Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I love you. I’m sorry. I love you.”

  “Shut up,” Sebastian snapped, and his throat sealed itself.

  “Go to sleep.”

  Darkness slammed him down, and he embraced it.

  Chapter 8

  SHE. THAT WAS how he thought of Her, a pronoun with a capital letter, because She had never told him Her name. She never spoke at all. He thought it was because of the chasm of a scar that split Her forehead, separating Her brown eye from Her crimson one. So deep a scar must have damaged what was underneath. She held his head between Her knees, so tight he was sure his skull would burst like an overripe fruit, gripped a handful of his beard, and ripped the last of his dignity away, along with half of his face. He screamed, and Her mind closed around his like a vice, choking his soul, until his body twisted and jerked with the agony of it.

  Some vestigial reflex seized control of his mouth and he cried out in Latin, the native language of his heart.

  “Salvame,” he shrieked. “Pie Iesu, salvame!”

  The name seared him into silence, and he lay still while She unmanned him.

  He had pitied Her once, had been ready to do anything it took to save Her – poor, ravaged creature. He had pitied Her and been repaid with venom. But that was a memory, unwelcome, and the memory quickly became a dream. Suddenly, he stood tall and powerful, as strong as he had been hours ago. He was the dominator. He was in control. He broke Her neck and beat Her, shredded Her until She was nothing but viscous, red liquid. Even then, She tried to run, dripping and flowing away, and he burned Her. He laughed. He felt the pressure of Her mind ease and exulted in the pleasant tearing sensation as the link between them was shorn away, all messy edges and fresh, necessary wounds. It was worth it to be rid of Her.

  But She came back, She always came back. She was out there somewhere, waiting – no. She was dead. Dead and gone forever. If She came back, it would be with a different face, some new tormentor. A thousand faces, a million. Seven billion. She was everywhere. She wore a man’s face, unkempt, with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes…

  Sleep fled, and he sat up, peeling himself away from the spot of dried blood his split scalp had left on the carpet. The sense of peace was gone, replaced by a deep, quivering need to be taken again, to be emptied, quieted. He contented himself instead with submission, and crawled to where Sebastian slept in the chair, unaware of any observer. His limbs trembled with that need, with pain and thirst, and the need for all of that to be transformed into ecstasy. He laid himself at Sebastian’s feet, so that even in sleep, Sebastian might be secure in his domination.

  He woke again when he felt the sun rise. The door opened and closed, and for a while Sebastian was gone; he came back frustrated and quietly seething.

  “They flew the coop. I knew I should have burned them out yesterday.”

  That rang a bell, faint but clear.

  “They said someone wants to k-kill you.”

  “Yeah, I know. You said that already. It’s taken care of.”

  He didn’t understand how it could be taken care of until he realized that the place smelled like industrial cleansers – a motel room. He hadn’t even noticed. The tenement, presumably, was far away. That was a comfort; he couldn’t have said why, but that ugly green wallpaper had put him on edge. And here, there were no ghosts watching him, waiting for help he couldn’t give.

  “They won’t give up just because I ran – No, don’t worry about it. I left false trails all over the city. And I can’t possibly be that high on the priority list. It’ll take them a couple of days to wrap up whatever they’re doing in Amarillo and get down here. We’ll wait here a few hours and then leave. San Francisco, maybe. Someplace big. Not too far east, though. I don’t have a lot of friends on the East Coast.”

  Sebastian sat on the edge of the single bed and stretched.

  “Well, hell, I’m already bored. Let’s do something.”

  * * *

  KIM, ZEBEDEE, AND Deaf Coyote met the undead law enforcement in the parking lot of the Department of Public Safety, the most neutral ground they could think of. Tony and Edith brought two minivans and six assorted minions of varying flavors, ranging from an acne-scarred teenager to a Polynesian woman with an eye patch. They didn’t look like much, but they were all guaranteed to be formidable.

  The vampires arrayed themselves in a semicircle to one side of the cars. Tony, the balding man with the loud tie, tapped a cigarette into his hand and lit up.

  The big German-looking one, Edith, lifted her sunglasses for a moment to peer at the welcoming party.

  “Had you made a plan for coordinating this?” she asked.

  “Can’t,” Coyote said. “They’re moving around too much. I’m tracking the guy we dug up, the one he lobotomized. They stopped in Lampasas this morning. Not making very good time, but I’m guessing they think we can’t trace them.”

  “Sounds likely. And this other party, the hostage. Will he be a problem?”

  “I doubt it. He’s completely in Duran’s pocket, but the bastard was keeping him totally dry. Even if he’s been gorging – how much can you guys take in? Five or six quarts a day, max? He still wouldn’t be at full strength.”

  Edith nodded thoughtfully, and Tony blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “You can take care of the hostage,” he said. “We’ll take care of Duran. I think it’s past the point that a trial is necessary or appropriate, and you shouldn’t be seen to take part in an execution. Although, we’ll probably have to justify killing him at some point, so if you want to keep trying to rehabilitate your self-storage friend, we’ll comp you for the trouble.”

  Kim nodded. “And if you could maybe cut me some keys to a local blood bank…”

  Tony smiled. “Picky,” he chided. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The teenager unfolded her arms and glanced at her watch. “We should get a move on,” she said. “It’s an hour and some to Lampasas if the traffic’s decent. And he could already be moving.”

  Four of the vampires broke off and climbed back into their minivan. One shook out a map and put a finger on US 183 North. Coyote heaved himself up into the cab of Zeb’s pickup.

  “I know this guy’s psycho,” Kim said, “but do you really think it’ll take eight of you to take him down?”

  “Probably not,” Edith admitted. “But it sends an important message. We’re willing to use excessive force. Maybe that’ll keep the other nut jobs quiet.”

  “Fair enough,” Kim said. She couldn’t argue with that. She climbed into the seat behind Coyote, letting Zeb drive.

  Four minions took the lead, with Edith and Tony and two more following and the wizards-and-cowboy trio bringing up the rear. Kim saw someone in the middle car break out a game of bingo. She guessed that an execution was probably like a field trip for them. That thought made her a little queasy, but it was a comfort to know that they weren’t worried. She wasn’t worried either, really, except for Rocky’s sake. There was really very little chance of things going horribly wrong. Nobody liked Duran; he had power he shouldn’t have, and he was willing to use it against anyone at all, even his own kind. No one would be coming to his aid. It was one against eight, and everyone present knew not to look him in the eye or give him a chance to speak. Kim might almost have found it unfair, if she didn’t have boxes and boxes of files detailing his exploits, the people he had ruined. Hell, it might even be a mercy, putting him out of his insanity. He had probably been a person, once. Maybe even a good one. Surely the person he had been wouldn’t want to carry on like this.

  Lampasas had a population of just over six thousand. It was a nice little town, no panicked residents to indicate that a fugitive vampire was causing trouble. Zeb poked Kim awake, and they piled out in the parking lot of a local grocery store to compare notes.

  “Gotta find a phone book,” Coyote growled, and he stomped into the grocery store to appropriate theirs.

  Kim watched him go, then turned to shr
ug at Tony and Edith.

  They waited. The teenage vampire tilted her head back and inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring. The whites of her eyes had begun to stain pink.

  “Five minutes?” she asked.

  Edith frowned, but nodded. “Three,” she said. “We’re in a hurry.”

  The kid nodded and grinned, snapping a sloppy salute, and made for the edge of the building. It suddenly occurred to Kim that the teenager was probably older than her, but she wasn’t about to ask.

  Kim stretched. Her back crackled and her shoulders popped. Zeb gave her a grin.

  “You’re too young to be old,” he told her.

  She grinned back and they stood in silence until Coyote came back with his phone book. He flipped it open to the back and ripped out the map of Lampasas. Then he pulled a wad of gum out of his mouth, stuck a snippet of a blond hair in it, and stuck both to the corner of the map.

  “Sic ‘em,” he said.

  The glob of gum mobilized, stretching out and creeping across the map like a spit-covered caterpillar. It wormed down the expressway, across a few residential neighborhoods, and stopped with the bit of hair pointed at a street corner off South Key Avenue, the main road.

  Coyote tapped the map, held it up for everyone to see, grunted, and climbed back into Zeb’s pickup. Thirty seconds later, the teenager was back, looking considerably more cheerful. She glanced at Edith, and something passed silently between the two of them. Edith nodded. She moved over to Kim and Zeb, Tony slipped into the driver’s seat of one of the minivans, and the other six vampires simply melted into thin air.

  Kim looked around to see whether any of the mundanes had noticed, but no one was looking.

  “We lay low until evening,” Edith said. “You three stay out of sight and far enough away that he can’t sense you. Edge of town or so, just in case. Someone will come get you when it’s time to move in.”

  Then Edith disappeared as well, and Tony drove away. Zeb checked his watch and jogged into the grocery store to come back with a huge sack full of chocolate bars.

  “Emergency power,” he said.

  Then he and Kim piled back into the pickup and headed out of Lampasas. They turned down an unassuming side street and into the cracked driveway of an empty lot. A man with a garden hose waved from across the street. Kim waved back, trying hard to look like she had every right to be there.

  “Anyone know when to expect sundown?” she asked.

  “I’d guess ‘nother three hours,” Zeb told her. “There’s some movin’ blankets in the toolbox if anyone wants to hang out in the back.”

  The sun crept across the sky. Kim stretched out across the back seat and hung her jacket over the window to keep the light out of her eyes. Coyote grumbled under his breath. After a few minutes, he climbed out of the truck and hobbled a slow circuit around the lot, poking at the dirt and whacking the fence with his cane. There was no tingle of magic, so Kim put it down to nerves rather than ritual, confirmed when he shrugged out of his flannel over shirt and pulled it up over his head. Kim fingered the cluster of medals at her throat and picked one at random. Saint Anthony of Padua, patron of missing persons and lost things. She kept him around mostly for keys and paperwork and other things that tended to get up and walk off when she needed them most, but he seemed appropriate for her current situation, as well.

  I know you’re probably kind of busy, she thought in Saint Anthony’s general direction, and we do kind of know where our missing person is, approximately, and there’s probably some moral gray area in this whole thing, and I don’t really know what your stance on dead people is… Not asking for a miracle, or anything, but some slightly improbable good luck would be nice. Also, if you know someone Up There who covers swift justice or hostages or not getting killed by the bad guys, could you maybe put in a word for us? Thanks.

  She shut her eyes and tried not to think about what might be happening to that hostage. Instead, she tried to plan, to play out what would happen in three hours’ time. She was reasonably certain that Duran had to be hiding out in a motel or something similar. He had low cunning, but not much real smarts, and she doubted anything more creative would have occurred to him. If it was a motel, Tony and Edith and their team would have no trouble breaking down a door, cornering him, and executing him. On the other hand, if he had forced an invitation out of someone and was laying low within someone’s threshold, things would be trickier. He would have taken precautions against anyone else coming by an invitation by accident, and that meant that the Amarilloans would have no way in.

  No, she corrected. She had forgotten for a moment that Tony and Edith weren’t the good guys. They would burn him out of someone’s house if they had to, him and Rocky and any humans unfortunate enough to be inside. They would regret it, and they would send out enormous compensations to the next of kin, labeled as checks from a fake insurance company, but they wouldn’t let innocent lives stand in the way of their version of justice.

  She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes and prayed, not to anyone in particular, that, in trying to stop a murderer, she hadn’t just enabled more. She folded her arm up under her head, milagro bracelet digging into her cheek, and the past week caught up with her. She dozed.

  The sun was just brushing the horizon when someone tapped on the pickup truck’s window. It was the vampire woman with the eye patch, except that she had ditched the patch somewhere and picked up a horrible, greenish glass eye. She climbed into the back seat with Kim as Zeb started the engine.

  “Dinky motel,” she said. “Zillion years old. This won’t take fifteen minutes. We’re going in. You stay in sight of the door and hex the snot out of him if he tries to run.”

  Kim breathed a sigh of relief as her visions of wanton murder evaporated.

  “Cowboy. You got any magic?”

  Zeb backed out of the lot and made for the expressway.

  “Not a lick,” he said. “But I got guns, an’ these beauties never let me down.”

  “Shoot for the head,” the woman said. “You hit him in the torso and miss the heart, it’ll slow him down but mostly just tick him off unless you fill him completely full of lead. Wizards?”

  Coyote grunted.

  “No fancy stuff. It’s hard to kill a vampire, even with magic. I recommend fire or big, flying objects. Don’t get closer than you have to. Don’t look him in the eye, and don’t let him talk. Name’s Bernice, by the way. If you got any questions, ask now.”

  Kim wolfed down one of Zeb’s chocolate bars, sank back in the seat, and pulled her little semiauto from its holster in the waistband of her jeans. She shook out her bracelets and made sure her necklace was as tight as she could safely make it. Coyote gripped his cane and pulled a massive bowie knife from who-knows-where. Bernice tensed her hands, and the tips of her broad, blunt fingers twisted into reddish-black talons. Zeb whistled Dixie.

  They reached the parking lot, and Edith and Tony appeared in front of the truck. Zeb slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting them, threw it into park, and the four climbed out. The molten rim of the sun sank below the horizon, and Bernice’s glass eye lit up like a candle flame.

  Suddenly, there were vampires everywhere. Edith and Tony, Bernice and the spotty teenager clustered together under an unlit streetlight. A football-coach type with a billed cap covering his bald head appeared beside them, accompanied by a dark-skinned, Aztec-looking man who gave Kim a grin filled with deadly teeth. An older woman in a track suit lounged nearby on the hood of someone’s car, and a small, round, smiling man waved from atop the motel roof.

  “He’ll already know we’re here,” Tony said softly.

  He turned to Coyote. “Which room?”

  Coyote pointed silently to the room on the far end of the block. In the time it took Kim to blink, Bernice was at the door. She bent to look at the slot for the key card, shook her head, planted her hand flat against the wood, and pushed it down. Surprisingly, it gave with almost no sound at all. The inside of the room was dark.
<
br />   “I don’t see him,” she said. “Lisa, Dave. Quick search.”

  The coach and the woman in the track suit slipped into the room behind Bernice. There was a pause of ten seconds or so before they came back out.

  “Duran’s gone.”

  Tony ran his tongue over his teeth. “You think he knew we were coming and split?”

  “Doubt it. His bag’s sitting in there, and so’s the other guy. I say we scatter, take cover. Watch for him to come back.”

  “What’s the hostage’s condition? Will he be a problem?”

  Bernice grimaced. “No,” she said. “He’s… reparable. Maybe”

  Zeb drew his revolver and cocked it. Kim leveled her semiauto and clicked the safety off with her thumb, stretching out her mind to feel for ambient energy she could use if she had to. There was enough power in the air that she could turn her bullet into an incendiary, maybe enough that she could do the same for Zeb. She pulled it in, through her core, and sent it down along her skin and into the firearm.

  “We’re going to want to back off some,” she told Zeb. “They can sense magic. We don’t want to tip him off.”

  There was a quiet noise to Kim’s left, and she turned her head reflexively, just in time to see the woman in the track suit tear off the teenager’s head. The girl’s body jerked, and then her skin sloughed away, baring the muscles underneath. The muscles disintegrated, leaving bones, and the bones crumbled. A pile of fine, powdery gray ash began to blow away in the early evening breeze.

  For a moment, nothing moved. Tony frowned. Edith opened her mouth as though to say something, but nothing came out.

  Kim could see Lisa’s face; her pupils were dilated, expression rapt, as though listening hard to something very interesting. She had seen that expression before.

  Apparently, so had everyone else present.

  Bernice let out an animal roar, flickering across the parking lot to tackle Lisa, who put up a fight with teeth and claws. A low, wet splat accompanied a shriek of pain. Blackish fluid sprayed outward, but it was impossible to tell whose innards had been breached.