Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser Series) (16 page)

“Stop it!” I screamed at the vampire, who was still trying to crack into my mind. “Something is wrong. Something is happening!”

The pressure of Kett’s magic dropped away from me and I stumbled forward. I’d never felt someone use magic against me in such force before.

The wrong feeling grew. It wasn’t coming from him.

“Articulate your thoughts, witch.” Kett sounded pissed. He sounded human again. I was starting to hate that he could do that, that he could play with my fear centers like that. Human or not human. Blood sucking monster or accessible, even sexy, guy.

“It’s … it’s …”

The body on the tray table moaned as if releasing its dying breath. Then it sat up.

I didn’t scream. No, I did something even worse. I threw myself forward and wrapped my arms around Hudson’s neck while joyful tears coated my cheeks. “Hudson,” I cried. “Oh, Hudson! … I thought you were … dead …”

Hudson, or what remained of Hudson, slowly and ponderously turned his face to me. I gazed up into his clouded eyes. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t see me. He didn’t see any more at all. He was dead. Someone else was looking through his eyes. Not that I knew that for sure, but I was damn sure someone was piloting Hudson’s body and that I currently had my arms wrapped around the neck of a zombie.

“Step away, witch!” Kett yelled.

The zombie’s head swiveled toward the vampire. Then the creature lurched forward.

And I, for some utterly unknown and stupid reason, hung on. So I’m a slow learner, sue me.

The zombie didn’t like me decorating its neck, so it threw me across the room. Literally. As in, I hit the far wall, smacked the back of my head on the tiled surface, and then dropped in a crumpled heap. I’m guessing that last part, because I pretty much lost consciousness when I hit the wall.

∞

I thought there was a chance I’d broken my neck. But I wasn’t dead, so I guessed not. The room was dim, patchy through my blurred vision, which certainly didn’t bode well for brain damage. I think my nose was bleeding and I was definitely confused, because the sound of pained grunting drew my woozy attention to the zombie — who had the all-powerful vampire pinned against a wall.

The room was torn apart. Literally. As in, chunks of wall and floor tile were strewn about the room, the ceiling lights ripped down and hanging from their wires. The zombie was missing an arm, or at least I was pretty sure that’s what I could see a few feet away from my head. It seemed to be trying to claw its way back to the zombie.

Oh, God. I took a moment to roll over and throw up.

Kett didn’t look right. His clothing was torn and bloody, though he wasn’t bleeding. He seemed to be missing … chunks of himself. Like the chunks torn out of the walls and floor.

The zombie had trapped the vampire against the wall perpendicular to the one I was crumpled against. Neck-pinning one’s prey seemed popular among the undead. First Kett, and now the zombie. The zombie darted its head toward Kett’s neck, but the vampire managed to deflect the bite away to his shoulder. The zombie latched onto Kett’s flesh and then ripped a large piece … off … a large chunk of vampire shoulder flesh. I had to be seeing things.

Kett growled in pain. I was pretty sure I could see the actual bone of his collarbone.

The flesh in the zombie’s mouth dissolved into ash.

The zombie could hurt the unhurtable.

I thought about throwing up again as I watched Kett’s flesh seal over the shoulder wound, leaving a dent behind. I made it to my knees instead.

Kett saw me over the zombie’s shoulder and shook his head emphatically. His eyes were blood red. He lost a chunk of his neck for his distraction.

I gained my feet and swayed in place. Zombie, zombie, zombie … what the hell did I know about zombies that was actual truth?

Well, I certainly didn’t know that zombies trumped vampires.

I drew my knife.

“Get out, Jade. Get the fuck out. Find the shifter —” This time Kett lost a hunk of his lower arm. He’d been trying to pry the zombie away from his neck.

I needed leverage. My knife wasn’t long enough to cut off the zombie’s head in one slice. Nor was I tall enough, but I was banking on full decapitation being unnecessary.

The room had settled into a strange permanent tilt, but I was fairly certain that the entire room couldn’t be listing to one side. I rolled my neck and felt something snap back into place with a spasm of pain. That felt better, even though the pounding in my head was worse, like I’d just undammed the blood flow.

With my knife in my hand, the next two steps were easier than I anticipated. I jumped up on the now empty — and, oddly, still upright and intact — tray table.

I took one more wide stride forward to the very end of the table. Then, holding my knife in both hands over my head, I leaped upward and toward the zombie.

As my upward momentum became a downward fall, I thrust my knife, tip down, through the top of the zombie’s skull. The blade slid in easy and clean, right up to the hilt. A shock of magic — not my own — reverberated through the knife and into my arms, forcing me to let go of the weapon.

I hit the floor feet first, but couldn’t catch my balance. As I sprawled against the zombie’s back, it tipped sideways, taking me with it.

I scrambled a few feet backward on my ass. The zombie’s supine body lay between me and Kett, who had sunk down hunched against the wall.

The zombie — my knife still sticking out of his head — didn’t move.

I was aware I was sobbing, and that I had been doing so throughout my leap and stab, but I couldn’t stop. I’d just killed something … something already dead, but still something I’d once thought, however briefly, that I could love.

“You … stopped it,” Kett said. His voice was little more than a moan.

“Yeah, though it was probably a good thing it was distracted.”

Kett raised his eyes to mine. He didn’t look good. The floor around him was coated in the ash that his magic turned to when it died. That scared the hell out of me, but being scared was getting to be a pretty permanent state of being.

“You need to go. Stand. Move slowly,” Kett whispered, never taking his blood-red eyes off me. “Don’t look back. Go now.” He shuddered and pressed his hands to his stomach. A few of his fingers were sticking out at odd angles. He wasn’t healing anymore. “Go!” He also had fangs. I hadn’t seen those before.

Red eyes, fangs … injured vampire. I was a walking, breathing blood bag.

His magic hit me as it had before, trying to pin me in place.
 

I straightened despite it. He copied my movement, though he had to lean against and slide up the wall to do so.

I flicked my eyes to my knife in the zombie’s head. It was closer to the vampire than me.

Kett grinned. “I shall enjoy draining you, witch. It’s been a hundred years since I’ve hunted so freely. And I’ve never tasted magic like yours.”

Mr. Nice Vampire was gone. I was really wishing he’d stuck around a bit longer.

I ran.

I didn’t have a hope in hell.

His fingers brushed my hair.

I hadn’t even taken a second step. I had a feeling he was playing with me, despite his obvious need. He was toying with me just a bit, before the big finale.

I was going to die and I’d just saved his freaking life. No good deed goes unpunished.

∞

The double swinging doors from the hallway blew open, and fury burst through in the body of a nightmare. This monster grabbed the enraged, starving vampire and tossed him — yes, tossed, with one massive, clawed hand — through the far wall, all without even sideswiping me. The thing had to be seven feet tall but was partly humanoid in form. It turned to look over its shoulder.

“Get her out of here.” It spoke perfectly through a face that was malformed, caught in some cross between human and beast — though what beast, I wasn’t sure. Its teeth jutted out of an oversized jaw and were fanged top and bottom. Like a cat’s; not like the vampire’s.

The vampire was laughing from beyond the far wall, and there was nothing human about the sound. I totally would have peed myself except I was actually frozen in place.

Suddenly, Kandy was trying to pull me from the room, more roughly than was necessary. But then, I was resisting more than was healthy for me. In my morbid fear, I just wanted to watch —
 

The vampire was on the monster before I knew he’d reentered the room.

The beast raised a clawed hand wider than a medicine ball, and smacked the vampire to the floor. The creature was gurgling some choking sort of laugh, like it was playing rather than in a battle for its life.

Kandy finally managed to yank me fully through the half-unhinged and dented swinging doors and out of the room. Two other werewolves — Lara and the tall blond, who were calm but glowing green around the eyes — waited in the hall. I clicked two and two together and figured out the identity of the monster. I’d blame the delay on whatever head injury I was currently suffering, but … well, I wasn’t known for being quick on my feet uninjured either.

“He’s not a wolf,” I said as Kandy pulled me past the two werewolves and continued dragging me toward an emergency exit, which opened to reveal stairs, not the elevator. I’d figured out the half-beast was Desmond Llewelyn, the Lord and Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack.

“No, a cat.” Kandy shoved me up the stairs in front of her.

“He didn’t look like any cat I’ve ever seen.”

“Half-form. Some of us can partly change, and meld the strength of our animal forms into the mobility of our human. Opposable clawed thumbs and all that.”

Oh. That was clear. Not. I wondered if he liked cream and catnip as much as my childhood cat, Lester, had. Kandy’s stifled giggle informed me I’d wondered that last bit out loud.

“But you’re a wolf?” I asked.

“Most of us are.”
 

How had I not known that not all shapeshifters were wolves? The
Compendium
had totally let me down in that respect. Shouldn’t the werewolf section have referenced a shapeshifter entry? I’d noticed the vampire calling the werewolves ‘shapeshifters’, of course, but I’d thought he was just being all correct and elitist, as usual.

Kandy slammed her palms on the bar of the emergency exit door at the top of the stairs, and we were suddenly in the fresh air. Well, the fresh air of an alley between two four-storey hospital buildings — but still, I breathed deeply, over and over again, to get the smell of morgue and undead out of my nostrils, out of my brain.

Kandy propped me up against a cement wall and began to pace the short strip of pavement twenty or so feet in front of me. Like she was securing her territory, or perhaps securing her prisoner. I was happy to be out of her bruising grasp. My upper left arm was tingling as if she’d actually hindered the blood flow.

“He’s going to kill him,” I said.
 

“Nah, they’re sort of friendly, as much as a shifter and a vampire can be. He’ll just subdue him. He looked pretty beaten up already.”

“I meant Kett would kill Desmond.”

Kandy barked out a laugh. I was pretty tired of being the butt of everyone’s jokes, so I chose to ignore her and rest my aching head against the concrete wall. My neck really was killing me. And whether vampire trumped were … cat? Well, that was way out of my hands and league.

Ah, damn it. I’d left my knife in the zombie’s skull.

I was proven completely wrong about Kett killing Desmond when, before I’d even caught my breath, McGrowly sauntered out of the emergency exit. Of course, I had no idea if it was Desmond’s strength and skill or Kett maintaining enough control to hold back that kept the werecat whole but bloody.

He was back in his full human form, clothed in a rather ratty, bloody T-shirt and jeans. He was just couple of inches taller than me, though I was sure he’d been closer to seven feet and covered in nothing but fur in the morgue.

I was going to need to start running an abilities-that-scare-the-shit-out-of-me list on the shapeshifters now, not just for the vampire. It was one thing to read about such abilities in a book and completely another to see it with my own eyes. Especially since the
Compendium
was obviously missing chunks of pertinent information. Or I hadn’t looked in the correct section. I could never rule out my own inability to focus on things that didn’t interest me.

Anyway, each hour with this group of Adepts was a whole new terrifying experience. Lucky me. Shapeshifters, who came in forms other than wolf, could transform into a half-human/half-beast over seven feet tall. Delightfully scary. Then they could throw a vampire through a cement wall. Though maybe that was a far more chilling fact about the vampire than the shifter. Also, they too, like the vampire, could casually pin a helpless half-witch against a concrete wall and stare at her intimidatingly until she wanted to pee her pants.

Um, yeah … speaking of which … Desmond turned on me the instant the door had closed behind him. Kandy took two big steps away and turned her back on us. Traitor.

Desmond didn’t actually have to touch me to pin me against the wall; one green-glowing-eyed look was enough. Plus, he was so wide that he pretty much created a wall himself. He practically occupied all my peripheral vision just by standing a foot-and-a-half away.

He narrowed his eyes at me, assessing I supposed. Then he held his hand out, palm up. He’d rescued my knife from the zombie’s skull. It was wiped clean and I was grateful for this. Overly grateful, in fact, because I felt like Kett and Desmond were to blame for the fact that I had to stab Hudson’s reanimated body through the head in the first place. Therefore, they deserved very little of my gratitude.

“Is Kett … dead?”

“Not any more than he was before,” Desmond said without smiling. It was a joke nonetheless; lame shifter humor, I supposed. I didn’t laugh either but Kandy snorted, even with her back turned.

“Nice knife work down there,” Desmond said. “Brave. The vampire is in your debt. He won’t like that, so use it well.” Then he reached up with two fingers to touch my chin. He added a bit of pressure to slowly rotate my head. I thought about resisting, but my neck was really killing me and I didn’t want to strain it further.