Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Oh, yes. Yes.” Gabriel didn’t have an accent at all, but his sister’s clear Spanish vowels added color to her voice as it brightened with enthusiasm. “Joe is very famous. He worked his whole life cleaning his church, until he was sixty-four, I think. One Sunday, when the priest…no they called him something else. Pastor, I think, or minister. Anyway when he came to open the church he found Joe dead in the kitchen. But he stayed there anyway. I talked to people who used to go to church there. They said that sometimes there were lights on at night when there was no one there. And doors would lock themselves. One person said they saw him on the stairway, but I’m not sure I believe that. That person just liked to tell stories.”

  “Where is it?” I asked her.

  “Oh. Not too far from our apartment,” she said. “Down on Second or Third, just a couple of blocks from Washington.” Not far from the police department either. “I went over to take pictures of it. It isn’t a church anymore. The church people built a new building and sold the old one to another church about twenty years ago. Then it sold to some other people who tried to run a private school. They went bankrupt, there was a divorce, and one of them, I can’t remember if it was the husband or the wife, killed themselves. The church was empty the last time I went by there.”

  “Thank you, Rosalinda,” I said. “That’s exactly what I needed to know.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked. “My mother says they are nonsense.”

  “Perhaps they are,” I said, not wanting to contradict her mother. “But there are a lot of people who believe all sorts of nonsense. Take care.”

  She laughed. “You too. Goodbye, Mercy.”

  I hit the END button and looked at the darkening sky. There was one way to tell if the vampires were up. I pulled Andre’s card out of my back pocket and called him.

  “Hello, Mercy,” he answered. “What are we doing tonight?”

  As soon as Andre answered the phone, I knew that my chance at finding the sorcerer in a daytime stupor was gone. I could wait until the next morning. Then we could go after him with Bran. Bran was, in my mind, exempt from the effects of the demon. I just couldn’t imagine the thing that could break his icy calmness.

  But if we waited for help, waited for the morning, I was almost certain that both Adam and Samuel would be dead.

  “I know where he is,” I told Andre. “Meet me at my shop.”

  “Marvelous. I will be there as soon as I can,” he said. “I have some preparations to do first, but I won’t be long.”

  I drove there to wait for him. I called Bran’s cell phone and got a voice mail request. I took it as a sign that he would be too late to help. I told him to look in the safe in my shop and gave him the combination. Then I sat down at the computer and typed out everything pertinent about what I was doing and where I was going. I wasn’t going to leave everyone wondering what happened to me the way everyone else who had gone after Littleton had.

  When I finished, Andre still wasn’t there, so I checked my home e-mail. My mother had sent me two e-mails, but the third was from an unfamiliar address with attached files. I was about to delete it when I saw that the subject line read CORY LITTLETON.

  Beckworth, true to his word, had gotten information about Littleton for me. His e-mail was short and to the point.

  Ms. Thompson,

  Here is all the information I could find. It comes from a friend of mine who is with the Chicago police and owes me some favors. Littleton disappeared from Chicago about a year ago where he was being investigated as a murder suspect. My friend told me that if I knew where this guy was, he’d appreciate hearing about it—and the FBI are looking for him as well.

  Thanks again,

  Beckworth

  There were four pdf files and a couple of jpgs. I opened the jpgs. The first picture was a full color shot of Littleton standing on the corner of a city street. On the bottom right-hand corner the photo was date-stamped April of last year.

  He was a good forty pounds heavier than when I’d last seen him. There was no way to be certain, but something about the way he was standing made me believe that he’d been human then.

  I opened up the second picture. Littleton in a nightclub talking to another man. Littleton’s face was animated, as I’d never seen it in real life. The man he was talking to was turned so all I could see was his profile. But that was enough: it was Andre.

  Andre pulled up just as I finished printing out a second letter to Bran. I tossed it into the safe, grabbed Zee’s vampire-slaying backpack and went out to meet my fate.

  Andre drove us out of my parking lot in his black BMW Z8. It suited him in the same way that Stefan’s version of the Mystery Machine had suited him. It surprised me a little because Andre had never impressed me as elegant and powerful. I gave him a quick look under my lashes and realized that tonight he was both, reminding me that he was one of the six most powerful vampires in the seethe.

  He’d turned a sorcerer into a vampire so that he could be the most powerful. And I was betting my life that he had lost control of the sorcerer the night Stefan and I met Littleton.

  Andre was something of an enigma to me, so I was trusting Stefan’s judgement, and the judgement of Stefan’s menagerie that he was loyal to Marsilia and jealous of Stefan.

  Daniel had been a trial, to see what Littleton could do against a new-made vampire. If matters had not worked out well, Andre could have dealt with it—Daniel was his, after all. But Littleton had proven himself, so Andre had set him up against Stefan. But if Andre were still Marsilia’s man, then he would not have condoned the bloodbath at the hotel. It was too likely to have drawn attention to the vampire. But the one thing that made me believe that Littleton was not following orders that night was that Stefan survived. Andre, I thought, would have killed Stefan. Not because of Marsilia’s affection—but because Stefan was always, so clearly, the better man.

  So I got in a car with the vampire who’d created Littleton because I believed he wanted the sorcerer as much as I did—he couldn’t afford for Littleton to continue to run free, making more and more trouble for him. And I got in that car because I knew that Andre was my only chance to keep Adam and Samuel alive.

  “A church is holy ground,” Andre informed me when I told him where we were going. “He can’t be in a church: he’s a vampire.”

  I rubbed my face, ignored the little voice that kept repeating “we have to find them,” and tried to think. I was so tired. I’d been up, I realized, for over forty hours without sleep.

  “Okay,” I said. “I remember hearing vampires can’t stand on holy ground.” Slipped in among a dozen things that weren’t true—say, for instance, the one about vampires crossing water. “But if Littleton was staying in a church, how could you explain it?”

  He turned onto Third and slowed way down so we could look for likely buildings. Gabriel’s sister hadn’t told me which side of Washington the church was on. Since my shop was east of there, that’s where we started. I pressed several buttons and finally got my window to roll down so I could sniff the air.

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe the demon changes the rules, but they’re not supposed to be able to abide holy ground either. Or, the church could have been desecrated.”

  “It was a school for a while,” I said hopefully.

  He shook his head. “Not unless it was a whorehouse. It takes one of the great sins to desecrate a church—adultery, murder—something of that nature.”

  “How about a suicide?” I asked. Gabriel’s sister hadn’t said the suicide had taken place in the church—but she hadn’t said it hadn’t happened there either.

  He glanced at me. “Then I think a demon would take great delight in living in a desecrated church.”

  The traffic on Washington was light tonight and he goosed the little sports car across all four lanes without stopping for the stop sign.

  “When this is over,” I muttered darkly, “I am never getting in a car with a vampire driving again.”
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br />   Rosalinda was right. The church was two blocks off of Washington. There were no signs around it, but it was unmistakably a church.

  It was bigger than I expected, almost three times the size of the church I attended on Sundays. The old church had once had a fair sized yard, but there was little left of it but sunburnt weeds chopped almost level with the ground. The parking lot had faired little better, the blacktop had worn down until it was more rock than tar and bleached weeds poked out through branching cracks in the surface. I looked, but I couldn’t see any sign of the BMW Littleton had been driving.

  Andre pulled over as soon as we saw the church, parking his car across the street, in front of a two-story Victorian home that looked as though it might once have been a farm house.

  “I don’t see his car,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s already out hunting,” said Andre. “But I think you’re right, he was here. This is someplace he would stay.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. It made me realize that he hadn’t been breathing tonight except a couple of shallow breaths before he talked. I must be getting used to being around vampires. Ugh.

  I took a deep breath myself, but there were too many scents around. Dogs, cats, cars, blacktop that had baked all day in the hot sun, and plants. I knew without looking that there was a rose garden behind the house we were standing in front of—and that someone nearby was composting. I couldn’t smell werewolf, demon, or vampire—except for Andre. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on some sign that Adam or Samuel had been here.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  Andre lifted an eyebrow and I realized that under the right circumstances he was very good looking—and that I’d been right, there was something different about him, something more tonight.

  “He’s not stupid,” he said. “Only a stupid vampire leaves a trail to his doorstep.” There was a little bit of pride in his voice.

  He looked at the church a moment, then starting walking across the street, leaving me to trot after him.

  “Shouldn’t we be practicing a little stealth?” I asked.

  “If he’s at home, he’ll know we’re here anyway,” he told me helpfully. “If he’s not, then it doesn’t matter.”

  I stretched my senses as far as I could, and wished that the roses didn’t have quite so strong a scent. I couldn’t smell anything. I wished I was certain that Andre would fight on my side tonight.

  “So if we’re not trying to take him by surprise,” I asked, “why did you park across the street?”

  “I paid over a hundred grand for that car,” Andre told me mildly. “And I’m moderately fond of it. I’d hate to see it destroyed in a fit of temper.”

  “Why aren’t you more afraid of Littleton?” I asked. I was afraid. I could smell my own fear over and above the roses, which had, oddly enough, grown stronger after we crossed the street.

  Andre stepped off the road and onto the sidewalk, then came to a full stop and looked at me. “I fed deeply this evening,” he said with an odd smile. “The Mistress herself did me that honor. With the ties that already bind us, and her blood fresh within me, I can call upon her gifts and her power at my need. It will take more than a new-made vampire, even one aided by a demon, to defeat us.”

  I remembered how easily Littleton had subdued Stefan and had my doubts. “Then why didn’t Marsilia just come herself?” I asked.

  His jaw dropped in genuine shock. “Marsilia is a lady. Women do not belong in combat.”

  “So you brought me instead?”

  He opened his mouth then closed it again, looking a little embarrassed by what he’d been about to say to me.

  “What?” I asked, beginning to be a little amused—which was better than terrified. “Isn’t it polite to tell someone she’s expendable because she’s not a vampire?”

  At a loss, he started up the cement steps that led to the worn double doors that hadn’t been painted in too many years. I followed, but stayed a step behind.

  “No,” he said finally, his hand on the doorknob. “And I prefer to be polite.” He turned to look down at me. “My mistress was certain that you were the only person who would be able to find this vampire. She gets glimpses of the future sometimes. Not often, but what she does see is seldom wrong.”

  “So do we all survive?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I do not know. I do understand, though, that you have taken great risk for the honor of the seethe. You are so fragile—” He reached out and rested his fingertips against my cheek. “Almost human. On my honor, I promise to do everything in my power to see that you are safe.”

  His eyes caught me for a moment before I took two quick steps back, all but falling over the steps. Stefan’s honor I trusted—Andre’s was questionable.

  Both of the front doors were locked, but neither had been designed to keep out a vampire. He put a shoulder against one of the doors and broke the frame so the door swung open freely. Apparently we weren’t being subtle tonight.

  I slid Zee’s backpack down my arms and retrieved the stake and knife. Zee’d included the belt and sheath for the knife so at least I didn’t have to run around with the knife in one hand and the stake in the other. I waited for Andre to ask me what I was doing with a knife, but he ignored me. All of his attention was on the church.

  Andre stood poised outside the threshold.

  “What happens if it is still holy ground?” I asked, hurriedly tying the belt.

  “Then I burst into flames,” he said. “But if it was holy ground I should have felt it before this.” As he spoke, he stepped through the doorway and stood fully inside the church. “This isn’t hallowed ground,” he told me, rather redundantly.

  I followed him into a large foyer and then looked around. The foyer was large enough for ten or twenty people to have milled around comfortably. The flooring was linoleum tile, cracked and pitted with age. There was a wide stairway leading upward that had a rather nicely carved handrail. Beside the stairway was a pair of double doors, propped open so I could see the large, empty room beyond them that must have been the sanctuary.

  The whole church was dark, but there were windows high up that let in a little illumination from the streetlights outside. A real human might have had trouble navigating, but it was light enough for Andre and me.

  He stalked over to the sanctuary doors and sniffed. “Come here, walker,” he said, his voice dark and rough. “Tell me what you smell.”

  I could have told him from where I stood, but I stuck my head into the sanctuary.

  The ceiling soared two stories above our heads with frosted windows on both walls that glimmered silver with the dim light of the city night. The floor was hardwood, scarred where pews had once been bolted in.

  The walls and some of the windows of the sanctuary had been covered with graffiti—probably done by the neighborhood kids. I just didn’t see either a vampire or demon writing things like For a Good Time Call—or Juan loves Penny. There were a few gang tags, too.

  At the far end from us was a raised platform. Like the rest of the room, it was stripped as well, the podium and organ or piano long gone. But someone had cobbled together a table out of cinder blocks. I didn’t have to go closer to know what that table had been used for.

  “Blood and death,” I said. I closed my eyes. It helped me catch the fainter scents and kept me from crying. “Ben,” I said. “Warren. Daniel. And Littleton.”

  We’d found the sorcerer’s lair.

  “But not Stefan.” Andre stood behind me, and his voice echoed in the rafters of the room.

  I couldn’t read anything from his voice, but I was not comfortable with him at my back. I remembered Naomi telling me that all of the vampires lost control sometimes—and the room smelled of blood and death.

  I walked past him back out to the foyer. “Not Stefan,” I agreed. “At least not in there.”

  There was a hallway on the other side of the foyer with doors opening off either side. I opened the doors and found three room
s and a closet with a hot water heater and a large fuse box.

  “He won’t be up here,” Andre said. “There are too many windows.” He hadn’t followed me, just waited in the foyer until I finished my search.

  His eyes weren’t glowing, which I took to be a good sign.

  “There’s a basement,” I told him. “I saw the windows outside.”

  We found the stairs to the basement tucked neatly behind the stairway to the choir loft. He didn’t seem to mind me being behind him, even with my stake, so I followed him down.

  Our footsteps, quiet as they were, sounded hollow in the stairwell. The air was dry and dusty. Andre opened the door at the bottom and the scents in the air changed abruptly.

  Now I smelled Stefan, Adam, and Samuel as well as Littleton—but the strongest scent of all of them was the demon. As it had at the hotel, after only a few breaths, the reek of demon drowned out everything else. The door at the bottom of the stairway had kept the scents contained.

  We walked even more quietly now, though, as Andre had said, if Littleton was here, he’d have heard us come in.

  The basement was darker than upstairs, and someone without preternatural sight might have had trouble seeing at all. We were in an entryway, similar to the foyer upstairs.

  There were a pair of bathrooms next to the stairway; and the MEN sign fell off when I pushed open the first door. Streetlights filtered through glass block windows allowing me to see that the room was empty except for a broken urinal leaning crookedly against one wall.

  I let the door close. Andre had checked the other restroom and was already walking past a cloakroom and into a short hallway, the duplicate of the one upstairs complete with doors.

  I left him to it and started on the other side of the stairs. The first room I walked into was a generous-sized kitchen, though there were only empty spaces where a refrigerator and stove had been. The cabinets were hanging open and bare. Along the inside wall there was a folding half-door covering the top of the counter. With it open, the church members could have served food from the kitchen to the room on the other side without walking back out to the foyer.