Blood Trade

“Yeah. I also know that what happened to your wife and to your kids when they were attacked by witch vamps was not the fault of my being evil. Just me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I also know that the real reason you hate me is that you feel like you didn’t do a good enough job of protecting your family. And because you can’t stand that thought, you hate me instead.”



Evan growled, so much like a bear that I chuckled. “You through being a pop psychologist?” he asked. “Because I’m here to a job and get back home. To my family.”



“No,” I said. “I’m not done. You need to forgive yourself. I understand misplaced guilt. I totally understand it.” Before he could raise one of his massive fists and knock me into the next state, I held out the discs from the pocket-watch amulets. As per Evan’s instruction, the discs had been removed from the amulets and were now all fused into one circular lump. “Now I’m through.”



Evan growled again but extended his hand. I dropped it—them—into his left paw. I placed the iron sliver in its copper wiring in his right hand, just like he had texted me. The moment his hand closed on the small spike-shaped sliver, Evan started to glow a weird yellowish color in the grim gray light.



I looked at Bruiser and said, “Let’s do this.”



Bruiser was heavily armed, as befitted a true Enforcer, and I was carrying everything I owned that had a point, a sharp edge, or would fire ammo, plus the bag full of stuff Evan had required, under my arm. I drew the shotgun, checked the load, and headed inside, following Bruiser, who broke through the crime scene tape and busted open the door with a well-placed kick. He-man stuff. Which would have made me smile if my face still remembered how.



Inside, the house was cold but dry, the heat off. The electric company hadn’t turned off the power, however, and the house had little lights along the walls, like Christmas lights, to show the way. I took the lead and found the hidden door to the basement. Opened it, as I had the first time I was here.



The smell ballooned out, as if it had been under pressure and opening the door released the effluvia. It was horrible. It would never go away, no matter how many cleansers they used, no matter how many coats of paint, how many gallons of chemicals. This smell of the grave never, ever, went away. They would have to burn the place. But now, nearly hidden below the stink of the grave, the place smelled of spidey vamp.



I stepped down the stairs. The men followed, and I turned on lights as I came to the switches, illuminating the room below. The cement floor was a reddish brown—the color of the blood that had seeped into the porous surface. There was no furniture, only bookcases on all four walls, the shelves bare. The place had been cleaned out by the cops searching for an entrance, a vamp lair. They hadn’t found one. But I had a new secret weapon, even better than holy water. I had Molly’s husband.



I set the shotgun nearby, where I could grab it up in an instant—not that having it handy was gonna help me against the things we had come to kill. The best it would do was slow them down. I opened the bag and took out the full-sized white bedsheet. It was brand new and I ripped the plastic wrap, stuffing the trash into the bag, and spread open the sheet. On it I drew a circle with black marker, the chemical stink vanishing beneath the smell of rot, and left a small opening. Evan, still glowing pale yellow, walked through the opening, and I closed the circle behind him, drawing the black marker onto the sheet, and capped the marker.



Evan sat, his legs bending into the small space with difficulty. He laid the fused disc on the sheet between his knees, keeping the copper-wrapped iron in one fist. With the other hand, he pulled a small wooden flute.



“Are you sure?” I asked. It was an awfully weak circle.



Big Evan glared at me. “I do this my way. This is witch business.”



I shrugged, and Evan placed the flute between his lips. He started to play. It was a simple melody, only four notes, something he could play with the fingers of one hand, four notes in a dirge of song, primitive and plaintive.



He had played for less than five minutes when the disc between his knees moved slightly, angling to the right only a few millimeters. It paused, then traveled over the sheet the way iron moves toward a magnet, and stopped at the edge of the black circle I had drawn and Evan had powered. The witch stopped playing, the sad notes hanging on the air for a moment. “The lair is there. Behind that wall and down.”



Bruiser pulled a crowbar out of his belt, and I smiled. “Mr. Prepared for Anything,” I said. He flashed me a smile before he wrenched back and stabbed forward, wedging the sharp end of the crowbar into the wood of the shelves. Within minutes, the back of the bookcase was in splinters, revealing only brick, until he splintered a long board off the wall and a small aluminum handle appeared down near the floor. I took up the shotgun and braced it against my shoulder. Set my feet and bent my knees slightly. Bruiser looked at me, and I nodded. He bent forward and gripped the wood. With a single savage jerk, the damaged shelves squeaked open on hinges. A black maw appeared.



Something white smudged across the darkness. Time slowed into the consistency of glue, each moment clear and concise, as if trapped in amber. All I could think in that long, stretched-out moment was that Molly would never survive the loss of her husband. My godchildren, whom I hadn’t seen in months, would grow up without their father. If this didn’t work.



Silandre waved through the opening, as if pulled along by more than four limbs. Big Evan stood, as if safe in his weak circle. I fired once, twice, three times as Silandre raced up the hidden stairs. Missing her each time as she wove side to side. The vampire launched herself at Evan, the witch in her lair.



I pivoted, following Silandre’s wavelike charge.



Bruiser fired at the form that followed Silandre. Fired again, at Lotus, her black hair flowing like a skein of silk. The rounds hit. But the silver fléchettes didn’t slow the vamp.



Silandre seemed to fly through the air. And across the circle. Around Evan, the witch circle imploded. It’s not going to work.



Faster than I ever expected, faster than any creature should be able to move, Evan reached out and scratched Silandre. Her blood shot into the air.



Big Evan adjusted the angle of his hand and reached for the witch still moving toward him. He scratched Lotus. And both vampires fell.



It was anticlimactic after all the killing and all the blood. With the iron spike wielded by a witch, the vampires were bound. Not dead, but in a form of stasis.



“Huh,” Big Evan said. “Would you look at that? It worked.” The sound of surprise in his voice made me shudder.



From the black hole leading down to the lair came a moan of pain.



CHAPTER 27



While There Is Breath, There Is Hope



I flipped on the switch and looked down the stairs. At the bottom was a tiny room, barely big enough to hold the oversized bed. The walls were unadorned; the mattress had no sheets. The room smelled of damp and mold and human blood and human waste.



Curled up on the floor, wedged between the wall and the floor, were four forms. Three women and a child. “Evan!” I said. I leaped the distance down, landing in a small, clear spot of floor, and touched the woman nearest. She flinched. “It’s okay,” I said, “You’re safe now.”



The woman turned her head to me and blinked. She was pale as death, and her throat was bloody from forced feeding. It was an Acheé witch. I looked at the others, trying to see beneath the blood loss and bruises, and I realized that we had all of them and all were still alive. Including the old woman who had walked my dreams, Kathyayini, who slept, scarcely breathing, in a corner of the small room.



I blinked back tears, thinking of the time they had spent here in this lair, tortured and tormented, all because I hadn’t come down to search. I ignored the small voice that whispered I wouldn’t have found the witches, not without Big Evan and the spell he used on the discs. Like the accusation I had made to Big Evan, I wasn’t ready to forgive myself yet. Not about everything. Not about this.



I said again, “It’s okay. You’re safe now. Let me hand you up the stairs.”



The witch started to cry. Above me, Big Evan bent over the hole to the lair. He started to curse softly beneath his breath.



We were standing in front of the refrigerator in the old bar, waiting to step into the witch circle. Just Big Evan, Bruiser, and me. And two unconscious vamps. Evan hadn’t been gentle with them, not since treating the Acheé witches. His eyes had filled with tears over the girl, not yet an adult, abused and nearly catatonic with fear. Kathyayini was in a coma, still dream-walking when the ambulances came.



And he had been taking his anger out on the vamps ever since. Yet I knew that Evan would have a problem taking a life, even a vamp’s undead life, even with justice so long overdue. He had already refused to kill, saying that no witch would use blood magic to break black magic. And I wasn’t sure if he could break the spell of the full witch circle without taking their blood and their heads.



“Time?” I asked.



“Eleven twenty-four,” Bruiser said.



“Close enough,” Evan said, urging us on.



I didn’t have to have my cell phone handy to know that the others were looking for us, worried sick. I could actually feel Rick’s panic, like a burr stuck in my paw. He had nearly changed already once, and the pain had been unendurable. Now the moon was at her fullest, almost midnight of the full moon, the witching hour. We had been waiting for hours, Big Evan setting the timetable and outlining the plan.



And now, at last, it was time to save Misha.



“I’ll go through first,” I said, “and open the trapdoor. Then you send the vamps through. They’ll fall through the opening into the circle below. Then I’ll close the door and you two come through, one at a time.”



I had wanted to do it all by myself and not risk Big Evan again, but breaking a working this strong took a witch and the blood of the vamp who set it into motion. Since he was dead, I was hoping that the blood of his killer and the blood of his heirs would do. I stepped into the fridge and fell.