FOUR
One minute Erin was struggling in the thick, viscous grip of that invisible something Parker had somehow created. The next, light exploded all around her.
And she was falling.
She barely had time to register the plummeting sensation before she hit hard, right on her ass. Rolling, she slapped the floor as she’d been taught in hand-to-hand combat class, turning a fall that might have otherwise ended with broken bones into one that did nothing more than bruise her behind.
For a moment she lay still, catching her breath and getting her bearings as she stared up at the vaulted stone ceiling over her head.
What the hell had happened to the sky?
A minute ago they’d been in Champion’s garden, listening to Geirolf spin his fairy tales. But where were they now?
Erin sat up slowly, in honor of both her aching behind and the general dubiousness of the entire situation.
She was sitting in the middle of a huge stone room straight out of The History Channel. The place looked just like a castle chamber, complete with rich tapestries on the walls interspersed with huge Gothic glass windows.
The bed went along with the general medieval motif—a massive dark affair piled with what looked like furs and surrounded on two sides by red velvet hangings embroidered with gold thread. There was a table and a couple of wooden benches, and an anachronism—some kind of small pool, maybe ten feet long and five feet wide, that looked vaguely like a Roman bath.
Over by the opposite wall stood Champion, wearing an expression of deep disgust on his face. In place of the tuxedo trousers he’d been wearing a few minutes before, he was dressed in a pair of loose silk pajama bottoms and a long silk robe, both in pure, unrelieved black.
He looked down at himself and curled his lip. “What am I, Hugh Hefner? Tacky, Geirolf. Very tacky.” Looking up, he spotted Erin watching him warily. He lifted a brow, a flash of male interest in his eyes. “I guess we should count ourselves lucky your outfit doesn’t have nipple cutouts.”
Erin glanced down. And swore.
Her red cocktail dress had somehow become a white satin Merry Widow that cinched her waist and lifted her full breasts until they damn near overflowed the low-cut bodice. Below that, she wore a tiny white lace thong and lace stockings. On her feet were a pair of platform shoes with three-inch soles and six-inch heels. “What’s lucky is that I didn’t break my neck when I fell,” she growled, glowering at the shoes.
Assuming they were even real.
Real or not, though, the shoes were coming off. She wouldn’t be able to run in them, much less fight. And the chances were good she’d probably end up doing one or the other before the night was over.
Erin slipped the platforms off, as Champion prowled the room, running his hands over the stone walls. “Great. Just great,” he snarled as she tossed the shoes into a corner.
“What?” she asked warily as she scanned the chamber. Yep, everything was the same as it had been a minute ago—table, Roman bath, canopied bed piled with furs. None of it made a damn bit of sense, but it was all still there.
“There’s no door,” Champion announced.
“What do you mean, there’s no door? There’s got to be a door.”
But he was right. There were plenty of arched, Gothic-looking windows, but there was no door at all. “How did they get us in here?”
He shot her a look. “Magic, sweetheart.”
Her stomach lurched. “Reece, no matter what this looks like, it isn’t really magic. They gave us some kind of drugs to make us susceptible to suggestion, and Geirolf threw in some smoke and mirrors. We hallucinated the rest. My guess is we passed out, and they brought us here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
“Erin…” he began.
“Champion, trust me. He did the same thing to me once before. It’s how he killed my partner.” Frowning, she crossed to the nearest window and tapped on the thick glass. It certainly seemed solid. But though she examined it closely and prodded every inch of it, she couldn’t find a latch, and it didn’t swing open. “Maybe we could break it.”
Reece started to speak, then shrugged. “I doubt it, but it’s worth a try.” He took several steps back, gathered his big body, and sprinted toward another of the windows.
“Champion, what—?”
He leaped up like Jackie Chan to slam feet-first into the glass. The window bonged, bell-like, as he bounced off and skidded halfway across the room on his back. “Ow.”
He rolled to his feet before she reached him. “You okay?” she asked, studying his face in concern.
He rubbed one thigh with a grimace. “Damn near broke my legs. Figured that wasn’t going to work, but I had to try. If this place really held Geirolf for sixteen hundred years, we’re not going to break out of it with muscle.”
She shook her head. “Reece…”
“Erin, it’s not a hallucination. This is real.”
She felt sick, but shook it off with a scornful laugh. “So, you’re saying, what? This Geirolf guy really is some kind of immortal demon who’s locked us up in a magic cell?”
“That’s about the size of it.” He moved to the table and looked over the selection of dishes that sat on the linen tablecloth. As he poured something from a pitcher into a pair of jeweled goblets, he eyed her. “Erin, I know this is tough to accept. Particularly for somebody from this century. Everything you’ve ever been taught tells you there’s no such thing as demons. But think about it—does any of this feel like a hallucination to you?”
“No,” she admitted. “Everything seems solid. Real. And I don’t feel drugged.” True, there had been the weird logic and location jumps, first when she was caught in that “spell” of Parker’s, next when she was transported here. Yet even that hadn’t been precisely dreamlike, either. And—she rubbed her backside absently—the ache in her butt certainly felt real.
Reece strolled over to her, holding the goblet in one big, tanned hand. He took a sip of it, watching her over the rim. He grimaced and extended it to her. “It’s a very nice Dom Perignon. You’ll like it.”
Erin hesitated before accepting the thick pewter cup. “So why did you make a face?” She sniffed the contents cautiously and took a sip. It tasted real.
Champion shrugged. “I was hoping for blood, but I guess that was too much to expect.”
Erin choked on her mouthful of champagne. Suddenly she remembered Parker’s sneer: You didn’t even recognize a vampire when he had his dick in your twat and his fangs in your throat. She felt again the ache and burn in her throat. Reaching up with one hand, she explored the injury.
Holes. In her neck.
He’d bitten her.
Champion met her horrified gaze steadily, his green eyes cool. “Yeah, I’m a vampire.”
“A vampire.” She’d slept with him, and he’d bitten her. Drunk her blood.
He sighed. “I’m not crazy, Erin.”
She gave him her best impassive-cop face. “I never said you were.”
“This is real, Erin,” he told her steadily. “Geirolf really is a demon, and I’m a vampire, and Parker is some kind of necromancer. And you and I really are trapped in a cell in the Mageverse.” Champion opened his mouth and peeled his lips back from his teeth. For about half a second, they all looked perfectly white, straight, and human. True, two of them looked a little sharper than normal, but…
Then the gums seemed to swell around those sharp canines, and the two teeth visibly lengthened, extending down from his jaw. Becoming fangs.
Erin stepped backward as the universe seemed to reel. “Don’t.”
“You know this is happening. And you’re too much a professional not to deal with it.” Tiny fireworks exploded in Champion’s eyes, a minuscule explosion of sparks shooting across the green. And he disappeared.
In his place, a huge black timber wolf sat on its haunches looking up at her. Its eyes were the same purely human green as Champion’s.
Erin leaped back from the animal with a startled yelp. She glanced wildly around the room, but Champion had vanished. Replaced by the wolf.
She looked down at the big beast and felt herself begin to shake. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what this means.”
Sparks exploded in those green eyes, and it was Champion again. She almost saw the moment when wolf became man. He stepped closer. “So explain it to me.”
For just a moment, she seriously considered hitting him. Then she shook off the impulse. She was a professional. And if she was going to get out of this alive, she had to work with him. Because vampire or not, he seemed to know what was going on. “That thing…That murdering thing killed my partner! It was all real, no matter what the shrinks said. All of it. Goddamnit.” She squeezed her eyes shut. She was damned if she’d cry.
Then she opened them again, squared her shoulders, and told him the story.
July 5, 2003
The silence in the car had the leaden quality of tension and guilt. Erin looked over at David Jennings for the fifth time in the past two minutes. She sighed. He still wore that grim expression, and his fingers gripped the wheel instead of riding it easily with their usually skilled insouciance. “David—”
“You think the profiler’s right, and this guy is trying to work some kind of magic spell?” He snorted. “Like the locals need another reason to lose their fuckin’ minds over these killings. God help us when the reporters get that little tidbit. They’ll start swarming like piranha.”
“I don’t think piranha actually swarm. David, about last night—”
In the dim blue light from the dashboard, she saw a muscle jump in his jaw. “Yeah. Look, I’m sorry about all that. If you’re gonna report me, I don’t blame you. I went too far.”
“I’m not going to report you,” Erin said impatiently. “For God’s sake, you’d had a little too much to drink.” They’d celebrated the Fourth by taking a twelve-pack back to their motel. While the town put on a fireworks display over the trees, they’d sat on the balcony outside his room and worked their way through several beers.
“That only makes it worse, Erin. One way or another, I was way out of line.”
“Actually, you weren’t.” Erin remembered the heat of his mouth when he’d suddenly pulled her down on his lap for a kiss that had made her toes curl. “Look, the only reason I said no is because I knew you’d react like this in the morning. For God’s sake, we’ve been working together for two years, and we’re both single and reasonably young. It’s only natural that we start caring about each other.”
“It may be natural,” David said grimly, “but it’s also completely against regulations.”
She thought about his hand cupping her breast through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “You know what? I don’t care. We’ve been ignoring this thing like the elephant in the living room for two years, and I’m getting sick of it.”
He shot her a look. For just an instant she saw naked need in his eyes. Then he glanced quickly away. “Maybe, but this isn’t the time. We’re in the middle of a case. After we catch this guy, we can talk about it.”
Yes! To hide the triumph in her eyes, Erin turned to stare out the window at the moonlit fields flashing by the car. She’d finally gotten him to admit it. For a man as relentlessly by the book as David, that was a major hurdle.
Of course, getting him to go any further would take patience, but…
A dilapidated barn stood in the moonlight about fifty feet from the road. A strange, faint glow shone from its windows. Firelight. Or candles? Erin felt every hair on her forearms rise. “Stop the car.”
“Oh, hell. You getting another one of your premonitions?”
“Yeah.” It felt as if she’d been dumped in dry ice. David whipped the car onto the shoulder and reached into his jacket for his cell phone to call the locals. He’d long since learned not to question her hunches. She opened the car door, aware of his deep voice relaying their location to the county dispatcher.
Standard procedure was to wait for backup, but Erin knew in her gut that somebody would be dead long before help arrived. They had to move now.
She jumped the ditch and started across the weedy field in long strides, her gun drawn, her gut twisted in a knot, her mouth dry. David followed at her heels like a brawny shadow, his carrot red hair shining gently in the moonlight.
They both knew this was likely to get sticky. They had no probable cause; if this was the guy, they’d have a hell of a time hanging on to him. But saving a life came first.
Never mind that Erin had no idea how she knew one was even at stake.
The wind shifted, bringing her a whiff of something that made her gag: the sickly smell of rotting meat and blood and human waste. And something else. A sound.
“Well,” David muttered, “something’s died around here. And it was sure as hell bigger than a barn rat.”
“Shhh,” Erin whispered, and strained to catch whatever it was she’d just heard.
There it was again. A voice, rising and falling on the wind.
“Sounds like chanting.”
“Just what I was thinking,” she murmured as she tried to make out the words the male voice was reciting. “Could be our boy.”
The two agents eased toward the barn together, moving as fast and silently as they dared through the thick weeds. Reaching the rough wooden building, they flattened their backs against the wall beside the door and went still, listening.
David’s eyes flashed toward her, and she knew he’d heard the same thing she had.
Under the chanting, a woman’s muffled voice sobbed in terror.
Suddenly Erin could make out the man’s words. She immediately wished she couldn’t. “Dread Geirolf, Lord of Darkness and Death, accept the sacrifice of this unworthy whore that her unclean life might feed and—”
“Do wrap it up, boy. All this foreplay is getting tedious.”
Erin glanced sharply at her partner. She could tell by David’s startled expression that he’d picked up the voice, too. Yet she hadn’t heard it with her ears. Instead it seemed to reverberate in her mind, in her very bones, as though, like the subsonic rumble of a building earthquake, it was too deep for human ears.
She wondered if it gave David the same gut-level sense of sickening horror it did her.
Suppressing her fear, Erin ducked down and edged her neck out until she could look around the doorframe. At first she saw only dark, indistinguishable shapes that might have been farm equipment. She craned farther. There. A dim glow of candlelight.
In the center of the dirt floor, a pentagram was laid out in kindergarten glitter, thick candles burning at each of its points. In the middle of the roughly drawn star, a pair of wooden crates and a board formed a makeshift altar. On top of it lay a young woman, naked and bound, a gag stuffed in her mouth.
A man stood over her, dressed in a cheap blue polyester robe sewn with metallic moons and stars. It looked like something you’d buy at Halloween.
But the foot-long butcher knife he held over the woman’s chest was no toy.
Something moved in the darkness, drawing her eye. Erin glanced toward it.
A wavering, glowing thing floated in the shadows just beyond the pentagram. All she could make out was an impression of horns and bulk and savage greed in eyes that were not human.
Every instinct she had screamed Evil!
A big hand locked into her collar and jerked her back. Erin would have screamed, but luckily terror had frozen her vocal cords just long enough for her to realize she was looking into her partner’s face.
David frowned down at her impatiently and mouthed, “How many?”
Erin hesitated, not even sure how to answer that question. Finally she held up two fingers and mouthed, “They’ve got a hostage.” No time to explain more, even if she could think of a way to describe what she’d seen. He nodded and jerked a thumb at the door, then moved around in front of her, taking the point as he always insisted on doing.
Erin gathered herself. All she wanted to do was run as far from the barn and its inexplicable contents as she could, but that girl was about to die. Nothing else mattered—not even the glowing thing she hadn’t quite seen.
Together, they charged through the door as David bellowed, “Freeze! FBI!”
The robed man swore viciously and drew the knife back to stab his captive, who shrieked behind her gag.
Erin fired, her gun roaring at the same time as David’s.
The would-be killer staggered, blood pouring from two wounds, one in the center of his chest, the other just above his eyebrows. He crumpled.
A triumphant roar filled the room as the glowing thing suddenly became solid. It dropped to the dirt floor with a thump, as though the pull of gravity had abruptly kicked in. “That wasn’t exactly the death I had in mind, but it will do.”
“What the fuck!” David gasped. He aimed his weapon at it. Erin automatically followed suit. She fired twice, the big gun bucking in her hands, gunsmoke filling her mouth and nose.
Light flared. The thing reached out a clawed hand and plucked something from the air. With a jolt, Erin realized it was a bullet. A second projectile hovered nearby, as if the creature had stopped both in flight.
“Well now, that’s interesting,” the thing said. “How did you manage to do that?”
Erin felt her guts turn to water. It had to be seven feet tall at least, its horns almost brushing the wooden roof beams as it walked toward her on its two cloven hooves. Her lips pulled back from her teeth as her finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. The big nine-millimeter roared again and again as she unloaded the rest of the clip.
Every single bullet stopped in the air. The thing, moving toward her, brushed them aside like a beaded curtain. The slugs dropped to the ground and bounced on the hard-packed dirt.
“Erin!” She barely recognized David’s voice as it spiraled into a high note of panic she’d never heard before. She dared a quick look at her partner. He stood still, his eyes wide, his gun still pointed at the spot where the thing had been. “What’s it doing to me? I can’t move!”
“Of course not,” the thing said. Her eyes watered at the brimstone in its breath. “I don’t want you to.” To Erin it added, “And you shouldn’t be able to, either.”
She shrank back as it leaned toward her and sniffed delicately. “You smell of magic, girl. One of Merlin’s get, I suppose. Not turned yet, luckily—just enough Latent ability to be resistant. And my power is still too reduced to overcome your will.” It shrugged. “I’ll just have to make the best of it.”
Erin tried to stiffen her shaking knees and called on every bit of childhood lore she could remember. Hell, it was worth a try. “I order you to leave, Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord!”
The thing stared at her in astonishment, then threw back its horned head and laughed. “Oh, I’m not your devil. Though I suppose you can be forgiven for making that mistake, given my current guise.”
Light flashed. Suddenly the thing was simply a man in an elegant black suit. She would have thought him human if it hadn’t been for the red eyes. “I actually prefer this one, but the other is better for impressing mortals,” he said, his voice perfectly ordinary now. Shrugging, he turned toward her partner. “David, dear boy, I find myself in a difficult situation. My pawn’s death enabled me to enter this universe, but I’m still weak and terribly hungry. I need another couple of sacrifices, and I need one of you to make them. Since your partner is resistant to my influence, it will have to be you. Shoot the naked blonde, would you?”
“Fuck yo—” David began, then broke off with a gasp of horror as he pivoted mechanically to point his Glock at the woman lying bound on the crates. She stared up at him in terror. “Shit. Oh, shit. Stop it!”
“David!” The thing, whatever it was, was doing something to him. Hastily shoving her own gun into her shoulder holster, Erin grabbed for his wrists. She tried to knock his weapon up, but it was like hitting a steel beam. Desperately she fought to pry the Glock from his hands, but his fingers seemed fused to the grip.
“On second thought, why don’t you kill your partner first,” the demon suggested.
“No!” David yelled, even as he clamped one hand over her shoulder with a grip like a vise and jammed the muzzle of the gun against the center of her chest. Stunned, Erin looked up into his panic-filled eyes as her blood turned to ice. “Erin, Jesus Christ!”
She tried to jerk away, but he was so damn strong. Helplessly she writhed in his grip, staring into his white-rimmed eyes. “David, let me go!” As she fought, every panting breath carried the smell of her partner’s Brut aftershave.
And his fear.
“Shoot me!” he gasped. “Erin, you’ve gotta—”
“Oh,” the demon said softly. “All that terror and doomed love! Delicious.”
A last-ditch idea hit her. Erin wrapped both hands more tightly around the gun and kicked out. Hooking her foot behind his left ankle, she shoved him over, using the momentum of their falling bodies to finally force the gun upward and clear of her body.
But instead of stiff-arming the weapon above his head, as she’d expected, David bent his arm, shoving it directly under his own chin.
Erin screamed, “No!”
“Pull the trigger,” the demon said.
The deep, full throated roar of the Glock seemed to stop the world on its axis.
She dimly heard the demon’s voice over the ringing in her ears. “Well, that wasn’t at all what I had in mind. And I still need another death.” He sighed in disgust. “I suppose I’ll just have to find another dupe.”
Erin felt his cold presence vanish, but she didn’t look around. She was still staring into her partner’s empty, fixed gaze as she lay sprawled across him.
In the distance, sirens wailed—their backup finally arriving.
Too late.