Darkness Calls

by Caridad Piñeiro

  Darkness Calls

  CARIDAD PIÑEIRO

  To Samantha—

  Thank you for understanding about Mom’s quirks

  and time away to write, for your support in everything

  I do, and for all the love that you give me.

  You are the best, and I am very, very proud of you!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 1

  His was a life filled only with empty dreams, if one could call those fleeting thoughts in a vampire’s sleepless nights dreams. His existence was without end and ruled by a loneliness that made each day harder to bear than the one before.

  High above the crowd, Ryder Latimer smelled the sting of the alcohol as the humans drank and spilled it in copious amounts in their search for oblivion or nirvana. Acrid smoke from cigarettes floated high into the air, and in that hazy cloud were the underlying tones of sweat. Sweat laced with lust, he thought, sniffing the air and detecting the ripe pheromone the humans exuded as they played their pitiful mating rituals.

  Scents, he had discovered, were important to a vampire. Musks and other aromas literally brought out the beast in him. He normally avoided the smells, but it was tough to do in a crowd as large as this.

  This far up, the sounds of the band and the crowd were garbled. Indistinct. A low buzz, like static, and a heavy thumping vibration from the bass of the music. An insistent lub-dub lub-dub, like the beat of a heart.

  Ryder closed his eyes, placed his hands on the metal railing of the catwalk and the vibrations traveled up his arms. He took a deep breath, absorbing the smells. Soaking everything up as if by doing so he could restore a small part of the life he had lost when a strange turn of events during the Civil War had condemned him to this solitary life. It was a fleeting moment, the human scents and sounds racing through him, enervating him as he stood near the ceiling of the club.

  In no time, however, Ryder was back to normal, watching like a disinterested deity, bored by the repetition of the activity below. Every night the same scene was replayed. Until tonight.

  He had discovered in this morning’s paper that there was some killing going on in that mob of humans. The murderer had struck last week and then a few nights ago. Maybe he would hunt another soon, Ryder thought, glancing down and wondering who might be the next one to be taken. Who might become another trophy for the psycho stalking his club. The papers hadn’t mentioned The Lair, but Ryder had no doubt it was here that the hunt was on.

  Ryder had sensed something different in the last few weeks, that unique smell of bloodlust that had made him wonder if another of his kind had come to feed. A club like this would be an excellent place to select a victim and then cull them from the herd.

  He looked down once more and he saw her, standing at the edge of the crowd, searching for someone.

  It wasn’t possible, he thought as he hurried along the catwalk, keeping the apparition in sight. For nearly a century she’d been in his dreams. Or maybe it was better to describe them as his restless nocturnal musings.

  Regardless, Ryder had stopped questioning why the spirit came to him. Sometimes she arrived at times of unrest, the visions she brought portents of things to come. At other times, when the monotony and uncertainty of his existence made him question why to go on, she’d come to soothe his soul and give him the peace he was unable to find elsewhere.

  But tonight, she was no longer just an apparition—or was his loneliness deluding him?

  He struggled to get a glimpse of her face, but even with his vampire night sight, he still couldn’t be certain his imagination wasn’t getting the best of him.

  After all, for more than a century, he had been virtually alone with only a human keeper and his apparition to comfort him. Maybe that was why his mind and eyes were playing games with him tonight. It was just a trick, Ryder told himself, and yet he stood, poised on the edge of the catwalk. Watching. Waiting. Hoping.

  The loud, driving beat of the bass pulsed through Diana Reyes’s body, the vibrations pulling at something deep inside her. On stage, a guitarist thrashed around, his arm wildly circling as he strummed chords in sync to the pounding of the band behind him. A spotlight focused on him, picking up the gleam of sweat on his lean torso and the dark, swirling artwork on his upper right arm and shoulders. With a final jump and strum, the song ended, but the band quickly launched into another, its rhythm and violence not much different from the first.

  Diana withstood the assault on her eardrums, watching from the periphery of the large crowd. There was a crush of bodies trying to make their way deeper into the space. Beyond them, other patrons lounged at tables along the border of a dance floor that was so packed she wondered how anybody could move to the music.

  It was dark in the club, nearly pitch-black in spots. Overhead, dangling from an irregular maze of catwalks, wires and ropes, was an assortment of lighting equipment and mirrored balls that shot off erratic spots of light to create a jarring visual display on the dance floor. The only steady sources of illumination were those directed at the stage and at the long metallic bar along the side of the building. The bar was bathed in red spotlights, making the metal of its stainless-steel surface gleam as if coated in blood.

  Apropos given that two women had lost their lives here…or at least commenced their journeys to death in this place. Those deaths were the reason FBI agent Diana Reyes had offered to go undercover. Her profile of the killer indicated this was the place where he’d selected his victims. And Diana was his type.

  The two victims she had seen in the morgue days earlier had been young and pretty until the killer had gotten to them. His sociopathic handiwork suggested he was someone who liked inflicting pain. Someone who knew how to make it last. The medical examiner had implied that at some point, the victims may have passed into a “no pain” zone, courtesy of the adrenaline coursing through their bodies.

  Diana absentmindedly nodded and rubbed at the ridge of scar along her own rib cage. She had firsthand knowledge of just what someone could do when her body shut down from an excess of physical and mental pain. She had crawled to her father, cradled him in her arms and tried to stop the bleeding from the bullet that had ripped into his chest, courtesy of a gang’s drive-by shooting. Futilely, she had pressed her hand against the wound, watching his blood leak between her fingers as he died in her arms. It wasn’t until after his death that she realized she had also been hit.

  Diana was certain that for these victims, the killer had made the pain a real living thing. And at the end, she thought with a shudder, the two women had likely realized death was close at hand.

  She intended to put an end to the killer’s spree. She threaded her way through the crowd, in search of her partner and hoping to become visible to the murderer.

  Her investigation had confirmed that both victims had planned to come to this establishment on the nights they were killed. Even before eliminating known acquaintances as suspects, Diana was certain she had a serial killer on her hands. One who would likely strike again, and soon. The
second girl had been murdered only a week after the first. Tonight’s surveillance should give Diana a feel for the place before she intensified the investigation with more equipment and personnel.

  The mark on her hand—the red bat used as proof that IDs had been checked and the entrance fee paid—confirmed that the victims had in fact been here. She traced the edges of the design with her hand, thinking how it marked her in another way—as prey.

  A touch came against the bare skin at the small of her back. She turned and faced David, her partner. Like the others in the club, he was dressed in black, from his jacket and T-shirt to his jeans, but with his blond, prep-school looks, it was hard for him to seem tough. Even the scruffy beard he’d grown did little to help. It was barely a peach fuzz on his boyish face.

  He grinned and moved his hand. Her backless halter exposed her right shoulder blade, and he traced the edges of the tattoo there. “Nice touch. Both the shirt and the tattoo. Shame it’ll wash off,” he said, and Diana didn’t correct him.

  The tattoo was a very real reminder of a moment of thoughtlessness, courtesy of a night of too much drinking. She’d only been nineteen at the time and trying to recover from the heartache of a long-term relationship that had gone sour. Her younger brother had offered to help her get over it. After many a foul-tasting tequila shooter, it had seemed appropriate to commemorate her stupidity with a tattoo. She had chosen a dagger poised upright over a heart, symbolic of the pain she suffered and hoped to guard against in the future. She had been too drunk to realize the knot of pain she carried inside her had everything to do with her father and nothing to do with the cheating boyfriend.

  She kept the tattoo to remind her not to act recklessly, though she battled her impulse to be rash more often than she liked.

  The knife and dagger on her shoulder was just one of the thousands of designs in the sea of bodies adorned with art and swathed in leather, chains and denim. The three earrings piercing her one ear coupled with the two on the other was a minimalist statement in this rough-looking crowd.

  The club appeared to be what their sources had described: a place for those who liked to play on the edge—although neither of the two victims’ lifestyles hinted at anything other than flirtation with dangerous elements. She was familiar with the allure of places such as this. In the year after her father’s death, she and her brother had spent many a night in bars with a hard edge. It had been her way of rebelling against a bureaucracy that had allowed her father to be killed by people who had passed through the criminal justice system only to be released onto the streets. She’d snubbed her nose at the time she had spent conforming and striving to be good when none of it really mattered. Bullets didn’t differentiate between good or bad. They were equal-opportunity killers.

  She had let the anger and hatred take hold of her after her father’s senseless death. In that dark place of anything goes, she had given in to her pain. She had lost herself in alcohol and dances with nameless partners.

  It was only after waking one morning to find herself facedown on the floor, with her eighteen-year-old brother passed out beside her from his own overindulgence, that she realized they were heading to oblivion. In her wallowing, she had dragged him down, as well. She had reached deep inside, where she still believed good could be rewarded, and she’d found the strength to take control of her life and to help her younger brother get on his feet.

  She had survived, but that need for the dark side had never really left her. She had sensed it coming back to life the moment she’d walked back into this bar. It had almost felt like…home.

  Maybe that was the allure for the victims and their hunter—the loss of restraint and identity that an ambience such as this provided. Perhaps the freedom of this place made the victims careless and the killer secure enough to hunt and lure his prey.

  Diana inclined her head toward her partner and pointed her finger in the direction of the bar. It was time to mingle and act as if they belonged. Time for her to become bait, which might be impossible in a crowd this size, even though she fit the profile of the killer’s tastes. He liked them young and flashy. Both women had been dressed provocatively, in clothes similar to what she now wore. The problem was that many young women in the club were similarly dressed. From a talk with the victims’ friends, Diana knew that both of the women had been outgoing and liked to dance, often with more than one man. She intended to do the same and hopefully set herself apart from the crowd.

  With David following her, she began to thread her way through the mass of people and over to the bar, but something made her stop. A presence? Someone watching? She paused, carefully looking around, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Writing off her unease to a case of jitters, she continued onward through the crowd.

  Chapter 2

  As they neared the bar, Diana glanced at the menu of drinks posted along the wall. What looked like the mummified remains of bats were affixed along the top edge. The uppermost section of the wall above held hundreds of bats hanging down, their bodies huddled tight together. Beyond that, there was nothing but the vague shapes and outlines of equipment high against a dark ceiling.

  Diana looked back at the menu. All of the drinks’ names dealt with the imbibing of blood, the imagined traits of bats, or the ever-popular rituals for transforming into mythical demons or monsters. The Blind as a Bat offered oblivion after only one drink due to a large amount of 151 proof rum. Maiden’s Gift was a creamy concoction with Cherry Heering and other liqueurs. Vamp Venom was a variation of a Bloody Mary but laced with hot sauce for that extra burn.

  She chuckled. The list was quite tongue in cheek, as if the inventor had thought the patrons somewhat silly in their dark fascinations.

  Above the specials, in red letters embellished with dripping blood, was the name of the club: The Lair. Unfortunately, the crimson of the letters against the white of the chalkboard and the gleaming steel of the bar’s surface were too much a reminder of the victims she’d seen in the morgue—and of the fact that someone didn’t think this was all in the spirit of fun.

  From beside her, David raised his hand to draw the attention of the bartender, who was dressed in a white T-shirt turned pale pink by the red lights. He scurried back and forth behind the bar, pouring and blending drinks, grabbing the money waved in the air by those fortunate enough to have snagged him. The bartender came over as they sidled up to some clear spaces at the bar.

  “What can I get you?” he said, eyeing her and sparing only a quick glance at David.

  “A sloe slayer screw,” she said, and smiled at the young man, who grinned back at her. He was cute and quite muscular, probably a wanna-be actor.

  “You sure that’s what you want?” he asked, reaching for a glass from the racks suspended above the bar.

  Diana leaned on the metal surface and gave him her most seductive grin. “That depends,” she teased. She had his complete attention.

  He leaned close, the drink and the glass in his hand forgotten. “And what does it depend on, sweetheart?”

  “Is it the slayer who’s slow, or the screw?” she said loudly enough to make a few heads turn and look in her direction.

  “Make that two diet Cokes,” David said immediately, slinging an arm around her shoulder.

  The bartender shot David a look of annoyance, then turned to Diana for confirmation.

  Diana glanced at David and shrugged. “Two diet Cokes it is.” The bartender gave them a perturbed huff, as if he didn’t appreciate being pulled into whatever game they were playing.

  When he returned with the drinks, he slammed them on the counter, and despite David’s presence, or maybe because of it, he leaned on the counter and favored Diana with a broad grin. “It’s not too late. Sloe gin is just waiting to be slayed.” He dropped his voice and lowered his head until it was almost touching hers. In a voice he must have rehearsed hundreds of times in acting class and with a wink that broadcast his invitation, he said, “And who doesn’t enjoy a good
screw?”

  David glared at him, took the two glasses and tossed a ten onto the bar. The bartender finally walked away, and Diana raised an eyebrow at her partner and the beverage he handed her. “I think I could have handled the sloe slayer screw and remembered to check out that bartender’s background when we return to the office.” Despite her comment about the drink, she took a quick sip and appreciated the cool of the liquid as it traveled down her throat.

  “Got to keep levelheaded, Di,” he said, his words tinged with both concern and reproach. It was so in keeping with his straitlaced personality that she had to bite back a laugh.

  He might be dressed like the rest of the crowd, down to a small silver hoop and ear cuff in one ear, but beneath the rough clothes he was still the restrained partner she had come to rely on during the last four years. David was everything she wasn’t and vice versa, which balanced their partnership perfectly. Her rashness, his calm. Her mind, which bounced all over in reaching conclusions, and his step-by-step way of solving things. Go figure, she thought with a shrug, and turned her attention to the dance floor.

  Having gulped down a good portion of his drink, David chewed on an ice cube and faced the crowd. He motioned to the crush of bodies with the hand that held the glass. “Wanna dance?”

  She leaned close to him and whispered in the ear without the earpiece, “Want to check out the wire so we know you can call for help?” She had on a small earpiece, the only way she could be wired, thanks to her clothes. Her low-rise black leather slacks were tight-fitting, and also precluded the use of her customary pants holster. Her gun, a small Glock 26, was strapped into place on her ankle, hidden by the slight flare of the pants leg. Not the best place for her weapon, but the only possible one.