Then they vanished.
Chapter Four
A surprised sound escaped from deep in Bobby’s throat. He pushed away from the wall, his eyes cutting across the room, searching for the vampires who’d disappeared.
I motioned him to keep quiet. I’d learned from my last encounter with the enforcers that they weren’t bound by conventional travel, but I’d been under the impression they flew, physically
flew
through the air, like Nathanial. But the kitchen wasn’t exactly a launch-pad, what with the roof overhead. The door was closed, so it was possible they were still in the room. Invisible. Watching.
Tipping my head back, I searched for scents betraying hidden vampires. Everyone who had walked into the kitchen tonight had tainted the room, and my olfactory glands simply weren’t strong enough now that I was a vampire to detect if the scents were wafting off unseen bodies.
Before I could ask Bobby for help, Regan stood and trudged to the space where the vampires had last been seen.
He sniffed hard. Then he snorted, turned, and trotted out of the room.
Well, okay, Regan had clearly dismissed Anaya and Clive.
But did I really trust the instincts of a dog? Yeah. This time.
He
had
realized they were on the porch before I did, and he had shown the good taste to dislike them.
Good enough for me.
Now to figure out what Gil wanted. I wasn’t scheduled for lab-rat duty with the mage tonight.
“Gil.” I pushed through the swinging doors and headed for the den.
It was empty. Had she left already?
“Gil?”
No answer.
Maybe she’s in the window-less part of the
house?
Nathanial kept an impressive library there, and I could just imagine Gil, a scholar, drooling over it.
“Gildamina!”
I pushed open the thick door separating the ‘show’ section of the house from the part catering to vampires. The lighttight seals slurped as the suction broke.
“What was that?” Bobby asked, a step behind me.
“What was what?”
“You screamed something,” he said as the door swung closed behind us.
“What, ‘Gildamina?’”
A frown dug into Bobby’s forehead. “What’s that? Some sort of human slang?”
I pushed open the study door. She wasn’t there.
“Gildamina. It’s Gil’s full name.”
Magic surged over my skin, lifting goosebumps.
“
There
you are,” I said, turning toward the twinge of magic.
Gil stood in the hall behind me. A bright flush ignited her cheeks, burning into her eyes. Her fingers flared wide at her sides, as if she’d just forced her fists to unclench.
“Where did you learn my name?” The words were a whisper, as if she were forcing them out around a solid knot of anger in her throat.
“Uh.” Okay, this wasn’t a response I expected. Gil tended toward mousey. She was a know-it-all, sure, but this barely contained temper was more like, well, me. Her voice wasn’t even squeaky at the moment. I blinked at her. “The judge called you Gildamina.”
“Don’t use my name!” A nerve twitched under her eye.
Then she took a deep breath, released it, and tugged on her coat in a stiff movement. “I’ve read that shifters have no
true
names, so you wouldn’t understand.” She frowned at me, her eyebrows cinching together. “You shouldn’t have been able to hear my true name.” Her scroll appeared in her hand. She jotted something down.
“Why not?”
She didn’t bother looking up from her notes, but asked, “Bobby, what’s my full name?”
Bobby, who’d been hanging back against the wall, shrugged. “Gil.”
Huh? Hadn’t he heard me say…
“See, Kita? A
mage’s
name is protected. Only I can choose to share it.” Gil tapped the feather of her quill against her thought-pursed lips. “So how did
you
hear it?” She cocked her head to the side and her eyes popped wide. “The Judge’s mark. It must be.” She scribbled something in her scroll, mumbling to herself. “The bond his mark created must have formed a link, a magical transference that allows you to access information the judge has mystical clearance for. I wonder if there are any similar cases.” She looked up. “This could make a fascinating paper.”
Right. Something else
interesting
about me for her study. I guess that was, technically, a good thing. After all, as long as I was useful as research material, she’d help me keep my protected, ‘Rare Species,’ status.
Gil vanished her scroll and looked around, probably for the first time since she’d popped back into the human world.
“Well, I can look into names later. I need your assistance with something.” She ran a hand through her dark curls and glanced over my bare feet and skin-tight tiger outfit. “You might want to change.”
Let me think. Stay here and wait for Nathanial so he could take me to see the vamp council, or go with Gil? What a choice. It wasn’t like the enforcers had given me an appointment time.
“I’ll grab my coat,” I said and ducked into the bedroom. I stripped out of the costume as I dug through the drawer Nathanial had cleared for me in his dresser. The wound over my collarbone had stopped bleeding, so I pulled a sweater on and slipped into a sensible pair of jeans before stepping back into the hall. “Where are we going, anyway? And for that matter, how are we getting there?” The cabin wasn’t exactly close to anything but acres of woods.
“Like this.” Gil’s hand shot out. Magic charged through the air as her fingers landed on me.
Then the hall disappeared.
A darkness surrounded me, a darkness so complete it burned away memories of light. The inky nothingness had no sound, no scent, as if I’d been swallowed by a black hole. I could see my feet but nothing below them.
“Gil!” The air was too thick. I couldn’t draw breath.
“Bobby?”
I swallowed the nearly solid air, gagging. What had Gil done? And more importantly, was this what she’d meant to do?
Or did I get sucked into the backlash of a botched spell?
I needed to scream, to move.
I couldn’t.
Blood roared through my ears—the only sound in the darkness. I hung suspended in nothing. Crushed by emptiness.
Then light burst through the dark, burned my eyes. My hands flew up, blocking out the light. No resistance met my movements. Crickets chirped. Tires crunched over pavement.
Wind tickled across my skin.
Slowly, I lowered my hands and risked peeking through my eyelashes. A dozen pinpricks of light met my limited gaze, none bright enough to be blinding. I opened my eyes the rest of the way, staring at the star-filled sky. I blinked. I could feel the ground and soft grass—not snow—beneath my back. My heart gave up its mutinous attempt to desert my torso, and I drank in a deep breath that tasted of spring and green life.
Where am I?
And better yet, where had I been?
My elbows wobbled as I pushed off the ground, my palms sinking into the thick grass. I looked around. Small cement buildings surrounded me on all sides. No, not buildings.
Sarcophaguses. Mausoleums.
I’m in a graveyard?
“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” I whispered.
“You weren’t in Kansas to start with,” Gil said from somewhere behind me. “But we’re not in Haven either.”
I jumped. My vision spun with the sudden movement, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
Can a vampire hurl?
I sure felt like I might.
“Are you hurt?” Gil asked, her rain boots thudding as she moved closer. The lightest touch of magic tinged the air, and I cringed, my eyes flying open.
Gil knelt a couple feet from me, but she wasn’t reaching out to help me stand. No, instead she jotted something in her damned scroll. Most likely something about
me
.
“Can you describe how you feel?” she asked, looking up from the tightly penned lines.
I forced my lips to curl into something akin to a smile.
“Like I’d commit
mageicide
if I could only stand up.”
Gil dropped her quill, her gulp audible.
She’d only recently started to trust me, and I needed to stay on her good side if I wanted to avoid the judge and his execution warrant. I was still on the magical equivalent of parole. I took a deep breath and let it out again, resisting the urge to yell as I asked, “So, should my first question be ‘How did I get here,’ or ‘Where
here
is?’”
Gil licked her bottom lip. “Well, as far as
where
, this is King James Cemetery. The
how
is a little… uh, complicated?”
Understatement. Definitely an understatement. I waited, my teeth gritted. Gil fidgeted.
“I might have tucked you outside of time and space while I traveled here. But it appears not to have had any adverse effects.” She fished her quill out of the grass and tapped it on her scroll. “I hypothesized that a short detour into the void between worlds would have no ill effects on a vampire. I wouldn’t chunk anything fully alive in there, of course.”
“You hypothesized? As in you guessed and then you threw me in a… a
void
?” I shoved to my feet. My face was hot, and the pinch against my lips told me my fangs were showing. I couldn’t help it. I was well and truly pissed.
Gil stumbled back and her scroll vanished. “I did consider the possible outcomes thoroughly before trying it,” she said, wringing her hands together.
When I only raised an eyebrow, she took another step back and her gaze darted away, skittering over stone monuments without finding a place to land. She tugged at an imagined wrinkle in her coat. “Well, that aside, my research points to this cemetery as the resting place of… someone I think can help us determine if you tagged any other rogues. I’ve narrowed it down to one sarcophagus, but I need help.”
“Help with what?”
“A little research.” She turned, her eyes still not meeting mine. “The lid is heavy. I can’t lift it.”
Great. I was here as muscle and we were what? Grave robbing? I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes. A headless body, the rogue’s haunting memories, the void, and now grave-robbing? Could this night get worse?
Wait, I forgot. When I returned to Nathanial’s, I still had to appear before the vamp council. I sighed and dropped my hands.
Might as well get this over with.
“Which one?” I swept out a hand to indicate the rows of monuments that stretched around us for as far as the eye could see.
Gil indicated a small mausoleum with what appeared to be a sphinx watching over the rusty gate covered opening. The gate squealed as it swung on ancient hinges, and flecks of red rust stuck to my fingers. Inside, Gil pointed to the second sarcophagus. I gave the lid a shove, but the large cement slab barely budged.
Moving to a better angle, I braced my knees and shoved harder. If a human had been watching, they probably would have laughed at the idea of me moving the slab. After all, I was only a few inches taller than five foot and my five years of living as a stray on the streets had made me skinnier than a predator should be, but as a shifter I’d been stronger than a human, and as a vampire I was even stronger still. Not like toss-a-bus strong, but much stronger than I looked.
The stone scraped along the base, and a nail-bitingly annoying grinding noise filled the mausoleum. Beside me, Gil bounced on her toes, anxiously attempting to peek into the hole as it opened. I gave one last shove, and stopped, looking down at what I’d revealed.
Inside the sarcophagus, an ancient skeleton grinned up at me, its thin arms crossed over gray cloth hanging to its ribcage.
“This is it?” I asked, stepping aside.
Gil hung over the triangular opening. Her hands clung to the ancient cement, her dark curls quivering as she shook her head. “He’s not here.”
Oh, there was definitely someone in this sarcophagus, though since the name carved on the front read ‘Mary Elizabeth Stanhope,’ I was fairly certain
he
, whomever
he
was, had never been in the tomb.
Gil pushed away and dragged her feet to the mausoleum doorway. “I must have miscalculated something. Maybe if…”
She pulled a scroll out of thin air again, glancing around the cemetery. “I could have sworn. But…” She frowned, vanishing her scroll. “I’ll take you home.”
Magic crawled over my skin.
“Wait.” I stumbled back. No way was I going into the void again. I’d call Nathanial. I didn’t know the number, but I’d seen the telephone on his counter. I could find his phone number and he could come pick me up. Okay, my reasoning might be flawed, but I’d just wait. The council be damned.
Gil ignored my protest. Her hand touched my arm. Then the mausoleum faded to black.
* * * *
I lay on my side and blinked into the darkness. Not the nothingness of the void—the wood-paneled walls and ceiling were clear to my vampire eyes, so this darkness was simply the lack of light in Nathanial’s hallway.
No more adventures with Gil.
Ever
.
My stomach couldn’t take it.
I fought the urge to hurl everything I hadn’t eaten. Then I pushed away from the thick pile carpet. My knees didn’t cooperate the first time I tried to stand, but the second time I managed to get my feet under me. I leaned against the wall before stumbling toward the main part of the house.
The swinging doors to the kitchen had gotten stuck half open, and I paused outside, staring in at Nathanial. He sat in one of the unpadded chairs, several books scattered across the top of the table and a laptop directly in front of him. He’d removed the opera mask. It lay face down, forgotten, on the edge of the table. He didn’t look up from the book he leaned over, didn’t realize I was there, so I had a moment to stare and let my eyes soak up the width of his shoulders, which tapered down to lean hips.
He wasn’t large and bulky like Bobby, but had a quieter, more lithe strength. I was supposed to hate him. After all, he’d made me this blood-sucking aberration. But as I watched him, all I could hate was the fact my fingers itched to trail through the dark hair streaming over his shoulders. I could only hope he never realized it, never saw me staring when he wasn’t looking, but sometimes I was afraid he knew me better than I knew myself. It wasn’t a comforting feeling.