The Demon Hunter (7 page)

Atop the sign was a tiny square marker displaying a red neon circle with a black plus sign in the middle. This symbol let the vampires know that this 24-7 was also their local Harvey's Discount Sanguinarium and Confectionery.

Oliver and Phlox crossed the street and entered the starkly lit store. Aside from occasionally hurrying in to pay for gas or buy cigarettes, humans rarely ventured inside. They couldn't help feeling like there was a friendlier place somewhere else, a place that was, well, warmer. There were only a few vampires in the store at the moment, and Oliver figured that Phlox was glad to see this.

The place looked like any other human twenty-four-hour convenience store. Its shelves were stuffed with unhealthy, overpriced snacks, and too-small packages of kitchen and bathroom necessities. Its walls were lined with refrigerators, featuring row after row of sodas, juices, teas, soda-juices, juice-teas.… The wall behind the counter was devoted entirely to cigarettes and scratch tickets.

Oliver walked beside Phlox as she took a basket and proceeded down the first aisle. She stopped in front of the piles of bag snacks, reached carefully between the Doritos, and pulled the very last bag from the back of the shelf. It looked like Doritos, except for a tiny Skrit symbol hidden on the bottom corner of the package. A human would have been surprised to open this bag, if the clerk ever allowed one to actually buy it, because it was full of blood-fried, spicy-hot triangles of alligator skin.

Phlox put the bag in her basket, then carefully rearranged the bags on the shelf into neat, equal rows, her lips clicking as she counted to herself. Oliver had counted the bags, too: twenty-five bags now in perfect rows of five. This order gave him a satisfied feeling.

They continued to the line of refrigerators. “Grab some Coke,” Phlox instructed. Oliver did so, and rejoined his mom at the display of sport drinks. Phlox ran her finger under the fourth shelf from the bottom. It passed under a small blue light, which scanned her and verified that she was a vampire. There was a click, followed by a quiet humming. The shelves began to move apart vertically, and rows of hanging blood bags slid forward in the new spaces.

The bags were clear, vacuum sealed, and marked with black labels covered in white writing. Each row contained blood from a different animal. For some creatures, there was more than one style to choose from, like pig, where there was the standard swine variety or the more expensive free-range organic. There was even blood from pigs whose diet included poison dart frogs, whose toxins were great for teeth whiteness and bacterial protection. This was the variety Phlox preferred.

“Anything you're in the mood for?” she asked.

“Panda maybe,” Oliver replied.

Phlox selected a few bags, then ran her hand under the light again. The bags slid out of sight, and the sport drinks returned to their usual position.

She moved to the refrigerator case of beer and wine. A similar switch made the shelves morph, only this time the bags that slid forward were marked with silver writing. These were filled with human blood. Again, there were varieties that affected price: age of the victim, lifestyle, or specialty additives like cayenne, cocoa, or various venoms.

“Oliver, can you get some tapeworms?” Phlox asked. She continued shopping, topping off her basket with fine white flour, unrefined sugar, pure maple syrup, and a few tarantulas in suspension, which were hidden in the ice cream freezer.

“Sure.” Oliver drifted away, pausing as he passed the magazine racks. A vampire man was carefully pulling a copy of
Bloodlust
from its hidden location behind
Newsweek
. Oliver knelt and reached for a copy of
Teen Fang!
On the cover was Tryshia Twilight, flashing her fangs like she was the underworld's greatest thing. Oliver didn't care much for her, or any of the teen stars, but sometimes the articles about bands were good.

He moved to the aisle of candy snacks, most of them made of disgusting artificial sweeteners and colors—humans really were so deprived—and reached back through the rack of Twizzlers packages. He selected the last package, which was actually full of gummified tapeworms. Again, you had to know where to look on the label. He was counting and rearranging the bags when he felt a presence nearby, like someone was watching him. And he smelled a familiar scent of lilacs …

“Those have all the protein that a growing boy needs.”

Oliver looked up across the tops of pretzel bags to find large, pale lavender eyes peering at him beneath bright magenta hair.

Lythia LeRoux.

Oliver tried to keep the surprise off his face.

“Oh,” Lythia murmured, leaning forward with a hand beside her mouth as if she were talking about someone else. “He's shocked to see me.”

Oliver thought he should reply—
Say something, anything!
—but as seemed to happen around Lythia, he couldn't decide what he should say and so ended up standing there like he was broken.

“Poor Oliver,” Lythia said, sucking air through her teeth. “Still having trouble with comebacks, I see.”

She plucked a can of tuna from the shelf and added it to the shopping basket that hung from her elbow. Oliver noticed human blood and a bag of frozen Gila monster heads in the basket, but also strange objects: a steak, two more cans of tuna, a box of baking soda, and a bundle of fresh datura root.

“No. I—” Part of Oliver's problem was that he was trying to think past what Lythia was saying and figure out what she might
really
be up to. She had a habit of saying one thing and being up to something else, like at the roulette table in Tartarus, when she'd talked with Oliver and Dean as if they were complete strangers, even though the whole time she'd been Dean's master.

Oliver also had trouble around Lythia because she had an intense presence: Though she looked about Oliver's age, she had a demon. Not only that, he'd seen her perform complicated adult vampire skills such as Evanescence, which even most vampires Bane's age couldn't do. It was like she was some kind of prodigy. Combine that with her piercing lavender eyes and the way she talked to him like she always knew something he didn't, and all Oliver could manage to do was stammer like an idiot.

In Morosia, Lythia had been after Selene's summoning charm, and she'd used Dean to get it. Her father, Malcolm, was a key member of Half-Light, but in Italy, Emalie had sensed that Lythia was up to something on her own. Strangely, if it hadn't been for Bane, who stole the summoning charm from Dean before he could deliver it, Lythia might have succeeded in whatever it was that she was really up to.

This time, well, Lythia's eyes were still just as arresting—
Stop it!
Oliver shouted at himself—but more importantly: what was she doing here in Seattle?

Lythia made a show of touching her finger to her chin pensively. “How about if Oliver says: Oh hi, Lythia, so lovely to see you!”

“Why would I say that?” Oliver managed to reply.

“Ha, obviously because you
do
think it's lovely to see me—don't you?” Lythia smiled, baring her perfect teeth. She'd applied glitter polish to them, a popular style among vampire girls, and so her teeth sparkled with flecks of gold. “Or he could say …” Lythia began speaking in a high-pitched child's voice. “No, Lythia, please don't kill my human girlfriend!”

Oliver froze. “What—”

“Leave her alone! She's my special little blood bag!”

Oliver's arm thrust forward. As soon as he realized what he was doing, he knew it was a mistake, but he had already hurled the bag of tapeworms at Lythia. Her face didn't even twitch, and her hand shot up and caught the bag. Then she burst into a snickering laugh.

“Watch out for big bad Oliver!” she taunted. “Nice to see you, too, though I would have preferred a kiss.” Lythia smiled wickedly. “It would be the least you could do.”

Oliver felt battered by each thing she said.
Say something back!
he thought desperately.
Stop standing there like an idiot!
It was horrible.

“Don't worry, Oliver, I know it's hard to use your words,” Lythia continued as if he was a toddler. “I'm a busy girl these days anyway, what with controlling your minion friend and plotting to save you.”

“What do you mean
save me
?” he groaned.

“Lythia to the rescue!” She grinned. “Don't worry, you'll find out when the time is right. Poor thing, that's how it always is for you, isn't it? Never a clue what's going to happen next.”

Her hand flashed out, and the tapeworm bag hurtled back and smacked Oliver in the face, his hand arriving a second too late to deflect it. He stumbled backward.

But then Lythia was being raised off the ground, an actual note of surprise crossing her face. “What—”

A black misty presence had wrapped around her and lifted her two feet into the air. It looked like a girl, shrouded in veils.

“You don't always have a clue what'll happen next, either,” whispered Jenette in her ear. She dropped Lythia and raced to Oliver's shoulder. “Hi, Oliver,” she said, her voice reverting to its mousy whisper.

“Um, hey,” Oliver replied.

Lythia staggered to keep her balance, a look of disgust on her face. “So this is your thing, eh, Oliver? Having little girls come to your rescue?” She glared at Jenette. “I'll come for you, too, smoky.”

“Please, please do,” Jenette hissed.

“Oliver?” Phlox was walking down the aisle, peering at Lythia. They'd never met, and Oliver could see Phlox trying to figure out who Lythia was.

“And Mommy, too!” Lythia clapped. “Oliver, you
are
the ultimate ladies' man.”

Oliver once again searched his suddenly empty brain for a response. There had to be something he could say that wouldn't make him sound as lame as he looked. Something that would let Lythia know that she couldn't mess with him and his friends.

But once again, the moment passed.

“Well, just wanted to say hi,” Lythia purred. “See you around, 'kay?” She turned to Phlox, smiled sweetly, and then dashed down the aisle and out the door without paying for her items.

Oliver watched her go, shaking his head. He was pathetic. “Thanks,” he muttered to Jenette.

“No problem,” said Jenette. “She's hideous.”

“That and a lot of other things,” said Oliver grimly.

“Was that Lythia LeRoux?” Phlox asked, arriving beside him. Jenette slipped down among the shelves, out of sight.

“Yeah,” Oliver replied.

“Last I knew, Malcolm was on business in Naraka.” Phlox sounded concerned. “Did she say anything to you about what she's doing here?”

“Nothing that made sense.”

“I'm surprised that he'd be in town without Sebastian knowing,” Phlox said, then frowned. “Maybe I shouldn't be.” She looked at Oliver. “Have you noticed anything … strange with Dean?”

“No,” said Oliver, but now he worried. If Lythia was around, she could make Dean do whatever she wanted.
Or maybe she's been giving him orders all summer,
Oliver thought,
and I just don't know it.
This was going to be a problem.

“Well then, come on, Oliver. Let's get going,” said Phlox, her concerns returning to the possibility of running into other vampires. She started toward the door.

“Where were you guys last night?” Jenette asked, returning to his shoulder, and sounding hurt. “I waited at the graveyard till dawn.”

“Ahh, sorry,” Oliver said. As a wraith, Jenette was helpful in the cemeteries when they were searching for Oliver's parents. She could float among the graves and determine in moments whether any of the bodies had similar force signatures to Oliver's. He didn't really understand how she did it. “We got sidetracked …” Oliver didn't want to say any more with his mom around. “We'll meet you there Saturday night, okay?”

“Well, I'm not sure I can get away from The Shoals again Saturday,” Jenette pouted. “It's not that easy, you know.”

Oliver nodded. Jenette was controlled by a powerful Merchynt demon named Spira, who inhabited the borderlands and sold wraiths for special jobs. Oliver didn't know much about Jenette's world, but really, she seemed to be able to get away whenever she wanted. “Can you try? We need you. And I promise we'll be there.”

“Swear it to me.” Jenette curled around so that her smoky, veiled face was inches from Oliver's.

“Um …” Oliver stepped to the side, but Jenette stayed face-to-face. “Right, I swear.”

“Then I'll be there,” Jenette said. She sounded very happy.

“Oliver.” Phlox had reached the door.

“See you then,” said Oliver, and he turned to leave, his mind on Lythia and what she might be up to.

Chapter 5

A Disturbing Absence

AS OLIVER DRESSED FOR
school Thursday evening, he found Emalie's note in his pocket. He knelt and dug into one of the drawers beneath his coffin. His fingers found a cool ivory box, and he grasped it carefully with two hands before removing it. The jewelry box, in which he kept the trinkets he'd collected from Emalie, was so full at this point that it would barely close. He'd even ripped out the padded inner lining to make extra space.

As he opened it, the tiny toy television that she had used as a locating charm in Italy fell into his lap. Oliver placed it back among the earring, other notes, and hair bands, then added the latest note. Just this sliver of paper made the box that much harder to close. It looked like a half-open clamshell. He was going to need something larger.

Across the crypt, on the other side of Bane's coffin, a black table stood along the stone wall. Oliver eyed a disorderly pile of boxes atop it. They were from Phlox's birthday back in July. The pile had been moved down here from the living room after the party. The fact that Phlox had not immediately organized the boxes and stored them in their proper places—and had now let a
month
go by—was further evidence that his parents were not themselves these days.