Dark Angel; The Chosen; Soulmate (22 page)

Rashel stopped suddenly, absentmindedly melting into a shadow as a police car cruised silently down the cross-street ahead.
I
know, she thought. I'll go see what the Lancers are up to. If anybody knows where vampires are, they do.

She headed for the North End. Half an hour later she was standing in front of a brownstone apartment building, ringing the buzzer.

“Who's there?”

Instead of answering, Rashel said, “The night has a thousand eyes.”

“And the day only one,” came the reply from the intercom. “Hey there, girl. Come on up.”

Inside, Rashel climbed a dark and narrow stairway to a scarred wooden door. There was a peephole in the door. Rashel faced it squarely, then pulled off the scarf she'd been wearing. It was black, silky, and very long. She wore it wrapped around
her head and face like a veil, so that only her eyes showed, and even they were in shadow.

She shook out her hair, knowing what the person on the other side could see. A tall girl dressed like a ninja, all in black, with black hair falling loose around her shoulders and green eyes blazing. She hadn't changed much since she was five, except in height. Right now she made a barbaric face at the peephole and heard the sound of laughter behind the door as bolts were drawn.

She waited until the door was shut behind her again before she said, “Hi, Elliot.”

Elliot was a few years older than she was, and thin, with intense eyes and little shiny glasses that were always slipping off his nose. Some people would have dismissed him as a geek. But Rashel had once seen him stand up to two werewolves while she got a human girl out a window, and she knew that he had practically singlehandedly started the Lancers—one of the most successful organizations of vampire hunters on the East Coast.

“What's up, Rashel? It's been a while.”

“I've been busy. But now I'm bored. I came to see if you guys had anything going.” As Rashel spoke, she was looking at the other people in the room: A brown-haired girl was kneeling, loading objects from boxes into a dark green backpack. Another girl and a boy were sitting on the couch. Rashel recognized the boy from other Lancers meetings, but neither of the girls were familiar.

“Lucky you,” Elliot said. “This is Vicky, my new second-in-command.” He nodded at the girl on the floor. “She just moved to Boston; she was the leader of a group on the south shore. And tonight she's taking a little expedition out to some warehouses in Mission Hill. We got a lead that there's been some activity out there.”

“What kind of activity? Leeches, puppies?”

Elliot shrugged. “Vampires definitely. Werewolves maybe. There's been a rumor about teenage girls getting kidnapped and stashed somewhere around there. The problem is we don't know exactly where, or why.” He tilted his head, his eyes twinkling. “You want to go?”

“Isn't anybody going to ask
me
?” Vicky said, straightening up from her backpack. Her pale blue eyes were fixed on Rashel. “I've never even seen this girl before. She could be one of
them
.”

Elliot pushed his glasses higher on his nose. He looked amused. “You wouldn't say that if you knew, Vicky. Rashel's the best.”

“At what?”

“At everything. When you were going to your fancy prep school, she was out in the Chicago slums staking vampires. She's been in L.A., New York, New Orleans… even Vegas. She's wiped out more parasites than the rest of us put together.” Elliot glanced mischievously at Rashel, then leaned toward Vicki.

“Ever heard of the Cat?” he said.

Vicki's head snapped up. She stared at Rashel. “The Cat? The one all the Night People are afraid of? The one they're offering a reward for? The one who leaves a mark—”

Rashel shot Elliot a warning look. “Never mind,” she said. She wasn't sure she trusted these new people. Vicky was right about one thing: you couldn't be too careful.

And she didn't like Vicky much, but she could hardly turn down such a good opportunity for vampire hunting. Not tonight, when she was in such terrific form.

“I'll go with you—if you'll have me,” she said.

Vicky's pale blue eyes bored into Rashel's a moment, then she nodded. “Just remember I'm in charge.”

“Sure,” Rashel murmured. She could see Elliot's grin out of the corner of her eye.

“You know Steve, and that's Nyala.” Elliot indicated the boy and girl on the couch. Steve had blond hair, muscular shoulders, and a steady expression; Nyala had skin like cocoa and a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were sleepwalking. “Nyala's new. She just lost her sister a month ago,” Elliot added in a gentle voice. He didn't need to say
how
the sister had been lost.

Rashel nodded at the girl. She sympathized. There was nothing quite like the shock of first discovering the Night World, when you realized that things like vampires and witches and werewolves were real, and that they were
everywhere
, joined in one giant secret organization. That anybody could be one, and you'd never know until it was too late.

“Everybody ready? Then let's go,” Vicky said, and Steve and Nyala got up. Elliot showed them to the door.

“Good luck,” he said.

Outside, Vicky led the way to a dark blue car with mud strategically caked on the license plates.

“We'll drive to the warehouse area,” she said.

Rashel was relieved. She was used to walking the city streets at night without being seen—important when you were carrying a rather unconcealable sword—but she wasn't sure that these other three could manage. It took practice.

The drive was silent except for the murmur of Steve's voice occasionally helping Vicky with directions. They passed through respectable neighborhoods and venerable areas with handsome old buildings until they got to a street where everything changed suddenly. All at once, as if they had crossed some invisible dividing line, the gutters were full of soggy trash and the fences were topped with razor wire. The buildings were government housing projects, dark warehouses, or rowdy bars.

Vicky pulled into a parking lot and stopped the car away from the security lights. Then she led them through the knee-high dead weeds of a vacant lot to a street that was poorly lighted and utterly silent.

“This is the observation post,” Vicky whispered, as they reached a squat brick building, a part of the housing project that had been abandoned. Following her, they zigzagged
through debris and scrap metal to get to a side door, and then they climbed a dark staircase covered with graffiti to the third floor. Their flashlights provided the only illumination.

“Nice place,” Nyala whispered, looking around. She had obviously never seen anything like it before. “Don't you think—there may be other people here besides vampires?”

Steve gave her a reassuring pat. “No, it's okay.”

“Yeah, it looks like even the junkies have abandoned it,” Rashel said, grimly amused.

“You can see the whole street from the window,” Vicky put in shortly. “Elliot and I were here yesterday watching those warehouses across the street. And last night we saw a guy at the end of the street who looked a lot like a vampire. You know the signs.”

Nyala opened her mouth as if to say
she
didn't know the signs, but Rashel was already speaking. “Did you test him?”

“We didn't want to get that close. We'll do it tonight if he shows up again.”

“How do you test them?” Nyala asked.

Vicky didn't answer. She and Steve had pushed aside a couple of rat-chewed mattresses and were unloading the bags and backpacks they'd brought.

Rashel said, “One way is to shine a flashlight in their eyes. Usually you get eyeshine back—like an animal's.”

“There are other ways, too,” Vicky said, setting the things she was unloading on the bare boards of the floor. There were
ski masks, knives made of both metal and wood, a number of stakes of various sizes, and a mallet. Steve added two clubs made of white oak to the pile.

“Wood hurts them more than metal,” Vicky said to Nyala. “If you cut them with a steel knife they heal right before your eyes—but cut them with wood and they keep bleeding.”

Rashel didn't quite like the way she said it. And she didn't like the last thing Vicky was pulling out of her backpack. It was a wooden device that looked a bit like a miniature stock. Two hinged blocks of wood that fit snugly around a person's wrists and closed with a lock.

“Vampire handcuffs,” Vicky said proudly, seeing her look. “Made of white oak. Guaranteed to hold any parasite. I brought them from down south.”

“But hold them for what? And what do you need all those little knives and stakes for? It would take hours to kill a vampire with those.”

Vicky smiled fiercely. “I know.”

Oh. Rashel's heart seemed to thump and then sink, and she looked away to control her reaction. She understood what Vicky had in mind now.

Torture.

“A quick death's too good for them,” Vicky said, still smiling. “They deserve to suffer—the way they make
our
people suffer. Besides, we might get some information. We need to
know where they're keeping the girls they kidnap, and what they're doing with them.”

“Vicky.” Rashel spoke earnestly. “It's practically impossible to make vampires talk. They're stubborn. When they're hurt they just get angry—like animals.”

Vicky smirked. “I've made some talk. It just depends on what you do, and how long you make it last. Anyway, there's no harm in trying.”

“Does Elliot know about this?”

Vicky lifted a shoulder defensively. “Elliot lets me do things my way. I don't have to tell him every little detail. I was a leader myself, you know.”

Helplessly, Rashel looked at Nyala and Steve. And saw that for the first time Nyala's eyes had lost their sleepwalking expression. Now she looked awake—and savagely glad.

“Yes,”
she said. “We should try to make the vampire talk. And if he suffers—well, my sister suffered. When I found her, she was almost dead but she could still talk. She told me what it felt like, having all the blood drained out of her body while she was still conscious. She said it hurt. She said…” Nyala stopped, swallowed, and looked at Vicky. “I want to help do it,” she said thickly.

Steve didn't say anything, but then from what Rashel knew of him, that was typical. He was a guy of few words. Anyway, he didn't protest.

Rashel felt odd, as if she were seeing the very worst of herself
reflected in a mirror. It made her… ashamed. It left her shaken.

But who am I to judge? she thought, turning away. It's true that the parasites are evil, all of them. The whole race needs to be wiped out. And Vicky's right, why should they have a clean death, when they usually don't give their victims one? Nyala deserves to avenge her sister.

“Unless you
object
or something,” Vicky said heavily, and Rashel could feel those pale blue eyes on her. “Unless you're some kind of vampire sympathizer.”

Rashel might have laughed at that, but she wasn't in a laughing mood. She took a breath, then said without turning around, “It's your show. I agreed that you were in charge.”

“Good,” Vicky said, and returned to her work.

But the sick feeling in the pit of Rashel's stomach didn't go away. She almost hoped that the vampire wouldn't come.

Quinn was cold.

Not physically, of course. That was impossible. The icy March air had no effect on him; his body was impervious to little things like weather. No, this cold was inside him.

He stood looking at the bay and the thriving city across it. Boston by starlight. It had taken him a long time to come back to Boston after… the change.

He'd lived there once, when he'd been human. But in those days Boston was nothing but three hills, one beacon, and a handful of houses with thatched roofs. The place where he was standing now had been clean beach surrounded by salt meadows and dense forest.

The year had been 1639.

Boston had grown since then, but Quinn hadn't. He was still eighteen, still the young man who'd loved the sunny
pastures and the clear blue water of the wilderness. Who had lived simply, feeling grateful when there was enough food for supper on his mother's table, and who had dreamed of someday having his own fishing schooner and marrying pretty Dove Redfern.

That was how it had all started, with Dove. Pretty Dove and her soft brown hair… sweet Dove, who had a secret a simple boy like Quinn could never have imagined.

Well. Quinn felt his lip curl. That was all in the past. Dove had been dead for centuries, and if her screams still haunted him every night, no one knew but himself.

Because he might not be any older than he had been in the days of the colonies, but he had learned a few tricks. Like how to wrap ice around his heart so that nothing in the world could hurt him. And how to put ice in his gaze, so that whoever looked into his black eyes saw only an endless glacial dark. He'd gotten very good at that. Some people actually went pale and backed away when he turned his eyes on them.

The tricks had worked for years, allowing him not just to survive as a vampire, but to be brilliantly successful at it. He was Quinn, pitiless as a snake, whose blood ran like ice water, whose soft voice pronounced doom on anybody who got in his way. Quinn, the essence of darkness, who struck fear into the hearts of humans and Night People alike.

And just at the moment, he was tired.

Tired and cold. There was a kind of bleakness inside him, like a winter that would never change into spring.

He had no idea what to do about it—although it had occurred to him that if he were to jump into the bay and let those dark waters close over his head, and then
stay
down there for a few days without feeding… well, all his problems would be solved, wouldn't they?