The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  Skamar was still preoccupied by this when she joined his undercover unit the very next night. They were outfitting a female cop so young-looking that only her scent gave her away as a mature woman. Yet mortal girls verging on puberty were olfactory blank spots in the mind, just like the initiates born in underground sanctuaries and raised to fight on either side of the Zodiac. Therefore this plan to plant the officer in the audience during an evening magic show—where a magician would oh-so-conveniently pick her for his disappearing act—was flawed from the beginning. The Shadows would never fall for it.

  The one thing it did have going for it was the proximity to another gathering of teens. Yuletide Magic raised money for underprivileged children while easing the social consciences of parents who otherwise seemed hell-bent on spending an insane amount of money on plastic trinkets for their offspring. Yet Skamar remained skeptical.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she muttered as Vaughn jerked at the neck of his rented tuxedo.

  “Why not?” he asked, frowning at his bow tie. It had been her idea for him to pose as an amateur magician, ostensibly to draw the girls close to him and possibly the kidnappers as well. In reality, she wanted only to keep him out of the way. The run-in at the Festival of Lights two nights earlier had shaken her—even if Vaughn didn’t remember any of it. She wouldn’t want anyone that close to the Tulpa. Never mind a man in possession of a surprisingly kind heart, dry scent, and lips that made hers tingle.

  “Too obvious a setting,” she lied, as there was no way to explain about the decoy cop’s scent.

  “Ah, sunshine,” he said, grinning as he pulled a springy bunch of colorful flowers from his tuxedo pocket. He offered them to her. “All you have to do is believe in magic.”

  Skamar crossed her arms until he tucked the flowers away, though her heart skipped a couple of beats and her mouth quirked at one side when he shot her a roguish wink. Be careful, she found herself thinking.

  Frowning, she wondered where that particularly human worry had come from, and turning away, she almost missed the Shadow entirely. As the bait took to the stage and the undercover officers fanned out about her, Skamar saw Dawn, a petite, unremarkable-looking woman . . . except that she was also the Shadow Gemini. She was speaking with a girl perched at the audience’s edge, gesturing animatedly to an exit door. Whatever she said made the girl’s eyes pop with excitement, and though no more than five feet from the nearest undercover cop, their body language indicated they were together. Dawn shepherded the girl toward a door leading backstage, and just as they gained the threshold, she shot Skamar a sweet smile over her shoulder.

  Skamar glanced over to see if Vaughn had noticed, but he was now surrounded by half a dozen children who wanted him to hop inside his Plexiglas box, pull the curtains shut, and make himself disappear. It was clear that disguise had backfired.

  Meanwhile the plant was onstage, ostensibly being hypnotized, and all other eyes were fixed firmly on her. It didn’t matter. Skamar was the only one who could keep Dawn from escaping anyway.

  She raced through the door and gained the backstage area in time to see the girl yanked behind an arching black scrim. Using the darkness to cover her unnatural speed, Skamar instantly closed the gap between them. Braced for attack—by a warden, by other waiting Shadows, maybe even by the Tulpa—she wasn’t ready for a conversation. But Dawn stood across the vast expanse of the stage, one hand holding a knife to the girl’s throat, the other muffling her sobs.

  “My friends and I want to show you a little magic trick,” Dawn called out in a singsong voice.

  Skamar laughed harshly. “You mean you and your invisible friends, Dawn?”

  “Better than mortal ones,” Dawn said, offering up her own harsh laugh. “Especially at a magic show. I mean, it’s just so easy to make them go poof!”

  Then both Dawn and the girl dropped from sight, a trapdoor swinging shut above them. Skamar ran, intending to give the door one hard stomp, but she came up short, Dawn’s final words—and the accompanying grin—finally reaching her mind and stopping her heart.

  After bolting back to the theater, she nudged aside surly teens and offended parents to stand in front of the glass magic box. Vaughn was gone, the curtains were pulled shut, and the whole box vibrated with energy. Swallowing hard, Skamar grasped the tassel at the box’s side and pulled open the curtains.

  A warden as giant and black as hell’s gaping mouth lunged at her, banging against the Plexiglas front with rabid fury. Screams erupted behind Skamar as the dog rocketed into the glass. Ignoring the chaos behind her, she reached for a note taped to the box’s front. A single word was spelled out in block letters on Valhalla Hotel stationery, one that brought back such an intense memory of pain that she actually sagged.

  Valhalla was where. Vaughn was who. Now was when. As for the what? The Shadows weren’t making her guess at that: “CRUCIFIXION.”

  Crumpling the note in her hand, Skamar bolted.

  Skamar didn’t own any weapons. Shadows were immune to them, so knives and guns were more irritants than deterrents, and the Tulpa was impervious to all weaponry—even the magical ones crafted for Zodiac agents. Skamar couldn’t complain about that too much since she shared the immunity as a tulpa, but it was also why she had to take on the Shadows, and whatever trap they’d set, all alone.

  Besides, the thought of something happening to Vaughn because of her was suddenly unacceptable. It set off such a panic in her chest, it was as if her lungs had grown wings. She had to stop it or—yes—die trying.

  So Skamar skirted slot machines, floor attendants, and oblivious patrons of the Valhalla Hotel and Casino and followed the meaty, furred scent of Shadow wardens into the heart of the property. When she passed the twenty-four-hour café, the girls’ scent joined the hounds’, causing her heart to skip a beat. She rounded the gift shop, one of four, and felt a mental punch as Vaughn’s scent was added to the mix. The olfactory triptych was impossible to miss—a rabid fury matched only by a throbbing fear.

  The scents led into a showroom, the grandest she’d ever seen, and home to one of those freaky acrobat shows Vegas visitors couldn’t get enough of. Multileveled pools and water features pitted the room’s center, and as it was obviously the show’s “dark” night, the Coliseum-like theater was empty.

  Yet there was still a show going on.

  Deep drums pounded through the cavernous room, while refitted spotlights blazed upon the platforms suspended above two pools of water. One held the four girls—bound and cowering in the rounded middle, facing drowning if any of them even wobbled. Their pool had been blackened into shimmering opaqueness.

  The other platform held Vaughn Rhett. He was suspended over a sparkling blue pool, though he faced exactly the opposite problem in his potential death. Lifted to his toes by a makeshift series of pulleys and levers, he would suffer crucifixion if his platform suddenly gave way. And though Skamar didn’t move, didn’t even blink, something inside of her screamed. Her palms also began to sweat as she recalled the acute ache ratcheting up her arms from the giant nails the Tulpa had driven into her wrists. Her calves cramped up reflexively, and she closed her eyes, swaying as she remembered her ribs pressing against her lungs in a slow suffocation. Her normally sharp mental admonition to pull it together might as well have been a kitten’s plea.

  “Decisions, decisions.”

  Her eyelids flipped open, and her gaze landed on the ringmaster to this wet, twisted circus. The Tulpa stepped onto the walkway separating the two pools, surrounded by three doppelgänger hounds, their bodies shimmering and frothing, refractive and nauseating. When Skamar said nothing, the Tulpa grinned and took a bow.

  “Choose platform A and you’ll save four innocent, albeit relatively useless, lives. My pets, then, will have to feast on something else.” He placed a hand on the flat head of the nearest warden. It growled liquid menace. “Choose the second, and you’ll save only one life—though one that’s been trained to save many.”

 
Skamar said nothing. She was trying to still her shaking hands, hidden behind her back.

  “No choice!” Vaughn’s voice was strained as the rope around his neck drew tighter. “Save the girls!”

  He didn’t realize his words made her decision more difficult, not less.

  The Tulpa smiled. He knew it. “Well, it’s a conundrum either way. I’ll leave you to it.”

  He began to turn, and Skamar acted out of instinct. Letting out a battle cry, she dove not for Vaughn or the girls, but for the Tulpa. Yet even as she flew forward, he rocketed straight into the air, yanking at ropes he’d had concealed behind his back. The platforms, one attached to each of his wrists, twisted from the pools. The girls fell. Vaughn screamed.

  Unable to cease her forward motion, Skamar could only drop to the walkway where the doppelgänger hounds lunged, all three striking at once. Skamar’s screams spiraled throughout the theater as the drumbeats increased, syncopated with the girls’ terrified cries and, just as they hit the water, the Tulpa’s booming laugh. “Permanence must be a bitch.”

  Skamar was too busy working a jaw full of luminous razors from her left calf while shielding her throat with her other hand. Yet the wardens were almost impossible to see in the reflected light of the tanks, eerie undulations appearing through their not-flesh. A strange sensation began to overtake her, one she’d only smelled on others before but recognized immediately—pure, sharp panic.

  When the third hound took a chunk from her back, she arched forward and knew the next would claim her heart. Ironically, it was that sharp pain of teeth piercing skin that brought Skamar back to her senses. She hammered one snarling beast on its head, less to fend it off than to anoint it, naming it even as it regained its balance. “Dasher!”

  He shuddered, the forced moniker giving him form as Skamar whipped around, kicking the second. “Dancer!”

  The third animal again found her back. “Prancer!”

  The power of permanence rippled through them, just as it had done when she’d turned from doppelgänger into a full-blown tulpa. It gave them the same momentary pause she’d had, too, and in that moment she launched herself backward. When they continued their midair attack, the wild snaps of the first two dogs found each other instead. Too far gone with battle lust, and too newly born in their permanent state, they writhed madly, tearing at each other’s bodies.

  Meanwhile, Skamar propelled the third dog, so recently existing in a liquid form, into the giant tank of water where the girls had already sunk. Release and relief came immediately, and as the third hound lost its breath and life to the black liquid, she dove past the pooling of her own blood to search out the drowning girls.

  Blindly, she flailed around until grabbing rope, or hair, or something that wound easily about her hands, then used her legs to thrust herself and the girls straight out of the tank. She dropped the gasping girls on the center platform and braced for the Tulpa’s counterattack, only to find the cooling bodies of the hounds destroyed by their own magic.

  And then she looked up.

  The sensation of flying was an afterthought. She was back on the ground so fast, a tortured man cradled in her arms, that the girls were still sputtering on hands and knees. But Skamar forgot them for now. How odd, she thought, removing the rope from Vaughn’s neck, that the Tulpa hadn’t missed a trick. After all, she wouldn’t have expected a patently unreligious being to remember the spear in the side.

  Though Vaughn’s larynx was crushed, his neck hadn’t snapped, leaving him to bleed out slowly, as the Tulpa had no doubt intended. Holding the man, Skamar thought of the boy who’d once borne kissable freckles. Tearing up, she could almost smell blueberries. “You did it, Vaughn. You saved those girls. Just like one of those medieval knights.”

  She didn’t know if it was the small white lie or her tears dropping to his face that did the trick, but his eyes fluttered open long enough to reveal recognition touching his gaze. “Your . . . name . . .”

  It wasn’t even a whisper, only his lips moving, but she read them and whispered back, “Skamar. It means star.”

  And he somehow managed to reward her with a full smile, though the shockingly brave look twisted quickly into an anguished wince. Then as she held him, as she cried for the first time ever, her fragile knight died.

  Skamar hadn’t opened the door to the apartment in days, never mind left it, so when she allowed Zoe in—and even that had taken a few moments of dull, uninterested consideration—her creator winced at the smell, and then in sympathy. It was the latter emotion that made Skamar want to slam the door shut.

  Zoe, in yet another pretty if nondescript disguise, perched on the rented sofa’s side. “So, the Tulpa thinks he’s won. That you’ve gone into hiding . . . injured, licking wounds, beaten.”

  “I don’t care what he thinks.” Though she did, of course. Thought created reality, and the Tulpa’s mind was a dangerously fertile place. But even the idea of facing him was too much effort right now.

  “He’s still after my granddaughter.”

  Skamar clenched her jaw, not looking at Zoe. “Well, I don’t know how to kill him. Obviously.”

  Zoe repositioned herself in front of Skamar, who—deeming it too difficult and pointless to move—had simply sunk to her knees just inside the door. Grasping those knees, Zoe squeezed. “Just because you’re born for a particular task doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it, or that it doesn’t come with a price. In fact, if you’re really born to do something, chances are you’ll die doing it, too.”

  “Great.” As ruthlessly unemotional as always. This time Skamar didn’t smile.

  Zoe reached for her shoulders. “But meanwhile, you have to live.”

  “I don’t even know what that means!” Skamar pushed away from Zoe’s touch, even though there was nowhere to go. “You never taught me that, Zoe! All I know is that the first person I opened myself up to in this world is dead because of me. And you know what? They all die! They’re all weak and fragile and . . .”

  “Mortal?” Zoe asked quietly.

  Skamar clenched her jaw so hard, she thought her teeth would crack. “If that’s life, if this is it . . .” She motioned around at the crappy apartment, but more important, the sorrow stinking up the air, a pain surely even Zoe could scent. If this was life, she continued silently, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Even for the chance to kill the Tulpa.

  “This isn’t life,” Zoe said, taking Skamar’s face in her hand and forcing her gaze. “This is experience.”

  “What’s the difference?” Skamar muttered, trying to shake the touch away.

  Zoe held on, her smile bittersweet. “Experience is what happens when you don’t get what you want in life.”

  Skamar was mortified when her face crumpled. “It hurts,” she whispered.

  For just one moment, only one, she’d given herself over to something good, and look what had happened. She shook her head. “How do you do it?”

  Zoe answered with a question of her own. “Would you rather it never happened? That you’d never met a human who made you want to open up? That either he or you hadn’t existed?”

  No. Somehow she couldn’t wish that.

  “You did the best you could,” Zoe said, then swallowed hard and bit her lip. “How about allowing me to try and do the same?”

  Skamar frowned, only belatedly realizing what Zoe was asking. “Let you in again? No.” She shook her head. “My mind is my own now.”

  Zoe inclined her head. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean upon others. Let someone else take the reins for a while.”

  Give up even more power? Even more control just for the opportunity to share the burden? Depend on someone else to thrive? Open, even a fraction, to love?

  “I don’t want control over you, Skamar,” Zoe said, misinterpreting her silence, though she’d have been right enough only days before. “I want to give you a moment of peace. I feel . . . somehow responsible.”

  “For sending me after those gi
rls?” Skamar shook her head, thinking of the families, their tearful reunions . . . the scent of blueberries. No. She knew now that it had been the right thing to do.

  “No.” Zoe bowed her head. “For birthing you into a world already waiting to cause you pain. It’s a mother’s shame.”

  It was the first time Zoe had ever admitted feelings for her beyond ownership, and Skamar was so shocked that she didn’t pull away when Zoe took her hand. And after another moment, she leaned against Zoe—strong against the weak—and eventually closed her eyes and gave herself over. One moment wouldn’t hurt anything, right?

  And then there was the familiar feeling and scent of Zoe moving around in her mind. She relaxed into the meditative rhythm, the reassuring words—affirming, positive, and, when the one-way conversation turned to that of the Tulpa, positively homicidal.

  “I’m so proud of you, Skamar,” Zoe said in conclusion. “Now rest, dear.”

  Yes, she thought, drifting off as Zoe let herself out. She was going to need all the energy she could get if she was to continue this fight. And while still unwilling to give up her life for others, maybe—just maybe—she could live for them. Giving a fair shot to good people was a worthwhile pastime, right? It was something she could pursue in Vaughn’s honor.

  When she wasn’t hunting the Tulpa, of course.

  The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Signs of the Zodiac series, Vicki Pettersson was born and raised in Las Vegas. She still lives in Sin City, where a backyard view of the Strip regularly inspires her to set down her martini and head back to the computer. Check out the latest at www.vickipettersson.com.

  ROOKWOOD & MRS. KING

  by LILITH SAINTCROW

  “I need to kill my husband.”

  Rookwood set the bottle of Scotch on his desk with a precise little click. His teeth were tingling, and he regretted climbing out of bed, not to mention agreeing to meet her so close to dusk. He hadn’t had time for his daily jolt of red stuff. “I think you’ve got the wrong man, lady.”