Nightwalker

by Connie Hall

  He looked at her, and they grinned at each other.

  At his close scrutiny, she felt the sheer force of his eyes pulsing against her. Her stomach did a little flip-flop, and she chided herself for letting that devilish face get to her.

  He frowned back at the road and asked, “Hungry?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your stomach has been loudly protesting lack of food for the past two hours.”

  She frowned at him. “A person is really exposed around you, aren’t they? You read minds. Hear every body function. Is there anything you can’t sense about me?”

  “Not much. You are human, vampire prey. We have survived by hunting you.” His eyes glistened almost black as they landed on her neck. “Naturally, we are attuned to your every nuance.”

  “See your point.” She instinctively laid her hand on her throat. What would a vampire bite feel like—no, what was his bite like? Was it as remarkable as his kiss? Takala breathed deeply, inwardly yelling at herself to get over him. It wasn’t good, or natural, nor would it end happily—just like the rest of her relationships; it was doomed from the start. Even more so, because he was a ruthless vampire who didn’t care about using Lilly or anyone else for bait.

  He turned back to the road and drifted into silence. It was a heavy, still kind of tension that poured over the whole car’s interior, ending their few moments of light banter.

  She swallowed hard and noticed the streets filling with housing projects. Clothes wafted on lines four and five stories up, looking like multicolored flags waving in the breeze. Screens were broken or nonexistent on windows. Bags of trash sat along some walkways. Youths hung out on corners, probably selling drugs. They were entering a not-so-desirable suburb of the city again.

  “What area is this?”

  “We’re on the Left Bank, south of the main city.” As if he could read her mind, which he probably could, he said, “It gets worse up ahead.”

  “I know Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, City of Lights and all that, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve only seen her worst side. I’d sure like to tour the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. Where are they?”

  “The Tower is north of us at the moment, at the Champ de Mars park. The Arc is on the Right Bank.”

  “You sound like you know the city.”

  “I lived here at one time.” His voice deepened and his expression turned to stone, as if the memories were not all pleasant. “Do not be fooled. Paris is like a rose, beautiful soft petals with enticing aromas, but beware of le thorns.”

  Had he been one of the thorns? She tried to imagine him prowling the city in search of his next feeding. She remembered his strength and decided she wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark street at night. Fear tightened her shoulders as she changed the subject. “Is this an area Raithe would hang out?” she asked, taking in the locals and the sidewalk vendors.

  At the mention of Raithe’s name, his fingers tightened on the wheel, every knuckle showing. “Yes,” he said, a barely perceptible frisson of excitement passing over his face.

  “Listen, I have to tell you up front, if you put Lilly in danger to get Raithe, I’ll stop you.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Anger rode his eyes, and he blinked several times.

  Clearly, he was used to having his every whim obeyed. “Just warning you. If she’s in danger, I’m going to help her.”

  “Admirable, but I am not the one putting Lilly in danger. She has single-handedly managed that on her own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The moment Raithe found out she worked for me and used her to kill my men, that signed her death warrant. She is dispensable to him now. Eventually, he will get around to disposing of her. He never leaves trails.” He fixed her with a smoldering look. “Rather than throw idle threats at me, your best course of action would be to stay out of my way and let me find Raithe. She might have a chance if he is stopped.”

  He had a point. Takala sighed and decided she hated when he was right. And he was right more times than he was wrong. She refused to speak to him and stared out the window, feeling her stomach churning from hunger.

  The Tesla whipped down a street toward a river. A no-swimming sign denoted it was the Seine. Takala could see the sun shimmering off the green opaque surface. Gulls flapped along the edges of the quay, picking at trash and debris. The car pulled into a parking spot, across the street from a sign with the international symbol for a subway pointing to a descending staircase.

  Striker said to himself, “I thought so.”

  “What? You know this place?” She looked at the pedestrians going up and down the subway steps. They looked tired and bored.

  He sighed loudly and said, “Unfortunately, yes.” He parked half a block away, near a tiny shop selling art paintings.

  Why couldn’t he give her any details? She had to pry everything out of him. So she sounded annoyed when she said, “So, spill.”

  “Ancient tunnels, caves, and catacombs run beneath Paris. Particularly here. We have dossiers on several malevolent vampire groups that plague the underground in this area.”

  “Do you know the tunnels here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, we won’t get lost.”

  “There is no ‘we’ involved. I am going in alone,” he said in that annoying I-control-the-world way of his.

  “Why?” Her fingers curled into fists, and she brought them down near her sides.

  “You lack an extraordinary amount of prudence in all areas of your life.”

  “You don’t know me. You can’t make judgment calls like that.”

  “I saw how you ran toward danger to protect my agents at the airport without thought for your own life or limb. How you disobeyed my orders and came into the bar.” He grimaced. “Now you wish to follow me into a den of vampires.”

  “I can handle danger.”

  “You have never seen anything to match what could be in those tunnels. Did you not see how you affected the young girl who delivered this car?” he asked, his voice polished yet teeming with the promise of something dark and scary and totally unbending. “Your blood sent her over the edge. That is why I dismissed her. If they should smell your blood…”

  She wouldn’t look in the deep purple pools of his eyes, because she could feel them sucking her in. “What about you? How do you handle it?”

  “I have more willpower than most, and I am one of the nicer ones.” An undercurrent of something dangerous swam below the surface of his voice.

  Takala remembered something Lilly had told her and said, “Doesn’t sunlight weaken you?”

  “Somewhat.” Striker frowned and pulled his attention back to the serpent shifter.

  Their mark was heading for the stairwell.

  She started to say something, but Striker held up a hand to silence her and opened his phone.

  A foreign-accented agent’s voice said, “Yes, Director.”

  “Subject is heading down into Underground 23. Going in. I need backup.” Striker closed his phone and hopped out of the car.

  “Wait, you need me. You’re not operating at full power, you just admitted it. Let me go with you. I’m not helpless.”

  He held the door open a moment, gazing at her, his conscience clearly fighting with her suggestion, hating it. Then he said, “Since it’s morning, and they are probably sleeping, and you will just disobey my orders to stay put, I’ll concede this one time. But you must do exactly as I say.”

  She saluted him with two fingers. “Right, chief,” she said, stepping out of the car.

  She didn’t even hear him close the door, only the chirp of the locks. Then he appeared at her side.

  They trailed the shifter down two flights of stairs into the subway, melding into the flow of people.

  Takala saw the guy check behind him once, but he looked right past her and Striker at the crowd around them.

  “This den—do you think all the vamps are sleeping?
”

  “I hope so,” he said, his gaze on the shifter. “They are young vampires.”

  “Like how old is young?”

  “Two hundred years.”

  Funny how what was young to a vampire was so old to a human. “With all your B.O.S.P. intel, got any idea who our boy is going to see?” Takala asked, wondering if he knew more than he’d told her.

  “Could be one of the families we’ve been monitoring, or an entirely new group who moved in.”

  The shifter opened a door marked in French and below, in English, Do Not Enter, Subway Personnel Only, and slipped through.

  They let their target get a safe distance ahead. Then Takala and Striker followed, leaving several crying children with their father. He had little patience and was berating them. If Takala hadn’t been in a hurry, she would have stopped and told the guy to read a parenting book.

  Striker moved the door so the hinges didn’t creak as they stepped through. Darkness surrounded them, and she had to wait for her eyes to adjust.

  Striker seemed to sense her uncertainty. He clasped her hand and guided her through the darkness. His hand wasn’t warm and comforting, just solid strength, and she felt safer holding it. A new feeling for her. She’d never been in a dangerous situation in which she didn’t feel confident and bold and in control. She didn’t know if she liked someone else leading the charge. It made her feel spineless. But then she’d never met a guy stronger than she, who made her feel protected. Either way, she was glad Striker was beside her.

  They followed the sound of the guy’s footsteps through the tunnel. They echoed, muffled and distant.

  Takala leaned over and whispered, “Is this an abandoned subway tunnel?” She inhaled his butter-rum, starchy-wool scent, mixing with the dank, musty smell around her, and it made her feel oddly comforted.

  “Yes.”

  She felt his cool breath on her ear, and a tiny shiver went through her.

  “Be careful here,” he whispered, putting his arm around her waist and easily steering her over an old rail that ran along the tunnel floor.

  A man had never led her around by her waist, and she decided she liked it, especially since she could feel his hard tensile strength brushing her side. She found herself wanting him to do more than put his arm around her waist. Not good at all. In fact, it was relationship suicide. And she’d had enough of that.

  “Thank you,” she said softly, brushing out of his grasp.

  He caught her hand again, and she decided to let that ride. Holding hands was safer than an arm around the waist. And she had to own up: the hand-holding didn’t feel threatening.

  Taking care not to make a sound, they moved deeper into the tunnel. The scent of heavy, moldy earth and bricks and industrial grease grew stronger. An icy breeze whipped down the tunnel and set the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. A door opened ahead of them, and the shifter walked through it.

  Striker guided her to the door and went through first; then he cautioned her forward.

  She entered a tunnel that looked as if it had been hand dug with pickaxes, the granite sides gouged and jagged in places. Torches burned on either side of the walls. Water dripped down the sides and collected in puddles on the ground. Lime and chalk deposits formed ugly tribal masks on the walls, their misshapen eyes following them. This place gave her the creeps. They must be close.

  That’s when the scream pierced her ears.

  Chapter 10

  Takala took off running, but Striker pulled her back. “Could be a trap. Let me go first.”

  “I’m not a fluff ball that will fall apart at the first gust of danger.” She met his gaze. They were close, nose to nose. His rapid breaths brushed her cheeks, glided across her neck. Her nipples hardened instantly. She cursed her body and said, “Stop worrying about my safety.

  “You are under my care. Therefore, I am your protector.”

  Another blood-curdling scream split the air.

  “Are we going to argue about this all day?” Takala asked.

  He turned and did his disappearing routine. One minute there, the next warping through space and time.

  Takala ran down the tunnel, but she knew he’d reach the screamer way before she could. Didn’t seem fair.

  The tunnel forked, and Takala followed the constant screaming to the right. The passage opened up, getting taller and wider and more cavernous. The metallic scent of fresh blood mingled with the fetid odor of rotting flesh. She put her hand over her nose to keep from gagging.

  She spotted Striker, crouched behind a huge wall of rubble, probably debris left there by the tunnel builders. He peered around it and waved her forward. She crept up behind him and glanced past his shoulder. Then her jaw dropped.

  Charnel house could not describe the ghastly sight before her. Naked humans of all sizes and descriptions were bound throughout the cavern, fang marks in every conceivable place on their bodies. Blood splatter all over them and the walls. Some were still alive, their eyes empty, begging for death. Others had been drained of blood, their rotting bodies left to hang by chains and rope. She quickly counted twelve alive and forty dead.

  She had seen death and violence in her lifetime. When your grandmother was the Guardian, and she had raised you, you saw every type of carnage and bloodshed in the fight against darkness. Usually Meikoda would take care to draw evil away from home and dispatch it, but there were always unpredicted surprise attacks on Takala and her sisters, or on Meikoda herself. So Takala was no stranger to the manifestations of evil. Yet the helplessness of these victims tore at her and angered her. She looked at Striker, and his face was blank, solid granite. He had probably seen this all before.

  She spotted the serpent shifter. He stood in front of a girl who looked about fifteen. She was screaming, her eyes frantic with madness.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t torture you like the others did,” he said, his voice a hiss.

  This only made the girl scream louder.

  “Shut up, shut up!”

  Then it happened. The guy morphed. His eyes narrowed to slits. Pupils turned bright yellow and vertical. His skin elongated and stretched, leaving his clothes in a heap. His face flattened as the thick boa-constrictor body took shape, at least forty-five feet long. He slithered up the girl’s leg, his forked tongue shooting out, tasting her skin.

  Fear gripped every part of her body now. Her mouth opened wide, but she couldn’t form a sound.

  Takala and Striker both ran out at the same time. Striker went instinctively for the boa’s head, locking onto the back of it. Takala grabbed its tail.

  Fortified by magic, the creature was stronger than a normal snake, and Takala felt its body curling in on itself, twining around her legs and waist. Takala couldn’t imagine how people could own pet boas. They needed to tangle with a serpent shifter.

  She glanced at Striker. The snake had twined around his neck and chest, picking him up and slamming him onto the cave floor like a rag doll. He wasn’t faring any better than she was.

  The snake’s body curled around her neck, squeezing until she thought her esophagus would be crushed. Takala looked over at the chained girl, saw the fear and death in her eyes, and that was all the impetus she needed. She channeled her anger into her hands and yanked them loose from the muscular clenches of the snake’s body. Instinctively she curved her fingers, forced power into the tips, then speared them into the snake. She drove them up to her wrists. Bone cracked. Flesh crunched. Pain flared through her raw hands.

  The creature growled, a monstrous reptilian sound. Then it rolled over and over, dragging Striker and Takala with it. Takala felt her head pound the rocky floor again and again, but she kept her hands buried in the snake’s writhing flesh.

  Striker managed to grab the creature’s head, and the thrashing stopped for a moment.

  With one quick trust, Takala ripped open the snake’s underbelly. Surprisingly there was little blood, mostly writhing and twitching muscle. She managed to wiggle free and ran to he
lp Striker.

  Striker still had a death lock on the head, but the snake’s coiled body trapped him.

  She caught his shoulder for leverage, then drop-kicked the snake in the head, driving the tip of her boot into its eyeball.

  The snake growled and thrashed again.

  She rolled down onto her feet and wheeled around to attack again, but Striker ripped off the jaw of the snake…and half its head.

  It flipped one last time, then lay there, muscles still jerking in the throes of contracting. Striker crawled out from beneath the heavy body.

  Takala helped him stand and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Of course.” He wore the expression of a vampire who had just felt his own mortality and couldn’t believe it.

  She heard the slight waver in his voice and saw that he’d torn his tie in the fight. It was the first time she’d seen him a little rattled, and he kept staring at her bloody hands. “Aren’t you glad I came along?” she asked.

  In one slick move, he extracted the handkerchief from his breast pocket, shook it out, and handed it to her. He kept his gaze from her hands. “We just killed the only lead I had to Raithe. Glad doesn’t describe how I feel at the moment.”

  “It was either kill him or he’d kill us.” Takala wiped her hands and flinched as the material met the gouges on her fingers. “Thanks.” She held out the kerchief.

  “Keep it.” He waved it away. His eyes took on a frantic, ravenous appearance. The pupils dilated, the whites quickly overtaken. They were wide black holes, swallowing everything in sight. The humans. The bloodbath in the cave. His gaze landed on her.

  He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple working in his throat. “I have to get some air.”

  Before Takala could answer him, he fast-forwarded and disappeared.

  She had found the chink in his armor. Blood. She tossed the handkerchief to the floor, then moved toward the chained humans, who called for help.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll untie all of you,” Takala said. “Please, someone tell me who did this to you?”

  “Don’t move.” An elderly man with a thick gray mustache and salt-and-pepper hair spoke in broken English. “There’s a trap. On the floor.”