Masters of the Night (19 page)

19.

As soon as the
Shadows closed her door thinking she was asleep, Angie threw back the covers
and slipped out of the apartment building to hail a cab. She needed to see her
mother’s words on her own, alone. But as the cabbie dropped her off, her high
heels touched the steps leading up to her apartment hesitantly. She knew her
laptop would still be on her desk, the photo of Bobby still on her
Facebook
profile, his false flattery still filling her
wall.

Maybe she should just throw the laptop out in the garbage, she thought.
It was part of her former life, not the life she lived now.

This apartment was a collection of everyday dishes, mall shop clothes,
a single bedroom and a few knick knacks. Now she lived in apartments on the go
with a collection of whittled stakes and belt packs, and her knick knacks were
bottles of holy water.

She pulled the apartment key from her shoulder bag, took a deep breath
and opened the front door.

She stepped into the living room agape. The whole place had been
trashed.

Walking from room to room as though in a surreal
world, she absently picked up pieces of broken ceramic, ripped clothes, cracked
dishes.
Pictures had been pulled from the walls, the glass
cracked, the photos scarred. The furniture was shredded, the couch pillows
ripped open. Cabinets were emptied, the drawers and doors hanging open. The
floor was littered with broken plates and dishes like an earthquake had struck.
Papers and bills were slashed as though by a sharp knife.

It was as though someone had been looking for something, in a hurry to
find it and angry at not finding it.

Angie crunched through the ruins of her former life, and yanked open
the hall closet door. Laying her car keys on a shoe box, she pushed aside her
winter coats to expose the back corner where she had stashed her box.

“Looking for this, my dear?” a man’s sickly sweet, familiar voice asked
in curdling tones behind her.

She whirled, to find Danby standing in the hallway.

Holding her mother’s diary.

Angie felt fear rise into her throat. And Henri’s
words,
“Trust no one.”

“I would like to have that back,” she said, holding out her hand and
trying to take it.

Quickly yanking it out of her reach, he held it high in the air, and
smiled.

But just as quickly he turned, startled, as the rooms
became pitch black.
The clouds had choked the moon.

Angie leaped past him, grabbing the diary as she jumped, and ran from
the apartment.

“My car keys!” she cried suddenly, looking back as she reached the
pickup and realized she had left them in the closet.

He was barreling down the apartment steps, coming after her with a
demonic pace in his shoddy shoes.

Kicking off her high heels, she ran down the sidewalk, harder and
harder until she could whip around a corner and slip into a night drenched
alley and catch her breath.

The vapid space was littered with the debris of civilization—
bleary-eyed men and glittery-eyed women standing among the blowing trash and
broken bottles of whiskey and wine, flashing narcotic smiles.

Two stark youths bracketed a destitute doorway, covering up their fear
of the night and their cement prison with drugs and knives. They were motionless,
their faces defensive, distrusting, as they watched the long dark cape pass
them by.

They laughed. The running, barefoot woman in a trench coat was
eccentric, someone they might find rummaging a trash bin or running out on a
drunken wife beater.

“Hey, bag lady!”

She halted, but as she turned, their mouths dropped open in wonderment
at her youth, her beauty—her eyes.

She turned away from them.

Your souls can never touch mine
, she thought.
You grovel with
untrained fists for a bit of dirt from your victim’s pocket, then you cower
like rats, in the corners of the night!

Take the night, you fools! It is yours! Embrace her!

Death embraces the night, but not gently …

In the next instant, she was lost to them, nothing more than a moment
that had passed in time as she slipped into an alcove through a broken gate and
behind an unguarded door.

Angie collapsed against the door.

These thoughts, these feelings, this affinity with the night, were not
hers. They were Henri’s!

She hurried on to escape the horrid little man she could hear asking
the youths if they had seen her.

They lied, said they hadn’t seen her,
then
they hunted her themselves. “Hey, gorgeous, come on. Let’s have a summer
party,” they called out, searching the alley’s alcoves. “No wonder you were
running from the old
geazer
. He’s a shriveled up,
butt ugly.”

She rose before them and threw them both against the side of an
oil-smeared wall.

They ran from her in terror.

Crossing yet another alleyway, Angie turned onto a shadowy street. The
clouds spit mist now, and the black pavement glistened. A column of gray smoke
curled from above a club where a sign blinked in neon orange. Music, hard and
metallic, pelted the mist.

“
Liora
!” she heard Danby call through the
music, through the crowd. “There’s nowhere to go!”

She looked
back,
saw him weaving through the
partiers making their way to the club.

On the skyline, an aging hotel roof poked at the low-hanging clouds.
Below the roof, soot-covered windows reflected only isolated, soiled shades and
murky obscurity.

She ran toward it to hopefully hide until he gave up the chase.

Another door.
On
the alley side.
Her hand, through the quickness and skill of Henri’s
knowledge, coaxed the lock into surrender and her soft soles touched the wooden
stairs with feather-light steps as his power moved though her.

Then onto the roof, she took a deep breath and jumped across a chasm to
the hotel.

More stairs.
This
time descending.
To just below the top floor.

With a deftness that surprised her, she moved like a spider through the
corridors and along a floor covered with decaying carpet.

Then, at the first single room engulfed in darkness, she stopped.

Her hand twisted the doorknob urgently, and the door obeyed her hand’s
command.

With a single, effortless movement, she was inside. The door was
secured and she was at the window, a narrow soot-blackened, rain-stained
window—

Indistinct, almost invisible, she edged along the drapes, a part of the
hour. Her coat, silhouetted against the thin drapery, doused the tiny, timid
bits of streetlight behind her.

She opened the drapes a slit, searched for Danby,
did
not see him. She stepped back and melted into the shadows of the dingy, dirty
room, dropping to the floor.

Henri
! She cried in anguish, dirt-smeared tears trailing
her cheeks.

As she looked around at the tattered room, her stomach quivered. She
peered outside again through a slit in the drapes to look alongside the
streets.

“Where are you, Henri? Help me!” she whispered desperately.

Footsteps.
In
the hall.

Don’t let it be Danby. Don’t let it be Danby.

She wilted into the wall, the darkness— hiding, hardly daring to
breathe, terrified. Danby’s cataract eyes had been so filmy, so wide and wild.
So determined.

So determined.

Her heart thundered in her ears.

The steps moved on, diminished somewhere down the corridor.

She rose carefully from the floor, slid her body along the plaster
wall, then cautiously opened the door and peered out. Seeing and hearing no
one, she eased out into the hallway. Clinging to the dirty wallpaper and gummy
stairs, she finally escaped the foul smelling building.

She began running across an expanse of parking lot, to go back to the
club and call for help, call Andre for help.

Footsteps again.

Hope against hope, she longed for it to be Henri.

But a
vampyre
would have no footsteps.

Her heart lost its beat as Danby stepped in front of her.

“You left these,” he said, jiggling her keys in the air.

As a stray bit of streetlight hit his face, Angie could see the evil
lines in his jaw, the heaviness in the rolls of eyelids that hid all but the
glitter in his eyes at finding her.

Danby grinned at her, a vile spreading of his mouth across his face.
“You need to come with me, my dear.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, stepping back as he took a step closer.

Then she saw the steel glinting in his hand.

She had seen a menacing glint like that before.

She stepped backward again, bracing herself to fight a knife for the
second time in her life.

“The Realm has offered quite a reward for you, my dear,” the little,
balding piece of feces chirped.

“You—” She had been duped. And this was not fighting darkness and the
undead. This was an unpredictable soulless human.

“Come quietly?” he smiled, then shook his head and sighed as she drew
her dagger from her pouch. “I suppose not. I will have to injure you.
Unfortunate.”

He leaped toward her, but her mystical power surged and carried the
force of foresight. She leaped to the side, knocking his knife from his grasp
as he stumbled past her and catching his arm in a slice with her own blade.

He looked surprised. He had not expected mystical strength, or that it
would be piggy-backing a master
vampyre’s
power.

But he recovered quickly from the realization and came back with a blow
to her side that took her breath.

And sent the diary spinning across the asphalt, under
a car.

The dagger went spinning under the bumper behind it.

Grabbing her arm, he slammed her belly down onto the hood of a Ford
Expedition to pull her arms behind her and tie her hands.

She felt the antique holy water bottle in her pouch break under the
impact.

He grasped the chain at her neck roughly, yanked and broke it, then
threw the cross and chain into a storm drain. “My business associates would not
appreciate it if I let you keep that, my dear.”

“Jackass.”

Pushing back hard, she knocked him off balance between two parking
posts. He caught himself and lurched forward. She broke off the side view
mirror of the Expedition and cracked it into his stomach. He fell back and
smashed into the windshield of the car next to them, but as he fell he grabbed
her arm again and took her with him.

In the ensuing struggle, the two cars quickly became breaking glass and
denting metal. She tried to run, but he threw her to the pavement into the
glass and asphalt chunks.

Angie rolled away from her attacker, but her head hit the base of a
cement pylon. Moaning, she shook her head against the stars and blackness
filling her consciousness, braced herself on the stone post, pulled
herself
up.

Without a sound, a pair of magnificent gray wings descended in front of
her, outstretched, and Nicholas stood between her and her assailant.

As the man backed away in paralytic fear, Angie knew the
vampyre
had bared his fangs.

The wings folded. Nicholas moved toward him.