Pomegranates full and fine (16 page)

The shouts of the crowd became screams of anger. More people continued to pour into the intersection, the press of the crowd carrying them forward. Everyone was yelling. Other mounted officers tried to move in; Tango heard the one closest to them start to shout into his radio before a demonstrator jumped up and tried to pull it out of his hand. The officer pushed him down. Ten more demonstrators howled in outrage and rushed forward.    ,

Dex was suddenly sitting bolt upright. “Oh, shit.”

Tango glanced over her shoulder. “The northbound lanes,” she said quickly. Dex glanced back as well and nodded; smoothly turning the steering wheel to escape back the way they had come. Unfortunately, the two cars immediately behind them had exactly the same idea and their drivers were less cautious than Dex. They jerked out almost simultaneously and far too fast. With a blaring of horns and squealing of brakes, one rammed the other. One of the horns continued to wail, adding to the noise of crowd. A second later, a surge in the fighting blocked any chance of going around the accident. Dex stopped, the nose of his Mustang halfturned into the intersection and the raging crowd.

A red-faced demonstrator slapped his hands down on the hood of the Mustang with a bang. “Hets!” he screamed. “Hatemongers! End bashing now! End bashing now!”

More demonstrators joined him, slapping the car and chanting, shouting in Tango’s face. Demonstrators began to surround other cars as well, filling the air with angry yells and the pounding of hands on metal. Tango tried to remain calm, looking for a way out. There was no reasoning with people in this state. Epp was cringing away from them, holding up her notebook like a shield. “Get away!” she shrieked. Glamour filled her, bringing a flush to her fat cheeks, and she worked a desperate cantrip. “Get away from me!” A few of the protesters obeyed meekly, moving away from the car, but there were always more willing to take their place. Epp curled up in her seat, shrieking in fright. Dex...

Dex was white-faced and thin-lipped, sunglasses hiding his eyes. Glamour filled him as well, but it was the noble Glamour of the sidhe, as cold and arrogant as Tango had ever seen it. Grimly, he revved the Mustang’s engine, pushing the roar of the car against the shouts of the crowd. Tango realized what he was thinking. She leaned forward and yelled in his ear, “Dex! No!”

The first red-faced demonstrator took the roar of the engine as a challenge instead of a warning. Still shouting “End bashing now!” he climbed up onto the hood.

Dex’s tightly pressed lips parted ever so slightly. “Get... off... of my., car,” he growled.

“Dex!” screamed Tango.

The demonstrator lifted a foot to stomp on the hood. “End bashing...”

Dex slammed the Mustang into gear and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Demonstrators’ screams of anger turned into screams of shock and terror as the Mustang plowed through them. Some got out of the way or jumped back. Some

— too close, too tightly held by the bodies around them, or simply too angry to know better — had skin torn as projections on the car caught them, or bones broken as the tires ran them down. Tango felt several horrible bumps as people were knocked to the ground and run over. The red-faced demonstrator yelled as the initial acceleration pitched him forward, a yell that ended in a sickening crunch as his cheek struck the top of the windshield. He rolled down and off the car.

Dex drove across a corner of the intersection and onto the now-empty section of College Street beyond the riot, heedless of whom he struck. A mounted police officer pulled her horse out of the car’s path just in time. Tango stared back at the riot in shock. “You might have killed people back there!”

“Humans,” said Dex with angry dismissal. “They’re nothing.”

“Yeah, well, I bet that cop got a pretty good look at your license plate!” Tango spat, fuming w'ith rage. “Did you ever hear of paint chip analysis?”

Dex laughed, a short, arrogant bark. “She won’t remember us. None of them will. There will be so many conflicting descriptions of us and so many contradictory lab reports that they’d have to bring in every car in the city!” He glanced at Tango in the rearview mirror. “Forget about it.”'

Tango’s mouth twisted and her stomach knotted in disgust. “Take me home.”

“What about the chocolate?” whined Epp.

“Get it another day! Take me home!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

One began to weave a crown Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown (Men sell not such in any town)

Miranda reached out of the car window and slapped the button on the ticket machine. It spat a little bar-coded chit at her. The gate ahead of her rose, and she drove into the airport parking lot, cruising up and down the lanes looking for an empty space like a desperate man looking for a hooker.

It had been easy to leave without the rest of the pack. She had simply risen with the setting sun, dressed, picked up her keys and walked out the door of the house that the pack shared. The others hadn’t yet stirred from their resting places. If they had been up, Miranda had been ready with a story that she was going hunting without them tonight, that she wanted to feed alone. It was the same story she used when she had to attend a ceremony of the Bandog or when Solomon wanted to meet with her. It could also easily have been the truth. It was often very disturbing to feed around Tolly, and Blue was like an animal. Matt’s feeding habits were closest to what she preferred when she had the luxury to indulge them: slow and intense, the pleasure of feeding prolonged. What she would have done to Tango if the woman had not been a changeling. Fortunately, Matt’s very specialized tastes in frat boys meant that the two vampires had never had to feed together. Miranda was profoundly grateful for that. She had enough trouble putting up with Matt at the best of times. Feeding with him would have been almost as sickening as feeding with Tolly.

She found a parking space and pulled into it, beating out a station wagon full of a harried-looking mother and three screaming children. The woman glared at her angrily, face tinted orange under the lights of the lot, but kept going. Miranda ignored her. She reached forward to switch off the radio, but paused as the news came on.

The pack’s murder of the bartender last night and the protest that had broken out into a small riot downtown were at the top of the news. She had heard the stories before during the drive out to the airport. Nothing had changed. An autopsy had shown conclusively that Todd Hyde had died from internal bleeding, the result of a severe, prolonged beating that had left him with multiple broken bones and massive damage to his internal organs. Police were denying any leads in what the media had started to call the penny murders, but there had been arrests and numerous injuries in the wake of the riot protesting “police inaction” in the deaths. Three police officers and twenty-five protesters had been treated and released or were still in the hospital with serious injuries, partly the result of violence during the riot, partly the result of a car ramming through the riot. One protester was in critical condition in the intensive care ward. Ironically, it seemed that the devastation wrought by the car had hastened the break-up of the riot. Police were searching for the car and its driver, but just as in the murder cases, they had no leads. Gays were already calling for a public inquest and planning more demonstrations.

Miranda turned off the radio and sat in the shadows of the car for a moment as a plane thundered into the air overhead. She had heard news stories before that she knew could ultimately be traced back to the Sabbat. A couple had been events in which her pack had been involved. When she had listened to those stories, however, all that she had felt was a sense of elation, the same feeling average humans got when they appeared on television. A feeling of “look — there we are in the back!” Certainly that had been her reaction, and the rest of the pack’s, when Blue had turned on the television yesterday evening so they could watch the report on the first murder. But tonight, for the first time, she wasn’t feeling that elation.

She was wondering about the consequences of the murders. They had inspired a riot. People had cared about the dead men, and they were angry at their deaths.

She wondered if Tango had heard about the second murder and the riot. The changeling must have. Miranda wondered what her reaction had been.

The roar of another plane taking off brought her back to attention. Miranda put the parking chit up on the dashboard and got out of the car, heading toward the terminal building. There was a covered pedestrian overpass across the taxi drop-off zone. The woman in the station wagon must have found a spot closer to the terminal, because she and her children were walking into the stairwell of the overpass just ahead of Miranda. The woman let the door slam shut behind, right in Miranda’s face. For someone from Toronto, it was a sharp gesture and a deliberate insult. It was savage, angry Sabbat instinct for Miranda to send dark, frightening shadows flitting after the family, crowding them in the empty, echoing stairwell. The vampire thought about snatching one of the woman’s children away from her. But she stopped herself, banishing the shadows.

The woman was tired. She had let the door close

— was that so terrible a thing that Miranda would kill a child in revenge? Who was the family meeting at the airport? A father? Grandparents? Miranda followed the family out of the overpass and into the bright and crowded terminal. The crowds swallowed them up. She let them go, cursing the attack of conscience.

It was Tango’s fault. She thrust all thoughts of the changeling from her mind.

It took her a little while to find the Lost and Found office in the maze of the terminal. A bored-looking man stood at the counter, idling flipping through a magazine. He barely glanced up as Miranda approached, but kept turning pages until she had stopped in front of him. “Can I help you?” he asked in a voice that implied he would have preferred to do anything but.

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed bags.” “Name?”

“Riley Stanton.”

The attendant finally looked directly at her. He snorted, and a sort of smile smeared itself across his lips. “You’re not him?”

“No.” Miranda gave him a condescending glance.

“I’m not. How observant of you.” She pulled Tango’s paper out of her pocket and handed it to him. “I’m a friend. This is the flight number he was on. Apparently his name and address are on the bags.”

The attendant glanced at the paper, then passed it back to her. “Sorry.”

“What?”

“Only the owner can pick up unclaimed baggage. And he has to have proper ID.”

“Well, the owner can’t make it out to the airport. He asked me to get his luggage for him.” Miranda set her mouth in a hard line and gave the attendant a dark look. ‘‘Give me the bags.”

“I can’t. If Mr. Stanton wants to call and make arrangements to pick up the bags at a convenient time, he can do that. Or if he can provide identification at the Air Canada office downtown, we can send them in and he can pick them up there.” The attendant’s eyes drifted back down to his magazine. “But we can’t give unclaimed baggage to anyone but the owner. It’s policy.” This time, Miranda didn’t even try to control her anger. Shadows fell across the man’s magazine. He looked up again. Miranda caught his eye. “Let me inside,” she hissed.

Her will bored into his. He didn’t have a chance. “There’s a staff entrance around the corner,” he stuttered.

“Go unlock it for me.”

The attendant disappeared. Miranda stalked around to the door, her anger a red haze in her vision. The attendant was standing just inside the door, holding it open for her. “I...”

She didn’t let him finish his sentence. She hadn’t fed yet tonight and she hadn’t fed last night either. She was hungry and she was angry, a bad combination for vampires. The Lost and Found office was quiet, and the corner by the door was secluded. Miranda pushed the attendant back against the wall and forced his head to one side. Her fangs descended, and she bit into his neck. He gasped. Once.

The blood was good. Miranda drank her fill, leaving the man weak and pale, but alive. This time when she tilted his head back, he barely had the strength to resist. His eyes were wide. “Your waking mind will forget me,” Miranda ordered him, “but I’ll come back in your nightmares again and again.” The man shuddered.

Miranda found Riley’s bags, a battered leather overnight bag and a big heavy suitcase, and went back out the staff entrance. Some of her anger must have lingered around her, because the crowd parted for her, stepping out of her way and pulling children aside. In the pedestrian overpass, the shadows thickened with her passage. And after she had put the bags in the trunk of her car and pulled up to the parking lot’s exit booth, even the parking attendant sat up and treated her politely, taking the chit she held out as if half-expecting her to seize him and drag him into the car. Warily, he kept one eye on her as he slid the ticket through a cash machine.

The machine beeped and churned out a merry little electronic tune. The parking attendant blinked. “Congratulations, miss,” he said to her nervously over the noise of the car radio. “You win.”

Miranda looked at him with blank disinterest. “Free parking?”

“A cellular phone.” He pointed to a poster taped up on the window of his booth.
Random customers will win free* cellular phone courtesy of...
Miranda’s eye skipped to the bottom of the page, where a counterpart to the asterisk highlighted the phrase *
Activation and subscription fees extra.

She glanced back up at the attendant. He was holding out a brightly colored box with a stylized telephone on the lid. “I’d rather have the free parking.”

The attendant swallowed. She let her cold gaze stay on him for a few more chilling seconds, and he blanched. “Enjoy your phone,” he said quickly, shoving it through her window. “Thanks for parking with us.” He stepped back and slapped at a button to raise the exit gate. Miranda pushed the box into the passenger seat and drove away.

Ten minutes later, the box began to ring.

The car skidded into another lane of traffic as Miranda snapped her head around to look at it in surprise. All around, horns honked in protest and brake lights flashed on. Miranda turned her attention back to the road. In its box, the cellular phone continued to ring. Miranda did her best to ignore it.