Bare Bones (31 page)

“I’ll call you, Ainsworth.” The detective’s voice was soft. “This one’s all yours.

G
OT HER.” DARIO
was downright smug.

It was close to midnight. He’d texted me the thumbs-up emoticon in reply to my eight-page message about Boo Hag attributes and how I
really
needed this girl alive if at all possible. The brief communication then radio silence had me on edge. I knew he was on the trail of our vampire Boo Hag.

“Where did you find her?” I asked.

“Getting beaten up by two girls behind a strip joint.”

That was unexpected.

“Cops showed up,” Dario continued. “It was all very entertaining. The dancers don’t like other women poaching their regulars. Drinks were thrown, words were exchanged, but our vampire wannabe persisted in trying to pick up the men at the club. She went out back to meet a patron and instead got pummeled by two of the dancers.”

“Two women subdued a vampire?” It was incredible. She might have been a Boo Hag in vampire skin, but having recently been on the receiving end of Boo Hag fists, I would have expected a different outcome. Unless these two women trained with Ronda Rousey, they should have been easily overcome.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Dario told me. “I think she’s dying. Maybe they’re not compatible with vampire skins.”

Or maybe she was starving to death.

“What happened with the police?”

The vampire snorted. “We told them she was a friend of ours, that she was drunk and we were taking her home. She wasn’t in any shape to protest. The dancers were clearly the aggressors, and were happy just to see her gone and not to wind up facing assault charges.”

How badly had she been injured? Vampires healed fast. And from what I’d seen, Boo Hag did, too. “What did they do to her?”

“Not a lot. Scratches, kicking, punching. Like I said, I think she’s dying. She was healing, but slowly. And she didn’t protest or fight us when we took her.”

That was kind of…sad. I couldn’t feel sympathy for this woman, though. She’d killed at least one vampire. She was a murderer, not a starving runaway kid. A murderer.

“Is she still up north in Towson or Hampton? Where did you end up taking her?”

“No, we brought her back. There’s nowhere adequate to hold a vampire up there, and she’s got the same strength and speed as one of us. I put her in Leonora’s holding cell for now, but I’m not sure how long even that’s going to hold her.”

Yikes. I wasn’t sure which alarmed me more—the fact that the Boo Hag might escape a cell meant to hold a
vampire
, or that Dario had taken her to the Mistress’s house. Leonora and I didn’t have the most amicable relationship, and I’m sure she was less than thrilled to have a creature wearing the skin of a rogue vampire in her house.

“Should I meet you there?” Duh. He was hardly going to drag the Boo Hag through the city to my apartment. It’s just that I was reluctant to go to Leonora’s. I’d have my sword, and Dario would meet me, but I still hated that place with a passion.

“Yes. Armand is at the door. He’ll escort you.”

Which meant Armand would ensure no one snacked on me or harassed me. Those loyal to Dario always treated me with the utmost courtesy, but Leonora’s followers tended to mirror her dislike if not expand it to a threatening extreme.

I hung up with Dario, grabbed my sword, but hesitated in the doorway. Should I call Sean? He was probably still in the city, although at midnight I wasn’t sure whether he would be in his human skin or out “riding.”

I wound up just texting him to let him know we’d found Becca and the vampires had brought her, alive but injured, back to the city. He’d promised to help. I was sure he’d get back to me as soon as he was able.

Driving to Leonora’s, I tried to think of what tactic I should take in interrogating this Boo Hag. My main goal was to find out where Gary and Lawton were, but I could hardly lead with that question. I’d need to find out as much about her as I could.

Armand did meet me at the door, a favor for which I was quite grateful. The two vampires out front were Leonora’s buddies and they made it very clear that without Armand, my drained body would have been found at dawn in a dark alley.

They were bluffing. That sort of thing would have meant war between Leonora and Dario—something the Mistress was eager to avoid. Even so, my palms sweated on Trusty’s hilt, protection blessings ready on my lips as I followed Armand through the hallway and down a set of stairs. It was different stairs than I’d been down last time, making me think Leonora had her basement sectioned off.

She did. And evidently there were different levels. We continued down two more sets of increasingly creaky wooden stairs, the air turning dry and cool. It reminded me of a wine cellar—a wine cellar with a set of holding cells, one in each corner of the room. Dario stood next to the far left cell. It seemed far too large for the occupant, a woman huddled in a ball as far away from the bars as possible. White-blond hair shielded her face and arms from view, its length even covering most of her legs.

“Becca?” I asked softly. She looked so frail that I suddenly decided to take a kinder, gentler approach than I’d originally intended.

She didn’t reply, or even look up.

Dario shrugged.

“Hon? What’s your name?”

Armand strode forward, snatching a stick off the floor and banging on the bars. “Hey. Answer the Templar when she asks you a question.”

So much for kinder and gentler. Or for keeping my identity a secret. This woman had never seen me. I’d hoped to keep the fact that I was a Templar from her as long as possible.

The woman looked up and snarled, baring her fangs. Yep, not likely to get any cooperation from her now—at least not without coercion.

In spite of the bravado she was drawn and paler than even a vampire should be. Bruises covered her face, and her bare arms still had the faint marks of scratches. Her eyes struggled to focus on me, her body slumped weakly against the back wall.

“She rallied a bit and tried to escape once we got her down here,” Dario told me.

The cage did look like it had seen better days, but I couldn’t tell what damage was from the Boo Hag and what had been caused by previous vampire occupants. Bars were twisted as if they’d been pulled apart then bent back into shape. Some had chunks taken out of the metal. Vampires were amazingly strong, but it would take one more than a few minutes to work their way out of this cage. An attentive guard would be able to subdue them before they managed to escape. Which made me wonder about
their
techniques of restraining prisoners.

“How do you guys keep vampires in the cage? The bars are just iron. Do you really have guards on them twenty-four seven to beat them back every time they try to break out?”

Dario got that blank, expressionless look that I was beginning to recognize so well – it was the expression he got every time he was about to tell me something I wouldn’t like.

“Normally prisoners are only kept alive long enough to interrogate, so long term guards or confinement isn’t an issue. We have ways of rendering them immobile for long periods of time so they don’t attempt escape while we’re holding them.”

I read between the lines. Vampires healed quickly, but amputations or massive amounts of bone breaks with internal injuries would take time—a lot of time if the vampire hadn’t fed recently. I could hardly complain, though. It’s not like human jails could hold them. Paranormal criminals required a different method of confinement. I could hardly fault the vampires for their extreme methods given the nature of their offenders.

“Any idea what’s wrong with her?” I asked. Dario wasn’t a medic and neither of us knew anything about Boo Hag physiology, but he did know vampires. She was wearing the skin of one. Maybe whatever she had going on was a vampire thing.

“I think she’s starving. The weird thing is she’s been trying to feed like a vampire, but she keeps vomiting the blood back up.”

“I am a vampire,” the girl shouted. “I’m Marcielle and I pledge my loyalty and life to Mistress Leonora and her
Balaj
.”

I caught Dario doing something suspiciously close to an eye roll. “And she keeps yelling that,” he told me.

“She’s no vampire,” Armand chimed in. “She’s crazy, that’s what she is. She smells funny, can’t keep blood down, and her one finger keeps turning into some kind of claw thing. Looks like a knife.”

Yeah, I’d had up close and personal experience with one of those. I’d no wish to repeat that.

“Has she tried to take her skin off yet?” I couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t resorted to that last ditch effort to escape. At night, or day, without the skin she’d be able to slip between the bars and be out of Leonora’s house before the vampires could catch her. She had to have another skin stashed somewhere she could use once she got away.

Unless she was particularly fond of
this
skin. I remembered what Sean had told me. If the Boo Hag had grown attached to living Marcielle’s life, she’d be very reluctant to leave it behind. That plus her vampire fixation and the difficulties in gaining a replacement skin could be keeping her here.

“Where are the other two Boo Hag?” I asked, deciding to cut with the small talk and go for the jugular.

She glared at me. “I don’t know. I’m a vampire.”

Was she trying to negate her real self, or did she really not know where the other two were? She could be telling the truth. When she’d left them behind to go vampire hunting up north, she could have broken off all contact with them.

“Why did the three of you leave your home, leave Grandmother?”

Loneliness flashed across her face before her expression hardened once again. “I’m a vampire.”

“You’re a renegade vampire,” Dario responded. “You have no family. You have no territory. You’ve been cast out to roam the outskirts, and either starve or be killed.”

Tears filled her eyes. “This is my
Balaj
. This is my family.” Her voice shook with uncertainty and fear.

“It’s not.” Dario’s voice was cold, impersonal. “We don’t know you. We would have killed you on sight if this woman hadn’t asked us not to. The only thing keeping you alive right now is this Templar. I suggest you answer her questions before we decide you’re of no further use and rip your head off.”

She burst into tears, curling into a little ball against the cell wall. “It wasn’t my fault. Master said I was weak, that Richard never should have turned me. I’m so hungry, so lonely, so scared. I don’t want to die. I want my family. I want my Grandmother.”

Finally. The emotions of the Boo Hag and the vampire seemed to be in alignment.

“You’re hungry because you can’t live on blood,” I told her. “I know you want to be a vampire, but you’re not. In time you’ll be able to fit into the human world, but you’ll never be able to fit into a vampire one. They’ll always know you’re not one of them. They’ll never accept you.”

“I’m a vampire,” she sobbed. “I’m a vampire.”

I was beginning to agree with Armand that crazy is what she was. But I wasn’t sure if her mental state was due to the disconnect of wearing a vampire skin, the fear that Marcielle would normally have being captured and caged by a strange
Balaj
, or the sudden realization that she was a young Boo Hag, alone and woefully unprepared for the world around her.

“Do you want to go home?” I asked her in as kind of a voice as I could manage. “Do you want to go back to Grandmother?”

She shuddered, drawing herself up and taking a deep breath. “I’m a vampire. My name is Marcielle and I want my family.”

“And we’re back to that,” Armand commented dryly.

I pulled Dario aside. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately? I’m assuming she has the hearing of a vampire, too.”

He nodded and motioned for me to follow him up the stairs and into the main-floor room where Leonora tended to hold court. Neither of us sat on the gigantic, ornate chair that served as a throne.

“I know someone who might be able to help,” I told the vampire. “But I need to make sure he can come and go safely. He’s another Boo Hag who has been living here in the area as a human for the last two years. He might be able to get through to her.”

He nodded. “One of her own kind. That might work. How human-like is he? She looks and smells like a vampire, but there’s something strange about her scent. I’m assuming we’ll notice the same difference in this Boo Hag?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Honestly he seems completely human to me, but I don’t have your heightened senses. I had some hesitation about him at first, but I figured that was just me being paranoid because he’s dating Janice and I don’t want her to get hurt.”

Dario blinked in surprise. “The developer? Sean Merrill? Suzette met him. She would have said if he’d seemed off, or smelled odd. Unlike our friend downstairs, he must be more skilled at impersonating a human.”

“She met him in the last two years? Because that’s when Sean Merrill became the Boo Hag Sean Merrill.”

The vampire nodded. “Suzette works with a lot of the city government, just to keep track of what’s happening with various buildings and long range planning. She met him last week at an evening community planning function.

“I’d like to bring him here, if that’s okay with Leonora. This Grandmother that raises the young is supposedly on her way, but I don’t know when she’ll arrive.”

Dario got my unspoken question. “We can continue to hold her until her Grandmother arrives, but she doesn’t look well. I’m not sure she’ll last more than a day or two, especially since she’s refusing all food but blood and can’t seem to keep that down.”

***

“SHE’S BEING HELD
in a vampire cage?” Sean asked. “All she has to do is shed her skin and she’s gone.”

He’d called me back and left a message, but our game of telephone tag ended with my most recent call. Reluctant to show up at the Mistress’s house without an escort, I’d agreed to drive out and meet him down the block at a gas station.

“I know. She’s really sick, Sean. Dario thinks she’s dying. She keeps insisting that she’s this vampire Marsielle. I don’t think she’ll leave that skin without a fight.”