by Karen Chance
And failed. It was getting bigger, that roiling ball of power, leaking out of her because she couldn’t absorb it all. And I guess she realized that, too, because she suddenly screamed and lost her grip, and something huge boiled away under the ground, like a torpedo through water.
Headed straight for the fey camp.
People screamed, bodies dove or jumped or were snatched out of the way, and the fire pit went up like a bomb, exploding into burning chunks as whatever-it-was raced underneath. It kept on going for another dozen yards, looking for all the world like some kind of huge, radioactive mole. Right up until it slammed into the fence.
I don’t know why it stopped there, why it didn’t just keep on going, doing no telling what kind of damage in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because the fey had enchanted the fence, or at least the vines flowing along it. Or maybe it had just hit exactly right, like lightning to a rod. But whatever the cause, it crashed into the fence like a freight train, in one burst of sound and violent white light.
And then the whole thing exploded.
But not in the normal sense.
Vines swelled like inflating balloons, going from the size of a finger to the size of tree trunks in an instant. The flower bunches dotting them here and there detonated all in a line, like living firecrackers. We were suddenly showered with what looked like confetti, covering half the yard in fluttering, flying petals. The part that wasn’t already covered in smoldering wood or burning tents.
I stared at Claire, who stared back at me, and then we both looked at the visitors, who were standing in a swirling snowstorm, looking around in wonder. And didn’t say anything. It was left to Jacob to sum up the evening.
“Whoa,” he said, eyes wide behind his glasses. “You folks really know how to party.”
Chapter Eighteen
Darkness, angry clouds boiling between buildings, and no electric lights that hadn’t been shot out long ago. Not a good part of town. Not a part where people liked light being shed on their activities.
Didn’t matter. Nature thumbed its nose at human preferences, sending the lightning that flashed overhead, strobing the dark street and the small alley that branched off from it with searing white. And causing the graffiti on the walls to practically leap off the old bricks.
The aftereffects lingered, crowding the small space with strange symbols in brilliant neon. They hung in the air for a moment, like bright banners, beautiful, ethereal, almost tangible. And then slowly faded.
I didn’t mind.
I didn’t need them.
The alley wasn’t dark to me. Mold grew over the old bricks, etching them with patches of teal luminescence that were slowly consuming the paint, blurring the letters with a more subtle message. A trail of muddy water ran down the middle, like a ribbon of emerald light. The edges of garbage cans, stacked outside a restaurant, glowed in a rainbow of colors, with layers of decomposing food stretching back for days. The cat huddled under some steps was a vibrant blob of crimson. The streaks some human in a hurry had dribbled on one wall were a smoking purple, like the rooftops of the buildings on either side, slowly releasing the last heat of the day.
All was visible, all was light.
But nothing was as bright as the small, glowing footsteps, like puddles of gold, that I was following.
They wove across the muddy width of the alley, so clear, I thought I could have reached out and touched one. Could have picked it up out of the muck and held it in my hand. Could have—
A door opened up ahead, sending a bright, artificial beam into the night, a river of smelly ozone that drowned all the other, fainter lights. Like a wash of acid across a floor. It made me want to flinch, to hiss like the cat under some stairs was doing, before it turned its bushy tail and leapt into the night.
But I didn’t. I didn’t move at all. I was hugging a wall, already in shadow, and the light served only to increase it. The wedge of deep blue-gray around me deepened to inky black, the open door providing additional contrast.
Not that it mattered. The human standing silhouetted in the rectangle of light was as night-blind as they all were, and cocky. So much so that a cigarette dangled from his lips, its deep red tip bright even against the electric field behind him. He may as well have had a target on his chest.
But I didn’t take advantage of it. He wasn’t the one I wanted. But he smelled like him.
A memory stirred.
A hand gripped my chin, cold, hard, alien. I hissed and tried to bite, and it was snatched away. Someone scowled; I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it in his voice. “What is this? Are you mad?”
“I thought you might find it…exotic.”
“Exotic?” The voice was incredulous now. “What are you trying to pull?”
“Nothing, my lord, nothing. But you always say you want the unusual, to keep an eye out—”
“For fighters, warriors. Someone to tease the crowds away from that damned Geminus. Not children!”
“But I thought—”
“Leave the thinking to me. Sell it to the pimp and be done with it, and show me something I can use!”
The cage door had clanged down, and they had gone. But the scent had remained. The same scent that was clinging to the guard’s skin now.
Fodder, then. Sent out to make sure the master’s many enemies weren’t lying in wait. Or if they were, to act like one of the canaries the humans used to put down their mine shafts. Nothing more than a walking early-warning signal, someone whose spilt blood would serve as an alarm no vampire could ignore.
Minutes passed. A car pulled up at the end of the alley, headlights off, and glided to a stop. The human raised a hand in greeting and went down the few short steps to the alley floor.
The car door opened; the driver got out and leaned against the side of the vehicle, legs crossed, body relaxed. “Got a spare?”
He was human, too. The voice harsh, discordant. Not the real driver, then. Just someone who brought the car around and was now waiting to hand it over.
“Sure.” The first guard flicked half a pack of cigarettes through the air, the cellophane side flashing for a second in the light from the door.
“Funny man,” the other said. “What am I supposed to light it with? My finger?”
“You don’t come too prepared, do you?” the first guard groused, reaching for something in his pocket.
“Trying to quit.”
And then, for a split second, both men were watching a lighter follow the same arc as the cigarettes. And I moved, in the instant before it was caught, just a blur against the night, unseen, unheard. Through the door behind the human, and into the brightness beyond.
Strange but true; those creatures that most liked the night, that preferred to shroud their deeds in secret, wanted brilliant light around them. Even those whose eyes didn’t need it. Maybe they didn’t trust their partners, and wanted to see every hand’s turn. Or perhaps it went deeper. An instinctive knowledge that they weren’t the only things that hide in shadow.
Like the one I melted into as a tall figure came down the stairs.
He was human-slow, with a heavy tread: another guard. He sent a disinterested glance around the room, checking everything, seeing nothing. “Clear,” he said, and I mouthed it with him.
Old trick, my heartbeat synced with his, our breathing in time, the same slow, steady aspiration. A clock ticked on a wall, heavy, loud. Outside, the smoking human finished his cigarette and crushed it underfoot, scattering a stale chemical scent on the breeze.
Then there were more footsteps on the stairs, quiet this time, light. Almost silent. Three, the two in front young, bright, warm. The one in back old, dark, like a pool of deep, cold water.
And strangely hesitant, as if he knew something was wrong.
They didn’t get that old by being stupid.
The two vampire guards stopped abruptly, halfway between one step and the next. But nobody spoke, nobody moved. It was as if time itself stood still.
One
second, two.
“Master?” the human said, confused.
The master didn’t answer.
I had done nothing wrong, made no mistakes. But sometimes it didn’t matter. The clock ticked.
Outside, the clouds cracked open and rain began to fall. Light at first, and then heavier, pattering against the roof, plinking off the metal trash cans, causing one of the waiting humans to curse. Inside, the master spoke.
“Danil.”
The human guard looked up. “Master?”
“Leave us.”
The man’s confusion increased. “But, master, the car—”
“Now.”
Danil left.
The two vampire guards leapt over the stairs and, a second later, hit the floor. One still wearing a snarl; the other with a strangely blank expression. Surprised.
Like the master when he spoke again. “Someone paid well. Tell me who it was, and I will make this—”
He cut off as my hand found his throat. From his expression, he hadn’t seen me move. I gripped his flesh, my nails breaking the skin. Thick blood, so red it was almost black, oozed down his neck in rivulets, over my fingers. Didn’t matter.
There was no one left to scent it.
“Painless?” I breathed, and he blanched. His fear flooded my nostrils as he recognized me—not who I was but what. I smiled. I liked that. Wanted more, wanted to close my hand, to jerk back, to tear out his throat in the same moment that I stabbed UP—
But not yet.
“I will make you the same offer,” I hissed, jerking him close. “Name him, and this will be quick.”
“Name? Name who? I don’t—”
I put it into his mind, the whole scene. His face as the cage door slammed shut, and the face of the one making the offer. The one I needed.
“But, that’s all?” He looked incredulous. “That’s why you’re—”
The nails sank in more, up to the first knuckle. I was enjoying this. He saw.
He saw and it broke him.
“I don’t know! I never had a name. They don’t—”
“A location, then.”
“A warehouse, in Jersey. I can give you the address, but it won’t help. We only meet there a few times a year, to bid on the more unusual lots, and only when we receive a call—”
I stripped the location from his mind. An old place, abandoned, overgrown. Useless. I growled.
“Please! I don’t know any more—”
“That is…unfortunate.”
“—but I can give you whatever you want!”
“No,” I said, looking into the shadows. Where something gold glimmered against the dark. “You can’t.”
I came to, thrashing around, caught in a trap that threatened to smother me. And halfway through a scream. I cut it off abruptly, but it echoed in my ears, like the pulse in my throat as I fought to free myself from the clutches of—
My overstuffed comforter?
The old squashy thing hit the floor like a body, and I sat up, breathing hard.
My eyes darted around, trying to find the source of the threat, only there wasn’t one. Just my bedroom, the pile of bras still on the dresser, along with a gun belt and more of Ymsi’s wilting flowers. All lit by dust-filled beams of sunlight.
Which was wrong.…Wasn’t it? It had been dark. It had been—
I had a fleeting image of a slice of blood hitting a wall, a cigarette falling onto dirty concrete, and small golden footprints glowing against a dark street. And then a blast of pain hit me, hard enough to wrench a cry from my throat. Son of a—
I jerked violently, grabbing for my temples.
And fell out of bed for the second morning in a row.
My ass hit wood, hard enough to bruise, because I’d managed to miss the comforter. Of course. I dragged it over, but otherwise I didn’t move. I just lay there for a few minutes, clutching familiar softness, feeling weak and disoriented and listening to that damned bird again.
My head was pounding like the world’s worst hangover, and the cheerful little trills weren’t helping. I blearily thought about shooting it, but our fey visitors would probably object. I decided it wasn’t worth it and started trying to squint the alarm clock on my nightstand into view.
And got a second shock: 3:45.
Not so much a cheerful morning, then, as a cheerful afternoon.
I stared at the clock and it stared stubbornly back, insisting that yes, it really was that late. That I really had slept for something like sixteen hours. And yet I didn’t feel particularly well rested. In fact, I felt a lot like crawling back into bed.
Until I remembered last night.
The tendrils of whatever I’d been dreaming about had dissipated, but my little freak show yesterday was clear as crystal. My forehead was halfway to the floor anyway, so I just let it sink the rest of the way down. Oh, God. Why?
God apparently did not have an opinion on the matter. Neither did the floor. But the smooth old boards were cool against my flushed cheek, so I stayed there anyway, working through the embarrassment and the guilt and the general fucked-up-ness of my life. Which you’d think I’d be used to after centuries of that sort of thing.
But I wasn’t.
Because I wasn’t supposed to remember.
I’d always blacked out during my little episodes. Always. I’d wake up, sometimes weeks or months later in different freaking countries, with no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. Or what I’d done in the meantime.
And that was scary; that was bad. But I’d just discovered something worse: going along for the ride. Staying awake for the whole terrifying scene, knowing just how out of control I’d been, just how close I’d come—
I broke off, breathing hard.
One of the few things I’d always been able to say about my condition was that it was constant. I’d sometimes railed about that, about the fact that age hadn’t granted me any of the extra powers and privileges that it did the vamps. Years had passed, but my fits had never become the slightest bit less frequent, never the tiniest amount more controlled.
But then, they had never gotten worse, either.
Until now.
And the really scary part of it was that I had no one to ask, no way to find out what the hell was going on. Because nobody knew anything about dhampirs. And they didn’t want to know, since experimenting on something that could go ballistic and kill you at any moment wasn’t high on most people’s priority lists.
Healers had slammed doors in my face or cowered until I went away. Shysters had sold me the magical equivalent of snake oil and then run for the hills. The few unorthodox mages with enough cred for me to bother hunting them down had given up in disgust when their enchantments slid right off me. And nobody had really known what the hell they were doing anyway.
And that included other dhampirs.
Not that I’d met many, since we were a rare breed. And most of those I did stumble across either weren’t sane enough or hadn’t lived long enough to wonder why we were the way we were. The only exception had been some Indian guru-type I finally tracked down in the deserts of Rajasthan. He was also the only one I’d met who’d lasted as long as me—by meditating the rage away, or so he claimed. I’d sort of suspected that living hundreds of miles from any possible prey might have helped.
And yet he’d proven as useless as all the rest. He’d suggested that I learn meditation to improve my karma. And that I get the hell out of his territory before he ripped my head off and ruined his. He hadn’t offered any advice on how to solve my problem.
I stared at the dust bunnies under my bed and wondered if this was how it ended. If this was why I’d never met any really old dhampirs. If maybe we self-destructed, assuming we didn’t manage to check out early, like some kind of metaphysical time bomb.
I didn’t know. I’d always just assumed that I would follow the vampire example and go on living until I pissed off the wrong person. But maybe not. Because I was half human, too. And human aging had
all kinds of issues attached to it, didn’t it?
Like mental illnesses that got worse over time, for example.
Fear clawed at my belly, as all the elements of my worst nightmares rolled together into one. The sense of powerlessness I hated, of not being able to control what I did, who I hurt. The dread of becoming like the things I hunted, of seeing the horror on people’s faces as I destroyed everything they loved, needlessly, uselessly. The terror of descending into a cage of my own mind, shouting, begging to be let out, while something else took control.
And forced me to watch.
I shuddered hard and sat up, wrapping my arms around myself. I wanted to shove the thoughts away, but I couldn’t afford it. Not now. Not when I didn’t know what had caused this.
And not when it had happened twice now.
The first time had been during a fight six weeks ago. I’d been hit with a stunner designed to take out a platoon of war mages, which should have taken me out, too. But my alter ego is stronger and I guess it had decided that taking a nap right then might not be a great idea, since we probably wouldn’t have woken up.
My dhampir nature had been in control for only a few seconds, but that had been enough to allow us to fight through the spell. And to freak me the hell out. But then, seeing myself in full-on Hulk mode wasn’t anything like the strangest thing that happened that day. And afterward, I’d managed to shrug it off, putting it down to extreme stress, or luck, or desperation.
That theory had been reinforced when weeks passed and it hadn’t happened again. I’d filed it away as a one-off, just another weird thing in a life not entirely devoid of the bizarre. Only apparently not. Apparently my control had had less to do with a stable psyche and more to do with other things. Like Claire coming back.
Or like my new favorite beverage.
I could see it now, due to my never having understood the point of a bed skirt. The bottle was thick blue glass, bumpy and bubbly and almost opaque, like the kind that puddles at the bottom of stained-glass windows. It had rolled next to one of the foot posts at some point, leaving a little trail in the dust. I reached underneath and pulled it out, and some liquid sloshed against the side.