“There are three dead vampires on my floor, and you are making out?”
Energy darted between us, and breathless, I pulled back, the sound of our lips parting sparking through me. Trent’s eyes smoldered. I held their heat, tasting him on my lips. It wasn’t the vampire pheromones in here. It was three months of saying no.
“Relax,” I said to her, never dropping Trent’s gaze. My heart was pounding, and I still didn’t care about tomorrow. “Only one of them is dead, and I think she’s going to make it. You probably won’t even have any jail time.”
“Jail time! They tried to blood rape me!”
“Like I said. No jail time.”
Trent was still silent, but he was smiling at the sound of boots and the flash of cop lights on the front sidewalk. The woman made a tiny sound and ran to unlock the door. We slowly parted, his hand slipping from me in a sensation of tingles. My smile faded as I looked at his hand and realized I’d never hold it again.
That hadn’t been our first kiss, but it had been our last.
Six
And there are no indications it will be any better tonight,” Edden said, his hand smacking the podium with a loud pop.
My head snapped up at the sharp sound, but not before my chin slipped off my palm and I did a classic head bob. Jerked awake, I looked over the FIB’s shift change meeting to see if anyone had noticed. The dream of purple, angry eyes and spinning wheels lingered, and I thought I could still hear the sound of wings beating upon me in punishment.
Sheepish, I resettled myself. I wasn’t surprised I’d nodded off, having come in early to the FIB to first fill out a report about the bar incident and, second, to get my car out of impound. Sleep had been a few hours on the couch, fitful and not enough of it. Coffee had lost its punch, and a vending machine no-doze charm wasn’t going to happen. Those things could kill you, especially now, maybe. It was starting to become really clear what might be going on, and even though there were more questions than answers, it didn’t look good.
Edden was up front between a podium and a big map hanging from the dry erase board. The city was cordoned off like one of Ivy’s maps, little red stickers showing vampire crimes, blue ones the misfired charms. There was an obvious pattern to the misfired charms, but the vampire crimes were widespread within the confines of Cincy and the Hollows, with no recognizable linkage to the sporadic waves other than they seemed to start at the same time.
Edden was hiding a smirk, clearly having caught my head bob, but his voice never faltered. There were rows of officers between me and him, and you could tell which officers were going off shift by the fatigue.
“I need some coffee,” I whispered to Jenks, tickling the roof of my mouth with my tongue to try to wake up.
“Yeah, me too,” he said, rising up with an odd blue dust. “You know what they say. You can tell a human by how many meetings he has. I’ll be back. I gotta get me some of that honey.”
“Honey!” I whispered, but he was gone, flying right down the center aisle and turning heads as he went for the coffee urn set to the side at the front of the room. Oh God, he was going to get drunk, right when I was trying to show them all how professional I was.
“We’re all pulling the occasional double shift until we’re sure this is over,” Edden said as Jenks saluted him and landed by the little packets of honey there for the tea drinkers.
“Captain,” one of the more round officers complained as a general air of discontent rose.
“No exceptions, and don’t trade with anyone,” Edden said, then hesitated as Jenks stabbed a honey packet with his sword, his dust shifting to a brilliant white when he pulled a pair of chopsticks from a back pocket and started eating. “Rose is doing the schedule so no one gets two nights in a row. I say again—no trading.”
The officers not griping were watching Jenks, and the pixy looked up, his chopsticks lifted high over his head as the honey dribbled into him. “What?” he said, his dust cutting off in a reddish haze. “You never seen a pixy before? Listen to Edden. I’m eating here.”
Edden cleared his throat and stepped from the podium. “As for our last item, I know it was a rough night, but before you go, I’d like those of you who dealt with something . . . ah, of an Inderland nature to share what you did and how it worked for those coming on shift.”
“Inderland nature,” an older cop with a raspy voice and belligerent attitude complained. “I was almost eaten last night.”
Snickering, Jenks dribbled more honey into his mouth, but I didn’t see anything funny. Whether he knew it or not, the craggy officer probably wasn’t exaggerating.
“I didn’t see you complaining at the time,” said the cop next to him, and the first officer turned to stare him down.
“Callahan!” Edden said, shouting over the sudden ribbing. “Since you volunteered. Let’s hear what happened on your Inderlander encounter and how you dealt with it.”
“Well, sir, I believe the woman bewitched me,” he said slowly. “My partner and I were responding to a misfired charm up by the zoo when we spotted two suspects outside a window, trying to break in. I politely asked them if they had lost their keys. They ran; we followed. One got away. When I tried to apprehend the other, she got all . . . sexy like.”
Hoots and whistles rose, and Jenks, deep into his honey drunk, gyrated wildly.
“Eyes black and coming on to me like one of those legalized prostitutes down in the Hollows,” he continued. “It was enough to embarrass a man.”
Jenks almost spun right off the table and I hid my eyes, mortified.
“I don’t see an arrest,” Edden said as he leafed through a clipboard.
“You get yourself some vampire ass, Callahan?” someone shouted, and the man cracked an almost-not-there grin.
“When I turned around, she was gone,” Callahan said.
A woman made a long “awwww,” and I smiled. They had a good group. I missed that.
“She wasn’t going to bang you, she was going to smack you into next week,” I said, and Edden hid a cough behind rubbing his mustache. “That is, if you were lucky.”
Callahan turned in his chair to give me an irritated look. “And you would know how?”
I shrugged, glad everyone was looking at me and not Jenks making a wobbly flight to the podium. “Because when a vampire gets sexy, they’re either hungry or mad. Cornering her was a mistake. You’re lucky. You must have left her an out. She was smart and took it.”
They were silent. Slowly the tension rose. But I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut if a little information might keep someone out of the hospital.
“Everyone, if you don’t recognize her, this is Rachel Morgan,” Edden said, and I could breathe again when they turned away. “I asked her to come in and give us some ideas on how to handle the issues falling to us right now as the I.S. takes care of an internal problem.”
There was a rising muttered complaint, and Edden held up a hand, then scrambled to catch Jenks as he slipped backward down the slanted podium. “Morgan is a former I.S. runner, and if she says you’re lucky, Callahan, you’re lucky. Rachel, what should he have done?”
I sat up, glad I’d pulled something professional from my closet today. “Not follow.”
They all protested, and my eyes squinted. You can lead a troll to water . . .
“She’s right!” Jenks shrilled, cutting off most of the grousing. “The woman is right! Righter than . . . a pixy in a garden.” He belched, wings moving madly as he tilted to the side.
I wondered if I should stand, then decided to stay where I was. “If you don’t have the skills or strength to back up your badge—and I’m sorry, but your weapons won’t do it—it’s best to just let them go. Unless they’re threatening someone, that is. Then you’re going to have to work hard to distract them until they remember the law can put them in a cage.”
Damn, even the women cops were looking at me like I was a hypocrite. “I don’t care if you don’t like it,” I said. “One vampire is enough to clear this entire room if he or she is angry enough. The master vampires will bring them in line.”
“But they aren’t,” said a woman who had clearly, judging by her bedraggled appearance, come in off the night shift. Around her, others nodded. “No one has been able to contact an undead vampire within the Cincinnati or Hollows area since yesterday afternoon.”
Surprised, I looked at Edden, becoming uneasy when he nodded. “How come this is the first I’m hearing about it?” I said, suddenly very awake. If the master vampires were incommunicado, that’d explain the increase in living-vampire crimes. For all the loving abuse the masters heaped upon their children, they did keep the bad ones in line when no one else could.
Edden straightened from his concerned hunch over Jenks. “Because we agree with the I.S. that it would cause a panic. The masters aren’t dead, they’re sleeping, and so far, it’s confined to the Cincy and Hollows area. The I.S. tried bringing in a temporary master vampire from out of state to handle things yesterday, and she fell asleep within five hours.”
I bit my lip, processing it. All the undead sleeping? No wonder the I.S. was down.
“Which brings me back to you, Rachel,” he said, and my head snapped up. “I originally asked you here to give us options for dealing with aggressive Inderlanders, but I think we’ve gone beyond that. What’s your Inderland take on the situation? Are the misfired charms and the sleeping undead vampires linked?”
Silence descended as everyone looked at me. That they were linked was obvious. The real question should be, was any of this intentional or simply a natural phenomenon, and if deliberate, was the goal to put the masters out of commission, create havoc with misfired charms, or both? If someone was creating the wave, it could be stopped. If it was a natural effect, it was going to be up to me—seeing as the wave was coming from my line.
Nervous, I picked up my shoulder bag and got to my feet. Jenks saw me coming, trying to sit up as his one wing refused to function, swearwords falling from him as his heels flipped up and he toppled backward down the podium. “Upsy-daisy,” Edden said as he caught him slipping off the edge, and Jenks giggled, his high voice clear in the dead air.
“Why would she help us? She’s a demon,” someone muttered, and Edden frowned.
“Because she’s a good demon, Frank,” he said, voice iron hard as he held Jenks gently in his cupped hand. Giving Edden a wry smile, I held my bag open and he dropped Jenks inside.
“Hey!” the pixy protested, and then, “Tink’s little pink dildo, Rache! Haven’t you gotten rid of those condoms yet? They got a shelf life, you know.”
I flushed, handing the bag to Edden as I turned. That awful map was behind me, and I shifted until I wasn’t behind the podium, not liking the feeling of separation I got behind it. “That the waves, the sleeping undead, and the vampire violence are linked is obvious,” I said, half turning to glance at the map. “I don’t know how to stop the waves, but until we figure it out, there are a few things that can be done to minimize the damage from the superpowered waves.”
“Superpowered?” someone in the back questioned, and I nodded.
“According to, ah, a reliable source, the misfires are actually an overexpression of what the charm is supposed to do, so a charm intended to clean grease removes the fat not just from the counter but from the person who invoked it. Fortunately, the waves appear to impact only charms invoked right when the wave is passing over them. Those already running aren’t affected.”
Most of them were staring at me in bewilderment. It was frustrating. Another witch would know exactly what I was talking about, and I wondered how charismatic Edden’s public relations person was. This was going to go down hard in the Inderland community. “You might want to work with the I.S. and get an early warning detector out to Loveland where the waves are originating. If you tell people not to invoke any magic ahead of a wave, that will probably minimize or eliminate probably ninety percent of the magic misfires.”
“What about the vampires?”
Good question. “Which brings me to the vampires. It’s a good bet that the increase in crime is simply a combination of the heightened fear brought on by the misfires and the masters being asleep and unable to curtail it. Take out one of the three legs, and the stool will fall. If you wake the undead up, the violence will stop. Curtail or eliminate the misfires, and the violence will probably diminish. Fear is a trigger to bloodlust, and the fewer misfires, the less fear there will be to trigger a twitchy vampire.”
Again silence fell, but it was the quiet of thinking. “So who’s making the waves?” someone asked.
Good question number two. “I’d guess someone who would benefit from the chaos. Someone trying to hide a crime? Or a firm specializing in disaster recovery?”
Or a demon, I thought, thinking this was just the thing to amuse a bored sadist. Newt, though, had seemed genuinely concerned. Damn it to the Turn and back, I didn’t have enough clout to work another deal with the demons. I’d barely survived the last one.
Edden rubbed his face, starting at the feel of his bristles, and I wondered how long he’d been here. The officers, too, were getting fidgety, and it felt as if I should wrap this up.
“In the meantime, it might be a good idea to block off access to some of the smaller parks to minimize large gatherings. Or better yet, Edden, have you given any thought to installing a curfew? Blame it on the magic misfire, not the vampires.”
