Demon Moon

by Meljean Brook

  She looked down at the infrared detector she’d pulled from her bag. “You don’t appear in reflective surfaces, like polished metals or still water or windows, but in mirrors, you see and hear Chaos. And you’re anchored to that realm by your blood, because of Michael’s sword and the changes it made in you when you were human. And maybe because the nosferatu whose blood Hugh and Lilith used to transform you had been killed with the sword, perhaps doubling the effect. Am I right so far?”

  At his nod, she continued, “Last year, Lilith and Hugh used your blood to send a group of nosferatu to Chaos. Hugh tricked them into drinking it during a ritual, and they gained an anchor to Chaos so that Michael could teleport them there. There’s no escape from that realm, no Gates. And only Michael and Selah can teleport, so there’s no possibility they’d get out. They hoped the nosferatu would be killed and eaten by the dragons and smaller creatures in that realm. But we know they haven’t all been eaten; if anything, the ones who live grow stronger.”

  “Yes.” His voice was flat.

  “But Michael lost his sword, which was his anchor to Chaos. He can’t go there.” A terrible thought occurred to her. “Has he tried to use your blood—body parts—as an anchor?”

  “Yes.” He stared straight ahead.

  Oh, god. Horrified, she said, “But it didn’t work?”

  “No. Go on, Savitri.”

  She really didn’t want to consider that, so she said, “So I think that Michael is using your ability to see Chaos to keep an eye on the nosferatu—and the wyrmwolf’s attack last month suggests that some kind of portal has opened. You immediately left for England, however, so Michael couldn’t keep watch over it. But now that you’re back, he wants you to use a mirror until they figure out what’s happening, and if the nosferatu in Chaos have something to do with it.” She took a deep breath and powered on the detector, checking its settings to keep her hands busy. “And I know that while I languished with boredom in Michael’s temple in Caelum, you were trapped in Chaos for almost a week, starving and almost mad. So I think seeing it now, even through the safety of a mirror, must be…unpleasant.”

  Terrifying. The lesson he’d taught her in Caelum had given her a very good idea of how terrifying.

  His fingers clenched on the steering wheel. “Castleford told you I could be teleported to Chaos? That I was mad?”

  “No. He wouldn’t divulge such a confidence, even if I’d asked. Nor did Lilith,” she said before he could ask. “I guessed. Are they still back there?”

  After another glance over his shoulder, he took an onramp toward the city center. Probably letting the vampires think they were headed to Polidori’s. “Yes. Forgive me for doubting you, Savi—but that’s a rather spectacular bit of deduction.”

  She tested the wide stylus against her legs; on the small handheld screen, her thighs appeared orange and yellow. “Not so spectacular. Lilith can’t be teleported anywhere because her anchor to Hell is too strong; if either Michael or Selah tried to take her from SI to our house, they’d end up Below. And if they did, even Michael couldn’t teleport her out—she has to go through a Gate.”

  With the press of a few buttons, she changed the display mode. The screen blanked, and a moment later read: Human .2 meters. She suppressed the little thrill that went through her; it was still a prototype, and hardly worth celebrating.

  She continued, “Selah teleported Hugh to my apartment the night Beelzebub and the nosferatu set fire to your house. Hugh told Selah to return for you in your basement before fetching a Healer for him, and she teleported away. Did she find you?” Savi was certain Selah had; Hugh had inadvertently told her as much the previous day.

  “Yes.”

  “But she didn’t come back. Hugh had been her mentor, and the injuries were bad. Really bad. If she could have, she’d have come back. And neither you nor she came to the hospital in the days following, before Michael took me to Caelum. I saw Selah in Caelum three days afterward; she was really shaken up. And when you came to Caelum, it was Michael who brought you…though, given that they were preparing to go against the nosferatu within hours, Selah would have been a more sensible choice to leave Earth at that time, even for a few moments. Unless she couldn’t bring you. So I think your anchor took you both to Chaos, but she couldn’t get you out. Until, eventually, she left you alone and went to find Michael. And he’s the one who brought you back.”

  “I should have let you question me,” he said. She looked over at him; his tension and stillness belied the rueful humor in his tone.

  Her throat tightened. There had been more. His hands, which had been immaculately manicured only a week before Caelum, had been reddened at the tips of his fingers, the nails half-torn away—as if he’d tried to claw his way out of something. Michael couldn’t have healed that; self-inflicted and human-caused wounds were beyond his power to repair. And Colin should have healed more quickly on his own, unless hunger had taken its toll and slowed the process. “I’m sorry.”

  He cast her a puzzled glance before maneuvering around a truck. “For what do you apologize?”

  “Dredging it up. I don’t always know when to stop.”

  “Must I remind you that I requested your recitation?”

  “I could’ve just asked, ‘What did Michael want from you?’ And you could have said, ‘He wants me to make a dreadful observation in a mirror, my sweet Savitri.’”

  A smile touched his lips. “Your accent is dreadful. What is that gadget?”

  “Just something I’ve been playing with—I pulled apart a pair of infrared goggles and a handheld game, made some adjustments to the display function. It’s for newbies, or humans who can’t quickly tell if someone is a human, a demon, or a vampire. I can see the differences after looking for a while, but this would take a temperature reading and tell me right away. And there aren’t any human agents at SI now, but eventually there will be. Without psychic abilities, they’ll need something like this. Only better—not a bunch of junk.”

  “There are humans: Castleford, Lilith…you.”

  “They can’t really be called human—and neither am I, not anymore. I wouldn’t be in this car with you if I were normal, would I?”

  “You weren’t normal before you ingested the venom, sweet; if you had been, I’d not have spent more than five minutes in your company.”

  Wrapped in such flattery, his confirmation shouldn’t have stung as much as it did, but at least he didn’t lie and pretend it was her, and not what he could get from her.

  “Anyway, I wanted to see if it could read through the spell to the vampires behind us.” She frowned down at the screen as she swept the stylus toward Colin, then switched to the IR display. Just a light green blob—no shape at all. “Except it doesn’t seem to be working now.”

  “It probably is. Try the vampires,” Colin said.

  She half-rose and turned to peer through the window behind them, saw the black Navigator as it passed beneath a streetlight. “Why do you still have an accent? You’ve lived in the States for a century.”

  Bright red filled the display: the SUV’s engine. The device was too primitive to separate the vampires’ data from the motor’s, but apparently it could detect heat from outside the spell’s protective shield.

  “Do you think it an affectation?” He sounded amused.

  “Maybe.” She settled back into her seat. “It probably makes it easier for you to hunt. You just say something poetic and they swoon.”

  He gave a heartfelt sigh, and said, “‘I die! I faint! I fail! / Let thy love in kisses rain / On my lips and eyelids pale. / My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast;—/ Oh! Press it to thine own again, / Where it will break at last.’” He lifted his hand from his chest and arched a brow. “‘The Indian Serenade,’ yet you are not swooning.”

  Only because she had something to support her. “Shelley has always struck me as overly dramatic and sentimental,” she managed.

  “My sweet Savitri—do not tell me
you are a cynic. I’ll not believe it. A skeptic, but not a cynic.”

  “No, I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary. Hugh and Lilith. My parents. Selah and Lucas. My best friend just married a man she’d met once before her wedding, and in her last e-mail she declared herself madly in love with him.” She shrugged. “I just think the odds of finding the perfect person are very low, particularly when you’ve got only sixty years to do it in. So most people either settle for security and fond companionship, or divorce when it doesn’t work out and keep on looking. Are you?”

  “I have also seen too much evidence to the contrary.” He smiled slightly. “And the odds have not increased over two hundred years, despite the reams of poetry I’ve recited.”

  “Perhaps your odds would increase if you wrote your own.”

  “I believe it would utterly destroy them. And I’ve no desire to become a starving poet. I’m content placing my failure at Shelley’s feet; I blame the poem for your resistance, not my recitation of it.”

  She met his eyes and bit the inside of her cheek to hold back her laughter when she saw the mirth reflected there. “You knew him, didn’t you? Shelley? Hugh once mentioned that you’d known John Polidori, and that you were near Lake Geneva the same year as he and Byron. So you must have encountered the Shelleys.”

  She didn’t miss the sudden darkening of his gaze before he nodded. “Yes. His wife had some sense, but Shelley was a bloody fool—though I suppose I was no less, at the time.” He paused, and a pleased expression lit his features. “Did you read his work for his connection to me, sweet Savitri?”

  “Hugh was a literature professor for years, and 1816 is a rather famous summer in the literary world. Ghost stories and competitions and all that. I also had a phase when I was a teenager and read tons of Romantic poetry. I don’t forget anything easily.” She worried her lip with her teeth, then added quickly, “But I’ll admit that I reread Frankenstein and The Vampyre after learning you were there. We’ve gone on a tangent: a century?”

  If he triumphed, he hid it well. “Auntie has lived here almost half that, and she still carries an accent.”

  “But her first language is different, and when she’s not hosting at the restaurant she’s talking to her friends in Hindi or Marathi. You speak English.” Was it possible that he didn’t talk to many people in San Francisco? Perhaps he only came into frequent contact with Hugh and Lilith—and more recently, those at SI.

  “That is true. I confess I prefer to speak English rather than American.”

  She rolled her eyes, smiling. Or maybe he was reclusive because he preferred his own rarefied company to the plebs’. “You are such a snob. You probably have Masterpiece Theater on all the time at your house. Do you call it a ‘telly’?”

  His shoulders shook. “No.”

  “At least there’s that, as televisions weren’t in development until the 1920s. If you did, it’d be proof of your affectation. You still say ‘bloody’ a lot, though.”

  “Given my lifestyle, it’s frequently appropriate.”

  Her laughter was cut short by a gasp as he whipped into an alley, plowed through a chain-link fence, scraped past a Dumpster, and accelerated onto a street, now headed in the opposite direction.

  Savi unclenched her fingers from his upper thigh and her door pull, and ran her palms down her jeans to wipe away the sudden perspiration. “Well,” she said shakily. “That’s one thing the symbols are good for: preventing scratches in your paint.”

  “I’d have warned you, but I rather like where your hand went.” He reached down beside his foot and fished for the IR detector that had flown from her grip.

  The vampires didn’t follow them through; she watched for them until Colin drove down another side street and her heart eased into a normal rhythm. “Gadgets, car chases, a suave British gentleman. I’m officially a Bond girl. I shall call myself Curry Delicious from this day forth.”

  He didn’t laugh; instead, he ran a slow perusal of her form. “The decorator and I performed the final walk-through of my house today. I have a new theater in the basement, and a collection of Bond DVDs. You should make use of me, Miss Delicious.”

  Her breath caught. “My Bond phase ended two years ago.”

  “My film library is ridiculously large. What is your newest obsession?”

  “A repeated one: horror noir anime. Why so extensive?”

  “I’ve little else to do during the day. My daysleep only comes upon me every five or six days, and I prefer to paint in the predawn hours.”

  “You can go out in the sun; you could leave your house.”

  “Yes, but it’s extremely uncomfortable.”

  Her brow furrowed in confusion. “In Caelum, you were out for hours.” For the first time she noticed she could think of Caelum without that familiar tightening in her throat, the dread of memory. Only a sense of wonder and loss.

  His tone echoed the same. “In Caelum, it was not painful.”

  She averted her eyes and studied the IR display with more attention than it deserved. The green blob wasn’t completely formless, she realized—it was the leather of his seat, absorbing his body heat.

  “Do you appear on any display? Film, digital cameras, video?”

  “No,” he said softly.

  Two hundred years, with nothing to confirm his existence but the gaze of others, his determination not to lose himself. Look at me. How many times had he asked her—begged her—to do that in Caelum? But she hadn’t…couldn’t.

  He obviously didn’t feel sorry for himself; so why did she suddenly feel like crying?

  She stared out the window, and asked nothing more the rest of the way.

  CHAPTER 9

  It is not that the Rules exist, or that I must abide by them; my anger originates from the insulting and outrageous notion that he thought it necessary to remind me of them.

  —Colin to Ramsdell, 1816

  Auntie’s sat between a beauty salon and a laundry, its colorful awning stretching over the sidewalk. It was a restaurant without pretension; though the menu boasted of authentic Bombay cuisine, an outline of the Taj Mahal surrounded the restaurant name. The décor was a mix of old Hollywood and new Bollywood, unapologetically invoking a stereotypical, homogenized vision of India. There was nothing subtle about it, and it catered to anyone who wanted spicy fare and an atmosphere that screamed foreign, exotic, and unreal.

  And it smelled incredible—Savitri, saturated. The few times he’d accompanied Lilith and Castleford, Colin had left starving, salivating, his hunts more desperate, the bloodlust deep.

  He dared not attempt several hours inside without soothing it first.

  Music pounded from the Bentley’s speakers; he’d turned it on to cover the silence that had fallen between them—the lull had been awkward for him, but apparently not for Savitri. He’d hoped she would interrogate him on his latest obsession with British punk, but she’d only closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest.

  She looked at him when he lowered the volume, then frowned as he pulled over in front of the restaurant and double-parked beside a green sedan. “You aren’t coming in? No kiss for Nani?”

  He watched her features carefully as he said, “I need to feed.”

  Her lips parted. “I assumed you’d already…” She smiled brightly, then gathered her bag from the floorboard. “It’s probably best if you go anyway; she’ll just try to force you to eat.” She blinked. “Eat food. Well, I’ll see you later then. Nani will give me a ride home after we close, so don’t worry about that.”

  That inane babbling. That ridiculously sunny smile. She’d worn the same expression outside Castleford’s house while thanking him for the night at the club. The smile that meant she’d thrown her shields up full-force.

  “I’ll return when I’ve finished,” he assured her.

  “Why?” Her smile wavered before it fixed to her lips again. She swung open the door and stepped out. “Oh. Of course. Happy hunting, Colin.”

 
Bloody fucking hell. “Savi—” The door didn’t slam; its design prevented such inelegant noise, no matter the force with which it closed. And she couldn’t have heard him. He clenched his jaw and wiped away the congealed drops on the dash.

  The bell above the restaurant door jingled as she disappeared inside.

  Why? Her question, and one she’d quickly answered for herself. He’d hoped his mention of feeding would pique her curiosity, stir her arousal. But he’d only succeeded in reminding her why he’d begun this slow chase and seduction, reducing the desire and budding friendship between them to fangs, blood, and his pursuit of her scent.

  A horn blared behind him. He suppressed a crude gesture and slid back into traffic. When had she forgotten his motives, that remembering them had engendered such a reaction? Certainly not on the ride over. So what new fear had he inadvertently raised?

  Unless it was not fear, but jealousy—and she’d reinforced her shields to prevent him from sensing it.

  Oh, sweet Savitri. He was grinning as he found a space in a parking lot two blocks away. The more he considered the notion, the more it made sense and the better it pleased him. An emotional entanglement might initially frighten her, but if he cultivated it along with her physical attraction, she’d be more likely to overcome any scruples she might have had in straying from her future husband.

  Poor sod. No matter how suitable he proved to be, he was going to lose Savi before he’d met her.

  Colin tucked his hands into his pockets and wandered from the parking lot to the courtyard of an apartment complex. He leaned his shoulder against a wooden trellis and waited; someone should happen by before too long. A more fascinating hunt waited back at Auntie’s—tonight, he’d let his prey come to him.

  A tired, feminine sigh alerted him to the woman’s presence before he saw her through the beveled-glass security door. She was dressed to go out in a flirty pink dress and heels, but she’d topped it with a worn beige coat. The bloodlust rose up within him, and he stroked his tongue against his fangs, soothing the hungry ache.