Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  I stopped at a stop sign in one of the plethora of new housing developments that had sprung up over the past few years, and there it was. Hollow eyed and sad, the middle-aged man stood on the porch of a respectable-looking house and stared at me.

  I pulled the Rabbit over and parked it, and returned his stare. As I sat there, another one appeared beside him, this one an old woman. When the third ghost appeared, I got out of the car. The house was only a couple of years old: three people were a bit much for a normal household to lose in a couple of years—especially three people who had become ghosts rather than going on to the other side as most dead people do.

  I took the backpack that held Zee’s vampire-hunting kit and walked across the street. It was only as I started up the porch that I realized he’d have some people here, too. For some reason, I’d forgotten that I’d have to deal with the vampire’s menagerie before I killed the vampire.

  I rang the doorbell and did my best not to look at the ghosts, of which there were now significantly more than three: I could smell them even if I couldn’t see them.

  No one answered the door, though I could hear them inside. There was no smell of fear or anger, just unwashed bodies. When I turned the door knob, the door opened.

  Inside the smell was bad. If vampires have almost as good a sense of smell as I do, I don’t know how any vampire could have stayed here. But then vampires don’t have to breathe.

  I tried to use my nose to tell me whose house I was in. His scent was partially masked by the sour smell of sweat and death, so I couldn’t be certain I had the right vampire, just that he was male.

  The ghosts followed me. I could feel them brush up against me, pushing me onward as if they knew what I was here for and were determined to help. They pushed and pulled until I came to a doorway next to the bathroom on the main floor. It was narrower than the other doors, obviously built to be a linen closet. But, at the urging of my guides, I opened the door and was unsurprised to see a set of winding stairs that led down into a dark hole.

  I have never been afraid of the dark. Even when I can’t see, my nose and ears work pretty well to guide me. I’m not claustrophobic. Still, climbing down that hole was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because, even knowing he would be inactive during the day, the thought of trying to kill a vampire scared me silly.

  I hadn’t brought a flashlight. Hadn’t expected to need one: it was daylight after all. There was a little light from the stairway. I could see that the room wasn’t very big, just a little bigger than the average bathroom. And there was something, a bed or couch, stretched across the far side of the room.

  I closed my eyes and counted a full minute, when I opened my eyes again, I could see a little better. It was a bed and the vampire on it wasn’t Andre. His hair was lighter. The only blond male in the seethe who had his own menagerie was Wulfe, the Wizard. I had no quarrel with him.

  I had to fight the ghosts as I climbed back up the stairwell. They knew what I was there for, and they wanted the vampire dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them after I made it back up to the hallway. “I can’t just kill for no reason.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  I swallowed my heart and turned around, expecting to see the vampire behind me, but there was only the dark stairway. But I couldn’t dismiss the voice as my imagination because all of the ghosts were gone. I touched the sheep on the necklace I’d bought to replace the one Littleton had broken.

  He laughed. “Are you after Andre? He doesn’t live around here. But you could kill me, instead.”

  “Should I?” I asked, angry because he’d scared me.

  “I know how a sorcerer is made,” he said. “But no one has asked me.”

  “Why haven’t you made a sorcerer and turned him then?” I asked, growing more confident. The hallway was dim, but I could see that there was light coming in the house from the windows still. If Wulfe was awake, he’d be confined to the dark room where he was safe.

  “Because I’m not a fool. Marsilia knows better, too, but she is obsessed with returning to Milan.”

  “Then I have no reason to kill you,” I told him.

  “Then again, maybe you couldn’t have killed me,” he said, crawling out of the stairway. He moved very slowly, like a lizard who had gotten too cold.

  I heard a whimper from behind one of the closed doors next to the bathroom, and sympathized. I wanted to whimper, too.

  “I’m not hunting you,” I told him firmly, though I stepped backward until I stood in a circle of light at the end of the hallway.

  He stopped halfway out of the stairway, his eyes were filmed over like a dead man’s.

  “Good,” he said. “If you kill Andre, I won’t tell—and no one will ask.”

  And he was gone, withdrawing from the hallway and down the stairs so fast that I barely caught the motion, though I was staring right at him.

  I walked out of his home because if I’d moved any faster, I’d have run screaming.

  Chapter 15

  I found another vampire’s lair in Pasco, but this time I played it smarter. I drove back at noon the next day when the sun was high in the sky and changed into my coyote self because my nose was sharper when I ran on four paws.

  I hopped over the fence and cast about, but whatever vampires did to hide their lairs almost worked. I could find no clear scent around the house, but the car smelled of a female vampire, Estelle.

  The third menagerie I found a few days later was Andre’s.

  He lived in a pretty little house mostly hidden behind a huge pole building. It sat on a couple of acres of land next to the wildlife preserve near Hood Park, just outside of Pasco.

  I wouldn’t have thought to look out that far since vampires, unlike werewolves, are city creatures. It was only luck that had me test-driving a VW Bus out that way. I pulled over to make a few adjustments and as soon as I got out of the car, I knew that people had died inside that house, a lot of people.

  I got into the back of the van to change to coyote.

  Either Andre was careless, or he wasn’t as good as Estelle or Wulfe because I found his scent all over the property. He liked to sit at a picnic table and look out over the preserve. It was a beautiful view. I didn’t see any ghosts, but I could feel them, dozens of them, waiting for me to do something.

  Instead, I drove back to the shop and went to work.

  If I could have killed him the day Marsilia released him, or even the night I killed Littleton it would have been easier. I’d killed animals to eat them, and because it was the coyote nature to prey upon mice and rabbits. Three times I’d killed in self-defense or defense of others. Cold-blooded murder was more difficult.

  An hour before closing I left Gabriel in charge of the shop and drove home. Samuel wasn’t there again, which was probably just as well. I sat down in my room and wrote a list of the people I knew Littleton and Andre, between them, had killed. I didn’t know all the names, but I included Daniel twice, since Andre had killed him once—and Littleton was responsible for his second death. At the end of the list I put down Warren’s name. Then below it, Samuel, Adam, Ben and Stefan. All of them had been damaged by the sorcerer.

  Andre intended to create another monster like Littleton. Could I kill him while he was held helpless by the day?

  Stefan couldn’t touch him because he was oath bound to Marsilia. The wolves couldn’t touch him or a lot of people would die.

  If I killed Andre, the only person who would suffer was me. Sooner or later, Marsilia would figure out who had killed him even if Wulfe didn’t tell her—and I trusted Wulfe about as far as I could throw him. When she knew, she would have me killed. I could only trust she wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it in such a way that Samuel or Adam would get involved: she wouldn’t want a war either, not with the seethe poised for rebellion.

  Was it worth my life to kill Andre?

  Deliberately I recalled the maid’s face and the sound of her hoarse cries as Littleton ki
lled her slowly in front of me. I remembered the shattered expression that Adam had tried to hide behind anger in the bright lights of the hospital, and the long days following that night before Samuel had strung two words together. Then there was Daniel, broken and starving, at Stefan’s trial. Andre had sacrificed him twice, once for revenge and a second time to see how powerful his monster was.

  I went to my gun safe and pulled out both of my handguns, the 9mm SIG Sauer and the .44 Smith & Wesson. I had to put a linen jacket on over my T-shirt so I could wear the SIG in its shoulder harness. The .44 would have to ride in the backpack with the rest of the vampire-hunting treasures. I was pretty sure the guns wouldn’t do me any good against Andre, but they’d take out any of his human sheep—though if Wulfe’s menagerie was anything to judge by, I might not have to worry about Andre’s blood donors.

  I hoped they’d stay out of the way. The thought of killing more people made me sick, especially as Andre’s menagerie wasn’t guilty of anything except being victims.

  Even with the guns, when I got in the Rabbit, I wasn’t entirely certain I was going to go after Andre. Impulsively I turned down Adam’s street and drove to his house.

  Jesse opened the door. “Mercy? Dad’s not back from work yet.”

  “Good,” I told her. “I need to see Ben.”

  She stepped away from the door, inviting me in. “He’s still confined,” she told me. “Whenever Dad isn’t around to stop him, he goes after the nearest wolf.”

  I followed her down the stairs. Ben was curled up as far from the doorway as he could get with his back to us.

  “Ben?” I asked.

  His ear twitched and he flattened a little against the floor. I sat down on the floor in front of the bars and put my forehead against the door.

  “Are you all right?” Jesse asked.

  Ben’s misery smelled sour, almost like an illness.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Would you leave us for just a few minutes?”

  “Sure thing. I was in the middle of a show anyway.” She gave me a quick grin. “I’m watching An American Werewolf in London.”

  I waited until she was gone and then whispered, so none of the other werewolves I could smell in the house would overhear. “I found Andre,” I told him. I wasn’t certain how far he’d sunk into the wolf, but at the mention of the vampire’s name, he came to his feet, growling.

  “No, you can’t come with me,” I told him. “If Marsilia thinks one of the werewolves is involved in Andre’s death, there will be retaliation. I came here…I guess because I’m afraid. I don’t know how I can kill Andre while he sleeps and still be me afterwards.”

  Ben took two slow steps toward me. I reached up and touched the cage with the tips of my fingers. “It doesn’t matter. It has to be done and I’m the best one to do it.”

  Abruptly impatient with myself, I stood up. “Don’t let them win, Ben. Don’t let them destroy you, too.”

  He whined, but I didn’t stay to talk anymore. I had a vampire to kill.

  The weatherman had been predicting a break in the weather for three days, and when I left Adam’s house the dark clouds that had been moving in all day had thickened impressively. Hot wind snatched my hair and whipped it across my face.

  When I got in my car, I was careful to hold onto the door so the wind couldn’t fling it into the shiny new Toyota I’d parked next to.

  It still hadn’t started to rain when I drove the Rabbit onto the gravel drive that stopped at Andre’s house, parking in front of the motor home–sized, garage door side of the pole barn. There were neighboring houses, but they were closer to the highway than Andre’s house and the pole barn, along with strategically planted foliage, protected his privacy.

  Anyone passing by would be able to see my car, but I wasn’t really worried about the neighbors. I’d destroy Andre’s body, and the vampires would never allow the human police to find anyone else’s remains—including mine.

  The grass was knee high and crunched as I walked across it. No one had watered the lawn for a month or more. There were flowers planted around the edge of the house, long dead. I suppose Andre didn’t care about how nice his place looked by daylight.

  I shouldered my backpack and walked around the pole barn to knock on the door. No one answered and the door was locked tight. I walked around the house and found a patio door on the other side. It was locked, too, but suitable application of a paving stone solved that nicely.

  No one came to investigate the sound of breaking glass.

  The dining room I walked into was spotlessly clean and reeked of Pine-Sol, the smell making me sneeze as well as disguising any other scent that might be present.

  Like the house, the room was small but pretty. The floor was oak, antiqued with a white wash that made the room feel bigger than it was. On one side of the room was a brick fireplace. Family photographs covered most of the surface of the mantelpiece. Curious, I looked at them. Children and grandchildren, I thought, and none of them related to Andre. How long would it be before one of them realized they hadn’t heard from their grandparents for too long? How long had he been here to leave so many ghosts?

  Maybe the owners of the house were off touring the countryside in the motor home that the pole barn had been built to house. I hoped so.

  I started to turn away and something knocked one of the photos off the mantle. Glass shattered on the floor and a chill breeze touched my face.

  I left the dining room and walked into the kitchen, which was surprisingly big for the size of the house. Someone had painted the wooden cabinets white, then toll-painted flowers and vines all over. The window over the sink was covered with dark green garbage sacks sealed with duct tape so no light would get through.

  There were no vampires in the living room either, though it wasn’t as clean as the dining room and kitchen had been. Someone had left a dirty glass on an end table—and there were dark stains on the beige carpet. Blood, I thought, but the Pine-Sol was still crippling my nose.

  The bathroom door was open, but the two doors next to it were not. I didn’t think Andre was behind either of them, because someone had put shiny new bolts on the outside to keep whoever was inside prisoner.

  I opened the first door gingerly and had to take a quick step back, even with my deadened nose, because of the strong smell of human waste.

  The man was curled up on a pile of filthy sleeping bags. He curled up tighter when I opened the door and whimpered, muttering, “They’re coming for me, Lord. Don’t let them. Don’t let them.”

  “Shh,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The smell was appalling, but it would have had to be a lot stronger to keep me out. He cried when I touched his shoulder.

  “Come on,” I told him. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  He rolled onto his back and grabbed my head in both hands.

  “Vampire.” Eyes wild, he shook me slowly. “Vampire.”

  “I know. But it’s daylight now. Come outside with me where he can’t get you.”

  He seemed to understand that part and helped me get him to his feet. I pulled his arm over my shoulder and we did a drunken dance out to the living room. I unlocked the door and took him out.

  The skies were darker, making it look hours later in the day than it really was. I sat him down on the picnic table with orders to stay there, but I wasn’t certain he’d heard me because he was muttering about the dark man. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t in any shape to get very far.

  I left the living room door open and hurried back to the second room. This time the occupant was an older woman. Bite marks trailed up both arms. If the puncture wounds hadn’t been in pairs she would have looked like a junkie. She was more alert than the man had been. She didn’t smell as bad, and, though she didn’t make any more sense than he had, she helped me get her out of the room. I had a harder time getting her to let go of me once I had her at the picnic table.

  “Run,” she said. “Run.”

 
“I’m going to take care of him.” I told her. “It’s all right.”

  “No,” she said, though she let me go. “No.”

  The house protected them from the worst of the wind, and it still hadn’t started raining, though I heard the crack of thunder. If it didn’t rain soon we’d have some grass fires out of this storm.

  The mundane worry steadied me as I went back into the house to hunt for Andre. I left the bedrooms for last. Partially because I was in no hurry to go back into either, but also because I was pretty sure that Andre had to be on the outside of the rooms in order to lock them.

  There were no secret passages I could see in the bathroom, and the closet next to it was full of furnace and water heater: there was no room for vampire. I walked back out to the living room and heard another crash from the dining room.

  I got there just as the last framed photo fell onto the floor, just in front of a small throw rug. Something shoved me between my shoulder blades and I took another step forward.

  “Under the rug?” I said. “How unoriginal.” Sarcasm, I’ve found, makes terror more bearable. I hoped that Andre would be helpless in the daytime even if Wulfe had not been. Andre was the same age as Stefan, and Stefan told me he died during the day.

  I moved the rug and there was a trapdoor, complete with an inset iron ring pull. I took out my flashlight before opening the trapdoor.

  Here there was nothing so sophisticated as Wulfe’s circular stairway. A free standing wooden ladder stood directly beneath the opening. I ducked my head into the hole, hoping the ghost who shoved me once wouldn’t do it while I was hanging my head down.

  It wasn’t a basement so much as a very deep hole dug into the dirt to allow access to the plumbing under the house. There were a few old shelves leaned up against a foundation wall, and some fencing materials. On the other side of the room was a canopy bed straight out of a bodice-ripper romance.

  My flashlight picked out an embroidered pattern on dark velvet fabric that enveloped the bed, hiding its occupant, if there was one.

  I lowered myself down onto the top of the ladder, and very carefully stepped down two rungs. From there on it was an easy scramble to the ground. I opened my backpack and took out the stake and a mallet I’d taken from the shop: I’d learned it was harder than I’d thought to punch the stake through a vampire’s heart.