Dressed to Slay

by Harper Allen

  “Yes, that’s my oboroten,” I said slowly. “I think he might be a tiny bit pissed off at his old master for keeping me in the dark about how I can save my life. I’d better call him off as soon as I change into the clean clothes you brought me, Kat.”

  Before I give the wrong impression here, let me just say that I did hurry. No, really, I was out of my grubby Juicy pants and borrowed shirt and into the Paper Denim & Cloth jeans and Custo top Kat had brought in less than five minutes. Okay, ten, because I had a five-minute shower in between outfits, which is a land speed record for me. And brushing my hair only took a few minutes more. Still, there was quite a knot of nervous onlookers surrounding Darkheart and Mikhail when my sisters and I exited unit seven. Ignoring my fellow motel guests, I walked up to Darkheart and looked down at him.

  “Mom wanted us raised in a country where we wouldn’t be shackled by the past,” I said. “I respect you for carrying out her wishes. But you’ve got to respect us, too. We’re not the babies you remember, we’ve grown into women who can work with you, but not under you. Are we clear on that, Darkheart?”

  “Da, is clear,” he said, meeting my eyes. “Was total fuck-up on my part, granddaughter.”

  I was startled into a smile and saw an answering glimmer of humor in his gaze. “And from now on you’ll keep us in the loop?”

  He nodded, the flash of humor I’d seen disappearing from his expression. “I lost daughter through my own fault,” he said quietly. “Will not make same mistakes with granddaughters.”

  There was no mistaking the throb of emotion in his tone. Before the leaky water main behind my eyes could go into action again, this time with an audience of strangers surrounding me, I gave Darkheart a quick nod. “I’ll see you just before sunset tonight.” I snapped my fingers sharply. “Mikhail, release!” Immediately the huge wolf moved away from Darkheart to my side. “Come on, big guy, we’re going for a car ride,” I said as I turned toward my parked Mini.

  “You know I had no choice about what I did back there,” Mikhail said a few minutes later. He’d transformed from canine to human form in the backseat and now he maneuvered his jeans-clad legs into the front of the car before wrestling himself the rest of the way into the passenger seat.

  “Even so, it was sweet of you to almost savage an old man in my defense,” I retorted. “But I think you did have a choice,” I added in an undertone.

  He gave a short laugh. “If you’re trying to convince yourself I went for Darkheart because I’m beginning to feel something for you, you’re wrong. My mandate’s simple—someone puts you in harm’s way, I go after him. Anton should have told you there might be an escape clause to becoming a vampire, to save you the pain I saw you going through last night.”

  I took my gaze briefly from the road. “You saw my pain last night,” I said disbelievingly. “Yeah, right. You saw my pain so deeply that it was all you could do to stay awake while I poured my heart out. Mike, honey, a word of advice—stick to what you do best, which is glaring and growling. Don’t try to pretend you’re a sensitive male.”

  “I’m not,” he folded his arms across his chest. “I couldn’t be even if I wanted to. In case you haven’t realized it, I’m not human the way you are or Anton is, and my responses aren’t always human, either. That doesn’t mean I’m insensitive, it just means I’m part wolf.” He was silent a moment. “Besides, I was getting a lot of sensory input from you last night,” he muttered. “I was trying to filter that out while I was listening to what you were saying.”

  “Sensory input?” I asked curiously. “Like what?”

  “Like nothing.” He seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “Just a wolf thing, it’s not important. Do you have a destination in mind, or are we just driving aimlessly?”

  “I have a destination in mind,” I said, proving it by slowing for a left turn. “But really, I’m interested. What kind of sensory input were you getting from me?”

  He looked out the window beside him. “Scent.”

  “You mean you could smell Zena on me?” I sighed in exasperation. “Look, enough with the telling me I reek of vamp. I get it. I’m tired of hearing it. I don’t need to be reminded of it everytime we talk—”

  “Sex.” His interruption was barely audible.

  “Sex?” I repeated, confused. “What do you mean, se—” Appalled understanding suddenly swept through me. I shot him a furious look, heard a car horn blare, and jerked the Mini’s wheel just in time to avoid clipping another car. “I didn’t have sex with Van last night,” I said tightly. “Maybe I wanted to, but just when things started heating up between us, you crashed our party! So there’s no way I gave off any kind of scent, okay? And for your information, I shower afterwards, anyway. God, I can’t believe you!”

  “I didn’t say I could smell a man on you, I said I could smell sex. Your sex—the heat you felt.” He took his gaze from the window and directed it at me. I kept my eyes straight forward and felt the burn in my cheeks. “So what’s he like, this Van Ryder who got you so hot?”

  “He’s a human,” I snapped. “He’s funny and considerate and interesting and like I told you last night, he’s up on the whole vamp thing, from his time with the LAPD. And yes, he’s totally hot. Can we talk about something else? Start looking for a trailer park, I think there’s one around here somewhere.”

  “You try shape-shifter sex, you never go back,” Mikhail observed, looking out the window again. “Why a trailer park?”

  “Dream on,” I snapped in response to his comment before answering his question. “Cherry, the stripper I had to stake last night, mentioned she lived in a trailer. I want to find an address for her parents so I can let them know she’s dead.” The bright day seemed to cloud over as I remembered her dying words.

  “Okay.” Mikhail was silent for a moment, and then he cleared his throat. “That’s really considerate of you. You must feel pretty sad about having to stake her, and I imagine that writing to her parents is going to be hard for you. Do you want to talk about it?”

  He sounded so much like a bad imitation of Barbara Walters that I couldn’t help myself. I laughed, and all of sudden the day was sunny again. Mikhail glared at me, I laughed harder and slowly his glare faded.

  “I thought I’d give it a shot, but it’s not me, is it?” Smiling wryly, he reached over and tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear. “It’s not that I don’t feel these things, it’s just that I don’t think of putting them into words. I get a constant flow of information from you without you saying a thing, and I forget that your senses don’t work like mine.”

  His teeth gleamed white against the tan of his skin. The June breeze coming in through the partially opened windows ruffled the midnight blackness of his hair, while the sunlight glinted off the silver-chunked strands. His one-sided smile created a slash of amusement in his cheek and as his gaze rested on me I could pick out tiny flecks of green mixed in with the hazel and gold. Shape-shifter sex probably involved a lot of ripped clothes, I mused…screams of ecstasy…multiple orgas—

  “Trailer park.” Mikhail’s voice sounded strangled. “Over there. Make your turn.”

  I felt as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice-water on me. Jerking my attention back to the here and now, I saw a poorly paved drive leading from the road and cranked the Mini’s wheel over to make the turn. A peeling sign announced Shamrock Trailer Court, but I barely took it in.

  “You sensed what I was imagining, didn’t you?” I said between clenched teeth. I braked the car. “It was idle curiosity, okay? People do that—they think of things all the time, like how would it feel to do it in a balloon, is tantric sex really all it’s cracked up to be, what would it be like to have a one-night stand with a stranger. Thinking about something doesn’t mean you’re panting to do it.” I took a breath and looked at the group of mobile homes at the end of the paved drive. “This can’t be the right trailer court.”

  “Why not?” Mikhail’s tone was as clipped as mine.

  “Be
cause Cherry said it was near a park and there’s nothing but factories and warehouses around here.” I flicked a glance at him. “So was I close?”

  “Pretty close,” he replied without returning my glance. “And the multiple orgasms part was right on track.”

  “I see.” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel for a second, but stopped when I realized it was beginning to hurt. “I guess we’d better keep looking for the trailer court near Rodney Park,” I said, putting the Mini in gear. “Or Rodnaye Park. However Cherry pronounced it, I’ve never heard of—”

  “Rodnaya?” Mikhail asked slowly.

  I looked at him. “That sounds right. Do you know it?”

  “It’s not a park,” he said, his gaze darkening. “Rodnaya pochva means native soil…and to a vampyr, that literally means earth from the country he or she once called home. We’ve found Zena’s daytime resting place.”

  Chapter 14

  Except we hadn’t found Zena’s daytime resting place, of course. We’d narrowed our search down to a few square miles, maybe, and if you think that sounds promising, all I can say is you try playing find-the-vamp in an area that size.

  Part of our problem was that the trailer park was plunked down in the middle of abandoned farm acreage; now zoned as future light industrial, according to the signs by the side of the road bearing a faded picture of a realtor with the unfortunate name of Steve Butt. So we’re talking fields and slogging through waist-high grass everytime Mikhail spied a falling-down barn or an empty farmhouse on the horizon. Old farmsteads, apparently, were prime locations for old wells.

  “See, if I were Zena, this is not the first place I’d think of when I was looking to settle in with my box of dirt and my toaster-oven,” I observed as we climbed yet another rusty barbwire fence. “I mean, a dry well? You can toss around all the silk-covered throw cushions you want, and it’s never going to be Home Beautiful.”

  “Wells are dark,” Mikhail answered, transferring the coiled length of nylon rope we’d bought at the beginning of our well expeditions from one shoulder to another.

  “I’m just saying we could have checked out some of those warehouses near the trailer park after lunch before resuming our down-on-the-farm routine,” I argued.

  Abruptly he stopped walking. “Close your eyes.”

  “Why?” I was in no mood for games.

  “Just do it,” he said implacably.

  Feeling like an idiot, I did. “Okay, they’re closed,” I said, tapping my foot on a clod of dirt. “Can I open them—”

  “Don’t talk. Be still for a moment and listen.”

  I wanted to ask him what I was supposed to be listening for, but I decided that the fastest way to get this over with would be to do what he wanted. Stopping my foot-tapping and keeping my eyes closed, I listened.

  To nothing. Well, maybe not nothing; from somewhere in the field the single violin note of a red-wing blackbird pierced the air and I could hear the breeze riffling the grass all around me. The summer sun felt warm on my skin, and as I inhaled I could almost taste it, like sweet butter, on my tongue. Another unidentifiable smell lent a faint cool top note, like a wash of blue over a watercolor.

  I opened my eyes and saw a cornflower, the pale saturation of its petals almost hallucinogenic in intensity, swaying in the grass a few feet away from me, as deeper back in the field the blackbird took wing. The flight of the bird and the fragility of the flower seemed suddenly to twist at my heart.

  “Isn’t this better than being stuck in a warehouse?” Mikhail was saying, but I barely heard him.

  “This is what I’ll lose,” I said in a low tone. “If I turn vamp, I’ll never experience the world in the daylight again. Zena will have taken all this from me.” I looked at him. “You know why I didn’t want to tell Darkheart and my sisters what we learned today, don’t you?”

  Slowly he nodded. “You want to be the one who stakes her. But if we’re still looking tomorrow, we’re going to have to ask them to help.”

  “Because I’m running out of time or because the honor of killing Zena should go to a Daughter of Lilith?” I shrugged. “I know—a little of both. I won’t argue with that, but let’s cross this last well off our list of places where she isn’t before we call it a day.”

  The silence between us as we resumed walking wasn’t uncomfortable, but I needed conversation to take me away from my thoughts. “I’m sure Kat and Tashya got a lesson on the meaning behind the term Daughter of Lilith, but I must have been playing hooky that day. Wasn’t Lilith supposed to be Adam’s first wife, the one before Eve?”

  “According to legend. The stories say that the first time God made man and woman, they were both created from dust. Since she’d been made the same way Adam had been, Lilith didn’t see why she should be considered inferior to him and when he tried to order her around, she told him to go fuck himself.” A corner of Mikhail’s mouth tugged upward. “Or words to that effect. Adam went whining to God, Lilith ended up banished from Eden and Adam was given the chance to create a wife to his own personal specifications. Except what he ending up creating was a soulless monster, Bala…or as Anton calls her just before he spits on the ground and crosses himself, the Mother of All Vampyrs.”

  “So vamps are yet another world problem created by the male of the species,” I said dryly. “Why do I get the feeling that it fell to a female to clean up Adam’s mess? And why do I also get the feeling that the reason for the bad rap Lilith’s gotten over the years is because men don’t like to admit they had to call on a woman to save their asses?” I frowned. “After she killed Bala, how’d Lilith get pregnant with a daughter to start the whole Daughter of Lilith thing? I mean, there was only one available man—please don’t tell me she went back to her ex.”

  We’d reached the farmhouse’s yard. Earlier in the day I’d nearly plunged through some rotted boards covering the first well we’d found, so I came to a halt as I waited for his answer.

  He stopped, too. “No, Lilith never went back to Adam. Her hunt for Bala took years, and by the time they finally had their showdown, Lilith’s daughter was a woman herself. Who her father was isn’t exactly clear, but again, according to the stories, Lilith consorted with demons during her banishment.”

  “A girl’s gotta take it where she can find it,” I said dubiously. “The woman deserved some R & R, after all, what with having to kill Bala, plus going after all the vamps she created.”

  He shook his head. “Lilith staked Bala, but the wounds she’d received in their battle were mortal. It was left to her daughter to carry on the fight against Bala’s creatures.”

  “And her daughter’s daughter, and so on right up to Kat today?” My guess confirmed by his nod, I began to walk carefully through the weeds, looking for the broken bricks or splintered wood that would indicate a long-disused well. “Totally unfair that Lilith didn’t get made a saint or something.”

  “Her bones were protected as relics for centuries,” Mikhail said, squatting down suddenly and parting the grass. “But they disappeared during some long-ago war and…here it is.”

  He unslung the coiled nylon rope from his shoulder while I donned leather work gloves, bought at the same time as the rope, and started to clear clumps of grass from the well opening. This one’s cover was dangerously rotten, and I made a mental note to contact Steve Butt and threaten to raise hell if his realty company didn’t do something about the safety of their properties.

  “Ready?” I asked Mikhail as he walked back to me from the gnarled apple tree around which he’d tied one end of the rope.

  He threw the other end down the well’s exposed mouth. “You want me to leave any spiderwebs for you?”

  “No, thanks.” I grimaced. “You can have the pleasure of brushing them away.”

  He put on a pair of gloves similar to the ones I was wearing and grasped a length of the tough yellow nylon. Tugging on it, he backed up a step to the well and then began walking down its walls, his feet and back braced against the st
one interior, his gloved hands gripping the rope. I peered over the edge, but after he’d descended a few feet I couldn’t see him any longer. I began to descend, too, my thoughts on the man in the darkness below me.

  “You try shape-shifter sex, you never go back,” I muttered with a snort. “Mikey-baby, you may have your problems, but a shrinking ego’s not one of them. To be fair, though, you haven’t been as much of a pain in the ass today as you usually are.”

  In fact, I reflected as the last of the light from the opening above was swallowed up and the beam from the flashlight clipped to my belt became my sole source of illumination, Mikhail hadn’t been a pain in the ass at all, which left him with only three drawbacks as far as I was concerned. One: He and I were still bound together. Two: He spent at least a third of his time as a wolf—not his fault, but it shifted him from the totally hot male category to the totally-hot-except-when-he’s-got-four-legs category. And three: He didn’t have melted-chocolate eyes.

  My heels hit the ground and I released my grip from the rope. Surprised that I hadn’t bumped into Mikhail, I swung my flashlight around the well’s interior. Here at the bottom it was relatively wide, about six feet in diameter, and like the others we’d explored, dry as a bone. A century and a half ago when these early homesteads had been built, Maplesburg had been a tiny village, but over the years it had grown into a large community that had needed to divert and control its water supply. As a result, the water table here had lowered.

  But I wasn’t exactly in a Mister Science mood at the moment. My hand was already on the stake shoved into a belt loop on my jeans when Mikhail’s voice floated eerily out of nowhere to me.

  “…opens into a tunnel. You coming?”

  The beam of my light darted across the stone walls of the well and halted at a dark hole. My heart lurched in my chest. “Are you serious?”

  “…gets easier…” His voice grew fainter as I mentally took back what I’d said about him not being a pain in the ass.