottie, on the other hand, is elderly, with a delightful lack of self-consciousness, a white-bread, walker-using American in vivid red velour sweats. Two halves of a whole or maybe just a vision of all of our futures. Dottie is our backup receptionist—brought on when Dawna suffered a mental collapse that put her in the mental ward for a little while. As far as I knew, she wasn’t doing inpatient therapy anymore. Emma still was.
“I’m moving slow, but I’m moving. What time is it?” I was guessing it was around ten o’clock given the position of the sunbeam on the floor, but I could be wrong. “Hopefully I know what day it is. Anyone know when I got here?”
Dawna shrugged, but Dottie said, “According to the security log, three men and one woman entered at seven fifteen this morning.”
I wondered immediately which three. Then I noticed that Dawna looked as startled as I felt. “We have a security log?” I asked.
“That shows the sex of the person who entered?” said Dawna.
When she nodded, my eyes met Dawna’s and we nodded. “Sweet.” It came out of our mouths at the same time, which made all three of us chuckle. I’d have to see what else the log showed.
“Oh, and it’s ten twenty,” Dawna added. “You have someone on the phone and someone in the waiting room. Should I tell them both to get lost or do you want one or the other?”
Did I want to see anyone? Actually I didn’t feel all that bad. I should be hungry, but I wasn’t. I briefly wondered what that meant—had Gaetano or Jones gotten some nutrition into me? I felt sore, but not to the point of turning down work. “Depends. Who’s who?”
“Your old therapist, Gwen, is on the phone. She says it’s important. Detective Alexander is downstairs. She’s been waiting nearly an hour and says she’ll wait all day if she has to.”
Crap. Well, there could be worse people waiting I suppose. Like my mother, for example. But she was in jail. One of the many reasons I had a therapist.
“I told her you’d had a long night. Was it a successful night? I haven’t been able to reach Emma.” Dawna was being deliberately coy with Dottie right there. I understood, but it wasn’t really necessary. Like Emma, Dottie was a clairvoyant. I seem to know a lot of them. Vicki had been, as well. I was betting Dottie already had seen what had happened. She’d told me that once she met me she started getting multiple images of my future—mostly of future dangers. Naturally. The death curse put on me as a child saw to that.
I nodded. “We got Kevin out and he was fine last time I saw him. I don’t know more than that. But I’ll bet you can’t reach Emma because she’s back in Birchwoods.”
“Okay. Gwen first and then I’ll see Alex. Everything else okay? Is there a reason you’re both in the office today?”
Dottie beamed at me, total excitement in her eyes. “Dawna’s teaching me how to do billing.” Awesome! I’d worried that Dawna would take Dottie’s hiring as a condemnation of her mental state. Looking at her now, I didn’t think the smile on Dawna’s face was fake, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I could meet with her privately to dance around the subject.
“Great. I have several bills to go out this month.” Because I damned well was going to send a bill to a certain monarch of Rusland for at least the cost of my friend Bubba’s boat. Bubba had helped me out so that King Dahlmar could meet with my ever-so-great grandmother, the queen of the sirens. The boat was destroyed in a very ugly way (think big chunks of it sinking slowly into the ocean) and I owed him a new one. Not that he’d asked for it, but our relationship was a little more … tense than it had been.
I put my hands out and made little waving motions. “Okay, shoo. Give me five minutes to talk to Gwen. Get Alex some coffee or something.”
“Already taken care of. Gwen’s on two.” Dawna shut the door. I waited until I heard Dottie’s walker on the stairs before I sat at my desk. I would rather she didn’t climb the stairs with her bad hips, but there’s no stopping her. God knows I’ve tried. She just said, I’m old enough to know my own mind, dear, and I’ll deal with my own consequences.
I stared at the desk and tried to think where I’d left off with Gwen the last time we’d spoken. She’d refused to take me back as a client, and that had hurt. Years ago, she’d helped me keep my sanity after my kidnapping and Ivy’s death. Then Gwen had fallen ill and had to struggle with her own sense of mortality. She’d let her license lapse. For a while I’d been seeing Dr. Scott and Dr. Hubbard at the Birchwoods sanitarium, where Vicki had once lived. But now Dr. Scott had his own problems to face and Dr. Hubbard … well, she was nice enough, but she wasn’t Gwen.
Why she was calling now? Perhaps she’d changed her mind and was willing to work with me again. I hoped she wasn’t going to say that she was disappointed with me after my latest appearances in the tabloids. Disappointing her would be second only to making my gran cry on my scale of “worst days ever.” Just the thought of harsh words from Gwen made my stomach hurt and a burning like bile rise in my throat.
You’re allowed to expect good things, Celia . Just the memory of her quiet but forceful affirmations made the tension in my shoulders release a little. I took a deep breath and pressed the button.
“Hi, Gwen. Sorry to keep you waiting.” I went for brisk and businesslike despite the fact that my hand was trembling. “What can I do for you?”
“Good morning, Celia.” Her voice was calm and collected. Not angry or excited. That could mean anything. Damn. “I hope I didn’t call at a bad time.”
Hmm. Let’s see … how to field that. Bad is such a relative thing. “No. Not at all. I do have someone waiting, but I have a few minutes.”
“Great. I’m
hoping you can stop by my office to talk. There are a few things I’ve just been told that affect you directly.”
Her office ? Yay! My shoulders dropped to nearly normal. “Sure. When were you thinking?” Lord knew when I could fit it in. I grabbed my flip calendar and started turning pages. Ouch. Not looking so good. I had meetings with potential clients every morning this week, plus jobs every afternoon and evening until Christmas. December is a busy time of year for bodyguards. There are holiday parties and benefits nearly every day where celebrities want to mingle and be seen—but not let certain fans, the ones who adore them far too much, get close. “I have an hour or so next Monday morning. Nine o’clock?”
There was a pregnant pause before Gwen sighed. “I was hoping it could be today. It’s rather urgent.”
Urgent? “What kind of urgent ? I’m not doing too badly right this second.” It was true, though I knew I was blithely ignoring most of the problems in my life, hoping that the holidays would be a blur of only mild discomfort. I’m not a holiday person despite Gran’s best efforts. I save Christmas morning for her—fresh biscuits and coffee around the tree—but other than that, I leave the season to people who enjoy it. Like Dawna. And Emma. They’re so into sugary goodwill it makes my teeth hurt.
There was a second, deeper sigh in my ear. “It’s not about you, Celia, although I do want to hear about what’s really going on with you.” I knew she’d catch me.… “This is about a friend of yours. I’d rather not say any more on the phone. Do you have time to drop by today?”
A friend? There aren’t many people in my life who fit that description, but the ones I have are important. “Um, sure. Do I need to set a time or should I just drop by?”