Blood Bound (28 page)

I was so stupid.

She'd told me that she changed her routine and all I'd thought was how sad it was, because without her usual habits she'd probably fade quickly. I hadn't wondered
why
she'd changed her routine. Ghosts, pattern ghosts, just don't do that. Someone had told her to, she'd said—I couldn't remember who, just that it was a man's name. Her route wandered all over Kennewick. If the sorcerer was in Kennewick, she might have run into him.

Jesse looked up from the kitchen table as I ran down the stairs. “Mercy? Did you find out something.”

“Maybe,” I told her as I kept going to the door. “I have to find someone though.” I looked at my watch. Eight twenty-seven. I had an hour and a half before dark—if the sorcerer had to wait for full dark to awaken.

For most of the time that I'd lived in the Tri-Cities, Mrs. Hanna had pushed her grocery cart along the same path from dawn to dusk. I'd never actually followed her, but I'd seen her any number of places so I had a pretty good idea about most of her route. I didn't have any idea about how she'd changed it, so I had to look everywhere.

When I passed the first church, I pulled over to the side of the road and pulled out a notebook I kept in the car and wrote down the name of the church and its address. After an hour I had a list of eleven churches, reasonably near the KPD, none of which had flaming signs that said
SORCERER SLEEPING HERE
. The sun was noticeably low in the sky and my stomach was tight with dread.

If I was wrong that the reason Mrs. Hanna had to change her route was to avoid Littleton, then I'd wasted the last hour. If I was right, I was still running out of time.

I was also running out of places to look. I pulled over by Kennewick High and tried to think. If Mrs. Hanna hadn't changed her route it would be easier to find her. If she hadn't been dead it would have been easier yet. I was counting on being able to see her, but ghosts quite often manifest only to some senses: disembodied voices, cold spots, or just a whiff of perfume.

If I didn't find her soon it would be dark and I'd have to face Littleton during the height of his power—both as a demon and a vampire.

I stopped at the light on Garfield and Tenth. It was one of those lights that stayed red for a long time even when there was no oncoming traffic. “At least I wouldn't have to face Littleton alone after dark because I can call Andre.” I pounded my hands on the steering wheel, impatient with the red light. “But if I don't find Mrs. Hanna before night, I won't find her at all.” Mrs. Hanna went home at night.

I said it out loud because I couldn't believe how stupid I'd been. “Mrs. Hanna goes home at night.”

There was still no traffic coming so I put my foot down, and for the first time in my adult life I ran a red light. Mrs. Hanna had lived in a little trailer park along the river, just east of the Blue Bridge and it took me five minutes and three red lights to get down to that area. I ran those lights, too.

I found her pushing her cart on the sidewalk next to the VW dealership. Parking my car on the wrong side of the street, I jumped out, biting back the urge to shout her name. Startled ghosts tend to disappear.

With that in mind I didn't say anything at all when I caught up to her. Instead I walked along beside her for a quarter of a block.

“What a nice evening,” she said at last. “I do think we're due for a break in the weather.”

“I hope so.” I took two deep breaths. “Mrs. Hanna, pardon my rudeness, but I was wondering about that change in your usual walk.”

“Of course, dear,” she said absently. “How is that young man of yours?”

“That's the problem,” I told her. “I think that he's run into some trouble. Could you tell me again why you came by my shop at a different time?”

“Oh, yes. Very sad. Joe told me the way I usually walk wasn't safe. Our poor Kennewick is getting to be such a big city, isn't it? Terrible when it's not safe for a woman to walk in the daytime anymore.”

“Terrible,” I agreed. “Who is Joe and where is it he doesn't want you walking.”

She stopped her cart and smiled at me gently. “Oh, you know Joe, dear. He's been the janitor at the old Congregational church forever. He's very upset at what's happened to his building, but then who consults the janitor?”

“Where is it?” I asked.

She looked over at me with a puzzled look on her face. “Do I know you, dear? You look familiar.” Before I could form a suitable reply she glanced up at the setting sun, “I'm afraid I must be going. It's not safe after dark you know.”

She left me standing alone in front of the trailer court.

“Congregational church,” I said sprinting for my car. I knew that none of the churches I'd written down had the word Congregational in it, but I also had a phone book I kept in the car.

There were no listings for a Congregational church in the yellow pages so I turned to the white pages and found a single listing in Pasco, which was not helpful. Mrs. Hanna's route didn't take her across the river.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Gabriel's phone number. One of his little sisters had a thing about ghosts. If her mother wasn't there, and you let her get started, she'd tell ghost stories the whole time she worked cleaning the office.

“Hi, Mercy,” he answered. “What's up?”

“I need to talk to Rosalinda about some local ghost stories.” I told him. “Is she there?”

There was a little pause.

“Are you having trouble with ghosts?”

“No, I need to find one.”

He pulled his mouth away from the phone. “Rosalinda, come over here.”

“I'm watching TV, can't Tia do it? She hasn't done anything today.”

“It's not work. Mercy wants to pick your brains.”

There were a few small noises as Gabriel handed over the phone.

“Hello?” Her voice was much more hesitant when she was talking to me than it had been when she was talking to her brother.

“Didn't you tell me you did a report on local ghosts for school last year.”

“Yes,” she said with a little more enthusiasm. “I got an A.”

“I need to know if you've heard anything about the ghost of a janitor named Joe who used to work at a church.” He didn't have to be a ghost, I thought. After all, I talked to Mrs. Hanna, and I wasn't a ghost. And even if he was a ghost, that didn't mean there were stories about him.

“Oh, yes. Yes.” Gabriel didn't have an accent at all, but his sister's clear Spanish vowels added color to her voice as it brightened with enthusiasm. “Joe is very famous. He worked his whole life cleaning his church, until he was sixty-four, I think. One Sunday, when the priest…no they called him something else. Pastor, I think, or minister. Anyway when he came to open the church he found Joe dead in the kitchen. But he stayed there anyway. I talked to people who used to go to church there. They said that sometimes there were lights on at night when there was no one there. And doors would lock themselves. One person said they saw him on the stairway, but I'm not sure I believe that. That person just liked to tell stories.”

“Where is it?” I asked her.

“Oh. Not too far from our apartment,” she said. “Down on Second or Third, just a couple of blocks from Washington.” Not far from the police department either. “I went over to take pictures of it. It isn't a church anymore. The church people built a new building and sold the old one to another church about twenty years ago. Then it sold to some other people who tried to run a private school. They went bankrupt, there was a divorce, and one of them, I can't remember if it was the husband or the wife, killed themselves. The church was empty the last time I went by there.”

“Thank you, Rosalinda,” I said. “That's exactly what I needed to know.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked. “My mother says they are nonsense.”

“Perhaps they are,” I said, not wanting to contradict her mother. “But there are a lot of people who believe all sorts of nonsense. Take care.”

She laughed. “You too. Goodbye, Mercy.”

I hit the
END
button and looked at the darkening sky. There was one way to tell if the vampires were up. I pulled Andre's card out of my back pocket and called him.

“Hello, Mercy,” he answered. “What are we doing tonight?”

 

As soon as Andre answered the phone, I knew that my chance at finding the sorcerer in a daytime stupor was gone. I could wait until the next morning. Then we could go after him with Bran. Bran was, in my mind, exempt from the effects of the demon. I just couldn't imagine the thing that could break his icy calmness.

But if we waited for help, waited for the morning, I was almost certain that both Adam and Samuel would be dead.

“I know where he is,” I told Andre. “Meet me at my shop.”

“Marvelous. I will be there as soon as I can,” he said. “I have some preparations to do first, but I won't be long.”

I drove there to wait for him. I called Bran's cell phone and got a voice mail request. I took it as a sign that he would be too late to help. I told him to look in the safe in my shop and gave him the combination. Then I sat down at the computer and typed out everything pertinent about what I was doing and where I was going. I wasn't going to leave everyone wondering what happened to me the way everyone else who had gone after Littleton had.

When I finished, Andre still wasn't there, so I checked my home e-mail. My mother had sent me two e-mails, but the third was from an unfamiliar address with attached files. I was about to delete it when I saw that the subject line read
CORY LITTLETON
.

Beckworth, true to his word, had gotten information about Littleton for me. His e-mail was short and to the point.

There were four pdf files and a couple of jpgs. I opened the jpgs. The first picture was a full color shot of Littleton standing on the corner of a city street. On the bottom right-hand corner the photo was date-stamped April of last year.

He was a good forty pounds heavier than when I'd last seen him. There was no way to be certain, but something about the way he was standing made me believe that he'd been human then.

I opened up the second picture. Littleton in a nightclub talking to another man. Littleton's face was animated, as I'd never seen it in real life. The man he was talking to was turned so all I could see was his profile. But that was enough: it was Andre.

 

Andre pulled up just as I finished printing out a second letter to Bran. I tossed it into the safe, grabbed Zee's vampire-slaying backpack and went out to meet my fate.

 

Andre drove us out of my parking lot in his black BMW Z8. It suited him in the same way that Stefan's version of the Mystery Machine had suited him. It surprised me a little because Andre had never impressed me as elegant and powerful. I gave him a quick look under my lashes and realized that tonight he was both, reminding me that he was one of the six most powerful vampires in the seethe.

He'd turned a sorcerer into a vampire so that he could be the most powerful. And I was betting my life that he had lost control of the sorcerer the night Stefan and I met Littleton.

Andre was something of an enigma to me, so I was trusting Stefan's judgement, and the judgement of Stefan's menagerie that he was loyal to Marsilia and jealous of Stefan.

Daniel had been a trial, to see what Littleton could do against a new-made vampire. If matters had not worked out well, Andre could have dealt with it—Daniel was his, after all. But Littleton had proven himself, so Andre had set him up against Stefan. But if Andre were still Marsilia's man, then he would not have condoned the bloodbath at the hotel. It was too likely to have drawn attention to the vampire. But the one thing that made me believe that Littleton was not following orders that night was that Stefan survived. Andre, I thought, would have killed Stefan. Not because of Marsilia's affection—but because Stefan was always, so clearly, the better man.

So I got in a car with the vampire who'd created Littleton because I believed he wanted the sorcerer as much as I did—he couldn't afford for Littleton to continue to run free, making more and more trouble for him. And I got in that car because I knew that Andre was my only chance to keep Adam and Samuel alive.

“A church is holy ground,” Andre informed me when I told him where we were going. “He can't be in a church: he's a vampire.”

I rubbed my face, ignored the little voice that kept repeating “we have to find them,” and tried to think. I was so tired. I'd been up, I realized, for over forty hours without sleep.

“Okay,” I said. “I remember hearing vampires can't stand on holy ground.” Slipped in among a dozen things that weren't true—say, for instance, the one about vampires crossing water. “But if Littleton was staying in a church, how could you explain it?”

He turned onto Third and slowed way down so we could look for likely buildings. Gabriel's sister hadn't told me which side of Washington the church was on. Since my shop was east of there, that's where we started. I pressed several buttons and finally got my window to roll down so I could sniff the air.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe the demon changes the rules, but they're not supposed to be able to abide holy ground either. Or, the church could have been desecrated.”