Something’s not right, Amelia murmured in the back of Cormac’s mind. Cormac scanned the depressing parking lot outside his apartment building, half-full of beater cars. Orange streetlights bathed the washed-out concrete walls. The roar of cars on the nearby highway beat at the air. His shoulders ached. They’d spent the afternoon putting up magical protections around a dog park on the other side of the city, which seemed weird to him but he didn’t question anyone willing to write a check. Amelia knew the spells, but Cormac did the work, seeing as how she didn’t have a body. That meant he’d been the one with his arms raised, waving sage and candles while walking around a couple of acres of territory. He was tired.
Amelia could only see what he saw, but she’d honed some magical instinct in him. When she said something wasn’t right, Cormac listened. Which meant he didn’t walk straight into the ambush at the base of the stairs.
Movement flickered, a shadow breaking away from the concrete and launching straight at him. He knew right off what it was. Nothing moved that fast, nothing was so at home in darkness. This was how vampires got the reputation of vanishing like smoke. You’d look and the vampire simply wouldn’t be there anymore. Cormac dived for shelter, hitting the asphalt and rolling under the nearest car, a sedan with busted fenders, while reaching inside his jacket for a stake. To think, some people made fun of him for carrying stakes everywhere.
A thump pounded the top of the car as he rolled out the other side, and the vampire came pouncing down on top of him. Cormac braced the point of the stake upward. The guy kicked it out of his hand, midair, then kneed him in the gut. Move like that shouldn’t have been possible, but then neither should vampires. Ignoring the pain, the air knocked out of his lungs, the shock in his back, Cormac writhed and kicked up, catching the guy in the nuts. That still worked on vampires at least.
The thing about fighting vampires, your defenses had to be solid. Not a crack. That was the only way you’d get a chance to strike back. They moved so fast, their reflexes were so sharp, they’d be on you and breaking your neck or ripping out your throat before you knew they were there. You couldn’t let them get close, bringing their power and experience to bear. Couldn’t let them catch your gaze, stare in your eyes, and immobilize you.
This one must have followed Cormac home. That was his mistake, thinking no vampire would ever be caught dead—undead— in this low-rent neighborhood off the Boulder turnpike. So he came home to the run-down two-story apartment block and relaxed before getting to his own front door.
Cormac recognized the guy. Sharp nose, long face, a flop of hair. The permanently offended snarl of a self-important minion. About ten years ago in Chicago, he took on a gang of vampires running a protection racket on a human neighborhood. He wouldn’t dignify the group with the label Family, though they were sure trying to act like one. They hadn’t been old enough, rich enough, or smart enough to avoid trouble. Cormac took out the leader of the bunch, a guy calling himself Lord Edgar, and half his followers. The rest had scattered, gone to ground.
Turned out, at least one of them had just been biding his time.
Cormac managed to shove himself out from under the guy, looked wildly around for the stake, raced for it—the vampire grabbed his ankle and he fell. Cormac immediately kicked, smashing the guy’s nose. Didn’t kill him. Not much would.
Nothing in Amelia’s magical arsenal could help them unless he could get away, get a little space and time for her to work a spell. But that was just it, vampires never gave you that time. She stayed quiet and let Cormac’s body and fighting instincts try to save them.
He ran. Didn’t think he could get to his front door and the safety of the threshold before the vampire caught up to him. He needed a weapon. The apartment building had exterior stairs leading up to the second floor. Cormac dodged behind the steel frame of the staircase and spotted the door to the janitor’s closet.
“You’ll pay for what you did!” the minion yelled, from the other side of the stairs.
“That was a long time ago,” he shot back, which was a stupid thing to say to a vampire, which was only part of why Cormac worried that he was getting soft.
He had one more stake tucked in his inside jacket pocket. Pulled it out, held it outstretched while the vampire ran at him. Alas, the vampire wasn’t stupid enough to just run right up it. He grabbed Cormac’s wrist and squeezed, causing him to drop the stake. He could have broken Cormac in half right there; instead, he paused, savoring the moment, leering with bared fangs and bringing himself closer, closer. . .
Cormac’s other hand was on the utility closet’s handle. He yanked open the door, fell in, knocking the vampire off balance and shutting the door behind him. As he hoped, a stack of mops and brooms lay piled up in the corner. He grabbed a broom with a wooden handle, set it under a foot and snapped it in half.
When the vampire opened the door, Cormac rammed the broken handle into his chest, right through his heart. The guy screamed, expression twisting with anguish.
The vampire couldn’t have been that old, a couple of decades at most. The body blackened, but it didn’t shrivel to a husk and turn to ash the way the old ones did, the rot of the grave if they had been allowed to rot in a grave. Becoming a vampire only delayed the inevitable. Vampires like this, throwing themselves on stakes for a Master who had been destroyed years before—what a waste. But nobody held a grudge like a vampire. They had the time to burn. Cormac let go of the stake, and the rotted body dropped at his feet.
Well, that was bracing.
Because the vampire didn’t turn to dust and blow away, conveniently disposing of itself, Cormac now had a body to deal with.
“I do not need this shit,” he muttered. Irate, he kicked it. The leathery skin made a disconcerting squishing sound.
It’s better than letting him kill you, Amelia stated, sounding nonplussed. But yes, it is a bother.
He dragged the body someplace where it would be exposed to sunlight before anyone found it. The apartment building’s dumpster had too much foot traffic, but behind the building lay a gravely stretch, a foot or two wide, between the building and a boundary fence. A couple of scraggily dead shrubs poked up through the rocks. No one went there, and it faced east. As soon as the rays hit it, it would burn to ash, then poof, gone. Hell, this was such a clear case of self-defense maybe he should call the police. Except no, not with a manslaughter conviction on his record. Besides, come dawn, there wouldn’t even be a body. Nothing to report.
Finally he got safely into his apartment and took a very long, hot shower to get the stink of dead vampire off him.
Explain it again, Amelia said when he finally got out of the shower. She’d at least given him some peace until he got clean. You went after an entire vampire Family by yourself?
“Wasn’t much of a Family. Most of them weren’t any older than that guy.”
You could have been killed.
“Turned out okay.”
There are times when I am grateful I didn’t know you earlier in your life. You seemed to have engaged in quite a lot of reckless behavior.
He barked a laugh. “If you only knew the half of it.”
She could know, if she wanted. But she was English, overly polite, and didn’t pry too much into the mind where she lived. That would be like rifling through the linen clo
set in the house where one was a guest, she insisted. Even though they were more like roommates.
Except with her, the door was always, always open. When he toweled off, she was there. When he slipped on sweatpants, so did she. Whatever he touched, she felt. They didn’t talk about it. Ignored it as much as they could. He avoided mirrors. When he needed to jack off, she pretended to leave the room, as if she could ever leave the room. And once in a while, he found himself in front of the mirror and hoping she was looking.
She wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
Cormac slept and dreamed in their valley.
His father had taken him camping here, a high valley in the Colorado Rockies where a snowmelt creek cut down through a meadow bowl, bounded by a pine forest. The sky above was searing blue, smudged with white clouds. No air smelled cleaner than this. No place felt safer. He and Amelia had built this shared space—part guided meditation, part visualization exercise— where they could talk. She’d had a body, once. Here, she did again, resembling the single old sepia-toned photo he’d seen of her, with her serious demeanor, her hair in a prim bun, her clothing precise, long Edwardian skirt and high-necked blouse. He liked being able to see her, to talk to her.
He lay back in the grass, hands laced under his head, eyes closed. Sleep within sleep. He thought he heard chickadees in the pines up the hill.
She sat nearby, leaning against an outcrop of rounded granite. Her hand tapped nervously against her knee in what seemed to be an unconscious gesture. A disembodied spirit shouldn’t have nervous ticks. If she existed only as consciousness, could she be unconscious of anything? This was why Cormac avoided the philosophy of it all.
“What?” he asked brusquely.
“Would you like to apprise me of any other outstanding grudges we might encounter?”
“Not particularly,” he said. “I didn’t even remember that guy until he was hissing spit in my face.”
“You destroyed a gang of vampires. How can you forget something like that?”
She wasn’t going to like the answer, so he waited, but she remained expectantly silent. “Because I used to do a lot of that sort of thing,” he said finally, and she blew out a frustrated breath. “They usually don’t come back for revenge.”
“Usually. How are you meant to protect yourself from random vampires seeking vengeance?”
Do a better job of keeping stakes and holy water in his pockets. Live in a never-ending state of vigilance. “I figure one of these guys’ll get me, sooner or later.” These battles just delayed the inevitable.
“If you die, I die.”
“You already died.”