“This feels like the start of a movie where everything goes horribly wrong,” she said in greeting. She had both hands wrapped tight around a tall cup of coffee. She smelled of office work, too much coffee, breath mints.
“It does, doesn’t it?” I said, grinning. “You’re just in time to get in on deciding what car you want to ride in.”
“Tina’s with me,” Cormac said. “We can figure out just how we’re going to play this.”
That meant the rest of us were not with him.
“Detective Hardin, I don’t know if you remember Tina McCannon?”
The two women shook hands and exchanged polite greetings before Tina turned to join Cormac at the Jeep.
“You going to be okay?” I asked her quietly.
“Sure.” She shrugged. “He’s kind of cute, you know.”
“Then have fun.” Should I warn her? Should I warn him?
Cormac, the man himself, shut the Jeep’s back door and gave us a cursory glance before climbing in the driver’s seat.
“You did tell him I was coming,” Hardin asked.
“Yeah. Briefly.”
She pursed her lips, considering. “Separate cars. Good idea. I’ll be asleep in the backseat if you need me.” She stomped off to Ben’s car and climbed into the back.
“Keep your phones on,” Cormac said through the lowered window, then started the engine and pulled into the drive. Tina waved back at us.
“This is going to be a very long drive,” Ben observed.
I sighed. Yes, it was.
* * *
SEVEN HOURS, a couple of stops for gas, and a terrible fast-food lunch later, we pulled into Albuquerque in the middle of the afternoon. Apart from a week a few years ago when I was on the road, I’d never spent time here. The place was an unlikely city in the middle of a very wide desert. Kind of depressing.
Tina pulled me aside at one of the stops. She seemed to be surviving the drive with Cormac, but she obviously needed to talk. We walked across the gas station parking lot with the excuse that we needed to stretch our legs. She’d put her hair up, and was still bundled in a sweater and jacket. I wondered if the heater in the Jeep worked. She was right on the edge of saying something, trying to find the words. I waited.
Finally she said, “Anyone who has any kind of relationship with him is going to have to have a relationship with both of them. Does he know that?”
I looked at her, part astonished, part horrified. “Are you considering it? A relationship? With Cormac?”
“I don’t know—he’s got that rugged thing going. But I’m kind of thinking he’s already taken.”
I had absolutely no response to that. They were both grown-ups, they could do what they wanted. But I shied away from trying to actually picture the reality of the pairing. I’d had my chance with the guy. Long time ago now. But he still looked at me sometimes in a way that made me wonder.
Let it go.
“Do you ever hear from Jeffrey?” I asked. Jeffrey Miles, another professional psychic, a good friend, and another victim of that damned reality show. Like Tina, he’d been shot, but he hadn’t recovered. Tina could communicate with the dead—sometimes.
She smiled, but the expression was sad. “Sometimes I think I do. Just the feeling that he’s looking over my shoulder. Nothing in words, you know?”
“Yeah. I have my own ghosts looking over my shoulder. We could maybe use a few guardian angels looking out for us on this one.”
This seemed to cheer her up. “Maybe Anastasia’s out there keeping an eye on us.”
Wasn’t that a nice thought? Ben waved us back over to the cars, he and I switched driving, and we continued on.
We arrived in the city with a few hours of daylight left to scout, to choose our ground. To set the trap.
Cormac and Amelia had negotiated a meeting place at the southwest edge of town, at Petroglyph National Monument. I couldn’t decide if this was good or bad. My impulse toward safety wanted us to meet in a very crowded restaurant or shopping mall, surrounded by lots of people, witnesses who meant everyone would be on good behavior, maybe impede potential fireworks. On the other hand, if there were going to be fireworks, best we go where no one would get hurt, yes?
Both Cormac and Roman, I gathered, wanted a location where they had a good line of sight, with few to no places to hide. Their mutual suspicion wasn’t, apparently, suspicious. Powerful magicians always acted this carefully, with this level of paranoia, Amelia assured us. Powerful magicians, and hunters. Cormac fit right in.
The place was bleak, dried-up sage and scattered juniper on a chalky plain, lined by low mesas of volcanic rock. The tract housing across the highway seemed unlikely, and a dusty smell tickled the back of my throat. The spot they’d chosen was a parking and picnic area a quarter mile or so from the visitors center. Nice place for a weekend outing, I thought. It would look lonely and desolate after dark.
We wanted to scout the site, but didn’t want to be seen scouting the area. Roman would have his own people out here, and they had the advantage—they knew us, and we didn’t know them. Ben and I walked the perimeter of the immediate area, taking careful stock of the scents as we went. We weren’t walking side by side, but staggered, a few paces apart, both of us looking in different directions—wolves on the hunt.
“No lycanthropes,” Ben said after a minute. His chin was up, his nose working, taking in the air. “Wolf or otherwise. I’d have thought this region would be filled with werewolves, there’s so much open space. Nobody’d bother them.”
“A few are around, but they’re not organized. I asked Rick about it once. He said there’s too much competition, too many other kinds of magic. Native American peoples maintained more of their traditions here. The Spanish and Mexican curandero traditions stayed strong. There’s too much magical protection against things like werewolves. At least, there’s a reputation for it. Keeps the riffraff out.” As far as I knew, Albuquerque didn’t have a Master vampire. That may have been part of why Roman agreed to meet here.
“Huh. I want to get the hell out of here, but I don’t think it’s from any magical protections keeping me out.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I smelled lizards and rattlesnakes, and the dust made my skin itch.
We didn’t smell anything unusual. If Roman had followers in the area, they were well hidden, or so entirely human that we didn’t notice them.
We met up with Hardin, who’d stayed by the road, and walked back to the cars. I caught her patting her jacket pockets and scowling. “I picked a hell of a week to try to quit smoking,” she muttered. “I’m going to be reaching for a pack for the rest of my life.” Finally, she stopped looking for the absent cigarettes, crossed her arms, and scowled.
After our survey, we retreated to an innocuous fast-food restaurant for another bad meal and last-minute planning. The mundane noises and goings-on around us seemed out of place, disconcerting. How could things possibly be normal? The place smelled like rancid grease. Most fast-food restaurants did. Cormac was the only one of us who ate much; the rest of us picked at fries and stared sullenly at a diagram he was drawing on the back of a napkin.
Cormac had sketched out the general layout of the parking lot, picnic tables, and outbuildings, and marked X’s where everyone would start out. We’d keep the Jeep hidden, since it was recognizably Cormac’s. Hardin would drive it off site, then keep watch over the outskirts of the area. Ben’s sedan was nondescript enough it could stay—ostensibly Tina would have had to get herself to the location somehow. Ben and I would patrol closer in, but still out of sight. Tina would be the only one visible, the lone magician here to make a deal. Cormac would be close by, in hiding, waiting to make the ambush. The place was officially closed after dark. We shouldn’t have anything in the way of innocent bystanders.
“It doesn’t matter how well you’re hidden, he’ll be able to smell you,” I countered.
“No, he won’t,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. Cormac had a few tricks he wasn’t
sharing, then. Fine.
The plan: Tina would engage Roman, keeping him in one place long enough for Cormac to shoot him. Easy. Yeah, right.
“If you shoot wrong, a crossbow could kill me just as well as it could kill him,” Tina said, her expression screwed up in concentration.
“That’s why you’re going to duck. Just as soon as he starts talking, get under a picnic table,” he instructed.
“Have you been practicing with that thing?” I asked. “Please tell me you’ve been practicing.”
He looked at me sidelong. “Trust me.”
“I do,” I said, and he arched what seemed like a surprised brow. Like he wasn’t sure.
Earlier, Ben suggested we fit Tina with a Kevlar vest in case of any misfires. Cormac nixed it. “If she’s wearing armor he’ll know something’s wrong. This is supposed to be a job interview, she’s supposed to be a magician. She has to act like it.”
He took this moment to pull out a bundle of Amelia’s amulets—a Thor’s hammer, an ankh, some bracelets, odds and ends that were actually magical, that might really protect her, but were also the kinds of things a magician would wear as a matter of course. Tina was also wearing a cross, but hidden under her shirt. Because she wasn’t supposed to know Roman was a vampire, and we didn’t want him to know we knew.
This had turned into a Rube Goldberg plot, where we thought we knew what Roman knew, but knew he knew we knew, and we had to work around that. We were second-guessing our second-guesses.
“This isn’t going to work,” I muttered. “It has to work.”
“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure,” Ben said.
I narrowed my gaze at him. “That’s a nerd quote, isn’t it?”
“I love you, honey,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I smirked back.
That did raise the question, though. “Would a nuclear blast kill a vampire? Or would it leave this burned-out, living husk behind? Or would it work like sunshine—it’s the same process of fusion essentially, right? So would it burn them just like exposure to sunlight? Hm.” Not that I wanted to try the experiment at all, but maybe I should ask Alette if there’d been any vampires in Hiroshima seventy-odd years ago.
“Write that down for the show,” Ben said. Yeah, that would make a good ten-minute topic.
“Take this. Just keep it in your pocket,” Cormac said, handing Tina the mirrored cross amulet. “He tries throwing anything at you, this should protect you.”
“Should?” she said, uncertain, running her fingers over the smooth surface. I wondered what she saw in it. “Wow, this is really old,” she murmured.
“You can still back out of this.”
“No, I want to stop this guy as much as you do.”
Cormac nodded, satisfied.
“We likely to get hassled by the cops?” I asked Hardin.
“I checked in with a friend at the local PD, and they do regular car patrols along the highway, but it’s not one of their high-crime areas. We should be okay, unless one of the locals calls in weird activity.”
“It’s worth the risk,” Ben the attorney said. “They can’t pin anything worse than misdemeanor trespassing on us if we get caught in the park after dark, if we’re not doing anything more illegal than that.”
“Is conspiracy to murder a vampire more illegal?” I asked. The excuse we’d give to anyone who called us on why we were at the park after dark was way down on my list of things to think about right now.
“Hey, assuming we get him, there won’t be a body and no way to prove what happened.”
That was logical. Didn’t make me feel any better.
Cormac glanced at his watch, then out the place’s big picture windows, as if he didn’t trust what the watch had told him and needed external confirmation. The sun was setting, casting a muted orange light across the sky. “Let’s get going. Everyone good?”
No. I was not good. But I wasn’t going to get any better than I was right now, so I supposed I was good. Nobody else said anything, yes or no. My limbs were stiff with tension.
We should Change, my Wolf said from behind the bars I kept around her most of the time. We can be stronger. This is a hunt, let me hunt.
It’s not the time for that, I murmured.
But it might be, before the night is over.
If it came to that, yes, it might very well be time for it.
Chapter 5
A STARK DESERT sunset haunted the sky, unfiltered light across a washed-out landscape granting a red tinge to the dust. The breeze had the chill of spring and smelled chalky. The wildness of it called to Wolf, but I shivered and crossed my arms, unwilling to expose myself, uncertain what else lay out there.
Ben and I were hidden in a stand of junipers near the mesa, too far away to be of any use if things went bad. Hardin waited at the other end of the mesa with a pair of binoculars. I could smell her, but her nervous energy seemed eager, full of anticipation. She was a hunter, too.
Tina had driven herself over in Ben’s sedan, the only car in the parking lot right now. I hoped Roman wouldn’t notice the Colorado plates and grow suspicious.
The reason Cormac wasn’t worried about hiding: he had some kind of spell or potion or thing from Amelia. It didn’t make him invisible, but it somehow convinced onlookers that he wasn’t there. I didn’t understand it, but I also didn’t see him, so it must have been working. I smelled him, his leather and determination, but only because I knew he was there.
It didn’t matter, because Roman the vampire would sense all our heartbeats. He’d smell our blood on the wind. He’d read our minds across the distance. We weren’t fooling anyone. Cormac insisted we didn’t have to fool him—Roman would stay because he’d be curious, no matter what, and Cormac only needed one clear shot.
I tried to tell myself to stop worrying.
Tina sat at one of the picnic tables, her back very straight, her hands folded on the surface in front of her. She looked like an arcane practitioner, a modern psychic channeling a Victorian woman. She must have learned something about Amelia on the trip down.
“What if he’s wearing body armor?” I’d said, cranky.
“You ever see him wear body armor?” Cormac countered.
I hadn’t. Huh.
We wouldn’t see him approach. Roman was a vampire, and they had strange ways of moving, of hiding in shadows, of making themselves invisible. Roman would simply appear, maybe standing off a moment to take stock. We wouldn’t see him until he wanted to be seen. Yet another of our disadvantages.
We waited half an hour past the agreed-on time. This was okay; we expected it. He wanted Amelia—Tina, all of us—off balance. He wanted the higher ground, the control. The desert air grew cold, and as time passed Tina hugged her coat around her.
I smelled Roman before I saw him. An even colder twist in the already chill air, a sharp odor that smelled dead, but not rotten. A heart stilled, but preserved. A corpse, but one with a mind, will, and motion. Close, and getting closer. Ben’s nose flared; he smelled it, too. Tina looked across the park the same time I did—she felt it.
I couldn’t risk saying anything to warn the others. The sound would carry. We had to wait and see what happened.
He appeared, a shadow taking form, breaking off from the night beyond the orange glow of the lights in the parking lot. He was dressed in black, long coat flapping around him, arms loose at his side. His dark hair was close cut, militaristic, and he walked with purpose across the asphalt.
He stopped about twenty paces away from the picnic table, as if giving Tina time to notice him.
Tina stood, mouth open, and I was glad we’d forgotten to warn her that Roman would likely appear out of nowhere. He’d have expected her to be surprised, and so she was. He actually smiled at her, a thin and somehow calming expression. Setting her at ease after the pain of so much anticipation. In our few encounters, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him smile with anything other than disdain.
He came
closer until he stood across the table from her. He could have reached out and touched her. She was frozen, staring—had she forgotten not to look into his eyes? I couldn’t tell from here. She smelled afraid.
“You’re Tina McCannon,” he said. “Not Amelia Parker. Or—are you? It’s my understanding you’re able to channel the dead.” He waited for an explanation.
Now, now she should get out of the way, let Cormac take his shot—
Before she could answer him, a shiny black town car pulled into the parking lot. Incongruous, suspicious, it stopped without turning into a marked slot. Somebody having a look around before getting chauffeured to the airport? Seemed unlikely. I braced to run—but I didn’t know which way to go. Help Tina, stop Roman—or what? She should duck, Cormac should shoot now, while we were all distracted.
The car also attracted Roman’s attention. He looked over, frowning. So, not part of his plan, either. The uniformed driver got out, stepped over to open the passenger door, and stood at attention as Mercedes Cook emerged.
She looked like something out of a film clip, pale and beautiful, shining with her own light in the dark. Her red curls framed her ivory face and fell to her shoulders, and she wore a long, thick shawl over a black calf-length dress, an outfit that would have looked brilliant in New York City but seemed far too glamorous for this obscure stretch of desert. She glared across the space to Roman, her red lips turned in a smile. I started to dash forward—all I wanted was to get my teeth around her throat. Ben grabbed my arm, held me back.
Mercedes strolled across the asphalt, chin up and haughty, focusing her attention on Roman. Tina was backing up. Probably smart.
The actress looked down her nose. She had stage presence in spades and brought it all to bear, commanding attention. But the way her hands clutched her shawl, the tightness across her shoulders—she was angry, or scared, and trying to hide it.
She stopped and regarded Roman. I got the feeling that each of them was waiting for the other to speak, and neither wanted to break that silence.
“I’d heard you were here,” Mercedes said finally. She gave Tina the merest dismissive glance. “Recruiting.”