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

by Rebecca Hamilton

  He had not been sure what reaction that revelation would receive, but dismissal was a disappointment. He tried again, but he had no words, and though Kim listened, she still did not understand.

  “You’re okay, honey,” she told him. She smoothed his hair back, brushed a kiss across his forehead, and left, and all he could do was lock the door behind her.

  Mara came home in the afternoon to find him exactly where she had left him. She cooked dinner for her children, but now that she knew why Lenny never ate, she did not make even a token offer for him to join them. He tried to talk to her, the way they had used to talk, but he didn’t have the words, and the ones he did have kept coming out wrong. The family watched television until it was time for bed, and the cycle began anew the next morning. They left. He sat alone until they returned. He hovered on the fringes of the family like an insect around a light, and at night, he woke from nightmares that twisted in his stomach and cramped in his back, trying his best to be silent about it, because the dreams hurt less than knowing Mara could hear and still would not come.

  Sometimes, he touched the mirrored compact in his pocket and thought about calling for Kim. Without her, he did not dare leave the protection of the house’s threshold, except when the burning in the back of his throat forced him out to the nearest stockyard. But she had told him to try, and he did not want to disappoint.

  So when Mara told him that a mechanic she knew was looking for help, he shuffled out the door and sat stiffly in her passenger seat, feeling very exposed.

  The old man listened patiently while Lenny stuttered through the list of all the cars he knew. The list ended abruptly in nineteen eighty-seven, and the old man shook his head.

  “Get stuck on the computers, huh? I know, they’re a hassle, but I need someone who can work on whatever folks bring in, here, and they’ve all got computers, now. Sorry.”

  “I c-can clean for you,” Lenny tried desperately. “I can lift things.”

  Mara left her number, just in case, but the mechanic did not call. The routine started back up again. Lenny sat alone from the time Mara and the girls left until the time they came home. He did not get bored; after so long in the dark it was enough that he was able to think, but his thoughts always turned to the things he still lacked. He could not support himself, could not protect himself, could barely even sleep. Even if he found a job, somehow, managed to find himself a place to live, he could not both work and avoid anyone who might remember him. He could not stand to look at Mara and see the decade that stood between them. He could not stay in Abilene.

  Another Saturday had come before he worked up the courage to tell Mara. She at least had the grace not to look relieved.

  “You don’t have to,” she told him. “You can stay as long as you want. It’s not like you’re costing me anything.” But she didn’t bother to sound sad, either.

  She hurried her children out the door and away from him, away from the thing that had upended her understanding of the universe. To the library, she said, but they were always gone somewhere, and Lenny understood.

  He had told Kim that the prejudice didn’t bother him, and it had been true. He had always known what his life would entail, when he chose to be with Kate. But Kate was long gone, and the mistrust in Mara’s face punched holes in his chest.

  He called Kim.

  “Can I come back?” he asked softly. His voice cracked.

  Coyote’s bass growl rumbled through the line. “We’re busy,” he snapped, but the line crackled as the phone was wrestled away from him, and Kim answered breathlessly.

  “Hello?”

  “Kim? I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were b-busy.”

  “It’s okay. It’s nothing that can’t wait a minute.” She paused. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just… I don’t want to stay.”

  Her breath rustled in the receiver. “Honey, you need to stay a little longer. They lost Duran. He got hold of Coyote’s supplies, somehow, and now we can’t track him. He knows where my apartment is, so you’re safer there.”

  Lenny’s throat closed.

  “Lenny? It’s okay, honey. He doesn’t know where you are. If he comes snooping around here, we’ll get him. Just, you need to stay put, okay?”

  “No,” he choked. “No, he c-can find me anywhere, same as you can. He can come straight here, and Mara c-can’t fight him. He’ll burn her out.”

  There was silence on the other end, long enough that Lenny began to become afraid. More afraid.

  “Kim?”

  He heard something that was almost a sob, but mostly a sigh.

  “Kim?”

  “No, you’re right. He will, won’t he? At least if we’re all in one place, we know there’ll be someone who can fight back. I’m coming, okay? I’m coming right now, and I need you to be ready to go the second I get there, because I don’t want to stick around.”

  Coyote’s growl moved in close to the phone again. “Like hell,” Lenny heard. “You’re not protected on the road.”

  “You want to take him down?” Kim shot back. “If he goes for Lenny instead of coming for us, they could both disappear. If everyone is together, Duran can’t strike without everyone knowing. If we don’t know what he wants, all the bait has to be in the same place.”

  Bait. Lenny squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard, but he preferred being bait in a trap to being bait sitting out in the open.

  Kim hung up, and Lenny got his things together. He didn’t have much – a change of clothes, razor, electric blanket, all of which had come from Kim. He folded those neatly into a paper shopping bag. The rabbit, and the specter it carried. He took it to the kitchen and carefully slit open the back seam with a knife. His fingertips probed the rag stuffing until he found what he had hidden there decades earlier. He loved Mara, but he knew he could not be in love with the person she had become – she was too distant and too hard to be the support he needed. He slipped the old gold band onto his finger and let go of the fantasy.

  * * *

  KIM HUNG UP and looked at Coyote.

  “No one’s free to go with you,” he growled. “Have to keep looking for bits to use. If the chindi son of a bitch hadn’t burned out his apartment…”

  “You keep saying that,” Bernice cut in. “Chindi. What the hell is that?”

  “Dead,” Coyote snarled. “Dead and evil. No offense.”

  Bernice rolled her eye. The patch covered the socket where her glowing glass prosthetic sat.

  “Go alone,” Bernice suggested. “Duran can’t track you, or I strongly doubt he can, so you’re safe until you’ve got your friend. Once you’ve got him, just keep moving.”

  “What, he can’t outrun an El Camino?”

  “Sure he can, but it’s a moving target. A lot harder to find a vampire speeding down the freeway than a vampire waiting in one place. Just make sure you don’t stay stopped for too long.”

  Kim considered the other woman. Bernice was not one of the good guys. If she had even the smallest personal interest in getting rid of someone, Bernice would not hesitate to send them into a death trap. Bernice was not trustworthy.

  On the other hand, they were on the same side for the time being. Bernice had more than a small personal interest in not going against Tony and Edith, and Tony and Edith had expressed an interest in Kim staying alive long enough to stay on their payroll. Kim was also ready to risk her life to help another vampire, albeit one with a little more to him, and that had to earn her some extra good will points.

  Kim cinched up her necklace and shook out her milagro bracelets. She grabbed her pistol and a water gun full of holy water. She filled a thermos with IntensiTEA. Then she poked her head out the door and, finding the coast clear, made a dash for her car. The parking lot was nearly empty at that time of the morning. Heart pounding, Kim cranked up the El Camino and peeled out, skirting around downtown traffic to get on the freeway toward Abilene. No one would be following her, Bernice had said, but Kim did not take chances.
She doubled back twice, cut across dusty back roads, and took a longer route than was strictly necessary. Though she watched her rear view mirror carefully, she saw no one tailing her. Every so often, she turned around to check for things that wouldn’t show up in a mirror. There was nothing.

  The drive did not take much longer than it had before, but it felt as though it took days. Kim passed the Abilene city limit sign minutes after two o’clock, and happened to check her gas gauge reflexively as she passed a station. A quarter of a tank. She had made it from Austin without trouble, but a quarter of a tank would not get her back. If she had to stop, she preferred to do so without Duran’s homing beacon sitting in her front seat. The brakes protested as she pulled a U-turn in the middle of the street and rolled up to a gas pump.

  “I’m almost there,” she thought as hard as she could, aiming it at the mind she felt about a mile and a half due north. She got no response, but she had not really expected one. Whatever connection they had, it seemed to weaken with distance; she could tell easily where Lenny was and received the vague impression that he was under no more stress than usual, but she had not been picking up on his thoughts or dreams since she left him with Mara.

  She tripped the catch on the gas nozzle and left the pump to fill her car on its own while she delved in her pockets for her compact. Exerting a tiny bit of effort to connect it to the one she had left with Lenny, she popped open the black plastic shell and pretended to search for something in her eye as she held it up to her face.

  “I’m filling up with gas,” she muttered, “so we don’t have to stop once you’re in the car. I’ll be there in five or ten minutes, tops, okay?”

  She waited, but she got nothing back.

  “Lenny?”

  Nothing.

  She could feel him nearby. He was not moving, and she assumed that she would have known if he had been under attack, but there was nothing except a vague sense of waiting. She tapped at her compact, forcing more power through the glass.

  “Lenny? Can you hear me, honey?”

  Still nothing.

  Even though Kim could identify nothing wrong, it scared her. Perhaps it was exactly because she could identify nothing wrong. He was there, calm, as far as Kim could tell, and not answering.

  She polished the little mirror on the hem of her shirt, then squeezed her eyes shut with a grunt. Mirror, of course. There was no way for her to be sure, but it seemed logical that someone who cast no reflection might be unable to use a mirror at all, even for unconventional purposes.

  “I don’t think these things are working quite right,” she said into the glass, just in case he was listening but could not respond.

  The pump clicked, and the flow of gas stopped.

  “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes, baby. Sit tight.”

  She snapped the compact shut and stuck it in her jeans pocket, hung the nozzle back on the pump, and screwed her gas cap back on.

  But just as she reached for the door handle, the feel of a hand on her shoulder stopped her.

  Without missing a beat, she whirled and lashed out, but there was no one there. Her fist made painful contact with the gas pump. The closest person in sight was an elderly woman two spaces away.

  She let out a breath and turned a slow circle where she stood, but there was no one else near, certainly not close enough to have touched her. The thought crossed her mind that she might have imagined it – she was stressed and low on sleep, and stranger things had happened – but that was not a thought she could afford to indulge. She drew in power, just in case, focusing on the tiny electrical connections in her body, amplifying them as much as she safely could. If grabbed, she thought it would be enough to give any attacker a severe shock, hopefully enough to give her time to draw and shoot.

  She slid into the driver’s seat and jammed the key into the ignition.

  “Kimberly.”

  Kim jumped and reached for her gun, but the voice was female, and it was familiar. Not Duran. She hesitated just long enough to recognize it, but by that time, her arm had locked, bones frozen in place. The stiffness spread outward, across her shoulders, down her back, and through her legs. The magic in her body jerked inward like a poked anemone, pooling uselessly in the core of her, far from any point of release.

  “What have you gotten yourself into, Kimmy?”

  Kim struggled to turn her head, but won only a few inches, barely enough to catch a glimpse of her captor out of the corner of her eye.

  The woman in the passenger seat tugged her sunglasses down with the tip of one exquisitely manicured finger and squinted at Kim.

  “I didn’t believe it until I felt it on you. How could you have let yourself get in so deep? Working for them was hard enough to believe, but letting one get that close to you…”

  Kim groaned. “This is a bad time. A really bad time, Mom. I’m in the middle of something extremely important.”

  Cynthia Reed patted her daughter’s hand. “I know it seems important now, Kim, but that’s only that creature’s hold over you. It lessens with distance, sometimes, which is why we’re going home, now.”

  “Austin?”

  “Massachusetts, Kim.”

  “Mom, no! He’s not in my head. He is in danger, though. You can ask Coyote.”

  “I’m not interested in asking anything of that hippie. And frankly, I’m not especially worried about your…” She stopped, searching for a word, then shook her head in distaste at the available options. “You’ve been indelibly marked. His death is the only way to lift his thrall, but the man I spoke to didn’t seem eager to kill him. That’s all right, though. Someone will be after both of them, soon.”

  Kim choked. “Duran? Sebastian Duran?! He’s insane! He’s a freak! There’s no way you can trust him!”

  Cynthia shrugged. The key turned in the ignition and the car rolled forward, out of the lot and back into the street.

  “I have no doubt he was serving his own interests, but they do happen to coincide with ours, for the moment. As for trusting him, he was right about you and your… mishap.”

  “He’s also trying to kill me and do God knows what to Lenny. It’s not right to stand back and watch that happen to anything.” Kim’s body rearranged itself, twisting to face forward, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, pretending to drive as the car took itself north.

  “You don’t have to puppet me, Mom. Not that I’m not seeing the irony, here.”

  “You’ll turn back if I let you go.”

  That was true enough. Kim gritted her teeth and made a futile effort to activate the compact in her pocket, contact someone – anyone – and let them know things had gone wrong, but the magic bounced right off.

  “And besides,” Cynthia continued, her voice soft, “you’re right. No one deserves the things those creatures can do to one another. But you’re my daughter, and your safety is a higher good than his. To me, at least. I’m sorry, honey.”

  The El Camino rolled past the city limits, and a spasm of someone else’s terror rolled through Kim like a tidal wave, and she cried.

  * * *

  IT WAS HIM.

  Lenny ducked to one side of the window, as though he thought hiding could do some good, and peered out between the slats of the blinds. There was no one in the street, no one but Sebastian. The afternoon shadows were short, and the pavement shimmered with the heat. The temperature would be well over a hundred; no one would go outside willingly in that kind of heat. That meant no one in danger, at least not until people started coming home from work. Sometime after five o’clock, though, there would be people, and people were victims.

  Lenny slid down to the floor and dug his knuckles into his eyes. He could feel him out there. Heat, smell of hot tar, cold patience. He could feel the pull to go, just get up, go outside, and… That was where the specifics became fuzzy. He tensed. His hands twisted into claws, and he dug them deep into the carpet. The feel of the pile beneath his palms was not enough to anchor him. Neither was the gro
wl of the air conditioner, the flicker of the night light behind the couch, the ache in his jaw as he ground his teeth until they creaked. He did want to go. He also knew that the want had nothing to do with him. It only went blood-deep, worming its way through him like a spreading disease, but not really part of him.

  Resisting seemed to be the clear choice, at least until he remembered that the longer he fought successfully, the more likely it became that someone would die for it. He did not even try to fool himself that his aversion to that idea was entirely altruistic. As much as he hoped to avoid death, he hoped even more that he would not have to feel it. His capture or someone else’s death, and he was alone.

  Calling Mara would get her killed. He had no doubt she would come, but she would come and be snared by Sebastian, become a hostage if she was not just slaughtered as an inconvenience. Kim was near. He could feel her close by, but near was not present, and she had said herself that she did not want to go up against Sebastian until she was at full strength again, maybe not even then if she could avoid it. Still, she did have a better chance than Mara, had friends she could call for help, and might be able to make use of the element of surprise. She was the best option.

  Lenny rose and was halfway to the front door before he could stop himself. He dug his heels into the carpet with effort and took a step back, knowing very well that Sebastian would be able to see him through the front window. He deliberately did not look. Instead, he took the compact from his pocket. It had not left his side since Kim had gone, and the constant itch, though tiny, had become all but unbearable. Still, he did not dare leave it, for fear of losing it. He paused, not really sure how to work the thing, then clicked it open, thinking as hard as he could about Kim. Nothing happened. He brought it up closer to his face. The glass reflected the wall behind him.

  “Kim?” he whispered at it. “Um… I need help. I need your help.”