Now that I’d had coffee, it was unlikely I’d fall back asleep for a few hours. As long as I was up, I thought I should feed Grendel and take him for a walk before he decorated the kitchen floor. I also thought I’d let Quinton get a little more sleep—at least one of us should, and he could play doorman and guard later so I could catch up on the doings in the land of Nod, myself. Grendel was more interested in the food. I put on a jacket against the exterior chill as he devoured his breakfast.
I’d never had a dog of my own as a kid—no pets at all in fact after the disaster of my mother’s first post-Dad boyfriend and his dopey Labradors. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I moved in next to Rick, that happy pit bulls, by nature, are just as playful and silly as any other well-trained dog. Grendel didn’t look too scary most of the time, grinning and wagging and doing the play-with-me bow. But in defensive mode, he was a terrifying bundle of crushing teeth and hard muscle. That’s what the asete and his plain-vanilla vampire buddy must have seen last night when Rick came out into the halclass="underline" eighty pounds of pissed-off pit bull. But they hadn’t dominated the dog or frightened it. They’d shot at it. And they were pretty lousy shots—not that I was surprised about that.
Vampires think of themselves as top predator and they aren’t afraid of much at night, not even mean dogs. They generally don’t carry weapons since they think they don’t need them. But the specimens in the hall had been packing guns. That seemed kind of odd to me. I thought about it as I walked Grendel twice around the water tower green space, stopping several times while he left various doggy messages.
The vampires had come to my door. They hadn’t just wanted in: they wanted to raise a ruckus. They didn’t come with just their natural weapons, so they hadn’t come with the intention of killing—No. Wait.
They had come to kill me. But it would have to be the right kind of kill since the whole point of pushing me close to death was to bend me into the Grey form Wygan needed for whatever plan he had in mind. And the more trouble the whole scene caused, the more likely I was to be forced out of my home if they weren’t entirely successful. Wygan wouldn’t want them to bite me, just in case someone was a little too thirsty: he couldn’t risk my not being in his control by being blood-tied to another vampire—if that was even possible. It also wouldn’t be difficult to explain the wounds on any bystanders who caught a bullet, unlike the classic broken necks and gouged throats of the usual vampire victim.
Solis had said violence and homicide were up, that the crimes fit a pattern, but he hadn’t said exsanguinated bodies or unexplainable wounds were part of it—Simondson had looked like a hit-and-run but I was pretty sure he was a vampire victim one way or another. The pattern of last night’s crime looked like thugs with guns who’d left some odd piles of human ash scattered around. That might be strange or creepy, but from the reports, the police were already thinking of the uptick in violence as weird gang crime with some bizarre ritual or marker. Witnesses wouldn’t be too eager to say they’d seen something as crazy as one apparent gangbanger roasting another into a pile of ash in the space of a few seconds. That’s nuthouse talk, and vampires are damned good at leaving only foggy memories in the minds of survivors. If anyone had been talking, they’d only say what the vampires wanted them to say—or something so crackpot the cops wouldn’t pay attention. The SPD gang unit was still based in West Seattle, even after the biggest gang problem was cleared out by the demolition of the projects. If they had related crimes downtown, they’d be working with Solis or one of his colleagues, which explained the detective’s swift appearance. Quinton had mentioned vampires making trouble downtown, including some shootings, while I was in London, but that had been centered on the clubs and bars around Belltown and the financial core—the vampire neutral zones where faction fighting was supposed to stay off the streets and not attract the attention of the sheep. But if it was part of the pattern Solis had noted, that would connect last night’s mess to his cases and to me by way of Simondson, the dead guy.
The possibility of a wider pattern explained another curiosity: the vampire who’d cooked another vampire with something very much like one of Quinton’s stunners—probably the same thing I’d done to the vampire last night. That first incident must have been a test run. Once the vampires with the stun sticks knew what effect they had on others of their kind, they could take out their rivals in a more public place than usual—someplace most vampires felt safe—so long as they sprayed a little lead around to cover the scene and make it look like a gang war. It also created panic and fear—emotions that the asetem fed on. Edward had kept his position partially by leaving Quinton alone so no one would discover he was as vulnerable to electrical disruption of his nervous system as the rest of the bloodsucking pack. Except that asetem weren’t as susceptible, according to Quinton, and they weren’t afraid of carrying the stunners around either. I’d just gotten lucky with the one I’d zapped the night before.
There lay an unhappy thought: vampires who weren’t as easy to knock down or kill as the usual kind—which wasn’t a waltz with Fred Astaire to begin with—even if they were a bit slower. And they had weapons to take down their vampire opponents as well as any human in the way without having to close to biting range. I hate it when the monsters get clever. Damn Wygan.
Grendel and I headed back to the condo as I kept thinking. If I were Wygan, I’d keep the pressure on and try to drive me out of my safe zone so he’d have a better chance to catch me and then do whatever he needed to do to me at his leisure. He’d want to keep me off-balance and tired so I’d keep on making mistakes like the ones I’d made with Goodall. On the street alone I was vulnerable; I had a much better idea of what I was and what I could do than ever before, but I still didn’t know enough about what was coming next. I quickened my pace and Grendel loped beside me with a huge doggy grin all over his face. Wygan knew I’d come to him eventually: He had my dad’s ghost captive; he’d taken my employer, too; and he’d teased me with information he knew I couldn’t resist pursuing and then killed off the man who had some of it—assuming Simondson did. But Wygan hadn’t tried to isolate me, hadn’t gone after Quinton. . . .
The thought galvanized me. The grid of power seemed to hum louder and with a discordant note as the shape of the world blazed for an instant, too bright. I burst into a full run, Grendel loping happily beside me as I pounded down the hill toward my place with the conviction that all was not well at home.
THREE
Smoke. I smelled it before I got there, before I saw the dark wisps coiling into the sky. The fire alarm in the building was shrieking loud enough to be heard on the street even over Grendel’s excited barking. A guy with a garden hose was already trying to douse the burning shrub under my balcony, but not all the smoke was coming from the landscaping. I cursed the security door and wrestled my way through it, tugging the dog behind me as he tried to go after the stream of water from the hose.
We galloped up the stairs, my chest tight from the whiff of burning and anxiety that made a high metallic ringing in my ears. It almost sounded like distant fairy voices screaming.
From the landing, I saw my door engulfed in yellow flames sprouting from a bundle of black cloth stuffed against the bottom. Someone had added two fresh, bloody handprints to the stain left on the wall the night before. Nice. As I crouched and ran forward, the bundle of burning cloth tipped away from the door, propelled by the tip of a yardstick poking out through the gap between the door and the threshold. I ordered Grendel to sit and stay while I yanked off my jacket and started beating the flames out.