Ding Dong...?
Five minutes later I stood with Nic outside of the apartment building. The city was bustling for a Monday, a steady pulse riding the night—energy in the air, people out and about. Heavy bass boomed in the distance and I hadn’t heard it in Zara’s apartment so she must’ve kept the place insulated from sound.
I started walking. Nicolette followed. This whole thing had better not turn into an intervention about suicide. I’d already walked out of one of those and I was pretty sure I could outrun Nic. Goddamn Drew and his fucking big mouth. If I saw him again, I would punch him.
Through a wall.
We wandered and the buildings seemed to grow a little more derelict the farther we went east. Nic didn’t offer any conversation and an easy quiet settled, like pressure was lifting and I didn’t have to be so tense, waiting for the bomb to drop. And why should it? She didn’t know me. She had no stake in this. Maybe she accepted it was none of her damn business—
I halted as a sudden chill rolled through the air. It wove under my clothes, touching my skin, digging in with ethereal needles.
Demon magic.
“Peri?” Nic said softly.
I glanced her way. “You don’t feel it?”
She shook her head, blonde hair blowing softly around the edges of her hood.
I splayed my fingers and reached out, feeling...feeling what, I couldn’t say. “There’s...fuck me, there’s a wall.” I glanced to the side, letting my peripheral vision do the work and pick out what was there. No thick tendrils of black smoke this time, but something lighter, like feathery trails. It went up, up, straight in the air, as well as down into the cement.
It gave me a tug, just a little nudge, something in me recognizing it. Something in it recognizing me.
“You should go back to the apartment,” I said as I began walking,
Nic kept up.
I held my hands out, feeling as I went, following the barrier of energy. When it cut into a building, I ducked down a side street, sensing where it bent and turned until I could feel it again out in the open. Something swelled in my chest, an odd feeling like pressure building and building.
“Where are you going?” Nic asked, her steps light behind mine.
“I’ll know when I get there.” The energy cut between two buildings and it was a tight fit but I squeezed through with brick scratching my jacket, my vampire shadow at my heels. The streets had a smell out here, thick with filth. More music shook the air, coming from various directions, and a bottle shattered in the distance. Nic jumped but kept following.
I paused as the alley broke and glanced around.
“This is—” she began.
“—where I was Saturday morning.” We’d come out roughly where the van had been idling. Granted, the scene was missing the bright light of day but my eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I recognized the intersecting walls, the space where I’d found the kidnapping in progress.
Fingers locked on my arm, Nic dragging me back. “Come.”
“What the—”
She was surprisingly strong, pulling me back through the short street. I wrenched my arm back and she came to a halt.
“What the hell?”
Her lips parted, hesitating on words, face pale in that dark hood. “I can...smell it.”
“What, demon magic?”
She went silent and dread sank in my gut, dropping lower and lower. My throat went dry. I took two steps back and she let me. I turned and stumbled the next few feet, back out into the open. Glanced around, looking, looking—
And I saw it.
The ground was dark with blood, right in the spot where I’d killed the woman. “I thought someone was cleaning this up?”
“I thought so too.”
Knots started up in my stomach. “You think...shit, did they come back and kill another kid?” Maybe Nic had been right—maybe I didn’t prevent anything, but just delayed it.
“The blood...it’s one source, whosever it is.”
Huh. “Vampire thing?”
She nodded. “I don’t smell a body either.”
I fished through my jacket for a penlight, withdrew it, and shone it on the ground. Lighting was shit, closed off from the bright streets beyond, and the buildings around us were dark. Maybe abandoned, maybe people just hadn’t paid their hydro bills. I cast the light around, crept closer—
And closer still.
Since when the hell was blood black?
I crouched, the soles of my boots scraping noisily on the cement. Fresh pain seared my leg and I winced, putting my weight on the uninjured one instead. “You’re sure it’s blood?”
“Oui.”
This is right where I killed that bitch. “Human? Not demon or something?”
“It could be demon, but your blood smells no different. I’m not Zara, but I’m still a vampire—I know blood.”
There was no question—the barrier I felt went straight through here. “You remember where the other locations were?”
“I can do you one better.” Something clicked and light flickered on, shining bluish over her pretty face. I rose to glance over her shoulder as she turned her cell phone toward me. “I’m synced with my files at home and I found two more possibilities last night while you were asleep. I widened the search at Zara’s suggestion. Not children, but low risk—John or Jane Does, believed to be homeless. Here’s the map.”
It was rough, but it looked like a circle, or part of one. Maybe they’d completed it in the past twenty-four hours. There were murder scenes northwest and southwest of where we stood, which was where the demon energy wall went.
“Shit.” This was not good. Not good. I didn’t know what the fuck it had to do with anything else we were doing but I had to grudgingly side with Nic—this was bad and it was somehow tied to me, so we had to figure it out. I pointed to the map. “What’s in the center?”
“Nothing I know of...” She zoomed in and squinted down at the screen. “Oh no.”
“Huh?”
“Come.” She made a hard right and jogged back down the alley I’d come through the other day, out onto a busy sidewalk. She glanced back and forth, then turned again, weaving between busy people on cell phones who barked if she nearly ran into them. But she darted, twisting to avoid brushing them, moving so swiftly that I had to jog on my sore leg to keep an eye on her. Spry little thing.
I followed, not bothering to ask what the fuck was going on because I doubted she’d stop to tell me. Another right, then a left, and we were into a residential area of pothole covered streets and litter in every corner. It was quieter, too, the rising sense of eyes in the shadows, criminals ready to lift the wallets of a couple of girls who didn’t belong there. I didn’t worry; I’d never been mugged, never been harassed, like even predators could tell not to fuck with me.
An old smell tinged the air the farther we went, like something...burnt clung to the atmosphere. Nic’s steps slowed as she paused to glance at street signs. Perhaps she hadn’t been to this part of town before.
“It’s up here,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me as she walked. “And I think it is right in the center of your circle.”
“What is?”
Another half of a block and she stopped. So did I.
We looked at an empty lot—or perhaps several—blocked off with tall chipboard around the perimeter. Around us, worn apartment buildings rose into the black night sky, making the empty lots like an odd little valley. The few unbroken streetlights spilled orange on the sidewalks and broken glass glittered. Layers of graffiti on the boards suggested the area had been closed off for a while. Signs declaring it a construction zone were bolted to posts but I didn’t think anyone had worked there in a year, at least.
“I’m drawing a blank,” I confessed.
Nic walked forward, crossing the street and heading to the lots. A wind kicked up and knocked her hood off, scattering her straw-yellow hair about her head; streetlamps above made the strands almost orange.
“Seriously, what the hell?”
When I caught up again, she turned to me, something worried in her eyes—a weight that pushed on me too, though I didn’t understand it. “What are the reasons for ritual sacrifice?”
“Uh...I’m not educated in this stuff, remember.”
“You recognized the demon magic. What does your intuition tell you?”
Shit. “Closing something? Opening it? Raising something? I’ve told you, I don’t really know about this shit.”
Nic gestured over her shoulder. “This used to be a building. Five and a half years ago, Zara told me it was blown up right in front of her. Peri, your sister lived—and was killed—right here.”
Demon magic. My magic—something from whatever hell dimension my family came from. Sacrifices, a circle...
They were trying to raise Mishka Thiering from the dead.