“Is this the team?” Slack-jawed, Lucas goggled at Cora. He pointed at himself before flicking his finger to Red and Quinn. “To go investigate the Burrows—unstable tunnels dug by vampires spun on meth-laced blood. Us three? This team?”
“And Joe Chang.” Cora’s smile hung crooked and brittle. “Let’s have positive mindsets.”
Lucas snorted. “Positivity doesn’t help when you’re fighting in a basement.”
“You aren’t going into a tunnel,” Cora snapped, then pressed her hands together as if centering herself before she spoke again. “I’m releasing my own negativity around everything that happened in ’93 to bring you in, Lucas. However, if this is uncomfortable and you want to set a boundary, I respect that.”
The two vampires studied each other like wild west duelists. They had their weapons up at metaphorical high noon, waiting for the other to blink.
“There are other members of this team who are committed.” Cora smiled, the airy tone returning to her voice. It wasn’t a blink. It was upping the ante. She turned to Red. “Have you piloted a drone or used such software before?”
“Assisted a few times.” Red wet her bottom lip. Her stomach sank as she realized Cora’s power flex. She owed Cora, even if she didn’t have an interest in keeping a souled vampire leading the city. As a free agent, Lucas was in the black, but he wouldn’t skip a hunt if Red was there.
“Good. I need recon. I need it tonight.” Cora snapped her fingers, smirking at Lucas. “This is what it looks like to give back to society.”
“Bugger all.” Clenching his fists in his lap, Lucas was the one to blink in the standoff. He sighed, putting his hands in his pockets. His chilly gaze warmed as he glanced at Red. “You know I’m in.”
Biting the inside of her cheek, Red’s typical relief at having him as backup sputtered like a motorcycle out of gas. This shadowy mission took him up against an enemy that was hunting good guy vampires like him. Just like Orval, he wouldn’t back down from a fight. Red stared up at the unmasked burrower on the screen. She told herself it would take more to bring down Lucas.
---
After being subjected to three hours of drum and bass, Red bolted onto the dirt road when the old Honda finally parked outside Slab City. She was ready to face the burrows to escape Joe Chang’s playlist, if nothing else. The best part of the ride was when she had cat napped against Lucas. She was fresh, even if her ear drums pulsed with a phantom techno beat.
Gripping a metal case, she glanced around. Her jacket flapped in the desert wind against her hunter’s kit strapped to her waist and thigh. In the distance, a pack of trailers, decked in lights, were decorated to be as unique as whoever lived inside. Music drifted from the settlement. The military had pulled out of the area in the middle of the last century when the man-made Salton Sea began to die, leaving only concrete slabs behind on the desert floor. Artists, snowbirds, and survivalists came later. No power lines, pipes, or property taxes connected the small community to even the edges of society.
Off the beaten path and then some, they parked near an earthen adobe home. Shaped like a cluster of cones, the house had a gate covered with nailed beer caps and fairy lights. Curious statues, cobbled together from scrap metal, peeked over the ocotillo fence.
Licking his lips, Lucas caught her gaze. Untainted by city lights, the stars cast a soft glow on his sharp cheekbones.
“Good luck with the contact.” Red smiled, and her breath hitched as she took his hand. His touch set off mini thunderbolts on her skin. She reminded herself that she was working.
Quirking a mischievous brow, his devilish stare told her that he had caught the lusty look. Lucas squeezed her hand and kissed her quickly, smiling against her lips. “Eh, I know Patrice from my CBGB days in the New York club scene. She’s a pushover for me, even if she does have a mean right hook.” Lucas followed Quinn through the gate with a wave.
Heart still fluttering, Red pushed the sexy vampire from her mind. Tonight, she played the part of copilot. She set the case on the hood, then opened it up to reveal the large controllers and a tablet-sized screen in the center. “Don’t you have the best toys, Chang?”
“Night vision, heat sensors, and of course, a direct feed.” Joe Chang set a laptop down by the case. He typed quickly. “When I was alive, we were excited to tap a phone. Had to remember not to cough or they’d hear you. Now, I have a little buddy in the sky.”
Lucas stopped from a dead run beside Joe. His clenched jaw didn’t hide the grieved shake to his chin. “She’s dead. Patrice.”
“Shit. We need to pack this up and find a new site for the launch.” Red pushed her jacket back to put her hand on her hunter’s kit strapped to the front of her thigh. Eyes darting, she studied the shadows of the clumped grasses and cacti off the dirt road. Moonlight dappled over the acres of flat, empty desert between Patrice’s house and Slab City.
“We need to investigate. Someone offed my friend in there,” Lucas insisted, jabbing a finger back at the house.
“The scene’s too hot.” Sympathy infused her tone, but her words were firm.
Rubbing her arm, Lucas nodded. “Take the fuzz and head off. We’ll meet you.”
Chang wiped his mouth, quick thoughts moving behind his darting eyes as his nostrils flared. “I just don’t like splitting up. This is all enemy territory. It’s all hot.”
“There’s no one in the house. Quinn checked the yard.” Lucas jerked his thumb over his shoulder, his other hand hooked into his belt. “We probably scared them off.”
“There’s a dead vampire in there,” Red pointed out, still wondering why they were having this conversation when they should be moving all the spy gear back into the car. “Am I the only one stuck on that point?”
“This is a two-part operation,” Chang reminded her, shoulders squaring as he raised to his full height, sharp cheekbones jutting out above a granite jaw. “We need to know what those fucking burrowers are up too. Cora needs this. We’re coming back with something besides another dead friend.”
Red crossed her arms. “This is compromised.”
Lucas jerked his thumb at her. “She has a point.”
“This is the closest to neutral ground we’re going to find in drone range of the burrows without being seen by humans or vampires.” Chang shook his head, pointing at Red. “You’re a merc on this job, and this is the call.”
“You’re the boss.” Red put her hands up, stepping back, tamping down the sarcasm in her tone. This wasn’t her play. It wasn’t a Quinn Investigations case either. If she was going to survive working off her debt to Cora, she’d have to remember that. Lucas and Quinn had as much control as she did when the supreme came to call on her.
Red gritted her teeth, looking away from Lucas. A pang twisted her stomach as she imagined him attacked in a posted video. The Dague were looking to get attention online. What would get more clicks than offing one of the original souled vampires? If it was open season on souled vampires, she just wanted him away. This case couldn’t end quick enough. The sooner Cora had the dirt on the Dague, the sooner Red could breathe easy about her souled honey.
“I’ll start setting up.” Chang nodded to Red. Tone blank, if polite, he pulled rank, but it was clear from his shifting feet that he didn’t like it. “See if Patrice left a clue of what we’re up against. We need to know which direction to point this thing.”
Red pushed back her disquiet. Fighting among each other only brought attention, and they already had a dead vampire on their hands. She walked with Lucas through the gate into the yard. In the bright moonlight, strange shadows lined the chipped tile mosaic path. Strings of lights dribbled from a hell hound’s jaws made from wire and welded rusty metals. The bike reflector eyes followed her.
Mirror shards glimmered in a stricken clay face from the gloom. Roughly feminine shaped, the earthen figure held a prone and broken form made of found metals and rebar. The design confused her until she placed the homage. A pietà depicting the Virgin Mary h
olding Jesus made of clay and scrap 80s electronics. Red shivered when she focused on the robotic face. The wires stretched into an eerie smile.
Going into the low circular door, her eyes adjusted to the solar lanterns hanging from the coned ceiling. The blue light fell on the skeleton on the ground, reflecting the splashed blood. A skull sat yards away, under a loom.
Quinn knelt by the bones.
Red circled the room. A studio, each inch of the walls was taken up by either work areas, projects in progress, or hanging supplies. She studied the napkins littering the work counters. Each had boxy handwriting wrapped around sketches.
Lucas picked up one. “Got used to writing on napkins at the bar.” He set it down, looking upward as if for strength. His expression curdled and he glanced down. “Someone is offing my best drinking pals.”
“You knew Patrice well then?”
“It’s a small community. I get on with even less. Patrice was good people.” Frowning, Lucas looked to Quinn. “Have you been able to get a signal yet?”
“No, I can’t send the pictures.” Quinn sighed, shaking his phone.
Red found a knocked over canvas with wet paint. She picked it up and placed it on the easel. “We just missed them.”
The harsh black and yellow of the rough paint strokes came together in a hunched mechanical form that looked as if an iron lung and a Dalek from Doctor Who had a baby. A baby itching to break all of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Smeared white sigils and runes framed the painting.
“Who was your friend Patrice, really?” Red wiped the paint off her hands on a rag hanging on the easel.
“If you had met her, you wouldn’t have guessed what her art looked like.” Gaze soft in grief, Lucas considered the painting.
“The soul hits us all differently.” Quinn commented as he took a picture, then started photographing the counters with his phone. “She found peace in creating.”
Red jabbed a finger at the wet symbols. Even if the struggle hadn’t jacked up the paint, she’d need a dictionary to translate them. “Was she a magic user? Because these are mystical signs.”
“Wouldn’t touch a charm even if her Old Fashions were magic. Had a brush with a mage. Obviously. Couldn’t even watch Bewitched on the telly.” Lucas frowned. “Loud, wild, and born in Hell’s Kitchen, Patrice had one fear and that was magic.”
“Hmmm. Artistic license then?“ Red rubbed her chin, relating easily to Patrice. She had met Nevaeh and Maxwell, and that had been enough magic for her.
“Red, I need my co-pilot.” Joe’s voice drifted in through the open doorway.
She squeezed Lucas’s hand and pulled him into a hug, her condolences muffled by his jacket. Going outside, she found Joe Chang kneeling by a drone the size of a dog set up on the dirt. “They can’t be far. Caught her painting.”
“I might be able to find the perps then. If they’re local burrowers, they could be on foot.” He rose and grabbed the controller from the car hood. Darting eyes illuminated by the dim touchscreen, he deftly manipulated the interface. “Watch my back and keep an eye on the laptop. I have to concentrate on the controls.”
The drone buzzed as it hovered. Compared to the earthy hive house, the drone looked like an alien UFO from a distant future. Sensors spun on its belly.
Pulling a stake from her belt, Red looked to the horizon to see if the stealth drone caused a curious head to peep up in the shadows. Only the machine stirred in the quiet night.
The video feed popped up on the screen. Oranges and yellows outlined her heat signature while Joe Chang showed up as blue and green. The drone rose, and their figures on the feed grew smaller. Heat traces of the Slab City humans in their trailers entered the screen. Three blue shapes bolted in the corner.
“We got a trio going south east.”
Chang looked over her shoulder. “Let’s see where they go.”
On the interface’s sidebar, the drone’s altitude meter zoomed up. Red watched the feed, imagining the drone settling into a cloudy perch like an eagle stalking prey. Music wandered on the wind from Slab City. The minutes ticked by as the three vampires darted across the desert floor.
She eased up her grip on the stake. “Stopping and starting. What are they doing?”
“Celebrating along the way. Twisted fucks.” Chang said grimly, an eye twitching, neck corded with tension as he clutched the controllers. “I have to adjust the settings. This bad boy can peep into their tunnels.”
Like a photography filter dropped on the screen, tiny dots sparkled on the feed like a distant fiery constellation. It was the drone picking up the heat signatures of desert critters in their dens. The blue figures turned to loop around. “They are veering to the north again.”
“Gotcha. Let me get ahead of them.”
The video terrain blurred from the speed of the drone. A ghostly blue smudge, larger than the red heat signatures of coyotes and cottontail rabbits, blipped on the screen.
“Slow down. I saw something cold underground. How many burrowers should we expect?”
“A dozen together for a kegger, maybe. This area can’t support a big population. Hunting between the border and LA, they rotate between a few tunnel systems and are always digging more. They are usually farther out from Slab City in smaller nests.”
“This burrow must be new.” Red saw another cold signature and then another. Then pairs and a trio before clusters of blue smudges were on the screen. “Oh, shit, there are a lot more than a dozen.”
Chang looked over her shoulder. “Get the coordinates down.”
Red typed the number into her phone in a text message, quickly looking for Lucas in her contacts, barely seeing the name before jabbing the send button. This intel couldn’t stay with them. Not in case the burrowers decided to come in force. “That’s more than enough traces to be the burrowers, the missing souled vampires, and if they decided to throw a house party for the whole neighborhood.”
“Cora is going to be pissed.” Joe Chang shook his head. “The sea is technically split between LA and San Diego, but the supreme down there fights too much with the brujahs of Tijuana to care. More shit on our plate.”
She pulled out her stake. “Can we take this on the road? We’re exposed here, and now we know that that a small team ain’t going to cut it.”
A pause in songs from Slab City brought silence to the desert. Gravel crunched nearby. She turned around. “Chang?”
“Give me a second. Wind’s picking up.” He focused on the drone controller. The screen flashed red. Chang cursed. “Something just hit the drone. Rock maybe. Stealth, my ass.”
Stepping away from the Honda, Red pulled a blessed silver cross on a necklace from under her shirt.
Appearing in the middle of the road, a heavyset female cast a long shadow in the moonlight. Black goggles on her eyes, body encased in a white lab coat over a skintight vinyl jumpsuit, she towered on platform shoes. A high brown ponytail crowned her head. She lifted an axe crafted from hubcaps and sharpened to a razor point. Her fangs dripped venom in anticipation.
“Locals.” Red gulped at the voluptuous dominatrix that looked like she had walked out of a BDSM vision of Burning Man. She glanced over her shoulder.
Shirtless and covered in raised brands, a scrawny vampire glared out of a zipped gimp mask. His eyes glowed amber. He swung a chain.
Red called out, reaching for her hunter’s kit. “More dystopian-looking locals!”
Chang rushed to meet the woman.
Red jumped back as the masked man appeared in front of her.
The vampire struck the car hood, barely missing the laptop with the chain. Metal clattered on metal.
Pivoting to the side, Red put a wide step between her and the gimp.
Spinning his looped chain in a figure 8, he reeled back and aimed for Red.
Dodging the swinging chain whooshing by her arm, she pulled a vial from the front pocket on her hunter’s kit. She flicked off the top and splashed holy water on the vampire’s bony chest.
He hissed behind the zipped mouth of the mask. His chain went limp as his arm fell.
Red stomped on the chain, jerking it down out of his grip. She elbowed the vampire, twisting away. Ducking a thrown hubcap axe, Red moved closer to the adobe house, turning by the car.
The gimp grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging into skin even through her jacket.
Red grabbed the laptop from the hood and slammed it across his face.
Swiping it aside, he yanked on her arm and pulled her against the raised brands and scars on his bare chest.
Her pulse throbbed in her ears. Fear sweat dripped down her back. Pushing the cross necklace up, she gritted her teeth and reached for her stake in her belt loop with the other hand.
Blessed silver sizzled on his skin. The vampire hummed happily as he loosened his grip to press closer to the cross.
Bile rising in her throat, she kneed him in the groin, then staked him in an upward thrust, piercing the bottom of his heart. She shoved it up higher before tugging the stake back.
Blood poured out between the teeth of his face zipper before he fell over. His body decayed to instant putrefaction. The raised brands on his chest dissolved into rot. His corpse fell over like a mummified board. He wasn’t old enough to leave only bones.
A flash of reflected Christmas lights dazzled the corner of her vision. Diving to the side, Red missed the axe blade whooshing by her ear. Her stomach dropped as she rolled into a somersault. She crouched by the fence.
Chang tackled the female vampire around the neck. He tugged at her white collar and ripped off her goggles.
The dominatrix’s deep laugh bubbled up as she bucked him off. She straightened her white coat and smoothed the lapel over her vinyl catsuit. “Stay down, dog.”
Stomach hardening, Red weighed her options in a snap. Slab City was lawless, but shooting near trailers would attract attention even if a stray bullet didn’t hurt a bystander. Killing the wrong vamp meant she took their place. Breaking the Dark Veil had the same result. Red knew exactly where a step out of line would take her—right onto Kristoff’s fangs. This time Cora might not be able to convince a tribunal that it was all on her orders. She knew the consequences. She made the decision anyway.
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