Companions (14 page)

"You haven't been on-line for a while, Sandy," Selena said. "We've missed you."
How did you find me,
she wondered.
How the hell did you find me?

"I… the group… yes." Sandy nodded so hard Selena was worried she'd break her neck. Then she took a pink plastic diskette out of her purse. "For you."

"What is that?"

"Everything I could find." Sandy opened the glove compartment and tucked the diskette inside the crowded space.

Curious as she was about whatever was on the diskette, Selena didn't have a computer handy. She concentrated on extracting information from the distraught person beside her. "Tell me everything,
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Sandy."

"He
doesn't know about you. I swear. I'm strong. Kept my secrets. Wiped the hard drive." She laughed.

"Not that
he
went looking. We are dolls to him. Toys don't have lives of their own. Him and his kind. The evil must die." Sandy clutched Selena's arm with bruising force. Selena gasped and shook her off. "You'll help me," Sandy went on. "You all will! You have to do what you can, any way you can. Fyrstartr is good at organization, but you… you, me, and DesertDog, we're the tough ones. The strong ones that won't put up with any shit from
them."

"We all put up with shit from them, honey."
Some more than others,
Selena thought, observing the distraught woman. DesertDog did talk tough, but Selena didn't recall ever sounding particularly militant on the board. She thought of herself more of a whining complainer than an activist of any sort.

"But we don't have to! I agreed with Fyrstartr at first, that we should plan now for how we'd behave when we're changed, to put together a charter for companions' rights that we'd all lobby for from within the system. Fuck the system! Bring it down now."

"And what is it that changed your mind?" Selena injected quietly into the other woman's fierce tirade.

"He
did, of course. Him and his sick friends. They invaded our nest. Destroyed our home, our lives.

Donavan's his now, and all that belongs to Donavan. Me! I belonged to Donavan." Sandy was shaking, tears streaming down her face. She didn't look tough or dangerous at the moment, but scared and hurt.

Selena couldn't help but put her arm around Sandy and draw her head down on her shoulder. Sympathy overcame all professional detachment. "Jesus, girl, what did he do to you?"

Sandy pressed her face against Selena's shoulder and sobbed. "In here," she said after a while, the words muffled. "They're all in me. I'm in them. Pieces of me everywhere. Have to get the pieces back."

Selena didn't understand exactly what the woman meant, but she saw clearly what Sandy had been doing. Serial killers always had a reason for what they did, even if it only made sense in their very sick minds. "You're killing them to get yourself back."

Sandy drew away from Selena's embrace. "Yes! Of course! How else can I survive?"

"And leaving the bodies where they'll be found by mortals."

Starting the revolution by dragging the vampires out into the light? This part made sense to Selena, though ritually displaying victims' bodies was another behavior pattern exhibited by some serial killers.

And why was it easier to think of this woman as a typical serial killer than as a revolutionary vampire slayer? Maybe she thought too much like a cop sometimes. Maybe because she'd had so much more experience thinking as a cop than thinking as a vampire's companion. And whose fault was that? No, no, this was no time to be thinking about her
him.

Speaking of which… "Who are you talking about, Sandy, if not Donavan?"

"Donavan loves me!"

A fresh blast of pain shot through Selena's head at Sandy's shout. Dizziness erupted around her again, along with the dark, ugly images. By the time Selena pushed it all out of her head, Sandy had the car door open and was getting out.

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Selena dived after her. "Oh no you don't!"

She grabbed Sandy and pulled her back inside. Selena held the other woman down with an arm across her chest and took a quick look around the garage. All she saw was parked cars, no people around to witness any odd behavior. Satisfied that they still had privacy, she turned a glare on Sandy. "You came to me," Selena reminded her. "You killed a vampire in my town. That makes trouble for me, and I don't like trouble."

Sandy looked down like a contrite child. "I'm sorry. But I had to kill him. He ran, and I followed him.

When he came to Chicago, it was a sign. I knew you'd help me. Then, when I saw you standing over the bastard's corpse, I felt your mind, and I knew it was you. You were sent to help me." She lifted her gaze and smiled at Selena. "The magic's working for us this time."

From a family of witches, Selena was uncomfortable with amateurs' definitions. "Magic is a form of energy. It doesn't choose sides."

"It brought me to you," Sandy said with an unnervingly serene smile. "That, and some high-level hacking.

That's a form of magic, too, isn't it?"

Was messing around with intent in cyberspace a way of manipulating energy? Was magic a place where art, intuition, and science collided? "Maybe," Selena conceded dubiously. "You're a hacker?"

"I'm a computer security specialist. I catch the hackers." A tear rolled down her sunburned cheek. "I did." She closed her eyes for a long moment. "It's so hard to concentrate for very long now. This hurts.

Trying to stay me hurts."

"Uh-huh." Selena fished in her pants pocket and drew out the coin. "Where'd you get this? Which nest does it belong to? Why give it to me?"

"It's to acknowledge you. You're our Nighthawk. The companion's Enforcer."

Oh, shit.
Well, she'd wanted an answer; she didn't have to like it. That kind of presumption on Sandy's part could get both of them killed if the Enforcers ever found out. She resisted the urge to press it back into Sandy's hand. The habits of being a cop were too ingrained in Selena to let her lose a piece of evidence, even one that could get her killed.

"That covers the why of the coin," she said. "Now answer the other questions."

"It was Donavan's, but
he
took it from him. He said he collects them, but I took it back before
I
left. Not the others in that black velvet bag he carries, just Donavan's. But Donavan's nest doesn't exist anymore.

Donavan wouldn't have taken it back, even if I'd dared try to give it to him. Donavan answers to
him
now. I couldn't bear to watch him groveling anymore. I couldn't stay."

"Stay where?"

"Denver."

It was the answer Selena expected, but she hadn't been going to prompt her suspect — the mentally impaired companion — in any way. "You killed a vampire in Denver."

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"Simona… the bitch! It wasn't easy. I thought it would be easy. I did it the way DesertDog said would work, and it did."

"What did you use?"

"A chainsaw, of course. But I had to use a knife to cut out her heart. That was messy. There was blood everywhere. They bleed just like us. I don't know why I didn't think there'd be much blood. I didn't find me inside her, but she didn't take much of me. That's why I picked her, to see if it would hurt any. I thought that she wouldn't hurt as much 'cause I wasn't in her much. It hurt a lot." Sandy smiled proudly.

"But I still did it. I only had to kill one of them, and they ran like rabbits. I followed one of them." She laughed. "Pretty Euro-trash Pyotr. Pretty Pete went right where I wanted him to go. To Chicago. To you.

I think it was me in him that gave him the idea to come to you."

"He didn't know anything about me."

"He came to our Nighthawk's town."

"Don't call me that. He went to his friend Larry's place."

"To another vampire, yes. All I had to do was wait for daylight." She smiled. Selena didn't see a shred of sanity in Sandy's eyes. "The other vampire was a mistake."

"You cut off his arm."

"I didn't mean to hurt him. I dropped the chainsaw."

"You dropped the — " Selena closed her eyes. This was all way too strange.

Closing her eyes was a big mistake. The moment she did, the fractured, terrifying, painful images erupted inside her head again. She might have screamed; she certainly heard the echo of screaming. It reverberated through her like the tolling of a great and horrible bell. The sound overwhelmed all her other senses, and the pain rose and the hellish kaleidoscope faded to impenetrable black.

When the world came back, the first thing Selena noticed was that Sandy was long gone.

"How did she do that?"

Magic, of course. Sandy had somehow managed to throw a spell past her defenses. Or had both their mental defenses slipped, and Selena had gotten a dose of what went on inside Sandy's screwed-up head? Selena sincerely hoped not, for Sandy's sake. Better to believe in bad magic than to think the woman was suffering that much.

Selena checked her watch again. Yep. Hours had passed since she'd met Sandy at high noon. Sunset wasn't that far off. Selena swore and slapped a hand in frustration against the steering wheel and sternly ignored the pounding headache. She deserved the pounding headache.

"How did I let her do that? I had a confessed murderer in custody, and I let her slip away." She considered pounding her head against the steering wheel next, but why abuse the car when there was a
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nice, solid concrete wall not five feet away that she could use? "What kind of an Enforcer lets the bad guy get away? Not Enforcer… cop. I'm a cop." A mortal, human police officer, she reminded herself.

What is the matter with that woman?
she thought.
More importantly, what was done to her to make
her like that? Was anything done to her? Was the woman's mental state induced by some sort of
abuse committed by a vampire, or was there some other explanation for her condition?
Selena tried for a moment to be objective about Cassandra Schwimmer's state of mind. It was a very short moment. Of course a vampire had messed with her head. Several vampires, maybe, though this made no sense to Selena. Vampires didn't play nicely together, and they didn't share.

"And they run with scissors," she muttered as she started the car.

What a day,
she thought, as she negotiated heavy traffic away from the tourist delights of Navy Pier. As near as she could recall, it had started with a night of passion in her vampire lover's arms. A sleepless night, and she'd much rather have the vampire whose touch she craved well out of town right now.

They'd gone from passion to her holding an interior dialogue with the
dhamphir
while her body sat at her desk, and she'd capped the daylight hours off with an encounter with a lunatic rogue vampire hunter she knew from on-line.

And that was only the daylight hours. Who knew what the night would bring? Selena certainly didn't look forward to finding out. Her first impulse was to run home and confess all to her vampire master.

"Fuck that," she informed the impulse.

Telling Steve about Cassandra Schwimmer would lead to his finding out about Sandswimmer and all the other on-line radical companions. Sandy's actions would get them all killed if an Enforcer found out about them. And there was still Aunt Catie and Larry's possibly forbidden relationship to consider. Nope. No way Steve was getting involved in this if she could help it.

She thought about going back to work but settled for calling in to check for messages. She wasn't surprised when there weren't any. Steve was busy making people forget about the case. He'd probably put in a few suggestions to make people ignore her erratic behavior and presence for a while. Normally, this would piss her off, but right now, she thought it was just fine. With vampires to deal with, she didn't need to be handling her regular caseload as well. Or, God forbid, answering official questions about her performance, behavior, and state of mind.

She didn't need to go in to the precinct. She wasn't ready to go home. Even with Steve lying still as death at this time of day, she wasn't ready to calmly face him as though nothing at all was wrong. As well as disgusted with herself, Selena was nauseated and had a horrific headache. Besides, there were a few other things she needed. So she drove to the nearest pharmacy and did some shopping.

"What's all the stuff in the other bedroom?"

Selena nearly screamed in surprise at the sound of Steve's voice. She settled for slamming the door behind her and demanding, "What are you doing out of bed?" He was standing in the middle of the living room, naked and with damp hair. He looked like he'd just gotten out of the shower. He gestured vaguely toward the living room window. "Sun's down."

"Just barely." She caught the scent of brewing coffee coming from the kitchen. He
was
an early riser. She could have sworn she'd had a few minutes to spare before he came out of the daylight trance state to complicate her life once more. "What do you mean, what's in the spare room?"

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"It's full of exercise equipment and boxes now. What happened to the orchids you used to grow? I liked them."

She put a lid on the rush of pleasure from hearing him say he was pleased with something she did. She refused to take even a clinical interest in his unclothed state. She put the plastic bag from the pharmacy down on the coffee table. "What are you doing snooping around my apartment?"

He smiled. "Testy this evening, aren't we?"

He was
not
cute when he teased. He was Istvan the Enforcer, for God's and Goddess's sake. She would
not
smile back. "Having you around gets on a girl's nerves."