Hellforged (42 page)

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Authors: Nancy Holzner

Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #General, #Demonology

BOOK: Hellforged
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Zombies would be dancing, no question. And I had no idea how to find Pryce and stop him before they did.
In my building, Clyde was on duty. “Ah. Welcome back, Ms. Vaughn.” He raised both eyebrows as he took in the Glitch spit, assorted bruises, and the condition of my clothes. “Perhaps I won’t inquire whether you had a pleasant trip.”
“Good thought, Clyde, because I don’t want to talk about it.” I crossed the lobby, shuddering as I passed the spot where the cleaning crew had mopped up what was left of Gary. I had to make sure that didn’t happen to another zombie—let alone hundreds.
The other problem nagging at my mind nagged a little louder. I turned around and went to Clyde’s desk. “Is Juliet back?”
“I’m afraid not. I haven’t seen Ms. Capulet for a week. Mr. Kane came by to inquire about her, as well.”
“Yes, he told me. Did anyone else ask about her?”
“
Three
different pairs of JHP officers.” He looked at me so sourly I felt like I was supposed to apologize for being a bad influence on my roommate.
“Did they go upstairs?”
“Not while I was on duty.”
Good. A homecoming was never all that homey when your place had been torn apart by cops in the interim. “So that was it?”
“As far as I can recall. I didn’t realize anything was amiss until Mr. Kane came by.” He wrinkled his pitted, gray-green brow and tapped a finger against his chin. “There may have been a vampire,” he said, mostly to himself. He shuffled some papers on his desk. “Yes. His name was unusual, so I wrote it down. It’s embarrassing when you call upstairs and can’t recall a visitor’s name after they just gave it to you. If I didn’t discard the paper … Here it is. Piotr.”
He showed me the paper.
“That’s it? No last name?”
“That’s all he gave me. You know how it is with vampires. So many of them use only a single name. It’s an affectation, really.”
I pictured the skeletal, hooded figure who’d stood over Juliet in our living room. “What did this Piotr look like? Was he tall?”
“No, I’d say he was slightly below average in height. Five-eight, perhaps? Dark hair, slicked back. Slavic features—you know, high cheekbones. Quite a handsome man, except he was terribly thin.”
I couldn’t recall meeting anyone who fit that description, but I didn’t know all of Juliet’s friends. She’d had several centuries to make them before I was born.
Clyde continued his chin-tapping, like it could jog his memory. “Yes, quite thin. If he were human, I’d be concerned he was ill. And his manner was odd, as I recall. At first I thought it was because he was foreign. Piotr is a Polish name, I believe. But that wasn’t it. He seemed … vacant. As though he were extremely tired, but it was only an hour or two past dark. Perhaps he hadn’t fed yet; he did look pale.”
Tap, tap, tap.
“But there was more to it than that. Talking to him was like conversing with a robot. There was interaction, but little meaning was exchanged.”
“The lights were on but no one was home, huh?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” he agreed. “If you specify that the lights were of extremely low wattage.”
This vampire didn’t sound like someone Juliet would hang out with. She preferred life-of-the-party types.
“What day did he come by?”
“I’m not entirely certain. I know it was before Mr. Kane inquired. The day before, I believe.” He shrugged. “So many people come by, it all blurs together.”
For a norm, any one of the visitors to our building would generate nightmares for months. For Clyde, vampires, zombies, werewolves, whatever—it was all in a night’s work.
Upstairs, I paused in front of my apartment door, listening. I half-expected to hear Juliet’s TV blaring. For once, I would’ve welcomed it, knowing she was home and all right. And not involved in an attempt to frame Kane for murder.
I turned the key and went inside. The silent TV greeted me with a blank, sixty-three-inch expanse of gray.
I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and listened. I reached out with all my senses, staying on this side of the demon plane. The apartment was empty. Nothing waited here—living, dead, or demonic.
I went down the hall to Juliet’s bedroom. The door was open, the bedroom still and silent. Juliet’s ebony coffin, lined with red satin and holding two lace-trimmed, heart-shaped pillows, lay open on its trestles. Her closet door was open, too.
Black clothes on hangers were pushed to the left and right, leaving a gap in the middle, like she’d grabbed a handful of clothing without paying attention to what it was. Or like someone had looked in the closet, pushing clothes aside and not caring whether anyone noticed they were out of place.
There was no way to tell what the gap in her closet meant. Probably nothing.
I went back through the living room, picking up my duffel bag on the way. I was worried about Juliet, yes, but I’d have to save that worry for later. She’d taken care of herself for more than six hundred years. Still, I wished I could hear her explanation of why she went to D.C. and what the hell those creatures were that had attacked Kane.
In my bedroom, I hoisted the duffel bag to drop it on the bed, then stopped. A book lay open on the comforter. The book wasn’t mine. I didn’t do much bedtime reading—usually I just collapsed and tried to pull up the comforter as far as my chin before sleep grabbed me. And I didn’t own a book that thick.
I put my bag on the floor and turned the book toward me. Across the top of the left-hand page was the book’s title:
The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare
. Facing that, across the top of the right-hand page, was
Antony and Cleopatra
.
My pulse sped up. This was a message from Juliet. She was playing her Shakespeare game, like she always did at Creature Comforts. Somewhere on these two pages was a clue about what was going on.
I’d never read
Antony and Cleopatra
, not in school and not with Mab. I didn’t much feel like reading it now, but I skimmed the pages that lay open. Nothing made sense; the archaic language and twisted sentences were hard to follow. It was a scene from Act III, well past the middle of the play. Cleopatra was getting some sort of message from Caesar and Marc Antony was having somebody whipped—no clue why. Maybe the guy was just kinky. Even if I could make sense of the language, trying to read the play was like walking into a movie after you’d missed the first hour.
I sighed with frustration. With Pryce on the loose in Boston—and a critical mass of Morfran that might be big enough and strong enough to attack without me—I didn’t have time to play Juliet’s game. I’d have to puzzle it out later. I checked my pockets for a slip of paper, found my boarding pass stub, and lay it on the page to mark the place.
As I was closing the book, a couple of lines jumped out at me:
’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp
Than with an old one dying.
An old one dying. Something in that phrase rang a bell. A whole bunch of bells—my head was clanging like a hundred trolleys on a collision course. The Old Ones. Juliet said something once about the Old Ones—what was it?
I thought back. An image arose of Juliet, sitting at the bar, stirring a Bloody Mary. It was at Creature Comforts, before that vampire junkie pointed Norden and Sykes her way.
The Old Ones—the really ancient ones, I mean—prefer to keep the old ways.
At the time, I wondered who might be so old that Juliet would consider them ancient. Now I wondered if the creatures Kane and I had seen—cold, skeletal, looking and smelling like old, old death—could be these Old Ones.
Somehow, Juliet was mixed up with them. When I’d heard her chanting in the living room, she’d sounded like a robot. Clyde said that Piotr, the strange vampire who’d come looking for Juliet, acted like a robot, too. The thought made me queasy. What if these Old Ones were somehow controlling her?
If they were, maybe she
was
involved in their plot to frame Kane.
But if the Old Ones sent someone to ask about Juliet, that meant they didn’t know where she was. Juliet had left me a message—a warning?—about the Old Ones through the Shakespeare book. Maybe she was resisting them; maybe Juliet wasn’t so easy to control.
But I still didn’t know where she was or how to start looking for her.
 
I CALLED KANE, GOT HIS VOICE MAIL, AND LEFT A MESSAGE I was home. I was about to get undressed for a shower when the phone rang. Expecting Kane, I picked up. The voice spluttering on the other end turned out to be Clyde’s.
“That … that
Tina
person is on her way up,” he said, once he’d calmed down enough to form actual words. “She wouldn’t wait, she just ran across—”
Pounding erupted on the door.
“It’s okay, Clyde. I’ll yell at her for you.”
He spluttered some more and hung up. Meanwhile, the door threatened to jump off its hinges. “C’mon, Vicky, let me in! I know you’re home. Come
on
. It’s
important
!”
I yanked the door open and almost got my face knocked on; Tina’s knuckles stopped an inch short. She squeezed past me, a dry cleaner’s bag slung over her shoulder.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back? I’ve been waiting
forever
to show you this.”
“I wasn’t gone forever. I’ve been home all of ten minutes. How did you know I was home, anyway?”
“Jenna saw you in a taxi at the checkpoint. She texted me. I was picking this up”—she draped the bag over the back of the sofa—“and I came right over.”
“You upset Clyde.”
“Why, ’cause I didn’t stop? He knows who I am, and I only ever come here to see you. He’s smart enough to figure it out. Anyway, celebrities get certain privileges.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulders.
“So you’re a celebrity now? That was fast. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t give you a right to be rude to my doorman.” I did
not
have the energy for this right now. Any of it.
“Okay, I’ll say sorry or whatever on the way out. But I wanted—” She cut herself off and stared at me openmouthed. “
What
did you do to your hair?”
“Nothing. That’s Glitch spit. There was a Glitch on the plane.”
“That’s a relief. I thought you’d gone punk or something. That look would be, like,
so
wrong for you.”
“Actually, I was about to take a shower. You know how important it is to wash this stuff out.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. I mean, I’m glad you weren’t in the shower when I came over, because then you wouldn’t have answered the door and I would’ve thought you were mad at me or something.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Patience. “Tina, I woke up in Wales this morning—yesterday morning now. My plane almost crashed, and Juliet is missing. I’m really, really tired. And besides all that, I’m kind of busy right now.” Trying to stop a demi-demon from unleashing the Morfran on Boston.
She shot me a withering look. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Her scowl changed to a grin as she pulled a heap of sparkles out of the dry cleaner’s bag. “Look at this! Isn’t this, like, the most amazing thing you ever saw?” She held up two pieces against her: a push-up bra and a pair of boy shorts—emphasis on
short
—made of sparkly silver material.
“Why are you showing me your underwear?”
“Ha, ha. It’s my costume. You know, for the concert.”
Suddenly, it hit me how vulnerable Tina would be, up there on a stage when the Morfran attacked. “Tina, you can’t go onstage—”
“Wearing this? Oh, please. Stop sounding like my mother. Or, you know, how my mother would sound if she gave a damn about me.”
“No, you don’t understand. You can’t go onstage at all. You’ve got to tell Monster Paul to cancel the concert.” It was so simple, I almost laughed. To stop Pryce, all we had to do was mess up the prophecy. No dancing dead, no chance for the Brenin wannabe to make his move.
Tina stared at me. “Did you get Glitch spit in your brain or something? This concert is my big chance. We’re gonna be on TV and everything. Plus we’ve been rehearsing for, like, a whole week.”
I gripped her arm, trying to convey how important this was. “If the concert goes ahead, there’ll be an attack to make what happened at the Halloween parade look like a Sunday picnic.”
“A demon attack—is that all?” She shook me off and waved her hand dismissively. “You can handle that. I’ll have Paul put you on security. Just bring, you know, some extra weapons. If you need help, I’ll jump in.” Her eyes widened. “Ooh, bring that big sword, the one I borrowed at Halloween. That was awesome.”
She was talking about the Sword of Saint Michael, and
stole
was a more accurate word than
borrowed
, but I didn’t argue the point. I needed to figure out how to prevent the concert. That would give me time to find Pryce, kill him, and put the Morfran back into its slate prison. If I could handle the ritual.

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