Sanguinity

by Tori Centanni

  “I got there a little too late for that.”

  “Are they dead?” he asked.

  “The mortals?”

  He nodded.

  “Not yet. But Lark’s not happy.” Understatement of the year. I doubted the mortals who had set the fire had long. She was biding her time before exacting her punishment, but they weren’t going to survive her wrath.

  Elliot lifted the drink and took a small sip. “What about me?”

  “I told Lark you called to warn me.”

  That wasn’t an answer. We both knew it. His call may well have saved Lark and Harold’s lives, but that didn’t mean she’d show him mercy. Although this past year, I’d come to realize Lark was more forgiving than I’d previously thought. Or at least, willing to release people who didn’t deserve death by her fangs.

  “Did they mention anything else?” I asked.

  Elliot’s brow creased. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe kidnapping a vampire and doing black magic with an evil witch?”

  Elliot’s expression said he thought I’d passed reality a few exits ago. “None of them are witches.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  He took another sip and then set down his mostly full glass, pushing it away from him. “Look, we were all really angry and frustrated, being kicked out like garbage just because Lark’s dead husband thought keeping us there was cruel. Cazimir could be an ass, but he never held people against their will. He provided us with shelter and food, kept us alive. A lot of us didn’t have other places to go. Do you know how hard it is to live a normal, mundane life and work a normal, mundane job when you know vampires exist, and if you could just get one of them to give you blood, you could leave all of that crap behind and become immortal?”

  “Yes, actually, I do,” I said. Which was true. From the moment I found out what Sean was, I’d been determined to become a vampire myself. I’d only had to wait weeks, not years. Now, back in the same position, I understood the vampire groupies’ pain more than ever. It was aggravating to have eternity that close and have it denied to you. Worse still to be thrown out on the street.

  “So we were all pissed. There were jokes about stakes and shit, you know? But no one was serious. So when Brad suggested the fire, it took us all a moment to realize he wasn’t kidding. I got the impression it hadn’t been his idea. He was really gung-ho about it. I thought maybe some vampire rival of Lark’s put him up to it.”

  My stomached turned. “So it’s possible someone wanted Brad to set the fire? Like maybe a witch?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t know what a witch could offer him.”

  “Did you hear any of them mention Bea?”

  “Lisa said Bea had been sorry to see us go. She liked Lisa, I think. They’re both bookish types, you know?” He shuddered. “Shit. Is Bea all right?”

  “She’s dead.”

  He let out a breath. He had dark circles under his eyes and was shaking slightly. He stared at his drink like it was full of angry hornets.

  “That sucks,” he said finally. “She was okay.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  The people at the table behind us got up and left. Elliot lifted a backpack from the floor and pulled out a phone to check the time. It was close to three a.m. He yawned, which made me yawn, before putting the backpack down.

  “Sunrise is at 6:43,” he said matter-of-factly.

  He was hiding out until then, I realized, laying low in a bar owned by a vampire who wasn’t going to let another vampire flay a human in the middle of her business. It was smart.

  It was also clearly taking a toll on him. “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  He laughed bitterly and tapped the side of his glass. “This was my last ten bucks. Figured it’s cheaper than a hotel room, and more secure.”

  My stomach roiled at the thought of how little Elliot had. Lark had been so selfish kicking these kids to the streets. They had no jobs, no family, no lives outside the vampires they’d worshiped and lived for, and now they had nothing at all. If a witch had convinced some of them to set the Factory on fire, I doubt it had taken much cajoling. They were all desperate.

  I reached into my purse and opened the envelope of cash Erin had given me, pulling out a few hundreds. I held out the money.

  Elliot did not reach for it. “Oh, fuck no,” he said. “I’m not getting in debt to you too. And I don’t take charity.”

  “It’s not charity,” I said. “It’s payment for your tip about the fire. Tip lines give rewards, right? Here’s your damn reward.” I slapped the money on the bar.

  Elliot started to argue, but sense got the better of him and he slid the money into a pocket instead. “So what, you’re some kind of vampire 911 now?”

  I snorted. “God help them if I were.”

  Elliot sipped his drink again. After a long silence, he said, “Four years.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That’s how long I lived at the Factory. Some of them, it was more than a decade.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that, except that I’d known many of them had lived among vampires for so long, they didn’t know anything else. Most of the mortals who’d been kicked to the curb had been what Lark not-so-affectionately called “strays,” meaning they didn’t have a vampire companion they were tethered to. Some of them lived at the Factory in hopes of finding a vampire who might see them as more than food. It happened, though it was rare.

  “How did you get there in the first place?”

  “One night, I came across a vampire feeding,” Elliot said. “I worked at a grocery store in Northern California, and was heading home around one in the morning. Saw the vampire in a dark corner of the store parking lot, sucking on this guy’s neck like there was no one else in the world. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. But it was also the most incredible. I couldn’t look away. The vampire met my eyes and I was sure I was next. I wanted to run, but I was frozen to the spot in fear. And then the vampire laughed and said it was my lucky night, because he needed a driver.”

  “To drive what?” I asked.

  Elliot smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “A hearse.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I said.

  “Nope. Swear to god. He had a coffin in there and everything, told me if I drove him up to Seattle, he’d give me a thousand bucks. If I didn’t, he’d hunt me down and murder me. Not exactly a hard choice, even though I was pretty sure he was gonna kill me as soon as we got where he wanted to go.”

  Elliot shook his head. “We ended up at the Factory and he actually gave me the money. He said he’d pay me to stick around. It’s not like I was itching to go back to the Shop n’ Save, so I did. After six months or so, he split, no warning, but I already had a room and friends at the Factory, and figured I might as well stay. Maybe I would hit the immortal jackpot someday.” He twisted his half-full glass in his fingers. “Stupid, really.”

  “Not stupid,” I said.

  Elliot raised an eyebrow.

  “Misguided and hopelessly optimistic, maybe.”

  Elliot shook his head and finished his drink. “I figure I have two options now. One, I forget the arcane world and leave it behind, try to live a normal life. Or I find some way to make it work for me.”

  “You can always ask Rhonda for a job,” I said.

  Rhonda, who heard this, looked up to sneer at me. “You want a drink, Henri?” she asked. “Because this is not a public park. Buy something or get out.”

  “That’s my cue,” I said, sliding off the stool.

  As I climbed the stairs, I kept trying to figure out why a witch who wanted to kill vampires in some weird ritual would want mortals to set other vampires on fire. Maybe Elliot was right and it was some rival vampire who had convinced the mortals to set the fire.

  That, at least, made more sense. Not that anything about it made a lot of sense, unless the mortals really did have a death wish.

  I opened the door
to the bar and got smacked in the face with a snowball.

  Chapter 14

  The snowball smacked me in the forehead and broke apart. Little ice crystals stuck to my nose and forehead. The cold stunned me. I wiped ice from my face and squinted into the dark.

  There was no snow on the ground. Snow was rare in Seattle, especially in quantities large enough to make a baseball-sized ball of it, and anyhow, it had yet to snow this year.

  As my vision cleared, I spotted a figure in bulky black clothes, wearing a ski mask. I pulled the stake from my purse—it was the first weapon I could reach. I stepped toward the person.

  “What the fuck?” I demanded.

  The guy—if it was a guy--raised his hand again. A bracelet on his wrist glowed, and a snowball appeared in midair, racing toward me. I ducked. It smacked into the sidewalk behind me. Another snowball smacked into my shoulder, ice sliding down my back and my sleeve.

  “Seriously? Magical snowballs? Who the hell are you, Frosty the Witch?”

  The figure shook his—or her, it could easily be a her--wrist like it had a cramp. I took the opening and bolted forward, tripping over an unevenness in the pavement. After stumbling but catching myself in time to keep my momentum going, I slammed the stake into my attacker’s thigh. The resulint scream was ear-piercing.

  He reached down, grabbing for me. Gloved fingers dug into my hair and I pulled away, wincing as a chunk was ripped out of my head.

  I backed away, ready to run.

  My attacker curled his fingers, bracelet glowing.

  Something slammed into my chest. It felt like I’d been stabbed with a stake made of ice. My heart froze and cold spread through my veins. My breath puffed out in front of me. Everything went black.

  I came to again and nothing had changed except my attacker was bent over, holding his injured leg. His bracelet glowed as a moved the hand over the injury and muttered what I assumed was a healing spell.

  My lungs felt frozen. What little air I could suck into them burned with cold. My head felt light. A shiver ran over me. My muscles were stiff, but I forced my arm to move. I dropped the stake in my purse and dug for the Taser.

  The witch in the ski mask looked up at me, going still like a deer caught in the headlights. Then the dude—or dudette--spun on his heel and ran. His gait was uneven, but he moved quickly and was gone before I could convince myself to give chase.

  My teeth chattered, and I pulled my jacket tight. It didn’t help. It was like the cold was coming from inside my bones.

  My muscles screamed as I took several steps toward my car. My throat and mouth felt icy. And the more I thought about it, the more familiar that ball of cold in my chest felt.

  And then it clicked where I’d felt it before: in the visions of the dead vampires. Right before things faded to black. One of them had even seen the same masked figure. They’d all felt the same sudden blast of cold.

  I swore.

  Then I called Erin.

  “Henri?” She sounded groggy.

  “Please tell me you and the Elders are all still gathered at Barry’s house, except for one person who is obviously and notably absent,” I said. That would make things a hell of a lot easier in terms of figuring out who my attacker had been.

  There was silence on Erin’s end of the line for a second. “What? No. It’s almost four in the morning. Everyone left hours ago.”

  “Of course,” I muttered. Nothing was ever that easy. “Where are you?”

  “Home,” she said.

  “Great. Send me the address. I’ll be there soon.”

  Erin was reluctant to give me her address, but I insisted, arguing that she had mine and fair was fair. Twenty minutes later, I was at her building.

  * * *

  “Who attacked you?” Erin asked as she made coffee. She was wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants, her hair up in a messy ponytail.

  One orange cat sat on a cat tree in the corner eyeing me with suspicion while the other, a black cat, had darted into her bedroom the moment I’d walked in the door.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.” I gave her the best description I could, but it left both of us baffled. The person had been average height, about as tall as me or maybe a little taller, and that didn’t rule out anyone except Kiki, who was noticeably shorter than the rest of the Elders.

  I gave her a detailed description of the attack, including my confusion as to why someone had used such ineffective magic to attack me. Sure, conjuring snowballs out of nowhere was a neat trick, but other than shock value, it didn’t pack a lot of punch.

  The other spell, the one like a lance made of ice in my heart, felt different. It had stunned me for seconds or perhaps a full moment, which was fucked up. But even that had been quick to lose its power.

  “Snowballs?” Erin asked.

  Erin’s apartment was on Queen Anne Hill, on the fourth story of an apartment building that gave her unit a nice view of downtown. I sat on her blue sofa. It matched the interior of her apartment, with light blue walls and a painting of a seascape. A white area rug covered most of the wood floor in her living room.

  “It’s strange, but it kind of makes sense.” She handed me a steaming cup of coffee, which I took gratefully, wrapping my hands around the hot ceramic. I was still frozen despite the heat blasting out of the vent to my right.

  “It does?”

  “The Guild doesn’t really use offensive magic. There’s not a lot to fight against. Vampires, sure, and other monsters, but it’s not like we’re under siege all of the time. Defensive magic is more common: learning to put up shields to block spells, to disarm opponents, that kind of thing.”

  “So no one in your group does fighting spells? Come on,” I said. I didn’t believe it. Just as vampires weren’t a monolith, there was no way hundreds of witches in the Greater Seattle Area all subscribed to the same philosophies about which magic spells were important.

  “I’m sure some do, but none of the Guild Elders do, as far as I know. But that second spell you described, that’s defense.”

  “The freezing spell?” I shivered, the cold still moving through me. It had frozen me in two ways: by freezing me in place for up to a moment, stopping me in my tracks, while also making my body so cold I felt like I’d been dipped in dry ice and longed for a hot bath.

  “It sounds like an anti-vampire spell.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up. “How so?”

  Erin’s fingers tapped her coffee mug. “It’s meant for vampires. It freezes the veins and stops the heart. The effect lasts several minutes, long enough to get away or stake them or even cut of their heads.”

  I grimaced.

  “For humans, the duration depends, but it can be up to a minute,” she said.

  “The magic froze my heart?” My voice went up an octave.

  “It’s not a spell meant for use on living things. Like I said, it’s for vampires.”

  “Vampires are alive.” My words held more edge than I’d intended, but the Guild’s attitude about vampires had been bothering me.

  “I know,” she said defensively. “I just meant that their bodies can take that sort of hit without a lot of side effects. It’s a spell meant to neutralize a hostile vampire. Barry created it, and he was pretty paranoid. Like I said, the Guild had an Accord with Cazimir, and the vampires left us alone. But he wanted us to be prepared if that ever changed, or if some rogue vampire showed up and decided witches were his preferred prey. It’s one of those spells developed as a safety measure. It wasn’t intended for going out and attacking vampires, but that doesn’t mean someone didn’t upgrade it and start using it that way.”

  “So once again, someone is using Barry’s magic.”

  “Seems that way.”

  I leaned back against the sofa. “I want to see Barry’s spellbooks. The ones you have locked away in your vault.”

  “Why?” Erin asked, almost automatically.

  “Because someone threw one of his spells at me and turned my veins to magi
cal ice, which you’re telling me is literally a page out of these books. If this person is using Barry’s spells, we might be able to figure out their whole plan or at least get a clue as to what they hope to gain by murdering vampires before they manage to get one or both of us into their circle of doom.”

  I shivered again. “If nothing else, we can see what other tricks they might have up their sleeves.”

  “Only the Elders have access to the vault,” Erin said, standing. “Let me go put on real clothes.”

  She sounded dejected and resigned. She’d suspected it might be one of the Guild Elders from the start—I knew from the way she’d wanted me to sniff them all like some kind of bloodhound— but she didn’t really want it to be one of them.

  That was understandable. My circle of friends consisted of murderous creatures, but most had moral compasses that at least edged toward north, killing only people who deserved it. I knew all of them, from Cazimir to Sean to Angela, were capable of terrible things. But there were limits even I didn’t want to picture those close to me crossing.

  And Erin was a witch, whose friends and family were not supposed to be evil creatures of the night. Finding out one of them was capable of multiple murders had to be jarring.

  I pulled my raincoat tightly around myself and turned up Erin’s heater as she drove us toward the vault, unable to shake the cold that had sunk into my marrow.

  * * *

  Erin drove us to Interbay, a neighborhood that stretched between Queen Anne and Ballard. She pulled into the parking lot of a tall, well-lit building with a Store-It-Urself banner hanging from the side.

  “You’re joking,” I said, as she parked. “Your super secret ‘vault’ is a storage unit?”

  Erin shrugged. “We’re modern witches. What did you expect? A cave with a magical gate that requires blood to open?”

  “Sort of,” I admitted, getting out of the car. “If you’re going to go modern, wouldn’t a lockbox be more secure?”

  “There are eight Elders, including my brother and I, which means eight people with keys,” Erin said. “This is as secure as it gets.”