One Grave at a Time (15 page)

Twenty-three

B
ones was in front of me in a blink, holding two fistfuls of burning sage. I held the woman with one arm and tried to reach for my own sage stash with the other, but then something heavy slammed into the back of my head hard enough to make me lose my balance. Bones whirled, grabbing us both and backing us into the wall, his body and that barrier a protective shield from any additional attacks.

“Door,” I muttered, seeing over his shoulder what I’d been brained with this time. “Fucker hit me with the bedroom door!”

“Get out,” an enraged voice hissed.

Blood wet my hair before the wound closed on itself, but that initial flash of dizziness was gone, leaving me good and mad. That only increased when all the broken dishes became airborne and thudded into Bones’s body like glass knives.

The woman didn’t scream, but she made a horrible keening noise, squeezing her eyes shut. “No, no, no,” she began to chant.

I managed to free my arms from the tight wedge Bones had us in enough to pull out some sage and light it. In the time it took me to do that, Kramer had blasted the couch into Bones. I felt his pain flaring along my subconscious as the impact drove those glass shards farther into his back, but Bones just braced himself, absorbing the blow without shifting his weight even an inch. Then he shot the unseen ghost a feral grin.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

Kramer howled in fury, outing his position even though he hadn’t manifested in appearance yet. I took aim and threw, using enough force that the sage went all the way across the room. Another howl sounded, pained this time, making me smile with vicious satisfaction. I pelted another handful in that direction, but Kramer must have moved, because the only sounds that followed were rattling from the cabinet doors he ripped off and began to chuck at us. One of them hit Helsing’s carrier, making my cat screech, but it was made of sturdy material and protected him from the impact.

“Kitty,” I urged Bones, still pinned too tightly to the wall to get him myself.

Bones didn’t move, but he stared at the carrier, his aura sparking like he’d just set off invisible fireworks. The carrier slid across the wall, pushing past the wood and glass in its path, until it was close enough for Bones to hook his foot around it and tuck it under the shelter of our legs.

I didn’t have time to admire the use of his power before pounding began on the apartment door, followed by a woman’s voice yelling, “This is too much, Francine. I’m calling the police this time!” Then Elisabeth burst through one of the walls, Fabian following closely behind her.

“Kramer,” she shouted. “Where are you,
schmutz
?”

Air swirled in tight circles near the kitchen, growing darker, until the tall, thin form of the Inquisitor appeared.

“Here,
hure,
” he hissed at her.

I was shocked when Elisabeth flew toward Kramer and started swinging. Unlike what happened when Bones or I attempted that, her blows didn’t harmlessly go through him. The Inquisitor’s head snapped to the side at the haymaker punch she landed. Then he was almost brought to his knees by the merciless kick she smashed into his groin. Kramer couldn’t be harmed by anyone with flesh, but clearly that same rule didn’t apply when it came to another noncorporeal being whaling on him.

Throughout all this, the woman—Francine?—seemed to be lost in her own private hell, murmuring, “No, no, no,” in an endless, ragged litany. Over Bones’s shoulder, I saw that Kramer had started to turn the tables on Elisabeth. He landed a vicious kick to her midsection that made her double over. Fabian jumped on the Inquisitor’s back, kicking and punching, but Kramer grabbed him and flung him off so effortlessly, Fabian disappeared through the apartment wall. Guess ghosts were similar to vampires, with age accounting for greater strength. Elisabeth and Kramer were nearly the same in spectral years; but Fabian was much younger, and from the looks of it, not nearly a match for the Inquisitor.

“We need to leave,” Bones said low. “Now, while he’s distracted.”

Then Bones turned his head, shouting, “Charles, to the house!” loud enough to make my eardrums vibrate.

But seeing Elisabeth getting the crap kicked out of her made me hesitate when Bones tightened his arms around us with obvious intent. Elisabeth’s gaze locked with mine for a split second. Then she threw her arms around Kramer, bear-hugging him despite the brutal pounding she received to her midsection in return. Fabian flitted around, desperately trying to intervene, only to be swatted aside like a fly.

I got her message, grabbing Helsing’s carrier and whispering, “Now!” to Bones.

The front door opened the instant we reached it, allowing us to exit without ripping a hole in the wall. I hadn’t opened it. I had one arm around his neck and the other gripping the cat carrier. Bones’s hands were likewise full, supporting me and the woman while he blasted us away faster than I could’ve flown. We must have been only a dark blur to the neighbor in the outdoor hallway, on her cell phone describing the noises in the woman’s apartment to the police, it sounded like.

Then we were well past the building, giving me only a moment to note that Spade’s car and the one we’d driven in were no longer in the parking lot before we were too high for me to make out the different vehicles. Now there was even less chance for Kramer to follow us. From how Bones seemed to have loaded up his jets, we only needed another minute or two more before the ghost wouldn’t be able to discern in which direction we’d flown away.

The downside was that this had shaken the woman out of her trancelike state. She screamed as fast as she could draw breath, but with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, I couldn’t green-eye her into a more calm state of mind.

“You’re okay, you’re okay!” I shouted to no effect. Either she didn’t hear me above the whooshing of wind from Bones’s speed, or she strongly disagreed. With everything that had happened to her, I couldn’t blame her. When we got back to the apartment, I promised myself, I’d give her a tall glass of whatever liquor she wanted. On second thought, make that the whole bottle.

Yet even then, it wouldn’t be enough to couch the devastating news I’d have to deliver: that the nightmare she’d experienced wasn’t going to end unless we caught Kramer, and she’d be part of the lure we would use to attempt that.

F
rancine sat on the couch, a glass candle filled with smoldering sage in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of red wine in the other. The bottle had been full when I began to explain about Kramer, the other women who were even now going through what she’d experienced, and the part about Bones and me being vampires. Flying Francine out of her apartment kinda let on that we weren’t human, so there was no sense in trying to keep that secret while telling her everything else. Spade, Denise, and my mother got here about an hour after we did, but so Francine didn’t feel like she was being ganged up on, only Bones, I, and Tyler were with her at first. Everyone else was in their respective town houses.

I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the suggestion Bones had planted earlier in her mind that she could trust us, but Francine was a lot calmer than I expected her to be at these revelations. It was possible she was in shock, and most of what I said didn’t register to her, but her thoughts weren’t in line with that. She had a few token moments of “vampires don’t exist” and “this can’t be happening,” but overall she seemed to accept that what we were telling her was true. Three weeks of being tormented by an invisible entity had evidently disabused her of the idea that the paranormal didn’t exist.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” was what she said when I finished speaking. “No one believed me when I told them what was happening. For a little while, I tried to pretend they were right. That I was doing all these things to myself through multiple personality disorder or whatever other psychosis applied, but I knew better.”

Francine glanced down at the wine bottle and let out a jagged laugh. “This is my first drink since all this started. My friends already thought I’d just snapped because of—of other events. I didn’t want them to add alcoholism into their rationalization that what I described couldn’t really be happening to me.”

“What other events?” Bones asked at once.

She balked, and I hastened to add, “We don’t mean to pry, but it might help us find the other two women before it’s too late.”

Francine let out a long sigh, scratching her hand through her sunshine-colored hair before she spoke.

“My mom died about six months ago. Dad passed on when I was really little, so she was all I had growing up. It really messed me up, which was way too much drama for my boyfriend, so he moved on to greener pastures. Then right before
he
started showing up, someone broke into my apartment and killed my cat. I mean, what kind of sicko does that? They didn’t even steal anything, just killed her and left!”

“That’s
awful,
” Tyler breathed. He hugged Dexter as he spoke, the dog in his usual spot on Tyler’s lap.

“So sorry for everything,” I murmured. I meant it, but the clinical part of me analyzed this against what I knew about serial killers in general and Kramer in particular. Francine and Elisabeth didn’t really look alike aside from both being Caucasians in their later twenties, so that wasn’t a trail to follow, and aside from the cat murder, everything else Francine related was, sadly, what I would expect. Francine didn’t have many close ties left, making her more appealing to a stalker like Kramer. It was harder to isolate and terrorize someone who had a strong support network around her.

“Looking back, do you think Kramer might have been the actual culprit behind your cat’s death?” Bones asked, zeroing in on the same oddity that bothered me.

Francine rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don’t think so. The person broke the lock on my front door to get in. Did it while I was at work, and most people in my building are gone during the day, too, so no one saw it happen. Kramer never broke anything to get in. He just . . . showed up.” Watery smile. “And then broke everything inside, but never the locks.”

“Destruction of the witch’s familiar,” Bones murmured. His mouth twisted. “Animals as familiars were one of the precepts set forth in many witch trials, and cats were commonly associated as a familiar. This could be nothing more than coincidence . . . or perhaps it’s the accomplice’s first test of loyalty.”

Breaking and entering, plus murdering something innocent for no reason other than warped superstition? Yep, sounded like just the warm-up Kramer might use for his human apprentice. Furthermore, Kramer had to know that animals could sense his presence. He’d tried to kill Dexter the first time Tyler summoned him. Poor dog still had that cast on his back leg, and Helsing would have been in worse shape if not for some lucky breaks. Getting rid of any pets his targets owned meant those pets could never warn their owners of Kramer’s presence before he wanted it to be known.

Prick.

Francine blinked back tears. “So it’s because of me that my cat was killed?”

“You’re not responsible for
any
of this,” I told her firmly. “Kramer is. Him, and whoever the shit is that’s helping him.”

“But you’re going to stop them, right?”

I had to glance away from the poignant hope in Francine’s face before I promised all sorts of things I wasn’t sure I could deliver on.

“We’re sure going to try,” I said, meeting Bones’s steady dark gaze, “and you just gave us a new lead to start on.”

Twenty-four

“T
his is the place,” I said, shielding my eyes from the morning sunlight.

I might have lost access to the Homeland Security’s database thanks to Madigan’s new position as boss, but a lot of the information that led us here was all a matter of public record if you were willing to pay a fee. A little hacking into the Sioux City Police Department database provided the rest. In the past two months, approximately 106 households in the Sioux City metro area had reported burglaries. That was a big number if we were doing door-to-door searches, but out of those, only thirty-eight were reported by women living alone. Filter that further by women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five living alone where the burglary resulted in the injury or death to a pet, and that number dropped to one.

If we were right about the connection between dead pets and Kramer, we’d found one of the remaining two women less than six hours after Francine told us her story. Maybe this new woman could give us information that could lead to Kramer’s final intended victim. Then we could start the really hard part: building another trap for Kramer that we could lure the ghost into. We had all the materials. We just needed a new place with a freshwater stream to set them up in.

But we had to do all this without Madigan finding us and screwing everything up again. On the principle that I’d vowed to stay optimistic, I wasn’t about to calculate our odds.

One thing was already in our favor: Someone with a heartbeat was in Lisa Velasquez’s home. I glanced at the clock in the car—10:17
A.M.
, miserably early for vampires but past the time most people had to be at work. Maybe Lisa had taken the day off. Maybe she worked second shift.

Or maybe she was being so tormented by a ghost that she’d gotten fired from her job for bizarre behavior and frequent absences, just like Francine had.

“We should’ve brought the cat,” Bones muttered, eyeing the one-story house where Lisa lived. If we were right, Kramer could be lurking in there, just waiting for us to cross the threshold.

“Helsing’s almost been killed a couple times. I’m not risking it, especially when we’re pretty sure those past attempts were deliberate, and we only get a two-second warning hiss before Kramer whales on me anyway.”

“His attacking you first the past three out of four times is what concerns me,” Bones replied, an edge to his tone.

“What can I say?” Wry smile. “I’m irresistible.”

Bones shot me a look that said my humor was wasted on this subject, handing me two glasses full of already smoldering sage. Then he took two more for himself, leaving the other two lit containers in the car. Both of us had more sage in our coats, plus the prerequisite lighters, but this time, we weren’t waiting to flame up. Sure, we’d look a little strange to whoever opened the door, but that was the least of our concerns.

“Hear anything interesting?” I murmured, as we walked to the door. I had my mental shields lowered as much as possible without the voices overwhelming me, but I wasn’t as good at filtering through unfamiliar ones yet, and Lisa lived in a subdivision bordering a busy business district.

He closed his eyes, his power flaring for an instant. “Whoever’s in there is asleep,” he stated.

That made this easier. I glanced around, didn’t notice any neighbors watching us, then marched up to the closest window, peering inside. No such luck, the drapes were drawn. I tried the next window. Same thing. Bones picked up on my intention and circled around the back of the house.

“Here,” he called out after a moment.

From his tone, he’d struck pay dirt. In the few seconds it took me to get to where he was, Bones had the sliding glass door open. Either he’d used his mind to unlock it or leaned in and pulled up at the right angle; either would’ve taken about the same amount of time.

I followed him inside, mouth tightening at the destruction inside that Lisa had tried to conceal with her tightly drawn drapes. Bones followed the steady sounds of a heartbeat to Lisa’s bedroom, which again looked so similar to what Kramer had done at Francine’s that we didn’t need to wake Lisa and question her to get our confirmation. Besides, speed was of the essence.

Bones put down the burning sage to place his hand over the sleeping woman’s mouth, stifling her instant scream as that jolted her into awareness. I felt guilty about the sudden frantic race of her pulse and the terror that spiked across her mind, but by the time Bones finished telling her we were taking her somewhere safe, and we wouldn’t hurt her, her heart rate had slowed to almost a normal rhythm, and her thoughts mirrored the suggestions he’d implanted with his gaze.

When he picked her up and the covers fell back, I saw she was wearing a nightgown that was so ripped, more flesh was revealed than covered.
Bastard,
I silently swore at Kramer, shrugging off my coat.

“No,” Bones said, voice low but sharp. “She can wear mine, but you’re keeping that sage close.”

Arguing with him would only take more time, and Kramer could show up at any moment. Bones doffed his coat, handing it to Lisa. She put it on, still mechanically obedient thanks to the power in his gaze. I hated the necessity of highjacking her will, but at that moment, her immediate compliance was in her very best interest.

I handed Bones a few extra packets of sage and a couple lighters that he put into his pants pockets before picking up the lit containers again.

“Straight to the car, Lisa,” he instructed her, gaze warily flicking around as we walked from her bedroom to the front door. I was braced the whole way, expecting one of the broken pieces of furniture or dishes suddenly to levitate and slam into us, but nothing happened.

We opened the front door and all my muscles tightened again, waiting for it to fling back and bash into us, yet only the bright sunlight waited on the other side. The car looked untouched, twin lanterns of sage still burning in the front cup holders and filling the interior with a light veil of smoke.

I got into the backseat with Lisa, rolling down the window enough that she wouldn’t choke from the haze but not too much that all the ghost-repelling smoke escaped. Then Bones peeled out of the neighborhood fast enough to cause a couple homeowners to peer after us as we sped by, and still, no sign of Kramer.

My relief was mixed with suspicion. “Do you think he’s off somewhere else at the moment? Or that he’s letting us get away unscathed because he wants us to lead him right to Francine?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bones said, glancing back at me. “We’re not driving straight back to the town house.”

“No?” That was news to me.

His mouth quirked. “No, which is why you’re going to turn the brights on in your gaze and tell her to remain
really
calm, else in another ten minutes, she’ll scream our bloody ears off.”

W
e left the car at the end of a cornfield, and Bones flew us the rest of the way with the explanation that ghosts couldn’t follow after about the half-mile height marker. Now that he mentioned it, I realized Fabian and every other ghost I’d seen had always kept pretty close to buildings or the ground when they traveled, unless they were hitchhiking on an airplane or something similar. Bones had us as high as Lisa could take without it being too cold or oxygen depleted. At that height, it would be harder to spot us against the clear morning sky, but Bones had packed a light blue sheet that we wrapped around us for even better camouflage. Maybe when I got more used to flying, I’d treat it with the same thoroughness he did, but for now, I was still doing well if I didn’t crash when I landed.

Once we got Lisa settled and explained all about Kramer, her story turned out to be eerily similar to Francine’s. She was divorced, no siblings, and while her father was still alive, he was in poor health in a nursing home. She’d also had a recent string of bad luck, like losing her well-paying job several months ago because of company downsizing and her house going into the early stages of foreclosure. Working two part-time jobs hadn’t been enough to pay her mortgage, and working at all cut off her unemployment. Add in a botched robbery where her cat was killed, and Lisa’s friends thought her claims of something invisible attacking her at home were a clear case of stress manifesting in the form of paranoid delusions.

Lisa seemed glad to meet Francine even though she was sickened to hear that the appartition who’d tormented her was doing the same thing to other women. Still, I understood why it was a relief for Lisa to meet someone who not only believed her but who knew exactly what she’d been through.

The same went for Francine. All the empathy Bones and I could give wasn’t the same as what Francine got when she spoke to Lisa. They were survivors of a battle that we could try to imagine but hadn’t lived through like they had, so our understanding was limited.

After we’d answered all her questions, Bones went next door to update the rest of our group, and I escorted Lisa upstairs to Francine’s room, where there was another bed and a clean outfit waiting for her. Later, I’d order both of them some new clothes, but for now, I left them alone. Francine had only slept a few hours, and Lisa looked like she needed a nice long rest, too. I didn’t imagine either of them had had a decent sleep since Kramer targeted them, but with sage burning on their nightstands, two pets capable of sounding a warning, and two vampires here to protect them—plus two more nearby—they were as safe as they were going to get.

Tyler wandered into the kitchen, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a sleeveless shirt. From the faint creases on his cheek, he’d just rolled out of bed. Since staying with us the past few weeks, Tyler’s schedule of when he was awake and when he slept had drastically altered.

“M’n,” he mumbled, though it was after two o’clock in the afternoon. “Want some coffee?”

I drank it with him to be sociable, but I’d never liked the stuff even before Bones’s blood became my beverage of choice.

“Not this time. We haven’t been to bed since yesterday morning, so we’re about to catch a few hours’ sleep. Oh, and we have a new guest.”

A wide grin slid across his face. “You found another of the women already?”

Tyler had fallen asleep before we got Lisa’s information, and instead of waking him when we left, we’d just had my mother come to watch over him and Francine. I grinned back, feeling more lighthearted than I had in a while.

“Her name is Lisa, and she’s upstairs with Francine.”

Tyler stuck his fist out, and I touched it with mine. “Nice work, kitty cat.”

“I didn’t do it alone,” I protested, but I was pleased by the compliment.

At last, we were making headway. Elisabeth and Fabian were still trying to track Kramer to determine who the final target was, but in the meantime, we didn’t have to sit on our hands and watch the days ominously count down on the calendar. Police reports weren’t the only way we could search for the last woman. We could check recent burials in pet cemeteries, veterinary offices, animal cremation companies, hell, even county records of rabies vaccinations to help narrow down our list. Somewhere in that mix had to be a trail leading to her.

Upstairs, Dexter let out a half whine, half bark. From somewhere else in the town house, Helsing meowed. Tyler and I both tensed. I yanked some sage from my pants pockets and had it lit before Bones came bursting back into the town house.

“Where is he?” he demanded, holding a handful of burning sage aloft.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, charging up the stairs to Francine and Lisa’s room. God, what if Kramer was in there now, hurting those women after I’d just told them they were finally safe!

“Cat!” a male voice called from outside the town house.

I froze in the act of flinging open their bedroom door. I knew that voice, and while it belonged to a ghost, it wasn’t any of the ones I’d expected.

A door’s banging open only punctuated the effect of Spade’s words. “Cat, your uncle’s in the yard.”