Darkness Returns (9 page)

“Won’t do you any good hiding your sweat smell from me. But if you ever plan on getting back onto the dating scene, it couldn’t hurt.”

She said it, and they both reacted the same way, as if she’d accidently cursed in the middle of Holy Communion. Her face pinched. Lockman felt his own pinch down in his chest. He knew Jessie was thinking about the same person he was.

Kate.

The best way to move past an emotionally awkward situation was to become the professional. “We’re wasting time. What’s in the bucket?”

Jessie crept over to it. “You know, it could just be paint. We—” Her lips peeled back as she peered into the bucket. Her fangs glistened with saliva. A faint hiss came from the back of her throat. A red glow flared in her eyes.

“What is it?”

“A head.”

“A what?” he asked, though he’d heard her fine.

“A fucking severed head.” She backed away. The expression playing over her face was hard to read. Disgust? Hunger? A little of both? She smacked a hand over her mouth and turned away. What she said next was muffled by her fingers, but Lockman understood anyway. “What is wrong with me?”

A severed head, with some blood, would naturally trigger the same reaction in a vampire as a slice of cheesecake on a plate would some mortals. But a vampire with a soul, still burdened with a mortal conscience, would see more than desert…she would still see the life that might have once belonged to the head.

Lockman crossed the room to Jessie and put a hand on her back. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay.” She shrugged away from his touch. “What the hell would Teresa be doing with a person’s head in a bucket?”

He glanced back at the bucket as if he could read some logic from the dried stains on the white sides. When that didn’t reveal anything, he forced himself over to take his own look inside. About three inches of congealing blood sat at the bottom of the bucket. The head itself was tipped, scalp down, against the bucket’s side, hair soaking in the blood, the clean-cut stump in full view like 3-D anatomy lesson. Hard to tell for sure, but it looked like a woman’s head.

Had Teresa done this?

He crouched for a closer look, hoping to find some sign that the head belonged to a vamp. Instead, he found a familiar tattoo, in miniature, stamped on the back of the neck. The eagle with the American flag clutched in its talons. None of the signs on the skin that this had been a vamp prior to beheading.

Why would Teresa go about chopping the head off one of her hired vigilantes and leaving it in a bucket in the middle of an empty room. This didn’t make any sense.

A noise drew his attention out of his thoughts. A scuffling, like bare feet against the dusty hardwood. He straightened and looked at Jessie.

She nodded that she had heard it too. “The closet.”

The closet door was set in one corner of the room on the opposite side of the bucket from where they stood, close to where the map hung. Lockman raised his weapon and approached.

The sound came again. Soft. Furtive even.

Somebody hiding in there?

If so, it wasn’t Teresa. She wasn’t the type to hide in closets. Not unless she meant to ambush them, which she would have done by now.

Lockman felt Jessie move up beside him before he reached the closet. She put a hand on one of his outstretched arms. “Let me.”

He started to protest on instinct. Jessie pressed a finger to her lips and shook her head. He conceded with a nod and held his position, barrel lined up with the closet door.

Jessie moved ahead. At the door, she pressed a hand against the surface as if she could feel the presence on the other side through the wood. As tricky as her mojo was, maybe she could. When she took another long breath into her nose, she visibly shuddered. “This is it. What I smelled when we came in.”

That surprised Lockman, that she could pick up something beyond the blood in the bucket. But if all she had smelled was blood, she probably would have recognized it sooner. “Still any idea what?”

She shook her head. “I feel like I should know. It’s so…familiar. But I can’t place it.”

“Not C4, though?”

That won him an eye roll and headshake. She took the knob. “Ready?”

In answer, Lockman thumbed back the hammer on his pistol.

Jessie swung the door open and it was like opening a lion cage. The sudden snarls and growling exploded into the room as if someone had flicked on a horror film on the TV with the volume already cranked to max. Lockman tried to take aim at whatever was inside making all that noise, but Jessie stood in the way, rigid, arms locked to her sides, gaze frozen to what she saw in the closet’s shadows.

“Jess, what is it?”

Gray, flaking hands came out of the dark and wrapped around his daughter’s throat. Jessie started to shout, but the hands’ grip cut her voice short. Her own hands went to the fish-belly flesh colored wrists connected to the hands that choked her, but either shock kept her too weak to pull them off or the thing that had her was too strong.

Along with the animalistic sounds coming from the closet, Lockman heard a metallic clinking and realized it was the sound of rattling chains. He hurried forward, never lowering his weapon, and sidled up to Jessie. Closer, and with the light from the single bulb on the ceiling, he could see the gray face with the black veins poking out of the shadows. He could also see the shirtless male vamp’s shrunken chest, the skin so taut against its ribs it looked ready to tear down the middle. A pair of dirty jeans hung around the vamp’s ankles as if they had fallen there after the vamp became so emaciated, but it had never bothered to step out of them. The silver band around its neck looked as loose as the belt that used to loop its waist, and if it tilted its head just right, might slip off as easily. The only thing keeping the vamp from flying out of the closest was the silver chain attached to the silver collar and locked to some exposed plumbing in the back wall. Each time the monster tried to jerk forward, the silver collar sizzled against its shriveled neck skin. Its obvious starvation, however, made it oblivious to this pain.

Add the smell of the bucket’s contents to the air, and this vamp was as likely to rip its own head loose to get at Jessie as it was to snap the chain. Never mind that once it actually sank fangs into Jessie, it would discover her inedible. While they all bled, vamps could not feed on other vamps. Then it would turn its attention to Lockman.

He never gave it the chance to do any of those things. Pushing around Jessie, Lockman fired four times into the vamp’s face. What the .45 rounds did not decimate, their silver jackets turned into bubbling slop. Only a jagged shell of skull and melting brains remained as the vamp released Jessie’s neck and dropped to the closet floor. The mangled leftovers of its head slipped clean through the collar on the way down.

In the closet’s confined space, the stink of cooking vamp flesh grew overpowering, forcing Lockman to cover his nose and mouth in the crook of an elbow and back away from the closet.

Jessie stood right where she had from the start.

From behind her, Lockman could see her whole body trembling as if she stood in blizzard without a coat—and didn’t have a vamp’s deadened sensitivity to temperature. He holstered his weapon. “Jess?”

She didn’t turn. Didn’t speak.

“Are you hurt?”

She slowly shook her head. When she finally turned around, tears glazed her gray cheeks. “That could be me.”

“No.”

She pointed to the bucket. “That makes me hungry.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder at the closet. “That was put out here to make him…voracious.” Her eyes flicked down to the bucket, then back to Lockman. “She set this up, didn’t she?”

Lockman nodded. “Probably meant for any other of Renee’s goons as a warning not to follow her around.” Smart, too. Vamps were strongest right after they fed. But a starving vamp made for a close second.

“Do you think she killed…” She tilted her head toward the bucket.

“I don’t know what to think about Teresa anymore. She’s not the same woman anymore.”

“Are any of us them same?”

The straight answer was
no
, but he didn’t give it. Jessie knew even better than he did that there was no going back for any of them. “We have to focus on who we are now. And who we want to be.”

“Is that fatherly advice?”

“It’s the best I’ve got.” He moved his head to make sure she looked him in the eyes. “That is not you. That vamp didn’t have a soul. You do.”

She smiled wanly. “Take it from me, Dad. Souls are fragile things.”

“She’s in the wind,” Lockman said into the phone as he and Jessie made their way back to the cafe with the interdimensional doorway that would take them back to headquarters. “The best lead we had was a dead end.”

No pun intended.

Kress didn’t come back for a couple seconds, just the sound of his breath like faint static through the phone. Then he groaned. “Pretty sick setup she left there.”

“You still doubt she’s a threat?”

“Bring Jessie back, ASAP. We’ll have to go into lockdown.”

“Meaning?”

“Just get her back here.” Kress disconnected.

Jessie raised her eyebrows as they both strode down Bourbon Street. St. Louis’s bells chimed, the sound echoing in the night, the sound somehow lonely to Lockman’s ears.

“He says we’re going into lockdown.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“Sounds reactive. I prefer proactive.”

She smirked. “Yes you do.”

Chapter Ten

Romeo Kress thumbed the OFF button on his phone and tossed it across his penthouse living room. The phone collided with a golden bust of some fat old actor—one of those lesser awards, like the People’s Choice, that meant little more than a temporary ego boost for the winner; certainly nothing like an Academy award, which he should have won a long time ago—and the phone exploded into pieces. The bits of plastic ticked and clicked onto the floor.

Kress felt his face swell with blood. His fingers curled into fists and he watched himself pound his thighs as if those fists belonged to someone else. They might as well have. He had no control.

His throat filled with bile and burned. His teeth felt ready to crack from grinding them so hard.

He tried to remember the techniques his counselor—at two hundred dollar per fifteen minutes—taught him. Deep breathing through the nose. Calming thoughts. Accept the emotion, don’t try to push it away. These things crumbled before he could initiate them. His breathing came out in heavy, frantic puffs, like a smoker after a couple flights of stairs. Calming thoughts? The only thing he could think of was some stupid rogue agent slaughtering vamps and mortals alike in a revenge fantasy gone wrong, become an unnecessary thorn in an already thorny endeavor.

On the heels of this though, his rage turned.

Tears filled his eyes.

No, no, no. I won’t do this.

He stood up from his couch and turned a circle, taking in his surrounds. His Grand piano. His shelves of collectibles—all the toys from his boyhood era that he could never afford to have at the time. His award statues. Even if none of them were from the Academy, some of them, like the three from the Actors Guild, were legitimate celebrations of his talent.

But my talent is a lie.

He wept. Tears and snot ran down his face in an uncontrollable torrent. The emptiness inside of him could consume the planet if it somehow broke loose. Even the view of the rolling plains and the purple mountained horizon out the glass wall of one whole side of his living room could not quell the depression coiling through him.

His thoughts skittered like roaches in the middle of a kitchen when the light flicks on. Often the thoughts brought up pictures of himself with a noose around his neck, or a gun to his head, or the toes of his Ferragamoes sticking out over the edge of the roof with ground twenty stories below framed between them.

He didn’t want to live. He didn’t have the right to live.

He even made a move toward his bedroom where he had left his .45 loaded on the nightstand. But his emotions turned again.

He dropped to his knees and laughed. What a fool to think he wanted to die. A man with so much. Rich, famous, and with a power no one else on this plane possessed as far as he knew.

There is no one else like me.

I am alone.

Alone.

An anomaly.

Tears streamed down his face and curled into his laughing mouth, depositing their salty taste.

When the episode finally passed, Kress found himself curled into a ball on the hard floor. Its cool surface pressed against his hot cheek. His body felt as though he’d been dropped from a great height, but he’d been made of rubber so he’d spent the last hour bouncing before finally coming to rest.

He thought of the trick he’d played with Lockman, jerking the gruff agent’s emotions around. Whatever Lockman felt then, Kress would have gladly suffered. That’s how these episodes had started, in fact. A short, though agonizing, tour of feeling. But they had grown so much worse. Eventually, one of these episodes would kill him. Either the suicidal depression would finally drive him to act on the urges, or the outrageous giddiness and overwhelming anger would send him into cardiac arrest.