Much Ado About Vampires: A Dark Ones Novel

  I remembered how Avery seemed wholly absorbed in Jas. “I think ‘intense’ is a good description.”

  “And then there’s the bad-boy image. Who doesn’t love a bad boy? Who doesn’t want to redeem them, make them whole again, show them the power of love?” She sighed, then giggled and poked me on the arm. “Listen to us! Mooning over vampires just like a couple of teenagers with a sparkle fetish! Mysterious and romantic they may be, but they’re not for the likes of us. Shall we get started?”

  My nose wrinkled as I looked around the entry hall. Directly across from the door was a staircase leading up to murky gloom, the pale fingers of light that managed to fight their way in through the boards on the windows not doing much to light the interior. To my right was a large room that seemed to stretch the length of the house, the dark, stained wallpaper making odd patterns that seemed almost to move when seen peripherally. To the left was a narrow hall with several doors, no doubt leading to smaller rooms. Thankfully, the house was empty of all furniture, nothing but a few torn shreds of ancient newspaper and bits of twine lying in desolation on age-stained wood floors to mark its removal.

  “Mice,” I said, rubbing my nose against the smell of stale rodent droppings.

  “Probably, but it doesn’t smell too fresh. Dee says the house was fumigated last month, so there shouldn’t be anything alive in here but us. At least . . .” She paused at the foot of the stairs, her face tight for a moment before she shook her head. “No, there’s nothing here but us. I must be imagining things.”

  “Oh, that’s not going to give me the creeps,” I said, rubbing my arms as I looked around the gloomy room.

  Diamond just laughed and ran up the stairs, turning on her camera as she did so. “Don’t forget to get several different angles of each room. I’d like to piece together each room’s photos into a panorama if possible. Buyers love panoramas.”

  “Anyone would have to be insane to want to buy this monstrosity,” I muttered to myself as I twitched my shoulder aside just in time to avoid hitting a massive cobweb that drifted down from an ornate, but filthy, brass light fixture. “I can only imagine what a barrel of laughs the basement is going to be.”

  “Just imagine it all fixed up, filled with people and laughter,” Diamond called as she started up the second flight.

  “If one single mouse so much as sticks his nose out of the wall at me, I’m leaving!” I bellowed up the stairs.

  A faint sound of her tinkling laughter was my only answer. Dammit, she even laughed nicer than me. Hers was all lightness while mine came out throaty, as if I were a five-pack-a-day smoker.

  “My life sucks,” I said to no one as I stomped loudly toward the back of the hallway, checking each room before heading toward the door Diamond had indicated led to the basement. “Everyone has hooked up but me. And what do I have, house? Huh? What do I have? I’ll tell you what I have,” I said in a loud voice as I grabbed the doorknob. “I have a job that’s going nowhere, a deranged vampire murderer trying to drive me insane, and abso-friggin’-lutely no man on the horizons. I swear, what I wouldn’t give to meet someone—urf!”

  The force of a brick wall bursting through the basement doorway and slamming straight into me not only drove all the air from my body but sent me flying backward, the brick wall falling with me in a tangle of arms and legs, and heads clunking together painfully. My camera fell to the floor, and the tinkle of coins and the smashing of glass warned that the contents of my purse had spilled out under the force of the impact.

  It took me a few seconds to shake the stars from my aching head, but that gave my lungs time to reinflate after the brick wall—which I was amazed to see turned out to be a man—rolled off me.

  He spoke in some lyrical language, stopping himself to grab my hand and yank me to my feet. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there. Get out.”

  “Huh? ” I said, rubbing my forehead where it had smacked against his. “Who are you? What are you doing here? We were told the house was empty.”

  The man cast a glance over his shoulder to where a narrow stairway descended into the yawning blackness of the basement. “Get out now! He knows I found the exit that led to this place!”

  “Who knows you’re here? Oh, man, if my camera is broken—” I ignored the man when he ran toward the front door, instead squatting to scoop up the small collection of coins, my now broken compact mirror, a tube of lipstick, and some sort of gray-striped flat round stone edged in gold, with a gold dragon embossed on one side. “What on earth is this? Hey, mister, this must be—holy Mary and all the apostles!”

  Another man emerged from the blackness of the basement, but instinctively I knew this was no normal man, not with the way power and fury were rolling off him in almost visible waves. I clutched my things to my chest, stumbling backward to get out of his way, ignoring the pain of the coins and broken compact as they cut into the flesh of my palm, my eyes huge as his attention was momentarily directed my way. I froze, unable to breathe, but was instantly dismissed as he turned toward the front door, raising one hand as he bellowed out a word.

  “Desino! ”

  Automatically, I translated the word from Latin to English—halt—and for a second, it seemed as if the world had stopped rotating. Everything seemed to hold its breath. Time just stopped dead as I stared in horrified wonder at the man. A sudden dizziness overtook me as the air in the house was suddenly contracted, then exploded outward with the velocity and volume of a nuclear explosion.

  I fell to the ground, my arms around my head, as the walls of the house itself groaned. I was going to die right then and there, without even finding someone to love.

  “Damn,” I whispered to my knees, and consigned my soul to heaven.

  Chapter Two

  Heaven, it seemed, didn’t want me. I realized this when the furious, frightening man stalked past me toward the man with whom I’d collided, the same man who was even now trying desperately to wrench open the front door.

  “You dare steal from me!”

  The powerful man’s voice was as terrible as a nightmare, shrill and piercing little bits of my soul, making it feel as if it were being ripped from me.

  “I would never do anything so heinous, Lord Bael,” the other man said, dropping to his knees in a penitent position when he realized the door wouldn’t open. “It was my master. He covets your tools, not I.”

  “Your master is a dead man,” the one named Bael said, his words wrapped in such horrible tones, I didn’t for one minute doubt the veracity of the prophecy. “What is your name?”

  “Ulfur, my lord.”

  I watched the scene with terrified amazement. Was the powerful man named Bael some sort of a peer? He had a British accent, so maybe he was some visiting dignitary. I wracked my brain trying to remember who owned this house before it got tangled up in probate. Maybe the Bael person was the owner? If that was so, why hadn’t he contacted the agency to let us know he was going to be present for the initial inspection?

  “Who is your master?”

  “Alphonse de Marco.”

  “I do not know this name. Where are my tools?”

  “I do not have them, my lord,” Ulfur said, spreading his hands wide. He had a bit of an accent, too, something Scandinavian. Slowly I got to my feet, still clutching my purse and its spilled contents, watching the men warily, my gaze lingering for a minute on the larger of the two. He had short brown hair and a worried-looking face that was more interesting than handsome, and wore a pair of jeans and a dark brown leather jacket. From beneath the back of his jacket, I got a glimpse of something shiny, something bulky.

  Clearly Ulfur was lying and up to no good. He’d no doubt taken something from the basement. I glanced down to my hands where the gold-chased stone was clutched with the coins, and amended that to he’d taken something valuable from the basement. It behooved me to tell the owner what Ulfur had done, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. The English peer was just too . . . wrong. His presence felt bad,
like he shouldn’t be there. Almost like he foreshadowed disaster.

  “Where are they?”

  The volume of his voice dropped, but I felt physical pain at Bael’s words, just as if they were etched with acid.

  “I do not know, my lord,” Ulfur said again, his head bowed now. “I know only that my master sent me to find them before the lichmaster Ailwin did so.”

  “Ailwin,” Bael snarled, and I heard the rain of glass, as if his very words had smashed the windows nearest us. “That name I do know. Jecha!”

  My eyeballs just about popped out of my head when, as if by magic, a large, muscular woman suddenly appeared before the peer. “My lord Bael?” she said, bowing low. “What is your pleasure?”

  “Ailwin,” Bael said, the word flaying me like a whip. I backed up down the hall, toward what I knew was the kitchen. I didn’t know what was going on, but it brought up all sorts of unpleasant memories from a trip to visit my sister earlier this year, and I’d be damned if I got caught up in something weird again.

  I bumped into something that moved, and almost shrieked, wheeling around to see Diamond making shooing gestures toward me. “I did both floors upstairs. Are you done here?”

  “Am I . . . no!”

  “No?” She frowned. “Oh, for pity’s sake . . . don’t tell me you saw a mouse!”

  “No. I saw them.”

  “Them who?”

  “The people out front. The two men who came up from the basement.”

  “What people? Cora, are you teasing me? I told you that this house was empty.”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to the basement people.”

  “Tch ,” she said, pulling open the basement door. “Let me go down and see for myself.”

  “They’re up here now,” I called after her disappearing figure, but she evidently decided to ignore me.

  I tiptoed down the hallway until I could see the front doors. Bael was grinding out some horrible instructions about locating and torturing the person named Ailwin, going into sickening detail about what he’d like done.

  “Go,” Bael said, waving his hand toward the woman, and just like that, she was gone. “As for you . . .”

  Ulfur had half turned toward me, angling himself so his back was to the wall, no doubt to keep anyone from seeing that he had an object stuffed into the back of his jacket.

  I bit my lip, unsure if I should say something, or just let it go. I didn’t condone stealing at all, but . . . my little devil urged me to turn around and walk out of the house, to leave the two men alone, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. It was obvious the strange stone I held must belong to the Englishman, and that meant I had to return it.

  I started toward him with the intention of doing just that when Bael threw wide his arms and, with a voice filled with fury, screamed, “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael! ”

  “Go to torment, go into banishment, for the judgment of Bael is at hand,” I whispered in translation, and just like that, I was slammed by a wall of power as the floor fell out from beneath my feet.

  A scream was literally ripped from my throat as I plummeted into blackness, but it was a short-lived scream, one that turned to, “Ow! Ow, ow, ow! Jesus wept!” For the second time in a few minutes, I shook stars from my eyes and pushed myself into a sitting position, wincing when my hands, still clutching my things, came into contact with sharp, pointy rocks. “What the hell?”

  “Not Abaddon, no,” a weary voice came from behind me. I got to my knees and looked over a large, craggy boulder that squatted next to me. The man named Ulfur lay facedown on the rocky ground. “Worse. We’re in the Akasha.”

  “How . . . what . . . huh?” I looked around as I got painfully to my feet. We seemed to be on some sort of horrible windswept, rocky moor. Or at least what I thought of as a moor, never having seen one in person. But this place . . . it brought a new level of angst to the word “desolate.” The wind seemed to carry with it the voices of a thousand tormented souls, the ground, stones, and sparse vegetation all the same shade of dusty brown. It was very rocky—not soft, smooth rocks, but sharp, pointed ones that jabbed up out of the earth as if they were straining to escape. “What’s an Akasha ? ”

  Ulfur groaned as he rolled over, brushing himself off as he sat up. “The Akashic Plain, more frequently known as the Akasha, is what mortals think of as limbo. It’s a place of punishment, of permanent banishment, and before you ask, yes, it is possible to leave it, but you have to be summoned out. I think my face is broken.”

  “Limbo? How did we get here? We were in the house.... Ow. What the devil . . .” I tossed my handful of coins, flinching as I pulled a thin sliver of gold from where it had pierced my finger. “Oh, holy Chihuahua, that hurts. Ugh. I broke the rock you stole.”

  “The what?” Ulfur touched his forehead, his fingers pulling away red.

  “The rock you dropped when you crashed into me. The one you stole from that English dude. All the little gold parts are twisted up, and the gray stone is in about a dozen little pieces.”

  He jerked upright at that, one hand scrabbling behind him to find whatever it was he had stuffed beneath his coat. What he pulled out was a flattened goldfish disk, discolored and stained. “The Anima! Oh, no . . .”

  “You know, there’s a limit to how many unbelievable, confusing things I’m willing to entertain in any given hour, and I think this hour has far surpassed that limit. What the heck is an Anima? And why did you steal it? And who was that English guy, why did he feel so wrong, how did we get here, where exactly is this Akasha place, and most importantly of all, how do I get back to the house? ”

  “Those are a lot of questions,” Ulfur said, his shoulders slumping as he touched one torn edge of the flattened gold. “I’m dead. That’s all there is to it. I’m dead. Again.” He looked up at me, and I noticed that he had absolutely black eyes, no difference between iris and pupil. “The Occio is destroyed, as well?”

  “Who knows? I certainly don’t,” I said, giving up and sitting down on the least pointy part of the boulder between us. “I just want to find a first aid kit so I don’t get tetanus or something like that, and then get out of here. Oh, and chocolate wouldn’t hurt, either. I’d take some chocolate.”

  “Let me see,” Ulfur said, stumbling over to where I sat. I held out my hand. “No, not your hand, the Occio.”

  “The rock?” I held out my other hand, the one with the bits of twisted gold and broken bits of gray stone.

  He frowned at it, touching one of the pieces with the tip of a finger. “I don’t understand it. This is a Tool of Bael. Why would it be destroyed?”

  “It’s not a tool. It’s like a . . . I don’t know, pendant or something.” I looked around the bleak landscape, wondering what sort of weird being the Englishman was that he could either make me insane or magically teleport me somewhere. “Who’s Bael when he’s at home, anyway? ”

  Ulfur’s black-eyed gaze met mine—he was about to answer my question when he suddenly squinted at me. “You’re . . . glowing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re glowing. There’s a sort of shadowed glow about you.”

  I held up a hand. “You know what I think? I think we’re both nuts, me because I let myself get caught in weirdness again, and you because you are seeing things.”

  “I’m not seeing things, not in the sense you mean. You’re glowing.”

  “Look, Ulfur—” I stopped in the middle of telling him that there was no way on god’s green earth that I was glowing, when I noticed something odd about him.

  “Hey,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re glowing.”

  He looked down at himself. “This doesn’t make any more sense than the Tools being destroyed. Why would we both glow just because we were banished to the Akasha? ”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up off my rock to circle him. I’d be damned if he didn’t have a faint blackish glow around him, almost like a corona. “Wh
en you say ‘banished,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  “Bael, the premier prince of Abaddon, banished us here. Or rather, he banished me, and you must have gotten caught in his power during the banishment. He spoke some sort of a curse when he did it—”

  “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael,” I repeated.

  Ulfur’s eyebrows rose.

  “Basically it means go to hell, you’re banished by Bael’s judgment. I went to a Catholic school,” I explained when he looked impressed at my knowledge of Latin. “I can say ‘of the Antichrist’ in ten different languages.”

  “How very . . . useful.”

  “Premier prince? That Englishman was a prince? I figured he must be someone important because you and that big chick were ‘my lording’ him all over the place, but a prince? Wow. I’m going to have to tell Jas that I saw a real prince. He seemed kind of . . . evil . . . for a prince.”

  “He is evil,” Ulfur said, slumping onto my place on the rock. “The title ‘prince’ is an honorific, nothing more. He’s the head demon lord of Abaddon.”

  “Abaddon being . . . ?”

  “Its closest approximation would be hell.”

  I gawked at him, my skin crawling with sudden horror. “That guy was the devil?”

  “No. Not in the mortal sense. Abaddon isn’t what you know of as hell—it’s . . . well, it’s Abaddon. Mortals based their concept of hell on it, just as they based their concept of heaven on the Court of Divine Blood, but they are not the same thing. Abaddon is ruled by seven princes, seven demon lords.”

  “And the Bael guy, the man with the wicked fashion sense and plummy English voice, heads the whole place up?” I tried to stop my brain from squirreling around at the fact that the devil had looked at me, had walked right past me, and had evidently been so pissed at the man before me, I’d gotten swept along in his wrath, but I just couldn’t resolve the idea of Satan and the man in the blue suit.

  “Yes.”

  I breathed deeply for about two minutes, then said, “OK. There’s a guy named Bael, and you stole a couple of pretty things from him. Why, Ulfur, did you steal a couple of pretty things from the man who rules hell?”