Bring On The Night (2 page)

“But that’s not how I roll.” She laced the fingers of one hand in his hair and pulled his head back sharply, black eyes boring into his. “I
like
to put the hurt on, and I want you to remember every second of it when you wake up.” She leaned closer, close enough he should have been able to feel her breath on his face. “If you wake up and you go looking for more girls to drug, you might want to think of tonight as a cautionary tale.”

She opened her mouth. He watched in horror as two teeth began to elongate into sharp, curved fangs. He began to scream as she lowered her mouth to his neck, struggling in vain to free himself. Her fangs sank into his flesh like hot knives, ripping and tearing as she jerked her head. The blood began to flow, followed by the echo of his screams.

* * * *

An hour before sunrise found Jessie climbing the stairs to her apartment at a leisurely pace, idly swinging the little pink purse on its short strap. Glancing at it and the matching dress that reached to mid-thigh, she thought with longing of the soft flannel pajama pants and cotton tank top waiting for her. Warm and drowsy, she was sated with the fresh blood coursing through her body and the feeling that she’d done some good tonight. She sang softly to herself, a few lines from an old Police song.

Jessie reached the landing leading to her hallway. Already she smelled the fresh flowers she’d bought the day before, half a dozen confetti roses. Taking a deep breath as she approached her door, she drank in the floral scent. As she reached inside her purse for her keys, another scent made itself known, dank and cold, like something that lived underground and rarely came out in the fresh night air. She stopped, one hand clutching her keys, the other spread out against the door. She listened for a long moment, taking another deep breath. Then, sure of who was there, she rolled her eyes and unlocked the door, swinging it open with a slight push.

“Trent, you smell like that cave you live in.” She kept a light teasing note in her voice, announcing her presence, though he’d probably known it as soon as she had stepped into the hallway. “You really need to get out more.”

“I get out often enough to suit me,” came the reply. The kitchen light flicked on and he stood in the doorway. “You know I generally prefer the company of my books.”

He spoke with a soft voice at odds with his appearance: medium height, dark blond hair and average build. Except for his face he would not have stood out in a crowd in the slightest. Half his face showed the bland good looks he’d been born with. The other half bore three long scars stretching from his forehead to his jaw line, interrupted only by the black patch where an eye used to be. The old injury looked like the claw marks of a large animal. The scars gave him a sinister air. He wore all black: trousers, shirt, tie and shoes. He held himself with an air of reserved aloofness. No doubt to most people he looked intimidating, if not downright scary, but not much scared her, and certainly not one of the few people she called friend.

She closed the door behind her and crossed the room to greet him with a soft kiss on the cheek—his scarred cheek. “What brings you here, Trent?”

Trent gave her a look that let her know what he thought of the blond wig and unsuitable pink. His voice taking on a somewhat formal note, he said, “His Majesty the King of Vampires, Regent of the Court of Monsters, sends greetings and a request for your services as his emissary.”

She snorted rather indelicately. “And what services does our king require of me? Am I to steal hundred-year-old absinthe, or eighty-year-old scotch?” She’d done both for the king in recent years.

Trent quirked an eyebrow, his lips pulling slightly in the barest suggestion of a smile. “Unfortunately, nothing so...what’s the word you used once?”

“Whackadoodle?” she offered, pulling the wig from her head and tossing it on a counter. She ran her fingers through her thick black hair, glad to have the confining wig off her head.

He pointed to a manila folder on the bistro table. “I’m afraid this is rather serious. Would you like to talk now, or would you prefer to rid yourself of that ridiculous pink first?”

She put one hand on her hip and with the other gestured at her outfit. “You mean bubble gum pink isn’t me?”

He refused to answer, keeping his face inscrutable.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think so, either. Be right back.” She left the room. Halfway to her bedroom she turned in mid-stride and called out, “There’s a couple of bottles of good wine in the rack, if you want to pick one out. Or you can make coffee.”

A few minutes later she returned, face scrubbed clean of makeup and the pink dress replaced with dark green flannel pajama pants and a dark blue tank top. Bare feet with crimson toenails peeked out from under the flannel pants. Trent sat at the small round bistro table. He moved the blown glass vase with the confetti roses in the center of the table to one side, making room for two cups of coffee and the manila folder he’d brought.

She sat. With a pointed glance at the coffee, she said, “So I take it whatever’s brought you here is too serious for a glass of wine?”

He opened the folder and removed the contents. From across the table and upside down, it looked to her like photocopies of newspaper articles and possibly even police reports. “Have you heard about the murders taking place in Concord?”

She shook her head and took a drink of coffee. Concord was four hours away, a midsized river town that had seen better days. “What’s happening in Concord that’s any different from what normally happens there?”

He pushed the small stack of papers to her. “Police are finding corpses at the waterfront that suggest...well, just take a look.”

She did. Something jumped out at her right away. “The body was exsanguinated? What is this, some newborn who doesn’t know the rules?”

“If this is a vampire, they’re not hunting alone.”

She raised an eyebrow in question. He reached for the papers, flipping through them to find copies of autopsy photos, showing her one in particular.

“Oh God,” she said in a hushed voice. The body in the photo was little more than shredded chunks of meat. “Werewolf.” There was no doubt in her voice, only a cold matter-of-factness.

“Yes,” Trent replied softly. “That’s the current theory.”

She looked through the rest of the stack of papers, the coffee forgotten. “Homeless, runaways, prostitutes, all the usual meals for rogue predators. But it looks like vampires
and
werewolves. Sometimes the same body has evidence of both.” She looked at Trent. “What the freaking hell is going on?”

“We think it’s exactly what it looks like, the joining of forces of at least one vampire and one werewolf, possibly more of one or the other or both.” His voice was flat. Obviously he’d had time to accept the idea.

She, however, had not. “Vampires and werewolves do
not
join forces. The two courts have fought wars against each other. Even now, we don’t have a peace accord with the werewolves. It’s more like, I don’t know...an extended pause in the conflict.”

He nodded. “I know that, as does our king. Nonetheless, looking at the evidence...” He gestured at the papers, but didn’t seem to want to look at the photos again.

“What does he want me to do?”

Trent took a long drink of coffee. “This is a very delicate matter. You and I know what a precarious hold the king has on his throne. Subjects like you and I are loyal to him, and to his philosophy of the Justice Killing. We choose not to hunt among the innocent and instead take our prey from the predators of the mortal population. Not all vampires agree, you know that. And certainly werewolves have no such moral compunctions. If he lost his grip on the Vampire Throne and his position in the Court of Monsters...”

She finished for him. “The number of innocent victims would skyrocket.”

“Which would in turn bring notice to our kind.”

“It’s hard to imagine mortals accepting we’re real, in this day and age.”

“Even so, it’s always a possibility, and if it happened, it would lead to war, war within the Vampire Court, war between vampires and werewolves, and other creatures in the Court of Monsters. And war between mortals and those of us who are...not.”

They sat quietly for a long moment. Trent drank his coffee as she went through the file. “I take it I’m going to Concord.”

He nodded. “Find out who’s doing this, and stop them, before too much attention is drawn, be it mortal or otherwise.”

She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound so simple.”

“I know it’s not, and so does the king,” he said. “There aren’t many he would trust enough to send to your aid, Jessamine, should you need it, but should things get complicated, you know I’ll do everything I can.”

The sound of her name, the name the king had given her years ago, startled her a bit. She’d known Trent a long time. He meant it when he said he preferred the company of his books. He was a man, a
creature
, of solitude. So was she, for that matter. Events in the past had brought them to an understanding of each other, and a mutual trust. No doubt this was why their king sent Trent to her, to ask her to risk her life in this matter. She gazed at Trent calmly as he drank his coffee, letting him read her thoughts in the set of her face, the resolve in her eyes. She would find these creatures that had formed such an unheard-of alliance, and she would stop them. There was no question it would mean killing them.

* * * *

Long after Trent left, taking one of the yellow-and-orange roses with him, she stayed up to read through the file with care and make notes. The Concord police went from not caring about the crimes because of the status of the victims, to theorizing they were drug or gang-related. A local journalist thought it might be a serial killer, though she noticed the theory didn’t seem popular with police. She made some notes of her own, conducted some research online. Exhaustion began to pull at her, dragging her thoughts down into a jumbled pool.

She shut down the computer, washed the coffee cups and turned off the lights. The bed was cold but she didn’t notice. She heard faint sounds of traffic outside the apartment building, the mortal world going about its daytime business. Her car, with its windows tinted darker than legal, was parked in the building’s underground garage. She didn’t drive it much, in fact didn’t care much for driving at all, but she was glad she owned it. She’d be able to leave for Concord before deep twilight fell, giving her time to take a good look around.

At first she mistakenly thought this “request” was another order, but in reality it was not. It was an appeal to her sense of honor and justice and her loyalty to the king himself. A vampire that had, for whatever insane reason, joined forces with a werewolf was killing innocent people. Worse than that, vulnerable innocent people. That went against everything this current King of Vampires believed in, everything his followers believed in. Everything
she
believed in. Jessie may have been a monster, but she was a monster with a code of ethics.

The highway passed by in a blur. The bland interstate scenery held no interest for her. Jessie kept her eyes on the road, her mind turning over thoughts and theories about the murders in Concord. As dusk fell, she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. She wore long sleeves and driving gloves. Once, years ago, she’d been burned in the bright light of the sun, and had no desire to ever experience that again. Even with the car’s darkly tinted windows she took extra caution. Now, with the last light disappearing below the tree line, she tossed her sunglasses onto the passenger seat and peeled off the gloves. Reaching into her leather backpack purse, her fingers searched for a pack of cigarettes and her lighter. She smoked for a while, her mind drifting away from Concord toward a nebulous empty calm, lulled by the boring drive.

The CD player was set to shuffle. Oliver Nelson’s
The Blues and the Abstract Truth
, Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
, John Coltrane’s
Blue Train
, Dave Brubeck’s
Time Out
and Chet Baker’s
The Italian Sessions
, all just for the drive. More were in a black CD carrying case in the passenger seat floorboard.
Locomotion
cued up and didn’t suit her mood. She pressed the “next” button until she found something that did,
Take Five
. She lit another cigarette, rolling down the window a few inches to let the smoke blow out. The night air felt warm and inviting, so she thumbed the button to let the window slide down a few more inches, hit another button to open the sunroof. She turned the stereo up louder to hear Brubeck over the rush of wind, playing
Take Five
over and over as she drove farther into the night.

* * * *

Half a dozen or so people loitered outside the Red Eagle bar, smoking. They were all cops, since the bar was a cop hang-out. They would much rather have been smoking inside, but state law made it illegal now and the police commissioner, not being a smoker himself, had no sympathy for anyone who wanted to break that law, even his own officers, so they smoked outside and complained in colorful terms.

Brandon Ellis parked in the lot across the street and jogged to the bar’s entrance. One of the cops gave him a nod in greeting, a few of them glared at him and the rest ignored him. As a crime reporter for the
Concord Post
, he was used to a mixed bag from local police. He returned a nod to the cop who’d greeted him as he opened the door and went inside.

For the most part, the Red Eagle looked like any other bar, heavy on the cop and military decorative touches. Several American flags covered the walls, with framed pictures of local cops who’d died in the line of duty, posters with law enforcement and military themes, and a large painting behind the bar of a red eagle in flight, wings spread wide.

Brandon surveyed the room and found who he was looking for at the far end of the bar—Henry Gonzalez, veteran detective on the Concord PD and Brandon’s favorite inside source. He was not the lead detective on the Waterfront Murders, as the
Post
—meaning Brandon—dubbed them, but it wasn’t for lack of ability. Gonzalez didn’t care to chase the attention of his superiors in the department anymore. The lead slot went to a much younger, attention-hungry detective named Robbins, who no longer gave so much as the time of day to Brandon, much less information on the case.