by K. F. Breene
I shooed him out of the door. “I need to see William.”
“William is busy at the moment,” the man said in a raspy voice. I noticed three small gashes spread across his torso, in the stages of bionic healing from vampire saliva.
“What were you, the appetizer or the main course?” I pushed him out of the way.
“Hey!” he said, staggering back.
“Where’s William? Or another rich vamp. I need money.”
“They don’t just give us money, you know that.”
Not allowing myself to flinch as I stalked across a cream-colored rug in my grimy shoes, I took the stairs. “You should work out a better deal,” I told the guy, who was now following me.
I peeked into the dining room and found a couple humans hunched over sandwiches. Clearly Darius hadn’t been in charge of organizing this dinner.
“Where is William?” I asked the built guy again.
“He’s in the east wing.”
I rolled my eyes. “This place is a big square. There are no wings. Lead me to him.”
Frowning at me, he did as he was told, bringing me up a floor and into a plush room with plenty of places to lounge. William was sitting beside another vampire, a different gorgeous woman than Marie, both in a state of sublime relaxation.
“It’s almost as if you didn’t know a crazy, powerful mage was running your benefactor ragged,” I said. They looked at me lazily, like two people might after a Thanksgiving dinner. They didn’t speak.
I stuck out my hand. “I need money.”
“Where is Darius?” William asked, making a halfhearted attempt to sit up.
“Were you giving blood, or taking it? I’m confused why you’re this slow.” I reached down and patted his pocket. Nothing there. “Money. Where is it?”
“We do not give out money, human,” the woman said around a mouthful of fangs.
“Ew. Put those things away,” I said.
“I am off duty and pleasantly relaxed.” William draped his arm over the arm of the sofa.
“Off duty? Looks like Darius made sure to keep you informed.” That was sarcasm. They didn’t seem to notice. “Whatever. Give me money.”
“William, get rid of this annoying pest, would you? Her smell is making me nauseated.” The woman waved her hand in front of her face.
“Stop breathing. Easy solution.” I reached down to William’s exposed chest, grabbed hair, and pulled. “Up we get.”
His eyes cleared before sparking with anger. An instant later, he was standing in front of me, arms flared at his sides, ready to battle. “You are protected now. You won’t be protected forever.”
I laughed and motioned him on. “Same goes for you. Let’s go. The sooner you give me what I want, the sooner you can go back to being useless while I protect the future of your species. No, no. Don’t thank me. It’s all in a day’s work.”
His glower didn’t stop him from moving out of the room and toward the stairs. We ended up in a large room with a tussled bed, thankfully empty. He opened a ceramic pot with a lid—either a poorly designed vase or an urn—and extracted a wad of money. Before he could leaf off a few bills, all twenties, I snatched it out of his hand.
“Thanks,” I said, already walking.
“Darius will be hearing of this.” William trailed me. “Your days as his honored guest are numbered.”
“You were so nice yesterday. What happened?” I jogged down the stairs, passing the buff human who’d disappeared from behind me somewhere along the way, and headed out the front door. “Have a lovely evening.” I closed the door in William’s face, not an easy feat from the outside. Timing was on my side.
Surprisingly, the driver was still there.
“Boy are you getting a big tip,” I said as I climbed in.
“Just remember to review,” he said sheepishly, waiting for me to input the next destination.
“Five stars, all the way. There you go, the destination is loaded.”
He checked the new route, and away we went.
I tapped my fingers against my knees as silence descended. I thought back to that woman vamp who’d said I smelled bad. From what little I’d seen of her, I couldn’t guess at her age, but I wondered if younger vamps were repulsed by my smell, while the older ones were attracted to it. It seemed to fit, but I had never heard of that happening. There were a few magical creatures that vampires couldn’t get enough of, but none that I knew of had a dual effect.
I shrugged to myself and glanced around as the driver slowly crawled through the French Quarter. Even so late and with a light haze of rain finally deciding to fall, people wandered around with their drinks, talking and guffawing, staggering or standing in doorways.
“What happened to the door?” the driver asked a while later as we pulled up outside my house.
My brow lowered in confusion.
The front door, which had already been busted, now leaned against the doorframe to mostly cover the entrance. The screen, which I’d left in the yard, had been placed on my porch, tucked behind my chairs.
“The cat got to it,” I told the driver as I got out.
I’d expected the door to be in bits, or at least knocked more to the side. Maybe the high mage hadn’t been my visitor after all.
The optimistic feeling was short-lived.
My heart dropped as I moved the slab of wood and got my first peek inside.
Charred to hell was the first thought that rolled through my head.
The floor creaked as I stepped on it. I paused and listened. Shuffling sounded outside, the slide of a shoe. I glanced over my shoulder, making eye contact with the man from down the way. He gave me a stiff nod as he trudged by, his glance taking in my front yard before darting into the house. I wasn’t sure what that was about, but he made looking creepy an art.
I took another few steps, gauging the floor. Similar to the mage’s house, it was charred but mostly solid. I could walk on it to check out the crime scene, but I couldn’t live on it without some serious repairs.
There goes my deposit.
Pressure squeezed my chest as I looked around my living room, a blackened, twisted mess. My couch was a pile of char. Same for my chair. The glass from my coffee table littered the blackened ground. All the little things I’d gathered over the years were destroyed. My physical memories, gone.
Rage and sadness choked me in turns as I checked out my kitchen. Unusable. It would have to be gutted and redone. The weird porcelain cow my mother had given me before she died was nowhere to be found. The blown glass I’d bought off a street vendor lay in black shards.
I blinked away tears. I’d been on the receiving end of grudge attacks before, but this was, by far, the worst penance I’d ever received from doing my job. This was hitting me on an extremely personal level.
In a daze, I continued on, noting that the hallway entrance was in the same state of disrepair. Halfway through, though, the destruction began to fade. The deep black of the walls lightened, and then disappeared entirely as I neared my bedroom.
A shock of fear stole through me. Had the mage stopped his shock and awe campaign because he’d found one or more of my stashes?
I hurried into the spare room, equally as untouched as my bedroom, and slammed open the closet door. Magic pulsed like a heartbeat, strong and comforting. My heartbeat, to be exact.
Quickly, I pulled away a comforter and the board games piled on the floor. The small rug was next to go, revealing a square crack in the floorboards. It was completely undisturbed. No foreign magic loitered around it, and no defense spells had been set in motion. Something else must have prompted the mage to give up burning my house.
I exited through the back door to check out my shed. The lock was broken and the inside looked ransacked. I waded in and put out my hands, feeling the familiar pulse echoing in my veins.
Another feeling caught me. Something foreign. Probing, almost. Like someone had tried to delve into my unique blend of magic to see how it worked.
Why wo
uld the mage do it back here and not inside, where he was less likely to be disturbed?
Unless the person who’d hit the shed wasn’t the mage, but someone else who was curious about me, someone who’d recognize both the faint pulse of my heartbeat and the ancient magic I’d used to create this cache.
Possibilities crowded into my head, but there was only one person who came to mind. With his extra-sensory hearing, he certainly knew my heartbeat, and he had connections to mages who could study the magic I’d used.
That stalking bastard.
He definitely needed that punch in the face. He was asking for it.
I checked the other caches, found them all unmolested, and returned to the spare bedroom closet. Once there, I pricked my finger. Blood welled up, hot and red. Turning my other hand palm up, I created a ball of fire, setting it to float in a perfect sphere.
The blood wobbled on my finger before falling through the air. When it touched the fire, a sizzle sent steam twisting upward. I surged my magic in pulses, timed to my heartbeat as I muttered the incantation in Gaelic.
I’d asked my mother, “Why not Latin?” when she’d taught me this spell. Her response: “Gaelic is less used than Latin.” I’d thought she was crazy at the time. Some villages in Ireland still spoke Gaelic as their primary language, not to mention the little bit children across the whole island learned in school. Since then, I’d seen so many magical people use Latin, each of them thinking they were so smart, so individual.
The ball of fire froze into a block of ice, which fell to the ground and cracked open. Vapor rose into the form of a skull, turning slowly through the air. Green light shone from its eyes and out of the missing front tooth. After a full circle, I said, “Droim ar ais.” Reverse.
Another two circles in the opposite direction and I repeated my command. After yet one more full turn, I said, “Slainte.” It literally meant health, short for “to your health,” and acted as a toast before drinking. I thought it a fitting sentiment.
The magical lock opened, and I used a knife to take off the cover. A real safe lay inside, fireproof, with a separate spell to be hellfire-proof. My fingerprint opened this one, and finally, after all that, I had access to the book I’d taken from the mage’s house.
I glanced at it in the safe’s depths, wanting to grab it out and flick through it, but that would be a dumb move. Considering how long it would take to secure it again—and the very real limits on my time—I resisted. Instead, I dropped in the second book and closed it all up. If I lived through the next few days, I would go somewhere quiet and do some learnin’.
As I was getting up, I heard a strange scuffle.
I froze, listening.
Like a live thing, the noise vibrated through my house.
I took out my gun and braced myself near the door to the spare room. Soft movement sounded in the entryway, someone trying to be quiet.
Adrenaline flooded me, heightening my senses and increasing my speed. I swung out into the hallway, gun up, finger on the trigger. A shape loomed large in the doorway, hulking and dangerous.
I sighted and barked, “What do you want?”
The man threw up his hands. A spell!
I dove forward and then rolled to the side, coming up on my knee with my gun out, crouching in the doorway to my bathroom. I sighted on the person’s head. No words drifted toward me. The hands didn’t move.
Finally, I registered the face.
“Oh. Mikey. It’s you.” I sagged before climbing to my feet. “You could have knocked instead of skulking in.”
My neighbor, No-good Mikey, could be one of the meanest sons of bitches in the neighborhood. If he thought you were looking crossways at him on a bad day, he’d charge you like a bull and beat your head against the ground. Or he could be the sweetest man on earth for no reason whatsoever. It was hard to gauge his various moods.
Most people tried to steer clear. Being that he was right next door and my moods could get as black as his, but rarely as sweet, we just tried to give each other a wide berth when one of us was ragey. We didn’t talk much.
“How?” he asked, not moving. “You ain’t got no door.”
I put my hand next to the wall, holding his gaze, and gave three deliberate knocks. “Works on any surface—no door required.”
He leaned against the doorframe, squinting in at me. “You’re good with that gun. Were you a cop?”
“Yeah, right. Not even dirty cops steal as much as I do.” I jammed my gun into its holster and retrieved my spells from the spare room. “What are you doing up this late?”
“Smokey said you came home.”
There was that name again. Mince had mentioned him, too. “Is Smokey that guy who was loitering around outside fifteen minutes ago? The creepy-looking dude?”
“Yeah, Smokey. Don’t you know your neighborhood?”
“I’ve seen him around, I just never bothered to ask his name,” I muttered.
I flicked a switch, but wasn’t surprised when the light refused to shine. I tried again in the hallway. Still nothing. I grabbed a candle from my bedroom—a prop I’d purchased in the silly hope that one day I’d have a romantic reason to use it—lit it with my finger, and brought it out so Mikey wouldn’t ask why I was getting around just fine in the dark.
“He’s usually up at night, prowling the neighborhood,” Mikey said, looking around the place. If he was surprised, he certainly didn’t show it. “He’s one of those quacks who think vampires and goblins are real. Says he saw a vampire with you the other night. You’re on his radar. Watch out.” He rolled his eyes.
I wondered if goblins were real. They weren’t in the Brink if they were.
I didn’t think so, anyway. Maybe I should pick Smokey’s brain…
“Why’d he wake you?” I asked, kicking the pile that used to be my couch. I rested my hand on my pocket holding the wad of cash I’d taken from William. It was made up of twenties, not hundreds like Darius carried, and this wad was much smaller. It wouldn’t come close to covering repairs for the mess I was standing in. Dare to dream.
“I told him to,” Mikey replied.
“Because…?”
“What do you mean, because? Look at your house!” He gestured angrily at the walls. “Look at it!”
“I’m standing in it. I see it.”
“I know Mince let a couple guys come in here the other day. Heard you left them to it.” Suspicion rang in his voice. I had no idea why.
“Yup. I didn’t feel like dying.”
“You didn’t call the cops.”
“I don’t like cops.” That wasn’t true, but it was what guys like him needed to hear so they didn’t freak out.
“Yeah, well, I heard those guys left without taking nothing. Somethin’s not right with that. Somethin’s up. So I told ol’ Smokey to watch this place. To let me know who was coming and going.”
“What’s it to you?”
He pushed away from the doorframe, his body going taut. “What’s it to me? You’re my neighbor, that’s what it is to me. I don’t gotta get a filthy dog because you’re here all the time. Everyone knows there’s one person crazier than me in this neck of the woods.” He jabbed a thick finger at me. “No one messes with my stuff when you’re around.”
He basically just called me a crazy, rabid dog. Awesome.
He put his hands on his chest. “You got my back.” His hands pushed through the air toward me. “I got yours. That’s how this shit works.”
“Touching,” I said dryly.
“Yeah. I’m a goddamned nun.”
Okay, then…
“This afternoon,” he went on, leaning against the doorframe again, “or yesterday afternoon, technically—another guy showed up. Skinny bastard with his face deep in his hood. I was sitting out on the corner this time, watching. He strolled right past me, not even a nod. In my neighborhood.” Usually people paid Mikey homage so as not to get their skull cracked. “He walked into your place without even knocking. Walked right
on in, like that sonuvabitch owned it.”
Mikey took a moment and cracked his neck. A burst of adrenaline filled my body out of nowhere. He was human, but he still wasn’t someone I wanted to tumble with. He’d probably conjure up weapons like a magic trick.
“He wasn’t worried someone might be in here?” I asked.
“Nah. Just walked on in.” Mikey scratched his chin. “He weren’t quite right, neither. Muttered to himself like a crack-head. He twitched like a crack-head, too. Far as I know, this ain’t no crack house. So that didn’t fit.” The accusation was soft, but it was there.
“Nope. No crack in here. Not even any weed. I’m naturally this crazy.”
Mikey pursed his lips. “That’s what I thought. That’s why I followed up, just to see what he was up to.”
“Let me guess: you didn’t call the cops either.”
“Hell no, I didn’t call the cops! You think I need cops asking me questions? Ain’t no one needs cops asking them questions.”
“Right.” Crime watch was exactly that in this neighborhood—people watching the crime take place. “Can you describe him, at least?”
“Wait a second, I’m not done yet.” Mikey held up his hand.
I went into the kitchen to get a second look at the damage. Maybe there was an unmelted fork somewhere.
“You gonna listen to this or am I wasting my time?” he called after me.
“Eyes don’t work like ears, in case you haven’t realized. I don’t actually need to be in the same room to hear you.”
I heard a sort of huff, then footsteps. He appeared in the doorway of the kitchen and resumed his lean. “I don’t like to yell unless I’m about to bust someone’s head.”
“Good to know.”
“So I walked closer, trying to figure out what the deal was. Before I got there, the door flew away. Blew out like a bomb went off. So I hurried up, then. I got a house right next door. No way do I need my house blown the shit up, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, I’m with you so far.”
“Sure enough, that bastard was lightin’ fires inside.” He blew out a breath and dramatically shook his head, making his body sway from side to side. “Nope.” He waved his finger in the air. “Nope.”