by Greco, Karen
"Sorry, I thought you were someone else."
"Like who?" Frankie's eyes were slowly going back to normal and his fangs were less pronounced.
"Kittie," Matty whispered, his eyes darting nervously up and down the hallway. Climbing to his feet unsteadily, he headed for the doorway that would take us into the lobby of the Biltmore, motioning for us to follow him.
"Hold on, we aren't going anywhere with you. Frankie needs to get underground in case your demon pal decides we're no longer useful and removes the sunlight spell."
"That's why I'm going with you," he said so softly I could barely hear him. Even Frankie, with his amped up vamp hearing, looked like he was struggling a bit. "And I can't bare the sunlight at all. So we must go. Immediately!"
I wasn't sure if his urgency was legit or some bullshit pseudo-celebrity demand. But one thing was certain: We needed to get Frankie underground in case Bertrand pulled the plug.
Frankie gave me a curt nod, agreeing with the plan. The three of us raced down the hallway and pushed open the door to the hotel proper. From a grimy window, I could see the dark sky streaked with pinks and reds. We had about 15 minutes before all hell broke loose.
We sprinted down the main staircase and through the lobby. I pushed through every manner of phantasm, barely feeling the ice-cold plasma of ghost goop since I was moving at such a high speed. We fell out the revolving door and darted across the street where we parked my aunt's Fiat. Frankie grabbed Matty by the scruff of his neck, opened the car door and shoved him into the back seat. He slid over the hood of the car and got into the driver's seat before I could protest. I was barely in the car when he jerked it into gear and we roared off.
CHAPTER SIX
The apartment was in a refurbished old factory in the Olneyville section of Providence. The area was once a booming manufacturing hub, but when the industry went belly-up, this industrial part of Olneyville sat abandoned. On my side of town were a few active factories, but mostly it was desolate. I swear I've heard coyotes howl some nights. Maybe they were shifters.
The building was left to me after Marcello, the mentally unhinged vampire assassin, killed my parents. I turned the first floor into a kick-ass apartment for me. I turned the basement level into an underground tomb for Frankie and a soundproof panic room for Darcy, a safe place for her to do her banshee wail. Mythologically, a banshee wail was an omen of death. In actuality, the wail itself was the killer. So technically, hearing a banshee wail was definitely an omen, since that's what did you in.
Frankie wasn't very happy about sharing his basement space with a howling banshee. He insisted that soundproofing meant nothing because of his vampire level hearing. I kind of thought he was full of shit. The one thing a banshee wail can't kill is the undead.
The second floor was empty. I didn't have enough time to oversee the gut renovation, but eventually it would be two separate apartments. Maybe one would be Blood Ops command center. The top floor I rented out to a novelty toy company.
Since Darcy wasn't wailing, she was staying in my place while I was apartment sitting at Auntie Babe's. I missed my large open loft space. I was still living out of boxes, only about half unpacked from the cross-country move from the Blood Ops campus in Nevada.
Hardcore supernatural activity was generally localized to a few areas in the middle of the country. The East and West coasts experienced hauntings, sometimes the extreme kind. But topnotch ghost hunters, most disciples of Ed and Lorraine Warren, were able to keep it under control. There was a recent spread east that went beyond the usual hauntings and poltergeists. Humans were turning up dead. Frankie and I cleaned out a nest in Newark, New Jersey before I moved out here, and we had our eye on small cities like Pittsburgh, Worcester, New Haven...even as far south as Orlando. Weird shit happened all the time in Florida.
Because of this uptick, I got clearance to leave the base to keep an eye on the East Coast. It was a lucky break. Auntie Babe was getting on in years and needed help at the bar. And I was sick of being landlocked in the desert. I was happy for the change of scenery.
The sun was just peaking over the horizon when I pulled Babe's Fiat up to the front door. I missed my garage door opener, which was with my beloved Triumph motorcycle in the police impound yard.
I got nailed speeding about three weeks ago, doing 110 in a 55 zone. Then I was busted twice more within the week. The final traffic stop turned a little ugly with the cop, so I was brought in on some stupid "you're not behaving like a lady" charge. Max had to intervene to keep me out of jail, but the tradeoff was that my bike was impounded and my motorcycle license revoked.
Anyway, I had turned part of the ground floor into a parking garage, with an electronic garage door where the loading dock used to be. Press a button on and we'd be safely in a dark garage. Instead we were racing against a rising sun.
Even though daylight was peeking over the horizon, Frankie was fine. Matty was, too, but you'd never guess that based on the way he was carrying on. Sprawled out in the back seat, he hid under my jacket, babbling nonstop. We weren't far from the Biltmore, maybe 10 minutes. But Frankie and I were sick of him.
Frankie was already out of the car, front seat down, and holding the door open so Matty could climb out. But Matty didn't budge.
"You gotta get out of the car, Matty," I said as I slammed my hand on the steering wheel. This was the third time I had asked him to move. I was certain that Bertrand was revoking the spell as we stood around like idiots trying to get Diva Cousin Rock Star out of the car. Frankie was out there unprotected. If my best friend fried because of this spoiled little prick, I was going to stake him. Twice.
"Oh for fuck's sake!" Frankie exclaimed. A surge of anger and frustration, mixed with a touch of fear, spilled off him.
I gasped from the unexpected potency of his emotions.
"Nina," Frankie said to me. "Go unlock the front door to the building. I'll get him out."
Before I could even get out of the car, Frankie reached in and yanked Matty out of the back seat. He lifted the sniveling pile of vampire over his shoulder, letting Matty's head smack against the car a few times, and then carried him to the front door. I raced to catch up, fumbled with my keys for a moment, and then swung the door open just in time. I think Frankie was ready to just plow on through.
He dropped Matty in the vestibule and yanked my jacket off his head. "You're inside."
Matty looked around the hallway, and then shrieked when he saw the dawn's weak sunlight filtering in through the glass window on the door.
"Maybe you'll get a sunburn, but you'll heal," Frankie said as he stalked down the hallway to the door that lead to the basement.
"I can't stay here in the light!" Matty was audibly sobbing at this point.
"Frankie..." I warned. Matty was right. Eventually the sun would get him. He had to get into Frankie's room. "Come on, Frankie. We need him alive."
Frankie shot us both a nasty look, but opened the door leading to the basement, bowing with a flourish as Matty rushed towards the pitch-black staircase. Frankie slammed the door behind them.
"I'll be right down!" I yelled at the heavy metal fire door. Then I listened carefully for the sound of a body falling down the stairs. There was a very good chance Frankie would give Matty a shove.
I waited a beat before knocking on Darcy's door. Well, my door, but technically Darcy's since she was staying there.
"Who is it?" Her voice was hard, cautious. She didn't like the barren neighborhood. Where I saw solitude, she saw desolation.
"It's me, Darce." I waved at her through the peephole.
The door swung open. She clearly just woke, but she still looked absolutely sleep-rumpled stunning in a black body-skimming jersey knit nightgown. The camisole-style top was trimmed in black lace. Her long blond hair was tousled to a perfect bed-head sexy.
"What the hell happened to you?" Darcy asked, moving to the side as I stumbled gracelessly into the apartment.
Feeling a pang of jealousy,
I yanked at my tangled mess of hair and sighed. I was so tired I could actually feel the bags under my eyes. And to make matters worse, I was pretty sure I smelled like stale beer and dry sweat. A shower and a few hours of sleep were all I really wanted, but since that was impossible, I'd take a steaming mug of coffee.
Darcy padded behind me as I headed to the kitchen. She plopped down at the large wood farm table while I made quick work of prepping a pot of coffee.
"So, what happened to you?" she repeated after a huge yawn.
I shrugged. "The usual Bertrand bullshit. Matteo Purefoy has a team of professional groupies surrounding him that everyone insists are sirens. But I am not so sure of that."
"Sirens? Following around a rock band, whose stock and trade is making women swoon?" She pursed her lips tightly and gave her head a small shake. "Well, that doesn't pass the smell test."
"Thank you!" A pang of relief hit me right in the gut, nearly doubling me over. Finally! Somebody got what I was saying. That's why Darcy was my best girlfriend.
"So, if not sirens, what are they?" she asked.
I stared at the coffee pot, willing it to drip faster. "Demons."
"Demons? You sure?"
"I have no idea what the hell else they could be." I rooted around the kitchen cabinets, looking for some mugs. Darcy moved some stuff around, compounding my frustration.
"Nina, hon, they may be plain old vanilla human," she said gently. "Not everything out there is some variation on us."
I slammed the cabinet shut. "Totally not human. The one I met, Kittie, she had a tattoo of a rattle snake, and it moved. And where did you put the damn mugs?"
She pointed at the cabinet above my head. "Closer to the coffee pot, where it made more sense."
"Oh." I wasn't exactly Suzy Homemaker. I glanced around the apartment guiltily. She piled my still unpacked moving boxes into a corner of the room. "Sorry, I didn't mean to snap. I'm just..."
"I know. You look exhausted." She smiled gently at me. "And you know what, a team of demons arriving last night may explain this."
She turned on the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. The local Rhode Island news station flickered on. A live shot of a crime scene with a mess of police cars was on. Darcy turned up the volume.
"The medical examiner cautioned that it would be at least two weeks before initial autopsy results would be revealed, but police sources say that the bodies were drained of all blood..."
Darcy hit mute. "There were 17 victims. This was right over the state border, in Fall River, Mass. Weird that this siren rolls into town and this happens, no?"
"Drained of their blood? That sounds like a vampire nest." I triumphantly pulled a mug out of the cabinet above the coffee pot.
Darcy nodded. "I know, but there are no known vampires in the Fall River area. Say what you will about Lizzie Borden, but her ghost usually keeps that city clean of any other supernaturals."
"Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks." I sing-songed the beginning of the old childhood rhyme. "Babe taught me that one when I was around three. I think we were living in Mexico at the time."
I smiled at the memory, one of the few I had left before Babe took me to Blood Ops. After my parents died, and with Marcello on the loose, it was too dangerous to stay in Rhode Island. So she tried to hide me with our family in Mexico. But when the witch-filled town in Catemaco figured out that I was part-vampire, a mob of witches tried to stake me. Rumor was my own grandfather, Babe and my mom's dad, was leading the charge. Babe never said one way or the other. We fled to the Blood Ops base in Nevada, where she left me in the hands of Dr. O.
The machine finally perked out its last bit of coffee, and I grabbed the pot and poured it into my newly found mug. I drank it straight, too caffeine-deprived to bother with the half-and-half.
"Why don't you go back to Babe's and crash for a while?" Darcy turned off the television.
"Because we're in the shit, and Bertrand may have reversed the daywalking spell on Frankie. Plus Purefoy wanted to get away from his Number One Fan." I raised my eyebrows at that one. "I don't know that he'd want to escape a plain vanilla human so desperately that he'd risk sunlight."
Darcy's eyes got wide. "Vampire?"
I nodded, sipping my coffee.
"Well I'll be damned." She waited a beat, and then her eyes lit up. "Wait, he's here? Matty Purefoy is here, in this building?"
I nodded again.
"Oh my god," she jumped up, suddenly flushed and breathless. "Will you introduce me? I have to meet him!"
Before I could even answer her, she bolted for the door. Hastily, I topped off my coffee, stopping to add a splash of half and half, and followed behind her. When I reached the apartment door, I heard her shouting down to Frankie's lair. "Hey, Frankie! I hope you're decent! We're coming down!"
She was halfway down the dark staircase when I started my descent. I could see the heat from her body glowing in the darkness, almost like built-in night vision except mine glowed red instead of green. It was a wild new ability, which I received courtesy of a wound from Marcello, done with a knife spelled to kill me. The knife was a "witch killer," and one that was not supposed to be wielded by vampires, only witches. Because I am both vampire and witch, it didn't kill me. It actually brought out long dormant witch powers and enhanced some of my vampire abilities. The night vision was vampire and, I have to admit, it was damn useful for stealth operations. The glow of a flashlight would never give me away again.
To be honest, my vampire side totally kicked ass above and beyond my witchy ways. Casper said it was because I didn't practice enough, but since I was hopeless in the kitchen, I wasn't exactly a natural at the spell pot. Still, I didn't need to spell to use some of my abilities. Like, I could control the tides and the weather. Of course, the word "control" was a bit generous. I had a 60 percent success rate using that power. I stopped practicing when I almost made a tornado touch down in the middle of Providence. A tornado in the dead of January in New England? That's not weird. Right?
The door to Frankie's apartment was repurposed from an old darkroom. It was essentially an enclosed rotating door. I installed it as a fail-safe, in case someone blew the top door off the hinges and flooded the stairs and basement with sunlight. Odds were slim that it would happen. But slim odds are still odds, and I wasn't taking any chances.
Darcy had already pushed through the revolving door. She must be damned determined to come flying down here in the pitch black, in her jammies no less. Even though she had been with us for five years, her wariness of vampires had not abated. She refused to talk to me about it. Guess she thought it would hurt my feelings.
By the time I rotated into Frankie's place, Darcy was smiling shyly and shaking Matty's hand. Her wild blond hair spilled over the side of her face. Damn she was stunning. Frankie raised his eyebrows at me, and an amused smile, barely visible, tugged at his mouth.
Away from the threat of sunlight, and the influence of the demonic fan club president, Purefoy played the role of Rock God to perfection. Grasping Darcy's hand, he pulled her in to him, singing quietly in her ear.
Trying really hard not to roll my eyes, I plopped down on Frankie's black leather couch, glancing around the apartment, which was really one cavernous room of exposed brick and oak flooring. He hadn't done much to it since he'd been here. The couch was part of a whole sectional set. It was a nice purchase, and probably courtesy of his mall obsession. I cringed when I saw a pile of clothes, tags still on, heaped on top of the dresser near his bed. If he didn't curb his shopping addiction soon, he'd need an intervention.
"Feel better?" I forced a smile at Purefoy, hoping to interrupt the intimate moment.
"Much, thank you. A little hungry. Do you have any blood bags?"
Frankie smirked. "Blood bags?"
"I don't like to bite," Matty said as he winked at Darcy. "No need to worry, doll."
Darcy giggled.
"Oh God. Seriously?" I groaned, rubbing my eyes with my f
ree hand.
"No blood bags, sorry," Frankie said, his tone clipped. I think he was trying not to laugh.
As if it wasn't clear enough before, we were now certain Purefoy was a Beta. Small fangs, didn't like to bite. I was so punch-drunk exhausted, it was all I could do not to laugh.
"So...Killing Haley? That's...not true?" Darcy asked hesitantly.
"No, of course not." His face lit up. He was very good looking, in that skinny, emo sort of way. "That was my Dad's idea. He's really a brilliant marketer. Wish he put that skill to better use."
Of course. Tavio was the man behind Bertrand's rise to power in Providence. The man got a demon into City Hall. Directing the career of a rock band would be a cakewalk.
Purefoy motioned for Darcy to sit on the chair beside him, and she sank into one of Frankie's spiffy new club seats. "Nice furniture, Frankie," Darcy said, still beaming at Matty. But Frankie was so delighted to talk about his shopping that he didn't even notice.
While Frankie launched into a blow-by-blow rundown of his afternoon testing out the chair, I took my coffee across the room to my partner's workbench, where he'd lined up a bunch of stakes along the table.
Frankie came up with some truly stunning weapons. In one of his many lifetimes, he’d learned to blacksmith and made silver and steel weaponry. But he really excelled at woodwork. He made me a beautiful wooden crossbow that was destroyed in the fight with Marcello before I could even get a shot off.
I picked up a stake and examined the intricate runes he had carved into the hawthorn wood. It was beautiful work. I reached for another one, this one etched with different runes, and felt slight sparks hit my fingertips. Clearly whatever he was warding them with reacted to either the vampire or the witch in me. It was cool.
"Nice work, Frankie," I said as I wielded the first stake in my hand and turned to the group on strike position, interrupting Frankie's story.