Laws of the Blood 2: Partners Page 5

  Magic mattered, though, and murder. The woman who had died could have been a vampire. Char had felt her strength as she died and knew what a waste the woman’s murder was. It was a tragedy on several levels. For one, the poor woman would now never have any chance to explore all she could have been. For another there was a vampire out there who would never be able to take her as companion. The strigoi community was too tiny to sustain many losses like that. A predator population should remain small, but . . .

  Char shook her head. She was letting herself sink into the comfortable security blanket of layers and layers of facts and data and analyses when she should act!

  Act on what? Do what? Char ran her fingers though her hair and wondered just what she was supposed to do. A mortal had died. It had felt funny—wrong—evil.

  But had it felt like a vampire was involved? Had it been Daniel? Would even a young vampire kill someone so gifted? Wouldn’t instinct have prevented him from destroying one of his own kind? Vampires didn’t kill each other. They had mortals and Enforcers for that. But would an abused kid in need of sustenance recognize a potential companion when he didn’t yet have the ability to focus on one lover? Maybe he had good reason to hate vampires. Or maybe he had the gene or whatever it was that turned normal vampires into Nighthawks.

  Had Daniel just killed a mortal without permission? Never mind explanations of why. If Daniel had committed the murder, Char’s job was to deal with it. If it had been a mortal that had killed the mortal woman, well, she would like to deal with it if there was time, but finding Daniel came first.

  But what if what she had felt out in the storm was magic?

  It wasn’t an if, she just didn’t want to believe she’d gotten hit in the face with a really ugly conjuration the minute she arrived back in town. Not that it had been aimed at her . . .

  But maybe it had. She blinked at her reflection. “Don’t be paranoid,” Char said to the mirror. “No one knew you were coming.” Except Helene Bourbon. “I never told her I’d go to Seattle. I just said I’d look into it.”

  She finished toweling off and walked into the bedroom. She’d left her suitcase in the car and had no intention of going out to get it now that she was warm and dry. She’d slept naked in this house before, she thought with a bittersweet pang. Fortunately, neither the bed nor any of the bedroom furniture was the same. Jimmy had done quite a thorough job of redecorating. It crossed Char’s mind for the first time, as she settled into bed a few moments before dawn, that maybe the vampire who had made her had been as devastated by losing her to the Law as she had been.

  Or maybe he’d just been bored.

  Which was a hell of a depressing thought to fall asleep on.

  “Good morning.”

  “It damn well better not be morning,” Haven answered as he came out of the bathroom, voice rough with sleep, mood as bad as usual. Worse. “Hell of a dream,” he said and took the coffee Santini cautiously held toward him. Weak stuff made in the little coffeemaker that came with the room, but fresh and hot. Haven took a look at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was morning, all right, but edging close to noon.

  He’d turned off the light around three A.M., after having had one drink too many while reading more information on Danny boy and serial killers than he ever wanted to know. He’d been in prison, he’d heard talk, but crazy mass murderers were kept out of the general prison population. They didn’t stay out of his head when he closed his eyes last night, though. The details of the murders occurring in the Seattle area turned his hardened stomach and freaked his brain into a rare nightmare.

  The dream had been very real. He distinctly remembered hearing her voice, jumping out of bed, and running into the rain. He remembered standing on the sidewalk, a cold stream of water rushing over his bare feet, and staring up the empty street, knowing that she was up on a mountainside. She was calling to him, but she was already dead—dumped like a slab of meat—her soul torn in two, drained out of her, eaten. . . . Then he was there, in a clearing in the deep woods. He could smell the pine. The wet cold froze his bare skin. Then reality shifted again, and he was yanked backward, back to the sidewalk outside the hotel, then back into his bed. He sat up as she called out for help—to him. She looked him in the eyes from miles away and begged him for help. Her eyes were green. One moment they’d been alive with terror and impossible hope, looking into his. The next there’d been nothing in them, they’d been like bits of green glass.

  When he woke up, he knew he’d dreamed it all. The memory chilled him, tore at him, pulled him out of thoughts of his past and awareness of the present. He’d been asleep through the horror. He knew damn well he’d been asleep, that he’d seen the desperate woman in a dream, that there was nothing he could have actually done to help her. But he knew he’d failed her, all the same. He could still hear her screaming over the sound of thunder.

  He gulped down the coffee. Burned his mouth, too, and the stuff boiled relentlessly down into his empty stomach. It felt like he’d swallowed hot coals for a minute, but the agony finally got his head back into the real world.

  When he could breathe again, Haven threw the cup away, but Santini caught it before it hit the hotel room wall. “Want some more?” he asked, grinning.

  Santini had that manic look in his eyes all of a sudden. The one that told Haven he was bored and restless and ready for anything. They’d been cooped up in the cheap hotel near the airport for two days while Haven did some research. Once upon a time, he’d been the impulsive type. Sometimes he still went off like a madman. He felt like doing that now, after doing nothing but reading for hours on end. He wanted to find the woman in the dream—and he knew that was crazy.

  “Walls closing in?” he asked the biker.

  “Got a job for me?” Santini asked back, eager as a rabid hunting dog on a scent.

  “Known body count is six, four unidentified. Go find out who they were.”

  “Seattle’s got a big homeless population,” Santini said. He rubbed his bearded jaw. His grin widened. “Want me to go undercover?”

  Sometimes Haven wondered why they bothered talking at all; they always thought along the same lines. He answered with a brief nod.

  Santini started toward the door but turned back when he got there. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go hunting,” Haven answered. He didn’t try to explain that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything else until he found out about a woman who didn’t exist and a murder that hadn’t happened. “Up in the mountains,” he added. That was where the imaginary woman hadn’t died.

  “Which mountains?”

  Santini was right, the city was surrounded by a glut of mountain ranges; a good part of the state was vertical real estate. Haven shrugged. “I’ll know the place when I find it.”

  Santini looked at him strangely. Santini always looked at everybody strangely, but he didn’t say anything else before he left.

  Chapter 6

  “SORCERY,” CHAR SAID, tapping her fingertips on the painted iron railing. The word left a bad taste in her mouth that a sip of cream-laced SBC couldn’t wash out.

  She didn’t want to think about last night. She didn’t want to think at all, actually. In fact, she found being in this house surprisingly comforting. Melancholy, too, but the familiar street, view, shape of the rooms, didn’t conjure up quite as much bitter sorrow as they had last night.

  “Conjure,” she mumbled, and cradled the warm cup between her palms. “Rituals.”

  She’d found coffee in the freezer but had had to make a quick trip out for groceries before she could settle down to a late breakfast. After she’d eaten, she took her coffee mug with her out on the balcony to think. The night was clear, the view from the condo balcony as spectacular as she remembered, but the wind coming down from Canada had the bite of winter. The house seemed as much of a haven as it ever had.

  “Haven,” she said, and sighed. She particularly didn’t want to think about Jebel Haven. Which meant she needed
to concentrate on why she was in Seattle, and she had to consider that last night’s mortal sorcery might somehow be involved.

  “Would rather chalk that up to being a coincidence.” The coffee was stone cold, which led her to believe that she’d been mindlessly watching the view longer than she thought. What did she think this was, a vacation? She turned around and went back inside.

  She’d left her laptop on the kitchen table. She sat down and turned on the computer. That Char didn’t want to think about sorcery wasn’t unusual. Witchcraft was hard to look at straight on, difficult to confront. Magic was something that happened to vampires once, maybe twice in their lives. It was something they performed to change long-time lovers into strigoi. Not every vampire did that, and most of the ones who had children didn’t make them very often. Other than the rituals of change that continued the community, the strigoi sanely and sensibly left magic alone as much as possible. Last night, Char’d been caught in a blast of the stuff, and the immediate aftershock had made it far easier to consider.

  Now that her head was clear, Char would much rather brave the world armed with logic, technology, and her highly enhanced psychic abilities than deal with spells, potions, incantations, and all the other volatile and dangerous ways of harnessing energy.

  She wasn’t much for doing something as simplistic as turning on the television in search of local news. No, she checked the websites of the Seattle newspapers instead. She found no new missing person reports and no grisly tales of bodies drained of blood or victims having their hearts ripped out. She saw no lurid headlines about ritually slain fresh corpses, either. Not that she looked too hard for such evidence of magic. She was in town to find a missing baby vampire. Her supposition was that the young vampire was being used by a serial killer as a form of accomplice or even as a murder weapon. She had no trouble imagining a mortal madman getting off on watching an uncontrolled vampire attacking his victim. Infant nestlings were more interested in sex than anything else, but under really sick circumstances, the sex could go too far.

  Of course, the only evidence she had that Daniel was involved with a group of linked murders were the newspaper clippings a justifiably disgruntled but not necessarily rational mortal had sent to Helene Bourbon. That was no proof at all. Char knew she might have to talk to Della, but she wanted to look around on her own first. No use bringing a mortal into the mix if it wasn’t necessary. No matter what Della might have been once, her connection to the strigoi was now tenuous and dangerous.

  Technically, Char supposed, Della shouldn’t be allowed to live. Char also supposed that if she didn’t actually have to see Della, she wouldn’t have to make any Enforcer-type decisions about the woman. But where was she supposed to start an investigation without encountering Della?

  That brought her back to sorcery, of course, which she wanted to think about or deal with even less than she did with a widowed companion.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  What was the matter with her? Char shook her head violently as the computer screen faded in and out of focus. Sometime in the last few minutes she’d gone off-line and was now staring at the laptop’s screen saver. She stood up and pushed back the chair. She made a sharp gesture and began to pace from the kitchen, across the living room, out onto the balcony, and back again. She tried to wrap her thoughts around something that was obvious, but it slipped and slid and slithered away from her every time she got hold of it. She was not being lucid and logical, and she knew it.

  She wished she’d brought Lucien along with her. At least then she would have company. She could talk to herself and pretend she was talking to the cat. Even without Lucien to talk to, she stood in the center of the kitchen and asked, “Where do I start?”

  And, of course, her mind went back to the woman who’d been murdered last night. “But . . .”

  The death had not felt like it was connected to a vampire. She closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly what she’d perceived. An ugly death, terror laced with gloating satisfaction.

  Maybe the murderer was not mortal. Vampires could and easily did kill like that. Char didn’t have to approve of that sort of murder to acknowledge it was acceptable behavior under properly sanctioned circumstances. Only there were no sanctioned vampires in Seattle at the moment. She doubted any strig was brave enough to be in town, either. Or would dare to hunt on streets so recently cleaned by Istvan.

  “But I have no proof Daniel wasn’t involved.”

  Maybe the dead woman was her lead to Daniel. Maybe she should trust her instincts and go looking for her. There might be a trace of energy around the body that she could follow.

  “And then what do I do? Avenge her death?”

  It was none of her business, but Char couldn’t help but answer “Yes” to the question she’d asked herself.

  As long as her thoughts dwelled on the murdered woman, she had trouble thinking about Daniel. Maybe the two were connected, maybe not, but somehow the woman’s death preyed on her conscience more than looking for the lost kid did.

  “Besides, it’s a start,” she told herself. “Have to start being an Enforcer sometime, somewhere. This might as well be it.”

  How to go about it? Char stood in the living room and took a few deep breaths to calm down. Then she walked back out on the balcony and closed her eyes in order to let all her other senses roam free. When she opened them, she found that she’d turned away from the city.

  “That way.” She pointed. “In the mountains.”

  Haven followed his instincts. He followed a trail he couldn’t see and couldn’t question. If he thought, he’d lose the mental scent. He focused on remembering the dream, on seeing the woman’s green eyes, on hearing her scream for help. He followed the dream when he got into his Jeep Cherokee and drove.

  He didn’t try to make any sense out of what he was doing; he didn’t think at all, not for the first few hours, anyway. He’d gotten into this kind of weird trance state a few times before, hunting vampires by somehow sensing some kind of invisible something. He couldn’t explain it, certainly hadn’t tried to. Santini and Baker wouldn’t get it—or they’d suspect he’d gotten bitten and was turning into one of them. He hadn’t and he wasn’t, but he guessed the more you hunted the bastards, the more you became like them.

  Or it was more likely that he was out of his mind. He decided this as he pulled off a narrow gravel road halfway up a mountain. He was deep inside a state park, and it was the middle of the night. Haven killed the headlights and switched off the Jeep’s engine. He was tired, hungry, and nearly out of gas. Haven rubbed an aching spot on his forehead. He wanted to cynically ask himself what he thought he was doing and turn around and head back toward the city. Instead, he reached under the seat, pulled out his favorite sawed-off shotgun, and got out of the vehicle.

  Haven had done a lot of night work in the last few years, so his vision quickly adjusted to the thick forest darkness. It was foggy under the trees, but at least it wasn’t raining. It was cold this high up at this time of the year, but Haven was used to the way the high desert chilled down after the sun set. He took a black leather jacket out of the backseat and zipped it on. When he moved cautiously onto a hiking trail under the trees, he looked like no more than another shadow in the fog. He knew he wouldn’t be hidden from any vampire’s night vision, but he didn’t think any vampires were out in the forest tonight.

  •••

  There was a mortal in the woods. Char could smell him psychically and, frankly, she didn’t think he’d bathed recently. All human senses were enhanced by the change to strigoi, and Nighthawk senses were keener still. This was not always an advantage where smell was involved. She had been able to smell the body in the clearing from a mile away, for example.

  She stepped away from the body and took a few sniffs of the damp night air. Char detected leather and cotton as well as old sweat and the scent of liquor and cigarettes from the man coming toward her. The emotions she caught could best be described as conc
entrated curiosity, annoyance, disgust. He moved slowly and cautiously up the hiking trail. His caution gave her time to continue her investigation.

  Char hadn’t been around a lot of corpses. What was the point? She understood the need to hunt; it was the very core of vampire nature. There was pleasure in killing, but it wasn’t something you needed to do all the time. You ate what you killed, killed only when you had to, chose the prey carefully, and treated the whole process with a modicum of respect. That was the way it was supposed to work, anyway.

  She blamed modern media, the breakdown in society, and sheer childish irresponsibility for the way some vampires behaved, like undisciplined, spoiled kids who treated hunting mortals like it was a live-action role-playing game instead of sacrament and survival of the strigoi kind.

  Mortals were even more irresponsible when it came to dealing out death. What had this woman done that she deserved to die? How had she been chosen? By whom? Char supposed mortals killed more of each other because there were more of them. There were only a few thousand, maybe even only a few hundred, strigoi in the world and over six billion mortals. She didn’t know if it was the sheer number of people available to commit horrific crimes that made the mortals seem worse than strigoi or if most vampires were a better class of killer. Of course, Enforcers were much more effective than mortal law enforcement.

  And none of that had anything to do with her standing in a cold, foggy forest next to a dead body while sensing a mortal’s approach.

  She was thinking again. She should stop doing that so much and focus.

  Char knew the woman had been ritually slain before she saw the wounds, but was it a strigoi ritual? All she had time for now was to quickly memorize the body’s position, how the victim had been mutilated, whatever details Char could discern to help determine what sort of ritual had required the woman’s sacrifice. At the same time she tried to pick up any residue of the sort of energy a vampire would leave. Mostly what she discerned was a lack of energy. The woman had been mentally strong. She’d fought hard enough to psychically call for help, a call that Char had been unable to ignore even a night after the murder. But the woman’s murderer left no mental scent around the corpse.