The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (6 page)

It had been the wolf's response to seeing the boy he was supposed to protect tied up like a bad dog, not the man's.

“They haven't been here,” said Devonte. “Unless they spend a lot of time in hospital prison, they won't know it was supposed to be there. I'll cover the cuff on my wrist with the blanket.”

Stella nodded her head thoughtfully. “All right. And if things get bad, at least this way you can run. He's right, it's better if the restraint is off.”

David let them work it out. He launched himself off Devonte's bed and onto the other—forgetting that Devonte was already hurt until he heard the boy's indrawn breath. David was still half-operating on wolf instincts—which wasn't very helpful when fighting vampires. He needed to be thinking.

Maybe it had only been the suddenness of his movement though because the boy made the same sound when David hopped through the almost-too-narrow opening in the ceiling and onto the track in the plenum space between the original fourteen-foot ceiling and false panels fitted into the flimsy hangers that kept them place. The track groaned a little under his sudden weight, but it didn't bend.

“My father always told us that no one ever looks up for their enemy,” Stella said after a moment. “Can you replace the panel? If you can't I—”

The panel he'd moved slid back into place with more force than necessary and cracked down the middle.

“Damn it.”

“Don't worry, no one will notice. There are a couple of broken panels up there.”

She couldn't see any sign that her father was hiding in the ceiling except for the bed. She grabbed it by the headboard and tugged it back to its original position, then she did the same with the chair.

She'd forgotten how impressive the wolf was . . . almost beautiful: the perfect killing machine covered with four-inch-deep, redgold fur. She hadn't remembered the black that tipped his ears and surrounded his eyes like Egyptian kohl.

“If you'll get back, I'll see what I can do with the wall,” said Devonte. “Sometimes I can fix things as well as move them.”

That gave her a little pause, but she found that wizards weren't as frightening as werewolves and vampires. She considered his offer, then shook her head.

“No. They already know what you are.” She gathered her father's clothes from the bedspread and folded them neatly. Then she stashed them—and the plastic bag with Devonte's clothes—into the locker. “Just leave the wall. We only need to hide the werewolf from them, and you might need all the power you've got to help with the vampire.”

Devonte nodded.

“Right then.” She took a deep breath and picked up her catch-all purse from the floor where she'd set it.

Her brothers had made fun of her purses until she'd used one to take out a mugger. She'd been lucky—it had been laden with a pair of three-pound weights she'd been transporting from home to work—but she'd never admitted that to her brothers. Afterwards they'd given her Mace, karate lessons, and quit bugging her about the size of her purse.

Unearthing a travel-sized game board from its depths she said, “How about some checkers?”

Five hard-won games later she decided the vampire either wasn't coming tonight, or she was waiting for Stella to go away. She jumped three of Devonte's checkers and there was a quiet knock on the door. She turned to look as Jorge, the cop who'd gotten babysitting duty today, stuck his head in.

“Sorry to leave you stuck here.”

“No problem. Just beating a poor helpless child at checkers.”

She waited for him to respond with something funny—Jorge was quick on his feet. But his face just stayed . . . not blank precisely, but neutral.

“They need you down in pediatrics, now. Looks like a case of child abuse and Doc Gonzales wants you to talk to the little girl.”

She couldn't help the instincts that brought her to her feet, but those same instincts were screaming that there was something wrong with Jorge.

Between her job and having a brother on the force, she'd gotten to know some of the cops pretty well. Nothing bothered Jorge like a child who'd been hurt. She'd seen him cry like a baby when he talked about a car wreck where the child hadn't survived. But he'd passed this message along to her with all the passion of a hospital switchboard operator.

In the movies, vampires could make people do what they wanted them to—she couldn't remember if the people were permanently damaged. Mostly, she was afraid, they just died.

She glanced down at her watch and shook her head. “You know my rules,” she said. “It's after six and I'm off shift.”

Her rules were a standing joke with her brothers and their friends—a serious joke. She'd seen too many people burn out from the stress of her job. So she'd made a list of rules she had to follow, and they'd kept her sane so far. One of her rules was that from eight in the morning until six in the evening she was on the job, outside of those hours she did her best to have a real life. She was breaking it now, with Devonte.

Instead of calling her on it, Jorge just processed her reply and finally nodded. “All right. I'll tell them.”

He didn't close the door when he left. She went to the doorway and watched him walk mechanically down the hall and through the security door, which he'd left open. Very unlike him to leave a security door open, but he closed it behind him.

“That was the vampire's doing wasn't it?” she asked, looking up.

The soft growl that eased through the ceiling was somehow reassuring—though she hadn't forgotten his reservations about how well he'd do against a vampire.

She went back to Devonte's bed and made her move on the board. Out in the hall the security door opened again, and someone wearing high heels
click-click
ed briskly down the hall.

Stella took a deep breath, settled back on the end of the bed and told Devonte, “Your turn.”

He looked at the board, but she saw his hand shake as whoever it was in the hallway closed in on them.

“King me,” he said in a fair approximation of triumph.

The footsteps stopped in the doorway. Devonte looked over her shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Stella inhaled and took her first look.

She'd thought a vampire would be young, like her father. Wasn't that the myth? But this woman had gray hair and wrinkles under her eyes and in the soft, white skin of her neck. She was dressed in a professionally-tailored wine-colored suit. She wore a diamond necklace around her aging neck, and diamond-and-pearl earrings.

“Well,” said Stella, “No one is going to think you look like a cuddly grandma.”

The woman laughed, her face lighting up with a cheer so genuine that Stella thought she might have liked her if only the laughter didn't showcase her fangs. “The boy talked, did he? I thought for sure he'd hold his tongue, if only to keep his own secrets. Either that or broadcast it to the world, and then you and I wouldn't be in this position.”

She gave Stella a kindly smile that showed off a charminglymismatched pair of dimples. “I am sorry you had to be involved. I tried to get you out of it.”

But Stella had been dealing with people a long time, she could smell a fake a mile away. The laughter had been real, but the kind concern certainly wasn't.

“Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room where her father could drop on top of her, but how?

The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a—” she took a deep breath, “—werewolf.”

The news didn't seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be over-matched. He'd been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.

“Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren't so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”

The vampire sneered right back and, on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella's neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”

David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire's voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.

Patience, patience
, he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.

If the vampire's theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he'd tried to drive her father through the wall.

The vampire had no trouble grabbing it . . . or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.

She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn't see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.

“Now,” whispered Stella diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.

Even though Devonte's chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella's motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling redgold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire's look like toys.

For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother's lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf's bulk—until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.

With an inhuman howl the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she'd had of her face, Stella saw something terrible . . . evil.

“Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.

She hadn't been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte's warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urban smile and
GQ
posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn't holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing though fabric but not skin.