Crossed (22 page)

Inside the Demon Heart, Magbidion was saying good
night to the last customer of the evening, a redcap who works over at the Iversonian. I stopped at the front door of the Pollux, by the shiny new numeric keypad, and typed in the passcode, paused, and reset the system. Something was wrong. Someone or something walked across my grave, turned around three times, and sat down. The scent slid into my nostrils and I wanted to hold on to it, to never let it go. Warm, musky, and magical, it . . . she . . . smelled like home.

“So this is how you spend your life now, Blackbird?” asked a familiar voice. “Playing nanny?”

“I prefer the term
manny,
Dezba,” I answered, half sarcastically, as I turned toward her. She stood in the dry spot under the awning. Wide-eyed and beautiful, Dezba was an Egyptian Mau, and her silver coat was dappled with crisp black spots. No cat I’d ever met was as beautiful or as cruel as Dezba. Her chosen name was from the Navajo language and it meant “Goes to War.” If I’d known she was coming, I’d have worn a better suit.

“As in a nanny, but still a Mouser, I hope,” she sneered. “Or have you really been exiled so long that you would take pride in a title that labels you a man?”

I dropped to all fours, becoming a black cat, albeit a black cat with glowing star emerald eyes. “Don’t worry, Dezba, I know exactly who and what I am. It’s you who seem to have forgotten. I certainly didn’t exile myself.”

“You helped a vampire, Chogan! You went into the holiest of places and stole knowledge, then used it to help a vampire!” She’d used my Narragansett name, a name I hadn’t heard in more than a decade.

“The vampire needed help defeating one of the Nefario,” I said calmly. “And you know Eric is not just any vampire. You’ve seen him in the light of
akasha;
you know he’s more than that.” It would be easy to lose control around Dezba. For fifteen years every cat, Mouser or mundane, has refused to acknowledge
me, has acted as if I were a human. A few had even attacked me. To have a cat, any cat, acknowledge me was so wonderful that it was almost impossible to keep up appearances. For that cat to be Dezba . . .

A momentary flash of paranoia overtook me and I glanced back at the parking deck. I could still see Greta’s spirit. She was fine. When I looked back at Dezba, she laughed at me.

“Same old Chogan, my little Blackbird. No, I’m not a distraction.”

“I answer to Talbot now,” I said, angry with myself for letting her bait me. “I answered to other names before Chogan. I have no doubt that I will answer to other names after Talbot.”

“So if a human threw a ball and said, ‘Fetch, Talbot . . .‘” She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry . . . Talbot . . . please forgive me . . . Talbot. I meant to say if a
vampire
said, ‘Fetch,’ then you’d just run out into traffic . . .”

I stood on two legs and became human again, turned, and punched in the security code. “It was nice seeing you again, Dezba,” I said softly.

“Blackbird, wait.” I felt a hand on my shoulder; it was soft, affectionate. “You know I can’t help it. You know how I feel.”

Her arms slid around me from behind in an embrace I hadn’t felt for fifteen years. It froze the breath in my chest. She let her head rest on my shoulder, and I exhaled raggedly, overcome with sheer desire. “Something is coming, Chogan . . . Talbot. It isn’t a danger to us, but then . . .”

“I’m not technically one of you anymore,” I completed her thought.

“We can pull all of ourselves onto one plane.”

“Oh.” Mousers are creatures of more than one world. There are plenty of creatures capable of seeing into another plane than the one in which they normally exist. If you see a domestic cat staring at the air, that’s probably what it is doing. With my kind, it’s different. In exile, I was essentially
straddling more than one world. To pull all of myself onto this plane would give the Ancients a good shot at making my exile permanent. “That.”

Closing my eyes to the physical world and blocking out the
akasha,
I opened my other eyes, the ones set in a sable-furred leonine body resting in the dream world. The other part of me. It was a body with golden chains around each massive silver-clawed paw and around its great neck. All I had to do to escape the chains was pull myself all the way out of dreams. Six Mousers of lesser breeding stood ready to enact a Seal and bar me from returning if I did so. I closed those other eyes and became conscious of Dezba’s touch again.

“You could snap the chains, Chogan.”

“Perhaps, but not today. I deserve my exile.”

Her arms vanished from around me, and when I turned toward her, she was feline again. “Be careful,” she meowed at me. “Earthbound cats cannot escape if Lisette threatens, but you are still my Blackbird, and blackbirds can fly away. No one can enforce your exile, Talbot. We know that all too well.” She turned, looked up to the moon, and leapt into the sky. I stared after her for a few minutes and then noticed Magbidion standing in the doorway of the Demon Heart, smoking a cigarette and looking straight at me.

“Did that lady cat just jump to the moon?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “Everyone knows that’s just a fairy tale. Besides, that was no lady cat; that was my wife.”
Ba-dum-bum.

I left him standing out there with his mouth open and went inside the Pollux. Once inside, I dried myself with a cantrip and for the first time in three years, I marked the threshold with my musk. If someone slipped in past the security, I would know. Eric never liked it because he could smell the musk, but it was becoming abundantly clear to me that Eric might not be back in time to handle the situation. I went upstairs, gathering Greta’s
trail of bloody clothes as I went, walked into Eric’s bedroom, and dropped the clothes in the sink. I ran cold water over them to let them soak.

In my mind’s eye, I could see what Eric would be doing at this time of night were he home. Greta would have fallen asleep somewhere in the Pollux, letting herself drop, not because she couldn’t feel the onset of sleep, but because she knew it would make her father care for her. He’d drag Greta’s corpse-like body off into the shower. Hot water would rush out of the showerhead and sweep the blood from her skin. Some of it would have dried and he’d work on particularly crusty spots with the loofah sponge Rachel leaves in the shower. Her hair might need shampooing, so he’d take care of that before patting her dry, putting her in a clean T-shirt, and tucking her into bed.

As dysfunctional as Eric could be at times, he had never needed this much looking after. Greta required something that I couldn’t give her, and if she didn’t get it soon then things were only going to get worse around here. The clock on the wall read six thirteen. That made it after 1:00 p.m. in Paris. There was no way Tabitha would be up, but maybe Eric . . . I called the number they’d given me for the hotel in Paris and asked for their suite.

There was no answer. I tried Tabitha’s, Bea’s, and Eric’s cell phones in sequence and left each of them a message asking them to call me.

    22    

TALBOT:

ANYBODY’S GUESS

Around 10:30 a.m. the downstairs phone rang. Everything seemed huge, too big, and that was when I realized that I’d changed shape in my sleep. Dezba’s visit had gotten to me more than I wanted to admit. The last sweet memories of what I’d been dreaming slipped away from me. I shook off the cobwebs of slumber and glanced at my clothes dangling from their hanger on the door back.

“No time.” I left them hanging and darted out of the room and down the stairs, where I reluctantly shifted forms to answer the phone behind the concession counter.

“Hello.” I spoke brusquely, trying not to yawn into the receiver. You learn to keep strange hours when you live with the dead.

“Talbot?” The connection was bad, but the voice on the other end of the line sounded panicked and hurt. “Talbot, is that you? Damn phone. Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“Talbot! It’s me, Tabitha.” She sounded like someone trying to keep it together and act like everything is all right when it clearly isn’t.

“What are you doing up? It’s what, five-thirty over there?” Oh . . . right. She’d probably had Eric force her awake.

“Would you shut the hell up and listen to me.” More crackling interrupted her speech. “My cell is broken and it keeps hanging up. Is Rachel there?”

“I haven’t seen her since you guys left for Paris. Is Eric there? I need—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you need, Talbot. Shut up and listen to me. Lisette is headed for you guys. She may already be there.”

I glanced around. Through the
akasha,
people walking by outside or driving in their cars became visible, even through the walls. There was no sign of Dezba or any other eavesdroppers. “Where’s Eric?”

“The fucking immortals lost him. And they made me do a lousy three-day initiation.”

“I’d have thought Phil would have called ahead, cleared things—”

Tabitha interrupted. “Eric was kidnapped by someone with cinnamon-scented magic and a female Vlad.”

“Damn. So you think Rachel—”

“Well, don’t you think Rachel?”

“Probably.” I sighed. “And Eric would want me to stay here and help Greta with Lisette.” I hissed. “Do you know what the Vlad looked like?”

There was a jostling noise, audible even over the crackle of the bad connection. “Describe the other Vlad,” I heard Tabitha say as the phone was passed to someone else.

A deep, yet female, German-accented voice obliged. “She was petite. Attractive. She’d been turned in her early twenties. The way she moved was distinct, as if she had trouble moving slower than her maximum vampiric rate. Eric seemed to recognize her.”

Shit. Irene.

“Put Tabitha back on,” I ordered.

Less jostling this time. “You know who it is?” Tabitha asked.

“It could be Irene,” I said. There was no point in beating around the bush. Tabitha needed to know who she was up against. “She’s one of Eric’s children. He tried to kill her after El Segundo. She was involved with the demons there. To her it was a game.”

“What was? El Segundo?”

“No. The end of the world,” I said seriously. “You can’t let him be around her, Tabitha. She’s not right, and he’s different around Irene. He’ll kill for the fun of it, just because it turns her on.”

“He’d do that for me,” she said. Yeah, but the two of them were like apples and oranges. But how to get that across over a really bad phone connection?

“He lets her bite him,” I said.

“That b—!” The static vanished along with the connection.

A dull throb settled in behind my eyes and I reached behind the concession stand, feeling around for a bottle of analgesic.

Something crossed the threshold of the Pollux. I felt it. It wasn’t a nice something and it hadn’t come to bring me breakfast. “Fine,” I said softly to the dead line, as I hung it up. “Shenanigans went on a world tour.”

I hopped over the counter and found the bottle of pain pills for which I’d been looking. After a brief fight with the childproof cap, I tapped two red and yellow capsules out into my palm and dry-swallowed them. “So . . . I’m going to Paris then. Guess I’d better take Greta with me.”

Two seconds later and I caught the scent; it wasn’t human, but it might have been human once. I couldn’t place it. Whatever it was, it was male and smelled like cheap cigars and expensive cologne. Below the cologne I smelled dirt or maybe stone, faint but distinct.

I reached through the
akasha,
pulling a little more of the real me through to the material world. Vampires seem to find changes uncomfortable. My kind doesn’t. A white glow spilled over my body as I clothed myself in fur and extra muscle, then vaulted up to the second-floor balcony, watching for the intruder, ready to pounce—if necessary.

The creature showed up through the
akasha
as sudden bursts of light, visible only when he moved. From the balcony overlooking the lobby, I saw a figure in a dapper brown suit and fedora gently tapping the rain off his umbrella. The suit coat bulged in the back, implying a pronounced hump, but he stood straight, which to me implied wings. He wore brown leather gloves, and his shoes squeaked when he stepped out onto the tile. I cleared my throat. The face that looked up at me was gray and goatlike. I fancied that if I took off his hat I’d find horns.