Dead Waters (3 page)

“Crap!” I yelled. I didn’t wait to see where Jane landed. I was already running off in her direction, seeking cover as I went.

Lamps of every size flew past me as I ran. The dull
thump
against my leather jacket from two smaller ones pushed me forward, but I kept running and dove for the safety of a large chest of drawers. Jane’s looked out from beneath one of the nearby beds. When I hit the floor, there was a crunch of broken glass under my coat, and I rolled toward Jane as she pulled me under the bed.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Oh, you know,” she said, with a nervous smile. “Just busy cowering.”

“Mind if I join you in a quick cower?”

Jane laughed, letting out some of her nerves. “Be my guest.”

I took a moment to catch my breath, and then rolled onto my stomach, putting my back against the bottom of the sturdy old bed frame. “We stay here too long, I think we’re going to die.”

I pressed up on the bed, driving the headboard down into the ground and lifting the feet of it.

“I hate antiques,” Jane said, grunting as she joined me in pushing up the bed. “So damned heavy.”

“But sturdy,” I reminded her, hoisting the bed into a protective wall position with one last burst of survival adrenaline. “Good for cover. Good for living.” I quickly told Jane everything about the lovers’ triangle I had witnessed in my vision.

“Maybe the haunting is totemistic,” Jane offered when I was done.

I looked over at her, the word barely registering in my mind.

Jane shrugged. “I’ve been reading up on totems in Arcana,” she said. “Objects embedded with ritualistic properties. Think about it. You got your reading off the energy imbued in that chair, hon. Her pain is wrapped up in that. What if the chair is the object holding her here?”

It made sense, and I could have kissed her for suggesting it. Destroy the chair, release the spirit. I felt around my inside coat pocket, searching for something but coming up empty-handed.

“Damn,” I said. “No good. Most of my tricks are in my regular work coat.”

I looked down at the bag Jane wore strapped over one of her shoulders. “Please tell me you have more than makeup in there?”

Jane nodded. “I still have some bits of my D.E.A. welcome kit in my purse,” she said. She pulled out three self-unraveling Mummy Fingers bandages, six rune stones, and a stoppered vial, the same kind Connor used all the time to coerce spirits into submission.

“Perfect,” I said, pointing to the vial. “Run for the chair. Coat the damned thing with it.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what I do best,” I said, “and see how much damage I can take.”

Jane gave me an unsure smile. “Is this something they teach you in Distractions 101?”

“Just make sure you get to the chair,” I said.

Jane nodded, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me. While it was much appreciated, I felt a weird surge of rage and realized that the tattooist’s anger and jealousy were still in control of me, running strong in my head, to the point where Jane’s kiss almost tasted like the betrayal Cassie had caught Jeremy in. I eased Jane back away from me, trying not to push.

Jane didn’t seem to notice, gave me a thumbs-up, and ran off along the outside edge of the room.

I pulled out my retractable bat before running back toward the outer edge of the circle where all the action was taking place. As I went, I made as much noise as I could, slamming my bat into anything and everything. It hurt my soul to bash away at antiques like this, but let’s face it—the room was already half-destroyed from Cassie’s lamp carnage.

The tattooist followed the sound of my progress with her ear cocked, sending more and more lampish destruction my way.

“Go ahead,” I said, stopping at a spot on the edge of the circle opposite the chair. I readied my bat. “Let it all out. I can take it.”

“Oh, can you?” she said, raising her arms up. The woman’s body was shaking now, her chest rising and falling like she had just run a marathon. Her hair rose up in snakelike waves all around her, floating in the air like she was underwater. The tattooist unleashed her full fury at me. Stained glass panels and bulbs shattered all around me. Like mighty Casey at the bat, I swung to deflect each and every item the woman launched at me, but my arms were already tiring.

Across the room, I still didn’t see Jane, but what I did see was a set of drawers moving out toward the old barber’s chair. The hint of a blond ponytail stuck up behind the unit and the sound of my bat crashing away masked its movement. When the drawer was in place, Jane popped up, unstoppered the vial, and coated the chair.

“Step away,” I called out to Jane and ran for the chair. The tattooist followed the sound of me scrabbling across the broken glass and sent her assault after me, which was what I wanted. As I slipped behind the chair, one of the Tiffany floor lamps headed straight for me and I brought my bat down hard on its still-glowing light. It smashed apart, the red-hot filament falling into the chair, which in turn ignited the liquid. The chair went up like a dried-out Christmas tree mid-February.

“No!” the tattooist screamed out, all of her focus turning from me back to the chair. She ran to the already burning mess and threw herself into it, the flames rising up all around her, not even affecting her ghostly form.

A wave of heat washed over me, forcing me to back away. The tattooist raised her arms, crying out as her chair went up in flames. Her cries echoed out, and then faded as her spirit did the same. The second she vanished, the sound of wrenching metal came from above and the entire floating structure came crashing down on top of me, the room going dark except for several small fires that broke out from the fall. There wasn’t time to move or dive for cover and I was driven to the ground, the thunder of it all deafening me.

As I lay pinned on the floor, the store’s sprinkler system kicked and I welcomed the coolness. It was actually refreshing as I spent the next few minutes watching the room descend back into darkness and figuring out how to untangle myself from the treacherous twists of metal and shards of glass. When I finally was able to stand, the pile of broken lamps was waist deep.

Jane groaned nearby.

“You okay?” I called out.

“My hair is full of broken glass,” Jane said somewhere off to my left, “but other than that, yeah. I feel like fiberglass insulation.” The sounds of her freeing herself filled the room with a metallic clatter and more crunching of broken glass.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I took in all the carnage around me while I tried to calm my racing heart, but then I realized I wasn’t calming. Part of me was still full of the tattooist’s anger and jealousy. It wouldn’t shake off, clouding my mind instead.

Jane knocked on something wooden, hollow, but I was too caught up in trying to recover myself that I didn’t bother to look over at her. I assumed she was still behind the dresser that she had snuck out behind before everything fell on us.

“Not only is it sturdy for defense against Tiffany lamps,” she said, “but it would look lovely in your bedroom, just underneath the windows along the left side. Don’t you think?”

I fought to clear my head, focusing on the antiques all around the room to bring me back to reality. The damage around us was incalculable. I tried coming up with a number in my head to price it all, but I couldn’t even begin.

“Simon. . . ?”

Jane’s uncertain tone brought me out of my thoughts. I turned toward where she stood, still behind the low set of dark wooden drawers. Now that I had a moment to look them over, they were lovely with slim, tapered legs and a sleek, mid-Century Modern look to them.

“What?” I asked, perhaps too sharp, but I couldn’t help it with the distraction of Cassie’s raw anger and emotions upon me still.

Jane’s brow wrinkled at my tone. She hesitated before speaking, and when it came out, her voice was small. “I just thought this might be nice in your place,” she said. “You know, for me. To hold my stuff, rather than just that drawer you gave me in your dresser.”

“We’ll see,” I said, distracted. The image of the woman taking the tattoo gun to her own eyes danced across my mind and I shivered.

Jane gave a fake pout. “
That
sounded less than enthusiastic.”

I sighed. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, testiness thick in my voice. “I just watched a love-crazed woman gouge her own eyes out over a guy, so picking out furniture seems a little trivial to me right now.” Snapping at Jane was oh, so easy right now given all Cassie’s feelings of betrayal, vengeance, and jealousy flooding through me. Why couldn’t I shake it off? “We’ll discuss it later. Let’s just try to get out of here without severing a major artery. Step carefully.”

By the time we picked our way out of the debris, we were soaked through from the sprinkler system. As we approached the front door of the store, my phone vibrated. I checked the text message. DEA NOW PLS. SPCL ASGNMNT U & CONNOR. AQ.

“We have to go,” I said. “Downtown to the Lovecraft Café and the Department of Extraordinary Affairs.”

“Not back to bed?” Jane asked, looking even unhappier than she had a minute ago. “We’re not even on tonight. What’s wrong? Please tell me it’s not another zombie infestation.”

I pulled up the gate and held it for her. Jane’s face was a grim mask as she ducked under it. “Possibly,” I said. “I have to go in, anyway. A call came in, requesting Connor and me specifically.”

My stomach sank. Given the tattooist’s emotions still coursing through me, I was glad for the text, secretly hoping it
was
about a new zombie outbreak that needed dealing with. At least then I could get out some aggression with my retractable bat.

2

We stepped out of the antiques warehouse and back into what looked like an empty shopping mall. The space was cavernous and modern, and rose up several levels above us. Off in the distance floor-to-ceiling windows showed the traffic going around Columbus Circle.

“Very disorienting,” I said. “Coming out of that old antiques shop that feels like it’s down on the docks and back into the modernity of the Gibson-Case Center.” Cassie’s emotions faded as I took in sights other than the mess we had left behind in there.

“Surreal,” Jane added.

“What can I say?” a voice called out from off to our right. “Our kind does Old New York well.”

I turned and looked over at Aidan Christos as he walked toward us. The forty-year-old vampire looked all of eighteen in his skull and bones Hot Topic hoodie, his emo swoop of black hair hanging down into his eyes.

“I appreciate you stopping by,” he said, walking past us and off across the empty mall. When he moved, the steps from his Doc Martens didn’t even make a sound.

“Can you at least pretend to make footsteps?” I asked. “It’s creepy.”

Aidan sighed and clomped around in a slow, deliberate circle. “Better?” he asked, but before I could answer he stopped and stared at us. “You’re wet. Why are you two wet?”

I looked over at Jane and smiled. “That must be those keen vampiric powers of observation I keep hearing about.”

The vampire smiled from within the darkness of the hoodie he wore, the tips of his fangs the only thing visible on the teenage boy’s face. He stood there, glaring at me, and I felt a wave of terror project over me directly coming from him—an oldie but goodie that I was already familiar with in the vampire’s bag of tricks.

“Cut the crap,” I said, pushing past him into the darkened atrium of the Gibson-Case Center, the secret home of New York City’s greatest concentration of vampires. “I’m not in the mood, Aidan.”

Aidan grabbed my arm and stopped me. It was like being grabbed by a stone statue.

“So, how did it go?” he asked. “Did you take care of her? And again, why
are
you all wet?”

“Oh, we saw her all right,” Jane said. “That’s one creepy bitch.”

“We might be talking some property damage in there,” I said. Aidan looked concerned and I sighed. “Okay, fine. We’re probably talking a
lot
of property damage in there. There was a small fire and the sprinklers went all
Singin’ in the Rain
on us, not to mention all the broken lamps . . .”

“There was a fire?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well, good to see the fire-suppression system works, anyway,” he said. “I’d hate to think of Vampire Central going up in flames.”

I shivered as the images of Cassie taking the needles to her eyes came back to me. “That spirit was messed up,” I said. “You’re going to get a lot of property damage with something like that.”

Jane walked over to Aidan. “You really didn’t have any way of dealing with her?”

“We’re biters and fighters,” Aidan said. “Hard to drain the blood from something you can’t touch. So, as you might have figured out, we’re not really fans of haunting.”

Jane laughed. Aidan and I looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just. . . well, technically, I haunted this place once.”

Aidan shook his head. “We’re not talking about a ghost in the machine here, technomancer. You saw that woman. My master, Brandon, tasked me with checking it out after shoppers started complaining, but, well, there’s really nothing one of my kind can do to something of her kind, you know?”

“Which is why you called in the experts,” I said.

Aidan nodded, and then started walking again. “Believe me, Brandon considers this a huge favor, stopping to check it out.”

“So, why didn’t Brandon ask us himself, I wonder?” I asked.

“Maybe there’s a
90210
marathon on?” Jane offered. “I mean, the great vampire lord did take his name from it, after all.”

Aidan jammed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and shrugged. “He’s a private guy,” he said. “King of the castle and all that.”

“Literally,” Jane said. “Speaking of which, you never invite us to pop over to your little Epcot Castle anymore.”

Aidan stopped walking once again, looking like a pissed-off teenager despite his fortysomething years. “First of all, it’s far more real than anything at Epcot. Castle Bran is authentic. They moved it here long before I was turned, building this arcology around it to hide it. Secondly, I don’t think just dropping in is all that great an idea nowadays.”

I shook my head and started walking again. Jane followed. “Geez,” I said. “Stop the great vampire/human war and I can’t even get a visitor’s pass? I’m hurt.”

“Give it time,” Aidan said, coming up soundlessly next to us. “You know how it flows differently for us.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “We’ve already got a more pressing date. Business down at the Lovecraft Café.”

The massive glass doors leading out of the atrium to Columbus Circle came into view up ahead. Aidan cocked his head. “I know the night is just starting off for me, but isn’t it a little late for you guys to be calling meetings?”

“No rest for the wicked, or government employees,” Jane said with an enthusiastic smile. As wet and damaged as she was, I don’t know where she found the energy to be so chipper.

“I’m sure something sinister is going down for them to be calling us in now,” I said.

“Brandon may have us under orders to stay out of most human affairs right now, but you
did
do us this favor,” Aidan said. “So just let me know if you need me. . . you know, if things go bad.”

“Then I should just ask now,” I said. “Ninety percent of this job is cleaning up things that go bad.”

“And the other ninety percent is filing paperwork on it,” Jane said.

“That’s bad math,” I said.

“That may be,” she said, “but we deal with impossible things all the time. You’re suddenly going to start arguing about the math getting wonky now, hon?”

“Fair point,” I conceded. Part of the tattooist’s raw emotions were welling up again, and had me wanting to pick a fight, but I fought the urge. “Truth be told—if we’re going for messed up math here—I’d probably say that my caseload paperwork takes up at least a hundred and twenty percent of my time on the clock.”

Aidan cleared his throat. A ring of keys was in his hand. “Do you mind?” he asked, unlocking one of the glass doors that led out onto the rainy streets of Manhattan.

“Your gratitude is underwhelming,” I said. I held my hand out and felt the rain coming down hard on it. “At least I don’t have to worry about getting dry anytime soon.”

“Sometime tonight, kids,” Aidan said. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t banter here.”

“Fine,” I said. “Although I’ll have you know that I consider banter a necessary tool in keeping from wetting myself in a lot of these situations.”

Jane gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Sexy.”

Aidan frowned. “Can I add that to my list of things I wish I could unhear?”

I started to respond, but Jane grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the streets. “Come on,” she said, “before you say anything else that makes me question our relationship further.”

As we exited the building, the Columbus Circle wind at the southwest corner of Central Park whipped Jane’s long wet hair around like she had gone all Medusa. I turned around as something struck me odd.

“I’m surprised you didn’t call Connor first,” I said. “My partner is the resident ghost whisperer in Other Division with the Department, you know. . .
and
your brother.”

“Oh, believe me, I did call him first,” Aidan said, “but he was busy.”

“So nice to be considered second choice,” I said. “It’s like my prom all over again.”

“Connor’s too busy for his own brother?” Jane asked. She ran her fingers through her already windblown hair as she tried in vain to make it settle down. “You’d think after a twenty-year absence . . .”

Aidan pulled his hood up to avoid the water. Whether it was vanity or some vampiric aversion to it, I didn’t know.

“That’s kinda the problem,” he said. “Not every day can be a happy family reunion. . . especially with the workload your boss heaps on him. Plus there’s all the work Brandon has Connor doing for our cause. Apparently vampires going bye-bye the past few years, and then just showing up again all friendly like, has caused a lot of meetings between our people.”

“Lucky Connor,” I said, “playing liaison to the undead. . .”

Aidan smiled as the two of us walked off to the curb, his fangs showing once again. “I guess having a vamp in the family means he gets the short straw.”

“We’ve got to get to our own meeting,” I said, not wanting to delay any longer. “Hopefully ours doesn’t involve your meetings. They might meet to make little baby meetings.”

“Let’s hope not,” Jane said, hailing a cab that was rounding Columbus Circle. It slowed for her, even as disheveled as she was. “I hope the meeting goes quickly either way. I still need to wash all the glass out of my hair. Ick.”

“Better glass than blood,” I said.

“Agreed,” Aidan added from over by the great glass doors of the Gibson-Case Center, and then gave me a dark smile as his eyes moved to Jane. “Would be a waste of perfectly good blood.”

I ignored his words, but the residual anger I was experiencing rose up inside me and wanted me to go back and see how large a pile of dust I could leave him in. I didn’t need to reawaken the vampire/human war simply because I had an all-too-intense reading with my power.