Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (2 page)

“I understand your confusion,” he says. His voice is strong, deep, confident, not the voice of a young man at all. I have a good ear for accents and I’m trained to identify over a hundred regional differences, but his escapes me.

“Actually,” he continues, “you’re not supposed to be fully cognizant yet. I don’t suppose I can convince you you’re still dreaming?”

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“Only if you turn into my father and tell me you’re disappointed in my grades.” I halfexpect exactly that to happen, but Cassius only smiles. It’s a boyish, engaging smile, and I bet it makes the sorority girls go all weak and giggly. I seriously consider putting a big hole in it.

“No, I didn’t think so. All right, let’s take this one step at a time. How do you think you got here?”

“Where I come from, the one with the gun asks the questions,” I snap. “Where’s your partner?” The undertaker is nowhere in sight.

“You probably mean the . . . one who brought you here. He’s at another location; I elected to be the one to officially greet you, but I was told you’d be in a more receptive state.”

I’m getting it now. “Okay. So someone drugged me at the party, I was scooped from my apartment, and you expected a little more drool and a lot less firepower. Are we up to speed?”

“Getting there.” His smile widens, going from gee-aren’t-I-cute to something approaching genuine amusement. “Keep going—I want to see where you end up.”

“You’re a government spook,” I say flatly. “The Bureau doesn’t play games like this. CIA, NSA, one of the black-ops outfits that doesn’t show up in the budget. You drugged me, hauled me out here . . .”

I stop. He waits.

“Oh, crap,” I say. “My gun isn’t loaded, is it?”

“See for yourself.”

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I do. All six chambers are full. I snap the cylinder back into place and look up, more confused than ever—and starting to be scared. Scenarios involving me being turned into a brainwashed assassin start to percolate in my brain. I level the gun at him again and say, “Full explanation. Now.” I’m close to convincing myself he’ll say Kumquat, and I’ll turn into a glassy-eyed zombie.

“You haven’t been drugged. I am, as you thought, a government operative—NSA, in fact. You’ve been brought here because we need someone in your field of expertise—

the tracking and apprehension of mentally fractured killers.”

It’s an odd way to put it, but I guess “mentally fractured” is as accurate as “psychotic.”

“What’s the matter with your own specialists?” I ask. “Or do you just need someone disposable?” I have visions of me tracking down some Senator’s son who’s gone off his meds, only to wind up in a shallow grave myself once I’ve caught him.

“You’re far from disposable,” Cassius says mildly. “As a matter of fact, at the moment you possess one of the most valuable minds on the planet. We’re hoping you’ll use it to help us. Now ask the important question.”

Which one? I want to scream. Am I about to die? Have all those years of making myself think like a psychotic finally turned me into one? Why are you so calm with a loaded revolver held by an extremely stressed FBI agent pointed at your heart?

No.

“If I wasn’t drugged,” I say, “then how did I get here?”

“Through that,” Cassius says, and glances behind me.

I’m not stupid. I keep the gun on him and move my body to the side, so I can flick my own glance from him to what’s behind me. I’d come through some kind of door, so that’s
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what I expect—but what I see instead is a blank white wall, with some kind of arcane designs scrawled on it in reddish brown. The designs are outlined in a rough semicircle around six feet in diameter—

I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.

It’s still a stupid thing to do. It’s virtually impossible to take a gun away from the person who’s holding it on you as long as the shooter follows one simple rule: don’t get too close to your target.

I haven’t.

Cassius actually manages to grab the barrel of the Ruger before I pull the trigger. The first bullet takes him in the sternum, and the next three are placed within inches of that. I’m a very good shot.

The sheer kinetic energy throws him backward across the room. He lands on his back on the desk, arms thrown to either side.

“Damn,” I whisper. “Just another crazy—”

And then he sits up.

There’s no blood on him, but his shirt and jacket have ragged, gaping holes—and all I can see through those holes is pale, unmarked skin. No body armor, no bulletproof vest. No way.

He looks more annoyed than anything. Thinking back on it later, I’m pretty sure that’s the real reason I put the next two shots into his face.

I can actually see the impacts this time. His skin dimples like an invisible finger just poked him—once in the cheek, once in the forehead—and then the flattened remains of
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the slugs fall onto the carpet. I wonder why the force didn’t drive him backward like the first time, and then I realize he’s braced himself by holding on to the edges of the desk. The desk is large and solid, unlike my present grasp of reality.

The gun is empty, but I’ve got a carton of ammunition in my other hand. And a laptop tucked under my arm. Right now, they both seem pretty useless.

Cassius gets off the desk. He sighs. “If I was going to hurt you,” he says reasonably,

“now would be the time, wouldn’t it?”

He looks down at the shredded remains of his tie. He sighs again. “Please,” he says, and motions to a leather sofa along one wall. “Sit. Or perhaps you’d like to discharge your weapon again?”

My mind is desperately trying to find some explanation that fits the facts, but it’s not doing so good. In fact, the idea that I’m still dreaming is looking better and better. I stride over to the sofa, toss down my gun, put down the laptop and place the ammo on top of it. Then I sit down, cross my arms, try to ignore the fact that the only thing I’m wearing is an oversize T-shirt with a picture of a panda on it, and glare at Cassius.

“Okay. Talk.”

“I apologize for trying to disarm you. It was rude of me.”

“If you’re looking for an apology in return, you’re not going to get one.”

“What a surprise. This isn’t your world, Agent Valchek.” His tone is suddenly noticeably colder—I think I finally managed to piss him off. “I realize that in your world, magic is something only children believe in. Here, it is real. You were brought through an interdimensional portal by extremely powerful sorcery, and it was not done lightly. We need your help.”

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I smile, and shake my head. “Okay, now you’ve gone too far. Some kind of covert spy operation I might have bought, but this? Over the top. So now I’m thinking practical joke, with really excellent special effects. New TV show, maybe? Special blanks in my gun, maybe hypnosis—”

And then he moves again, in that ultrafast way only animals can, and his face is about a foot away from mine.

“Does this look like special effects?” he says, and grins.

The grin isn’t meant to be friendly. He’s showing me his teeth.

His incisors are sharp—and as I watch, they get longer. His eyes—a very startling blue—turn bloodred.

I swallow. “Kind of,” I say. “But only when I’m on the other side of the screen.”

“Welcome to this side,” he says. “I’m a vampire. Not a demon, not a creature of pure evil, not a figment of some writer’s imagination. I drink blood, I’m extremely allergic to sunlight, I’m effectively immortal. I’m a supernatural creature, not a natural one, and if you’re going to survive here, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with beings like me—because I’m far from the only one.”

And, just like that, I believe him. The human mind always searches for order, no matter how chaotic or insane events become—we want to believe in a pattern, any pattern, and when somebody offers you one in the middle of a storm of craziness, you grab it and hang on until something better comes along.

“Vampires,” I say calmly. “Lots?”

“Thirty-seven percent of the population. Worldwide.”

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“Barely a third. How’s the war going?”

His eyes fade to normal. His fangs recede. “It was over a long time ago,” he says. He straightens up from his feral crouch, seems almost embarrassed. “You lost.”

“So the other sixty or so percent is what—livestock?”

“Forty-three are lycanthropes. Nineteen are golems.”

“Werewolves and living clay. How’s that work? The bloodsuckers and werewolves take turns biting each other while the Jewish statues referee?”

“We aren’t monsters, Jace. We drink the blood of animals, not men. We shop in supermarkets, we drive cars. This world isn’t so different from your own.”

“Why am I here?” I shout. Bulletproof vampire or not, I’m about ready to rip the truth out of him with my bare hands.

“Because one of the ways this world is different from yours is in the sickness you call insanity. Most supernatural creatures are immune to disease—our minds as well as our bodies. Only human beings are experienced in dealing with madness, and—well . . .”

“We’re hard to come by?” I’ve already done the math. “One percent. That’s all that’s left of us, you bastard? One percent?”

“Less than that,” he says quietly. “Your species numbers under a million. And one of them is slaughtering my people.”

“Why should I care?”

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“Because catching this madman,” Cassius replies, “is the only hope you have of ever seeing your home again.”

Suddenly I don’t feel so well. Nauseous, dizzy, one step removed from reality. Which is exactly right, I think and a huge wave of relief surges through me. This can’t be real, because I feel like I’m about to throw up and I never, ever do the Technicolor yawn. Not when I saw my first floater, not when they hazed me at the Academy, not when we opened that root cellar outside of Augusta. Therefore, this is something simple—a brain tumor, maybe—and not the horrifying predicament the Vampire Surfer just described.

I sigh happily, throw up all over my panda, and pass out.

I wake up in a hospital bed. I put a checkmark in the “Brain Tumor” column and look around for professional corroboration.

No one in the room but me. Vomit-stained panda shirt replaced by standard-issue green hospital gown. No plastic ID band on my wrist, though. Odd.

Also, I’m strapped to the bed. Maybe I should have mentioned that first.

The door opens and a doctor walks in. He looks like a doctor, anyway, white coat over blue scrubs, with a stethoscope slung around his neck and a clipboard in his hands. He’s in his thirties, clean shaven, with shaggy brown hair and a face that reminds me a little of a young Harrison Ford.

“Ms. Valchek,” he says, smiling at me. “I’m Dr. Adams. Sorry about the restraints—you were convulsing when you were first brought here, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.” He starts undoing buckles.

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“Where am I?” I ask, resisting the urge to grab him by the throat. Ask questions, then shoot. As soon I find out where my gun is.

“St. Francis Infirmary.” He finishes unbuckling the straps and steps back. “How are you feeling?”

I lift my hand and put it to my forehead. “My head hurts. I’m a little queasy. And I think I may have had some kind of hallucinatory episode.”

He nods. “The nausea and headache are common in cases of RDT—though there aren’t that many case histories to study. Hallucinations are a more severe symptom, though; they usually only manifest in the later stages of the syndrome.”

“So I guess my RDT is pretty bad. What’s that stand for—Raging Doom Tumor?”

“Reality Dislocation Trauma. To put things simply, Ms. Valchek, you come from another universe, with a different set of physical laws. Your body doesn’t like it. It’s trying to reject what it’s being told on a very basic level, but there’s nowhere to go.”

I stare at him. I like to think I’m adaptable, but I kind of had my heart set on the whole brain cancer thing. Rational, tragic, possibly fixable—all I had to do was pick out some fashionable head scarves for my post-operative look. And now?

Now I don’t have to worry about any of that. Just vampires, werewolves, and being allergic to existing.

“I know it’s a big shock,” Dr. Adams says. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds. There is a treatment available; it’s effective and noninvasive. I was just waiting for you to wake up before administering it.”

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“Does it involve ruby slippers?” He gives me the blank look I often get when I’m trying to be funny. “Never mind.” A sudden and very nasty thought strikes me. “Wait a minute. Does this mean I’m going to be developing a sudden aversion to sunlight and/or silver?”

Now he’s the one who looks shocked. “Of course not! Ms. Valchek, we have something here called the Hippocratic oath, and we take that very seriously. Turning a human being against their will is a Federal crime, not to mention extremely rare. No, the treatment you’re going to receive—”