Master of the Night (6 page)

“Geirolf's not a god,” Erin gritted, her voice rough with exertion as she fought to escape the spell. “He's a con artist with a collection of hallucinogens.”

Parker sneered. “You think a hallucination's holding you three feet off the ground? Idiot. It's
magic
. Mageverse physics manifesting itself in our universe—with a little starter fuel provided by your dead friend's life force.” He stepped closer to her, looking up into her face. “And you still don't believe me. Then again, you didn't even recognize a vampire when he had his dick in your twat and his fangs in your throat.” He gave her a contemptuous smile. “So much for that keen, investigative intellect.”

Erin's heart pounded in long, jarring beats. It was happening again. Just like the night David died. Things that could not possibly be were happening again, and another man was dead.

All the shrinks had sworn she'd been under the influence of some kind of hallucinogen, but this felt no more like a delusion than that night had.

But it must be. Because if it wasn't…

Erin sneered at Parker, even as her instincts shrieked all this was horribly, impossibly real. “So now you want me to believe Reece Champion is a vampire. Yeah, right. Do you seriously think you can sucker me with this bullshit?” Her mouth was dry as sand. “If you're going to kill me, get it over with and quit insulting my intelligence.” She almost wished he would. Better to die than discover it had all been real.

Better to die than learn a demon really had killed the man she loved.

“We have no intention of killing you, sweetheart.” Parker's grin took on a chilling cast. “At least, not until Count 007 over there has had his fun. But I think I'll let my master explain it to you.”

He took a step back and closed his eyes. Again, the mysterious nimbus appeared around his hands, snapping and fizzling like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Even frustrated, furious, and terrified, Erin felt a niggle of curiosity. How was he
doing
that?

As she watched, the FBI mole lifted both hands, rising onto his toes as he threw his head back, his face contorting with effort.

“I wonder what it is about working magic that gives them all that melodramatic streak?” Champion muttered. “I've never met a Maja yet that could resist striking a pose.”

What the hell's a Maja?
Erin thought.

Before she could ask, a rolling crack of thunder made her jump in her invisible bonds. A blast of wind blew into her face, hot and smelling faintly of sulfur.

And a man simply popped into existence inches from her nose. She jolted, swallowing a scream.

“Why, hello there, Erin.” He grinned at her, his smile wide and white, his eyes as pale as a wolf's—and just as feral. His hair fell in a gleaming black curtain around his T-shirt–clad shoulders, and black jeans hugged his thighs.

She might have found him attractive if she hadn't seen him kill David.

“Geirolf,” Erin spat. “You sick fuck. Still scamming the suckers with the demon act?” God, please let it be a scam. It couldn't be real.

He laughed, a deep, sensual boom. “Darling, it's not an act.” Geirolf turned away from her, strolling up to Champion as he hung in midair, his big body straining as he fought to escape whatever it was that held them.

No. This isn't happening
, she told herself desperately. There was no magical forcefield holding them trapped and levitating. Somehow Parker had drugged them without their knowledge, with something that made them both susceptible to suggestion. Then the magician hit them up with a couple of stage tricks while they were too out of it to question what was happening. It was the same scam the shrinks swore he'd pulled on Erin and David a year ago, with such fatal results.

But why? That was the one thing the psychologists had never been able to explain. What was the point? Why not just shoot them and get it over with?

“So, you're one of Merlin's vampires,” Geirolf said, looking up at Reece. “He always was a whimsical bastard.”

“Vampires?” Erin interrupted. It was the same line of trash Parker had used. She made herself sneer. “Funny—I didn't notice any bat wings.”

Parker sneered back. “You really need to wake up and smell the Bloody Marys, sweetheart. Or hadn't you noticed the fang marks in your throat?”

Fang marks? She licked her lips, suddenly aware of the faint ache and pulse in her neck. There was something sticky on her skin, something that felt almost like…

No. It was whatever they'd used to make her hallucinate all this. There was no such thing as vampires.

Or demons.

Suddenly she realized Geirolf was watching her with a fixed and ugly gleam. “Oh,” he said softly, “this is going to be such fun. I'm going to enjoy blowing all your cool little assumptions all to hell and back.”

“Who
are
you?” Champion demanded impatiently. “What's this all about?”

“Geirolf here is a con man and a murderer,” Erin told him, glaring at their captors. “He uses drugs to make his victims more susceptible to his parlor tricks, then he gets them to commit his crimes for him. Primarily murder.”

“She thinks I'm Charles Manson,” Geirolf told Champion, his tone confidential. “I'd be offended if it weren't so damn funny.”

“I repeat,” Champion said steadily. “What are you?”

“I'd think that would be obvious, vampire. I'm a god.”

“Of course you are,” Champion said, without a flicker of emotion.

Geirolf sighed and said to Parker, “It's so sad to be forgotten.”

“I could kill them now if you want,” Parker said, turning a glittering stare on Erin.

She curled a lip at him despite the chilling hunger in his eyes. Damned if she'd show these assholes fear. No matter what they were.

“No, boy, they're perfect.” Geirolf started walking around Champion, looking up at him in calculation. “A Latent and the young vampire who could transform her—all magical potential, yet without enough real power yet to be a pain in my ass.” He grinned. “The perfect blood sacrifice.”

 

Oh, hell.

Reece stared at the being who stalked around him. Whatever Geirolf and his flunky were, they weren't Magekind. And he had an ugly feeling they weren't mad, either, despite all the babbling about gods and demons.

But they were powerful as hell, and they worked death magic—using the energy released in a murder as a conduit to Mageverse energies.

An act strictly forbidden to Magekind.

“What sort of spell are we talking about here?” Reece asked, trying to sound as if he didn't give a damn.

Geirolf grinned. “You honestly think I'll tell you?”

“Unless I miss my guess, you feed on terror. Death, too, ofcourse, but definitely terror. So yeah, you'll tell me, if only to scare the hell out of us.”

The grin widened. Every tooth in the demon's head was pointed. “You're right.”

“So what exactly does this spell do?”

“Kill every last vampire and witch in the Mageverse.”

Reece stared, feeling all the blood drain from his face. “That's not possible. Even if you sacrificed us both, the power it would take would be immense.”

“Well, yes,” the demon said, then spread his hands. “But after all, I'm not your average witch.”

“But why?”

The thing bared those razor teeth. “You're in the way.”

“Of what?” Reece demanded.

“Of the rebirth of paradise.” The demon clasped his hands behind his back and looked up at the stars. “Or hell, I suppose. Depends on your point of view.”

“What are you talking about, you lunatic?” Erin snapped.

He glanced at her. “I'm going to bring back the good old days when my people came to this rock. Humans called us names like Set and Baal then, and a hundred others they've forgotten now.” His razored smile was chilling. “I'm going to remind them of every single one.”

Each time Reece took a step, this mess just got deeper. “You passed yourself off as a god.”

Geirolf shrugged. “Or a devil. Depended on my mood. Either way, they gave us sacrifices. Blood, pain, and all the life force we could drink.” His expression hardened. “Then Merlin, Nimue, and the rest of their sanctimonious kind arrived to declare war on us all.”

Reece smiled coldly as Geirolf's account at last began to make sense. “The Fae were more powerful than you.”

The demon snarled. “They drove my people from this world and set up dimensional wards to keep us away. But Merlin particularly hated me because I'd almost managed to wipe them all out. He was afraid to leave me free, afraid I'd find a way to destroy the wards.”

“It was never smart to piss off Merlin.”

“Merlin?” Erin said. “As in the Round Table?”

The demon ignored her. “He sealed me in a cell on Mageverse Earth. It provided for my every physical need—except freedom. And it was impervious to magic. Without sacrifices, I grew weak. So weak, it took me a millennia and a half just to chip out a chink big enough to send a dream through.”

“And yet, you're back.”

Geirolf shrugged. “I found Gary Evans, who had just enough talent to see me in his dreams. After I convinced him to sacrifice a dozen or so coeds so I could feed on their deaths, I managed to escape.”

“He used drugs and tricks to make Evans believe he was a god,” Erin interrupted. Reece craned his neck so he could look back at the bitter fury on her face. “And Gary, the sick fuck, was happy to believe him.”

“Until our luscious Erin and her partner blew poor Gary's head off in the middle of a sacrifice,” the demon added. “Fortunately that last death gave me just enough power to break free. I've been rebuilding my strength ever since.”

Erin jerked at her invisible bonds. “And suckering gullible cultists into committing new crimes.”

“I can hardly commit my own,” Geirolf said. “Using too much magic would attract Majae attention, and I don't care to have a few thousand pissed-off vampires and witches banging at my door.” He smiled. “Not just yet, anyway.”

“I can see how that would be inconvenient,” Reece said.

“Indeed. So you've all got to go. Luckily, I've got the perfect spell. But to make it work, I need a Magekind couple as a sacrifice.”

“But the minute you captured a Maja, she'd send a message to the rest.”

“And I'd be back where I started,” Geirolf agreed. “But if I had a vampire and one newly turned Maja who didn't quite know how to handle her powers yet…Now,
that
would work.”

“Good plan. Except, much as it grieves me to point out, you're assuming I'm going to cooperate.” Reece bared his teeth savagely. “And I'm not.”

The demon smiled. “Well, not willingly, anyway. Then, of course, there's the problem of that magical energy burst when a Maja Turns.”

“Oh, take a chance.”

“And have the entire Round Table and a coven of witches down around my horns? I don't think so. No, what's needed is a magic-tight cage that would keep the Majae's Court from detecting the girl's Change. Luckily, I've got one.”

Reece's heart sank. “The cell Merlin locked you up in.”

“Exactly. I did some damage to it, but it should still hold you and your pretty girlfriend.” Geirolf shrugged. “Of course, I won't be able to sense when she Turns, so I'll have to check in periodically. But once I have, and once you're dead…”

Reece swore silently. With the Magekind eliminated, Geirolf could set himself up as a god, tormenting and killing until he plunged the planet into another Dark Age.

“Oooh, yesss,” the demon purred. “You know, it isn't all that easy to scare the hell out of a vampire. And I just have.” His laughter rolled, reverberating like thunder. “Fear's got the most delicious taste. Not quite as good as death, but close. Makes a good appetizer.”

“Fuck you,” Reece growled.

The demon smirked. “No, fuck her. Repeatedly.”

Before Reece could flinch back, Geirolf leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Reece felt the hot energy of a spell slice into his brain. He cursed.

The demon smiled. “Bye-bye.”

Then the world went white.

One minute Erin
was struggling in the thick, viscous grip of that invisible something Parker had somehow created. The next, light exploded all around her.

And she was falling.

She barely had time to register the plummeting sensation before she hit hard, right on her ass. Rolling, she slapped the floor as she'd been taught in hand-to-hand combat class, turning a fall that might have otherwise ended with broken bones into one that did nothing more than bruise her behind.

For a moment she lay still, catching her breath and getting her bearings as she stared up at the vaulted stone ceiling over her head.

What the hell had happened to the sky?

A minute ago they'd been in Champion's garden, listening to Geirolf spin his fairy tales. But where were they now?

Erin sat up slowly, in honor of both her aching behind and the general dubiousness of the entire situation.

She was sitting in the middle of a huge stone room straight out of The History Channel. The place looked just like a castle chamber, complete with rich tapestries on the walls interspersed with huge Gothic glass windows.

The bed went along with the general medieval motif—a massive dark affair piled with what looked like furs and surrounded on two sides by red velvet hangings embroidered with gold thread. There was a table and a couple of wooden benches, and an anachronism—some kind of small pool, maybe ten feet long and five feet wide, that looked vaguely like a Roman bath.

Over by the opposite wall stood Champion, wearing an expression of deep disgust on his face. In place of the tuxedo trousers he'd been wearing a few minutes before, he was dressed in a pair of loose silk pajama bottoms and a long silk robe, both in pure, unrelieved black.

He looked down at himself and curled his lip. “What am I, Hugh Hefner? Tacky, Geirolf. Very tacky.” Looking up, he spotted Erin watching him warily. He lifted a brow, a flash of male interest in his eyes. “I guess we should count ourselves lucky your outfit doesn't have nipple cutouts.”

Erin glanced down. And swore.

Her red cocktail dress had somehow become a white satin Merry Widow that cinched her waist and lifted her full breasts until they damn near overflowed the low-cut bodice. Below that, she wore a tiny white lace thong and lace stockings. On her feet were a pair of platform shoes with three-inch soles and six-inch heels. “What's lucky is that I didn't break my neck when I fell,” she growled, glowering at the shoes.

Assuming they were even real.

Real or not, though, the shoes were coming off. She wouldn't be able to run in them, much less fight. And the chances were good she'd probably end up doing one or the other before the night was over.

Erin slipped the platforms off, as Champion prowled the room, running his hands over the stone walls. “Great. Just great,” he snarled as she tossed the shoes into a corner.

“What?” she asked warily as she scanned the chamber. Yep, everything was the same as it had been a minute ago—table, Roman bath, canopied bed piled with furs. None of it made a damn bit of sense, but it was all still there.

“There's no door,” Champion announced.

“What do you mean, there's no door? There's got to be a door.”

But he was right. There were plenty of arched, Gothic-looking windows, but there was no door at all. “How did they get us in here?”

He shot her a look. “Magic, sweetheart.”

Her stomach lurched. “Reece, no matter what this looks like, it isn't really magic. They gave us some kind of drugs to make us susceptible to suggestion, and Geirolf threw in some smoke and mirrors. We hallucinated the rest. My guess is we passed out, and they brought us here. Wherever ‘here' is.”

“Erin…” he began.

“Champion, trust me. He did the same thing to me once before. It's how he killed my partner.” Frowning, she crossed to the nearest window and tapped on the thick glass. It certainly seemed solid. But though she examined it closely and prodded every inch of it, she couldn't find a latch, and it didn't swing open. “Maybe we could break it.”

Reece started to speak, then shrugged. “I doubt it, but it's worth a try.” He took several steps back, gathered his big body, and sprinted toward another of the windows.

“Champion, what—?”

He leaped up like Jackie Chan to slam feet-first into the glass. The window bonged, bell-like, as he bounced off and skidded halfway across the room on his back. “Ow.”

He rolled to his feet before she reached him. “You okay?” she asked, studying his face in concern.

He rubbed one thigh with a grimace. “Damn near broke my legs. Figured that wasn't going to work, but I had to try. If this place really held Geirolf for sixteen hundred years, we're not going to break out of it with muscle.”

She shook her head. “Reece…”

“Erin, it's not a hallucination. This is real.”

She felt sick, but shook it off with a scornful laugh. “So, you're saying, what? This Geirolf guy really is some kind of immortal demon who's locked us up in a magic cell?”

“That's about the size of it.” He moved to the table and looked over the selection of dishes that sat on the linen tablecloth. As he poured something from a pitcher into a pair of jeweled goblets, he eyed her. “Erin, I know this is tough to accept. Particularly for somebody from this century. Everything you've ever been taught tells you there's no such thing as demons. But think about it—does any of this feel like a hallucination to you?”

“No,” she admitted. “Everything seems solid. Real. And I don't feel drugged.” True, there had been the weird logic and location jumps, first when she was caught in that “spell” of Parker's, next when she was transported here. Yet even that hadn't been precisely dreamlike, either. And—she rubbed her backside absently—the ache in her butt certainly felt real.

Reece strolled over to her, holding the goblet in one big, tanned hand. He took a sip of it, watching her over the rim. He grimaced and extended it to her. “It's a very nice Dom Perignon. You'll like it.”

Erin hesitated before accepting the thick pewter cup. “So why did you make a face?” She sniffed the contents cautiously and took a sip. It tasted real.

Champion shrugged. “I was hoping for blood, but I guess that was too much to expect.”

Erin choked on her mouthful of champagne. Suddenly she remembered Parker's sneer:
You didn't even recognize a vampire when he had his dick in your twat and his fangs in your throat.
She felt again the ache and burn in her throat. Reaching up with one hand, she explored the injury.

Holes. In her neck.

He'd bitten her.

Champion met her horrified gaze steadily, his green eyes cool. “Yeah, I'm a vampire.”

“A vampire.” She'd slept with him, and he'd bitten her. Drunk her blood.

He sighed. “I'm not crazy, Erin.”

She gave him her best impassive-cop face. “I never said you were.”

“This is real, Erin,” he told her steadily. “Geirolf really is a demon, and I'm a vampire, and Parker is some kind of necromancer. And you and I really are trapped in a cell in the Mageverse.” Champion opened his mouth and peeled his lips back from his teeth. For about half a second, they all looked perfectly white, straight, and human. True, two of them looked a little sharper than normal, but…

Then the gums seemed to swell around those sharp canines, and the two teeth visibly lengthened, extending down from his jaw. Becoming fangs.

Erin stepped backward as the universe seemed to reel. “Don't.”

“You know this is happening. And you're too much a professional not to deal with it.” Tiny fireworks exploded in Champion's eyes, a minuscule explosion of sparks shooting across the green. And he disappeared.

In his place, a huge black timber wolf sat on its haunches looking up at her. Its eyes were the same purely human green as Champion's.

Erin leaped back from the animal with a startled yelp. She glanced wildly around the room, but Champion had vanished. Replaced by the wolf.

She looked down at the big beast and felt herself begin to shake. “You don't understand. You don't know what this means.”

Sparks exploded in those green eyes, and it was Champion again. She almost saw the moment when wolf became man. He stepped closer. “So explain it to me.”

For just a moment, she seriously considered hitting him. Then she shook off the impulse. She was a professional. And if she was going to get out of this alive, she had to work with him. Because vampire or not, he seemed to know what was going on. “That
thing
…That murdering thing killed my partner! It was all real, no matter what the shrinks said. All of it. Goddamnit.” She squeezed her eyes shut. She was damned if she'd cry.

Then she opened them again, squared her shoulders, and told him the story.

 

July 5, 2003

The silence in the car had the leaden quality of tension and guilt. Erin looked over at David Jennings for the fifth time in the past two minutes. She sighed. He still wore that grim expression, and his fingers gripped the wheel instead of riding it easily with their usually skilled insouciance. “David—”

“You think the profiler's right, and this guy is trying to work some kind of magic spell?” He snorted. “Like the locals need another reason to lose their fuckin' minds over these killings. God help us when the reporters get that little tidbit. They'll start swarming like piranha.”

“I don't think piranha actually swarm. David, about last night—”

In the dim blue light from the dashboard, she saw a muscle jump in his jaw. “Yeah. Look, I'm sorry about all that. If you're gonna report me, I don't blame you. I went too far.”

“I'm not going to report you,” Erin said impatiently. “For God's sake, you'd had a little too much to drink.” They'd celebrated the Fourth by taking a twelve-pack back to their motel. While the town put on a fireworks display over the trees, they'd sat on the balcony outside his room and worked their way through several beers.

“That only makes it worse, Erin. One way or another, I was way out of line.”

“Actually, you weren't.” Erin remembered the heat of his mouth when he'd suddenly pulled her down on his lap for a kiss that had made her toes curl. “Look, the only reason I said no is because I knew you'd react like this in the morning. For God's sake, we've been working together for two years, and we're both single and reasonably young. It's only natural that we start caring about each other.”

“It may be natural,” David said grimly, “but it's also completely against regulations.”

She thought about his hand cupping her breast through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “You know what? I don't care. We've been ignoring this thing like the elephant in the living room for two years, and I'm getting sick of it.”

He shot her a look. For just an instant she saw naked need in his eyes. Then he glanced quickly away. “Maybe, but this isn't the time. We're in the middle of a case. After we catch this guy, we can talk about it.”

Yes!
To hide the triumph in her eyes, Erin turned to stare out the window at the moonlit fields flashing by the car. She'd finally gotten him to admit it. For a man as relentlessly by the book as David, that was a major hurdle.

Of course, getting him to go any further would take patience, but…

A dilapidated barn stood in the moonlight about fifty feet from the road. A strange, faint glow shone from its windows. Firelight. Or candles? Erin felt every hair on her forearms rise. “Stop the car.”

“Oh, hell. You getting another one of your premonitions?”

“Yeah.” It felt as if she'd been dumped in dry ice. David whipped the car onto the shoulder and reached into his jacket for his cell phone to call the locals. He'd long since learned not to question her hunches. She opened the car door, aware of his deep voice relaying their location to the county dispatcher.

Standard procedure was to wait for backup, but Erin knew in her gut that somebody would be dead long before help arrived. They had to move
now
.

She jumped the ditch and started across the weedy field in long strides, her gun drawn, her gut twisted in a knot, her mouth dry. David followed at her heels like a brawny shadow, his carrot red hair shining gently in the moonlight.

They both knew this was likely to get sticky. They had no probable cause; if this was the guy, they'd have a hell of a time hanging on to him. But saving a life came first.

Never mind that Erin had no idea how she knew one was even at stake.

The wind shifted, bringing her a whiff of something that made her gag: the sickly smell of rotting meat and blood and human waste. And something else. A sound.

“Well,” David muttered, “something's died around here. And it was sure as hell bigger than a barn rat.”

“Shhh,” Erin whispered, and strained to catch whatever it was she'd just heard.

There it was again. A voice, rising and falling on the wind.

“Sounds like chanting.”

“Just what I was thinking,” she murmured as she tried to make out the words the male voice was reciting. “Could be our boy.”

The two agents eased toward the barn together, moving as fast and silently as they dared through the thick weeds. Reaching the rough wooden building, they flattened their backs against the wall beside the door and went still, listening.

David's eyes flashed toward her, and she knew he'd heard the same thing she had.

Under the chanting, a woman's muffled voice sobbed in terror.

Suddenly Erin could make out the man's words. She immediately wished she couldn't. “Dread Geirolf, Lord of Darkness and Death, accept the sacrifice of this unworthy whore that her unclean life might feed and—”

“Do wrap it up, boy. All this foreplay is getting tedious.”