Necromancing Nim (4 page)

Bloody Bob wasn’t particularly intimidating. I’d expected someone large and growly. Bob was a skinny little shit with thick, black-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a garish Cobra Starship T-shirt with a “Fangs Up” logo on it and dark purple girl’s jeans. I judged his age at about twenty. Of course, since he was a vamp, he could have been ninety-seven, for all I knew.

“Anything for you?” he asked me.

I made a face. He knew damn well I was human. “No, thanks. Unless you can whip me up a bacon cheeseburger.”

“Would if I could.” He chuckled. “Sure you don’t want to try a shot? We’ve got extra-good calf blood tonight.”

Checking out Bob maybe hadn’t been such a great idea, after all. “Next time.”

Colin tipped up his second shot and eyed Bob thoughtfully. “What have you heard about this murder at the Brown Palace?” He pitched his voice low, but even so, Bob gave a quick glance from left to right as Colin spoke, as if afraid of being overheard. There were a few more vamps in the bar, but they sat at booths toward the back. I could see little more than hulking shadows, but I was pretty sure the couple in the booth by the restrooms was making out.

“Not much,” the bartender answered, also keeping his voice down. “Girl worked at the State Capitol Building.”

“Anything about who did her?”

“Some English vamp. Guess they arrested him.” He leaned closer, anger sparking behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “What the fuck is some English vamp doing over here killing people anyway? I just got granted a crossover license so I can stay open ’til sunrise through winter; now we got a dead girl, and who knows what kind of damn new laws they’ll pass now? You don’t gotta kill them.”

Colin nodded sagely, seemingly unperturbed at the outburst. “Guess the English aren’t so civilized after all.” He tipped back the third shot.

“Too many damn foreigners,” Bob grumped. “Like that Russian asshole yesterday, in here causing trouble.”

Colin’s gaze suddenly sharpened. He lowered the shot glass, setting it silently on the wooden bar. “Russian?”

“Yeah. Big, ugly dude. Started a bar fight. I almost had to call in the cops.”

Nodding slowly, Colin inexplicably glanced at me, then back at Bob. “What was his name?”

“Don’t know. Just Russian Asshole, far as I know.”

“I see.” His eyebrows drew together, mouth tightening. “Let me know if you see him again.”

“Sure. No problem.”

Colin grabbed my arm, tighter than I felt was necessary, and half dragged me out of the bar. At least it felt that way. In reality, he was a little more circumspect about it. It just caught me off guard.

When we reached the sidewalk outside the bar, door safely closed behind us, I wrenched my arm free. “Okay, what the fuck? Seriously?”

The sharp, sidelong glance Colin gave me lacked any ability to reassure. “What did Sebastian say to you, exactly?”

I blinked. “He said, ‘Thanks, and tell Colin I said hi.’”

Colin nodded. “No other message?”

“No.”

“And they put him in lockup?”

“As far as I know. They can hold him for forty-eight hours.”

“Shit.” He practically spat the word. “Shit.”

I folded my arms across my chest in a movement so violently indignant I almost hurt myself. “What the hell is going on?”

He started down the sidewalk, knee-length black coat flapping, leaving me to trudge after him. He has long legs. I had to trot.

“We have to get him out of there,” he said finally.

“We?” I repeated. “What the fuck is this ‘we’ business?”

Colin just shook his head. His shoulders were hunching as he walked, his face as fierce as I’d ever seen it. “They’re going to kill him.”

“Who’s going to kill who?” Bad grammar, but I was too pissed to care.

“Sebastian.” He half jogged lightly down the stairs to the parking garage, leading the way back to the office.

“Why?”

“Long story.”

I started to demand that he tell it, then decided maybe his earlier “we” didn’t involve me, after all. Maybe he’d meant the royal we.

In any case, he shoved through Bernstein & Carter’s front door, stalked straight to his office and closed the door. Obviously we weren’t going to be friendly anymore tonight. Kim watched him, jumping a little when the door slammed shut.

“What’s up with him?”

“He’s an ass.”

Kim nodded. “I knew that one.”

I shook my head at her, at him, at myself and at the general state of my universe. It was five a.m., and there was no point trying to get anything else done before sunrise. I collected a couple of manila folders from my desk and went the hell home.

The dark parking garage seemed extra creepy when I slipped out of the office. The night’s events had sent me into adrenaline overload, and now I was crashing hard. I needed to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and become unconscious for at least twelve hours.

Pepper spray in hand, I tiptoed the few feet to my car. I didn’t take a full breath again until I drove out of the garage and into the open air. It was dark, but at least I wasn’t underground anymore. I headed for home.

Nothing against the downtown Denver area, but when I’d lived there to be closer to work, it made me claustrophobic. I’d had a nice enough place, but the building was partially coded for vampires, so there were no windows in any of the common areas, and the apartments themselves, while funky enough, were also short on sunlight. Even the ones meant for humans. I spend all my work nights underground, so when I go home I want sunlight, even if I’m sleeping through most of it. So when I got the opportunity to buy a house a year earlier, I’d jumped at it.

It’s a small house in the Park Hill area, just far enough from the downtown area to seem, well, not quite downtown. Several of the houses on the block are Craftsman-style bungalows—mine is the smallest and ugliest of the bunch. I think the original builders bought it as a kit from Sears or something. Anyway, I have a postage-stamp-sized yard for my dog and something resembling a driveway for my car. Sometimes I even mow the lawn, but usually only when official types stick annoying notes to my door telling me I have to.

I positioned my car on the tiny square of concrete that passed as a driveway and got out. My hands were shaking. The aftermath of the adrenaline rush was resolving into a heavy-duty panic attack. I managed to stumble up onto the porch, get my key into the lock and go inside.

My house, at least, was quiet and secure. I take precautions to keep unwanted visitors out. There are crosses and other religious artifacts along the doorways and windowsills, and the openings are also painted with a special blend of paint that contains garlic and holy water. I doubted any of the Bernstein & Carter clients I visited would actually find it worth the effort to hunt me up, but it never hurts to be careful.

Nevertheless, I still felt overly shaky until I managed to flip on the light. The front door opens into what used to be a dedicated dining room but is now only part of a combined dining room/kitchen/living room area. I treat it more as a combo dining room/place to toss all my shit. From the front door, I could see into the kitchen over an island that separated it from the dining room. The larger living room spread to my left.

All appeared to be well. My furniture was where I’d left it, and Rufus, my scroungy husky/shepherd mix, lay sprawled in the middle of the floor. He thumped his tail at me but didn’t bother expending the energy required to actually lift his head. Rufus is a terrible guard dog.

I went into the kitchen and took off my jacket. In my usual ritual, I began to pull things out of its pockets and lay them out on the counter—my water gun, pepper spray, the Taser, the Ziploc bag full of garlic cloves. The water gun needed refilling, so I set it aside.

The coat still felt strangely heavy. I sorted through the pockets again but couldn’t find anything. But the coat clunked when I laid it out on the counter. Weird. I searched again.

The clunking had come from the inside pocket, made especially to hold a cell phone. Inside it was something hard and lumpy. I fished it out. It was a rock.

How the hell had a rock gotten into my inside pocket? It wasn’t anything special as far as I could tell—just an oval stone slightly smaller than an egg. It was tan, the color more regular and consistent than normally found in random rocks. I would have tossed it in the trash if it hadn’t been in that inside pocket. It couldn’t have gotten there by accident. Instead, I put it on the kitchen counter, half-hidden behind the coffeemaker. I could examine it more closely later.

In the meantime, I needed to wind down before I could sleep, so I booted up my computer and sat down to scan my usual forums before bed. Maybe I could find something about Sebastian and why Colin was so sure “they” were going to kill him. I had an awful feeling Colin was going to do something stupid. If Colin did something stupid, he could end up dead in the permanent way, and I could end up unemployed, and that would suck. I was beginning to think he’d taken me to Bob’s so there’d be a witness in case anything happened to him. The thought didn’t make me feel any better about, well, anything.

Every local community forum these days has at least one board dedicated to the local vamps. They have all kinds of interesting threads—where to get the best blood shots, what local businesses hold night hours, when the next midnight interactive showing of
Vamps Take Manhattan
is going to be held, how to fix the computer you spilled A Positive on. And of course there are dating boards and travel boards, even a forum dedicated to golfing. I’ve never really understood the whole golfing-at-night thing. Then again, I’ve never been that excited about golfing during the day. Vampires are kind of into sports, though. They even have their own professional leagues.

No one seemed to know much of anything about the Brown Palace murder. The dead woman still hadn’t been formally identified, pending notification of relatives. Sebastian was being held without bail but hadn’t been charged with anything. Some chatters seemed to be familiar with the name, but no one seemed to know much more about him.

Reading the speculation, and especially the strings of increasingly hostile comments, made the panic attack sneak back up on me. Colin was going to stick his nose into this, whatever it was, and get himself and Sebastian killed. And I didn’t know enough about what was going on to prevent it. Also I should know better than to read comments on the Internet.

There was no point pursuing that line of thought, and I knew it. Unfortunately, the part of my brain that took charge when I was this exhausted didn’t know it. My heart pounding hard and high in my chest, I forced myself to turn off the computer.

My system started to calm again as I went through my before-bed ritual. With the sun gradually seeping light through the not-quite-closed curtains, I brushed my teeth, took a Sominex and went to bed.

And woke four hours later to the certain knowledge that I was no longer alone in the house.

 
“Vampires want the same thing everyone else does. To love, live, work and prosper in this, our great United States of America.”

“Bullshit.”—
Floor exchange, House of Representatives, debating the Vampire Assimilation Bill, 1969

Chapter Four

I still had a shitload of adrenaline in my system. It’s as good an excuse as any for what happened next.

At first, I wasn’t sure what had awakened me. I held still, unable to hear anything but my own heartbeat. I swallowed, took a long, slow breath and closed my eyes.

Someone was in the kitchen. I could hear the scuffing of feet on the tile. Where the hell was Rufus? He was seriously the worst guard dog ever created.

Carefully and silently, I opened the drawer on my bedside table. Most people keep, I don’t know, sex toys, condoms, lube, that kind of thing in their bedside tables. Me, I’ve got a bottle of holy water and a silver cross. Okay, one vibrator. Shut up.

With the water bottle secure in one hand, I screwed off the top and slipped out my bedroom door.

The noises were definitely coming from the kitchen, but whoever was out there hadn’t turned on an overhead light. I could see a faint glow, as if the light over the stove might have been on, but that was all. Vampire? Surely not. My house is as vampire-proof as I can get it, and I’ve never issued a formal invitation to anybody with fangs.

Still, the holy water was a reasonable precaution. I tiptoed silently down the short hallway, then jumped around the corner. I registered little more than a backlit silhouette as I flung the holy water over the kitchen island at the person standing in front of the stove.

There was a long moment of suspended silence. I stood there, feeling ridiculous, hand still outstretched, holding the half-empty water bottle. Then the intruder said, “Holy doo-whacky on a stick, Nim. Seriously!”

I straightened and put the bottle on the kitchen island, adrenaline draining out so fast I thought I might have wet my pants. Not a vampire or a bad-intentioned burglar type after all. Only my sister can say, “Holy doo-whacky on a stick,” and make it sound like, “Holy fucking shit.” She doesn’t swear. It’s why I’m such a potty mouth—I have to fill her bad language quota and mine both.