Blue Bloods: Keys to the Repository (10 page)

The freezer slammed shut with a thick, wet sucking sound that made her wonder if this had been a good idea. How much air was in here? No time to

worry about that now. She grabbed a knife hanging on the wal and jammed the lock closed.

She could hear the creature throwing its weight against the bolted door, making the archway shake. It was larger and more dangerous than she

had thought. Tame the hounds? She would be lucky if she got out of here alive.

She looked around. There were a dozen or so carcasses hanging from the ceiling. The air was rancid, metal ic. She pushed her way through the

animal corpses to the back of the freezer, toward the sound of ragged breathing.

On the floor of the meat locker lay a boy, no older than she was, chained to the back wal . Next to him were a cutting board and a band saw. A

meat hook swung above his head, crusted with blood and rust. The tiled wal s were splattered a deep shade of scarlet. The boy’s skin was blue, his

hair caked with filth . . . there were ugly red marks around his wrists and neck, where he was bound with heavy iron shackles. Dear God, what was

going on here? Bliss wondered, her stomach churning. . . .

The beast couldn’t have done this alone. There was something else going on. Bliss shivered, goose bumps appearing on her skin. Now that she

wasn’t a vampire, her body did not control its temperature as wel as it used to. But was it fear or the cold that had caused the rows of tiny bumps?

For the first time in her journey, Bliss wondered if she was in over her head.

She bent down to touch the boy’s face. It was stil warm at least. She placed a tender hand on his bony shoulder. “You are going to be okay,” she

told him, and wondered if she was also consoling herself.

“Yes, but you’re not.” His eyes came alive, and before Bliss could blink, the boy had wrapped his fist around her neck and pinned her to the floor,

locking his knees against her waist and keeping her arms away from her body. His shackles, Bliss could see now, had not been locked.

“Who are you?” she asked, spitting out the words with difficulty, recoiling from the boy’s grip around her neck. She wondered if she could reach

into her jean pocket to stab him with the hidden blade she always kept there.

“I think the correct question is, who are you? You’re in our territory.” His voice was low and musical, friendly.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We don’t like the likes of you here. You smel like the glom,” he said, and she knew he meant that she was not quite human; that somehow, he

could sense her formerly immortal stature, when she had once been an angel of fire.

“You know about the glom?” Bliss asked.

The boy laughed. “We hunt
in
the glom. We are the
Abyssus Praetorium
.”

Bliss startled. She’d heard the term before. The Guards of the Abyss. Also known as the Praetorian Guard. An image flashed in her mind. She

saw the Visitor—Lucifer—her father—standing inside an elaborate palace, surrounded by magnificent columns of gold. A cast of thousands was

gathered around his court. Was this Rome? Or ancient Egypt? She couldn’t tel . Lucifer stood at the top of a marble staircase, looking down at a

creature of exquisite beauty. It was a man, but he was tal er than a human male, with a certain otherworldly magnificence, wild-eyed and ferocious.

The image did not come from her memory but from Lucifer’s. When she had been captive to his spirit, when he had taken over her soul,

fragments of his memories had drifted into her consciousness. Triggered by random events, memories she’d never had would suddenly pop into her

mind. So. The Visitor knew these creatures. She closed her eyes to recal the scene once more. She could hear Lucifer speak. The language was

unfamiliar, its words harsh and convoluted, but she knew she could speak them as if they were her own.

“
Release me
!” she cried, just as the boy’s hand tightened on her throat. The room froze and from the other side of the door, the beast howled.

Then the boy’s grip eased and he fel away, staring at her in amazement and confusion, as if he could not quite understand why he had let her go.

She was as she shocked as he was, but she didn’t have any time to lose. In one fluid motion, Bliss rol ed away and bolted from the room,

catching her balance before she slipped in a puddle of blood. She wrenched the knife from the freezer door and ran through the doorway and back

out into the shop.

What just happened? She had tracked the creature for weeks, and now suddenly it seemed that
she
was the one who was being pursued. Had

Lucifer sent the creature to lure her here? Was he somehow able to reach her once more? Was the boy working for him? How could Al egra have led

her to this hel hole? Was everything she had been told and everything she believed nothing but a lie?

Bliss pushed against the front door, surprised to find it was locked. She had purposeful y left it open when she’d entered. Who had locked it?

She kicked at the jamb, splitting it in two and throwing glass out onto the street. She flung the door open and skidded out onto the sidewalk. Tiny

shards of glass dug into her shoes as she stumbled across the pavement toward her car. She heard the slap of running footsteps behind her, but she

didn’t turn. Grabbing the keys out of her pocket, she wrestled the door open, slid into the driver’s seat, and fired the engine. She looked ahead of her,

and then behind. She was parked in from both sides, the other cars mere inches away from hers. There was no way she could get out without doing

damage to either vehicle, or her own. It was obviously a trap. She’d just have to smash her way out. She floored the gas pedal, and slammed into the

car in front of her. It moved, but barely.

She slammed on the gas again, this time throwing the car into reverse, and plowed directly into the car behind her, causing a sickening crunch of

metal against metal as the back end of her car crunched like an accordion and her tail ights exploded in a shower of plastic and dust. She threw the

car back into drive and pancaked the rear bumper of the car in front of her. Her own car popped up on the curb—that was more like it— al owing her

to twist her way out from between the two cars that had trapped her in front of the butcher shop.

Sweat dripped from her forehead and into her eyes. She blinked, feeling dizzy. She was human now, and despite her strength, she would have to

get used to her new limitations.

She hit the gas again and powered forward, turning the wheel, speeding wildly down the street. The windshield had cracked, making it hard to

see, and she immediately crashed into a telephone pole. The windshield caved in, and the car swung sideways as it plowed into the curb. Bliss was

thrown backward against the headrest. What had she done? She had gone from escape to disaster in only a few seconds. The car was demolished.

She hit the gas again, but nothing happened. She tried reverse, but the engine was dead.

Then a loud thump hit the top of the car, and the roof caved in slightly. She saw a pair of boots descend from the top of the car to the hood,

fol owed by four hairy paws. So that’s where the beast had gone. She could see it more clearly now—its silver fur, its crimson eyes. They settled in

front of her, the boy and the wolf, both of them crouched on their haunches, nimble as acrobats as they stared at her through the broken windshield.

Behind them, she could see others, a group of kids slowly circling the car. How many were they? Three? Four? More? She caught a glimpse of a

fierce-looking girl with wild green hair and tattoos, and several boys who looked dark and menacing. Someone was trying to pry open the rear

passenger-side door. The handle rattled, but al of the doors had been smashed shut. Bliss took a deep breath and waited. “What do you want from

me?”

The boy smiled. “I want you to calm down before you hurt yourself, Bliss.”

He knows my name. How does he know my name?

“I’m Lawson, by the way.”

She nodded, but her attention was elsewhere. The wolf had pushed forward, its teeth inches from her face. Spit oozed from its mouth; the odor

was unbearable. Lawson coaxed the creature’s head away, so it backed off from Bliss with a whimper.

“Come on now, Scooby, lay off,” he said, giving the creature an affectionate shake.

One of the kids standing near the car—a little girl, Bliss could now see—she couldn’t have been more than eleven— tossed over a dog biscuit.

The wolf caught the treat in midair and wandered away from the car, tail wagging.

“Scooby?” The wolf was his pet. Bliss tried not to look too incredulous. When her mother had sent her on this quest, she had imagined the

Hounds of Hel as supernatural creatures. Beasts that were half human and half animal, something from nightmares and horror movies. Hel hound,

werewolf . . . same thing, right?

“Is that what you thought? That we
turned
into them? At the sight of a ful moon?” Lawson smirked. How did he know what she was thinking? It

was as if he had heard every word. Venators could do that, of course, but she could tel he wasn’t a vampire. What was he then? And who was “we”?

That group of kids around the car? Were they with him? They had to be.

Lawson threw back his head and howled. He pul ed at his shirt col ar in an imitation of an uncontrol able dramatic transformation. “You’re not

serious are you?” he asked, looking a bit insulted. “I mean, you know there’s no such thing as werewolves, right? They were invented by some

desperate screenwriter in the 1940s. We noticed you’d been fol owing Scooby for a while and thought it was high time we final y met. Sorry if what we

arranged was a little crude. The boys have a sick sense of humor. Comes from living in the wild, I guess.”

Bliss didn’t know what to say. Lawson was awful y chatty for someone who, moments ago, seemed to mean her quite a bit of harm. Her neck stil

pinched where he had held her.

“Sorry about your car, by the way; although you didn’t need to overreact so much. Anyway, we’l get you another one. Or Gorg could fix it.

Whatever you’d like. But we need to talk about what happened in there. How do you know our language? Nothing like that has ever happened to us

before. We thought we knew every Praetorian in the district.” He studied her face closely and then plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and

dabbed her cheek with it. “Best we get you inside and clean up this mess before the police arrive. We don’t like to attract attention. This town might

look dead, but I assure you, the smal -minded sheriff is very much alive.”

He hopped off the car and easily lifted open the damaged driver’s side door. The metal was bent and twisted, but he hadn’t even broken a

sweat. He wasn’t as frail as he had looked earlier, nor as skinny. Bliss wondered if he had been able to adjust his presence somehow. He was quite

tal and muscular. Whatever he was—or any of his friends, for that matter—he was not quite human. But neither did he resemble the exquisite

monsters from Lucifer’s memory. In any event, he was as much a mystery to her as she was to him.

“Coming?” he asked, waiting for her to step out of the car.

Bliss winced. In the heat of the moment, she hadn’t felt the pain. But now it was unbearable. “I think both my legs are broken.”

“Oh god, now I’m real y sorry Malcolm talked me into such a stupid stunt. Here,” he said, bending down so that she could put her arms around his

neck.

Her legs dangled uselessly as he carried her back to the butcher shop, and she took the opportunity to study him in more detail. He must have

wiped the gunk from his hair, because under the glow of the streetlight, Bliss could see that it was actual y a lovely deep chestnut color. He had sharp,

fine features, wide blue eyes and an Irish nose, a square jaw and a strong forehead. He wasn’t frail and sickly at al , but young, virile, and very handsome.

After months of searching, Bliss felt oddly safe in his strong arms, and wondered exactly who or what she had found in Hunting Val ey.

After months of searching, Bliss felt oddly safe in his strong arms, and wondered exactly who or what she had found in Hunting Val ey.

Behind them, his team was already clearing away every trace of the accident.