Scorched (8 page)

 

“Whoa, sweetheart,” Mac said as Constance leaned into him again. “I never open a vein on the first date.”

She reached up, stroking his cheek with dainty, cold fingers. “But I have to . . .”

He flinched and pushed her back, staying gentle but firm. “That’s what they all say. Y’know, I’m sure there’s a support group for this sorta thing.”

She pushed his hand aside as if he were no stronger than a kitten. “I need help.”

“You have no idea.”

“I need your blood.” She was closing in again.

“Uh-huh, and I need a key out of this cozy piece of hell.”

Less gently now, Mac shoved her out of his personal space. He had the sword in his hand, but he couldn’t see himself using it. Constance was dangerous, but didn’t exactly radiate evil—just desperation. That was odd, he thought. In the Castle, there was no reason she should be hungry. She closed the gap again, her eyes glinting in the uncertain light. “Forget leaving. I don’t have a key.”

“Then who does?” Mac felt the hair on his neck lifting. The animal part of him was fast heading into the fight or flight zone. She was spooking him far worse than either Caravelli or the hellhounds. No one that soft and pretty should have such a predatory look in her eyes.

She shrugged. “Right now? I don’t know. No one ever admits it if they do. Not if they want to keep it for their own.”

Mac backed away. “If you don’t have a key and can’t tell me how to get one, then I’m outta here.”

“You can’t go. We’re not done.”

She reached for him, but he dodged her fingers. A shevamp’s nails sliced as sharp as talons. Years in the supernatural crimes unit taught him that lesson fast, right along with just how well vamps could mess with their victims’ heads.
Should’ve remembered that nugget of info five minutes ago
. Then again, Constance hadn’t hit his radar as a bloodsucker, just a really pretty girl. Just his luck she had to embrace her inner Babe of Doom right when he came along.

He had to wind up this fiasco and move on. “Look, really, I’m flattered you want to drink my blood—”

She stamped her foot in frustration. “I don’t want to, you great idiot. I
need
to. Stay still!”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Right. Why?”

“That’s a very personal question.”

“Biting is a very personal act.”

“Oh, be quiet! This is hard enough as it is.”

“Look, I’m walking away. You stay. I go.”

“No!”

He could feel her will pushing on his mind. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but more than he would have expected
.
“Back off.”

“Come
here
.” She sprang like a cat, fingers crooked into claws.

In an instant, the demon took over. Pure reflex. There was a sudden flash of ice cold, like a freezer door had opened beneath his ribs, and every one of his senses cut out.

Black. Silent. Stifling.

The rush of blood in his veins just . . . vanished. The spaces where his pulse
should have been
beat in his mind, but not his body. The terrifying silence beat . . . and beat . . .

And he was back, as if a switch had tripped.

Constance was still leaping toward the spot he had been standing a moment ago. Somehow he had moved a good twenty feet down the corridor. He grabbed the wall, disoriented.
Huh, that hasn’t happened in a while
.

She stumbled, grabbing nothing but thin air. “You turned to dust!”

Mac shook his head, although he knew it was true. Poofing to an insubstantial black cloud was a demon talent. He had done it fast, too, the way he had when he had been at the top of his game. A cold, greasy unease slithered in his gut.

Constance balled her hands in fury. “You’re a liar; you’re not human at all!”

The words hit with all the subtlety of a city bus. “Never said I was!”

He turned before a weird impulse to apologize could overtake him.
I’m sorry I turned out to be a less-than-tasty treat.

“What are you? Vampires know a demon’s stink, and you barely smell!”

He was walking now, not so fast as to excite the predator in her, but not wasting any time, either. He suddenly felt hot, as if he had spiked a fever. “Flattery still won’t get you into my jugular, sweetheart.”

Mac glanced over his shoulder, making sure she wasn’t coming after him. She looked beside herself, eyes round with anger and disappointment, but she wasn’t moving. Maybe that meant she’d given up. Maybe it was because he still clutched the sword. That was one of the bizarre things about the demon-dust-travel thing. Pretty much anything he was touching came with him. Handy, but strange.

Don’t go there
. If he was going to keep it together, thinking about what just happened was taboo. He wasn’t supposed to have major demon mojo. That could only mean really bad news, and the last thing he could afford to do was work himself into a panic.

Doggedly, Mac kept striding. He focused on the immediate problem of getting out of the Castle. He worked his way back to the door without passing the spot where he’d flattened Bran—neither of them needed a rerun of that encounter.

The door looked as impenetrable as ever. Mute. Solid. A scar in the endless vista of stone walls.
What do I do now? Sit down and wait for someone with a key to come along?

Mac folded his arms, leaning against the wall opposite the door, and settled in to wait. A cold draft slithered over his foot. As always, he wondered where the air currents came from in a world with no sky, no wind, and no weather. Nothing in the prison ever made sense.

Take the wars. The Castle dampened magic, so most of the fighting that went on was pure brute force. Swords. Fists. Guns, if someone had them. But the no-magic rule wasn’t consistent. There were sorcerers that could still throw the odd zap of power. He’d seen werewolves shape-shift now and then. Odd things happened. Magic sometimes slid through the cracks.

He started to pace, walking a few feet to one side of the door, then the other.
Slid through the cracks?
The phrase nagged at him. There was something he needed to pay attention to. He could feel his cop brain struggling to find a connection.

Why had he been able to dust?

No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t immune. He’d somehow
regained
power he’d lost. That part of the Castle mojo was working in reverse.

In the world outside the Castle, demons didn’t need no stinking keys. They came and they went as they pleased, drifting through tiny cracks and holes in their dust form.

The Castle was different. Here, demons smashed into the doorway portal like a bird into a glass window. But what if he could make it through?
Slide through the cracks.

The alternative was sitting by the door for the next millennium, like a dog waiting to go for a walk. Whatever magical blip was making him different might wear off. He could lose this chance.

Suck it up
. Sometimes the only options available were bad.

Mac reached for the cold place where his rediscovered powers hid. He knew what he was doing. He knew he would regret it.

Cold shot through him with dizzying intensity, as if Jack Frost invaded his bones. The frozen sensation was stronger this time, but slower. In a fleeting glimpse, he saw his hand laced with veins of blackness, a latticework that melded and pooled as he disappeared into nothing. Bit by bit, his sensory awareness fell away as parts of him simply ceased to be.

Disintegration always followed the same sequence: edges first, then his feet, his fingers, his limbs falling away before the core of him blinked out into a smudge of darkness, an afterimage that faded away like errant smoke. This time, he held onto a smidgen of consciousness to guide him through the door. That’s all he was—a thought.

He drifted to the door, then threaded himself into a crack between two of the huge, upright planks of wood. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t a real door at all. It just looked like one. It was a portal made of earth magic.

He had no body, but he could still feel the buzzing energy of the portal, like ants crawling over flesh that wasn’t there. He roiled, the motes of himself spinning in the wild energy, distracted, stirred to a frenzy. Pulling himself into a hard knot of darkness, he willed himself through the force field like a bullet, an image of the alley beyond like a beacon in his mind.

He popped out between two hellhounds, barely missing the elbow of one, and hurtled toward the neon sign of Naughty Nanette’s.

Mac’s laugh whispered in the rustling breeze.

Then it died when he considered what he’d just done.

 

“F
inally, Dr. Elterland, let’s move on to talking about vampires.”

“To be honest, Errata, I don’t make them part of my study.”

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing there left to learn.”

“I see. How many vampires have you actually met, Dr. Elterland?”

 

Alessandro Caravelli strode back to the graveyard where he’d parked his car. It was a long walk, but he didn’t mind. He wanted time to unwind. Enforcing the peace among the supernatural population in Fairview was stressful, and he never took his work home with him if he could help it. Holly was a special woman and a powerful witch—the perfect mate for a vampire warrior—but even she had her limits. Decapitation and dismemberment did not make for good pillow talk.

A fitful wind blew garbage along the gutters, making a forlorn rustle. Pedestrians walked in twos and threes toward the parking garages, the early shows at the movie theater over. With his dark-adapted sight, Alessandro could see the street predators waiting in their lairs—an alley, a doorway, a patch of unlit street.

He silently dared one of the lowlifes to jump him, but that would never happen to a vampire with a broadsword. Undeath had its privileges. In fact, the part of town where the supernatural citizens had set up their businesses—some newspaper had called it Spookytown, and the name stuck—was remarkably free of crime. The merchants just ate the troublemakers, and the police rarely complained.

The thought of police took Alessandro back to Macmillan. Mac, as he preferred to be called. They’d never been friends, but there had been mutual respect. The detective had been out of his depth working preternatural crimes, but then, so were all the humans. He’d done better than most, up until the part where Geneva infected him with her demon taint.

Yes, magic might have blasted away most of the demon inside Mac, but the infection was like a virulent mold. If there was the tiniest remnant, it would spread and take over, reducing its host to a soul-eating machine, a monster’s monster. It was just a matter of time.

He would have traded in his right fang for a better solution than a sword or a dungeon. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stand around wringing his hands while Macmillan went evil and ate half the city. That just wasn’t practical.

His cell phone rang, and he answered it.

“Hey,” said Holly. Even that one word sounded tired.

“Hello, love,” he replied, his outlook suddenly changing for the better, as if a projector had clicked to the next slide in the carousel.
Do people use those anymore?

“Did you find Mac? Was the tip on the radio good?”

Alessandro sighed. “Yeah, I found him.”

“Crap,” she said softly. “Did you—”

“No. I put him in the Castle.”

“Oh.” Her tone was ambiguous. Holly had liked Mac. She had even dated him once.

There was a long silence. Alessandro kept walking, but his mind was with Holly, imagining her cradling the phone under her chin in that peculiar way. She was in the kitchen. He could hear the tick of the wall clock.

She finally spoke. “The Castle. Sweet Hecate, I don’t know which is worse. That place or . . . death.” There was no criticism in her tone. It was an honest question.

“I don’t know, either. He’s still infected.”

“Goddess.” Another long pause while she digested that. “When’re you coming home?”

“Now.”

“Good. I need company.”

With no more warning than that, she hung up. The night was suddenly emptier. Alessandro quickened his pace. He never liked leaving Holly home by herself, even if she was a powerful witch. She meant too much to him not to worry.

There was a lot to worry about. For one thing, the hellhounds had to stop wandering away from their post at the Castle door. He was going to call Lore, their alpha, and have a word. Alessandro didn’t pay the Baskervilles to take kibble breaks whenever they felt like it.

Not with Holly home alone
. Of course, all thoughts eventually led to her.

He finally reached the street beside the graveyard where his T-Bird was parked. The sight of her—the car was the other woman in his life—made his spirits rise. She was a sixties red two-door with custom chrome and smoked windows. He’d bought her new and kept her up himself. It was a point of pride that he never locked the doors. No one dared to mess with his car—except, of course, the occasional bird. Nature kept everyone humble, even vampires.

A cold wind whispered in the cedar trees as he threw the broadsword in the trunk and got behind the wheel. He wondered whether Holly had finished studying for the night, or if he’d have to coax her away from her books and over to the couch, where they could talk or watch television until other ideas pleasantly interfered.
The ugliness of the night is done, and I’m going home to the girl I love
, he thought, and he smiled. In all his long centuries of existence, this last year had been the first time he had been able to say that night after night.