I heard the crackling sounds of walls collapsing above and jumped for all I was worth for clean air and sky. I hurtled up through the fire like a scrawny, retarded phoenix, landing just long enough for my pants to catch fire, then executed another jump that would have made Jordan retire out of pure jealousy. With solid ground under me, I hotfooted—pun intended—it back to the truck where Greg and King were waiting.
King pulled a small fire extinguisher from his rolling garbage dump of a vehicle and sprayed us down. I dumped Abby into the bed of the truck and hopped in beside her.
“Get us the hell out of here,” I yelled, then fell to my knees as King floored the gas pedal.
I had just enough time to make it to the side of the truck before the contents of my stomach and lungs came up. Black bits of ash mixed with blood and beer as King shifted into high gear and booked it out of the cemetery as the emergency vehicles started rolling in. I reached into my pocket for my phone to text Sabrina.
Then, suddenly, the really bad news hit me. Despite the fact that my shoes were still smoldering, I got goose bumps and started to shake uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong with you?” King asked through the rear window of the truck.
“Sabrina wasn’t in there.”
“That’s good, right?”
“They’ve got her,” I clarified, staring at the lightening horizon.
“Are you sure?” King asked.
“She wasn’t in the apartment. Even through all the smoke I would have smelled her. They took Sabrina,” I said. “And it’s almost sunrise.”
“So you can’t go after them, if you even knew who ‘them’ was,” he replied.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. I told them about the letters painted on the wall over Abby’s head.
“Sounds like pretty solid evidence to me, but we still need to get you three indoors before you catch fire. Again,” King said. “So, where to?”
“Only one place we can go when all hope is lost.” I pointed him toward a left turn.
“A bar?”
“Church.”
Chapter 15
The sky was getting light when we pulled into St. Patrick’s. I directed King around to the rectory. I beat on the door for what felt like an hour until a sleepy young priest finally opened it.
“Can I help you?” he mumbled, tugging his shirt around to get the collar just right.
“Where’s Mike?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry, sir. Father Mike is on medical leave for a few weeks. He’s having surgery today. Is there something I can help you with?”
Oh, crap. I’d forgotten about Mike’s surgery in all the fighting, shooting and burning. “No, thanks, Father. It’s personal with Mike and me. We go way back.”
I saw the humor in his eyes and remembered that I had stopped aging at twenty-three. Mike and I were the same age, but he looked a lot older than his almost-forty, while I still got carded from time to time when buying booze. Good thing for me I usually stole my booze from my dinner dates.
The young priest asked again if I needed any help, and while help was exactly what I needed, or at least near the top of the list, I couldn’t ask for help or blood from an unsuspecting clergyman. I thanked him again and limped back to the truck. My back and neck were really starting to sting from the fire, and I just hoped that I could heal burns, or Abby and I weren’t going to be nearly so attractive anymore. Greater loss for her than for me, but I’d grown accustomed to my face, as the song went, and I didn’t want it to be all melty for the rest of eternity.
“What’s wrong?” King asked, as I got back in the truck.
“My contact at the church, who happens to be one of my very best friends in the world, is in the hospital having a tumor the size of a golf ball removed from his esophagus today. I’d completely forgotten about this relatively important event because my house was just burned down. Or up, since it was a basement. My best friend and business partner is riding around in a werewolf’s pickup truck trying to heal from being thrown off a roof, and my new protégé is in the bed of said pickup while she tries not to scream in agony from being staked to a wall and set on fire. Add the fact that I just got my ass kicked by the Master of the City, a vampire I never even knew existed, and I’m having a pretty crappy night. Oh, yeah, and the closest thing I’ve had to a girlfriend since 1993 was just kidnapped by a group of stoner vampires, and I can’t do anything about it because the sun is coming up. So as far as ‘what’s wrong’ goes, did I leave anything out?” My voice might have gotten a little shrill by the end of my recitation, and the possibility existed that I bared a little more fang than I really intended, but those things could happen.
“Nah, I think you covered it,” King replied. “So what are you gonna do about it?”
“Thanks to this little issue I have with the sun, which is quickly rising, I’m going to do the only thing I can—namely, call in some reinforcements that don’t share my sunburn problem.”
“Sounds like a fair plan.”
“I’m so glad you approve. Now, do you have anywhere we can crash, preferably with a supply of B-negative in the fridge?”
“Nope, after our little run-in with Krysta last night my hotel is probably being watched, and it has too many windows, anyway.”
“All righty then, Plan D it is.” I opened the door and dropped the tailgate.
“Plan D?” The werewolf asked, as I tossed Abby over my shoulder and started walking into the cemetery behind the church.
“Yeah, grab Greg and follow me,” I called over my shoulder.
“Follow you where?” he asked, but he did as I said.
Where was a sizable crypt Greg and I had used on a few occasions when we were having issues with hallowed ground. It turned out that was all a psychological thing, not a mystical thing, but it never hurt to have a few extra hideouts up your sleeve. Or in your armpits if your sleeves had been burned off. The crypt was one of those old family ones that were more common in New Orleans than North Carolina, and there were no dates more recent than 1910, so we’d used it from time to time to crash. There was a big open space in the middle, a couple of benches on one wall and about two dozen plaques on another wall where the coffins were stored. I dropped Abby onto one of the benches, and King settled Greg on the floor along the wall with the plaques.
When we had the wounded settled as comfortably as possible, I sagged against the wall furthest from the door and pulled out my cell phone. It was wrecked. The screen was shattered, and all that happened when I pushed the buttons was kind of a sad clicking sound. I rolled Greg over and grabbed his phone. Of course, even after falling off a building, his shock-resistant, water-resistant, fall-proof, titanium-coated cell phone cover kept his smartphone from getting busted. I scrolled through his contact list for a minute until I came to the name I was looking for, then dialed.
“What do you want?” Anna’s voice crackled across the telephone wires. Anna was a local witch and good friend of Mike’s who had helped us out once or twice in the past. She kinda hated my guts, but I was hoping that she’d do a little tracking spell for me on Sabrina’s behalf. Strong women working together, that kind of thing.
“Hi Anna, how are you?” I put a fake pleasantness into my voice whenever I spoke to her. I didn’t really have anything against the woman, but she really, really didn’t like vampires.
“I’m fine, Black. What do you want?” she repeated.
“I need your help.”
“No.” She hung up. I stared at the phone for a minute, then dialed her again.
She answered. “I said no.”
“Wait! It’s for Sabrina,” I shouted into the phone.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Anna answered in a much more pleasant tone.
“You didn’t give me a chance. You hung up on me.”
“I don’t like you. I thought that was a perfectly reasonable response to receiving a phone call from someone I don’t like while sitting in the hospital waiting room as so
meone I do like is undergoing surgery for a potentially life-threatening cancer. You did remember about that little event, didn’t you?”
Shit. She was with Mike. Where I should have been, if I wasn’t trapped in a crypt with two vampires and a werewolf waiting for sundown.
“Yes, Anna, I remember Mike’s surgery, and I will get there to visit him as soon as I can. Please tell him that for me.”
I guess she heard something in my voice that flipped her bitch switch to the “off” position for a few seconds, because her answer was surprisingly gentle. “I will. I promise. Now what do you need?”
“Sabrina was kidnapped by vampires. I think they’ve got her at a house near the college, but I need some daytime intelligence gathering. Can you help?”
“Yes. Do you have anything of hers that I can use for a locator spell?” I did, but it all got burned up with my apartment. Then I remembered, and reached for my wallet. I opened the tattered leather bifold, and there, tucked in the folds behind a couple of twenties and my membership card to an upscale strip joint, was a little white rectangle.
“I’ve got her business card. Will that work?”
“That’ll do in a pinch. Mike’s in surgery now, so I’ll come over, do the spell, and be back here before he’s out of recovery. Where are you?”
I gave her directions, she muttered something about stereotypes, and told me she’d be there in twenty minutes.
I paced until the knock came at the door, and Anna came through, looking much more civilized than the rest of us. Of course, in our defense, she hadn’t been thrown off a building, fought a couple of über-vampires or spent any time in a burning building in the past twelve hours, so she could still look nice in a long rust-colored pleated skirt and white top. She looked around the crypt like she didn’t want to touch anything, and I didn’t really blame her.
“Who are all these people? And what the hell happened to that poor child?” She moved toward Abby with an outstretched hand, but I stepped in front of her. Her eyes widened at my speed, and she staggered back a step.
“Sorry,” I said, taking her arm to steady her. “That’s Abby. She just got turned, then staked to a wall and set on fire. Probably better to let her sleep right now, if you don’t fancy being her breakfast.”
“I’m Kyle King. I kill vampires,” King said from where he sat on the floor with his back to a wall. He didn’t get up, just offered a lazy wave.
“A profession I approve of wholeheartedly,” Anna said.
One of these days I was going to dig into why she hated vamps so much, but this wasn’t it. “Abby got set on fire, King and I got our asses kicked, and Greg got thrown off a building. And Sabrina was kidnapped. So it’s been a night. Can you help us find Sabrina?” I asked.
Anna held out her hand and I gave her the business card. “Yes, I can feel her. There’s a connection with this. It’s weak, but enough to cast a locator spell and to scry her briefly.”
“Scry her?” I asked.
“I can cast a spell that will allow you to see her. You will see her as she is right now, and you will see whatever is happening to her. You will not be able to communicate with her, and there will be no sound, only images.”
“Do it,” I said. Anna looked at me, not the “look at this idiot” looks she usually gave me, but a sharp look with a little fear in it. I didn’t care. She wasn’t going to be the only person afraid of me before this was through.
Anna cleared off the top of a big sarcophagus in the center of the room, then drew a circle in the dust on top. Around the inside of the circle she drew symbols, all kinds of squiggly lines and geometric shapes. She set the business card in the center of the circle and murmured an incantation. The business card began to glow, then flared with a bright white light that made me turn away. When I looked back, the card was glowing with a pale blue light.
Anna reached into the circle and took the card. She handed it to me. “This will lead you to Sabrina. You will feel a tug in the direction you should go. It is not precise, and the object may have formed a stronger bond with other objects in her possession than with the detective herself, but as long as they are together, this should locate her.”
“Thanks,” I said. I handed the card to King. “Can you take this and go to campus? Between this and your nose, you should be able to pick up her trail. When the sun goes down, we’ll head out there together.”
“Yeah, I can do that. I’ll even wait for you to start the staking party.” King left, and I heard the sound of his big pickup roaring to life. I turned back to Anna. “You said something about scrying?”
“Yes. I can do this, but just for a moment. Stand back.” She waved her hands over the circle again, and murmured more Latin or whatever. The surface of the stone coffin shimmered, then transformed into an image of Sabrina tied to a chair in a lush apartment somewhere. She had a black eye, and a split lip and her clothes were torn, but it looked like no serious damage had been done.
A big vampire was drinking from her when the image swam into view, and I stood there, frozen. I couldn’t turn away, but I knew there was nothing I could do, either. The vamp, a linebacker-sized white guy with a crew cut, drank a little, then pulled back and waved another vampire over. The next guy came at Sabrina from the front, earning himself a headbutt for his troubles. She hit him square in the face with her forehead, and I laughed a little as he spun back. I could tell he was swearing even without the audio track.
The big guy cuffed her in the back of the head. I stared hard at the image, fixing him in my mind’s eye. That one dies slow.
“I can’t hold the image much longer,” Anna said, her voice shaky.
“It’s fine. She’s okay for now. Thank you, Anna.” I turned away from the scrying and went to the door, taking a self-indulgent moment to kick it and swear before I turned back to the witch.
“How’s Mike?” I asked when I had myself back under control.
“Scared. This is a bad type of cancer, James. I don’t know how much he’s told you, but it’s bad.”
“Are there good kinds?” I asked.
She gave me a pitying little smile. “There are certainly kinds with higher survival rates.”
Once again I was forced to think about the possibility of a world without Mike in it. Then the obvious solution came to mind, and I shoved it aside. I could no more turn Mike than I could turn Sabrina. Besides, his religion was kinda founded on a resurrection of a different flavor.
My eyes met Anna’s again. “No,” she said. Her mouth was a tight little line. “Don’t even think it. He’d never let you. And I’d kill you if you tried.”
I looked down at the witch and said, “Lady, I’ll put up with a lot. Threats are fine. Insults are just peachy. But you try and come between me and my best friend when he’s sick and I will end you. I won’t bother turning you. I’ll just shoot your ass. Mike’s one of my oldest and best friends. I’d do anything for that man. But I am not bringing another vampire into this world, not even for him.” We stared at each other for a long time, almost daring each other to look away.
Finally Anna nodded once and said, “Good. I believe you. Now what are you going to do about your lady friend?”
“As soon as King gets back with a location, I’m going to make a plan. Then when the sun goes down, I’m going to get her back and leave a lot of dead vampires in my wake.”
“Sounds good. I’m going back to the hospital. You can call me later for word on Mike’s condition.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks.”
She left, and I was stuck in a crypt pacing a hole in the floor waiting on King to come back. Greg and Abby were still out cold, and I left them that way. With the injuries they’d sustained, there was nothing I could do for them. Rest was the best solution. Too bad I couldn’t get any.
Fortunately for my nerves, King got back less than an hour after Anna left.
“What’s the deal?” I asked as soon as he got the door closed.
“The little locator
thingy led me back to the house, but I couldn’t see anything inside. There were some serious blackout shades over all the windows, and the doors were all locked tight. I decided breaking in was probably not the stealthy approach we were looking for, so I came back here.”
“So she’s there.” I cracked my knuckles.
“Or at least her stuff is there. Remember, the witch said—”
“Yeah, I remember what she said. It’s still the best lead we’ve got.”
“Now what?” King asked.
I stared at the light under the crypt door. “Now we wait for the sun to go down, and then we go kill a lot of vampires.”
Chapter 16
King sat with his back blocking the door, just in case anyone got too enterprising during the day, and we tried to get a few hours’ rest before I went off to tear a pack of vampires into little bat-shaped pieces.
That whole thing about us passing out as soon as the sun came up was a myth, like so much of what people had written about us over the years, but the second I sat down, the events of the night caught up with me, and all the anger, fear and pain washed over me like a tidal wave. I went crashing down into a deep sleep for the next three hours or so.
I woke up with a stiff neck and a bad attitude. Greg and Abby were still out of it, both looking terrible. King’s eyes snapped open the second I stirred, and by the time I had my feet under me, he was standing with a hand under his jacket.
“Relax,” I said. “Nothing going on, just me.” The werewolf relaxed and sat back down against the door. I leaned over to Greg and shook him awake.
“Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his head and wincing at the new bruises he’d accumulated in his fall. He’d been out cold when I dragged him inside, and he looked around in confusion for a minute.
“Crypt behind Mike’s place,” I muttered.
“What’s on fire?” He took a couple of deep breaths and tried to get up, but he was still too beat up to stand for more than a few seconds.
“Nothing now. The college vamps burned our place down.”
“Burned?” Greg asked in a small voice.
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