Constance balled her hands in fury. “You’re a liar; you’re not human at all!”
The words hit with all the subtlety of a city bus. “Never said I was!”
He turned before a weird impulse to apologize could overtake him. I’m sorry I turned out to be a less-than-tasty treat.
“What are you? Vampires know a demon’s stink, and you barely smell!”
He was walking now, not so fast as to excite the predator in her, but not wasting any time, either. He suddenly felt hot, as if he had spiked a fever. “Flattery still won’t get you into my jugular, sweetheart.”
Mac glanced over his shoulder, making sure she wasn’t coming after him. She looked beside herself, eyes round with anger and disappointment, but she wasn’t moving. Maybe that meant she’d given up. Maybe it was because he still clutched the sword. That was one of the bizarre things about the demon-dust-travel thing. Pretty much anything he was touching came with him. Handy, but strange.
Don’t go there. If he was going to keep it together, thinking about what just happened was taboo. He wasn’t supposed to have major demon mojo. That could only mean really bad news, and the last thing he could afford to do was work himself into a panic.
Think happy thoughts. Puppies. Kittens. Beer.
Doggedly, Mac kept striding. He focused on the immediate problem of getting out of the Castle. He worked his way back to the door without passing the spot where he’d flattened Bran—neither of them needed a rerun of that encounter.
The door looked as impenetrable as ever. Mute. Solid. A scar in the endless vista of stone walls. What do I do now? Sit down and wait for someone with a key to come along?
Mac folded his arms, leaning against the wall opposite the door, and settled in to wait. A cold draft slithered over his foot. As always, he wondered where the air currents came from in a world with no sky, no wind, and no weather. Nothing in the prison ever made sense.
Take the wars. The Castle dampened magic, so most of the fighting that went on was pure brute force. Swords. Fists. Guns, if someone had them. But the no-magic rule wasn’t consistent. There were sorcerers that could still throw the odd zap of power. He’d seen werewolves shape-shift now and then. Odd things happened. Magic sometimes slid through the cracks.
He started to pace, walking a few feet to one side of the door, then the other. Slid through the cracks? The phrase nagged at him. There was something he needed to pay attention to. He could feel his cop brain struggling to find a connection.
Why had he been able to dust?
If I’m immune to the anti-magic rules here...
No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t immune. He’d somehow regained power he’d lost. That part of the Castle mojo was working in reverse. If the magic here doesn’t affect me the same way.
In the world outside the Castle, demons didn’t need no stinking keys. They came and they went as they pleased, drifting through tiny cracks and holes in their dust form.
The Castle was different. Here, demons smashed into the doorway portal like a bird into a glass window. But what if he could make it through? Slide through the cracks.
If this goes wrong...
The alternative was sitting by the door for the next millennium, like a dog waiting to go for a walk. Whatever magical blip was making him different might wear off. He could lose this chance.
If I get stuck in the portal or only half of me makes it...
Suck it up. Sometimes the only options available were bad.
Mac reached for the cold place where his rediscovered powers hid. He knew what he was doing. He knew he would regret it.
Cold shot through him with dizzying intensity, as if Jack Frost invaded his bones. The frozen sensation was stronger this time, but slower. In a fleeting glimpse, he saw his hand laced with veins of blackness, a latticework that melded and pooled as he disappeared into nothing. Bit by bit, his sensory awareness fell away as parts of him simply ceased to be.
Disintegration always followed the same sequence: edges first, then his feet, his fingers, his limbs falling away before the core of him blinked out into a smudge of darkness, an afterimage that faded away like errant smoke. This time, he held onto a smidgen of consciousness to guide him through the door. That’s all he was—a thought.
He drifted to the door, then threaded himself into a crack between two of the huge, upright planks of wood. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t a real door at all. It just looked like one. It was a portal made of earth magic.
He had no body, but he could still feel the buzzing energy of the portal, like ants crawling over flesh that wasn’t there. He roiled, the motes of himself spinning in the wild energy, distracted, stirred to a frenzy. Pulling himself into a hard knot of darkness, he willed himself through the force field like a bullet, an image of the alley beyond like a beacon in his mind.
He popped out between two hellhounds, barely missing the elbow of one, and hurtled toward the neon sign of Naughty Nanette’s.
Mac’s laugh whispered in the rustling breeze.
Then it died when he considered what he’d just done.
Chapter 7
October 1, 9:55 p.m. 101.5 FM
“Finally, Dr. Elterland, let’s move on to talking about vampires.”
“To be honest, Errata, I don’t make them part of my study.”
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing there left to learn.”
“I see. How many vampires have you actually met, Dr. Elterland?”
Alessandro Caravelli strode back to the graveyard where he’d parked his car. It was a long walk, but he didn’t mind.
He wanted time to unwind. Enforcing the peace among the supernatural population in Fairview was stressful, and he never took his work home with him if he could help it Holly was a special woman and a powerful witch—the perfect mate for a vampire warrior—but even she had her limits. Decapitation and dismemberment did not make for good pillow talk.
A fitful wind blew garbage along the gutters, making a forlorn rustle. Pedestrians walked in twos and threes toward the parking garages, the early shows at the movie theater over. With his dark-adapted sight, Alessandro could see the street predators waiting in their lairs—an alley, a doorway, a patch of unlit street.
He silently dared one of the lowlifes to jump him, but that would never happen to a vampire with a broadsword. Undeath had its privileges. In fact, the part of town where the supernatural citizens had set up their businesses— some newspaper had called it Spookytown, and the name stuck—was remarkably free of crime. The merchants just ate the troublemakers, and the police rarely complained.
The thought of police took Alessandro back to Macmillan. Mac, as he preferred to be called. They’d never been friends, but there had been mutual respect. The detective had been out of his depth working preternatural crimes, but then, so were all the humans. He’d done better than most, up until the part where Geneva infected him with her demon taint.
And it still eats at him. He struggles, and he will lose.
Yes, magic might have blasted away most of the demon inside Mac, but the infection was like a virulent mold. If there was the tiniest remnant, it would spread and take over, reducing its host to a soul-eating machine, a monster’s monster. It was just a matter of time.
Sad, but now he is a threat like any other. A task to be dealt with. Work.
He would have traded in his right fang for a better solution than a sword or a dungeon. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stand around wringing his hands while Macmillan went evil and ate half the city. That just wasn’t practical.