8

“Was that your sister?” Kett asked as the taxi pulled into midafternoon traffic on West Fourth Avenue.

“Foster, technically.”

“Ah. A witch?”

“Half, yes. You couldn’t tell?”

“Not through the wards. They are … impressive.”

“My grandmother’s.”

“Hmm, not entirely.”

I didn’t argue with him. I had, of course, contributed private spells and reinforcements to the defensive wards on my apartment under my Gran’s instruction. However, the impressive part was hers alone.

“Southwest corner of Vancouver General Hospital, please. Laurel and West Tenth Avenue, I believe.” Kett leaned back from speaking to the taxi driver, who took a quick right onto Vine Street to loop back east toward the hospital. The morgue, specifically. I imagined all hospitals had morgues, but this was the first time I’d thought about it. Actually, I’d never even been to the emergency room at Vancouver General, not once in twenty-three years.

I realized I was subconsciously leaning as far away from the vampire as I could, and therefore cramming my left shoulder into the car door. Though he’d shown up at my apartment looking almost human, I was still riding in the backseat of a taxi with a vampire who was stronger, faster, and far more deadly than me. The fact that his skin looked almost pink-tinged didn’t thrill me either. I imagined that meant he’d recently fed.

“So … the morgue,” I said. “We breaking in?”

The vampire — Kett, I had to keep reminding myself — turned his icy eyes from the road and looked at me. I didn’t meet his gaze. Everything he did had this deliberate quality to it, as if he thought about moving and then moved. Which was just fine, as I really didn’t want to see any more provoked movements on his part. My memory of the chunks of bridge cement in his hands was still fresh, and it was a little freaky if I watched him too closely.

“No,” he answered. Well, that was informative. He was in a chatty mood.

“Sienna tells me that vamp … your people don’t like being around the truly dead.” I slanted my eyes toward him. It looked like he was staring at my chest, but it was my necklace that had his attention — again. A girl could develop a complex around him. I’d only wound it around my neck twice this afternoon, and currently had the fingers of my left hand twined through a few of the rings — an unconscious mimicry of the vampire’s grasp in the club bathroom. I had my other hand resting on the invisible knife sheath at my hip. When had I become this wary, cautious person? Overnight, it seemed.

“Myth,” the vampire finally answered. I’d almost forgotten my question. He turned his gaze out the side window and I tried to not shudder my relief.

I’m not sure I could ever get used to this. I fought off the urge to call or text someone, anyone, as I turned to look out my window.

It was raining again. Big surprise.

The taxi ride took twelve minutes that felt like hours. We didn’t speak again. I let him pay for the cab.

Though we were parked in front of the emergency entrance at Vancouver General Hospital, the vampire stepped out of the cab and crossed to a nondescript door toward the middle of the sprawling building. Buildings, actually. The hospital grounds were large enough to take up an area of three blocks on the side. It was currently quiet, even in emergency. No speeding ambulances or intense, dramatic doctors. So TV didn’t get it right every time.

I guessed I was to follow Kett, though he gave no indication whether he cared one way or the other.

The unlabeled steel door opened to an elevator. The vampire hit the down button.

Great. I totally wanted to be in the tight confines of an elevator with a vampire as we travelled beneath the earth … to a morgue. Damn — internal sarcasm usually settled me … but not this time.

The ride was quick and painless. The elevator opened to a tiled hallway. Then the smell hit me — that of heavy-duty cleaning agents attempting to cover … darkness. Yes, now darkness had a smell. It was faint and gritty. Kett strode forward and paused at an office to speak to a nurse or attendant of some sort. She seemed immediately enamored with him, so I assumed they knew each other. Obviously, he didn’t look or move inhumanly to her human eyes. She didn’t notice me at all.

She led us down the hall and through double swinging doors into the morgue. And this the TV shows got totally bang on — creepy lighting and everything. Well, maybe I was the only one who thought it creepy. One wall was lined with steel, cubby-like cooler racks with numbered doors. Everything else was either tile or green-painted walls, if that’s what passed for green in a morgue. Washed out, dirty green. Dull, dead green … all right, I was aware I was obsessing about the wall color.

The nurse wandered over to the cubby labeled number six, pausing oddly with her hand on the levered handle. She turned to look back expectantly at Kett, and he turned to look at me.

It was only then I realized I wasn’t hearing properly. He moved his lips again. I inhaled and raised my hands partway to my ears before I understood. Magic. The vampire had been using some sort of magic, and I’d been caught in the wake of it.

In fact, I now suddenly seemed to be in the middle of a mild panic attack, like my body had recognized the magic and immediately fought its effects before my brain kicked in. I inhaled again, attempting to filter the almost toxic smells that coated the air here to find the oxygen my brain needed.

Sound came back, though the room was still deadly quiet. The vampire was watching me like I was some sort of mildly interesting science experiment.

“Are you ready then, Jade?” My name sounded foreign, as if he had to think to pronounce it.

I nodded.

He turned back to the nurse, who had just been standing and staring at him. She smiled and then opened cooler door number six. He’d spelled her — maybe speaking to her telepathically, perhaps compelling her movements. It seemed effortless for him to do so.

My stomach rolled with fear.

The nurse pulled out a long, telescoping tray from the cooler. A body, barely covered in a white sheet, occupied every inch of this tray.

Hudson. All six-foot-something of him. I’d thought he’d be in a body bag … or … I don’t know. I wrapped my hand around the hilt of my knife, and it helped steady me.

The nurse abruptly turned and left the room without a single glance around. Kett’s attention was on the body and some sort of chart I hadn’t noticed before. He’d probably gotten it from the nurse.

“You’re controlling her, aren’t you?”

“We aren’t exactly authorized to be here.”

“And the ends justify the means,” I muttered. Kett looked up at me as if puzzled. I had to stop drawing his attention. Though, now that I had it …

“Could you spell me like that?”

“It doesn’t seem so, though I haven’t tried very hard to ensnare you.” He returned his attention to the chart.

I thought about fleeing the room but took a firm step forward instead, just to dampen the flight instinct. So … mind control, just another reason to stay far away from vampires. Not that I needed more reasons.

Yes, I recognized that I was avoiding dealing with the body on the tray table before me.

I stepped up to the head. The sheet masked but didn’t completely obscure the outline of Hudson’s strong facial features … high brow, long nose, square jaw. The vampire stood on the other side, a few feet away from the body. He looked up from the chart — at me, not the body — but didn’t speak. Then again, he didn’t need to; I knew why I was here.

I shifted the sheet off Hudson’s face with a suppressed moan. If he wasn’t so pale and not breathing, I could have pretended he was sleeping.

I slipped the sheet farther down his chest and shuddered in relief when I didn’t see the autopsy cuts I’d prepared myself for. His chest was almost as perfect as it had looked in yoga. Except for the not-breathing thing. That really was the exception to everything, wasn’t it?

“How does this work? How do you stop the medical community from discovering he’s a … was a werewolf?”

“Religious beliefs, usually. But if it appears to be a murder or when we’re too late, memory spells and misplaced reports, of course. How do you not know that?”

“It’s never come up before. I’m a witch, born and raised by witches. We read as human.”

“Not if someone looked at your blood closely enough. If they knew what they were looking for. And you — you wouldn’t read human at all. How many times have you been to the hospital? Or the doctor?”

“Many times. Countless.”

“How many times were you the patient?” The vampire’s voice was low, nonconfrontational. It raised my hackles immediately.

“I just answered you! Many, many … times …” Wait. I hadn’t actually ever broken any bones or needed any stitches. There had been those spell accidents with Sienna, but I guess we hadn’t gone to a doctor then. Surely, I’d had my blood drawn for some sort of test? When had I suffered anything more than a cold?

I’d had a terrible fever when I was little. I remember Scarlett — I’d called my mother that even then — icing over wet hand towels with a whispered spell and placing them all over my body. Had she taken me to the doctor? I could distinctly recall the strain that the use of so much magic had placed on her as the evening wore on. She’d also mixed poultices and cast other healing spells. Funny, I couldn’t remember where my Gran had been that day. Scarlett had curled up next to me at dawn, just after the fever had broken. She hadn’t been much bigger than me, even then. She’d fit on one side of the twin bed no problem. The early morning sun had glinted off her strawberry hair, the glow of her magic the dimmest I’d ever seen it …

The vampire was smirking. What did he think he was implying?

“How quickly do you heal, witch?”

“None of your business,” I snapped. “As quickly as any human.”

He tilted his head. It could have been mistaken for some sort of concession, but it wasn’t. I tore my attention from him and looked down at Hudson.

On closer inspection, Hudson’s lips looked pale, bloodless. And a faint reddened outline of the trinket marred his neck and collarbone. I hovered my fingers over this burn but couldn’t bring myself to touch it. “Werewolves heal fast, don’t they?”

“In optimal health, yes.”

“So, the burn? It would have occurred near or after death?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m not a doctor!”

“You’re a dowser. Use all your senses, witch. I prefer to linger no longer than necessary.”

I thought about ripping his head off, but then dismissed the idea. Where was a good cupcake when I needed one? Right — at the bakery, where I should be.

I touched the burn mark that crossed Hudson’s right collarbone, the one closest to me. I ignored the inert feel of his skin and tried to concentrate on the magic.

“His magic is almost gone,” I whispered.

The vampire sighed at my apparent stupidity. “That’s a side effect of death for most.” Except him, of course, being a vampire and all. I didn’t point that out. Undeath was supposedly a prickly topic for vamps.

“But before he died, then … there’s a greater residual concentration in the burn marks and … has he … has he been drained? Of blood, I mean?”

The vampire moved with that creepy deliberate swiftness, flicking Hudson’s left wrist over the sheet. His lower arm was slashed vertically, though it looked like it had had a few days to heal. I slowly turned over his right wrist. Same slash marks.

“On the femoral artery near the groin as well, if you care to look further.”

I ignored this upsetting suggestion. “Drained of life blood and magic.”

“Yes.”

“While he was alive, because the wounds have tried to heal.”

“Yes.”

“… because our blood holds our magic?”

“Basically, yes.”

“Except she wanted all of it. Any magic she couldn’t collect in the blood … so she siphoned off the rest into the trinket?”

“Interesting. Possible, except the trinkets are left behind.”

“Through the trinket then, into another vessel or … her.”

“Her? The magic has a female tinge?”

“No … sorry, him or her.”

“Look closer, witch. A witch or sorcerer couldn’t do any of this without leaving a trace of their own magic.”

“There’s none. Just the trace of the trinket —”

“Your magic.”

“Not really. I mean the trace magic of the trinket. Yes, I’ve noticed a residual layer of my signature on the actual trinkets, but I have no capacity to infuse my magic into an object.” I was aware I was stumbling around the subject, stumbling around my knowledge and understanding. “Yes, if you work with an object long enough you can get residual, but no one has the power —”

The vampire laughed. God, he sounded human. He’d actually thrown back his head — his long, pale-skinned neck like carved marble — so that a deep, full-throated laugh emanated from within. I, or rather my ignorance apparently, amused the hell out of him. Or was that heaven in the vampire’s case? Where did religion place vampires in the heaven/hell spectrum?

“This is not funny, vampire!” I shouted, my fists clenched at my sides. I was suddenly furious. Furious that I was here at all, that I’d been dragged into a situation that was so beyond me … every fucking step, every fucking guess. “I’m trying! I’m here. I’ve never even seen a dead body. I’ve never even dowsed for magic like this, and you’re laughing at me. Laughing at my ignorance as you rip my life apart!”

The vampire stopped laughing as swiftly as he’d started. I was surprised he heard me over his own din. I was surprised he cared enough to stop.

“It is not I who’s ripping your life apart, Jade. Look beyond the magic of the trinket, as you call it. Please, we should not dally. The shapeshifters will become impatient, and they do not have my talent for subtlety.”

I dropped it. I already knew that wringing information out of him was next to impossible, so why bother asking any more questions? Plus, I had an inkling I was mixing a bunch of different feelings and confusions into one pot and that always brewed trouble for me.

I could have loved Hudson, had I managed to get beyond my own shit. I could have loved him.

I touched the half-healed slashes on his right wrist. I imagined the knife that had made the cut. I imagined the position of the wielder. I touched the burn at the edge of Hudson’s neck. I imagined the killer placing the trinket over his head. Had he been conscious? Had he fought? I remembered the taste of Hudson’s magic in the club, in the yoga studio. The perfect flow and depth of it … except …

Except that instead, I caught the taste of … a trace of something reminiscent of the scent of the morgue … something dark but not evil, of the earth, of …

Oh, God. I thought … I thought I knew this magic.

I ripped my hands away from Hudson and met the eager eyes of the vampire. I opened my mouth. No, I was wrong. I couldn’t vocalize. This magic wasn’t capable of killing a werewolf at the height of his power. This magic was —

“What is it, witch?” Kett demanded.

I snapped my mouth shut. I took a step away from the table, from the body, but really from the vampire.

My eyes were still locked to his icy gaze. I knew this was wrong, that I should look away. I felt the wall of his mind magic hit me full force. I actually staggered back and put up a hand as if to block the assault.

“Stop it!” I managed to say through gritted teeth. “Stop it!”

Another layer of magic twined through the vampire’s — a magic that couldn’t be here, in this room, this strong. A magic that felt wrong, felt different than it ever had before, stronger, darker …

“Stop it!” I screamed at the vampire, who was still trying to crack into my mind. “Something is wrong. Something is happening!”

The pressure of Kett’s magic dropped away from me and I stumbled forward. I’d never felt someone use magic against me in such force before.

The wrong feeling grew. It wasn’t coming from him.

“Articulate your thoughts, witch.” Kett sounded pissed. He sounded human again. I was starting to hate that he could do that, that he could play with my fear centers like that. Human or not human. Blood sucking monster or accessible, even sexy, guy.

“It’s … it’s …”

The body on the tray table moaned as if releasing its dying breath. Then it sat up.

I didn’t scream. No, I did something even worse. I threw myself forward and wrapped my arms around Hudson’s neck while joyful tears coated my cheeks. “Hudson,” I cried. “Oh, Hudson! … I thought you were … dead …”

Hudson, or what remained of Hudson, slowly and ponderously turned his face to me. I gazed up into his clouded eyes. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t see me. He didn’t see any more at all. He was dead. Someone else was looking through his eyes. Not that I knew that for sure, but I was damn sure someone was piloting Hudson’s body and that I currently had my arms wrapped around the neck of a zombie.

“Step away, witch!” Kett yelled.

The zombie’s head swiveled toward the vampire. Then the creature lurched forward.

And I, for some utterly unknown and stupid reason, hung on. So I’m a slow learner, sue me.

The zombie didn’t like me decorating its neck, so it threw me across the room. Literally. As in, I hit the far wall, smacked the back of my head on the tiled surface, and then dropped in a crumpled heap. I’m guessing that last part, because I pretty much lost consciousness when I hit the wall.

I thought there was a chance I’d broken my neck. But I wasn’t dead, so I guessed not. The room was dim, patchy through my blurred vision, which certainly didn’t bode well for brain damage. I thought my nose was bleeding and I was definitely confused, because the sound of pained grunting drew my woozy attention to the zombie — who had the all-powerful vampire pinned against a wall.

The room was torn apart. Literally. As in, chunks of wall and floor tile were strewn about the room, the ceiling lights ripped down and hanging from their wires. The zombie was missing an arm, or at least I was pretty sure that was what I could see a few feet away from my head. It seemed to be trying to claw its way back to the zombie.

Oh, God. I took a moment to roll over and throw up.

Kett didn’t look right. His clothing was torn and bloody, though he wasn’t bleeding. He seemed to be missing … chunks of himself. Like the chunks torn out of the walls and floor.

The zombie had trapped the vampire against the wall perpendicular to the one I was crumpled against. Neck-pinning one’s prey seemed popular among the undead. First Kett, and now the zombie. The zombie darted its head toward Kett’s neck, but the vampire managed to deflect the bite away to his shoulder. The zombie latched onto Kett’s flesh and then ripped a large piece … off … a large chunk of vampire shoulder flesh. I had to be seeing things.

Kett growled in pain. I was pretty sure I could see the actual bone of his collarbone.

The flesh in the zombie’s mouth dissolved into ash.

The zombie could hurt the unhurtable.

I thought about throwing up again as I watched Kett’s flesh seal over the shoulder wound, leaving a dent behind. I made it to my knees instead.

Kett saw me over the zombie’s shoulder and shook his head emphatically. His eyes were blood red. He lost a chunk of his neck for his distraction.

I gained my feet and swayed in place. Zombie, zombie, zombie … what the hell did I know about zombies that was actual truth?

Well, I certainly didn’t know that zombies trumped vampires.

I drew my knife.

“Get out, Jade. Get the fuck out. Find the shifter —” This time Kett lost a hunk of his lower arm. He’d been trying to pry the zombie away from his neck.

I needed leverage. My knife wasn’t long enough to cut off the zombie’s head in one slice. Nor was I tall enough, but I was banking on full decapitation being unnecessary.

The room had settled into a strange permanent tilt, but I was fairly certain that the entire room couldn’t be listing to one side. I rolled my neck and felt something snap back into place with a spasm of pain. That felt better, even though the pounding in my head was worse, like I’d just undammed the blood flow.

With my knife in my hand, the next two steps were easier than I anticipated. I jumped up on the now empty — and, oddly, still upright and intact — tray table.

I took one more wide stride forward to the very end of the table. Then, holding my knife in both hands over my head, I leaped upward and toward the zombie.

As my upward momentum became a downward fall, I thrust my knife, tip down, through the top of the zombie’s skull. The blade slid in easy and clean, right up to the hilt. A shock of magic — not my own — reverberated through the knife and into my arms, forcing me to let go of the weapon.

I hit the floor feet first, but couldn’t catch my balance. As I sprawled against the zombie’s back, it tipped sideways, taking me with it.

I scrambled a few feet backward on my ass. The zombie’s supine body lay between me and Kett, who had sunk down hunched against the wall.

The zombie — my knife still sticking out of his head — didn’t move.

I was aware I was sobbing, and that I had been doing so throughout my leap and stab, but I couldn’t stop. I’d just killed something … something already dead, but still something I’d once thought, however briefly, that I could love.

“You … stopped it,” Kett said. His voice was little more than a moan.

“Yeah, though it was probably a good thing it was distracted.”

Kett raised his eyes to mine. He didn’t look good. The floor around him was coated in the ash that his magic turned to when it died. That scared the hell out of me, but being scared was getting to be a pretty permanent state of being.

“You need to go. Stand. Move slowly,” Kett whispered, never taking his blood-red eyes off me. “Don’t look back. Go now.” He shuddered and pressed his hands to his stomach. A few of his fingers were sticking out at odd angles. He wasn’t healing anymore. “Go!” He also had fangs. I hadn’t seen those before.

Red eyes, fangs … injured vampire. I was a walking, breathing blood bag.

His magic hit me as it had before, trying to pin me in place.

I straightened despite it. He copied my movement, though he had to lean against and slide up the wall to do so.

I flicked my eyes to my knife in the zombie’s head. It was closer to the vampire than me.

Kett grinned. “I shall enjoy draining you, witch. It’s been a hundred years since I’ve hunted so freely. And I’ve never tasted magic like yours.”

Mr. Nice Vampire was gone. I was really wishing he’d stuck around a bit longer.

I ran.

I didn’t have a hope in hell.

His fingers brushed my hair.

I hadn’t even taken a second step. I had a feeling he was playing with me, despite his obvious need. He was toying with me just a bit before the big finale.

I was going to die and I’d just saved his freaking life. No good deed goes unpunished.

The double swinging doors from the hallway blew open, and fury burst through in the body of a nightmare. This monster grabbed the enraged, starving vampire and tossed him — yes, tossed, with one massive, clawed hand — through the far wall, all without even sideswiping me. The thing had to be seven feet tall but was partly humanoid in form. It turned to look over its shoulder.

“Get her out of here.” It spoke perfectly through a face that was malformed, caught in some cross between human and beast — though what beast, I wasn’t sure. Its teeth jutted out of an oversized jaw and were fanged top and bottom. Like a cat’s; not like the vampire’s.

The vampire was laughing from beyond the far wall, and there was nothing human about the sound. I totally would have peed myself except I was actually frozen in place.

Suddenly, Kandy was trying to pull me from the room, more roughly than was necessary. But then, I was resisting more than was healthy for me. In my morbid fear, I just wanted to watch —

The vampire was on the monster before I knew he’d reentered the room.

The beast raised a clawed hand wider than a medicine ball, and smacked the vampire to the floor. The creature was gurgling some choking sort of laugh, like it was playing rather than in a battle for its life.

Kandy finally managed to yank me fully through the half-unhinged and dented swinging doors and out of the room. Two other werewolves — Lara and the tall blond, who were calm but glowing green around the eyes — waited in the hall. I clicked two and two together and figured out the identity of the monster. I’d blame the delay on whatever head injury I was currently suffering, but … well, I wasn’t known for being quick on my feet uninjured either.

“He’s not a wolf,” I said as Kandy pulled me past the two werewolves and continued dragging me toward an emergency exit, which opened to reveal stairs, not the elevator. I’d figured out the half-beast was Desmond Llewelyn, the Lord and Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack.

“No, a cat.” Kandy shoved me up the stairs in front of her.

“He didn’t look like any cat I’ve ever seen.”

“Half-form. Some of us can partly change, and meld the strength of our animal forms into the mobility of our human. Opposable clawed thumbs and all that.”

Oh. That was clear. Not. I wondered if he liked cream and catnip as much as my childhood cat, Lester, had. Kandy’s stifled giggle informed me I’d wondered that last bit out loud.

“But you’re a wolf?” I asked.

“Most of us are.”

How had I not known that not all shapeshifters were wolves? The Compendium had totally let me down in that respect. Shouldn’t the werewolf section have referenced a shapeshifter entry? I’d noticed the vampire calling the werewolves ‘shapeshifters,’ of course, but I’d thought he was just being all correct and elitist, as usual.

Kandy slammed her palms on the bar of the emergency exit door at the top of the stairs, and we were suddenly in the fresh air. Well, the fresh air of an alley between two four-storey hospital buildings — but still, I breathed deeply, over and over again, to get the smell of morgue and undead out of my nostrils, out of my brain.

Kandy propped me up against a cement wall and began to pace the short strip of pavement twenty or so feet in front of me. Like she was securing her territory, or perhaps securing her prisoner. I was happy to be out of her bruising grasp. My upper left arm was tingling as if she’d actually hindered the blood flow.

“He’s going to kill him,” I said.

“Nah, they’re sort of friendly, as much as a shifter and a vampire can be. He’ll just subdue him. He looked pretty beaten up already.”

“I meant Kett would kill Desmond.”

Kandy barked out a laugh. I was pretty tired of being the butt of everyone’s jokes, so I chose to ignore her and rest my aching head against the concrete wall. My neck really was killing me. And whether vampire trumped were … cat? Well, that was way out of my hands and league.

Ah, damn it. I’d left my knife in the zombie’s skull.