Laws of the Blood 2: Partners (6 page)

The car pulled into the three-stall parking lot behind the old mansion that had been subdivided into a trio of condominiums without her feeling like she had any control over where the machine went. It was like it knew its way home even after so many years.

Char turned off the engine and wiped her eyes. She knew she would not let herself cry anymore. She would run in out of the rain, go into the place that no longer had Jimmy’s magic attached to it, and she would unpack.

“There’s no magic here,” she said. “Just a job.”

After a good day’s sleep, she would start looking for Daniel. How hard could it be to sense the presence of a vampire in a town where no vampires were supposed to live?

She got out of the car and looked down the hillside and up at the building, letting the rain and fierce wind pour and pound over her. She glanced up at the storm-split sky. Lots of lightning tonight.

The cold and the wet and the lightning didn’t bother her. The weather was a strong, powerful thing, but it was natural and right. The storm was a part of the city. The magic all around, though . . .

She’d been wrong about there not being any magic.

Char felt the dark surge of it beneath the power of the storm. Not Jimmy’s kind of magic, oh no. Evil. Dark. Vicious and barely controlled. Someone somewhere was conjuring, preparing to channel—

Char stepped out into the center of the alley behind the building. There was a low fence on one side of the alley overlooking a hillside garden. She looked over the fence and down toward the center of the city. It was so very dark in the heart of town. She was cold, but not from the weather. Her nerves strung out tautly, her mind and heart ached, but not with her own old, well-known pain. A new sorrow filled Char, and a fear that was beyond bearing but not her own rose to a pitch that nearly made her scream.

She tried to tell herself that what she experienced was the residue of recent events in Seattle. That she was feeling the deaths of the strigoi Istvan had executed. But
Char knew what she sensed had nothing to do with her own kind. Or so she hoped, prayed. She hugged herself close and couldn’t help but mutter an old prayer learned in mortal childhood.

It didn’t comfort her one little bit when the fear and agony rose up all around, exploded through her, and crashed down like all the water in Elliot Bay coming down like a tidal wave.

Char clutched at the fence to keep from falling, but her hands slipped, and she went to her knees. It was not the blinding flash of nearby lightning or the crack of thunder immediately overhead that sent the worst shock through her. It was the sound of the woman crying out, “Help me!” as she died that sent Char over the edge into darkness, falling face first into the icy stream of water running down the alley.

“
M
Y MOTHER ALWAYS
said I’d end up in the gutter,” Char said when she came back to her senses and found herself lying on the ground in a freezing stream of water. Her mother had never actually said any such thing, but a quip seemed the appropriate way to distance herself from the situation.

She sat up, soaking wet and shivering, pushed hair out of her face, then wiped water out of her eyes. She pulled herself to her feet. Char had to hold onto the fence for a while to get under enough control so that she could make her way up the back stairs and into the building.

She was so shaken that she barely noticed her surroundings once she entered the third-floor condo. The place smelled of dust and felt unused, and the psychic emptiness was fine with her. What was important was that there were towels and soap in the linen closet and plenty of hot water gushed out of the showerhead when she turned it on. She stripped out of her wet clothes as quickly as she could and stepped into the shower. She was so glad to feel hot water running over her chilled
body that she almost forgot feeling the woman’s death for a few minutes. Almost.

She had killed mortals, of course, several times and without any qualms. She was no angel; she was a vampire. She had killed a vampire once as well and had taken pleasure in the act, though she’d been quite disturbed about it later. She had the slim consolation of knowing that each death she’d brought about had been deserved. The mortals had preyed on other mortals. She had served all of humanity by ridding the world of them. The vampire’s death had been decreed necessary by the Council, and killing him had completed Char’s transformation into a Nighthawk. The world needed Nighthawks—Enforcers—to keep the strigoi and mortal worlds safe and separate. Each of those deaths had been accompanied by magic. Vampires and Enforcers were made by magic. Spells had to be cast as well as blood exchanged. She preferred to think of the process that was called magic as an advanced method of energy manipulation, but however you defined it, magic was all about power. You had to get energy from somewhere in order to manipulate reality. A human mind gave off a lot of energy, especially when experiencing strong emotions. Terror, and the release of death, were very powerful sources of energy. Char knew this in theory and in practice, and she preferred theory.

The death she’d felt earlier tonight had not been theoretical, and it had been accompanied by ritual magic.

“Maybe.” Char shuddered with the memory but held onto a shred of hope that she’d mistaken what she’d
sensed. It was possible; she was out of practice and out of touch. The death had been real. The woman who had died had been psychic enough to shout for help. And asking for help at every level with every conscious and unconscious resource at your command was a logical way of reacting at the instant of death.

“The woman was murdered.” Char shuddered again and shut off the tap at the exact instant that the hot water ran out. That wasn’t any magical talent, she told herself as she grabbed a towel. She’d used this bathroom every day for several years, and old habits were hard to forget.

“Murdered,” she said again and looked in the mirror.

She had a reflection, of course. Sometimes she thought it would fade, but that was on the days she was feeling particularly like a nonentity, particularly sorry for herself. It had nothing to do with her being a vampire. A great deal of the bad publicity that stigmatized her kind could be traced to other magic-using entities, but
vampire
was a catchy, sexy term that people remembered. You could hang just about any evil and ridiculous behavior pattern on vampires. True, there were some entities that couldn’t cross running water, some that reacted badly to all forms of alum. There were all sorts of behaviors, all of them restrictions that came about due to the type of magic that had created the entity. Vampires took the rap for all of them. Fortunately, no one
really
believed in vampires—strigoi spent a great deal of time and money seeing to it—so it didn’t really matter.

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.