Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds)

by AJ Larrieu

  A young man walked in. Twenty years old, maybe younger. He was wearing a light blue polo shirt and khaki cargo shorts.

  “Miz Perrin?”

  “Come and sit down.” She patted the couch next to her.

  “Sam said you needed help moving a dresser?”

  “Later.” She put her hands on either side of his face. He jerked back, but she was strong. She pressed and held him, looking right into his eyes. “You will feel no pain. You will not cry out. When I release you, you will remember nothing and you will leave with the memory of moving my dresser and being paid. Diana?”

  Diana stood up straight and handed a hundred-dollar bill to Annette. She took it and shoved the bill into the young man’s shorts.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  He did it, methodically and carefully, as if he were at a doctor’s office. He had a broad, hairless chest, the muscles cut and hard. It rose and fell with his breathing, which had gotten faster. He sat very straight on the edge of the couch and stared at a spot on the opposite wall. She hadn’t told him not to feel fear.

  Annette handed his shirt to Diana, who took it and twisted the fabric in her hands. Annette laid a towel in the guy’s lap then stroked her hand up the side of his face, tilting his head to the side and exposing his neck. Then she struck.

  I felt Diana’s gasp, her involuntary step back. It wasn’t like in the movies. There was blood everywhere. It ran down his neck and chest and soaked the towel she’d laid in his lap. Whatever mind-bending craziness she’d done to him, it worked, because he didn’t make a sound. Her throat worked, swallowing. Her hands clenched around his upper arms so tightly I was afraid she’d broken his bones.

  When she pulled back, I saw the fangs. They were long and pointed and slightly curved, extending half an inch past her upper lip. She tipped her head back and gave a moan of ecstasy, her eyes half-closed in satiated bliss. The guy touched the side of his neck and gazed at his bloody fingers in bewilderment.

  Annette licked her lips and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She used her own nail to slice the pad of her thumb, and she rubbed her own blood over the wound in his neck. I could only assume she’d healed him, because blood stopped gushing from the holes. She wiped his skin clean with another towel.

  “Diana? His shirt?”

  Diana didn’t move. Annette had to turn and pry the thing from her clenched fist.

  She dressed him. It was almost tender. She helped him stand and sent him on his way. Then she turned to Diana.

  “You see? That’s all I need. I know it seems terrible, but I do what I must to survive. You understand, don’t you? Haven’t you done what you need to do to survive?”

  Diana nodded automatically, but the tangle of her emotions nearly overwhelmed me. Fear that bordered on terror, sorrow with the flavor of loneliness, an overpowering desire to forget what she’d just seen, to go on like she’d been before. It was heartbreaking—the uncertainty of a betrayed child.

  The memory faded to black, shields coming back up around her mind, and I dropped out of her head.

  “Do you believe me now?” Her voice was softer, almost pitying.

  I couldn’t answer immediately. This was impossible. It couldn’t be happening. Shane stared at her in open shock.

  But I remembered how Annette had moved, how she’d survived a knife wound to the chest. “Yes,” I said finally. “I believe you.”

  * * *

  We waited until we got downstairs to speak, ducking into the garage. It was hot, but at least we wouldn’t be overheard.

  “It’s got to be—I don’t know—one future out of many, or something.” My hand went involuntarily to my throat. Shane’s face was serious.

  “Sibyls are rare,” he said. “I’ve never met one before. I don’t know how it works.”

  “And what’s this about vampires? I mean—vampires?”

  “I was as shocked as you are.”

  “I’m calling Susannah.”

  “I’m not sure—” Shane began, but he stopped when we both felt it. Anger with a thread of panic.

  Lionel. The kitchen.

  Everything Diana had just told me fled from my mind. We raced back inside and through the guests’ dining room, where Bruce had already laid out place settings for breakfast. I burst through the swinging door to the kitchen and almost knocked over one of the guests. Mrs. Robards, a tourist from out of state. And she was not happy.

  We never let guests into the kitchen. Too much of a chance they’d see something they shouldn’t. It was surprising enough to find her there, but it was even more surprising to see her yelling at Lionel.

  “There was a fight out there last night! I know what I heard!” She barely looked up as Shane and I barreled into the room and skidded to a halt. A man—I guessed it was her husband—was standing behind her, and so was one of the other guests, a single woman named Nicole who looked too timid to join in the shouting match, but not too timid to nod in agreement.

  “Ma’am, the Quarter can be loud at night, what with all the folks coming and going from the bars. I’m sure—”

  “And she found blood on the front porch.” Mrs. Robards gave Nicole a brisk little nod. “How do you explain that, hmm? Blood!”

  “I—” Lionel began. The rest of the guests were listening in. The two guys from the Blue Room actually poked their heads in the swinging door and watched the show.

  “I want my money back or I will be going to the local news with this.” Mrs. Robards looked at her husband and nodded. “I don’t know what kind of illegal activities you have going on here, but I want no part in it.” The two guys laughed out loud. It was one of those moments when I wished I wasn’t telepathic.

  —crazy bitch—That was one of the guys.

  —I’m not racist, but something just seems wrong about this place—That was Mrs. Robards.

  —wow—didn’t think she’d go nuts like this—wow—That was Nicole.

  —not staying if it isn’t safe—That was Mr. Robards.

  The unfortunate thing was, he was right. It was safer for all of them if they left. I thought about how much money I had left in savings. Enough for us to float for a month, maybe six weeks.

  “We’ll be checking out immediately,” Mrs. Robards said. “I would like the remainder of my balance refunded in cash.”

  Lionel sighed and nodded to Bruce, who shook his head but went into the office. He counted out their bills while Lionel apologized. Nicole looked almost like she’d stay, but when Mrs. Robards glared at her, she asked for her money back. After they left, we all stared at each other, then Lionel sat down at the battered wooden table and blew out a breath.

  “I reckon I’ll get breakfast started,” he said.

  “Uncle Lionel—”

  “Shane, go get the coffee urns. Forgot to wash them last night, what with everything going on.”

  “I—”

  “Go on. Not a lot of time left.”

  Shane went to get the urns from the guests’ dining room, and I slipped out the door to the backyard. I scrolled through my contact list and found Susannah. Lionel didn’t know the half of it yet.

  I called the grill, thinking she’d be there, and she was. I didn’t have to go through a perky waitress this time. Susannah picked up on the first ring.

  “We have a serious problem,” I said.

  “Another one?”

  I ignored her tone and told her what Diana had said.

  “A vampire. Hmm.” She didn’t sound surprised. At least it was confirmation that the things existed. Not that that was reassuring.

  “They’re actually real?” I asked. There was still a chance this was all some incredibly strange misunderstanding.

  “Oh, yes. Not all that common, fortunately, and they rarely call attention to the
mselves. You appear to have found a more active one.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s not surprising, given that you still don’t have a guardian.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not like I can put an ad in the paper.”

  She ignored my sarcasm. “What color are her eyes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her eyes. What color are they?”

  “It’s hard to say. Really pale blue, almost white.”

  Susannah sighed. “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Her eye color is unfortunate?”

  “It means she’s old. Very old. Her skin—was it pale? Washed out?”

  “I guess.”

  “She’s ancient. Very strong, very powerful. It will take a great deal to kill her.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “And is she rooted? Has she established a nest?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by nest, but yeah, she’s got a house here.”

  “Even worse.”

  “Do you have any good news for me? I mean, anything I can use, here?”

  “They’re sensitive to light—all forms, but especially UV. Regular light bulbs aren’t much use. LEDs and fluorescent lights will annoy her, black lights are better, but if you can find something stronger, use it. Set up a perimeter. It won’t stop her, but it will slow her down.”

  I took notes on the back of a grocery store receipt. “What else? How do I kill her?”

  “Decapitation’s best, but it’s difficult. They’re tough. You can rip out her heart, but that’s not easy, either. Guardians have the strength to do it, but since you don’t have one...”

  “What about Ian?”

  “Too young. Too inexperienced. Too far from his anchor point. Send a week-old guardian up against a vampire that old and he’s dead.”

  He’d struggled, fighting her. And he’d needed Bunny’s intervention to recover.

  “It sounds like we’re all dead.”

  Susannah didn’t disagree.

  “There’s something else,” I said. I told her what had happened when I pulled from Ian.

  “Interesting,” she said, and I got the feeling I’d surprised her for the first time. “He didn’t even weaken?”

  “Well, he had a knife in his wing, so he was pretty bad off already, but he didn’t seem to get any worse.”

  She was quiet for a long time. I would’ve thought we’d lost the connection except for the sounds of frying and coffee percolating in the background. When she spoke, she was thoughtful. “I can only imagine it’s his connection to his city that you’re drawing from. You’re pulling from the whole city of Baton Rouge.”

  “Is that...bad?”

  “This is out of my area.”

  “Great.” If it was out of her area, it was out of everyone’s area.

  “Good luck.” She might’ve even meant it. I hung up.

  In the kitchen, Bruce and Lionel weren’t speaking. Shane was washing coffee urns and rolling Diana’s words through his head. —trapped in that house, all those years—monster—why would she want me dead—Upstairs, Diana was sleeping. The vision had taken a lot out of her. Ian, though, was up.

  Could a guardian tell when a telepath was in his head? I slipped into his thoughts. The difference between his waking mind and his sleeping one was subtle. He was still difficult to read, still brimming with power. He hadn’t signed up for this, either. He at least had a right to know what was going on.

  I went back inside and up to the second floor, to Mina’s old bedroom. The door was closed. I knocked. Ian only grunted, so I pushed it open.

  He was wearing an army green tank and black sweatpants, and he was using a bar braced in the bathroom doorway to do pull-ups. The towel he’d spread beneath was dark with sweat. He didn’t stop when I walked in. He kept working, biceps bulging. With each repetition, he counted softly. He stopped when he got to twenty.

  “I hope your wing is all right,” I said.

  He extended it. I couldn’t even tell where the injury had been. “Like new,” he said.

  “Thank you. You know. For saving my life.”

  He ignored me and grasped the bar again. On his left forearm, a tattooed row of small, straight lines rippled under cut muscle.

  “So. Uh...” There was no easy way to prepare him for this part. “It turns out she’s a vampire.”

  He snorted and turned back to his makeshift pull-up bar. “Figures.” He counted off his set again, his voice a heavy whisper.

  “They didn’t tell you about vampires in guardian school?”

  “Seven. I didn’t get that far. Eight. I kinda flunked out. Nine.”

  “Susannah says only a guardian is strong enough to kill her...”

  I waited while he finished his set. He grimaced as he pulled himself up for number twenty, held it, and lowered himself slowly to the towel. He wiped his face and neck with his shirt and turned to face me, arms crossed, wings folded and glistening with sweat.

  “She’s says you’re not strong enough to take her yet.” It sounded ridiculous, but we’d both seen what she could do.

  “Get me close enough and I’ll try again.”

  “There might be other ways.” He watched me, expressionless, while I explained what I could do. His face didn’t waver when I told him I might’ve killed him. As though death was something he expected, something overdue, and he was tired of waiting around for it.

  “Must be a rush. Getting power like that.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You sure you can handle it?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  He raised one eyebrow at me. “If you say so. So I get you juiced, we go after her.” He spread his sweat-soaked towel over the rug, dropped, and started doing pushups. His breath came like a shot after every one. “You hold her down,” he said at the top of a pushup. “I’ll cut her heart out.” Another rep. “Problem solved.”

  “Right,” I said, watching him. “Easy.”

  Up, down, up. “How hard could it be?”

  I shook my head, frowning. “Aren’t you a cop?”

  Up, down, up. “Was.” Down. He let his chest touch the floor and stayed there. For a moment I wondered if he’d pushed himself too far and passed out from dehydration. Then he levered himself up to a sitting position and didn’t look at me.

  “I think you need to tell me why you killed those men.” It wasn’t what I’d been planning to say, but once the words were out, I knew I needed to know. Was he really bloodthirsty, or had things just gone badly wrong?

  “Are you going to kick me out?” His tone was barely even curious.

  “I guess that depends. Should I?”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. The close-cropped stubble over his skull had gotten longer. I ducked down and forced him to look at me.

  “I don’t have to ask, you know. I can read minds.” Though guardians, I was finding, were harder to read than most. They weren’t so much shielded as dense, hard to navigate. I could get into his head, but finding what I wanted was another story. It would be easier this way. I waited.

  “Fine,” he said. He stood up and started pacing. I sat down in Mina’s old armchair and let him find his way.

  “I’m ex-military. Marines. Joined the state police when I got out. Seemed like the closest thing, you know? And I wanted... It’s hard to explain. I tried selling insurance with one of my frat brothers, but...” He stopped pacing and faced me. “I don’t like feeling useless.”

  “I can understand that.”

  He went back to pacing. “Anyway, I ended up helping with this...investigation.” He stopped and looked at the pull-up bar, gave a little laugh. “I was just the muscle. They had me sitting outside the house of this gir
l, one of the accountants over at the River Queen Casino. You know it?”

  I nodded, recognizing it from the news report. It had opened a couple of years ago, before I’d returned to New Orleans.

  “Anyway, this girl. Emily. Her manager had some shady shit going on, paying out salaries to people he’d fired. She noticed—thought it was a mistake.” He chuffed and shook his head. “That’s the kind of girl she was. Never thought it might be something worse.”

  Her face swam in his mind. Pale skin, freckles, red-gold hair and a wide mouth, bright blue eyes a little on the small side. Pretty in that impossibly sweet way some women never lose. Innocent.

  Ian shut his eyes and shook his head. “Anyway, she shows him the records, he tells her not to worry about it, and she finally figures out something’s not right. Calls the police. Turns out this manager guy’s been slipping suitcases full of cash to this guy on the gaming control board. Buddy Boudreaux or Broussard or whatever.”

  I gasped, but he didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t talking to me anymore. He was confessing, and I could tell this was the first time he’d spoken this story out loud.

  “We just needed evidence to take it to trial. A few photographs and her testimony—we would’ve had the sonofabitch. I ended up assigned to bodyguard detail on Emily. We got...involved.” He turned away and looked out the window to the backyard. “I knew I was crossing the line, but you have to know this girl. She was really risking her life.” He took a deep, wavering breath, then faced me. “No point in dragging it out. They found out she was talking to the cops and they killed her. Made it look like a suicide.”

  I covered my mouth with my hands. His memories of the events were finally on the surface of his mind where I could reach them. They kept skipping around. I saw him coming upon her pale body, propped in a bathtub in a pool of bloody water. When he spoke, it took me by surprise.

  “We didn’t have enough to go to trial, not with her dead. They all got away with it, the bastards. And when I got home that night—well—I was halfway through a bottle of Jack when Frank showed up.”

  “Frank?”

  “Guardian of Houston. Almost shot him when I saw the wings.”

  “I think most people would react differently.”