Catastrophe (7 page)

I rolled my eyes. He wasn’t alone. Message received. “Fine. Whatever. I’ll take care of it.” I hung up.

It wasn’t like Sy to completely blow me off. Maybe the vampires were connected to the case and he knew it. There was way too much coincidence to ignore. The simplest answer was normally the correct one. So we either had two separate yet similar killers and a sudden vampire uprising that I was in the middle of, or someone was moving all of us around like toy soldiers. But why?

I couldn’t stand not knowing. That was why I took the job with the council to begin with. The fact that were was a council at all ate at me. I wanted to know all of their secrets—I wanted to know Sy’s secrets. The hows and whys kept me going and pushing forward with everything I did. It was that insatiable curiosity that had driven me from my homeland in search of more. It was also the reason I couldn’t just leave.

I replayed everything that had happened in the garage and everything they had said. Really, it could have gone much worse. Actually, it probably should have. The whole thing was too easy. My feet slowed to a stop, and I looked back over my shoulder at the faint scratching noise behind me. A rat scurried into an alleyway.

The vampire who’d snuck up on me wasn’t an adolescent vampire. No way did a new vampire get the jump on me. That vampire had been too fast and too silent for that. Yes, I had been distracted, but so was I just now, and I still noticed a rat. Even distracted, I was alert. The vampire who’d captured me had to have been older, much older, and stronger. I lightly touched my head. It was the perfect spot to knock me out, but not permanently damage me. And my skull hadn’t been fractured. That showed a tremendous amount of control.

And then there was the knife in my boot. Why would they leave the prisoner armed even if they were tied up? That was an unnecessary risk, even for a vampire. Sure, they could move fast, but it gave the prisoner a chance to get the jump on them, like I did. What if I had waited to attack until it was Paolo standing in front of me?

Also, if they knew they hadn’t really searched me, why was no one watching me? Why were all the vampires there so new? I had personally spotted at least twenty older vampires since I’d set foot in this city. Yet the ones charged with guarding me were babies, and slower than most. It was almost offensive that they hadn’t taken more precautions.

Not to mention Corbin’s timing was perfect. Too perfect…that son of bitch.

He knew I wouldn’t tell him if I knew something about Thomas. He also knew he couldn’t force it out of me, but he could “save” me and make me feel like I owed him something. I’d bet my next three meals that Corbin was the one who’d hit my head against the wall, and he had arranged everything that happened. I was good, but making it out of a situation like that pretty much unharmed was nearly impossible. Just when I was starting to like him, too.

Were the others in on it, or was Corbin playing both sides? Knowing him, it was the latter. He was on the outs with Paolo, which meant others were probably honestly vying for his spot in the vampire hierarchy. Fake-kidnapping me meant embarrassment for them, and he would buy himself more time to find Thomas, hence his renewed interest. I almost felt sorry for him.

I rolled my eyes.

I had no idea how he’d done it, but obviously he had made sure they “found” me. Then he let them call Paolo before he waltzed in, giving me the chance to escape, thereby making them look incompetent and making me trust him. It was actually a really good play. All things considered, they were incompetent, or they would have done a better job with me. At the same time, though, he’d used me and put me in a dangerous situation.

As annoying as that was, the real part I needed to focus on was how did all of this connect? Had the council set it up as a test, and if so, why? Or was Thomas once again at the heart of this clusterfuck? He knew I was here. Was he reaching out, or was he using the vampires to distract me from the case? Then there was Corbin. Twice, Corbin had helped me on cases that had nothing to do with him. I didn’t want to suspect him, but what choice did I have?

You know what they say:
never trust a vampire.

By the time I made it to the hotel, I was pissed off in general. I needed to talk this out with someone, and all of my usual sounding boards were off-limits. Normally, Sy was my first call, but that was obviously not going to happen again. Next, I would go to Olivia, but since Holden was on the council—and if I told her about it, she wouldn’t be able to resist getting involved—that pretty much meant she was off-limits too. Next in line would have been Baker, but since he was currently in diapers and just being fed solids, I didn’t think he would be much help. Cute, but no help.

And because fate was a bitch, Dempsey stood outside my hotel room door in his now-wrinkled suit and with five o’clock shadow. He looked like he could use a good meal and a solid night’s sleep, neither of which he was going to find here. I didn’t have time to deal with a human, especially now that I had a vampire problem.

“It’s not a good time,” I said, as I went past him. After unlocking the door, I went inside and tried to shut it on him, but he stopped the door and came in anyway.

“I’ve been waiting for over an hour. We’re going to talk now,” he said. His irritated eyes met mine, widening slightly. “What happened to you?”

Of everyone in the world I could talk to, a human was the last person who would understand. I had to find Amos. He wasn’t the ideal choice, but at least he understood the politics. Even if he was a spy for the council, he was better than a human. “I’m fine. You need to go.”

“No. You need to tell me what’s happening.”

I took off the leather coat and let it drop to the floor, not caring that I no longer had a shirt on underneath it. What I really needed was a shower, but the damn human obviously wasn’t leaving unless I physically removed him. The vampire blood, dried and caked over me, was making me itch. I wetted down a washcloth and scrubbed my skin. Dempsey stood in the doorway to the bathroom opening, gawking at me as I slid off my ruined jeans and threw them at the trash can. I glared at him.

“Sorry.” He held a hand up as he turned around. “That’s too much blood for you to be
fine
. Were you attacked? Do you need to go to the hospital? Are you hurt? What attacked you?”

It didn’t escape my notice that he’d asked
what
and not
who
. I let out a slow breath. Even so, I didn’t want to get involved with having to explain the Abyss to a human. “I’m fine. It isn’t mine. At least, most of it isn’t.”

“Whose is it?” he asked, looking back at me.

I shook my head. “You don’t know them.”

His mouth creased into a frown and his hand inched inside his jacket. “Have you been in a fight in the past month?”

“Probably,” I said.

He pulled his gun and pointed it at me. “Were you scratched? Have you been losing time?”

I went back to scrubbing the blood from my legs. “I’m not the killer.”

He didn’t lower his weapon. “I must inform you, if you have been a party to a criminal act, anything you say can and will be used against you.”

I snorted. He had no idea. Anything I said right now I had a feeling the council would happily use against me. “Are you threatening me? You’re the one who barged into my room. Now you are pointing a gun at me. Get out.”

“You can talk to me now, or I’ll take you down to the station. One way or the other, you are going to tell me what you know and whose blood is on you.”

My temper boiled up. In about two moves, that gun could be mine and he could be one less problem in my life. Instead I threw the washcloth into the sink. He wasn’t the one I was mad at. That squarely fell on Corbin’s shoulders. “Look, you don’t need to worry about it. I didn’t kill a single
living
human. Grab me some clothes then get out of here before someone thinks you know more than you should.”

Amos said he had the information I needed. I didn’t need Dempsey anymore. We would both be better off if he had nothing to do with this case. He could go on living his oblivious, yet happy, human life, and I could keep from having to babysit a nearly helpless human.

“I already know more than I ever wanted to,” he mumbled to himself as he went to my duffel bag and pulled out a pair of leather pants and a long-sleeve black shirt and handed them to me, but made no move toward the door.

I dried off and changed, feeling slightly better. “Look, I should have never come to your crime scene. There are probably two different killers. Good luck with your cases, but I don’t think we can help each other.”

“That’s it?” He gave me a dubious look. “You said something today…” His tongue touched the corner of his mouth.

“About?” I asked, putting my boots back on and tucking the last of knives back into their hiding spots on my body.

“You said you know about…”

He couldn’t even say the word. “Supernaturals?”

Relief washed over his face. “What do you know?”

This wasn’t the first time I had seen a human go through something like this. Knowing in theory but not knowing enough to understand was terrible, but it also kept them alive. So long as they were smart enough not to keep digging, no one in the Abyss had to know they knew, because once that was out, they were a liability. The only choice I really had was to perpetuate what everyone was probably already telling him. “That it’s bullshit,” I said, forcing a smile. “I lied. I heard them call you X-Files and took a stab. Is that why you are here and waited for me? Sort of pathetic. You’re too old for ghosts and goblins.”

He rolled his shoulders back, eyes trained on the ceiling. “I was married once. Wife. Kids. That sort of thing. It was the happiest time of my life.” His voice cracked. “I was never a believer back then. The stories, the legends—they weren’t my thing. I always figured we had enough real bad guys to deal with that we didn’t need to make up fake ones.” His hands went up and loosened his tie. “I honestly never gave any of it much thought. Then one night this happened and my whole life changed.” He opened his shirt, revealing a long, jagged scar across his chest.

“It’s not possible,” I said, staring at the scar. If a werewolf had scratched him, he would be a werewolf now. That didn’t go away. Once someone transformed into a wolf, they didn’t go back to their human form…ever. If he had some sort of mutation of the virus, then the council had a much larger problem on their hands. Also, he might very well be the killer. He asked me if I had been scratched, if I had blacked out. Was that what happened to him?

He buttoned his shirt again and ran his hand back and forth through his hair. “For someone who doesn’t believe, you seem to know what you saw.” He met my eyes. “As I said, you are going to tell me what you know.”

I put a hand to one of my knives just in case. “If I do, I can’t protect you.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t need protection. I need to know what is happening.”

I nodded. “Fine. Tell me the whole story about what happened to you, and I will answer your questions if I can.”

His shoulders sagged and his eyes closed. Not exactly the response I expected. He opened his mouth to speak then closed it again, the lines on his face deepening. He ran his hand over his hair again. “Do you want to get something to eat?” he finally said.

My stomach rumbled in response. “Sure. But I want to make one thing clear. I answer your questions and then you stay out of my way. None of this makes us friends or partners. And if I find out you are the one behind anything that is happening, I will not hesitate to kill you.”

“Noted,” he said, glancing at me with a smile. “You don’t trust me, do you?”

My head tilted to the side, but I kept my hand close to the knife. “Wherever you want to go. Let’s make this quick.”

His eyes trailed to my fingers tapping against the hilt of the knife. A moment later he drew his gun and handed it to me. I hesitated for just a moment before I took it. “Whatever you think I am, I not that anymore.”

I nodded slowly, putting the gun beneath my jacket. “We’ll see.”

He took me to a much quieter section of the city. Neither of us spoke much on the way there. I was still stewing over him potentially being a werewolf while watching the shadows for vampires.

Finally, he opened the blue door to a tiny restaurant named Alfios. The waitress tried to sit us in the front along the windows, but he asked for a table in the back. She shrugged and gave us a dimly lit table in the very back of the restaurant, near the restrooms. The entire restaurant was human; I could tell almost immediately from the smell as I entered. Each species had their own scent, but only humans worked so hard at covering it with perfumes, making them the most identifiable of all.

I ordered a beer and the house special. He held up two fingers and the waitress nodded as she left.

“Having been sworn to uphold the law, I feel like you should probably tell me exactly what happened to you tonight…but my instincts are telling me to let it go.” His intense eyes drilled into me. “Do I need to know what happened?”

I shook my head. “It’s out of your jurisdiction.”

He sighed. “I knew you’d be trouble the moment you crossed my police tape.”

That was big talk coming from someone who could sprout fur and fangs at any second. I accepted my beer from the waitress and took a long drink, finishing over half of it. “What happened after you were scratched?”

He barely sipped the alcohol before setting it back down. “I had been chasing this guy, or at least I thought it was a man, for weeks. The trail of bodies all led back to one person, but I couldn’t physically connect him to any of the scenes, so I staked him out. That’s when I saw him change from man into…some sort of beast. I pursued him. He led me deeper and deeper into the woods before I lost him entirely. I didn’t even have time to react before he took a swipe at me, laying open my chest. I knew in that moment I was dead. I had seen the victims he had torn apart. I drew my weapon and fired a round directly into his heart. He fell next to me, and I watched as he changed back into himself. The bastard almost looked relieved.” He shook his head.

“I was taken to the hospital, got stitched up, and thought everything was fine. My temper was worse and I was constantly in a bad mood. Mostly, though, I felt like I was getting sick. I was tired, and even the smallest things would set me off. I assumed it was the stress of the job and nearly getting myself killed. Then one night, I don’t even remember what happened, but I got angry. Rage exploded inside of me and I changed. It was horrible. Blinding pain and bloodlust pumped through me. Luckily that night I didn’t harm anyone, though I did kill a deer. That was when I understood that monsters were real and I was one of them.”

“Let me get this straight. You can change into a wolf at will?” This went against everything I had ever learned or knew about werewolves.

“Not anymore, and I was never a wolf. Neither was the man I chased.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “We have a legend here about people who are cursed for one hundred and one days to become this half-man, half-beast creature. That’s what happened to me. The curse was passed on to me because I killed the carrier. We call it the loup-garou, or rougarou.”

I had never heard of such a thing, but I wasn’t well versed in magic either. Curses were tricky. “How long have you been cursed?”

He shook his head. “I’m not anymore. I made it through my hundred and one days, then the curse passed on to another.”

“So that’s it. You just waited and it went away? You didn’t have to sacrifice something or…” That seemed highly unlikely. Most curses had a purpose, and until that purpose was fulfilled, they never left.

He took a longer drink this time. “The curse takes everything you love from you. As I said, I had a wife and kids, and then I was cursed.”

My breath thinned. I could predict what was coming, but I still wanted to hear it from him.

“I killed them,” he whispered. “Shredded them. I couldn’t stop myself. It was my last day, and the bloodlust…you can’t understand what that was like. I tried. Lord knows I tried.” He pressed his hand to his mouth. No tears, just tortured, haunted eyes.

There was nothing I could say to that. No words would ever make it right or assuage his guilt. It was a pain he would always have to live with. He may have lost the physical curse, but he would always be scarred from it. “What happened after?”

“There was an investigation. It was ruled an animal attack and the case was closed. I wanted to die, but…” He shook his head. “I started tracking the curse. I survived it for a reason. It had to mean something. So now I track it and make sure that what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else, but I lost track of it. For a couple months there was nothing. No deaths. I hoped it was over, that someone had finally figured out how to end it, but then they started again, and now I have no idea who the loup-garou is.”