by Michele Hauf
“Maybe. And now look. I reduce others to ash. Sounds about right to me.”
“Sounds as if the world is a better place, thanks to you.” Zoë hugged Sid to her chest. “I have to get Luc away from Mauritius. That vampire is only concerned with making money. He’ll let Luc die. I’m surprised he even takes care of him now. He’s detained him against his will, I’m sure of it.”
“He wants to control him, Zoë. Mauritius gave Luc something he values more than freedom. And in exchange, you know what Luc gave him.”
She looked for the answer in his freckled eyes, and he finally offered, “You.” The truth stabbed her in the gut. “And if Mauritius needs to control you, he’ll use Luc to do so. He’s not stupid.”
She shook her head. “That hurts my heart to think about it. I have to go back. Luc was in the building somewhere. I know it. There was a residential floor in the building because I noticed a maid’s cart with linens on it when I was riding the elevator down with Switch.”
“You are not going anywhere near those vampires. Mauritius just lost his only supplier of Magic Dust. You can bet he’ll have a team combing the streets for you.”
“But I have to help Luc.”
“The vampire means that much to you?”
Zoë looked up from her hands. “We had a rough start, Luc and I, but he’s my best friend, Kaz. You must understand. Do you have a best friend?”
The man shook his head. “Not practical in my line of work. Doesn’t matter. I’ll go get him.”
“You will? You won’t stake him?”
He squeezed a fist tightly and shook his head. “But I’ll have to detain him. He could prove a danger to others. You really want to deal with what your friend has become? Do you know a way to help him down from the addiction?”
“Apparently not. That’s why I concocted the blend. Oh, I hate that it was something so evil and I didn’t even know. I may have been responsible for human deaths. Oh, my goddess, I know I was. What you told me about your friends getting murdered by a vampire scamming for something that sparkled...”
“Don’t think about it, Zoë. You can’t.” He sucked a breath through his nose and exhaled heavily. “What’s been done is done. Now you move forward, yes?”
“Can you ever forgive me?”
“Forgiveness is important to you.”
“It’s everything. Without it, we become mired in the past and the things we can never change. I always forgive. It’s unthinkable not to. But I wouldn’t expect the same from you.”
“I can forgive, Zoë, but I’ll never forget. And my friends deserve retribution for their lost lives. Any information you can give me about Mauritius and Switch will be helpful.”
“I didn’t even know her name until we stood in Mauritius’s office and he addressed her as Switch. I thought of her as Pink. I don’t know where she lives, either.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve marked the location where Mauritius works on the left bank. And we’ll find that lab he’s set up for you.”
“Thank you for believing me. I don’t know what I’d do if I had fallen in your eyes.”
“You would have moved on.”
“No. Kaz, what you think of me means so much. I...I’ve—hell, I’ve fallen in love with you.”
She met his gaze, seeking, hoping, pining for the same confession. The man slid the tip of his tongue along his lower lip and, with a shrug, patted the cat’s head. “I’ve certainly fallen for you,” he said, “but as for love...”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to love me. I needed you to know that’s how I feel about you.” She slumped against the couch back, the soft shirt she’d taken from one of his drawers reaching over her thighs. “I’m so tired. But I can’t stop thinking about Luc.”
“I’ll go after him in the morning when the vamps usually sleep in.” He looked around her at the sofa. “I can, uh...sleep here on the couch and give you the bed.”
“You don’t want to share the bed with me?”
“I need some space right now, Zoë. Please understand.”
She nodded, not wanting to understand, but it was clear that she had forced him to act against his vows to protect humans from vampires when he had saved her. And now by agreeing to help her find Luc he would once again go against those vows.
“Sure. I’ll see you in the morning?”
“I might be gone before you rise.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then patted Sid’s head. “I have to run out for a bit. Order business. Lock the door behind me.”
He stood and, claiming his leather coat with the stakes and holy water and cross, he opened the door. Zoë watched him pull out a key from his pocket, then tuck it away as she’d seen him do before. Then he closed the door and his boots clunked down the staircase.
“He’s running away, isn’t he, Sid?”
The cat nudged his head up under her chin in agreement.
“Guess I shouldn’t have expected him to want to share a bed with me after the day we’ve had. Do you think we’ll ever get back to the fun, new love we had?”
Sid offered no response, so Zoë stood and padded into the bedroom. Lying down on the bed, she spread her hand over the sheets and snuggled her face into the pillow. She couldn’t smell Kaz in the fibers. So easily he had slipped from her life.
Rolling to her back, she allowed Sid to crawl onto her belly and snuggle. Her thoughts could not enjoy the quiet comfort of the softly purring cat.
What would the witches of the Light do to her if they discovered she had been using the same magic as her father? She cringed to recall the brand of the warlock her father had proudly shown her. Red and thick, it had been ugly, a symbol of the mistrust of others and ignorance.
She was not a bad person. She was just a little misdirected.
* * *
Kaz stood in the hallway before his front door. He’d checked his pockets for the key, feeling relief when the curved lines of it fit into his palm. He always made a key check before walking away from a closed door. It was an ingrained habit.
Damned past would never extract its claws from his shoulders. He’d been checking for a key ever since he was fourteen years old.
“Thanks for nothing, Dad,” he muttered. “Except making me a freak.”
A freak who couldn’t even stay in the same room as his girlfriend and offer her comfort because he wasn’t sure how to do that.
Talking. Man, they had talked. About things that still made him feel a little teary. But talking wasn’t action, and action equaled trouble to him.
He always ran toward trouble. That compulsion had been programmed into him by the Order. But now he was running away from conflict. A different beast than the trouble involved with stalking and staking vampires. This conflict required him to care enough to stand and meet Zoë’s eyes and tell her exactly how he felt.
She’d confessed she loved him. He should have replied with his feelings.
“Can’t do it,” he muttered. “Don’t know how.”
Chapter 17
The vampiress with the ridiculous pink hair struggled against the magic that held her to the marble floor in the center of the huge sanctuary hidden in the depths of FaeryTown. Corinthian columns queued along both sides of the floor, and vines grew up from their bases as if they’d been planted in dirt, yet there was no sign of any growth medium. Overhead, the ceiling was nearly covered by a canopy of the thick vines, and long, white flowers hung, dripping their honeylike pollen onto the floor.
Faery glamour at its finest.
Coyote strolled before the pinned vampire, her bare feet silent on the warm marble. They’d found the idiot vamp lurking around an ichor den.
She smirked at Whim’s antics. Her cohort danced about the vampire on his hooves, his ve
lvet-antlered head bowed and tilted in glee as he spun and swept the tips of his wings over her face, not cutting, but imbuing his dust into her skin. The longtooth would get a contact high, but not enough to distort her thinking.
Off to the side, Never stood, expressing his usual feigned disinterest. The dark sidhe gave them his back, bared shoulders straight and proud. The arrows queued between his dark wings glinted with sunlight that beamed in from the stained-glass windows that encircled the room.
“If you don’t tell me what I want, Whim will crush your bones,” Coyote tossed out casually. She and Whim worked in tandem whenever they tortured; both played off the other, not having a predetermined tactic. “But you won’t die. You’ll feel the pain again and again. Until I have my dark one pierce you through the heart with his true weapons.”
Switch spouted mortal curse words and told Coyote to do something to herself that she felt sure was impossible.
Whim pounced onto the vampiress’s chest, squatting there and shouting louder than Switch’s cries of pain. A sweep of his wings showered dust over the vampire’s face and she spat at the substance.
“You’ve encroached upon our territory.” Coyote continued pacing. “Selling product that has not been sanctioned. The Cortège will not suffer you to live.”
“It wasn’t me!” Switch yelled.
“Of course, you work for a vendor. But that vampire can’t possibly make the product. Who manufactures the Magic Dust, Switch?”
The vampiress spat dust-glittered blood at Coyote’s feet. Whim slashed a wingtip across her throat, spilling out blood. Unfortunately, the longtooth idiots had a tendency to heal rather quickly.
“Is it the hunter?” Coyote prompted.
She doubted a hunter, human or otherwise, would have reason to dally in dust manufacture, but crazier things had occurred. Never had recently marked the hunter as suspect.
Never switched his stance, which alerted Coyote. She stared at him, but he wouldn’t gift her with a return glance. Annoying entitled bit of—
“Make her speak, Whim.”
Whim jumped off the vampire and performed a jig near her head. His clacking hooves tangled within the horrid pink and black hair and tugged out chunks. Howling like a banshee, the faery then danced a cruel storm upon the vampire’s chest, sweeping his sharpened wingtips across cheeks, throat and mouth.
“The hunter is involved with the witch who is making the Magic Dust!” Switch cried out in a spatter of blood.
Coyote approached the vampiress, who groaned and cursed anything and everything. Whim stepped off her body, wings fluttering gaily. Vampire blood dripped from a wing tip and onto the pollen-spotted floor. “A witch is making the Magic Dust?”
“Her name is Zoë Guillebeaux and she’s allied with the slayer Kaspar Rothstein. He’s Order of the Stake.”
“Ah, a knight on your ass?”
“He’s too much of a wimp to take me out. Had the chance a couple times and only wanted to talk. What kind of hunter talks?”
“And yet, he’s apparently taken the one person you need most away from you.”
“I could care less about the witch. It’s not my operation, it’s Mauritius—”
Coyote seized the vampiress by a hank of bloody pink hair, lifting her head from the floor. “Mauritius of the Anière tribe?”
“Fuck.”
Coyote slammed the vampiress’s head against the marble, delighting when she heard the skull crack.
She had names now. Plenty of them. “Never!”
The dark sidhe lifted his chin, but still did not regard her. Yet she could sense his sinews tighten in preparation. How she did take delight in his sanguine methods to homicide.
“You bring the hunter to me. Alive,” she directed Never. “I’ll take care of Mauritius.”
“What about the witch?” Whim asked.
“I hate witches,” Coyote muttered. Witches had lured her mother to FaeryTown with the promise of prosperity. And then they’d drained her of ichor and used it in a strange ritual that Coyote had witnessed. It was the only time she had ever been literally sickened. “I’ll save the witch for something special.”
She strode away from the groaning vampiress, tilting Never a nod as she passed him by. Whim paralleled her.
Behind them, the dark sidhe introduced a flechette into the vampiress’s chest. She yelled and spasmed and gave a good fight. Finally, she managed to pull the weapon out, but not so carefully that the glass tips did not shatter. When she ashed, the silence was cut by a giggle from Whim.
Her behooved cohort nudged his nose into Coyote’s hair. “Pretty when they die.”
* * *
Kaz hadn’t gone home after leaving Zoë alone last night. He assumed she’d snuggled into his bed with Sid and had fallen asleep.
He’d slept in the Metro station on an aluminum bench. The station closest to his home was always quiet in the middle of the night. And no one ever bothered the sleeping bums. His neck ached and his back could use a good tug to get out the kinks, but he was standing upright and his head was clear.
More than he could say for the person he needed to find today.
“A vampire.” Zoë’s friend. “If Rook hears about this he’ll kick me out of the Order.”
Not that Kaz hadn’t sympathy for a vampire who was under the influence of an addictive substance. The drug controlled the user, not the other way around. Luc may very well want to get clean, but could not. He was lucky he had a friend like Zoë, because had she not begged Kaz to find Luc, he may have staked the bastard had he run into him while investigating.
He wondered if Luc had ever attempted to achieve the Neverland Fix Vail had mentioned. A vampire never came back from that. Kaz was surprised he’d not run into one of those addicts. On the other hand, perhaps they were in no condition to move. Or maybe they were dead.
He couldn’t help but feel sympathy toward them all.
When and how had he become such a softy? Had one night of sex with a pretty little witch screwed up his sense of right and wrong so wickedly?
Apparently, it had.
Which was why Kaz now stared at the red, metallic gleam on the facade of the steel business building where he’d rescued Zoë last evening. Inside he may or may not find the vampire Luc. Zoë had given him a brief description: tall, thin, dark loose hair and attractive. Hell, that covered just about all the vampires in Paris.
But the vampire would know Zoë, so he relied on that to ensure he nabbed the right one.
And if he ran into Mauritius while in there? Then he’d ash another with his stake. He did know what that vampire looked like, thanks to checking Order records earlier. He gave the sketch of Mauritius on his cell phone one last look, then turned off his phone and shoved it in a pocket. A sweep of clouds overhead cast shadow across the sunlit cobbles as Kaz crossed the street. He looked up, but noted the sky was actually cloudless.
“Hell of a big bird,” he muttered, then entered the building.
The digital entry box detailed each floor and the business names. He guessed the third floor was the residential level because there was no label or business name on that one. Kicking the steel door loosened the dead-bolt locks at the top and the floor, and he managed to shoulder it open and pass into the parquet-floored lobby. No alarm went off. Hoping it wasn’t a silent alarm, he veered toward the stairs.
Once on the third floor, he was surprised there were no guards. Odd, if they were keeping a vampire against h
is will. Or maybe they weren’t and Zoë only believed Luc was a captive. He could very well be voluntarily involved with Mauritius, receiving payment in the form of Magic Dust to keep him appeased. Made the most sense.
Prepared to face the worst, and cursing the fact he’d made a promise to Zoë that he would not harm Luc, Kaz took out a half-inch-wide plastic zip tie that had been warded to withstand vampire strength from a pocket as he walked down the hallway. He stopped at the first door and listened. Silence. Sun beamed in from under the next door. Not the optimal place for a manic vampire to get some rest.
The door on the opposite side of the hall was also quiet, yet dark. At the next door he saw the movement of shadow at the doorjamb and then heard the crash inside. Sounded as if a piece of wood furniture had hit the wall. When he arrived at the door he saw it had been padlocked on the outside. Someone wanted to keep whatever was on the other side of this door behind it.
“Bingo.”
Jamming the titanium stake end against the standard-issue padlock, Kaz pounded twice more. The cheap mechanism surrendered. He kicked the door inside and caught a raging vampire against his chest. Fangs gnashed across his coat sleeve and growls sounded more canine than human.
They both went down, Kaz landing on his back out in the main hallway, stake in one hand and zip tie in the other. The vampire had earned his freedom and stood, ready to dash away. Kaz tripped him, bringing him down. He couldn’t let him out of the building or he’d never wrangle him.
Kicking at him with his bare feet, the vampire swore at him. “Who the hell are you? You’re not one of Mauritius’s thugs.”
“Thank you for noticing my lacking evil.”
Kaz dodged a lunging foot and snapped the vampire’s arm behind his back. Rolling his body, he landed on the vamp’s head with his back, smashing the longtooth’s face against the floor.
“I’m trying to help you,” Kaz said, but he kept his voice down. He didn’t want to alert the cavalry, if there was one. “Zoë sent me.”