by Devin Hanson
Or not. Almost immediately, my phone started ringing again. I groaned and thumbed the phone over to speaker. “What do you want, Tovarrah?”
“Steven Martin is gone.”
My eyes snapped fully open and I sat up, the last threads of drowsiness burned away in an instant. “He died?”
“What? No. Gone. He escaped the hospital.”
“How? He was strapped in, right? Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t break free of those bonds.”
“We are still investigating, but I’m afraid it’s academic. How he broke free is less important than what he is doing now that he has.”
“Okay. Um. I agree. Sounds like you’ve got some sleuthing to do. Best of luck with that.”
“We need your assistance again, Alexandra.”
I fell back against my pillow with a sigh. “I don’t know what you expect me to do, Tovarrah. I was attacked last night by the ghoul and barely survived. Finding out why the ghoul is in LA is a much higher priority for me than figuring out where your charity case went.”
“You were attacked? I did not know.”
“Yeah, well. Now you do.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“I sympathize with your predicament, but you must consider what will happen if Mr. Martin is not located.”
“Let me guess,” I grinned sourly up at the ceiling. “He’s going to have sex with someone?”
“At the very least.” Tovarrah didn’t seem to find that as amusing as I did. “If he falls to the temptations of the demon, all our progress will have been lost.”
Ugh. As much as I wanted to blow off Tovarrah, I also couldn’t let my mother regain her power. God only knows how much that would complicate my life. “Okay. I get the point. I don’t suppose you have somewhere I can start looking?”
“I do. There is a… cousin of yours in town. Like you, he has refused his sire for the time being. He might know.”
“Why?”
“Steven is on the run. He needs a place to hide where the House cannot find him.”
“And you think a Nephilim he hasn’t met before will help him out?”
“It is not Steven the Nephilim will be helping,” Tovarrah pointed out. “The demon would be quite generous to anyone who aided it in gaining a foothold in this world.”
Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. “Okay, where do I go?”
“Vermont and 4th Street.”
I tapped the location into Google, and puzzled over the intersection, trying to figure out what was significant there. “Uh, he’s at a bowling alley?”
“Across the street.”
“The Sizzler?”
“You will find him holding court from noon until two.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous or anything. Are you coming too?”
I could hear the amusement in her voice. “I would not be welcome. Do try to be subtle, Alexandra.”
Tovarrah hung up and left me staring at the blank screen on my phone. What was a Nephilim doing at a Sizzler? I tried to picture Raveth, the only other Nephilim I had met, eating at a Sizzler and couldn’t wrap my head around it. Of course, Raveth was a son of Mammet, the Succubus of Greed. There wasn’t enough gold foil and caviar in the food items at Sizzler to satisfy Raveth.
I was curious. Despite my sense of misgiving, I wanted to see what kind of Nephilim would “hold court” at a buffet restaurant.
There was no way I was going to be falling back to sleep now, so I rolled out of bed. I was halfway to the door dressed in underwear and a chemise before I remembered there was not one, but two men in my house. While I wouldn’t mind reminding Sam what he was missing out on, our relationship was fragile enough already without me rubbing it in his face.
It took me a few minutes to get dressed for the day. The weather forecast suggested temperatures would be staying somewhere in the low fifties with a better-than-average chance of rainstorms, so I dressed as warmly as I could without my leather jacket. I really did need to find a replacement. Or maybe send it to a dry cleaner to see if it could be salvaged. I bagged the jacket in a spare pillowcase and headed out of my bedroom.
The smell of bacon hit me before I reached the kitchen and I walked in to find Sam and Ryan cooking. I went to lean on the island and drew in a deep breath. “I could get used to this,” I announced.
Sam threw me a grin over his shoulder. “Whenever I’m short a night of sleep, I try to make up for it with a big breakfast.”
“Did either of you get back to sleep?” I asked.
“He did,” Sam tilted his head at Ryan, who was working at the toaster, swapping out finished slices for fresh bread. “I might have a concussion, so I did not.”
“Oh, damn. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. I found some Advil. It’s not the first time I’ve taken a hit on the head. I’ll be all right. Oh, I’ve got good news: Lara called. After she was pulled from bed to deal with the body we sent her, she burned a little midnight oil herself. She thinks she finally got a break on the journal.”
“That is good news. Did she say what she found?”
“No, but she wants to meet in an hour or so.”
“I’ve no argument with that. How you doing, Ryan?”
Ryan turned around and slid me a plate with the two fresh slices of toast on it. His eyes had dark circles under them and his usual cheerful demeanor was muted. “Tired. Kept having rough dreams.”
I wasn’t surprised. That was the price anyone paid for sleeping under the same roof as me. That would have only been made worse by having had to kill an old man. I gave him a sympathetic smile. “Thanks. Maybe take it easy today? Try and take a nap once we’re gone.”
Ryan shrugged. “I was thinking of finishing cleaning out the garage again. There’s not enough to need a dumpster. I’ll pick up a U-Haul truck on a day rental and haul it to the dump myself. A little hard labor should take the edge off and let me sleep once it’s done.”
“That’s a good plan,” Sam said. “This… wasn’t your first time? With, ah…”
“Killing?” Ryan frowned to himself. “No. I’ve done that before. But not like that, with an axe.” He looked up and flashed a quick smile. “It’s much easier with a gun.”
I looked at Sam and raised my eyebrows.
Sam shrugged and scooped the last of the bacon out of the pan onto paper towels. “Either way, works up an appetite.”
“Amen to that, brother.” Ryan stole a couple slices of bacon and juggled them between his hands before he crammed the lot into his mouth. He closed his eyes and groaned in pleasure.
I rolled my eyes. Men. I took a slice of bacon from the offered plate and bit into it delicately. It was good, just salty enough to start my saliva flowing, with that crispy fat and savory meat that made bacon such an awesome breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner.
“Mm. That is good. Thanks, Sam.”
Sam kept cooking until I finally waved my hands in defeat. The two men divided the remains of my portion between them and kept packing it away with the bottomless appetites of teenagers and working men. Breakfast came to a close and Sam and I headed for his car. It was cold enough outside that I didn’t relish the idea of riding my scooter without an appropriate jacket.
After a quick stop at the dry cleaner to drop my jacket off, we went to the precinct and met Lara in a back room of the basement, where some techs had dissected what remained of the journal and laid its half-charred pages out in plastic sheathes like a museum exhibit.
Lara gave me a weary smile and a pair of disposable gloves, then gestured me closer to look at the pages.
“What am I looking at?” The handwriting was cramped and difficult to read. I tilted my head and tried to make sense out of the line. “Looks like a date… and… LAT? Los Angeles…”
“Times,” Lara finished for me. “It’s a record of news articles. I’ve tracked down a handful. It’s all third- and fourth-page anecdotes, National Enquirer-grade reporting.”
“Bat-child discovere
d? That sort of thing?”
“The Times is a respectable rag,” Sam shook his head. “They wouldn’t run something like that.”
“No, the articles are tame enough,” Lara agreed. “Lost child recovered, building burns down and all residents survive, head-on car collision with both drivers surviving.”
“Good news, in other words,” Sam said, puzzled.
“Well, you know how it is,” I shook my head. “Good news doesn’t sell.”
“There’s some additional notation along with the article. Initials, it looks like. I dug a little deeper, because it seemed strange. Not just that someone would bother recording it, but because our perp is going through so much trouble to destroy it. Take this one here. March of 2015, Jane Mathews, age six, missing for four months and discovered in an abandoned warehouse and returned to her parents. I googled the name and found additional details that the Times didn’t run. Understandably. Jane Mathews claims her five captors were beaten up by single man wearing a mask.”
A tinge of unease went through me. “They’re all vigilante stories?”
Lara looked at me in surprise. “You knew?”
I swallowed. “Let me guess, the last recorded date is late September this year.”
She blinked at me, then turned to check the last page. “29 September. Okay, Alexandra, spill.”
“That’s the date my apartment was destroyed,” I said quietly.
“You’re telling me this is connected to that serial murder case from October?” Lara demanded.
I held up my hands. “I don’t know.”
“That case is closed. You caught the murderer yourself,” Sam said.
I had run the servitor through an industrial shredder designed to turn cars into confetti. The murders had stopped after that, but I had only eliminated the active agent, not the source. “Yes, I stopped the murderer. But it might be more accurate to say I stopped the assassin.”
“What’s the difference?” Sam asked.
“Assassins are hired,” Lara said with a nod.
“These initials,” I said, running my finger down the list, “I bet they match up to the victims from October.”
“We’ll have to check… but I do recognize some of them, I think.” Sam frowned thoughtfully at the pages. “But what does that mean? Where does that lead us to next?”
“They’re finishing the job,” Lara said, then shook her head. “No, that isn’t right. There haven’t been any murders that we haven’t solved in the last couple days, and certainly none with the sort of profile those October victims displayed.”
“It’s connected, that’s all I know,” I said.
“So, hold up,” Sam said, waving his hands to bring the tumbling conversation to a halt. “All those murders in October, they were targeting vigilantes? That helped people?”
Lara paused then turned to me, an expectant look on her face. “Well?”
“Um.” Shit. This could get complicated fast. “Look, I didn’t know any of them personally, so I can’t say for sure. But that’s what this journal suggests, right? You’ll have to chase down every story to verify that’s what is actually happening, but it would certainly seem that way.”
Lara groaned and rubbed at her eyes. “The captain is going to be pissed. There isn’t room in the budget for another task force.”
“You know,” Sam said grimly, “if all these vigilantes were solving mysteries of the type that Alex deals with, then there’s going to be a giant void in Los Angeles. Forget a task force. We might need a new department.”
Lara dropped her hands and glared at Sam. “You’re not helping.”
“All that aside,” I said tentatively, “why would a ghoul come here to destroy these records? And who kept them in the first place?”
The room was plunged into silence while we pondered that question. My thoughts were paralyzed, running in circles. The ever-present threat of the vampires across the ocean loomed large. It seemed like I was the only person left to defend against the inevitable invasion. I couldn’t fight vampires. Hell, I couldn’t fight a vampire, singular.
I wasn’t completely alone, though. The Red House would help, but I doubted they had the numbers to put up any kind of resistance, or the muscle to be effective. And the servitor hadn’t killed every one of its targets. A good number had fled. They might be trickling back, but leery of opening new contact with each other.
We were isolated, out-numbered, out-maneuvered, and we didn’t know what was coming.
“If there were multiple journals, it wasn’t a single person doing the tracking,” Sam said, breaking the silence. “That implies an organization of sorts. There’s a purpose behind it. Payments, perhaps?”
“We could look into the finances of the victims from October. It’ll take a warrant, but that wouldn’t be impossible to get.” Lara nodded wearily, but she seemed to be warming to the idea. “If any of our victims received an unusual payment that coincides with an article, that could mean there’s a larger organization behind all this.”
I cleared my throat. “And, uh, what would our approach be to such an organization if we were to uncover it?” I had an image in my head of the police raiding the last bastion of defense against the vampires and dragging them away in cuffs. Or, alternately, the police coming away with heavy losses and starting a turf war that would lead to the same result.
“Vigilantism is illegal in California,” Lara said.
“But rescuing kidnapped children isn’t,” I protested. “Vigilantism implies carrying out civilian justice. These people were heroes, not killers.”
“She’s right,” Sam said.
“Thank you.”
Lara rolled a shoulder. “We’ll have to see where the rest of these entries lead. If you’re right, and no laws were broken, we can leave it at that.”
“You know,” I said irritably, “if you gave them a chance, you might find useful allies.”
“The government doesn’t ally itself with civilian forces—”
“Oh please. The government also doesn’t deal with ghouls and vampires and—”
“Vampires?” Lara coughed a laugh and held up a hand. “Okay. Sure. Sam, I’m going upstairs to start figuring out the manpower we need to track all this down. Why don’t you work with our consultant here and try to transcribe as much of this as you can? A link to the actual referenced news article would be best.” Lara gave me a tight-lipped smile and left.
“Shit,” I muttered once we were alone.
“Vampires, huh?”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Yeah, but you did. So. Vampires?”
I groaned and sat in a chair. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“At this point, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
“You know that saying is about throwing good money after bad, right?” I sighed. I had been doing a lot of research, and had the basics down. Enough to explain their origin, if not actually fight one. “Fine. Look, forget everything you know about Anne Rice’s vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula too. Bunch of nonsense.”
“Crosses, garlic, sunlight?”
“Well. Not the sunlight bit.” I rubbed my forehead. “Or garlic. Okay. We have to start earlier. God created the world—”
“Isn’t that a bit early?” Sam laughed.
I scowled at him. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
He waved a hand at me. “Sorry. Continue. God created the world?”
“Yeah. He created water, land, the sun, plants and animals. And a few other things.”
“And on the seventh day He rested.”
“Or whatever. Sure. The relevant bit comes after that. He created angels to help Him carry out His will to the furthest corners of the Earth. It wasn’t enough to have only animals and servants, though. He wanted creatures with free will to experience His creation.”
“And thus, He created humans from clay.”
“Not quite. First, He made the djinn from fire. Five forms of djinn were mad
e, exemplifying each of the five virtues. Or something like that.”
“We’re getting to vampires, right?”
“You’re not going to understand it unless we get through this background stuff first. If you don’t mind?”
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” I eyed Sam and considered dropping the subject, then sighed and pushed on. “The djinn provided free will to make the world interesting, but God wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a creation that was perfect, a harmonization of all virtues in one vessel. He created Adam, from clay, in His own image, and to Adam he gifted an angel to be his wife.”
“Woah, even I know Adam was married to Eve.”
“Not at first. Lilith was the first consort of man. But Adam was not satisfied, he wanted a bride of his own kind, so God created Eve from Adam’s rib.”
“Okay, I’ve heard that bit about the rib.”
“Yeah. Well, Lilith wasn’t exactly thrilled with being tossed aside in favor of a clone. She was actually the first of the angels to break from God’s will. She turned Eve’s thoughts to defiance against God and convinced Lucifer to declare his independence.”
“Women, am I right?”
I glared at Sam until he held up his hands in submission. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and the two humans were cast from Eden. Adam demanded retribution for Lilith’s betrayal. At God’s will, Lilith was cast from Heaven, and was cursed so that one of her spawn would die each day for all eternity.”
“Jesus. That’s a little grim.”
“This was before the New Testament. God was all retribution and fiery wrath in those days. Besides, it was that or be destroyed on the spot. She actually suggested the punishment, as the story goes. So, Lilith fled from Heaven and Lucifer came after her.”
“In solidarity?”
“Possibly. Nobody I know has actually asked him. If you don’t mind?”
Sam held up his hands again. “I’ll be good.”
“With Lilith and Lucifer fallen and forbidden access to the creation of God, Lucifer created a, I guess you would call it a demi-plane to live within.”