Then and there, Dahlia decided she’d transport again, this time to some place a lot more populated. Then she would break into the first large public building she saw. She was hoping for a bank; that would get major attention, but anything with a decent alarm system would do, and she really wasn’t feeling picky right now. She was feeling anxious instead. Every time she closed her eyes, the glow of that damn Stag filled her mental vision.
When the cops started showing up, she would destroy some expensive shit and ride the blue wave in from there. She needed to make sure she kept her destruction within the human range, though… she didn’t want to cause so much trouble that entire supernatural nations had it in for her. She didn’t want to die. Not really. She just wanted to be undesirable.
Okay we need big cities…. She could do New York. That was big enough.
But she liked New York. And destroying any bit of New York had a slimy feel to it, especially given what New Yorkers had been through this century. Plus, the bigger cities on the east coast were dragon territory. Dragons loved glitz, and no one put on the glitz like New York. No, the Big Apple is out, she decided. Ironically, the west coast was off limits for her too. Where she liked New York, she loved the west coast cities of San Francisco and Portland – and the west coast was D’Angelo’s territory. She didn’t want the king of kings mad at her.
She could obliterate Houston. That was a huge one. But then again, people who lived in Houston were miserable enough. It was hot, it was humid, the traffic was maddening, it was crime-ridden, and many days of the year the air was un-breathable. If she were one of the gods, she’d transplant all of Houston’s people to some place fresh and clean and then take a celestial hole punch to that town and be rid of it for good. But that was just her.
She sighed. Well, crap. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was having a hard time picking a city because she was having a hard time settling in with the idea of being destructive around humans. She was fond of humans. She liked their cities – because she liked them. She liked what they built, what they created. She admired human invention, and she revered human hope and willpower.
The fact that mortals kept going despite the way the cards were stacked against them was frankly amazing to Dahlia. She was surprised they hadn’t all decided on a mass suicide years ago. Poppy was human – or she had been, anyway. And that woman’s strength blew Dahlia away. Dahlia may have been a Tuath fae warlock vampire, but she knew damn well that she could never hold her own as a human. Those fuckers were tough.
Okay, so maybe you don’t have to be destructive. Just get someone’s attention.
With that in mind, she finally settled on Boston, Massachusetts. Massachusetts was a place linked at its core to magic, and Boston was the busiest in that area, so it seemed like a more obvious choice anyway. Plus, as far as she knew, none of the Thirteen factions were housed there. Right? She hoped she was right.
She pulled her magic like a swaddling cloak around her body, watched the world melt into swirling shades and shifting time, and transported out of the desert and into New England.
She could sense the change even in the portal; the air was full of life now, filled with moisture and coolness. It was June, six months after the Winter Queen had taken her place on her icy throne, and Dahlia could smell the perfume in the air that came with late spring. It was much more obvious here, where trees and plants abounded than it had been upon entering the arid atmosphere of the desert.
The portal vanished, and Dahlia was alone in what appeared to be a park. She turned a slow circle, taking in the lack of litter and the smell of aster, spider lilies, and helenium. Those were flowers normally found in private and small gardens. She was in the suburbs. She cocked her head and shrugged. The Boston suburbs would do.
She smiled to herself, spotted a large building in the not-too-far distance, and made her way toward it at a fast blur.
Chapter Twelve
Laz came out of his reverie to realize he hadn’t yet moved from his spot on the dark sidewalk in front of the house he’d been led to by the address on the card given to him by Bael – the demon. The card bore no indication of who owned the house, and neither did the house itself. It was a small two-story brownstone, built maybe two centuries ago and, as mentioned, well maintained. It was set apart from its neighbors just as every brownstone in this part of the tiny Boston neighborhood was. Each little plot of yard had a bit of very green, trimmed and edged grass, and if it had any other vegetation, it was a single tree a hundred and fifty years old. One after the other each house repeated the last, all of them laid out on a plotline as if to remind their owners that they were nothing special. They were just people, like everyone else.
They just happened to be people who could afford historical houses in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in all of Boston.
The house could have technically belonged to anyone. But now Laz knew. Especially after that memory, and with this feeling moving through him, he just knew that this particular house was his birth mother’s home.
Maybe it was exactly that the home was nondescript and “normal.” It seemed to melt into the area around it like a puzzle piece that fit so smoothly, the lines dividing it from its partners were invisible. The house was invisible. That was what it was. There was nothing to make it stand out from the world around it. It might as well have been non-existent.
Just like his birth mother had been for all these years. And… like his father had been too.
At that thought, Laz laughed. He laughed because he realized he was being a whiny baby, and he laughed because when he pictured his father, he pictured a giant beast of a man with red skin and horns and cloven hooves – and that was hilarious. Because he knew it was more likely wrong than right. Humans had their imaginations, and those imaginations fed stories and tales and legends and myths and made them grow and expand into ridiculous things that could only exist in said imaginations. The reality was that supernatural beings were usually far less spectacular. And far more complicated. And in some cases, humans interacted with them on a daily basis without even knowing it. All in all, humans were idiots. He should know; he’d been one for thirty years.
Lazarus looked down at his boots and ran a hand through his thick hair. When he did, he realized it was shaking. So he lowered the hand and stared at it. “Really?” he asked himself. He was going to be the man who faced down bullets and vampires – but was afraid of his mother? “Jesus.” He bent to open the latch to the white picket fence. His phone chimed with a text alert. He straightened and pulled the phone from his front jacket pocket.
Trouble in Dorchester – Four Corners. Possible cleanup required.
Laz hit the microphone button on his phone and dictated a quick response. It was worlds faster than trying to type anything in with his normal sized thumbs on the toy-sized “keyboard.” On my way. Contact D’Angelo.
He re-pocketed the phone and glanced up at the silent house. Whatever waited for him inside would have to keep on waiting.
*****
A smashed window maybe, she thought, and some motion-activated alarms, or possibly one or two easy to return stolen items. This was her plan, at least initially. But as she drew nearer to the building, several things became rapidly apparent. The first was that this was not the high-end suburb she’d originally thought it to be. She had transported into a green space with trees, but it hadn’t been the park she’d pegged it for. Instead, it seemed it was a small empty lot in-between houses in what looked like a trailer park.
The plethora of blooms she’d scented were actually coming from a single yard a block away that was miraculously and stubbornly tended amidst rows of dilapidated houses with peeling paint, curling siding, metal barred windows, and alleys full of junkyard remnants.
A thin dog wandered un-chained between the houses. Dahlia stopped to watch it a moment. It was a mixed breed, mostly pit, brown with a white spot over its left shoulder and white “socks” of fur on all four paws. I
t sniffed at a pile of rubbish, found nothing interesting, and moved on toward the opposite end of the next house.
Dahlia called out to it, sending it a quiet mental summons laced with magic. The dog made a soft whining sound and turned to face her. Upon seeing her wave it over, it trotted across the street and stopped in front of her to sniff her outstretched hand. Up close, Dahlia could see it was a female. She had one blue eye and one brown. Dahlia smiled. “Like Bowie, eh?” she said softly.
The animal wagged her tail. Dahlia was happy to see that she still had one; many humans took it upon themselves to butcher pit bulls by chopping them off. To Dahlia this was on par with other equally unnecessary displays of barbarism such as cropping a dog’s ears or declawing a cat.
“Where do you live?” she asked. The dog had no tags, nor even a collar. But before Dahlia could magically acquire an answer from the dog, a scream of unnatural proportions split the night.
Dahlia straightened from her stooped position at once, and the dog let out a second soft sound, this time of curiosity and concern. The neighborhood around her remained stiffly quiet. No porch lights went on, no doors opened. It was as if the scream had never happened, and Dahlia began to wonder if she’d imagined it.
She looked down at the dog. “You heard that, right –”
A second harsh cry cut through both her sentence and the darkness. This time, Dahlia could tell where it had come from: The same large building she had been headed for moments earlier.
“What the hell?” she wondered aloud. But she was already moving, having broken into an unconscious run toward the structure. The dog ran beside her, the animal’s canine speed a natural match for Dahlia’s Tuathan agility. She didn’t know why the dog had decided to tag along, but it was a much less pressing concern than the flood of darkness she suddenly experienced as she neared the building.
It felt like being hit with a wave as you were making your way into the sea. If you didn’t brace yourself for the onslaught of water, it would knock you on your ass. This was the same. She hadn’t been expecting it, and she certainly wasn’t prepared, so the sudden contact with it caused her to stumble. She took a miss-step, and in a manner entirely un-Tuathan, she keeled to the side.
As if to catch her, the dog moved its body alongside hers, and its sturdy pressure against her leg kept her just balanced enough to maintain her footing. She came to a full stop and glanced down at the dog, who panted happily back at her.
“Thanks,” she said softly. Then she returned her attention to the building.
The thing about what Dahlia called “darkness” was that she simply didn’t know what else to call it. “Darkness” was admittedly not the best term. It was used for so many things these days, especially among supernaturals, and most especially among supernaturals who were also warlocks. But the ability to sense this thing was fairly new to Dahlia, and she hadn’t had time to give it another name.
It wasn’t the same thing as dark magic. Not by a long shot. It also wasn’t the same as night, which was just the absence of sunlight. It was something she’d been able to pick up on since she had been turned into a vampire, a kind of feeling mixed in with the sense that everything in the proximity of that feeling was suddenly encased in a miasma of fog-like darkness.
There was that word again – darkness.
But it truly did seem as though the building ahead of her, and the parking lot and sidewalk and crabgrass around it, were all at once miss-colored and shaded as if by a dark red or black camera lens filter.
“This can’t be good,” she muttered as she prepared herself for whatever she was going to find inside. She considered the building’s unassuming façade for a moment. No windows. One metal door, no doubt locked. Around the side, she had earlier spotted a set of much larger double doors for truck loading and unloading, but again no windows. There must have been something inside the owners wanted to keep safe.
If this was a shipping company, as it appeared to be, then that something was other people’s belongings. Worth stealing, certainly, but that wouldn’t explain the dreadful sounds coming from inside.
A small sound drew her attention to the dog. Big eyes gazed up at her, one blue, one brown. A sudden flash of the dog unconscious and crushed beneath something awful caused Dahlia’s chest to tighten. She really didn’t want the animal getting hurt because she followed Dahlia into something dangerous. “Stay here, okay?” she said, lending a little force to the word “stay.”
The dog whined softly, but sat down as if she were well trained and had been with Dahlia for years. Dahlia nodded. “Good girl.”
Slowly she turned back to the building and began creeping toward it. As she moved, she wrapped herself in protective magic, adding layers with each step. First was a shroud of silence so whoever was in the building wouldn’t hear her coming. Next was a scent blocker, so that if they were something akin to shifters or even other vampires, they wouldn’t smell her. She placed a shield around herself as best she could, one that would protect her from the brunt of most magic, but shields were power sapping, so she left it minimal and moved on. The final thing she did was wrap herself in darkness. This time, the word was fitting, because it was actual darkness plain and simple that she used – to help hide her from sight.
Approximately ten feet from the single door of the building, another cry rang out, splitting the night and halting her in her tracks. Dahlia took a deep breath, swallowing with a dry throat past a lump of sudden hesitation. That cry wasn’t human. She could hear the difference in it now. There was a vibration to it that was not only inhuman, but unnatural. It was the kind of sound difference that only something magical could make.
With that in mind, she decided on a new approach, and ducking inside a spell that allowed her body to dematerialize for just a moment, she passed through the stone outer wall of the building, and into the space on the other side.
Chapter Thirteen
What she found when she came out on the other side of the warehouse wall was not at all what she’d been expecting. Some kind of human gang fight or a terrible form of initiation to a twisted fraternity or maybe even a gang rape in progress – that was what she’d braced herself for. She hadn’t braced herself for what was clearly the attempted summoning and capture of an otherworldly being. She’d seen this kind of thing before, in the drawings of a few of the texts she’d gone over while studying under Lalura. This kind of magic was forbidden. It wasn’t black magic or dark magic – it was wrong magic. Slavers used it. No one and nothing wanted to be a slave.
The complicated symbols drawn into the cement floor of the warehouse surrounded a wide circle approximately ten by ten feet. The circle and the symbols were glowing. A band of hooded figures standing around the amalgamation of drawings held out hands that were also glowing. The entire warehouse was lit with the reddish light emitted by the goings-on within it, but what burned the brightest was the thing trapped inside the circle itself.
This is where the screaming is coming from, she thought. And piggy-backing on that verification was the knowledge that everyone in the room was almost instantly aware of her arrival. Her shields and protective spells had dropped the moment she entered the room, perhaps canceled by some negating wards.
Her sudden and unexpected meld through the wall halted a wail of pain or anger – she couldn’t tell which – and brought the creature in the circle spinning around to face her. Eyes that burned locked on hers mere moments before every other set of eyes in the warehouse followed, and she was embraced by the glares of half a dozen magic users.
A number of things happened inside a person’s mind and body when they found themselves in real, and possibly mortal, danger. The five senses of the body were triggered to instantly perceive the body’s immediate environment. This information was then sent to the brain. The brain began to work faster on the information than one can truly imagine, processing it at light speed, and sending the results into a body’s various systems. Adrenaline and endorphins were relea
sed into the bloodstream. The heart began pumping faster and harder, carrying those crucial chemicals to the body’s muscles. And a hard, numbing cold settled in the gut. Why it was there and what purpose it served exactly, Dahlia was uncertain. It was simply an accompaniment, like low ominous music, to the fleeting and nearly imperceptible thought that floated through a person’s shadowy old brain in situations like this: I might die right here and right now.
Dahlia had lived a long time. But even she would never get used to this feeling.
Thank goodness for the rare mercy of nature in moments like these, and for the rather blurred form of consciousness it afforded people when they had no choice but to fight. What never once struck her as strange was the fact that she knew it was the hooded figures and not the monster they’d summoned that she would be fighting.
Magic flooded her arms, pooling in her palms like a crackling, swirling heat. She felt her eyes heat up and saw her vision shift from the already altered shades of her vampirism into the hyper contrasts of magical battle. She had barely decided upon her first offensive spell when she was hurling it out in front of her in defense because the hooded figures had managed to attack first.
They’d simply pulled up their red, caging power and tossed it at her in a knee-jerk reaction to her sudden appearance. Her equally fast spell was a burning, fizzing ball of electricity that was one of the most basic and therefore easily obtainable offensive attacks for her. It hurt more than usual to use the magic; sizzling along her skin with needle-like pain where it used to only tickle. But she ignored the pain. The ball of electricity slammed into the pulsing red of their magic and exploded.