The Vampire's Revenge (29 page)

“When she turned up missing they sent me to look for her like I said. By that time it was a hundred years later, so the trail was pretty cold, and—”

“Whoa! Back up,” I said, starting the car up again. “That doesn’t make a dab of sense. Why did they wait a hundred years to send you to look for her?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What the hell? Faeries are supposed to remember everything!” This was just lame. William used to tell me that the fey were powerful, talented, clever creatures. Otis must have gotten left under the Blarney Stone when the brains were given out.

Otis hung his head. “I guess I’m not a very good faerie.”

Just my luck that the only faerie in my orbit had to be one with deep-seated competency issues. Not only that, but this whole situation was just unbelievable. A faerie princess and a pot of gold? How cliché was that?

“Look, I’m sorry. Go on with the story.”

Otis sighed. “I remember it was about this time of year—Saint Patrick’s Day . . .”

I gritted my fangs and suppressed the urge to slap him upside the head. “Get on with it.”

“So I went to the island, searched for the princess, and didn’t find a trace of her. But when I was called back to the Old Country to give my report, this one guy in the royal family accused me of doing away with the princess in order to steal the gold.”

“That’s crazy. A hundred years had passed. If the princess was still alive, surely she would have come back on her own, gold or no gold.”

“You’d think so.”

“Okay, so what’s the upshot of all this? Why don’t you want Olivia to ask about the island?”

“I just don’t want to open old wounds. I get along pretty good with the people I report to. I try to keep my head down and maintain a low profile when it comes to the higher-ups. And you can’t get any higher up than the king and queen. I think they believe me, but this prince who accused me of offing her was one of her cousins. It was him she was running away from according to the gossip.”

“Why was she running from him?”

“They’d been betrothed since they were infants. She was going to be the queen someday and he would have been her consort. When she disappeared, his path to power went up in smoke, and he never got over it.”

We were coming into the outskirts of Savannah and it occurred to me that despite how long Otis had been hanging out at the garage I didn’t have any idea where he lived. For all I knew he lived under a toadstool or something. “Where do you want me to drop you off?” He gave me an address on one of the nicer squares.

I took a few minutes to let everything Otis told me sink in. By that time, we were at the address he’d given me. The place wasn’t a mansion like William’s, but it was a nice town house in a historic building. A man with a clipboard under one arm was training the beam of a flashlight along an ornate wrought-iron handrail at the door. The sign on a van parked at the curb read
ACME WELDING
.

“This is a good-looking place,” I remarked as Otis opened the car door. “Bet it costs a pretty penny.”

Otis laughed nervously. “Oh. Yeah. I’ll see you later, Jack. Thanks for the ride.” He walked quickly past the man inspecting the railing to the entrance.

I began to pull away, but something stopped me. I paused to listen as the man spoke to Otis. “Oh, hello there, Mr. Fey. I just came out to personally inspect the work our man did for you this morning. Would you like to take a look? I think he did a very good job.”

“Uh, it’s fine. Just fine,” Otis said. “I really have to go now.”

“Sure. If you’d just sign the work order right here where it says ‘owner approval,’ I’ll be on my way.”

I was out of the Corvette and at Otis’s side by the time he’d finished signing his name. I nodded to the welding man as he turned to go and grabbed Otis’s elbow. “I need to talk to you, Mr. Fey.”

Otis looked a little pale, even for a faerie. He shimmered a little like he was in danger of losing his glamour, but he toughened up and held on.

“The faeries must have you on quite an expense account, huh?” I asked him.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded.

“Otis, do you know what happens to someone who lies to a master vampire?”

He shook his head gravely. I was totally bluffing. Oh, there’d be hell to pay if another vampire lied to me but as far as I knew that threat didn’t extend to other types of creatures. But Otis had always had a healthy fear of me, and he always fell for my bluffs when we played cards, so sure enough I could tell that he believed me right now.

“What they give me wouldn’t keep a bird alive,” he said.

“And you didn’t save a lot of money from your show business days as a glam rocker in the seventies, did you?”

“Nope.” He shook his head.

“You stole that gold, didn’t you, Otis?”

“I didn’t steal it! I found it!”

I clapped my hand over his mouth as a couple out walking crossed the street in front of us. “I’m a vampire, dammit, I can hear a fish fart at a hundred yards. Keep your voice down.” I removed my hand and the couple kept going.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Jack,” Otis whispered.

“You could have taken the gold back when you were called back to the Old Country.”

“I needed that gold, and I knew they wouldn’t miss it. They’ve got tons of the stuff. Plus, I figured if I got in trouble for failing to bring the princess back with me, I’d need it to run as far and as fast as I could.”

“But surely you didn’t know that that one guy would accuse you of harming the princess at the time you found the gold.”

“Listen, Jack, when the faeries send you to find something—especially if it’s a member of the royal family—and you come back empty-handed, well, let’s just say they can punish you in ways you don’t want to think about. I had to come back here and stay for my own protection. I barely got away in one piece, and I had to have something to live on.”

I looked at him hard and he didn’t look away. “But you’re telling the truth about not finding the girl, right?”

“On my honor as a faerie.”

“And that is just so very valuable. Geez.”

My cell phone rang. It was Olivia. I didn’t even have time to say hello before she said, “Jack, go and get Connie off Tara now!”

“What? Why?” I asked, immediately alarmed at the panicked tone of her voice.

“Because that island is about to disappear for one hundred years!”

Twenty-five

“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded even as I grabbed Otis by the shirt collar and propelled him back toward the car.

“The island is cursed. It could disappear at any moment.”

“What do you mean ‘disappear’?”

“What—” Otis began.

“Get in the car, Otis!” We got back in the Corvette and I headed it back in the direction we’d come from. I plugged my cell phone into the gizmo attached to the cigarette lighter so the sound would come through the speakers and Otis could hear what Olivia had to say.

“Otis was right when he said only faeries could see the island. But what he didn’t tell you is that the island is only reachable, even by faeries, once every hundred years.”

“I didn’t know! I swear!” insisted Otis.

I steered the Stingray with one hand and reached out to throttle him with the other but then figured it wouldn’t do any good. “Were they sure?”

“There’s no doubt.”

“How much time do I have to get them back?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that the only time you can access the island when the hundred years is up is a week or so before and after Saint Patrick’s Day.”

I let loose with a string of expletives. I was worried about Connie being trapped on the island with Seth for a few weeks and now Olivia was telling me it could be a century! “My God. It may already be too late.”

I turned a corner so fast the car went up on two wheels. Otis covered his eyes and screamed like a girl. “Shut up!” I yelled. “Not you, Olivia. What am I going to do if I can’t get them back? They’ll get old and die there.”

“Not necessarily,” Olivia said.

“What do you mean? If a hundred years goes by—”

“Jack, did you ever see
Brigadoon
?”

“Maybe it’s me, but is this the right time to discuss the musical theater?”

“Humor me. The story was about a small town in Scotland that appeared every hundred years. Only for that hundred years, the people who lived there only aged a day.”

“Are you saying that somebody made a movie about this island?” I asked, totally confused.

“Yes, but they changed the name and the setting. Tara—that is to say the real island in question—is legendary.”

I gave Otis a murderous look. He shrugged apologetically and said, “I’ve been over here so long I haven’t exactly kept up with the Irish legends.”

“So you’re saying that even if I have to wait a hundred years to get her back, she’ll still look exactly like she does now.”

“And she’ll think it’s . . . tomorrow,” Olivia said.

“What if I can’t get to her? Did you explain the situation to the faeries?”

“Yeah, but they said there’s nothing they can do to intervene.”

“What about those two gods you sent for? Do you think they might still be here in Savannah?”

“I heard they returned to Europe. They wouldn’t be able to help you anyway. They’re pagan, but they’re not part of the Sidhe, so they couldn’t remove the curse.”

“Why was the island cursed in the first place?”

“The faeries I talked to weren’t privy to that but it may have something to do with a missing princess.”

I pulled back my lips and showed Otis my fangs and he covered his face again.

“But listen,” Olivia said. “I did ask them to speak to their higher-ups about the situation. They said they’d take it all the way to the monarchy if they had to, as a special favor to me.”

“I’m glad you’re hitting it off with them,” I said glumly.

“Me too. It bodes well for the future. Speaking of that, I’ve got to get back to the meeting. I still have a lot on my agenda to go over with them.”

“Wait. I’ve got some bad news for you, too,” I said.

“Oh, my goodness. What is it?”

“Will showed up here last night. He had no idea William is dead. He didn’t take it well.”

“Oh no! The poor thing!”

“Poor thing my ass. Now he wants to kill me. His mother showed up and convinced him that I helped Connie murder William. I think she got a whiff of Will’s scent somewhere and tracked him to me. She’d probably been watching the house anyway, waiting for a chance to get the drop on me.”

“That’s dreadful! What happened?”

“I nearly tore out Diana’s throat, but when Will took her away she was still alive. I expect he let her feed on him. She’s probably almost gotten her strength back by now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Olivia groaned. “I had such high hopes for Will. I was sure he was one of us now. The shock of losing his father must’ve been too much for him.”

“Yeah. Whatever. You’d better get back to your meeting.”

“I’m so very sorry about all this, Jack. What a rotten series of events.”

“You can say that again.” We said our good-byes and I flipped the phone closed.

I snarled at Otis and it scared him so badly that his glamour completely disappeared. There he sat in his true faerie form, three feet tall and in that shimmering blue getup. His skin had an unnatural glow and his hair glittered like it was shot through with stars.

“I’m really, really sorry, Jack,” he said.

“Get a grip on yourself, you shiny little bastard. We’ve got to go get the Slayer back.”

We searched until it was almost sunup without finding any sign of the island. I made Otis promise to keep looking through the daylight hours and made sure he had plenty of cash on him for gasoline.

He apologized so many times I finally told him to shut up. Since it was closer than William’s mansion I went back to my old place next to Bonaventure Cemetery to spend the day. After a quick call to make sure the twins were all right, I laid on the couch.

In my mind I replayed all the trouble I’d caused everyone I loved—Connie, Seth, the twins, Melaphia, Renee, William. Of all the mistakes I’d made in the last few months, this latest just took the cake. I’d trusted an incompetent faerie with the lives of the woman I loved, my child, and my best friend—and now they all might be lost to me. The only positive was that inside of the next hundred years I was pretty sure that I’d be no more than a pile of dust. With my luck one of the bigger, badder vampires would have put the bite on me, and I would finally stop being a danger to those around me.

I must have dozed off, because at some point I heard a faraway tinkling sound and wondered why somebody didn’t make it stop. After a few moments I woke up enough to realize it was my cell phone. I fished it out of my pocket and saw that it wasn’t ringing. Connie’s phone, in my other pocket, was the one that was making that racket. My phone didn’t play “Another One Bites the Dust.”

By the time I’d figured that out, the ring tone had stopped. I flipped it open and pressed the button for the voice mailbox. Diana’s recorded voice startled me completely awake. “We have McShane surrounded. If you want to see him again, come to his warehouse home at sundown.”

Surrounded?
What the hell was happening? I could tell it was still daylight outside. Where were Diana and Will? If they were checking my usual haunts they would have seen my car parked outside and figured they had me trapped. Or if I’d been particularly careless in my distraction over Connie they might have followed me. Either way they would have had to find shelter from the sun shortly after they found me; I’d barely made it inside with my own hide intact. Which meant that they’d called Connie from somewhere close by after having glamourized someone at the cop shop to get her number. I had to get out of here as soon as the sun went down, and I had to be smart about it.

I called the garage, hoping Rennie had already opened up shop. He answered on the fifth ring. “Midnight Mechanics,” he announced.

“Rennie, listen close. I need you to drive the wrecker to my place at the storage warehouse. Bring the boys and tell them to arm themselves.”