“Peter!” she called.
Octavian had cast the spell that saved her. A man and woman hung ten feet from the ground in a similar sphere, all the oxygen being stolen from them. A shambling fat Asian man careened toward him from behind. With the noise of the fire and the entire sky’s worth of rain pouring down upon them, Keomany could not be sure Octavian heard him. She reached down into the earth again. This time, so far away, she felt contact, just the lightest touch of the goddess. With a gesture, she brought the floorboards to life. Roots and branches sprang from long-dead wood, reaching up to twine around the gargantuan man. Flames raced along the floor and began to spiral along the roots, and she knew her mistake at once. Trapped in the prison her witchery had just made, the man would die.
“Something’s controlling the fire!” she called to Octavian.
The mage shot out his left hand and an arch of golden light sliced across the club, knocking the other two beastmen from their feet. Then he spun around, staring at the blue core of the fire, and raised both hands.
“Vodilna roke odšla,” he chanted. “Pusti naravi z naravo. Je treba očistiti zunanjih vplivov!”
The light that burst from his hands and his eyes turned from gold to amber to blinding red. The wind that flashed through the club had more power than the storm and it shook the building to its burning rafters, but when it had passed, Keomany stared at the ring of fire in the ceiling above.
The blue fire had gone, leaving only ordinary flames behind. The rain had already begun to subdue the blaze.
“This I can work with!” she said, grinning, twirling, and dancing, singing a song that she often hummed in the orchard.
The wind died but the rain came on. The fire began to gutter like a million dying candles, hissing as it subsided.
In seconds, the blaze had gone out.
“Well done,” Octavian said.
With a wave of his hand, the crackling energy sphere vanished and the two lunatics within fell to the ground with a crash. The two he had cast aside with a concussion spell were beginning to stir.
“No sign of a vampire?” Keomany asked.
“None,” Octavian replied. “These people have been cursed somehow, turned savage. It may fade or it may not. Their best bet is us being able to stop the chaos here. We do that, and they should be all right. But they’re not vampires.”
“The one guy who nearly got me had some nasty teeth. Maybe that girl outside just thought she saw a vampire,” Keomany said.
Octavian nodded. “Maybe.”
But as firefighters and EMTs began to enter the burned wreckage of the club, Keomany walked farther inside, toward the motionless bodies scattered on the floor.
“Careful,” a firefighter called to her. “This place is unsafe. The roof could come down on our heads. You folks should wait outside.”
Octavian glanced at her and they shared a moment of quiet irony. They had just extinguished the blaze and put down the rabid freaks who’d been tearing each other apart in here, and he thought maybe they should wait outside?
Off to her left, just to the left of the stage, something moved. Keomany looked toward a platform that had been rolled off to one side, perhaps used for some performances but not others, and saw a figure rise. Clothes singed, coppery red hair wild and unkempt, the girl might have been nineteen or twenty. Though slender and of average height, she carried another girl in her arms as easily as she might have cradled an infant. Beautiful, her ocean-blue eyes bright, she walked toward Keomany and laid the other girl on the floor.
The injured girl coughed harshly, smoke inhalation having done its work. With her short-cropped black hair and the ring through her lip, she fit the description of Makayla, the friend who’d been left behind by the panicked girl outside.
“She’ll be all right. Just see she gets oxygen. Too much smoke,” the redhead said. She hesitated and started to walk away.
“Hold on,” Keomany said, reaching for the redhead’s arm. “That corner was on fire. How the hell did you—”
The copper-haired girl spun, silently baring fangs.
Keomany swore and stepped back. The vampire’s eyes flashed a warning and she picked up her pace, hurrying out of the burned shell of the club. She could have turned to mist or rain, could have been a mouse or a fly, but she seemed determined to walk out on her own two feet. Keomany turned and saw Octavian talking to two EMTs.
“Peter!” she called. She wanted to shout, Here’s the vampire , but since the vamp girl didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, she didn’t want to freak out the emergency workers. But the mage did not seem to hear her. “Hey, Octavian!”
Octavian spun around, eyes narrowed, alarmed by the edge in her voice. It had been a long night already, and they had known from the moment they’d entered Hawthorne that the chaos would only get worse.
Keomany gestured toward the copper-haired girl, but even as Octavian started across the scorched club to pursue her, the vampire halted in her tracks. She turned to stare at Keomany and then spotted Octavian approaching.
“You’re Peter Octavian?” the vamp girl asked, her eyes filled with hope.
Confused, Keomany studied the two of them. Once upon a time, Octavian had been a vampire, and for a time he had led a group comprising both humans and vampires, trying to protect humanity from vampires who refused to give up the bloodthirsty ways of the past. He still worked with the UN, aiding their efforts to hunt rogue vampires.
“I don’t know you,” Octavian said, studying the girl warily.
“I’m Charlotte,” the vampire replied.
“Are you registered?” Octavian asked.
Charlotte glanced away.
“You’re a rogue,” he said ominously. “Why aren’t you running?”
She flinched as though the words pained her. “Maybe because I’m hoping that instead of killing me, you’ll actually help me. Someone has to.”
Octavian hesitated. Keomany inched closer to him, just in case the vampire girl tried anything—not that he would need her help for one vampire.
“Look,” Charlotte said, her anger flaring again. “I didn’t kill any of these people. I need your help. Come on. Seriously, don’t you have bigger problems than one vampire girl who hasn’t signed the Covenant?”
Octavian hesitated. Charlotte looked to Keomany.
“She has a point,” Keomany said, keeping her voice quiet. Already the firefighters and EMTs were starting to pay close attention to this exchange, and she didn’t want anyone to get hurt trying to interfere. Officer Connelly would be waiting for them outside, and the cops would be tempted to start blaming some of this nastiness on Charlotte once they found out she was a rogue.
“All right,” Octavian said. “We’ll talk, but not here.”
“There’s a café up around the corner that looked like it might still be open,” Keomany said. She’d spotted it as they’d driven through the town center, a place called After Midnight Café.
“Fantastic,” Charlotte said, flashing a pouty, sharp-edged smile. “I’d kill for a coffee.”
Octavian narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the vampire girl said, rolling her eyes in perfect teenager style as she turned and marched out of the club. “It’s a friggin’ figure of speech.”
Keomany arched an eyebrow, amused. Octavian only looked troubled, but they followed the girl out into the warm blue rain and the burgeoning chaos of night in Hawthorne. Daybreak could not come soon enough.
CHAPTER 8
MILES sat on a floral-patterned, high-backed chair in his mother’s living room. The fabric smelled of flowery perfume and when he had sat down, it had exhaled the scent of dust and old age. It had been a quiet sort of house, even when Miles had been growing up, used to long silences or to stillness broken only by the voices of soap opera actors and news anchors. His mother liked to have the television on for company when she did her cleaning or folded laundry. Had liked to have the TV on. Had being the operative word.
&n
bsp; His mother was past tense now. History. Past tense, past tension, passed on.
“Shit, Ma,” he whispered to himself, scraping his palm across his eyes, swiping at a fresh trickle of tears.
He had been keenly aware of her mortality for years. Since the death of his father, when Miles had been only a boy, the idea that his mother would one day follow had haunted him. But in a way her presence had also comforted him when he had been lured into dark musings about his own eventual fate. His grandparents had been old and had passed away when he was small. But sad as they might have been, their deaths had seemed natural and ordinary. His father’s, less so.
Now, though, with his mother gone . . . he was next in line. Miles knew he wasn’t old, but it felt to him as though the Grim Reaper had touched his hand tonight, had slipped up beside him and breathed the same air. With no generation ahead of him now, he felt a new intimacy with death that he had always feared. It had come for his father so long ago, but now it had come for his mother as well, and too soon. She had still enjoyed cooking, still read her mystery novels, still painted flowers and ducks and the old grist mill from time to time. She had friends who loved her, including Tricia Bowker, who walked with her four mornings a week to keep their hearts pumping. Tricia would probably stop walking now, Miles thought.
With a shudder, he buried his face in his hands, bent over in the chair, trying to make sense of what he had lost today. He remembered coming in from sledding with his friends and his mom making him hot chocolate and indulging him when he wanted to stick his feet under the baseboard heater to get them warm. She had brought him shopping with her and he had sat patiently inside the circular clothing racks, hidden from other shoppers in a forest of dresses or blouses, waiting for her to finish. He remembered his birthday parties and how each one had seemed quirky and different; one year, they’d had a séance. His mother had loved parties and didn’t mind if the other parents thought she was a little strange.
Miles had never told her about what happened the Christmas after the séance birthday party. He had been eleven . . . certainly old enough to tell the difference between dreams and the waking world. After a long Christmas day, his mother had gone to sleep and his Aunt Betty and her second husband, Uncle Artie—who had come in from Colorado for the holiday—were crashed out in the living room, nodding off in front of the television. Miles had gone off to the bathroom for a quick pee before bed, heavy with Christmas dinner and the exhaustion of postpresent ecstasy. Emerging from the bathroom, he had nearly run into Tim McConville in the hallway.
The trouble had been that Tim McConville—a boy with whom Miles had taken the school bus every day since the beginning of third grade—had dropped dead in September. A hole in his heart, a birth defect no one had been aware of until it killed him. Tim had been at Miles’s eleventh birthday party, but he had not wanted to take part in the séance. He had left the room, deeply unsettled, though just why he could not say. Miles had located him in that upstairs hallway, just outside the bathroom door, crying.
The sight of the ghost sent him screaming down the stairs to his mother, who had led the way back up with her son shaking behind her. There had been no sign of Tim McConville, but Miles had never doubted what his eyes had seen, and his mother had never expressed any doubts either. She had believed him completely. God, how he had loved her for that.
He had seen the ghost of Tim McConville several times over the years, but he had never been as afraid as he had been that first time. When he was twenty-two and just home from college, he’d been up late watching an extra-innings Red Sox game and seen Tim standing behind the television, and he had tried to speak to the spirit of the dead boy. The ghost had not replied.
There had been several other ghosts as well, but no one he knew . . . just glimpses of translucent figures on the street or in the library, and once in a tiny Irish pub on East 19th Street in New York.
Ghosts. Miles tried to steady his breathing. His mother was dead. And what was that thing that had killed her? Was that a ghost?
The grief came at him in waves and he exhaled, letting the latest one pass. But along with the grief there had come shock and fear and confusion, and those came in waves as well. He sat up straight, swallowed hard, and, after a moment, somehow managed to control the fit of trembling that came over him.
Awful images flashed in his mind, things that filled him with dread. Just like the ghost of Tim McConville, he did not doubt the horror he had witnessed in his mother’s bedroom. The first police officer on the scene and the EMTs who had followed had all looked at her and turned away. What could they say about the withered skin and her sunken eyes? She looked like some kind of papier-mâché creation, as though she had been laid out and dried in the sun for weeks. There had been suspicious looks, and he knew they wondered if she had been dead a long time, and he had only just called. Maybe they thought he was taking her social security checks or something.
But then Don Kramer had shown up and had mentioned seeing her just the day before, and none of them were going to argue with the chief of police, no matter how impossible it might be that this woman had been dead only an hour.
Miles felt bile burning up the back of his throat. Ma. Oh, hell, Ma. What did it do to you?
That was the question he did not want to ask, and he certainly had no desire for an answer. In his mind’s eye he saw the horrible thing on top of her, hacking those smokescythes into her body and tearing out that nebulous light, that colorful radiance that looked almost like a butterfly . . . that bit of his mother’s life, or that part of her soul, that it took with it when it fled the house.
Miles had known death all his life. He hadn’t been prepared for his mother to die, but he had thought about it enough that he could have weathered it, could have managed the grief . . . if only he did not now have to ask himself a dreadful question. Was she at rest? Could she find peace beyond this life without whatever vital piece of her that thing had stripped away?
The stairs creaked under the weight of heavy footsteps. Miles turned to see Chief Kramer reach the foyer. The chief spotted him in the living room and came in to join him, perching on the arm of the sofa.
“Miles, I’m so sorry,” Chief Kramer said.
“Thanks, Don. I appreciate you coming by yourself.”
“Of course,” Chief Kramer said.
He looked genuinely upset, and Miles believed he must be. The Kramers had lived two houses over for years. Don might have been three years older than Miles, but he had never teased the younger boy and always included him in the baseball games and touch football matches and street hockey games in the neighborhood. And young Don Kramer had visited the Varick house often, too. Toni Varick made the greatest cookies the world had ever known, and Don was always welcome. They hadn’t been buddies, really—the age difference had been a major gulf in those early years—but Miles certainly considered Chief Kramer a friend.
“Is there anything you need?” Chief Kramer asked. “Right now, I mean?”
Miles shook his head. He tried to smile and knew he only managed a grimace. He threw up his hands, knowing his voice would crack with grief.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “Thanks, though. I’m just going to sit here for a while, let it sink in, you know?”
Chief Kramer nodded. As they were talking, the EMTs had been carrying the stretcher down the stairs. Strapped to it was a black body bag. Miles tried not to think of the dried husk inside it. That thing wasn’t his mother. His mother was gone.
As if to punctuate this thought, the EMTs put down the wheels on the stretcher, turning it into a gurney. The wheels rattled over the threshold as they rolled it out of the house, leaving only Miles and Chief Kramer, and just maybe the ghost of Tim McConville. Miles hadn’t said a word to the chief about what he had seen, the demon or whatever the hell it was, in his mother’s bedroom. Now he had begun to regret it. He hated the idea of Don Kramer thinking he had lost his mind, or been hallucinating or worse. But in a world where the publ
ic had been given ample evidence of the existence of demons—though many still didn’t believe in them—would the chief have thought him crazy? And did it really matter? What could one middle-aged police chief, or an entire police force, do against demons?
“All right,” Chief Kramer said. “Call me if you need anything, Miles. Truly. But I’ve got to head out. There was some kind of fracas down at the Troubadour and now the place is burning down.”
“In this storm?”
“Looks like.”
Miles shook his head. “What a fucked-up night.”
Something rippled across Kramer’s face—irritation, yes, but also a certain unease. But then he was retreating across the living room, headed for the exit. He had a job to do, and Miles didn’t begrudge him that. After the phone call he’d had from Amber earlier and the unearthly thing that had killed his mother—the thing that looked exactly like the creatures Amber had described from her vision—he knew that it wasn’t only his life that was unraveling tonight.
“I’ll call to check up on you in the morning,” Chief Kramer said, standing in the open door.
Miles lifted a hand in farewell but did not rise from the musty chair. “Tomorrow. Thanks, Don.”
Then the door closed, and Miles was alone in the silence of his mother’s house. For several minutes, he played the events of her death over again and again in his head. But then his thoughts began to slip back to the phone call he’d had from Amber right before he had gone up to his mother’s room. He thought about her dreams. She had insisted they were visions, and if he had been hesitant to believe her before, he had no more reservations. Amber had described in perfect detail creatures just like the thing that had killed his mother. Hawthorne wasn’t the kind of big city where most of the supernatural wars and skirmishes had been fought in the years since the world had learned the truth about magic and evil. But something evil had indeed begun to infest the town.
You should’ve said something to the chief, he chided himself. And he knew that he would. But Don Kramer might be the kind of guy who needed convincing, and a college girl’s dreams might mean nothing to him if he refused to believe in the creature Miles had seen. No, he needed more than wild stories and visions to get the chief’s attention.
Waking Nightmares Page 14