| |
An unmarked car rolled to a stop in front of the cemetery, signaling the end to my five minutes of peace. Shortest five minutes ever.
Reluctantly, I lifted my head from Sawyer’s beefy shoulder and untangled my hand from Eddie’s, then hopped down from the log pile in their backyard. “Welp, time to go.”
Sawyer jumped down, too, executing the movement flawlessly for the mountain of a vamp he was. “You sure that’s him?”
“Oh yeah.” Even from this distance, Detective Appelt’s fury rolled from the car in oily black waves.
It was frowned upon to escape jail after an arrest—who knew?—and since he’d been the one to arrest me, I was sure he was pissed. But that angry road went both ways. He’d stolen my slayer power in a creepy black cell in the police station’s basement.
I intended to get it back. With violence, if necessary, or at the very least, a good old-fashioned kidnapping.
Eddie leaped from the log pile, the air rushing through his wild blond hair, and then pushed up his adorkable glasses once he landed. “We’re coming with you tonight, Sunshine. This guy stole your powers, so he can’t be trusted.”
“No.” I glanced at the woodshed near the far corner of the backyard and swallowed thickly. The door was partway open, and murmured voices drifted through, too low for me to hear. “I need you both here with Jacek for moral support and to make sure he doesn’t kill Ro—” I sighed. “The bad vamp who’s in there with him.”
I couldn’t actually say his name—Ronick—because he’d split my hand open with his sword that had been doused with the same spell that made me unable to tell anyone I was the slayer. He wanted to kill Jacek, so I captured him, eerily similar to how Ronick’s brother had captured Jacek about two hundred fifty years ago. Needless to say, I didn’t feel good about it. I also didn’t feel good about dying, either, and so far Ronick and his sword were the only ways I could see to prevent that from happening.
Sawyer stepped up close, his silky black curls framing his perfect face. He brushed a loose hair from my cheek that had fallen from my bun, his touch chilly in the cool night air. Goose bumps swept over my body as he cradled my face in his large hand, his kind golden eyes shining with moonlight. “The other cell in the woodshed is for this...detective?”
I nodded, not missing the note of derision in his voice, though I knew without a doubt it wasn’t aimed at me. But maybe it should’ve been.
“How will you get him in there?” he asked.
I tipped my head toward Night’s Fall, the sword leaning against the log pile, its black steel a long shadow against the blue tarp. “By sword-point. And stake-point. Basically all my points.”
“And if he has a gun?” Eddie asked softly. “Because I would imagine he does.”
“I have the new Kevlar vest Jacek got me. He can shoot me all he wants, but that doesn’t mean I’ll just be standing there taking it. Dude stole my powers.” I lifted my hand with my index finger and thumb centimeters apart. “I’m just a little bit bothered by that.”
So much so that I was willing to imprison him next to Ronick, like a gradual collection of those who’d wronged me until they made things right. My stomach coiled tight around the hundreds of knots already there. At least I hadn’t resorted to torture. Too much. Not at all like what Jacek had endured. But would I? It was my life on the line—Jacek’s, too, if Ronick had his way—and I didn’t have much time to dilly-dally around with being nice. Nice didn’t win battles. Forget making it to my twenty-first birthday—Paul could very likely kill me even sooner without my slayer power. I seriously doubted dark unknowns like him stopped their murder-the-slayer quest because the slayer had a run-in with a meddlesome detective.
So would I resort to torture in order to live? Signs pointed to ask me later. Sawyer had told me I would have to become a monster to defeat the monster, but so far, none of my vamps had run away from me in terror. A good thing. No, a great thing. There was no way I could defeat Paul all on my own without them, my lovers, my only family, my confidantes, my rocks in this shitstorm.
I twined my fingers with Sawyer’s, still cupping my cheek. “I’ll call you if I need you.”
“We’ll be standing right here,” Eddie said, gazing out over the fence toward the graveyard. “We can see everything.”
“That detective won’t be able to do anything but talk to you,” Sawyer said. “That’s it.”
I nodded, grateful they had my back. “Keep an ear on Jacek. Hopefully when I see you again, I’ll have my powers back or the guy who took them from me. His choice.”
Eddie’s lips quirked up. “Let’s hope he makes the right one.”
Pulling away from Sawyer, I turned and picked up the sword, its weight tipping me off balance a little, and then held it out in front of me. My point would be better made with the sword out and...uh, pointed. On the other side of the gate that led to the front of the house, I discovered my duffel bag full of stakes. One of my vamps must’ve brought it on their way out. My chest swelled with warmth as I stuck several stakes throughout my slayer ensemble for easy reach—one in my boot, another in the belt loops of my jeans, and a third speared through the bun on top of my head, Pebbles-style. Then I slinked across the porch and up the street a bit, sticking to the shadows, sword in hand. I didn’t want to give Detective Appelt any more information about me—like why I was at this particular house—than he already had. The guy had so much ammunition to use against me that I might as well have a target stamped to my forehead instead of my usual GTFO message.
Since he was parked along the side of the cemetery, I walked straight toward his headlights, the idle of his engine the only sound in the otherwise quiet night. When I was about ten feet away, I stopped and waited. Only he didn’t get out. Had he fallen asleep? Decided to hell with me for one more round of Candy Crush? Behind the beams, he was only a vague shadow behind the wheel. Maybe he was sizing me up, and maybe, like others who had done that exact same thing, he would be severely dumbfounded by my true size, slayer powers or not.
I planted the tip of Night’s Fall into the street in front of me and glared him out of the car. Eventually, it worked. He cut the engine but not the lights, then clambered out, keeping the door open as a shield between him and me. He was an even darker shadow now, condensed with secrets.
“You’re a slippery one, Belle Harrison,” he said.
I sighed, thinking I should legally change my name to Just Belle. “And you’re not who you say are, Detective Appelt. You took something from me.”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
He went silent, possibly a bit of payback for our question-and-non-answer session at the police station.
“I didn’t kill Tim.”
“But you know who did.”
My turn to go quiet, but the weight of it likely spelled everything out in gory, blood-drenched detail. I glanced at the gate of the cemetery and beyond it, trying and failing to scrub that horrible night out of existence from my head. I could’ve prevented Tim’s death, but I didn’t. In some ways, I deserved to rot inside a black cell in the police station with that guilt strapped like a boulder to my shoulders. Or I had to make it my mission to not let anyone else get hurt, no matter what. If that meant sharing carefully veiled slices of info, then I would do it.
“I saw Tim’s killer at the police station,” I blurted. “A picture, I mean. On the missing person’s bulletin board. His name is Paul, wears a bowling shirt, looks like he’s never seen a comb.”
“Paul...” the detective said, weighing the name.
“Yeah.” I twisted Night’s Fall’s blade into the gravel at my feet. “Just let me handle him.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because I’m the one he wants dead.” I stared at him straight-on so he would know I was telling the truth.
After a long silence, he strode out from behind his car door and ambled forward, but still a safe distance away. The beams from his car highlighted his buzz-cut hair, making it appear more white than blond. He wore a dark suit with the jacket unbuttoned and a deep frown, both the norm for him. “So you want me to turn over a murder case’s potential suspect to you, just like that, so you can...handle him.” He posted his hands on his hips, folding his jacket back enough for a clear view of his badge and gun holstered to his hip, and lifted his eyebrows. “The law doesn’t work that way.”
“But it does lock women up in cells in the basement and steals their power?” My volume rose and cut through the night. I pointed the sword at him and widened my legs into a fighting stance. “I don’t recall any episode of Law & Order ever panning out quite like that.”
He shrugged. “Where’s your proof?”
Roiling heat simmered underneath my skin. The nerve of this guy. “My proof? So glad you asked. On my way out of the police station, I changed into that guard’s uniform and was shot in the back. I still have the uniform with the bullet hole and my blood all over it, as well as my old Kevlar vest that saved my organs. I’m sure that will corroborate at least some of my story, and I’ll gladly sing the rest from the top of a mountain to anyone who listens. There’s your goddamn proof. Now, give me my power back.”
He tipped his head at the ground, either considering a pothole or what I’d just told him, and flicked his dark eyes up to me again. “Did you cause all that damage at the police station?”
“Damage? No. I was the one being shot at.”
“No one seems to remember what happened there that night.” He sighed. “Since you’re in a truth-telling mood, do you mind telling me why you tried to open the door in the Appelt mausoleum?”
“The same reason anyone opens a door, I guess.” What a strange question.
“Not the main door. The door in the floor.”
“Ah, the trapdoor.”
He nodded. “Your fingerprints were all over the handle.”
Funny thing about the doors in that mausoleum—I had a hell of a time opening them, and if I did happen to, they wouldn’t stay shut. The mausoleum was also the only place where Paul’s magic couldn’t affect me.
“Curiosity?” I said.
His gaze drilled into me. “Stop being curious. That door stays closed.”
“Why?”
“It stays shut.” He pointed a finger at me, so of course I thought about lobbing it off with Night’s Fall. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Oh, I disagree.” Whether he had the Appelt name or not, that mausoleum was like a safe space for me with its anti-Paul magic, which meant it was tied to both of us in some way. But how? “That Paul guy I was telling you about? I don’t think he likes your family mausoleum all that much. Which means I’m a huge fan of it. So what’s up with the trapdoor?”
He tensed, squeezing the air around him with a sharp inhale. “What did you just say?”
I ground my teeth in frustration. This didn’t have to take all night, but it sure would if we kept talking in circles. “Paul. Mausoleum. Bad.”
That seemed to drive the point home and stunned Detective Appelt into silence for a moment. “Paul isn’t really Paul, is he?”
I frowned. “No...why?”
“It wasn’t just your fingerprints I found on the trapdoor’s handle.”
“Okay...”
“Someone else came in and tried to open it.”
“Not Paul.” I shook my head, grasping at the connections being made but still not understanding them. “I don’t think he can go inside it.”
“Not Paul,” the detective agreed, “but someone who wants to help him.”
“Help him?” I sucked in a breath. Did they want to help him kill me, too, then?
Detective Appelt rubbed his jaw and stared at the pothole again. “My family has been guarding that door for millennia. It’s the reason the mausoleum was built up around it, and a graveyard around it hundreds of years ago, so the Appelts can guard it even in death.”
“Guard it from what?” I asked, my voice losing most of its edge.
“A dark unknown.”
I sagged against Night’s Fall, pointing its blade into the ground again. It was currently the only thing keeping me upright. Paul wanted inside that trapdoor. He also wanted me dead. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“What’s inside it?” I asked.
He chuckled, so humorless and dark that it ripped a chill up my back. “No one’s ever opened it to find out.”
Whatever it was, it had to be bad. And to think I’d actually tried to pry it open with a shovel and attacked it with a flamethrower. Here, Paul, you poor thing. Let me help you open this door that’s not supposed to open so you can play with what lurks underneath. I could just punch myself in my own throat for being so stupid. I’d even considered asking Sawyer to see if he could open it. So fucking stupid. That saying was wrong—if one door shuts, another opens. No. Slam it closed, lock them both, and don’t. Touch. Anything!
“We’re on the same side, then.” My voice warbled slightly, betraying my taut nerves. “You want to keep the door shut against the dark unknown. I want to destroy the dark unknown before it kills me. We can work together on this.”
He sighed while he studied me closely. “Why you? Why does it want to kill you?”
I couldn’t tell him. The golden letter I’d received informing me of my destiny when I was nine years old prevented me from saying anything about what I was as soon as I’d touched it. To humans, anyway. But maybe I could skate around it in a broad circle. I’d tried that with Mom several times, though, and I think she thought I’d made an early career choice as a mime.
“Just think about it for a second, Detective. You know I had magic or you wouldn’t have stolen it.”
His eyes narrowed. “You can’t tell me, can you?”
I shook my head.
“The only reason I took it and put you in jail was because I thought you might’ve been working with this...Paul to get the trapdoor open.”
“This other person...” I started. “The one who really is helping Paul. Do you think they have power?”
“They would have to,” he said, shrugging. “Regular humans like myself aren’t allowed to even touch the door in case one of us stumbles across it by accident. I’ve seen pictures of those humans who tried, and it did not turn out well.”
Yet another reason to never open a strange door again. Lesson definitely learned. “But this person who tried to open it wasn’t Paul?”
“We have the fingerprints on file for the real Paul from an incident in his youth. They’re not even remotely the same. Besides, the mausoleum has been spelled by a coven of witches to keep him—it—out.”
So someone not human was really trying to help him. Voluntarily or because he was strolling? Paul had a tendency to take walks through people, including myself, to control them. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to side with a murderous, creepy thing that only knew how to say two sentences, but maybe that was only because I was on his hit list. No. Never mind. Even if I wasn’t, I still couldn’t imagine it. Still, the thought of another person helping him, a person who might take great joy in seeing me dead, shook my foundation hard enough to rattle my teeth together.
Wait. Did he just say a coven of witches?
“Did you just say a coven of witches?”
He nodded. “They deal in light magic, the good kind.”
Vampire slayers. Vampires. Witches weren’t that far of a stretch.
“But you didn’t steal their power, did you?” I said. “I’m going to need to take my power back.”
“Not tonight.” He turned and started for his car.
“What?” I followed, Night’s Fall readied to get stabby. “What do you mean not tonight? We do this right now.”
He stopped behind his open car door. “I’m not going back to the station right now. You gave me a name, a face. I need to warn some people so they can keep a lookout.”
“You need my help.”
“So help.” He waved his hands in the air and then climbed back into his car. “The spell on the mausoleum seems to be weakening since the door won’t close. Find out why.”
“No, you don’t seem to get it. He’s after me.” I rammed the tip of Night’s Fall into his hood, and it sliced through the metal like it was warmed pie. “I need my power back, goddamn it!”
He started his car and shoved it into gear, but I would be damned if I moved from this spot without making him give back what he stole.
Which was why, apparently, he’d shifted into reverse. Bastard. Tires screeched as he started to peel away, and I was forced to pry Night’s Fall loose or else he’d steal that too. He maneuvered the car to the side of the road so he could turn around.
And also to shout out his open window, “Come by the station tomorrow.”
Rage boiled my blood as I glared after his fading taillights. Tomorrow. What about tonight? How dare he take part of my identity and then schedule its retrieval. This wasn’t a dog pound. My slayer power was mine. I might resent it at times, hate it even, but it had become a part of me over the last eleven years. It had seeped underneath my skin, pressed between my ribs, and wound around my entire being like a noose bound tight with purpose. Without it felt wrong. Empty. I was still the slayer without my power—so says me anyway—but the title and the magic went together. And minus my power, I didn’t stand a chance against Paul.
Maybe Detective Appelt was a misogynist piece of shit and was just threatened by me. No power for you, Belle Harrison, until I say so. You’re just a woman. The man has this all under control.
“Yeah, well, sorry about your penis, I guess,” I growled at the empty street.
Only it wasn’t so empty.
Eddie stood at the edge of his lawn, a cold breeze tumbling his messy blond hair over his glasses. He held his fists by his side, his lethal red gaze aimed down the street to where the detective had disappeared. Fury rolled out of him, so much so that it hesitated my steps.
“I heard him yelling at you,” he said without looking at me, his voice edged with violence. His fangs shimmered in the moonlight. “I could really go for some detective blood right about now.”
“Slow your roll there, Eddie. I need him alive.” I crossed in front of him so he’d look at me instead of a murderous possibility.
His expression instantly softened, the angry red in his eyes fading to a vibrant ochre. His fangs retracted, slowly, as if in case the detective returned. “No one deserves to be yelled at, least of all you.”
A painful lump pulled at my throat hard enough to sting the backs of my eyes. Yelling likely wasn’t Eddie’s favorite thing because of his horrendous home life when he was still human, about seventy years ago, give or take. He and his siblings had suffered unimaginably at the hands of his parents, so much that even Jacek, held prisoner and tortured for hundreds of years, had described Eddie’s life as “hell on earth.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s not.”
“But it will be.” Somehow. I couldn’t bear to think otherwise. That felt too much like giving up. “I still have to patrol, but I’ll fill you in later, okay?”
He nodded, his protectiveness sweeping over me even as I turned toward the cemetery.
A new lock adorned the iron gate, and once again, I smashed it to pieces with the stake from my bun. Night’s Fall was too pretty to smash things with, but I would certainly cut a bitch if I needed to with it. Plus, it was too heavy to swing if I didn’t have to when my body’s muscle mass could fit into the hole of a Krispy Crème donut. I really needed my slayer strength back. I also needed to not think about donuts.
Inside the graveyard, all appeared quiet and still, but when I wound deeper through the statues and headstones on the familiar rocky path, a low creak scraped a shiver across my shoulders. I stopped and zeroed in on the sound. What a surprise. It was coming from the Appelt mausoleum tucked away near the back. The stone door stood wide open.
My body went rigid. I gripped Night’s Fall and my stake even tighter. It wasn’t Paul. Detective Appelt had said he couldn’t come inside the mausoleum, and I was pretty sure Paul needed to refuel after strolling through the entire town to get Podunk City’s residents to kill me. So maybe I would finally come face to face with whoever—or whatever—was helping him.
I started forward, my breaths shallow, my footsteps as feather light as I could make them. If someone were in there, I could try to reason with them, explain that Paul was shifty as fuck, and if that didn’t work, I would turn them into a pincushion until they saw the error of their ways. Something told me it was much too late for them to have a come-to-Belle’s-side moment, though.
Pitch black crowded the inside, a color I only associated with the inky shadows that dripped from Paul’s static-noised nightmare veil he liked to drop on me on occasion. Slowly, steadily, he really was creeping his way into the mausoleum by way of whatever was helping him. But why? What was it about that trapdoor?
A violent shudder shook down to my toes at the thought. I closed in on the open stone door, my heartbeat thrumming. My phone was in an evidence bag at the police station, so it would have to be just me and my shitty human eyeballs rolling around the inside of the mausoleum. Not literally rolling. Jesus, I creeped myself out sometimes.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust from night to almost nothingness, but then vague shapes appeared—the window on the far wall now taped up with a garbage bag, the steps leading down, and a stone coffin lying on top of them. Again. I couldn’t blame Mr. Appelt for wanting to get out of here, whether he was dead or...dead. He was most definitely dead. But it was freezing in here, probably twenty degrees colder than the late fall night pebbling goose bumps up my back. And it felt...bad. Heavy, too, just like the air did when Paul was near.
Some of this was a drastic change from just last night when I’d spent the night in here, not-so-comfortably in Mr. Appelt’s coffin with Ronick. But some of it hadn’t changed. The trapdoor was still shut. Hooray, hooray.
Despite all the changes, the mausoleum stood empty, save for Mr. Appelt. A weird mix of relief and frustration settled into my gut. I loosened a breath and grabbed the edge of the door to pull it shut. It protested with a loud creak and smacked the corner of the stone coffin lying in the way. To hell with doors, forever and ever amen. Baring my teeth, I pushed my weight against the stone coffin until sweat popped out on my forehead. Gravity helped a little, and the coffin budged half a centimeter down the stairs. Enough for the door to close. Except it wouldn’t. I heaved and pulled, but all I did was make it groan.
It stood as a wide-open invitation to Paul.
Whenever he was ready.
I had a feeling that would be soon.