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

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Like pulling off a Band-Aid, the shaman said into Lenny’s mind.

  It was nothing like pulling off a Band-Aid, though. It was like cutting out a tumor with a belt sander and chopsticks, and he was doing it on purpose. Lenny could feel the shaman’s little silent grin every time he ripped something away. As much as it hurt, though, it was helping, too. The pieces torn out did not belong to Lenny, and when the shaman rearranged things, tidying things away and filling holes Lenny hadn’t known were there, it built something that, on the surface, seemed whole.

  And he remembered.

  He remembered everything that had happened to him, but this time, it was real. He remembered everything Sebastian had done, the things he stole, the things he slapped together to replace them. There were vast stretches when Lenny had been too dry, and there was no memory, and those times were almost a relief. Thirst was agony, but it all condensed into a single point, like a flash, and all sense of duration faded away. He remembered every time he woke to find a corpse beside him, and he remembered why he shouldn’t be ashamed. Whatever Sebastian might have thought, Lenny did know what it felt like to be responsible for death, and not one of those lives down there had been extinguished by his hand.

  And he remembered Kate, and the memory had a face, and it was like losing her all over again. He had spent years crying for her, and he cried again on the floor in that kitchen.

  At some point, the spirit walk must have stopped, but the onslaught didn’t. It was as though part of him was trying to find something specific, buried back among the years he had only just regained. He remembered home, his family, the crossing, and Kate, always Kate. The moment he reached out for her and came up against the ragged, amputated hole where their bond had used to be. Moving east, always east. California to Nevada, Nevada to New Mexico, New Mexico to Texas. Abilene. Mara. I used to be someone. I used to be real.

  Whatever he was looking for, he couldn’t find it. Either it was too well hidden, or it was gone.

  A hotel. Green wallpaper. Cellar. Then a small light. Lighter. Fire. A girl with dark hair, barely more than a kid. She didn’t let him burn.

  But it suddenly occurred to him that he was more than just memories. There was a hard floor underneath him and florescent light on the other side of his eyelids.

  The most important thing, though, the thing that captured all of his attention, was the overwhelming absence of pain. It’s very hard to appreciate not-hurting except in the few moments just after the pain is gone.

  “He’s a wuss,” a voice growled. “Not a lick of fight in him. Coward, too. Would probably have just sat there and let you kill him if you felt like it.” It was true enough.

  Lenny looked up, blinking away bewilderment. The speaker was the old man. Lenny remembered that they called him after some kind of animal, and it wasn’t too much of a stretch to recognize him as the one who had recently been messing around in the more rundown portions of Lenny’s mind. Running closer to full steam, though, he had to say Coyote didn’t look like someone who could have taken someone out with a thought. He was shorter than Lenny and developing some impressive stubble, and a hairy paunch drooped over the waistband of his jeans. He was appropriately weathered and leathery, but portions of his tan were more orange than copper, and a shiny, raised scar on his left bicep showed the vaguely feminine outline of a defunct tattoo.

  The cowboy stood next to the shaman, outrageously tall, considerably younger, and wearing nothing but shorts and tall socks. Lenny thought he recalled that the cowboy’s name was biblical and somewhat unlikely. He had a revolver in each hand, and he held them with the familiar ease of a man who shoots dimes out of the air in his spare time. If he decided to shoot, Lenny thought he might possibly have time to see it coming. Might. Possibly. There was an odd sensation around the man, a feeling of bone-tired restlessness, like he had gotten too old but couldn’t move on. His heart was still beating, though, and humans couldn’t get too old. When they got too old, they died. It didn’t make sense.

  Then there was the wizard. Kim. She had a pistol also, something a lot newer than the cowboy’s revolvers. She held it close to her chest, pointed at a spot about a foot above Lenny’s head. Barely more than a kid, just like he remembered. The blood on her throat had dripped down onto her chest and was only just beginning to dry, flaking around the edges. There were tracks in it where she had scratched some away. She freed up one hand to push her hair out of her face, and she watched Lenny, waiting to see what he would do. She was very careful not to meet his eyes.

  She was waiting for something, and he didn’t want to disappoint her, so he doubled over and heaved onto the floor. Nothing came up, but he wished that it would. He had violated her, forced himself on her, and the proof was inside him. Proof and power. He had some dim memory of her demanding that he undo it, that the reason they had shoved him back into himself was so he could fix the mess he had made, but he did not know how. When they figured that out, the obvious solution would be his speedy death. It was hard for him to object to that.

  “Wuss,” the shaman said again. “Not even a little dangerous. Dependent personality. Little bit of a weird feel, some kind of defect. Might be one of your Broken things. Might just be broken. Can’t tell without going in further. Not a direct threat, though.”

  “Do you think you’ll really need to?” the wizard asked. She sounded reluctant, for which Lenny was grateful, because the thought of Coyote going in further terrified him.

  “Nah. Got out all the big problems. Everything else he should be able to work out on his own, with some time.”

  That was nothing but a lie. Lenny could feel the inside of himself, and the shaman was partly right; Lenny was harmless, defective, broken, a coward. He had been someone before. He had been real. He had been someone who could trust people, trust himself, who never looked for trouble but whose first instinct wasn’t to cower. That was gone, and there was no way he was going to be able to work that out on his own.

  There was a rustle of clothes as one of them moved closer to him. The only one with any significant amount of clothing on was the wizard. The one he had hurt. He shied away from her reflexively. Wuss.

  He looked up and found her hand outstretched toward him. He didn’t take it. He couldn’t.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “We’re starting over, okay? Hi. I’m Kim.”

  It took him a moment. The knowledge was there, accessible, but he wasn’t sure where to look. After a few seconds, it came back to him.

  “Hugo. I-I-I mean Leonard.”

  She tipped her head and winced as the movement tugged at her wound. Lenny winced, too.

  “Which is it?”

  “Leonard Hugo. He…” – A shudder wracked his frame – “…c-called me Hugo.”

  “So you want to be called Leonard?”

  He thought about that. He didn’t want to be called Leonard, either.

  “Lenny.”

  “Lenny, okay. Okay. You know we’ve got kind of a big problem. Do you remember?”

  His hands shook.

  “I…” The most technically accurate word was one he couldn’t make himself say. It took him a few seconds longer to come up with a substitute. “I stole your b-blood.”

  She crouched and took his hands in hers. He knew she was trying to come across as kind, to put him at ease, but his muscles tensed reflexively in preparation for pain. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had crushed his bones. Nothing happened.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “As far as blame goes, I think I’d rather say that we’re both victims, here. That puts us on the same side. The problem is that Sebastian Duran has a hold over you, and now you’ve got a hold over me, and if he can get to me through you, we’re all in trouble. You know anything about contagious magic?”

  That name brought feelings he didn’t want to think about. It was almost like love, if love was slimy and false. His throat closed, and he could only nod.

  “Yeah, well, if you could, y’know, cut that cord
, that would be good. I can’t help you if I can’t help myself.”

  “D-don’t know how.”

  “If you need to think about it for a while…”

  “I don’t. I d-don’t know how.”

  She looked over at the old man. “Coyote?”

  For a very brief moment, Lenny could feel him in his head again. It was a lighter presence, this time. He wasn’t rearranging things, just checking.

  “He doesn’t know,” he confirmed.

  So that was it. The other option was his death, destroying the chain by destroying the middle link. He didn’t want to see it coming. He shut his eyes. Wuss.

  “Mom might know,” the wizard mused. She let go of Lenny’s hands, and he heard her move away.

  “Oh, that’ll be a fun conversation. How long you reckon she’d have you locked away for somethin’ like this?”

  “If the options are getting locked up or being a vampire puppet, I’ll gladly take the former. Besides, she got me on this job in the first place. She can’t really complain if the occupational hazards get me.”

  “I guess the real question is whether she’d get them to send someone to finish the job or just let Duran get away.”

  “Depends on whether you can work contagious magic through a degree of separation and if you can, whether they can get me out of it. They wouldn’t just let me stay compromised.”

  No one got started on killing Lenny. In fact, they left the kitchen.

  He dared to open his eyes and saw that they were in the other room. The old man, Coyote, had taken a chair, while the cowboy buttoned on a shirt and the wizard rummaged through her books. She looked over at Lenny and forced a smile. It looked painful. She gestured for him to come.

  He used the edge of the counter to haul himself up, but something squished under his foot and almost burst before he could process the sensation and step back. There was a small pile of plastic bags, each one filled with a pint of plasma. She had told him to finish them off. That made sense. He picked one up and stacked the rest beside the sink.

  “Ainslie might know,” she said. “She’s got thousands of references piled up, by now. She could probably give me a place to look. Wouldn’t hurt to ask Tony and Edith, too. Looks bad on them if someone they pay gets screwed over.”

  Coyote harrumphed.

  “Tony and Edith are busy licking their wounds, at the moment,” he said. “Besides, they’re a lot more worried about beating the crap out of Duran than about keeping you safe.”

  Kim nodded. “Truth. Someone give them a call anyway. They need to know where to center their search.”

  She turned to Lenny, a stack of books in her hands.

  “If you have any idea where he might be headed,” she said. The question trailed off.

  They planned to kill Sebastian. That was probably necessary to keep him from killing other people, to keep him from doing to someone else what he had done to Lenny, but the thought still made Lenny’s stomach lurch. He didn’t have any illusions that the overwhelming need to defend Sebastian was his own. If he felt anything but disgust and fear, it was only because Sebastian had planted that in him. But without Lenny, Sebastian was alone.

  “He m-mentioned San Francisco,” Lenny heard himself say. Wuss. Traitor. He winced.

  Kim nodded and signaled to the cowboy, who already had the telephone receiver up to his ear. Lenny could hear the slow ringing on the other end.

  The wizard picked up a book and leafed through the pages. She snapped it shut again with a sharp thud and dropped it onto the table. Then she turned to look at Lenny. Her dark eyes were intense. He had to look away.

  “You know him?”

  “I… I g-guess.”

  “Probably better than me. I mean, I’ve been following him, but I never actually met him. Do you think he’s more likely to stand and fight again, or just run away?”

  He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to be useless, but he hadn’t exactly been in peak observing condition for most of his acquaintance with Sebastian Duran. If he gave them bad advice, they could get killed. If he gave them good advice, they could kill Sebastian.

  But he did know him. It took some digging to recognize the memories that weren’t his, the dreams Sebastian had projected into Lenny’s head through the bond he forced on him.

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  She tilted her head, eyebrows drawing together in a frown.

  “He’s sick,” he explained. “He’s n-not evil. Just very, very sick.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” she said. He believed her.

  “He’ll run,” Lenny told her. “Then he’ll w-wait. Then he’ll c-come back to p-pick them off one at a t-time. Not you. He d-doesn’t take revenge, just g-gets rid of threats. You’re not a threat, now.”

  He doubted that Sebastian meant to kill her. The monster probably wouldn’t have objected if Lenny had somehow managed to bleed her to death, but generally speaking, Sebastian was more interested in neutralizing than in causing pain. Torture for him was recreation, not business. Lenny wondered whether Sebastian had hoped he would maim the wizard, cripple her and get himself killed by her friends. Take her out and tie up a loose end in one go.

  The cowboy muttered in a low voice to someone across the state. Lenny could hear him clearly but didn’t listen.

  Kim waved a hand in front of his face. He did his best to turn his attention back to her.

  “So I’m not in immediate danger,” she clarified. “Not unless he wants to use me to get at someone else. What about Zeb and Coyote?’

  That was a trickier question. It was obvious both men were dangerous, but it was also obvious that the wizard was the head of their group. Sebastian had tried to take her out already, and he was smart – he would know better than to stick around long enough to find out whether she was down for the count. He would probably leave Austin immediately, hang out somewhere else while he waited for a chance to come back and start killing. When he did come back, Kim would be in danger. He wouldn’t kill her straight off, but he might decide to have fun with her, which could be worse. Then he would turn to her friends, seeing them as… what? Rogues looking for vengeance, most likely.

  Lenny shook his head. “Not yet. But eventually.”

  “How long?”

  “No idea. C-could b-be years. He’s not exactly short on t-time.”

  “Or it could be days.”

  He doubted that, but it was possible. He nodded.

  She blew out a breath and gritted her teeth so hard, he could hear them creak.

  “Still can’t make a plan,” Coyote said from the chair he had taken. He tapped his cane against the side of his leg. “Not until we know what he knows. If he thinks I can track him, he might come back to make sure I can’t. If not, he might stay away a while, then probably go after Amarillo first. They’re the ones actively pursuing him. And the chindi bastard says you’re not a threat. Well then, neither am I. We can sure as hell look like we gave up.”

  “Might at least give us a chance to regroup. I’m not feeling so hot. Tea will help, but it’ll still take a while before I can really hex the snot out of an attacker again.”

  “And there’s the question of this contagious magic. And your mother…”

  They talked. Lenny tried to listen – the least he could do was correct them if they went horribly wrong somewhere – but it quickly became obvious that he had already been as useful as he was going to be. They talked strategy, made plans, talked about people he didn’t know and places he hadn’t seen. He sat against the wall and faded quietly into the background.

  He woke up horizontal with his neck and shoulders stiff. Someone had thrown the electric blanket over him, and it had been there long enough that he was warm almost all the way through. That was probably the only reason he didn’t panic, since a large part of him was insisting he was somewhere else, that it was all a dream, an illusion, a game. He would not have put it past Sebastian to do something like that, give him hope just to
see him cry when he snatched it away. Or worse, construct this sad hallucination just to make Lenny prove his loyalty. He had already failed that particular test a hundred times over.

  But Sebastian would never think to make sure he was warm.

  He pushed himself up to sitting. His head felt like it was full of water, and he had to wait for it to stop sloshing before he was able to stand. There was no one else in the living room and only one heartbeat nearby. Only one. That seemed wrong, but it took him a moment to remember why. Something had happened.

  He didn’t go running to see what was wrong. He might have wanted to, maybe, but he couldn’t. If something was wrong, it could only be Sebastian, and if he stayed still and quiet and pretended to be somewhere else, it might not hurt too badly when Sebastian came for him.

  Kim came out of the bathroom with her hair wet and a square of fresh gauze taped to the side of her throat. She didn’t look like she thought anything was particularly wrong. At least, not immediately. She saw Lenny and stopped dead, took a step back, and frowned.

  “Um,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  He struggled for a reasonable answer. She watched for a moment before moving into the kitchen.

  “You drink coffee?” she asked.

  “I g-guess.” He wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. He followed her into the kitchen. The sun came in brightly through the window, still the pinkish gold of early morning. “Where…?”

  “The guys? They went to go pick up Coyote’s materials. They should be back in a bit.”

  “But…”

  “It’s okay. Coyote needs his stuff to tell where somebody is, but it’s a lot easier to tell where somebody’s not. For instance, anywhere within a given radius. You were right about Duran taking off. No telling when he’ll be back, but we’ve got a little breathing space for the time being.”