by P. N. Elord
That reminded me of something. I cut a little deeper with the knife. “How did you deceive me? I saw through your eyes, in the desert. You never left.”
Ellie’s lips split into a cold grin. “You saw what you wanted to see,” Karathrax said. “Desert. It never occurred to you that what you were seeing might have been me in your desert. It was a long, cold flight, racing the sun, and I was daring fate, but I knew it was time. Time to end it.”
“It is,” I said. Yet something in me was howling. Something awful. When Karathrax was gone, something would be missing from the world that would never be in it again.
He killed Ellie.
And I had slaughtered his mate, punishing her on behalf of all dragons, with no more care for who she was or what she’d done than singling out one ant from a colony.
I’d killed so many of them, with poisons. Deception. Treachery. Heliothrax had been the first I’d faced, the first I’d bloodied a sword on, the first I’d destroyed with my own reddened hands.
Karathrax would be the last.
He should have changed by now, I realized. He could have taken on his dragon shape, ripped me apart, crawled away to a bitter healing in a lonely world.
He hadn’t.
We stayed that way for a long moment, my ancient enemy and I, and then I said, “Do you want to die as a human?”
“No.” Ellie’s even teeth flashed in a grim smile. “But I’m old, Lisel. Far older than you. Changing form is a young dragon’s game. Changing back is the work of hours for me these days. I don’t suppose you’ll be polite enough to wait.”
I readied the knife.
“But,” Karathrax said, “what happens to you, Lisel? When my blood is in the sand, what magic will you have left to sustain you? You’ve lived all these hundreds of years of stolen time because your life is linked to that of the dragons. Because seven hundred years ago, Godric forced you to drink the hot blood of my sire, Aedothrax, and bound you into the dragon line. Your life is linked to mine. Nothing else now.”
I knew he was right. Godric had said so, from the beginning—the dragon’s blood would sustain us as long as the dragons lived. Once the last dragon was gone . . .
I took a firmer grip on the knife. “I’ll risk it.”
“Not a risk. A certainty. You kill me, you die.” His eyes darkened back to Ellie’s clear blue. “But the same isn’t true for me. If I kill you, I go on.”
I had taught her too well. Too well.
The girlish right hand, during the distraction of his speech, had drawn a small, hidden dagger, and now Karathrax buried it to the hilt in my side, at the same time shoving me off with all the strength in that small female body. He couldn’t walk, but he could crawl, and crawl he did, not away from me, but toward me. Pain radiated from the wound in my side, flooding in pounding waves through my body, and my shaking hand tried and failed to remove the knife. It was stuck in bone.
Karathrax took the larger hunting knife away from me.
My blood thickened the sand. So did his.
We sat together in silence, and then he reached out and pulled the knife from my side. I screamed, unable to stop, and my vision flared white, then gray.
When it cleared, Karathrax was raised up on his arms, looking down at me from Ellie’s perfect, pretty face.
“I hated you,” he said. “For hundreds of years, you were the only thing in the world that existed to me. Your death. Your blood. Your suffering.”
And it had been the same for me, with him. Enemies to the end. Even long past the point where it had made any sense.
“But now I see you’re just an old, tired woman,” he said. “Old, tired, and lost.”
He slowly lowered himself down, a controlled collapse, and I saw the pupils of his golden eyes growing wider.
“You kill with poison,” he said. “Don’t you?”
That was what I had been about to tell Ellie, before Karathrax had revealed himself. Before you touch the arrows, I want you to learn precautions against the poison. Because every wicked edge had been tainted with it, a poison that felled dragons and humans alike.
It had sliced my hands, as I’d caught it.
It had sliced open the tendons at the backs of his legs. A death sentence for us both.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it came from some secret, true, dark place inside me. “She was magnificent. You were all magnificent. And we were wrong to destroy you. I know that. I knew it then.”
And in the end, Karathrax reached for my hand, and we lay in the hot, comforting afternoon, growing cold in the sun together.
“Murderer,” he murmured before his eyes fluttered closed.
My heartbeat slowed, slowed, and in the instant before it stopped, I thought, Guilty.
No doubt the Pope would have disagreed.
He would have been wrong.
Rachel Caine is the New York Times bestselling author of the popular Weather Warden series and the young adult Morganville Vampires series. She has another series, Outcast Season, which began in 2009 with the novel Undone. In addition, Rachel has written paranormal romantic suspense for Silhouette, including Devil’s Bargain, Devil’s Due, and Athena Force: Line of Sight (which won a 2007 RT Reviewers’ Choice Award). Visit her Web site: www.rachelcaine.com. MySpace: www.myspace.com/rachelcaine.
DARK LADY
by P. N. ELROD
My name is Jack Fleming. I am owned by a nightclub. As a sideline I have been known to help damsels in distress, though in my experience the damsels of the Windy City are well able to look after themselves. Now and then I’ll step in, against my better judgment, and attempt to lend a hand; just call me Don Quixote with fangs.
CHICAGO, APRIL 1938
“Myrna,” I said to the apparently empty room, “you are the pip.”
Myrna wouldn’t leave the office radio alone and kept changing the station to dance music when I wanted to hear the sports scores. I’d dial it back, but soon as I sat down, she’d switch to dance music again.
“Five minutes,” I said, twisting the knob. “Just lemme listen for five minutes, then pick whatever you like.”
She gave no reply until I was behind my desk, then Bing Crosby crooned from the speaker, smooth as butter, the volume twice as high as normal.
“Okay. You win. Just turn it down so I can work.”
After a moment, the volume eased. She’d made her point.
Arguing with a dame gets you nowhere fast.
Arguing with a ghost dame who happens to be haunting your nightclub is just plain screwy, but some nights I’m a slow learner.
I could imagine her putting on a smug smile, though I had no idea what she looked like. She’d been a lady bartender killed by shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade during a gang war that began and ended years before I bought the building. The bloodstain marking where she’d bled to death was visible on the floor behind the lobby bar. I’d replaced the tiles a few times, but the stain always reappeared.
Myrna was quirky, but as ghosts go—and I don’t have much experience—she was okay. She seemed to like me and my friends, and even helped out at the club’s bar, moving bottles around. Sometimes she played with the lights, which was hell when we had a stage show going, but I didn’t mind much. She was usually undemanding, comfortable company, just not at present.
Maybe she was bored. I could sympathize. The nights got long for me, too, though I had worldly distractions to keep me busy.
I hammered various keys on my adding machine, pulled the lever, then wrote the result into the correct ledger column. It being Sunday night, my club was closed, and I used the time to check stocks and balance the books. The place was quiet, except for the radio.
Myrna must have changed her mind: Bing’s voice faded and ceased altogether with a soft click. The dial no longer glowed. She’d switched it off, which was odd. I held still and listened, and downstairs in the chrome-trimmed lobby a visitor rapped insistently on the front door.
Someone must have spotted my Studebak
er in its reserved slot in the side parking lot and knew I was putting in extra time. A customer would have seen the CLOSED sign and noticed the lights were off. A friend wanting to visit would have phoned so I could leave the door unlocked. My partner and my girlfriend had their own keys, so it could be anybody. Might as well find out what the problem was, and it would be a problem, hopefully not a lethal one.
I’m not being melodramatic. I have aggravated a number of people in Chicago’s underworld. My last two years have, to wildly understate things, been harrowing. On my first day in town I ran afoul of some gangsters, which led to my untimely death, which led to a lot of other things that I would rather not go into. The end result put me in this office doing the books on a Sunday night and wondering if yet another mug on the wrong side of the law had plans to ventilate me.
Taking a shortcut, I vanished, sank through the floor, angling to the left, and then re-formed in the lobby with nary a hair out of place.
It’s ghostlike, but I’m undead, not dead.
That’s spelled v-a-m-p-i-r-e.
Look it up in Webster’s, but don’t take the definitions as gospel. It’s given me an edge on life and hard times, and I keep quiet about it. People will forgive you for having Mob associations, but let them find out you visit the Stockyards every few nights to drink blood and it’s a pitchfork parade with torches followed by a hammer-and-stake party.
Okay, that was melodramatic, but why take chances? What I drank in private was my own business.
The small light behind the lobby bar was on; Myrna liked it that way, but the rest of the space was dim and echoed the rappings of my visitor. I could make out a shape through the frosted-glass windows set in the doors. The height and build indicated the caller was female, and so it proved when I opened up. She was plump, looked as if she’d just come from church in her best black clothes, and under one arm was a paper-wrapped parcel tied with string. She wore a short-brimmed hat, and a thick black veil obscured the top half of her face. A purse dangled from her other arm, which was raised to knock again. She rocked back with a little “oh” of surprise.
“Jack Fleming,” she said decisively, taking in my rolled-up shirtsleeves and unbuttoned collar. The day had been warm, or so I’d been told, the night temperate enough to throw open the windows.
“Maybe.”
“I’m Emma Dorsey. You don’t know me, but I do costuming work over at the Nightcrawler Club.”
Good enough. The memory prompt reminded me that I knew her by sight, if not to speak to; I recalled a youngish woman of her proportions floating about backstage with the leggy, giggling dancers. There should be a pleasant face under the veil, a match to her soft voice, and neatly combed hair the same color as her dress.
I motioned her in with a word of welcome.
“What is it, something for Bobbi Smythe?” My girlfriend was a professional singer and might have placed a costume order. If her outfit was so skimpy as to fit inside the parcel, which looked about half the length of a shoebox, then I couldn’t wait to see her in it.
“N-no, nothing like that. I need help, and I shouldn’t even ask, but I’m scared, and Bobbi’s always said you’re a straight-arrow guy and . . .”
I let her run on, steering her toward the bar.
“C-could you lock the door?”
I took a quick gander outside to see if anyone was hanging around who might spook her. The street was clear of suspicious characters. I locked up.
The general darkness within was no problem for me, but her human-normal sight and the hat veil limited her view. She finally brushed the obscuring barrier out of the way. She usually wore glasses for her work, but they were gone now, and for the first time I got the full impact of her lustrous dark eyes. Wow. Film stars would kill for big, expressive glims like those.
“Drink?” I asked. Whatever her story, it might require a jolt of alcohol.
“Oh. No, thank you. I don’t drink.”
“Good habit to get into,” I said. I gave her a moment to explain herself, but she was taking in the high ceiling, red velvet curtains, and black and white marble tile floors. Mine was a swank operation, and I was proud of it. “Like my place?”
“I’ve seen it from the outside, but never been in. It’s very nice.” She sounded distracted. Her heart pattered fast, and I could smell fear.
“I’ll put some lights on, give you a tour.”
“Oh! No lights. Please! I’m sorry, I’m doing this badly. I don’t know where to start.”
“You’ll get to it. Let’s go to my office. Bar stools aren’t comfortable when you’re sober.”
She made a little “hmm” sound of hesitation but followed me upstairs. The office door was open. It had been shut when I’d vanished from the room. Myrna was being helpful, probably curious, too.
I got Emma Dorsey to sit on my new sofa and pulled up a chair to face her. She perched primly on the edge and fumbled the parcel so it rested on her lap. The way her gloved fingers twitched around like nervous butterflies gave me to understand that she didn’t care much for the contents. It was wrapped in plain brown paper, just the way those ads in the backs of magazines promise, and the string was a thick, sturdy twine tied in a bow. No address was visible.
“What do you need help with, Mrs. Dorsey?” I asked.
“Um . . . it’s Miss Dorsey, but call me Emma, everyone does, and it’s about my boyfriend . . . my fiancé, I mean. I’m still getting used to that.” She plucked off her gloves and put them in her purse, then tucked it next to her. No engagement ring, so the change must have been recent.
“Congratulations. Who’s the lucky man?”
“Joe Graedon.” She briefly pulled in her lower lip, her breath giving a hitch as she waited for a response.
“Don’t think I’ve met him.”
“Um . . . yes, you have. He works for Gordy. At the Nightcrawler.”
“Lots of guys do.”
“You might know him as Foxtrot Joe?”
“Ah.” I tried not to give a reaction, but she was watching and saw what she expected.
“He loves me,” she said, as though that explained everything.
Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world, though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to the general misery. I’m usually in favor of love, the good kind, the kind that’s between me and my girl, but Bobbi and I were a match. I couldn’t see Emma and Foxtrot Joe passing each other on the street, much less walking hand in hand in the same direction. She was plump and cheery, he was hard edges, as personable and tough as a brick wall, but crazier matches have happened.
He worked collections with Gino Desanctis, who answered directly to Northside Gordy, who ran the Nightcrawler Club and a large chunk of territory in Chicago. Gordy was a good friend of mine, one of the few who knew about the vampire stuff.
Relations sorted, I asked, “What’s going on?”
“Joe did something stupid. He did it for me, for us. He’s crazy about me, and it’s not really his fault, but if I make it right, maybe Gordy won’t . . . do anything.”
A well-considered euphemism, that. It covered all manner of mayhem from a severe bawling out to sinking a bullet into the head of an offender as a cautionary lesson to impart wisdom and prudence upon potential offenders.
Gordy was capable of ordering up all kinds of havoc when required, though I never stuck around to watch if I could help it. He also owed me a few favors. Emma might have heard and hoped I could work a miracle for her.
“What did Joe do?”
He’d dropped from sight with money that was not his. When a collector goes missing—along with cash—guys like Gordy tend to get homicidally annoyed. While the gangs had no problem skimming a share off the various businesses of the city, they took a dim and grim view when one of their own skimmed some for himself. Joe’s continued employment, not to mention his ability to keep breathing, was in peril.
Collectors worked in pairs so they could keep an eye o
n each other and not get ideas, but Joe had earned a reputation for reliability, so his boss, Desanctis, let him loose on his own once in a while.
“Then,” said Miss Dorsey, “Joe started talking about us getting married and how we didn’t have enough money, but I thought we did. I don’t need a fancy ring. A plain gold band was good enough for my mother and it’s good enough for me, but Joe said he wanted only the best.”
It didn’t sound right. She was sincere, but none of this tender consideration for a prospective bride went with what I knew about Foxtrot. He had gotten the name from the way he’d roughhoused a slow-to-pay gambler twice his size. The larger man took a swing; Joe took a swing. The gambler staggered back several strangely graceful steps before slamming into a slot machine, which fell on him when he hit the floor. It knocked him out for a week, and when he woke up he didn’t remember the debt. He still had to pay it—and for the machine. Joe hung around the hospital and made sure. After that, Joe had only to smile at deadbeats and ask if they wanted to dance.
“It’s not like he took the money that was going to his boss,” she went on. “He had people put a dollar or more on top of that, and it added up. He wasn’t stealing, this was more like getting a tip.”
Foxtrot raised a total of eight hundred bucks, which gave me an idea of just how profitable and wide-ranging an operation it was. He’d collected almost a year’s pay in less than a week. I was in the wrong business, what with trying to be honest.
“A tip.” My tone was completely neutral.
“He did it for me. He’s crazy about me. I told him not to, but he just couldn’t help himself.”
If he was getting tips on top of regular collections, no one would say a word. A few bucks going to Foxtrot was cheaper than a hospital stay.
“Look, if Gordy doesn’t know about these tips, then—”
“He does know. Someone complained last night to him, now Gino Desanctis has people looking for Joe. That’s why I asked you to lock the door. They’ve been watching my place, I guess to see if he came by. I sneaked out with my landlady’s family. They were going to evening Mass, and I just stayed in the middle of them and got on the El. I was going to the Nightcrawler, but I got so shaky and scared. Then I remembered Bobbi talking about how you sometimes helped people, so I took a chance that you might be open tonight. But the place was dark, and then I saw the lights in the upstairs and—”