Death Blows: The Bloodhound Files-2 (39 page)

“Gretch’s still zonked out, huh?”

“Yes. They tell me she broke two of the orderlies’ arms when they tried to restrain her, too. Dr. Pete was just arriving to visit her when all the commotion broke out—he disappeared from the hospital right after that.”

“Yeah. About that . . .”

I do my best to explain what’s happened to Dr. Pete, though I’m a little unclear on the details myself.

“He’s calling himself Tair now. He was shadowing me for a while—I almost caught him in a supermarket, but he threw me off by shifting to were form and pretending he was after Dr. Pete. Thing is, he
is
Dr. Pete—a Dr. Pete that could have been, anyway.”

It takes a lot to make Cassius look worried, but he looks worried now. “That’s unfortunate. Peter had a troubled past—if he’d continued on that path, he would have become a very dangerous man. And now, it seems, he has.”

“Yeah—in the blink of an eye.” I shake my head. “We’re not going to just give up on him, are we? I mean, this isn’t some criminal that may or may not be worth rehabilitating—this is Dr. Pete. We know that underneath it all he’s a good person.”

“Of course we won’t give up, Jace. But the magic that triggered his change was meant for you—it’s not just a powerful spell, it’s a powerful spell gone wrong. Reversing it will be difficult, maybe even impossible.”

“Then we’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Worked the first time, didn’t it?”

He smiles. “Yes, it did. And this time, he’ll have you on his side from the very beginning. I’m sure that’ll make a difference.”

Gretchen shifts and mutters something in her sleep. I notice that both her wrists are still in padded metal restraints. “Not taking any chances with Gretch, huh?”

“She’ll wake up with her baby beside her. That’ll calm her down in a hurry—but I don’t want her disabling another orderly before her head clears.”

“Yeah, she’s got enough to worry about. Single motherhood and getting used to aging again.”

“I’m hoping I can alleviate some of that.”

I frown, not sure what he means. “Excuse me?”

“It’s possible—if you act quickly—to replace a pire father with a surrogate, another donor for the child to draw life force from. I’m going to offer to do so for Gretchen.”

For a second, I can’t even process it. David Cassius, a vampire who’s spent unknown centuries in the body of an eighteen-year-old, is giving up some of his youth. “I—what? Are you serious?”

He gives me a carefully neutral look. “I’m very serious, Jace.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s wonderful, but—you and Gretch? Really?”

“It’s not like that,” he says. “She’s one of my most valuable operatives. I have the years to spare—even nine of them will leave me relatively untouched. I think it’s time I added a little more . . .
stature
to my image, anyway.”

“Stature, sure. Maybe you should grow a mustache, too—I understand that really impresses the girls. And helps you get in bars.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Plus, you can finally move out of your parents’ basement and get that cool bachelor pad.”

“Are you done?”

“Me? Never. I’m a work in progress.” I pause. “And I guess you are, too. Or will be.”

“It’s not that big a deal, Jace.”

“ ’Course not, Caligula. It’s not a big deal at all. And definitely not the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen one friend do for another.”

I lean over and give him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. He looks a little surprised, starts to say something, then stops.

“Well,” I say. “I better get going. I’ve got—you know. Things. Call me when she wakes up, okay?

I leave him there beside the bed, still looking like he has something to say.

I do some hard thinking on my way home.

Now that the case is over, it’s back to hunting Aristotle Stoker. I’m beginning to think that the best way to do that is to have
him
start hunting
me
. . . and in fact, I may have already set that in motion.

My last lead on Stoker had him researching Ahasuerus, the sorceror who created both the golem race and the anti-firearm spell—and the one that brought me across the dimensional divide. If Stoker is looking for Ahasuerus, then the best way to catch him is to bring Ahasuerus to me; and since Ahasuerus is the only one that can send me back, I need to locate him anyway.

Which might just happen on its own. The third level of the no-guns spell is an alarm system. If the spell is ever broken—even in only one person’s mind—the alarm is supposed to go off, alerting the spell’s caster. Presumably so he can show up in person and eliminate the problem.

I don’t know if it’ll still work now that da Vinci is dead. Guess I’ll have to wait and see—but if and when he does show up, he’s in for a surprise.

I pick up the comic book from the seat beside me. It’s the one Dr. Pete lent me, the one of the Bravo Brigade that the government printed. The stated reason for its existence was to counter the power of the Kamic cult—but it was printed
after
the attack on Wertham, when the members were already dead and their power drained into the bulk of a volcano.

The government completed the ritual anyway, though. Blood from the Bravos went into the ink, the comic went into the hands of thousands of kids, and then the government used a flimsy excuse to recall and destroy every issue they could get their hands on—except for a select few, no doubt, locked away in a Hexagon or NSA vault for future use.

But they didn’t get them all. Which means, if I understand my Animism 101 correctly, that the remaining ones still have all the power of the Bravo Brigade’s spell locked up in them. I don’t know how to access it—but human beings have a natural affinity for magic that pires and thropes have to work at.

If I concentrate, I can feel the slightest hum of
something
coming from the comic in my hand. Looks like I have some studying to do . . .

Because when Ahasuerus shows up, I’m going to be ready.

“Oh boy,” I say. “Home sweet—”

“Jace!” Galahad says, and tackles me like a linebacker.

I hit the floor with a thud, and shove him off me as he attempts to lick my face. “What the hell?” I manage, getting back to my feet.

Xandra looks up from where she’s curled up on the couch, reading a magazine. “Hey, Jace. Gally’s glad to see you.”

“Jace! Jace!”

“So I see. Down, Galahad.” He promptly kneels on the floor, which is endearing but a little creepy. At least he’s wearing pants. “Xandra, what’s he doing here? I thought your family said they’d take care of him until—”

“Uncle Pete’s gone missing again. Guess you’re back to square one.”

And then it hits me. No more Dr. Pete. He won’t be coming by to pick up Galahad like he promised, he won’t be volunteering at the anthrocanine clinic. Galahad won’t have the run of that place anymore—it might even have to shut down.

“Ah, well,” I say, and sink onto the couch wearily. “I was kinda getting used to having him around, anyway.”

“I thought you’d worked things out with Uncle Pete,” Xandra says. “I mean, I know he took off from the hospital—but he’s all right, isn’t he?” She looks at me quizzically.

Damn. I’m really not ready to have this conversation. I jam my hands in the pockets of my coat, and find something cold and metallic in the right-hand one, something plastic and rectangular in the left. My brain’s too exhausted to analyze this, so I just pull both objects out.

In my left is the Blood Cross. Sharp, silver, deadly. It makes my forearm ache just to look at it.

In the right is a cassette tape, the one Dr. Pete gave me. The one he said would cheer me up, the one I was too angry to look at. I realize what it is, and start to laugh.

“Are you all right?” Xandra says as I lurch from the couch and put the cassette in my scavenged tape deck. Please, God, let it be functional.

“I’m fine, sweetie. I’ve got something to tell you, but we should listen to this, first.”

“But you’re crying.”

I hit PLAY. And then I’m laughing again, laughing and sniffing and rubbing tears out of my eyes, as the sublime, ridiculous tune “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window” warbles out of the speakers.

Good-bye, Dr. Pete. I really hope I see you again.

Read on for an excerpt from DD Barant’s next book

KILLING ROCKS

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

I have this recurring dream where I’ve been ordered by a federal judge to join a support group.

“Hi,” I say. I’m sitting on a folding chair, part of a circle of people. “My name is Jace, and I am a human being.”

“Hi, Jace,” everyone choruses.

“I’ve been a human being for—well, thirty-some odd years. Actually, where I come from, pretty much
everyone’s
a human being.”

A large woman in a floral-print house dress puts up her hand. “Don’t use the people around you to justify your actions,” she says primly.

“But it’s true,” I insist. “No vampires, no lycanthropes, no golems. And then I got shanghaied into this universe by a shaman named Ahaseurus—believe me, when I find that guy, we are going to have
words
—and now I’m trapped here until I catch a Free Human Resistance terrorist named Aristotle Stoker—”

A weaselly guy with a ridiculous mustache and a BELA LUGOSI FOR PRESIDENT t-shirt puts up his hand. “So none of this is your fault?”

“No! I’m telling you, I was kidnapped out of my own bedroom—”

“Why you?” he asks in a nasal voice. “Are you trying to say you’re different from everyone else?”

“I
am
different. I’m a criminal profiler for the FBI, specializing in hunting down homicidal psychos—a job that doesn’t seem to exist here. Pires and thropes and lems don’t go crazy—well, they never used to, anyway—so they need me to hunt down Stoker, who’s definitely out of his gourd—”

The woman in the flowery dress shakes her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Mentally unstable. Deranged. Squirrelly. Nuts. Wacko. Out to lunch—”

Nasally Mustache frowns. “You’re no different from anyone else, Jace. You have to accept that before we can help you.”

“—insane in the brain. Off his meds. Unable to locate his marbles. Needs to be fitted for a long-sleeved love-me jacket so he can hug himself all day long, bats in the control room, long-term resident of a rubber room, lights are on but so is the vacancy sign—”

The woman sighs. “Sounds to me like you’re in denial, Jace.” The rest of the group mutter and nod their heads. “Normally we insist that members finish each step in the program before they go on to the next, but in your case I think we’ll make an exception. You need to go right to Step Thirteen.”

She gets to her feet. So does Nasally, and everybody else.

“Being human doesn’t have to be a life sentence,” someone says. Coarse grey hair sprouts on the woman’s face as it lengthens into a muzzle filled with long, sharp teeth. Nasally’s teeth are getting longer too, his eyes turning blood-red.

“Fur or fangs?” he says as they all reach for me.

That’s usually when I wake up.

At least they didn’t threaten to turn me into a golem.

Much as I care for my partner and official NSA enforcer, Charlie Aleph, I really wouldn’t want to go through life as a three-hundred-pound, plastic-skinned mannequin filled with black sand. Not that he’s ever been human himself—Charlie’s body is animated by the life force of a long-dead T-Rex, distilled through careful animistic magic by this world’s shamans. It’s something they do here a lot—though they usually use cattle or some other large animal to charge the lems’ batteries—because golems make up something like nineteen percent of the planet’s population. Of the rest, forty-three percent are lycanthropes, thirty-seven vampires. One percent is all that’s left of the human race.

Welcome to my life.

I’ve discovered that a few universal truths hold firm no matter what alternate world you’re in; for instance, Mondays always suck. On a planet loaded with hemovores they tend to suck even more, in both volume and intensity.

“Morning,” Charlie says in a deep-voiced rumble as I get on the elevator. He’s his usual natty self, wearing a double-breasted dark green suit and matching fedora with a tan snakeskin hatband. His tie is black silk with an emerald stickpin, which complements both the black chrome shininess of his plastic skin and his highly polished shoes.

“It is, isn’t it?” I mutter. “A.M. As in Awful and Malignant.”

“Rough weekend?”

“No. Angels massaged my feet while I bathed in sunbeams and chocolate.”

“Wouldn’t that be messy?”

“It sounded better in my head.” I take a long slug of coffee from the travel mug in my hand. “Will to live . . . returning,” I say. “Damn. Thought I had it beat this time.”

“The day’s still young.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“Something’s up.” He glances at me and frowns. “Not you, obviously. But Cassius wouldn’t call us in this early unless it was important.”

I give him a withering glare, which has about as much effect as a laser on a mirror. David Cassius is our boss, the head of the National Security Agency, which for some reason is based out of Seattle here. He’s a very old, very powerful pire, and he looks like an eighteen-year-old Californian surfer boy—or at least he did, until recently.

The elevator doors slide open and we step out into the NSA offices. It looks pretty much like the offices of any intelligence-gathering agency in my own world—lots of people in lots of cubicles, the murmur of voices and machines, people in suits and ties striding along clutching laptops or file folders or paper cups of hot blood.

Yeah.

See, that’s the thing about this place. It does a real good job of seeming normal, at least on the surface—but then some little detail comes along and whacks you between the eyes. Cars look like cars until you notice how many of them have windows tinted so dark you can’t see inside, even through the windshield. At Easter, the bunnies aren’t made of chocolate—though there’s still a hunt and kids still stuff their faces. And during the full moon, every thrope beneath it participates in a massive, three-day party that makes Rio during Carnival look like a Mormon picnic. Okay, that last one isn’t all that small, but at least I only have to deal with it once a month.