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

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “How m-much?”

  “At least a hundred miles. If he’s smart, he probably headed someplace big like Houston or Dallas.”

  She filled the coffee maker’s carafe from the sink and poured it into the reservoir, then started scooping grounds into a paper filter. It felt very familiar, watching her.

  “Anyhow,” she continued. “We couldn’t get a hold of Tony or Edith last night, but their people in Amarillo said they’d give us a call as soon as they find anything out. The tentative plan is for Coyote to go with them to nail Duran. I’m not in fighting shape, so I’m taking care of you, and Zeb’s hanging out to make sure nothing goes wrong. Again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know. That’s the weird thing. Does the word ‘uszkodzony’ mean anything to you?”

  It was familiar, Slavic, but he couldn’t be sure what it meant. “No. I don’t know. I d-don’t think so.”

  “How about broken?”

  Oh. She wanted to know what was different about him, what was wrong with him. The same thing Sebastian had wanted to know, that little fact that had turned Lenny from a point of interest to a target. He shook his head. It was a lie, and Sebastian would have seen through it, but Kim didn’t. She sighed, pursing her lips, and turned to pour coffee. She loaded hers up with cream, and Lenny loaded his up with sugar.

  “I guess I’m asking why you didn’t kill me. You definitely could have. I get that you probably didn’t want to. You don’t seem like the kind that gets off on that. But my understanding is that what you want doesn’t really enter into it when you’re like that. So what gives? Has that ever happened to you before?”

  “No.”

  She heard something in his voice and turned around to study him. He let his mug warm his hands and refused to look at her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. She took a guess anyway.

  “You’ve never lost it before, have you? I mean, other than…”

  “C-couple times. Had a friend there to help, though. No one g-got hurt.”

  She watched him, waiting for him to go on, but he didn’t want to. After a moment, she heaved herself up onto the counter with a grunt.

  “Okay,” she conceded. “Okay, so don’t tell me. It’s not like I’m doing my best to save you, or anything.”

  She grinned to let him know she wasn’t actually mad.

  “Anyway, you’re going to have to stick around until they have a chance to talk to you some, but after that, I figure you’ll probably want to go back to, y’know, whatever you were doing before. You guys, like, keep secret accounts and extra identities and all that fun stuff, right? Starting over somewhere shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  She kicked her legs, swilled down the rest of her coffee, and poured herself another cup.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’d rather just go home. If it’s all the same to you.”

  Her grin faded. She pushed her hair out of her face and bit her lip.

  “That’d attract an awful lot of attention,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “I mean, you don’t want cops getting involved and finding out things they shouldn’t. And someone is bound to remember you. You disappear and then come back, someone’s going to ask questions.”

  That was true. But Lenny already knew he couldn’t go back to teaching – he could feel eyes on him and hear laughter when he thought about it, and he could guess that any attempt would end in a breakdown. He felt liquefied inside. He didn’t have the strength left to hold his own in a classroom, to meet deadlines, to exist in a world that needed him to accomplish something. It didn’t seem likely that he could do much of anything. Trying to carve out a new place among strangers wouldn’t be possible. He needed someone he could trust, someone who already knew him and would be willing to hide him.

  “Mara’ll help.”

  “That friend of yours?”

  “Different friend. She d-doesn’t know, but I was g-gonna tell her anyway.”

  “And she’ll be okay with a vampire?”

  “Dunno about okay. She wouldn’t be scared, though.”

  “Okay.” She sounded skeptical. “We’ll see about digging up a phone number for her. Probably shouldn’t try having any involved conversations over the phone, though. We’ll just tell her you’re not dead and, I don’t know, that you need a couch to crash on, or something.”

  She slid off the counter, sloshing a little bit of her coffee onto the floor, and moved past him into the living room. He followed. She bent and shoved some books around and came up with a headband.

  “Okay,” she said again. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and snapped the headband into place. “Are you from Austin?”

  “Abilene.”

  “Not too far. I think I can drive you when it gets down to it.”

  She reminded him of Mara, sort of. Shorter, darker, maybe a little younger, but she shared that matter-of-factness and that sense that there wasn’t much anyone could do to really upset her. Unshakeable. She was also in the know and didn’t seem to care that he was dead. He thought he could probably like her a lot, if he could only manage to trust her.

  Three sharp raps sounded at the door, and Kim went perfectly still. A small pistol appeared in her hand, seemingly from nowhere, and Lenny heard her stop breathing for a moment. She held up a hand to keep him where he was, even though he doubted he could have moved even if he had wanted to, and sidestepped over a pile of books to press her eye to the peep hole. He saw her shoulders relax, and she opened the door, but the person outside didn’t come in. It wasn’t hard to guess why.

  “Hey,” Kim said. “Itzli, right? You guys got our message?”

  She leaned on the door, showing Lenny a small man with a hard, sharp face. His chest was bare under his windbreaker.

  “Swung by the…” He paused and tilted his head to one side, shooting a glance past Kim at the other man.

  “By the regional office,” he finished. “They had your message. The others went on to Amarillo. I’m to help you if you need it.”

  “Don’t need anything. Just wanted to let you know Duran was here last night, briefly. Coyote can confirm he’s no longer within a hundred miles of Austin, but he did come back here.”

  “And that was when you had your incident?” His eyes moved from Lenny to Kim, then back to Lenny.

  He was off, bordering on crazy. Lenny could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes. Something vital had been ripped out of him, and it made him volatile. If Lenny’s guess was right, though, it also made him a nightmare for Sebastian.

  “Just a little incident. It’s all taken care of. I’m sorry about your friend, by the way. Or more than a friend?”

  “Hetty was mine.”

  The guess was right. Itzli wouldn’t stop until Sebastian was dead. Lenny thought about Kate, and he could understand that. Nothing Sebastian had done to him had hurt as badly as losing half of himself. Itzli was going to be deadly.

  “I’m sorry,” Lenny told him.

  He nodded. “You know,” he said.

  Kim looked at Lenny, frowning, then turned back to Itzli.

  “We’ll get him,” she said. “If you stay in town a while, Coyote’s going to be tracking Duran as soon as he’s got his stuff together. We can point you in the right direction. Zeb said something about taking him out long-range. I don’t know if he meant sniping him or what, but it sounds like the best idea, to me.”

  “I’ll be in town,” he said.

  He gave her a local number and said he would check back later. Then he left. Kim closed and locked the door as Lenny took an end of the couch, and she came to join him.

  “I know you don’t want him hurt,” she said, “but you know he won’t stop hurting other people unless someone makes him stop.”

  He just wanted to go home. He couldn’t protect himself, or Sebastian, or Kim, and he wanted to go home, so he told her so.

  “Okay,” she said. “Would your friend be home on a
Saturday morning?”

  He nodded and gave her the number, and she began to dial, but he stopped her. He picked up a manuscript, a huge bundle of papers titled Dietary Requirements of the Palo Duro Jackalope.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, holding the receiver away from her ear.

  He pointed to the cover page.

  “Is… is that the d-date?” he asked. “February sixteenth…”

  The year made his throat close.

  “No,” she said. “Seriously, that’s like, two years a-…”

  He could feel her tense beside him when the realization hit her. “Oh. Oh, God. When…?”

  “Eighty-seven,” he whispered. The stack of papers slipped out of his hand as ten years slipped out of his life. He didn’t even try to catch them.

  Chapter 11

  AS SOON AS he thought to look for them, the signs were obvious, and they were everywhere. The phone, the television… Everything down to the décor and the style of Kim’s hair. The world had gone smoother, smaller, more austere. The angles had been replaced by curves. The colors were muted. The frills were gone, and the exaggerated flowers.

  It was a new decade, fast approaching a new millennium. Suddenly, when he tried to picture Mara, he couldn’t. She would be ten years older, ten years smarter. She would like things he had never heard of. She would be ten years used to thinking of him as dead, if she even thought of him at all, any more. Physically, she would be older than him, now. She might be married. She might have moved out of Abilene, like she sometimes said she wanted to. She might have died young of cancer, like her grandfather and both of her aunts had. She might be gone.

  The shock hit him, piled on top of everything else, and for a moment, he thought it would be the tipping point. But Kim put an arm around him and held him still.

  “One thing at a time,” she said. “Stuff’s changed, but maybe not everything. Don’t flip out until we find out how much, okay?”

  “T-ten years…”

  “Yeah, ten years. Drop in the bucket for someone who’s immortal. You’ll be fine, honey. It’ll be weird, and then you’ll get used to it, and then you’ll be fine.”

  She leaned over and gave him a quick squeeze. The warmth was welcome, because he felt almost frozen.

  “Breathe, baby,” she said.

  Then she called Mara. He held his breath until he heard the tone that greeted her on the other end. Disconnected number.

  “Okay. One thing at a time. Next: dig up an Abilene phone book. Lucky for you, I have obsessive book junkie friends who collect useless stuff like that. What name do I look under?”

  “Demarco. Mara D-demarco.”

  Unless she was married. Unless she had moved. Unless she was dead.

  “Deep breaths, Lenny. Take it easy. We’ll find her.”

  She tried someone called Ainslie, and they talked for almost an hour. Lenny thought he remembered Ainslie, and the snippets of voice he heard from the other end sounded familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to it. Books came to mind, though. Lots of books.

  The cowboy and the shaman came back before Kim had hung up. Coyote had an ugly yellow duffel bag, and Zeb was dragging a wheeled cooler. Neither of them looked at the vampire. Considering the amount of trouble he had caused, that seemed natural.

  Instead of bothering with Lenny, Coyote started to unpack: chalk, a bag of rice, a brass censer and cardboard box of what Lenny assumed was incense, a pair of extremely old Ray Bans with sandblasted lenses, several sloppily-folded state maps, a roll of tape, a bag of marbles, and a brown glass bottle of something that was actually labeled ‘Snake Oil.’ It seemed like a bit much to Lenny, but magic had never been one of his strong points.

  “Get lost,” Coyote growled over his shoulder.

  Lenny was curious about the shaman’s procedure, but the air was already getting itchy with power, and the look Coyote gave him said that he would be totally willing to add a sacrifice to his routine if curious vampires stuck around, so Lenny followed the cowboy into Kim’s bedroom.

  Zeb kicked his boots off and sprawled across the mussed bed, watching the other man while the other man carefully watched the carpet. An awkward silence began to build.

  “I ‘member,” Lenny muttered. “You’re g-gonna kill me?”

  Zeb snorted. “Kim told me not to. ‘Sides, if she’s wantin’ revenge, she can do that herself any ol’ time. So I’ll clarify: You hurt her so bad she can’t hurt you back, then I’ll kill you. Sit down or sum’m. You’re makin’ me nervous.”

  Lenny sat down right where he stood, folding himself up against the wall.

  The bed creaked as Zeb rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow.

  “She thinks you ain’t so bad, on account’a she can sort of feel you. Now, I figure she might say that if you were makin’ her say it, but Coyote, he’s of the same opinion. Not in so many words – he’s all for leavin’ you on the side’a the highway somewhere, but he ain’t said nothin’ ‘bout settin’ you on fire for a few hours, at least.

  “Now me, I don’t have any windows into your head. All I got is what I know, and what I know is that bloodsuckers are bad news. I been around a while, never seen nothin’ to tell me otherwise. So me thinkin’ of you as a bloodsucker don’t work. There’s somethin’ else goin’ on there, and I wanna know what it is, or my whole paradigm is shot to hell.”

  Lenny gritted his teeth and thought about Mara and how, a long time ago, he had planned to tell her. The longer he thought about it, the more foolish the idea seemed. He didn’t answer.

  “No? You know how bad that looks? I’m sittin’ here lookin’ at the top of the food chain, the Devil’s own chauffeur, and you got sum’m you think I’ll think is worse? You wanna at least tell me why you don’t wanna tell?”

  Lenny’s forehead wrinkled as he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, turning away from the cowboy.

  “He asked, too,” he whispered.

  “Oh.” Zeb sat up and propped his elbows on his knees. “Look, it ever occur to you that, us bein’ on the other side of this, sum’m that ticks off Duran might actually get you points with this crowd?”

  The vampire curled up and wrapped his arms around his knees, hiding his face away.

  “I can’t help you,” he mumbled. “I d-don’t have anything you could use. Can’t fight. Can’t t-track. Got no magic. Okay? Please.”

  He kept his head down and held as still as he could, halfway wishing he could will himself invisible. The cowboy left him alone.

  It was true that he had no magic, nothing but the few sparks that kept him moving, but he could feel it, and whatever was going on in the other room, it itched annoyingly just beneath his skin and behind his eyes. He tried to listen, but there was nothing to hear except shuffling movement and the occasional exasperated snort. The smell of burning rubber crept under the door and began to soak into the carpet.

  He waited. The cowboy stayed silent, though his pulse pounded slowly and his breath whistled. Kim’s wristwatch ticked on top of the chest of drawers. In the other room, there was a tiny splash.

  “Got the bastard,” Coyote crowed. The air surged and crackled as though electrically charged.

  Lenny’s reality blurred. In his mind’s eye, he could see Sebastian, dead; Sebastian, crumbling to ash; Sebastian, human and helpless, centuries ago, blissfully ignorant of what he would become, of how he would end. Sebastian, horrible green wallpaper, the musty carpet and the tape-

  The wizard gripped his shoulders and shook him, but she didn’t seem quite real. The shaman stood behind her, wearing his sandblasted sunglasses. There was someone else as well, someone who touched his ghost sense, but not a ghost. Dead. Undead. He reached out to brush them all away like troublesome gnats.

  -projected across his vision like looking through a film strip. It was just as real as anything else. More so, even. And he knew, was completely sure, that he had never escaped, had never gotten out, was still in the cellar, and everything he saw was illusion, noth
ing but a cold trick. It hurt, but not as much as the idea that he-

  A broad, sturdy woman with an eye patch peered into his face and frowned. She asked him questions, and he answered distantly, mechanically, not sure what she had asked or whether his replies were composed of real words.

  -had failed as a medium, had turned his back on a creature as impossibly damaged as Sebastian, one who so plainly needed help. He listened in the dark for another dream, another sign forced into his mind through his blood, one last signal-

  Impressions drifted past: the cowboy’s hat, a severe profile, black eyes, the sharp smell of matches, bright light. They strung themselves out and strung themselves together: bright smell of hat profile, severe black, beams of light from matchstick eyes. He shivered and curled in on himself.

  -that he wasn’t alone inside his head. He could almost feel the dry bones beneath his hands – almost wanted to feel them. If he stretched out far enough, he could do that. If he reached, if he stretched, he could be where he was, back in the familiar, because pain hurt less than the unknown. If he reached far enough, he could almost touch the stolen pieces of himself and the man who held them, could almost, could almost…

  He felt the darkness before he saw it. It was snug and pleasant, deep enough to hide him, too thin to be oppressive. A warm, dry hand rested on his forehead. The thumb moved slowly, brushing at his hairline. But that wasn’t what had grounded him. There was something else on the edge of his perception, getting stronger, filling the cracks that had spread across his world.

  His chest hitched as he tried to get a decent breath in. The hand’s movement stopped.

  “Lenny? Honey?” The wizard. “You okay?”

  He tried to open his eyes and realized they already were open. It really was dark, but not completely; the girl had been reading, using a flashlight strapped to a baseball cap. The glare obscured her face, forcing him to look away, but her tone was sad and worried. He registered her existence, but it didn’t seem urgent; there was something else that needed his attention.

  The electric blanket slid off him as he rolled onto his side and pushed himself up. His stomach lurched, and a dull, insistent heat scratched at the back of his throat. That seemed slightly more important but still, it could wait.